The Strategy of Protest and Revolution 2: The French
Revolution
Hi, and
welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is a video series on “The Strategy of Protest
and Revolution”, where we’ll look at how successful revolutionary,
protest and other social movements have strategized in order to achieve
their political goals. To do that, we’ll be focusing on the following
questions:
- First: How can activists turn public
discontent into a political movement?
- Second: What do successful movements
do to achieve their political goals?
- And third, how have successful
strategies changed with time?
Over this
series, we’ll answer these questions by looking at various historical
movements, starting with the French Revolution of 1789.
Introduction
The French
Revolution of 1789, which overthrew the absolute monarchy of King Louis XVI, is
seen as the prime example of a “Spontaneous Uprising” grand strategy. Under this
narrative, decades of mismanagement by the absolutist establishment, initially
meaning the King and his court at Versailles, triggered an explosive anti-absolutist
uprising amongst the King’s subjects: first from the aristocracy, then from the
bourgeoisie and finally the urban workers.
This
narrative isn’t wrong, but it overlooks the extent to which anti-absolutist
groups organized and prepared for 1789. They organized into a broad coalition
that, while very loose, very informal and very conflicted, nevertheless managed
to overcome the establishment’s political and physical power. Focusing on the
experience of Paris, we want to focus on three questions:
- One. How
did activists convince the aristocracy, bourgeoisie and workers to join the
movement?
- Two. How
did the movement stay together long enough to overcome the establishment?
- and Three.
How did the movement actually overcome establishment power?
Establishment
and Movement
Because
social movements can’t usually match an establishment at full strength, their
success depends on political opportunities. The best opportunities occur within
an extended window of opportunity, where an already-declining establishment
receives a further blow to its power.
This was
what the Versailles establishment was facing on the eve of Revolution. Throughout
the 18th Century, the French state had failed to raise enough tax to
cover its expenses, preferring to take on debt instead. By 1787, France was
struggling to pay the interest on its debt – if it was to avoid a humiliating
default, Versailles had to reform the tax system, and especially get rid of the
aristocracy’s – meaning the clergy and nobility’s – tax privileges. But this
action broke the implicit agreement that tied the aristocracy to Versailles,
and – not for the first time – the establishment split apart, with aristocrats
deploying their power not for the King, but against him. In this way, reform
periods present a particularly powerful opportunity for social movements.
*
But even
then, the obstacles to success were high. Within Paris, Versailles had a
formidable internal security force: to police a city of 600 thousand, it had a
Paris Guard of 1.5 thousand and the 6 thousand strong regiment of the Gardes
Francaises, which would give a force-to-civilian ratio higher than modern
cities.
Of course,
these units were hardly professional police, but they were well-experienced in
managing public anger. While political assemblies were officially banned, the
police recognized the value in letting people gather in quote-unquote
“celebrations” to blow off steam. This was the case even for riots, where a few
minor villains – usually price-gouging bakers – were sacrificed to mobs, preserving
the larger system and reminding the well-off of the value of order. The police
would even offer to escort protests to Versailles, encouraging the population
to see the King, rather than fellow citizens, as their only savior. Thanks to
their management, Paris before the 1780s had not seen a movement last longer
than 3 months.
The police
were helped by the segmented nature of French society. We can simplify things
into three social classes: first, there was the aristocracy of the clergy and
nobility. Their goal was to defend their existing privileges, and to achieve
that, they would deploy the political power they held to disrupt Versailles and
force it to give in.
At the other
end were the workers, made up of the skilled and unskilled laborers of Paris. They
wanted to get rid of aristocratic privilege, but at the same time they also
wanted to protect their own privileges, most often in the form of guilds and
wage levels. Disruption was also their standard method, but this time in the
form of physical violence, like riots.
In the
middle were the bourgeoisie or middle-class, made up of non-aristocratic
professionals and merchants. They wanted to eliminate both the aristocratic and
working-class privileges that limited their economic and social power. Unlike
the other two classes, they preferred to coopt rather than disrupt the
establishment, exploiting the fact that French society valued their expertise
and money to influence others to grant their demands.
From this
overview, we can see that these classes were not natural partners – on the
contrary, each class had every reason to see the King as their defender against
the threat posed by the others. So how could a movement even get going like
this?
