French Revolution Part II

İçindekiler:

• The Legislative Assembly
• War
• National Convention
• The Reign of Terror
• The Directory

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The Legislative Assembly (1791-1792)

The new Legislative Assembly met for the first time in October 1791. Under the Constitution of 1791, France was a Constitutional Monarchy. The King shared his rule with the Legislative Assembly, but had the power to stop (veto) laws that he did not like. He also had the power to choose ministers.  

The Legislative Assembly had about 745 members. 260 of them were  Constitutional Monarchists. 136 were Girondins and Jacobins (left-wing liberal republicans who did not want a king). The other 345 members were independent, but they voted most often with the left wing.

The Legislative Assembly did not agree very well. The King used his veto to stop laws that would sentence émigrés to death. Because so many of the members of the Assembly were left-wing, they did not like this.

Crisis of Constitution
The people were turning against King Louis XVI. On 10 August 1792, the members of a revolutionary group called the Paris Commune attacked the Tuileries, where the King and Queen were living. The King and Queen were taken prisoner. The Legislative Assembly held an emergency meeting. Even though only a third of the members were there and most of them were Jacobins, they suspended the King from duty.

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War

The kings and emperors of many foreign countries were worried by the French Revolution. They did not want revolutions in their own countries. On 27 August 1791, the kings of Austria and Prussia wrote the Declaration of Pillnitz. The Declaration asked for Louis XVI to be set free and the National Assembly to be ended. They promised that they would invade France if their requests were ignored. The Declaration was taken very seriously among the revolutionaries.

With the Legislative Assembly in place, the problems did not go away. The Girondins wanted war because they wanted to take the revolution to other countries. The King and many of his supporters, the Feuillants, wanted war because they thought it would make the King more popular. Many French were worried that the émigrés would cause trouble in foreign countries against France.

On 20 April 1792, the Assembly voted to declare war on Austria (Holy Roman Empire). They planned to invade the Austrian Netherlands, but the revolution had made the army weak. Many soldiers deserted. Soon, Prussia joined on the Austrian side. They both planned to invade. Together, on 25 July, they wrote the Brunswick Manifesto, promising that if the royal family was not hurt, no civilians would be hurt in the invasion. The French believed that this meant the king, Louis XVI, was working with the foreign kings. Prussia invaded France on 1 August, 1792. This first stage of the French Revolutionary Wars continued until 1797.

September Massacres
In September, things got worse. The Legislative Assembly had almost no power. No single group was controlling Paris or France. The country was being invaded by the Prussian Army. The revolutionaries were very angry and violent. They began to go into prisons and kill people they thought were traitors to France. They hated the priests of the Roman Catholic Church the most, but they also killed many nobles and ordinary people. By 7 September, 1,400 people were dead.

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National Convention (1792-1795)

The Legislative Assembly had lost all its power. France needed a new government. On 20 September 1792, the National Convention was formed. The Convention had both Girondins and radical Jacobins.

Execution of Louis XVI
The Brunswick Manifesto had made many people suspicious of the king. They thought he was plotting with the Prussian and Austrian rulers to invade France. In January 1793, the National Convention voted and found Louis XVI guilty of “conspiracy against the public liberty and the general safety.” On the twenty-first of January, the King was executed using the guillotine. Marie Antoinette, the Queen, was also executed on the sixteenth of October.

Revolt in Vendée
People in the area of Vendée did not like the revolutionary government. They did not like the rules about the church in the Civil Constitution of the Church (1790) and new taxes put in place in 1793. They also disliked being forced to join the French army. In March, they rose up against the government in a revolt. The war lasted until 1796. Hundreds of thousands of people from Vendée were killed by the Revolutionary French army.

The Jacobins Seize Power
Now that the king was dead, the National Convention made a new republican constitution that began on 24 June. It was the first one that did not include the king and gave every man in France a vote. However, it never came into power because of the trouble between the Jacobins and Girondins. The war with Austria and Prussia was causing financial problems. Bread was very expensive and many people wanted things to change. In June 1793, the Jacobins began to take power. They wanted to arrest many Girondin members of the National Convention. In July, they became angrier when Charlotte Corday, a Girondin, killed Jean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin.

By July, the coup was complete. The Jacobins had taken power. They made new, radical laws including a new Republican Calendar with new months and new ten-day weeks. They made the army bigger and changed the officers to people who were better soldiers. Over the next few years, this helped the Republican army push back the attacking Austrians, Prussians, British, and Spanish.

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Reign of Terror

In July 1793, a Jacobin called Maximilien de Robespierre and eight other leading Jacobins set up the Committee of Public Safety. It was the most powerful group in France. This group and Robespierre were responsible for the Reign of Terror. Robespierre believed that if people were afraid, the revolution would go better. The Reign of Terror lasted from the spring of 1793 to the spring of 1794.

It was not only the nobility who died in the Reign of Terror. Anyone who broke the Jacobins’ laws, or was even suspected of breaking their laws or working against them, could be arrested and sent to the guillotine, most without a trial. Even powerful people who had been involved in the Jacobin coup were executed. Prisoners were taken from the prisons to “Madame Guillotine” (a nickname for the guillotine) in an open wooden cart called the tumbrel.

According to records, 16,594 people were executed with the guillotine. It is possible that up to 40,000 people died in prison or were killed during the Reign of Terror.

By July 1794, people began to turn against Maximilien de Robespierre. He and his Revolutionary Tribunal had killed 1,300 people in six weeks. On 27 July, the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety turned against him. Robespierre tried to get help from the Convention’s right-wing members, but he failed.

A day later, Robespierre and many of his supporters in the Paris Commune were sentenced to death by guillotine without any kind of trial.

Now that the terror was over, the National Convention started to make a new Constitution. On 27 September 1794, the constitution came into effect.

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The Directory (1795-1799)

The new constitution had created the Directory. The new parliament consisted of two houses (assemblies). The lower house had 500 members. It was called the Council of Five Hundred. The upper house, the senate, had 250 members and was called the Council of Elders. Five directors were chosen every year by the Council of Elders from a list made up by the Council of Five Hundred. This group was in charge and was called the Directory.

Although the constitution of 1793 had given all men in France a vote, in this new constitution only people with a certain amount of property could vote. The Directory was much more conservative than the governments in France since 1789. The people were tired of radical changes and the unstable governments. Things were much more stable under the Directory than they had been before.

However, the Directors were disliked by the people – especially the Jacobins, who wanted a republic, and the royalists, who wanted a new King. France’s financial problems were not solved. The Directors ignored elections that did not go the way they wanted. They ignored the constitution in order to do things to control the people. They used the ongoing war and the army to keep their power.

Napoleon in Power
People rioted against the Directory, but the Directory used the army to stop them. The army, under the Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte, became much more powerful. On 9 November 1799, Bonaparte took power. Napoleon Bonaparte set up a new government called the Consulate with him in power. This led to him to become the dictator and, in 1804, the Emperor of France.

This is the end of the Republican part of the French Revolution.

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THE END

Napoleon ⇒