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French Revolution (1789-1799)

On this page:  {The Ancien Régime}

Leo Gershov. The Era of the French Revolution, 1789-1999. 
             Ten Years That Shook the World. Van Nostrand.
ISBN 0.442.00022.7 (Cincinnati, 1957).
             
               
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The Ancien Régime

P.14
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Economic Progress and Social Change

The France of the Old Regime was a class society grounded in
in-equality of rights. By law, there were three orders or
estates, but out of a total population of between 24 and 26
millions, more than 96% beclonged to the Third Estate alone.

At most 500_000 individuals made up the enormously privlidged
ecclesiastical aristorcracy of the 1st and 2nd estates. In
numbers, the secular and regular clergy of 130_000 memembers 
was significant [see below]

Never-the-less, the clergy possessed influence far beyond 
its numbers. The Church was an organised body, a self-governing
corporate structure, hierarchically arranged and subject to
frim internal discipileine. It was almost a state within a
state, with its own officers of administratin, its own 
courts of law, and a representative assembly meetoing at stated
internvals, for among other purposes, regulating its relations
with the monarchy. The Church was immensely wealthy, enjoying
great income from the annual revenue on its vast landed 
possessions, from the tithe [P.15] that it levied on all crops, 
and from many gifts and fees. 

It was powerful as well as influential, holding a monopoly 
of the registration of births, deaths and marriages. It 
controlled poor relief and education. Sharing with the State
in the censorship of all publications and upholding the 
traditions and the values of the established order, the
Church was a profoundly conservative force, a pillar of 
society.

PP.3 

The number of individuals making up the lay aristocracy of
the nobility, which was the second order (Estate), has been
estimated at between 100 and 400 thousdand, or between 1 and 3%
of the total population. Unlike the clergy, it was not 
corporately organised. But, as a legally distinct social
group, it was set apart from all others by its own rights
and privledges. AMonth them were the rights enjoyed by its
memebers to be tried at special courts, to be exempted from 
the heaviest of the direct taxes, and to be granted 
preferential rates for the others; to have a monopoly of
the highest positions in the civil administration and in
the Church and, in the closing years of the Old Regime, 
in the military, naval, and diplomatic services as well.

... From the ranks of the magistrates in the superior
courts, the parlements, came the tough 
opponents of the abosolute monarchy, the parlementaires
[Parlementariasts], who time
and again in the century obstructed royal policy and challenged
the very theory of absolutism. Cultivated and refined,
rich and arrogant too, they spearheaded the revival of the 
influence and power of the 18th century (1700c) nobility.

PP.1

The over-whelming majority of the population belonged to 
the 3rd Estate. This was a legal catch-all in which the
middle class, or the [bourgeoisie], to use the
French term, was the most important segment. ... The
bourgeois made up 10-12% of the total ??? population 
and over half of the population of the towns and cities.
... [The layers within the bourgeois consisted of]...
[the upper layer] composed primarily of the wealthy new
new business elite and government officials not of the
nobility. There was a middle bourgeoisie, comprising 
independent craftsmen and artisans, well-to-do merchants
and traders, booksellers and printers, members of the
rapidly growing liberal professions: writers, scholars,
and lawyers. Whiel all other town dwellers technically
constituted the populace (gens du peuple), it was
difficult in practice to distinguish between representatives
of the working class proper, such as journeymen, apprentices,
clerks, domestics, and the memembers of the petty bourgeoiseie
of small shop-keepers and neighborhood tradesmen.

PP.2

For those with some capital, the times were good during the
greater part of the 1700c. International trade was booming
in volume and value. On the eve of the Revolution, the
value of the total foreign trade was slightly above 1_T livres,
most of it in the taple colongial products of raw cotton, 
sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate, and Negro slaves.
In consiequence ofhte great profits, a new plutocracy of
merchants and financiers established itself along the 
Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboards, investing and 
re-investing their gian in refining and processing plants,
in financial and insurance operations, and in advanced
forms of industrial enterprise. The un-precedented 
increase of 3_000_000 in the population since mid-century
helped their cause, furnishing them with both a new labor
force and a broader market, while an equally stupendous
increase in the amount of minted money in circulation
-- between 2T and 3T [P. 16/17] livres in gold and silver 
-- elevated sales prices by 50%.