A Good
Issue: Mismanagement and Citizenhood
A
Spontaneous Uprising is a high-issue, low organization movement, made up of
independent cells that loosely work together because they share similar
demands. Until the very end, the French anti-absolutist movement of 1789, had
no central command. Nobody had the authority to order others to do something;
instead, participants were motivated by the issues to do whatever they thought
would be useful. So the key thing for the movement was to find an issue that
would motivate as many people as possible to join the movement and act in its
name.
Usually,
this is the point where we start talking about the “Rights of Man”. But a good
issue requires more than just abstract philosophy: it needs to identify a
pressing societal problem, and offer a solution to said problem that works for
the public. In true low-organization form, the movement’s issue slowly formed
as individual activists published, debated, reacted to events, and received
feedback, and gradually, everybody came to some conclusions as to what would
best motivate the public.
The problem
was relatively simple – it was the self-evident mismanagement of France by the
absolutist establishment. Repeated debt crises, economic recessions, defeat in
war and royal scandals made it easy for the public to accept that the
establishment was not running the country well. There was no need to narrow
down the mismanagement beyond this – the goal, after all, was to appeal to as
many groups as possible, even if each group had a different interpretation on
what the mismanagement was.
For nobles,
Versailles was reforming away their privilege; for officers, France’s defeats
were because Versailles protected noble privilege. Versailles sided with
British manufacturers against the French bourgeoisie; Versailles was siding
with the French factory owners against the workers. By holding a broad
definition of ‘mismanagement’, the movement could bridge the gap between
France’s bickering classes, so long as they didn’t examine each other’s
positions too closely.
So how to
fix ‘mismanagement’? The solution came in the idea of ‘citizenhood’, which was
another broad concept that could appeal to everybody. The idea, that every
subject of France should have certain rights and a say in how the country was
run, could justify almost every political outcome. It was of course used to
justify bourgeois constitutionalism and working-class radicalism, but even
conservative nobles could get behind it, because they already saw themselves as
defenders of traditional rights against the King. Army officers imagined that a
‘citizens’ army’ would achieve success like the Roman legions; Church
reformists argued that citizenhood would bring the church closer to the people.
Again, so long as they didn’t look too closely at each other, everybody could
see ‘citizenhood’ as a solution to their problems.
Furthermore,
implementing ‘citizenhood’ was not seen as a radical change. Nothing in it
demanded the removal of the King; instead, Versailles was only expected to accept
or tweak existing political institutions, and many even saw the King as the one
who would set this process in motion, given his role in freeing the United
States. The solution was therefore well-positioned to, again, appeal to large
segments of society.
So, we’ve
seen how the issue of ‘mismanagement’ and ‘citizenhood’ used broad definitions
to unite France’s competing social classes in a common struggle against absolutism.
But the downside of designing an issue this way is that whatever unity that
results is just an illusion, because participants are still expecting different
results. As the anti-absolutist movement developed, its participants would
increasingly clash over what ‘citizenhood’ meant specifically, leading
ultimately into Revolutionary Terror.
July 87 –
Apr 88: Aristocrats and Bourgeoisie
Let’s go
back to Paris in 1787, where the absolutist establishment under King Louis XVI
was trying to revoke the tax privileges of the church and the nobility. These
aristocrats responded by using the institutions they controlled to disrupt Versailles’
plans. Their key tool here was the Paris parlement, an aristocrat-dominated
law court, whose approval was needed for tax legislation. Unsurprisingly, the parlement
refused to approve.
Aristocratic
disruption soon spread across the political system. In May, Versailles
tried to overawe the parlement by convening a handpicked Assembly of
Notables to support the King. Instead, the aristocrats in the Assembly not only
forced out the Finance Minister, they also declared that the King had to
convene the Estates-General, for now another institution the aristocrats
controlled, to discuss reform.
In these
ways, the anti-absolutist movement, almost exclusively driven by
ex-establishment aristocrats, demonstrated a power to disrupt Versailles
politically. But Versailles was not ready to compromise. It deployed more of its
political power to suppress the movement: in July, the King banished parlement
from Paris and tried to impose the tax reforms by edict.
