In October 1776 Louis XVI placed responsibility for the national finances in the hands of Swiss financier Jacques Necker (1732-1804). Necker’s four-year tenure had a significant impact on the French national economy, in part because of his reliance on foreign loans and the deceptive financial reporting he used in his 1781 Le Compte Rendu.

A curious choice

Necker was a curious choice for such an important office in the French royal government. He was not a native Frenchman but was instead born and raised in Switzerland to a family of English heritage. Unlike his predecessors, he held no noble or clerical title.

Necker was Protestant rather than Catholic. This fact alone prevented him from being appointed comptroller-general, forcing the king to create a new office. Necker had no background in ministerial government or public office.

Despite all this, Necker was well equipped for the role – and indeed, certainly better qualified than some who had previously held it. He had shown considerable skill in business, making his name and fortune as a banker, financier and director of the French East India Company. He had also published essays on France’s national economy and was an outspoken critic of Anne-Robert Turgot‘s fiscal reforms.

Reaction to Necker’s appointment

Necker’s elevation was popular both with the local financial community and observers outside France. The value of royal bonds rose significantly after his appointment, as did some share prices. An Italian report praised Necker’s early policies, declaring that he had “made his superior abilities known through several works of truly sublime talent, lacking in partiality and filled with vast and excellent information about the finances”.

Necker certainly initiated some successful, albeit minor economic reforms. He targeted the notorious Ferme Générale, the oligarchy of ‘tax farmers’ contracted by the government, ordering a reduction in their number and placing some of their activities under state supervision. He also abolished numerous sinecures and negotiated reductions in royal spending.

These minor reforms produced a small but noticeable increase in government revenue, which rose from around 25 million livres to 30 million livres during Necker’s five years in office.

A master of credit raising

Necker’s true financial skill, however, was both the acquisition and the juggling of credit. Between late 1776 and his resignation in 1781, he signed off on a series of new or revised loans on behalf of the French government. Most were obtained through bankers in his native Geneva. Though the true value of these loans is difficult to calculate, it is believed he borrowed in the region of 530 million livres in his four and a half years in office.

Necker used these loans to finance the state, to create the illusion of a recovering economy and, perhaps, to maintain his personal reputation. Unfortunately, this access to easy money gave the king and his ministerial advisors an unwarranted confidence in the nation’s economy.

Not fully aware of the parlous state of the national finances, Louis XVI committed his support for the American Revolution – first with material aid for the rebellious American colonists, then with a declaration of war against Great Britain in March 1778. France’s involvement in the American Revolutionary War would cost the nation close to two billion livres. Necker was able to fund the war effort but again, this was mostly achieved with new and renegotiated loans.

Le Compte Rendu

By no means did Necker fool everyone. He had plenty of enemies in the royal court and by 1780, some writers and cartoonists were ridiculing his smoke-and-mirrors approach to fiscal management.

In January 1781, Necker responded to these criticisms by publishing Le Compte Rendu au Roi (‘The Record of Accounts for the King’). For the first time in France’s history, the general public was presented with a full and frank account of the nation’s finances.

Sadly, both for the people and the king, the Compte Rendu was little more than a gigantic con, an exercise in public deceit through false accounting. By cooking the books, overestimating revenue and omitting significant expenses such as war costs, Necker was able to forecast an annual surplus of 12 million livres, based on revenue of 264 million livres and expenditure of 254 million. The true state of the nation, later calculated by Necker’s successors, was a 70 million livre deficit.

Necker’s popularity

The Compte Rendu drove Necker’s popularity to new heights. For the first time in history, an agent of the French royal government had taken the people into his trust and raised the veil of secrecy over the nation’s finances. The Compte Rendu sold thousands of copies and Necker was hailed as both a liberal political reformer and a clever economic manager, even though experts quickly picked up on his deceptive accounting.

