The French Revolution:  A Brief Summary
Part 2: The End of the Old Regime

I. Initial Reforms of the National Assembly

A. Abolition of Feudalism, 4 August 1789

The first action taken by the National Assembly was in response to the Great Fear. In a decree of August 4, 1789 known as the Abolition of Feudalism, the National Assembly eliminated noble hunting rights, banalités, the tithe—all the obligations that fell on the peasants of the Old Regime.

B. Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 27 August 1789

Next, the National Assembly issued a theoretical statement of the principles on which the Revolution was to be based: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

II. The Reorganization of France

Cumulatively, the events of the early Revolution declared an end to the Old Regime—replacing a society based on orders whose members were unequal due to the possession of privileges with one that was a single nation, made up of citizens possessing equal natural rights. The next task was to create the institutions to go along with this new reality, to reorganize the nation of France on revolutionary principles.

A. Economic Reorganization

One pressing problem was the debt and the deficit. France’s financial crisis, the reason the Estates-Général had been summoned in the first place, hadn’t gone away while the delegates were busy abolishing feudalism and proclaiming the existence of natural rights. The National Assembly might have repudiated the debt, on the grounds that it had been incurred by the now defunct regime. However, the debt was held in the form of government bonds, called rentes, and many of the bondholders, or rentiers, were the bourgeois constituents of the Assembly. They had to find some other way of raising revenue. Their solution was to confiscate and sell the property of the Church.

B. Religious Reorganization: The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, July 1790

Selling Church property helped with the deficit, but it created another problem: how to support the Church and its clergy (especially since the tithe had already been eliminated with the Abolition of Feudalism). The solution was to nationalize the Church, making it totally subordinate to the state (something dreamed of but never achieved by the absolute monarchy).

The new Church organization was laid out in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed in July 1790. It provided that all clergy were to be elected by the people. Bishops were required to notify the pope of their election but were forbidden to acknowledge his authority in their selection. Clergy were to be paid salaries by the state, making them into civil servants, and monasticism was abolished.

The pope’s reaction was to condemn both the Civil Constitution and the Revolution itself. The Assembly then required all clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. This forced the clergy to choose between France and the Church, the Revolution and the Pope. About half agreed to the oath and half refused, resulting in two churches in France: the official, revolutionary church and the underground, counter-Revolutionary church.

C. Political Reorganization

The most fundamental reforms of the National Assembly were political. The Assembly re-organized both the internal administration of the country and the constitution in general.

1. Internal Administration

Internally, the Assembly eliminated all the old government offices, taxes, titles of nobility, local estates, local systems of law, municipalities, and provinces—in short, all the privileged groups within society and the institutions that went with them. In their place, they tried to substitute a simpler, more rational, national system that would enforce equality of citizenship. For example, the old town governments of varying types were replaced by a uniform system of municipal administration. The ancient provinces (Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Languedoc, etc.) were replaced by 83 départments for administrative purposes (France is still administered according to those départments).

2. The Constitution of 1791

More generally, the national assembly had to decide what form the government as a whole would take. The constitution they agreed on was formally adopted in 1791. This document replaced the absolute monarchy with a constitutional monarchy—the king was not eliminated, but his power would no longer be absolute. Sovereign power was to be in the hands of a new elected assembly (to be known as the Legislative Assembly). The king’s only power over the new Assembly would be a suspensive veto—he could veto legislation, but he could be overruled if the law were passed by three successive legislatures (which were elected every two years). In effect, he was given the power only to delay legislation. The assembly was afraid to give the king any more power, with good reason—in June 1791, he tried to escape the country and join with others who had fled the revolution (known as émigrés). He had been captured near the border in the town of Varennes in Lorraine in northeastern France after being recognized from his portrait on the French money (he had a very distinctive profile!). This incident is known as the Flight to Varennes. Louis XVI was brought back to Paris and made to accept his status as a constitutional monarch.

Voting rights in the Constitution of 1791 was not as democratic as the Declaration of the Rights of Man might have led you to expect. The Constitution classified citizens as either active or passive, depending on whether they met a minimum property qualification. Active and passive citizens had the same civil rights except for voting; only active citizens had the right to vote. Elections, moreover, were indirect; that is, the active citizens voted for electors and it was the electors who then chose local officials and the delegates to the Legislative Assembly. Political rights, in other words, now depended not on order (status) but on wealth (class).

The Constitution of 1791 was supposed to be the permanent answer to the question of what kind of “new regime” would replace the old regime that the first part of the Revolution had swept away—but it wasn’t.

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