In response,
aristocrats looked to increase their power by bringing in more participants. The
first – and more important – group they approached were their counterparts in
the provinces. Being from similar social circles and having the same interest
in defending privilege, the country aristocracy easily joined the movement. The
provincial parlements refused to approve the tax changes, and the clergy
voted to pay only 25% of their dues to the King. By increasing the scale of the
disruption, the movement temporarily outmatched Versailles and the banishment
of the Paris parlement was lifted in August.
At the same
time, the movement was also reaching out to another group. On their own
initiative, the professional bourgeoisie who staffed the Paris parlement,
and who became unemployed during the banishment, implemented their own outreach
towards fellow Parisians, particularly of their social class, urging them to
support parlement against Versailles.
We’ve gone
through how the movement’s issue was structured to appeal to both aristocrats
and bourgeoisie. But to broadcast their message to the public, parlement
activists resorted to the simplest action of: doing something to get attention.
They burnt effigies of the King’s ministers, and marched around central Paris
yelling slogans. The point was to advertise their existence and to draw a crowd
– but not to disrupt the establishment. In fact, at this point activists
cooperated with police to guarantee a safe environment to quote-unquote “amuse
ourselves”.
Despite
this, serious work was being done. Peaceful mass gatherings served three
purposes: firstly, they served to draw in both the friendly and the curious.
Secondly, they demonstrated that public opinion favored the parlement. Lastly,
they were also centers of agitation and political education, where activists
turned uncommitted people into motivated supporters.
These mass
gatherings soon moved into bourgeois and aristocratic districts to achieve
greater effect. The bourgeoisie were already unhappy with absolutism, and these
gatherings eventually agitated many to take action against Versailles, as we
will see. For now, this surface-level unity between aristocrat and bourgeois
was good enough to keep the movement alive through the banishment of the parlement,
as well as another round of attempted suppression over the winter. The movement
was readying itself to navigate the turbulent years ahead.
May – Aug
88: The Workers Join
Up until the
spring of 1788, the anti-absolutist movement was mainly comprised of
aristocrats and bourgeoisie. The aristocratic parlement continued to
disrupt Versailles’ tax reform attempts, supported by the bourgeoisie’s mass
gatherings that, in the absence of any pro-establishment gathering, represented
the only public opinion on the issue.
With the
debt becoming increasingly unsustainable, the movement must have thought that
this was the best time to escalate the disruption and force King Louis to
compromise. The parlement began to not just obstruct, but actually
intrude on the King’s powers. In May 1788, it declared that it, not the King,
was the defender of the so-called ‘fundamental rights of the Nation’, and
followed it up by rejecting the King’s right to veto or punish it.
The movement
was inflicting ever-greater costs on the establishment; but to King Louis, the
costs of compromising on absolutism were still much higher. This time,
Versailles drew not just on its political power, but also on its physical
power. In a set of May Edicts, the King formally stripped the parlement
of its powers, and backed it up by sending in the police and the army to break
up mass gatherings. Undoubtedly, he hoped that such a display of power, which
the movement surely could not match, would be enough to suppress the movement.
Versailles
didn’t count on the workers – the sans-culottes – joining the
anti-absolutist movement. Throughout France, the bourgeoisie and working class
began to riot, attacking officials and holding political assemblies. Even when
troops were ordered to disperse rioters, working-class soldiers often deserted
or mutinied instead. Everywhere, workers parroted the message of the movement:
“Down with the King’s Ministers!”, “Long Live the Parlement!”, and “Soldiers,
Defend the Citizens!”.
So why did
workers join the movement now? The establishment accused them of being mobs for
hire, paid by aristocrats to cause trouble. More realistically, we can point to
the bad harvests of 1787 and 88, and the state failing to pay soldiers’ wages.
But that doesn’t explain why workers would join a movement that, by and large, was
made up of people who didn’t share their goals.
It all goes
back to the movement’s continuing outreach, which was now filtering down to all
of Parisian society. But a different approach was required to recruit the workers.
The revolutionary press that would agitate the sans-culottes in later
years was still miniscule in 1788, and in any case the average worker was
probably too busy surviving to be motivated by high politics. Instead, workers
participated through their social circle: if their friends, employers, or local
leaders joined, they would join too.
So,
mobilizing the workers meant tapping into the social connections within the faubourg
industrial suburbs of Paris. Unfortunately for the establishment, they had unwittingly
given the movement a major opportunity here. In 1782, tax collectors had built
a ring of customs posts to tax goods entering the city, and among those who
most resented the taxes were the wine merchants who delivered and served cheap
wine in the taverns of the faubourgs. This put them in the perfect position
to both be influenced by the bourgeois part of the movement, and to direct the
workers and their social circles in the movement’s direction.
