The French Revolution: causes, phases and consequences, explained simply

A state that could no longer balance its books

The French Revolution did not begin with a crowd in the street but with a budget problem. By the late 1780s the French monarchy was in debt and could not put its revenues back in order. The trouble was not only how much it spent: it was also how taxes were collected.

The nobility was exempt from the taille, the main direct tax, from the corvée royale (compulsory labour), from the salt tax and from most other levies. Every attempt to widen the tax base ran into the resistance of the noble orders, who had little appetite for any cut to their privileges.

A practical example: debt becomes unmanageable less because of its size than because of what it costs to carry year after year. It is the same logic that ties a modern state’s accounts to interest rates: when the cost of debt grows faster than revenue, sooner or later somebody has to give something up.

Out of room to manoeuvre, Louis XVI made the one move left to him: summoning the Estates General, the assembly of the kingdom’s three orders.

Three estates, one country

Society under the ancien régime was divided by birth, and the division had very practical consequences for who paid and who decided.

Order	Who belonged to it	Share of the population
First Estate	The clergy	about 130,000 people (0.5%)
Second Estate	The nobility	about 1.5%
Third Estate	Everyone else	98%

Out of a population of roughly 26 million, 21 million lived from agriculture. The Third Estate was not one homogeneous class: it held destitute peasants and wealthy merchants, lawyers and artisans. What held them together was a legal status that said nothing about their income.

A practical example: picture a village of a hundred people where ninety-eight pay the land tax and the other two are exempt. If more revenue is needed, you can either ask the ninety-eight for more or change the rule. Changing the rule was precisely what the two exempt villagers opposed.

1789, month by month

The Estates General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789. From there events came in quick succession, each one making the previous step irreversible.

• 17 June — the Third Estate deputies, joined by part of the clergy, proclaimed themselves the National Assembly: representatives not of an order but of the nation.
• 20 June — finding their hall locked by royal order, they gathered in the Real Tennis Court and swore “never to separate and to meet wherever circumstances require until the kingdom’s Constitution is established and grounded on solid foundations”. It is regarded as one of the founding acts of French democracy.
• 9 July — the Assembly declared itself constituent.
• 14 July — the Paris crowd stormed the Bastille, the fortress-prison that stood for royal authority in the city.
• 4 August — the Assembly abolished feudal privileges: society by orders lost its legal foundation.
• 20-26 August — the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was voted, 17 articles, ratified by the king on 5 October.

Article 1 states that men are born and remain free and equal in rights; article 4 defines liberty as being able to do anything that does not harm others; article 6 holds that the law is the expression of the general will.

The monarchy did not fall straight away

Here the chronology surprises almost everyone meeting the Revolution for the first time: in 1791 France adopted a Constitution that kept the king. It was a constitutional monarchy, not a republic.

What cracked the arrangement was the flight: on the night of 20-21 June 1791 Louis XVI tried to leave the country and was stopped at Varennes. By fleeing, the king had in effect stopped honouring the constitutional bargain. In 1792 came war against a coalition of European monarchies bent on restoring absolutism, and on 10 August the crowd stormed the Tuileries.

On 20 September 1792 the French army won at Valmy. The next day, at its first sitting, the National Convention (749 deputies elected on 2 September by universal male suffrage) unanimously decreed that royalty was abolished. From the following day public acts were dated “year one of the French Republic”; on 25 September the Republic was declared “one and indivisible”.

The assembly split into three groups: the Girondins on the right, moderate republicans rooted in the provinces and wary of Parisian radicalism, the Montagnards on the left, who backed a strong central republican power, and the Plaine, the moderates in the centre. On 21 January 1793 Louis XVI was guillotined.

The Terror

With war on the borders and revolts inside the country, the Convention handed government to the Committee of Public Safety and repression to the revolutionary tribunals. This phase is known as the Terror and runs from 5 September 1793 to 27-28 July 1794.

Two laws marked its hardening. The Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793 made anyone deemed an enemy of the Republic liable to arrest. The Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) removed the investigation phase of a trial and the right to counsel.

The figures, estimates though they remain, give the scale: 16,594 people guillotined across France, 2,625 of them in Paris, roughly 10,000 deaths in prison, and an overall toll estimated between 30,000 and 50,000. The Terror ended when the Convention turned on the man running it: Robespierre was arrested and guillotined on 27-28 July 1794, along with twenty-one supporters.

The assignats: the Revolution seen through prices

An economic story ran alongside the political one. From December 1789 the state issued assignats, paper money backed by national property confiscated from the crown and the Church: a first issue of 400 million livres, decreed in December 1789.

The mechanism jammed quickly. By April 1790 the assignat was worth 10% less than metal currency; every new difficulty pushed the authorities to print more, and by 1793 some 3.7 billion livres were in circulation. By 1795 a 1,000-livre assignat had the purchasing power of 80 livres in silver. On 19 February 1796 the Directory stopped the issues.

This is inflation in its purest form, two centuries before the word carried its present meaning: more means of payment chasing the same goods, and prices climb. Not to be confused with a recession, which is about output contracting instead: two distinct problems, and revolutionary France was mainly dealing with the first.

Thermidor, Directory, Brumaire

With Robespierre gone, the Convention wrote a new Constitution in 1795 and handed executive power to the Directory. These were unstable years, marked by war and by the republican governments set up in Italy between 1797 and 1799. On 18-19 Brumaire 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup overthrew the Directory.

From that point the regime changed its name, but several revolutionary changes stayed in place. Privilege by birth was gone, equality before the law applied, and the subject had become a citizen.

What was left behind

The 1789 Declaration is not a filed-away document. The preamble of the Fifth Republic’s Constitution points back to it, and in 1971 the French Constitutional Council granted it constitutional value: a law passed in Paris today can be struck down for conflicting with a text written in 1789. The same principles turn up in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written a century and a half later.