The French Revolution was one of the most important moments in world history. The French Revolution symbolized that the ideologies and methods of the Enlightenment were no longer only the work of philosophes, academics and of the salons of Paris. The French Revolution was the moment when all of this theoretical knowledge regarding the way societies and governments should be organized left the pages and entered the streets, the cafes and the political clubs. The French Revolution was the result of a crisis in France’s ancien regime and its assertion of the division of the state, the polity, that is between the various estates. The political awakening of the third estate especially of the bourgeoisie asserted a new political and epistemological reality for a country that had been organized in a particularly medieval manner. Marx talks about “class consciousness” and class conflict as one of the necessary steps for the advancement of history from stage to stage. In this sense, the French Revolution in a Eurocentric context was the victory of the middle classes over the aristocracy and monarchy. Eric Hobsbawm one of the most famous Marxist historians discusses how the French Revolution was the moment in which the world became “modern” and entered the nineteenth century. The concept of the nation as articulated by the many of the most important “leaders” of the French Revolution in the Estates-General and later in the National Assembly argued for creating a nation, which could integrate the French people and serve to articulate the general will. Men like the Abbe Sieyes, the Abbe Gregoire, the Count Mirabeau and Maximillien Robespierre all argued for a particular version of what they thought the nation was how it was constructed, who it represented and its political purpose.
Indivisible, Inalienable Sovereignty The first and most important conclusion from the principles we have established thus far is that the general will alone direct the forces of the State to achieve the goal for which it was founded, the common good Sovereignty is indivisible and is inalienable A will is general or it is not: it is that of the whole body of the people or only of one faction. In the first instance, putting the will into words and force is an act of sovereignty: the will becomes law. In the second instance, it is only a particular will or an administrative action; at the very most it is a decree.
The political thought of the French Revolution and of the men that defined it in its early days was highly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his philosophy. Rousseau was a very accomplished thinker and one that had an interesting thought on how government should be organized and the nature of the relationship between the state and the people. Rousseau argued in the Social Contract that government is not the “sovereign”, but instead “it is an intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign to keep them in touch with each other. Government, Rousseau thought existed as a method of expressing what he thought was the general will of the nation. The general will according to Rousseau was characterized by the fact it represented the whole nation and that good government try to do their best to implement the general will. Furthermore, the general will Rousseau argued: “is always in the right and inclines towards the public good.” These definitions put forward by Rousseau are all very important when thinking about the political thought of the men in the early French Revolution. For the first time, France was no longer only beholden to the politics of privilege and the estates the calling of Estates-General by the King and the uprising within the Third Estate towards recognition as the nation was one of the most important and defining moments of the Revolution and in many respects what set it apart from other instances of political crisis becoming much more than just that.
The French Revolution was important for many reasons, the least of the them was its base political reality. The legislative leaders of the French Revolution strived for much more than only replacing France’s Ancién Regime with a new form of government they wanted to reshape what public life was and meant in France. Lynn Hunt argues that the French Revolution was significant because “it showed how much everything depended on politics, but it did so in ways that would have surprised Rousseau had he lived fifteen years longer.” The pressure that the Revolution put on public life in France meant an expansion of what politics consisted and what all of it meant. The Revolution led to an expansion of the political and to a significant increase in popular participation in politics. This meant that, that within France political language, ritual and organizations all took very new forms and meanings. This meant the creation of a new sphere of public life in France which did not exist before the revolution and it had wide-ranging ramifications on the organization of the French state which had so long been in the hands of the King and his ministers alone.
Of the political innovations laid out by Hunt above one of the most important ones in the case of the French Revolution was the creation of the nation. The concept of the “nation” during the French Revolution was used to represent the French people, but most importantly it was the place where the locus of sovereign power was held. The nation was the body that had the power to decide, according to Emsley, the term “la nation” replaced the person of the king in the organization of the French state. During the “experiment with a constitutional monarchy, it was the nation which was regarded as deciding, drafting and commanding through the laws: the king was merely the executive.” One of the primary ways in which French Revolutionaries aimed to create the French nation was by dealing with the problem of the lack of unity of the French people under the French language. France was, and continues to be, a very large and geographically diverse country, and at the time of the revolution, only three-quarters of the population understood “some French” and only three million could speak it in earnest. This was important because the Revolution and revolutionary ideology were spread using written works which had to be translated so everyone around the country could understand them. In this sense, the nation was little more than the changing of political terms as a method of strengthening the power of the revolutionary movement. The Revolution was about much more than a change in politics it was about the recreation of France in a new image.