Adopting the
movement’s issues as their own, the workers sought to achieve them in their
typical fashion – violence. Suddenly, the movement gained a physical power that
the King’s scattered forces had not planned for. Rocked by urban riots and
going bankrupt, Versailles by August was forced to not only restore the Paris parlement,
but also to convene the Estates-General by May 1789, and place the movement’s
favored candidate, the bourgeois financier Jacques Necker, as Finance Minister.
From the
aristocratic viewpoint, Versailles had completely capitulated to their demands;
all that remained was for them to exercise their control over the
Estates-General, and finally put an end to the absolutist threat to their
privileges… but of course, that wasn’t the end of it.
Aug 88 –
Apr 89: Ideological Clashes
At this
point, we should remember that each social class of aristocracy, bourgeoisie
and workers joined the anti-absolutist movement for contradictory reasons: the
aristocracy wanted to defend privilege, the bourgeoisie wanted to end it, and
the workers took both pro- and anti-privilege stances for their goal of social
equality. So far, the movement had papered over their differences by using
broad definitions for its issue of ‘mismanagement’ and ‘citizenhood’. But now,
the aristocrats had achieved victory according to their definition of the issue.
Almost
immediately, the movement broke apart. True to their idea of aristocratic
representation, the Paris parlement in September 1788 announced the
famous three tiers of the Estates-General: the First Estate of the Clergy, the
Second Estate of the Nobility, and the Third Estate, with every resolution
requiring the separate approval of all three Estates. This essentially gave the
aristocracy two vetoes over any proposal.
To the
bourgeoisie and workers, this arrangement merely substituted absolutist
privilege with aristocratic privilege. So they used their larger numbers to impose
a new interpretation of the issue upon the movement, one that rejected their
former partners. Now characterizing the aristocracy as in with the absolutist
establishment, they demanded changes to the voting structure of the
Estates-General that would allow the Third Estate to outvote the other two.
This was not what most aristocrats wanted, and all but the most liberal
deserted the movement.
The
aristocrats’ loss of leadership is a demonstration of what could happen if a
movement does not enforce ideological discipline on newcomers. The bourgeoisie
overwhelmed the aristocrats; could the workers eventually overwhelm the
bourgeoisie? The movement needed the physical power of the workers to face down
Versailles, yet worker demands clearly conflicted with bourgeois interests. This
uncomfortable relationship was fully tested in the Reveillon Riots of April
1789.
Reveillon
was a bourgeois factory owner who made his wealth selling to aristocrats. This
made him a success story to the bourgeoisie, but a potential collaborator and
profiteer to the workers. So, when Reveillon made some misinterpreted comments
about reducing wages, workers decided to teach him a lesson, and destroyed
Reveillon’s house, factory and neighborhood in a four-day riot. As if to
indicate that this was what they expected out of the broader anti-absolutist
movement, they called out “Long Live the Third Estate!” even while looting from
another member of the Third Estate.
Bourgeois
leaders had to walk a fine line between keeping their movement viable and maintaining
their control over it. The easiest solution was to have Versailles fulfill
their demands, and so, throughout the riots, they stressed their loyalty to the
King, said that they were defending Paris from anarchy, and tacitly cooperated
with police in suppressing the riot.
At the same
time, bourgeois leaders also inserted themselves as leaders of the working
class. Bourgeois pamphlets such as Sieyes’ famous What is the Third Estate?
portrayed workers and bourgeoisie as part of a common front, even though only
10% of Parisian workers earned enough to vote for representatives to the Third
Estate. Still, those inevitably-bourgeois representatives also acted as voices
for the workers and peasants, drafting the lists of grievances that were
delivered to the Estates-General and leading protests against other bourgeoisie
– though during the Reveillon Riots, they actually led workers away from
his factory.
These
measures worked to some extent: the bourgeoisie and their liberal aristocrat
allies would lead throughout the 1789 Revolution and for a while afterwards.
But they were also helped by the lack of a working-class institution that could
organize the workers. This would not be the case after 1789 and partly explains
why the Revolution turned into the Terror.
