SCRIPT - The Strategy of Protest and Revolution 2: The French Revolution (05/05/2020)

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 18^th 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.

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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 20^th. 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.

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