The Normal Times

1789 to 1799

“Nearly all the great legal reforms had been legislated, at least in principle, in 1789. The formal abolition of feudalism, legal privilege and theocratic absolutism and the organization of society on individualist and secular foundations…”

J.M. Roberts, A History of Europe, page 312

Other Europeans were either shocked or amazed as a new legislative engine tore down and re-built institutions on every level of French society. Judicial torture, titular nobility, juridical inequality and the corporate guilds of French workers were brought to an end. Trade unionism was made forbidden by legislation that barred association by workers or employers for collective economic ends. French peasants who had benefitted from the abolition of feudal dues were unhappy about the disappearance of the common lands and the rights to exploit them, from which they had benefitted.

The holy vessel kept at Rheims from which the kings of France had been anointed since the Middle Ages was publicly destroyed by authorities during the Terror, an altar to Reason replaced the original at Notre Dame, and many priests underwent fierce personal persecution. Most Frenchmen didn’t miss the theocratic monarchy, but the treatment of the Church had aroused more popular opposition than anything else had. The cults of quasi-divinities of the revolutionaries, such as Reason and the Supreme Being, were abject failures.

“The principles of ’89 had at first commanded much admiration and not explicit condemnation or distrust in other countries. This soon changed, in particular when French governments began to export those principles by propaganda and war.”

Revolution in France generated debate about what should happen elsewhere and thus gave Europe a new type of politics. Liberals and conservatives came into political existence by the litmus of political attitudes highlighted by the revolution. One one side: republicanism, a wide suffrage, individual rights, free speech and free publication. On the other: Order, discipline, a belief in duties rather than rights other than those entrenched in law, the recognition of the social function of hierarchy and a preference to temper market forces by morality.

“The old idea that a political revolution was merely a circumstantial break in an essential continuity was replaced by one which took it as radical, comprehensive upheaval, leaving untouched no institution, limitless in principle, and tending, perhaps, even to the subversion of such basic social facts as the family and property.”

The judicial murder of monarchs had hitherto been believed to be an English aberration. In January 1793 the Convention voted for the execution of the king. A new instrument for humane execution, the guillotine, became the symbol of the Terror. The Terror was the name given to the period during which the Convention strove to save the Revolution by intimidation of it perceived enemies. Roughly 35,000 died in the events of the Terror, but only a minority by guillotine.

By 1797 the Republic was ruled by a kind of parliamentary regime under a constitution whose adoption closed the Convention era in 1796. Abroad, the Royalists worked to gain allies with whom they could return home; they also intrigued with malcontents within France. Conversely, there were figures who argued that there were still great divisions between the rich and poor that were as offensive as the old disparity; they also believed Parisian radicals should have greater say in affairs. Pressed like this from the Right and Left, the new regime known as the Directory would be destroyed from within when a group of politicians conspired with soldiers to overthrow it by coup d’etat in 1799.