May – Jul
1789: Revolution
By spring
1789, the ideological struggle within the anti-absolutist movement had, for now,
been resolved in favor of the bourgeoisie and its liberal allies, just in time
for the convening of the Estates-General of 1789 to discuss France’s fiscal
situation.
Versailles
had given in to this in the face of the massive disruption inflicted by the
aristocrat-led movement. While it recognized that the two aristocratic vetoes
within the Estates-General would kill off any reform of aristocratic privilege,
this concession would at least allow normal business – which included tackling
the deficit – to resume. There was still the small matter of the
anti-absolutist movement taking over the Third Estate, but now that the
establishment had been reunified, it could surely outmatch anything the
bourgeoisie or the working class could do.
As we all
know, the establishment miscalculated – again. But this time, they didn’t get the
level of disruption wrong. Granted, they weren’t expecting the Third Estate to
insist on voting reform within the Estates-General, and when that was rejected,
to declare itself the National Assembly and demand a constitution for France in
the famous Tennis Court Oath of June 20th. But the Assembly still
needed the rest of the French political system to accept these changes, and
surely, the vetoes of the aristocracy and the forces of the King would stop
that from ever happening.
The fact
that the establishment was unable to stop such a happening represents the
crowning achievement of the bourgeois movement’s outreach. Even before the
birth of the National Assembly, the non-aristocratic clergy had already decided
to join the Third Estate, and they brought the rest of the First Estate with
them. Soon, nobles also began defecting to the Assembly, and within a week of
the Oath, King Louis had no choice but to order the rest of the Second Estate
to join.
Under the
very nose of Versailles, the movement had coopted enough of the establishment to
hand over its political powers. The Assembly cleverly deployed them to declare
itself the only tax authority in the country, placing Versailles at its
financial mercy. In any future political disruption contest, the establishment
would surely lose.
But King
Louis still could not accept limits on his absolutism, and once again, he
turned back to the physical forces he controlled. Versailles now ordered armies
to concentrate around Paris, threatening to re-impose absolutism at the tip of
a bayonet.
What was
once largely a political contest was rapidly turning into a physical one, and
to survive it, the movement needed to assemble a force that could match that of
an actual state. This was not something that a low-organization movement of
loosely-coordinated groups was good at.
There were
some attempts at independently setting up local forces. The workers’ riots of
the previous months had already forced Parisians to see to their own defense,
throwing up barricades that would then be policed by neighborhood militia.
Within these barricades, neighborhood committees began taking over the business
of government: overseeing residents, organizing supplies, exchanging news with
other committees.
Nevertheless,
movement leaders recognized that these mini-states were little more than
disorganized rabble without a central coordinating organization. Now, most low-organization
movements trying to set up centralized commands fall at this last hurdle, both
because of the high material and non-material cost to set up these
institutions, and because they present a juicy target for establishment forces.
But here,
the French anti-absolutist movement had the extreme luck of being supported by
the richest man in France – the Duke of Orleans, King Louis’ cousin and a
liberal aristocrat. He offered the movement not just unlimited funds, but also
his Palais Royal in Paris’ city center, which was off-limits to police.
Money and safety were no longer a problem.
While movement
leaders negotiated their way towards a central command that satisfied all
groups, they were already using the Palais Royal to coordinate action at
a much higher level. A key objective was securing the defection of the policing
forces within Paris: the Paris Guard and the regiment of the Gardes
Francaises. Despite their suppression of the Reveillon Riots, both were
being swayed by the general anti-establishment mood within Paris. So the
movement launched a coordinated and sustained campaign to encourage their
defection: propaganda, bribes, appeals from the crowd, even sending mobs to
break into jails to free defectors. The result was a 1% defection rate to the
movement even before the dramatic days of the Bastille, not just from the Gardes
but also from units surrounding Paris and beyond.
The movement
also cooperated with the National Assembly in Versailles, hoping for the
least-risky way of winning, which was a compromise with King Louis. As the
King’s military intent became more obvious in late June, the Palais even
discouraged protests to support the argument that the National Assembly would
restore order to France.
Unfortunately
for himself, King Louis continued to believe in absolutism at all costs, and on
July 11, shut down all possibility of compromise by dismissing what the bourgeois
movement saw as their representative at Versailles, the Finance Minister Jacques
Necker. Versailles seemed intent on re-imposing order through force.
