IN PRACTICE...
- Liberty means free enterprise.
- Equality brings the end the nobles' privileges that limit business growth.
- Fraternity calls up the rank and file to blow those privileges away.
Zoom
Middle-class leader, underclass striking force
The reasons usually given for the French Revolution are a background of archaic systems of land ownership, taxation and government finance, to which were added exceptionally poor harvests, the cost of aid to American revolutionaries, the extravagance of the royal court and new ideas.
Not said: that economic growth made conflict between nascent capitalists and hereditary landowners inevitable — one way or another.
- When the explorations and discoveries of roughly 1500 bring unprecedented expansion of chains of production, new entrepreneurs — producers of supplies, cloth, ships, sails, nails, raisers of horses and mules — threaten the ruling class of hereditary landowners, the nobles.
That evolution leads in France to stronger monarchy, which contains the new interests; to associating nobles with the gods of mythology; to "Wars of Religion," that pit popular masses against entrepreneurs who challenge traditional protections.
- Nobles' legal privileges and control of the State hamper but do not stop the growth of those interests. By the 1780's establishments employing hundreds of workers have grown up around Paris:
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Pillage of la Folie-Titon [Réveillon] on 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 reacting against 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; several plants north of the Saint-Denis gate, one of which has 800 workers; manufactories in Orleans and Rouen... .
-- In the 13th:
Elements for a History of the Commune in the 13th Dstrict by Gérard Conte, 1981 (in French)
-- In the north:
The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé, 1982
-- In Orleans and Rouen:
The Monarchy's Last Fires by Charles-Eloi Vial, ch. 1, 2016 (in French)
- Those entrepreneurs resent the nobles' privileges that block their expansion, and want political power that fits their economic clout. Nobles, whose revenues come from peasant dues that inflation reduces and whose values and upbringing make them ill-equipped for business, resist.
The street provides the force that leads to them to hide, flee or be guillotined: "What had been pretension became tragedy."
-- Adolphe Thiers, History of the French Revolution,1834 (in French)
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Illustration in The Great French Revolution by Georges Soria (ed. Bordas) in French, 1988 |
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Marx's summary:
"The dykes to capitalism had to be broken.
They were broken."
But not quite.
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