The most distinctive change in social and political organization in the nineteenth century was the rise of Nationalism and the self-conception of the “nation” as a construct. The most important leaders of the French Revolution being representatives of the Third Estate imagined France as the nation as something which was made up of a select group of individuals which had shared qualities. Both the Abbe Sieyes and the Abbe Gregoire in the early days of the Revolution attempted to create a definition of the nation which empowered the great majority of the French people. As a matter of fact, the early Revolution characterized by the work of the Estates-General and later the National Assembly worked for carve out a place for the nation as the locus of the sovereignty of the French government. Statesmen and legislators like the Count Mirabeau and Maximilien Robespierre in their speeches in the new legislative bodies attempted to negotiate what the nation was and what its powers were.
One particular vision of what the French Nation represented was forwarded by The Abbé Sieyes in his famous pamphlet, and one of the most important documents of the French Revolution “What is the Third Estate?” In it Sieyes argued for a particular version of what he conceived of as the nation and the role of the Third Estate – the commoners – in making up the nation. Sieyes argues that the Third Estate are the main reason why a “nation should subsist and prosper.” The functions served by the Third Estate, namely, agriculture, industry, commerce and all others could easily be called the productive classes and that is exactly what Sieyes calls them. The Third Estate although they are the sector of society who he argues creates all of the wealth while being subordinated to a system of privilege which places both the nobility and the clergy above them. The question posed by Sieyes, one of the most important of the Revolution asks: “What is the Third Estate?” The response being “everything, but an everything shackled and oppressed.” The pamphlet also goes on to explain what Sieyes constitutes a nation. In this pamphlet, Sieyes argues that the Third Estate is the productive force of the French state and although it is the most important part of it is held down by the institution of privilege and what may be called “feudalism” of the Ancién Regime. In practice, Sieyes main argument is for the abolition of privilege and force the creation of a nation in which all of its members are equal. This was an argument based on class and one that shaped the rhetoric of the early Revolution.
The Abbé Sieyes in his pamphlet was just one just such advocate of the abolition of privilege and of the antiquated institutions of the Ancién Regime. The rise of the nation and of the consciousness of the Third Estate, that is the great majority of the French people represented according to Eric Hobsbawm a “striking consensus general ideas among a fairly coherent social group gave the revolutionary movement effective unity.” These ideas were held by the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, and they were represented by the concepts of classical liberalism as formulated by the leading enlightenment thinkers and spread through associations and through freemasonry. This new class which was the leading faction within the Third Estate and later in the National Assembly consecrated all of these concepts of the bourgeois liberal nation in one of the founding documents of modernity and of the French Republic, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The declaration formalized both the ideas of Rousseau and of Sieyes laid out above when it affirmed that “the principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation. No body and no individual may exercise authority which does not emanate expressly from the nation.” This elevated the abolition of privilege and the concept of the general will as the primary values of the French Revolution.
One of the most vehement supporters of the state proposed by Sieyes and protected by the Declaration was the Count de Mirabeau regardless of his being a part of the nobility. Mirabeau in one of his speeches to National Assembly in June of 1789 argued that the representatives to that body were the representatives of the French nation. Mirabeau argued that the power of the nobility and the clergy had power which greatly outmatched their importance in the French state. He goes on:
that they should struggle to perpetuate a pretended constitution, where a single word, pronounced by a hundred and fifty-one individuals, might shackle the king and four and-twenty millions of men; a constitution where two orders, which are neither the people nor the prince, employ the second to constrain the first, the first to intimidate the second, and circumstances to annihilate every thing that belongs not to themselves.
