Art Inspired By The French Revolution Research Paper
The same day, the 25th, soldiers of the French Guards deserted their barracks, fraternising and drinking with the people, who carried them off to various quarters, shouting through the streets as they passed: A bas la calotte! On May 19, the Girondins, at the suggestion of Barère, decreed the formation of a Commission of Twelve to examine into the decisions passed by the Commune, and this commission, appointed on the 21st, became the driving-wheel of the Government. Two days later, on the 23rd, it caused Hébert to be arrested, the deputy-procurator of the Commune, beloved by the people for the frank republicanism of his Père Duchesne, and Varlet, the favourite of the Paris poor, for whom the Convention was but a law-shop, and who preached the social revolution in the streets. But the arrests were not meant to stop there. The Commission of Twelve proposed also to prosecute the sections; it demanded that the register of the sections should be given up, and it procured the arrest of the president and secretary of the City section for having refused to give up their registers. The following spring, therefore, the war was to recommence but the Republic could now struggle under far more favourable conditions than in 1792 and 1793. Thanks to the enthusiasm with which it had inspired the poorest classes, the Revolution was freeing itself little by little from those external enemies who had sought to crush it. But at what a price when we consider the sacrifices this entailed the internal convulsions, he alienation of liberty, which in the end killed this very same Revolution and delivered France up to the despotism of a military saviour.
The Kings treachery having been proved, were they not going to proclaim his dethronement, overthrow the old feudal institutions and inaugurate the democratic republic? This is why it would be a strange reduction of the importance of the agrarian insurrection in the summer of 1789 to represent it as an episode of brief duration brought about by enthusiasm over the taking of the Bastille. What is still more interesting is that from this time the provincial towns began to put themselves in communication with the Commune of Paris concerning all things. From this there developed a tendency to establish a direct link between the towns and villages of France, outside the National Parliament, and this direct and spontaneous action, which later became even more manifest, gave irresistible force to the Revolution. First of all, the anarchists did not form a party. In the Convention there were the parties of the Mountain, the Gironde, the Plain, or rather the Marsh (sometimes called le Ventre), but there were no anarchists. Danton, Marat, and even Robespierre, or some other Jacobin of the same stamp, could work at times with the anarchists; but they always remained outside the Convention.
French revolution paper - The greatest difficulty for the Revolution was that it had to make its way in the midst of frightful economic circumstances. State bankruptcy was still hanging threateningly over the heads of those who had undertaken to govern France, and if this bankruptcy came indeed, it would bring with it the revolt of the whole of the upper middle classes against the Revolution. If the deficit had been one of the causes which forced royalty to make the first constitutional concessions, and gave the middle classes courage to demand seriously their share in the Government, this same deficit weighed, like a nightmare, all through the Revolution upon those who were successively pushed into power.
[120] The majority of historians in sympathy with the Revolution, when they come to the tragic struggle which was fought out between the Mountain and the Gironde in 1793, dwell too much, it seems to me, on the secondary aspects of this struggle. They attach too much importance to the so-called federalism of the Girondins. Already on August 11, while the smoke of its burning still hung over the Tuileries, and the corpses still lay in the court yards of the Palace, the Assembly had commanded the election of a new Directory of the department which they wished to oppose to the Commune. The Commune refused this, and the Assembly had to capitulate; but the struggle went on an inexorable struggle, in which the Girondins of the Assembly tried at times to detach the sections from the Commune, and at times to obtain the dissolution of the General Council elected revolutionarily on August 9. ContemptiUe intrigues in the face of an enemy that drew nearer to Paris each day, plundering shamelessly as it went. Altogether, the reading of the discussion in the Assembly on the feudal rights suggests the question whether it was really in March 1790, after the taking of the Bastille, and on August 4 that these discussions took place, or were they still at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI.
Therewere to be no guilds, no trade societies; neither trade wardens nor master craftsmen; nothing which might in any way check the exploitation of the wage-earner. There was no longer to be any State supervision which might hamper the manufacturer. There were to be no duties on home industries, no prohibitive laws. For all the transactions of the employers, there was to be complete freedom, and for the workers a strict prohibition against combinations of any sort. Laisser faire for the one; complete denial of the right to combine for the others. They revolted when they were compelled to pay the tithes, and they made themselves masters of the municipalities, so that they could strike at the priests and the landlords. In short, they maintained revolutionary conditions in the greater part of France, whilst in Paris they kept close watch over the law-makers from the vantage-points of the galleries in the Assembly, and in their clubs and meetings of the sections. Finally, when it became necessary to strike a heavy blow at royalty, the people organised the insurrection and fought arms in hand, on July 14, 1789, and on August 10, 1792. This weapon was the triage, which permitted the lord to appropriate a third of the lands belonging to the village communities that had formerly been under his jurisdiction, and the lords eagerly took advantage of the edict to seize upon the best land, chiefly the meadows.
