CHAPTER XXIII - THE OUTBREAK OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Summary

To the nineteenth-century historian the French Revolution was largely a battle of ideas and its outbreak the more or less fortuitous climax to a series of political crises—the rejection of Calonne's proposals for tax reform by the Assembly of Notables of 1787, the convocation of the Estates General, and the king's dismissal of Necker on 11 July 1789; while, in the background of events, an undifferentiated mass of peasants and turbulent town-dwellers, prompted by age-old grievances or hopes of easy spoils, waited to settle accounts with seigneurs, tax-collectors and city authorities. During the past half-century, however, this general thesis has been largely modified by the work of such writers as Jaurès, Mathiez, Lefebvre and Labrousse, all of whom have been more or less influenced by Marx's historical methods. As the field of research into the origins of the Revolution has widened, it has been found necessary to pay more attention to social and economic factors in general and, above all, to the particular grievances and social claims of an extremely heterogeneous peasantry and urban menu peuple, whose intervention, therefore, no longer appears as a mere echo or reflection of the actions or speeches of aristocrats, lawyers and journalists at Versailles and in Paris. More attention has also been paid to the ‘feudal reaction’ of the last twenty-five years of the old régime in France and to the aims of the parlements and provincial noblesse, who staged the famous révolte nobiliaire, or aristocratic revolt, of 1787–8; in fact, it has even been claimed that this episode was not merely a curtain-raiser to the events of 1789, but marked the opening shot of the Revolution itself.