Caught up in
fear and anger, the workers and their radical allies gave the call to arms, and
began rioting all over Paris. They shut down economic activity in the city,
pillaged civilian and religious buildings in search of food and guns, and burnt
down the hated customs barrier ringing Paris, though *strangely enough*, the
ones owned by the Duke of Orleans were spared. The mob even tried to fight army
cavalry, which they quickly ran away from. This outburst unnerved the army
enough that they retreated beyond the boundaries of Paris, but this sort of
rioting was hardly going to stand up to a full assault.
Even worse
from the movement leaders’ perspective, the workers were organizing and arming
themselves in a way that threatened bourgeois control. This finally pushed them
into setting up their central command: on July 13, a Municipal Committee, later
the Paris Commune, was set up to coordinate the neighborhood committees. Each
neighborhood would also send men for a Bourgeois Militia, later the National
Guard. These institutions would be led by bourgeoisie.
The movement
could finally be directed from a center, and at this point, things began to run
their course. The entire regiment of the Gardes Francaises, having been
ordered to leave Paris, now defected to Bourgeois Militia, staffing key
positions and greatly enhancing the movement’s physical power. To find arms for
this new army, the Militia broke into the Hotel des Invalides on the night of
July 13 and, of course, the famous Bastille on July 14. Contrary to popular
image, the mob that took the Bastille was not made up of the urban poor, but
instead of merchants, ex-Gardes, shopkeepers and skilled laborers –
exactly as the bourgeois leaders wanted.
In any case,
it was not the taking of some obsolete fortress that secured the
anti-absolutist movement’s triumph; instead, it was its transformation from a loosely-coordinated
movement to an organized mini-state that did it. At its height, about a third
of Paris’ 600 thousand individuals were armed, and while most of these were
unorganized individuals, the prospect of facing an organized National Guard on
top of that overwhelmed Versailles. The army was dismissed, the King gave up
much of his power to the National Assembly, and royal court came under the protection
of the movement. The bourgeois movement’s leaders – men such as Orleans,
Lafayette, and Mirabeau – were now also leaders of France… at least, until the
working class began taking over the institutions they once controlled.
Conclusion
We started
with the idea that the French Revolution of 1789 was a classic “Spontaneous
Uprising”. For most of its duration, it was indeed what a Spontaneous Uprising should
look like: various loosely-coordinated groups, putting their own spin on the core
issue of absolutist mismanagement and citizenhood, in order to collectively
forge a large and diverse coalition that bridged France’s class divides.
It also
exhibited the defects of such a high-issue, low-organization grand strategy, as
the aristocrats, bourgeoisie and workers within the movement eventually
realized that they didn’t actually share the same goals. The resulting ideological
conflicts saw the bourgeoisie oust the aristocrats and repress the workers, laying
the groundwork for trouble in the years ahead.
As the
contest between movement and establishment ultimately came down to physical
force, the movement’s victory came because it moved away from the Spontaneous
Uprising template, acquiring a centralized command that could organize Paris’
resources in a way that proved too much for Versailles to handle. That it
achieved this might simply be a matter of sheer luck, in having the support of
France’s foremost noble.
Finally, we
might also think about what the establishment could have done to defeat the
movement. Once it started, King Louis has often been criticized for failing to
appreciate the danger of the movement, but in this analysis, his moderation
might have been the greater error. By initially escalating his responses to only
be a little more severe than what the movement had been capable of, King Louis set
a low bar for the movement at each stage, incentivizing the movement to improve
its capabilities each time.
We might
contrast King Louis XVI’s failure in 1789 with the suppression of the parlements
under his grandfather, King Louis XV, in 1770. Then, Versailles immediately
deployed vast political, physical and administrative powers to humiliate, exile
and ultimately dissolve its opponents. These actions were widely seen as
tyrannical, but they set such a high bar for success that activists were more
likely to succumb to defeatism than to try and match that power. In that sense,
perhaps King Louis XVI, who desired the love of his subjects, represented the
perfect opportunity to bring about the French Revolution.
*
Thanks for
watching the video, and please do give a like and subscribe. If you have any
questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. Also check out
my Facebook page, where I review the literature and post some additional
thoughts regarding the video.
No comments:
Post a Comment