Taine disparages the festivals of the Revolution, and it is true that those of 1793 and 1794 were often too theatrical. They were got up for the people, not by the people. But that of July 14, 1790, was one of the most beautiful popular festivals ever recorded in history. The weapon used by Louis XVI. , in preference to all others was deceit. Only fear made him yield, and, using always the same weapons, deceit and hypocrisy, he resisted not only up to 1789, but even up to the last moment, to the very foot of tile scaffold. At any rate, in 1778, at a time when it was already evident to all minds of more or less perspicacity, as it was to Turgot and Necker, that the absolute power of the King had had its day, and that the hour had come for replacing it by some kind of national representation, Louis XVI. could never be brought to make any but the feeblest concessions. He convened the provincial assemblies of the provinces of Berri and Haute-Guienne (1778 and 1779). But in face of the opposition shown by the privileged classes, the plan of extending these assemblies to the other provinces was abandoned, and Necker was dismissed in 1781. The food necessary for the people, he declared in the Convention, is as sacred as life itself. .
The middle classes put forth in this way their liberal programme of equality before the law in judicial matters and of government controlled by the nation and existing only by its will. And, as in all minimum programmes, this signified implicitly that the nation must not go further; it must not touch upon the rights of property established by feudalism and despotic royalty. Since August 10 the Commune of Paris had dated its documents from the Fourth Year of Liberty and the First of Equality. The Convention dated its acts from the Fourth Year of Liberty and the First Year of the French Republic. And in this little detaiI already appeared two ideas confronting one another. In reality it was the Convention itself supplanting the Ministry, but little by little, as was to be expected, the Committee of Public Welfare overruled the Convention and acquired in all the branches of administration a power which it shared only with the Committee of Public Safety (Comité de Sûreté générale), entrusted with the control of the State police. One might think that now was the time for the Revolution to pursue its logical development with giant strides.
in the year 1775. As the eighteenth century came to the end, Frances essential involvement in the American Revolution and wasteful spending by King Louis XVI and his predecessor had left the nation on the brink of bankruptcy. Many people expressed their hopelessness and indignation towards the regime that imposed high taxes yet failed to guarantee changes by rebellion, robbery and striking (French Revolution, n. d. ). People required significant changes, and they wanted to be represented in the society. In the fall of 1786, the kings controller general de Calonne offered the financial reform. It contained a universal land tax that supposed the following: a privileged class no longer would be exempt since the tax reform forced aristocracy to pay taxes. In addition, it led to the confrontation between the monarchy and nobility. In order to solve the debt problem of the nation, the king and the French authorities decided to summon an Estates General Assembly of the three estates, nobility, clergy, peasants, and citizens. In short, what they wanted was what economists have called freedom of industry and commerce, but which really meant the relieving of industry from the harassing and repressive supervision of the State, and the giving to it full liberty to exploit the worker, who was still to be deprived of his freedom.
They were, one might almost say, above it: they dominated it. One might have thought that now the Revolution was going to develop without further hindrances and follow the natural path dictated by the logic of events. The trial and condemnation of the King, a Republican Constitution in place of that of 1791, war to the death against the invaders; and at the same time the abolition of all that constituted the power of the old régime the feudal laws, the authority of the clergy, the royalist organisation of provincial administrations all these ought to have been considered as the necessary outcome of the situation. In reality, except that the idea of feudal property was shaken by Article I of the resolutions of August 5 to 11, everything which concerned dues reputed to be attached to the use of the land remained just as it was, and the municipalities were ordered to bring the peasants to reason if they did not pay. We have seen how ferociously certain of them carried out these instructions.
Well, Dumouriez, said the Duchess, do you not know the great news? Your friend Necker is turned out, and the result is that the King reascends the throne and the Assembly is dispersed. Your friends, the forty-seven, are at this very moment in the Bastille, perhaps, with Mirabeau, Turgot, and a hundred or so of those insolent fellows of the Third Estate, and for certain Marshal de Broglie is in Paris with thirty thousand men.[32] It was then that Danton negotiated with the Duke of Brunswick for the retreat of the Prussians. What the conditions were is not known to this day. Did Danton promise him, as it has been later maintained, to save the life of Louis XVI.? It is possible. But if this promise was made, it must have been conditional, and we do not know what engagements were undertaken in return by the invaders, beyond the immediate retreat of the Prussians. Was the simultaneous retreat of the Austrians promised? Was a formal renunciation of the throne by Louis XVI. spoken of? We are only able to make conjectures. It needed all the genius of the Revolution and all the youthful audacity of a people awakened from its long sleep, all the faith of the revolutionists in a future of equality, to persist, in the Titanic struggle which the sans-culottes had to carry on against the invaders and the traitors. But how many times the exhausted nation was on the point of giving in!