This vehement argument against the power of the nobility and the clergy was little more than a method employed by Mirabeau to argue that France needed a constitution which would protect it from the “Gothic oppression of ages sunk in barbarism,” and “ministerial despotism.” Mirabeau’s argument lay in the fact that the Third “order” had enough reason it itself as representatives of the French nation to break away from Estates-General and form their own deliberative body which was formed to assure the “regeneration of the kingdom is to be effectuated, shall have been legally agreed upon and established, the rights of the people secured, the foundations of a wise and happy constitution laid.” Would take on the reasonability of the debts incurred by the king which from then would become. the national or public debt. The nation as explained by Mirabeau here is not only an abstract concept but instead a very real one. The nation here is the body which has the right to dispense sovereignty and authority, not a part of the nation, all of it.
The ideas of the French Revolution weren’t universally accepted at the time and it had many critics. One of the most vociferous critics of the French Revolution was the Anglo-Irish conservative statesman Sir Edmund Burke. Burke’s work Reflections on the Revolution in France was one of the first and most thoroughly well-argued pieces refuting the Revolution and asserting the value of tradition, history, and good order as the key values of conservatism. In response to Burke, Thomas Paine most well known as the author of Common Sense wrote the Rights of Man. In it Paine argued that the French Revolution and its ethos aspired to the creation of a new kind of political order on the European continent. Paine argues that the National Assembly by doing what it did had done more than created a revolution it aspired to the “regeneration of man.” Alyssa Sepinwall, argues that regeneration was one of the main tenets used by the French Revolutionaries who argued that it would serve as an integrative ideology which aimed to correct “man physically, morally and politically,” as well as, to renew French society anew from the weaknesses of the Ancién Regime. The ethos of regeneration of bringing both the state and man out of its weakness and decay through the establishment of a nation was one of the main goals of the French Revolution and it is something that even contemporary commentators like Paine
Maximilien Robespierre who would later become the leader of the Reign of Terror and the most radical of French Revolutionaries argued on the floor of the National Assembly regarding the role of the nation and the general will in terms of political rights. Robespierre argues that liberty “consists of the general will” and he argues that the “votes” of the nation will not be counted. According to him, liberty also means the ability for the people to appoint their own magistrates, which the French people did not have the power to do as well. The ability to ascertain the general will was always tricky, and it led to the conclusion of trying to divide between what was the general will, public opinion and the collective force of the nation. Revolutionary France was a state unlike any other and it faced challenges that no other polity had ever faced before in trying to square the revolutionary impetus with the practical matters of running a country.
The concept of the nation as it was developed throughout the early French Revolution had a lot of different meanings and an incredibly varied logic of national integration. The thought of the philosophes and most importantly of Rousseau created the conditions under which a people would have the power to have the self-conception of nationhood. The nation took varied forms but its most significant characteristic was that it recognized as something separate from the rest. Eric Hobsbawm argued that the nation as it was drawn up by the main revolutionary thinkers circumscribed the values of the Enlightenment, classical liberalism and a reaction against privilege and hierarchal society. The aim of the French Revolution was to create a new nation which had liberty and equality as it's main values. Count Mirabeau, the Abbe Sieyes and the liberal wing of the national assembly put these values in writing and asserted their primacy with the promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
The other function of the nation was much less about ideology and much more about where the power tested in French politics. The nation during the early Revolution and especially during the Constitutional Monarchy was the locus of power and it subordinated the person of the king to a functionary of that power. Sovereignty lay with the people not the king. The manner by which that power was dispensed and under what guise was the main conflict of the Revolution. The nation represented the French people and it was a collection of their general will which aimed towards the regeneration of the state and the creation of a new polity which was self-consciously a break from the Ancién Regime. The nation during the revolution was still not an entirely realized idea but it served a purpose. It worked on a civic level as a way to build consensus, integrate the nation and give it impetus to move away from the outdated institutions of the Ancién Regime towards a progressive. Liberal future.
Bibliography
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Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel de Riqueti, Etienne Méjan, James White, James White, and Samuel Vaughan. 1792. Speeches of M. de Mirabeau, the elder, pronounced in the National Assembly of France: to which is prefixed, a sketch of his life and character. London: Printed for J. Debrett.
Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man; being an answer to Mr. Burke's attack on the French Revolution. 1819.Bottom of Form
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