PP.1  

The boom was great, but guild rules and restrictions,
governmental monopolies and controls, internal customs
dues, [as well as] a multiplicity of weights and measures,
contradictory legal practices and principles, all those
obstacles seriously impeded economic growth and retarded
economic growth and retarded economic unification. More-over,
this expansionist cycle brought the workers few benefits 
other than increased employment opportunities. In terms of 
purchasing power, their real wages were lower at the end
of the long cycle than they had been at the start, for 
while real prices went up on an average of about 45%, real 
wages rose only by about 22%. When the boom ended in
the 1770's and a recession set in, the hardship of the
working people was appalling.

PP.2 

Nor was the expansionist period and un-mitigated blessing 
for the peasantry. France, it must be remembered, was 
over-whelming rural and the status of the French peasantsry
was unique, un-paralled in Europe. Nearly all peasants were
legally free and perhaps 3 out of every 4 heads of families
were propietors, in fact if not in title, of the land that 
they cultivated. Suject the payment of of manorial dues
and services, they were free to bequeath, inherit, and 
improve if they could, the plot that they worked. What they
owned as a group made up close to 40% of arable land.
Never-the-less, the total was not nearly enough for the 
needs of a rapidly growing population.

The average plot was grossly in-adequate. Thus, the majority
of the peasonts also worked a large part of the
remaining cultivable soil which they did not own but which 
was owned by either the monarchy, the Church, the lay
aristocracy, or the bourgeoiseie.If they were fortunate,
they worked this additional land as tenant farmers; if not,
as share-croppers. Apart from a tiny minority that was 
well off, most peasants only mangaged somehow, by pooling
the combined labor force of the family with such income from 
suplementary work as they could find, to make do in good
times. One out of every four families, if not more, was
completely landless. For the heads of such families, [P.17/18]
the alternative to disaster was to hire themselves out as 
farmhands or do piece-work as spinners or weavers for the
town entrepreneur. Even in good times, the highways of
France swarmed with tramps and beggars; and when times
were hard, with brigands too.

PP.1

Illiteracy was general among them. For the average peasant,
his small piece of land was insufficient. He had no capital
to fall back upon. His obligaions to the State, Church, 
and Lord of the Manor were many and heavy. Un-aided, he
could not improve his lot. The Physiocrats, the great 
capitialist agricultural reformers, pressed their campaign
to improve and increase agricultural production, but the
changes which they advocated decreased the poor peasants'
margin of security. Enclosure of their plots, abolition
of their ancient collective rights to the common fields,
division of cleared or re-claimed land, higher rentals
for improved land, all these improvements were burdens
rather than blessings for peasants who could not take 
advantage of the new opportunities.

PP.2

Beginning with about 1776 (see map), trial after trial
afflicted the rural population. Reversing the trend since
the early decades of the 1700c, grain prices sagged. This
gradual decline continued until 1788, when the harvest
failed, which shot grain prices to a century high. A very 
small minority of the peasants benefitted from these 
developments, but most did not. The greatest number had 
to pay the high market prices for their seed as well as
for their bread. Meantime, landlords, themselves affected
by rising costs, had raised the rentals on leased land. 
In this same span of years, the important wine production 
segment of rural economy was suffering from a glutted
market and collapsing prices. Thus, the income of many
peasants was dropping off sharply, just when for all of
them grain and bread prices were soaring. To cap the 
climax of misfortune, the boom burst in industrial 
expansion, most of all in textile production, and a
severe crisis of un-employment followed.

PP.3

The winter of 1788-1789 tried the forititude of the 
poor. It was the coldest in the memory of living men. 
Provisions were inadequate, naturally, for relief
and no public works program existed to take care 
of the needy. In the towns there was rioting for
bread, work, and living wages; in the country-side,
half-starved peasants were on the loose. The cry,
to be heard again during the Revolution, that "the
brigands" were coming, reverberated through-out the
land. The military authorities had been called out 
more than once before this break up demonstrations
for higher wages and better work conditions. Now,
in this crisis of un-exampled intensity, both 
economic and political, the people had no one to 
turn to for guidance and leadership, save their
bourgeois associates.




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