"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY" LETS CAPITALISM TAKE WING

IN PRACTICE...

• Liberty means free enterprise. 

• Equality ends the nobles' privileges that limit business growth. 

• Fraternity calls up the masses to blow those privileges away.

The French Revolution is usually explained as due to archaic systems of land ownership, taxation and government finance, plus exceptionally poor harvests, the cost of aid to American revolutionaries, the extravagance and short-sightedness of the royal court and new ideas. 

One of the web's explanations 

Causes: Inequality / The poor have no power / Absolutism / Hunger

Not said: that economic growth made conflict between hereditary landowners and nascent capitalists inevitable, and that the latter had to call up the street to win.  

Painting gone from the web. For similar images, please click. 

Middle-class leader, popular striking force: But only the man with the blue head scarf at the bottom right appears to work with his hands.

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When the explorations and discoveries of the end of the 15th century bring major new revenues, an unprecedented expansion of chains of production lets new entrepreneurs challenge the ruling class of hereditary landowners, the nobles. 

In France that brings:

• Stronger monarchy, which contains the new interests.

• Arts that buttress the threatened nobles by associating them with the gods of mythology.

• "Wars of Religion," that pit popular masses against entrepreneurs who challenge traditional protections.  

Nobles' legal privileges and control of the State hamper those interests, but do not stop their growth. By the 1780's establishments employing hundreds of workers have grown up around Paris:

   Pillage de a Folie-Titon [Réveillon] au Fbg. Saint-Antoine, April 28 1789, anonymous, end 18th century / zoom

A riot at Réveillon, with 200 employees, takes place two months before the taking of the Bastille. By opposing a rumored reduction of salaries rather than the cost of bread, it announces the struggle between capital and labor. 

Similar establishments: A company with 300 employees in what is now the 13th; plants north of the Saint-Denis gate, one of which has 800 workers; manufactories in Orleans and Rouen... .

-- In the 13th:

Éléments pour une history de la Commune dans le 13e arrondissement by Gérard Conte, 1981

-- In the north:

The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé, 1959

-- In Orleans and Rouen:

Les derniers feux [fires]de la monarchie by Charles-Eloi Vial, ch. 1, 2016

Entrepreneurs resent the nobles' privileges that block their expansion, and want political power that fits their economic clout. Nobles, whose revenues come largely from peasant dues that inflation reduces and whose values and upbringing make them ill-equipped for business resist (please click and scroll down).

The street provides the force that leads to them to hide, flee or be guillotined: "What had been pretension became tragedy."

-- Adolphe Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution française,1834

 

      Illustration in La Grande Révolution française by Georges Soria (ed. Bordas), 1988

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Marx's summary of the French Revolution: "The dykes to capitalism had to be broken. They were broken."

But not quite.

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Next,

 5.1.2.

The 1830 Revolution: capitalists' neglected triumph