5 - Crisis and change in the Caux

Summary

Revolution

By the winter of 1788–89, the French monarchy was in serious financial trouble and embarked on a series of fateful decisions. Having failed to convince the parlements to register edicts that would have levied taxes on the nobility, the king ordered a meeting of the Estates General, announced procedures for electing delegates, and requested people meet by village, order, and occupation to compile lists of grievances. The peasants, artisans, and merchants of Rouen and the Caux held meetings, elected representatives to regional assemblies, and wrote their cahiers de doléances. The major concerns of the cauchois peasants and artisans were not, however, the kingdom's finances and the struggle taking shape over the national government, but their need for economic aid. Unfortunately for Louis XVI, as well as for the Caux (at least in the short run), the government was rapidly losing its ability to help itself, much less anyone else.

The problems in the Caux had begun earlier in the decade, when English textiles began to eat into the foreign market for French textiles. They did not become truly serious, however, until 1786, when an Anglo—French commercial treaty allowed English fabric to be sold in France itself. Commonly called the Eden Treaty after the chief English negotiator, William Eden, whose preparations for the meetings allowed him to outmaneuver the French at every step, the treaty was greeted with dismay by French manufacturers.