The French Revolution: what is known, what is argued

It all starts with a money problem. The Estates General met on 5 May 1789 at Versailles; on 17 June the Third Estate and nineteen deputies of the clergy constituted themselves a deliberating assembly; on 20 June, locked out of their hall, they swore in the tennis court never to separate.

Then came the Bastille, the feudal regime abolished on the night of 4 August, the Declaration of Rights on 26 August, a Republic on 21 September 1792, a Directory, and 18 Brumaire, Year VIII, which opened the Consulate.

The Bastille was not full of political prisoners. The attackers found seven detainees. What they had come for, writes Pascal Dupuy, was powder and shot. The governor of the fortress, de Launay, was murdered on the way to the Hôtel de Ville.

14 July carries two anniversaries. The law of 6 July 1880 made it the national holiday. Luce-Marie Albigès points out that it was the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790 that was invoked in the Senate debates, whereas in everyone’s mind the date points to the founding event of 1789.

“Let them eat cake” is not hers. The line is in Rousseau’s Confessions, written in 1765, attributed to “a great princess”: Marie-Antoinette was ten at the time and living in Vienna. The attribution to her appears in 1843, in Alphonse Karr; at her trial nobody held it against her.

The night of 4 August did not abolish everything at once. The corvée, the tithe and hunting rights went without compensation; the other dues were declared redeemable, and at a costly rate. You had to pay to stop paying, and irrevocable abolition waited until 17 July 1793.

How many dead? The answer depends on what you count, and the historians say so first. For the Terror the base is judicial: Criminocorpus holds to nearly 17,000 victims for the revolutionary tribunals alone, across the whole of France, from March 1793 to August 1794; the Assemblée nationale counts 1,376 executions for the forty-seven days of the “Great Terror”. Biard and Linton map the death sentences using the figures of Donald Greer, the American whose statistical study The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution appeared in 1935. None of these counts catches what no court clerk recorded: deaths in prison, summary executions, civil war.

The Vendée resists counting most of all. For Michel Biard and Marisa Linton the toll is estimated at between 170,000 and 200,000 dead. Jean-Clément Martin has shown why the count stalls: at May-sur-Èvre, tradition speaks of 1,900 dead where the civil register records 555 deaths in 1793-1794.

On the facts historians agree; on the meaning they have been at each other for two centuries. Michel Vovelle, taking stock in 1988, distinguishes two camps. On one side the Jacobin school (Aulard, Mathiez, Lefebvre, Soboul), which proposes the pattern of a bourgeois revolution with popular support.

On the other the revisionists (Alfred Cobban, François Furet, Denis Richet, George Taylor), who dispute the existence or the substance of a real bourgeoisie and read the years 1791 to 1794 as a skid off the road. Furet announced in 1978 that the Revolution was over; Vovelle read in that the wish that a certain historiography had had its day. Biard and Linton add that there never was a system of Terror: the expression was coined after the fact by the Thermidorians.

The most contested word is genocide. Since 1985 Reynald Secher has argued that the Vendée suffered a genocide decided by revolutionary France and carried out by Turreau’s armies. Jean-Clément Martin refuses the word, and says why: the Vendée did not exist as a distinct population before 1793, the word brigands was used against opponents everywhere, the state was at the same time relieving thousands of Vendéen refugees, and no organisation of extermination is attested. War crimes, he writes; not a genocide.

The Revolution also wanted to change time. By decrees of 5 October and 24 November 1793, the Convention adopted a republican calendar whose Year I began on 22 September, the autumn equinox and the day the Republic was founded. Three ten-day décades replaced the weeks; every date carried the name of a plant, an animal or a tool. No more saints: things.

The same ambition for measures: on 26 March 1791 the metre became the ten-millionth part of a quarter of the earth’s meridian, and Delambre and Méchain would spend nearly seven years measuring it, from Dunkirk to Barcelona. On 17 February 1793 a five-year patent was granted for the invention of new playing cards: on that pack, king, queen and jack had given way to geniuses, liberties and equalities. You play your hand without crowning anyone.