Conservatives in the royal court – including foreign minister Comte de Vergennes, Marie Antoinette and the king himself – were appalled at Necker’s publication of the national balance sheet. In their view, the ordinary citizen had no need to know the state of the nation’s finances. To involve the public in such matters was not only presumptuous, it undermined the principles of absolutist monarchy.

In May 1781, five months after the publication of the Compte Rendu, Louis XVI asked Necker for his resignation.

“The public nature of the Compte Rendu, rather than its inaccuracy, incensed ministers. Necker was accused of being something less than a Frenchman. Vergennes gave to Louis XVI an opinion of the Compute Rendu which encapsulated this point of view: ‘…the example of England, where accounts are made public, is that of a calculating, selfish, troublesome nation. To apply such principles to France is a national insult: we are people of feeling, trusting and devoted to the person of the King’, and he went on to spell out that the Compte Rendu was a slight to monarchy… The King yielded and Necker lost office.”
Olwen Hufton, historian

Dismissal and replacement

Necker was replaced by Joseph Joley de Fleury, a conservative and uninspiring magistrate from the Paris parlement. Joley de Fleury found himself having to juggle expensive loans and mounting war debts. He resorted to the old methods of revenue raising: a new vingtième, the sale of venal offices and more loans. Joley de Fleury resigned after less than two years, while his replacement Henry Lefevre d’Ormesson lasted just a few months.

In November 1783, the king appointed Charles de Calonne, one of the critics of Necker and his Compte Rendu, as controller-general of finances.  Calonne immediately recognised the dire financial state of the nation. Rather than raise taxes, he decided to stimulate the economy with several large spending projects, funded by more loans.

Calonne’s policies raised the suspicion of the Paris parlement which, by 1785, was threatening to deny registration to further loan contracts. This not only brought the king into confrontation with the parlements, it also forced Calonne to embrace fiscal reform as his only course of action.

By 1786, France’s national spending was outstripping its income by 161 million livres, or 34 percent, while interest on loans made up more than 40 percent of the government’s outlays:

Government revenue in 1786 (livres):
Indirect taxes – 219.5 million
Direct taxes – 162.8 million
Royal lands and forests – 51.9 million
Royal monopolies – 18.8 million
Donations – 18.8 million
Total – 472 million

Government expenditure in 1786 (livres):
Interest on debt – 259.5 million
Military spending – 158.3 million
Costs and expenses – 66.5 million
Salaries and pensions – 50.6 million
Royal household – 44.3 million
Charitable spending – 19 million
Public works – 12.7 million
Foreign affairs – 12.6 million
Total – 633 million livres

1. Jacques Necker was a banker and company manager who was handed responsibility for France’s national treasury in 1776, despite being a commoner, a Protestant and of Swiss birth.

2. In his more than four in this role, Necker undertook some minor reforms that increased revenue – but he also increased the nation’s debt by signing off on around 530 million livres in new and renegotiated loans.

3. In January 1781, Necker sought public support by publishing Le Compte Rendu, a balance sheet of the national finances, the first time information of this kind had been publicly released.

4. Through deceptive accounting, the Compte Rendu claimed the nation was in good financial shape and was likely to record a surplus when the reality was closer to a 70 million livre deficit.

5. Publishing the national accounts increased Necker’s public popularity – but it brought him into disrepute with the king and the royal court. Necker was sacked in May 1781, leaving his successors with greatly inflated levels of national debt.

Extracts from Jacques Necker’s Compte Rendu (1781)

Citation information
Title: ‘Jacques Necker and the Compte Rendu’
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/jacques-necker-compte-rendu/
Date published: September 21, 2019
Date updated: November 8, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

In the 1600s and 1700s, France’s rulers maintained an aggressive foreign policy that saw the nation participate in several imperial wars. These wars helped lay the foundation for revolution in France, chiefly by increasing government spending and state debt to unsustainable levels. The last of them, the Seven Years’ War, also saw France lose possession of its lucrative colonies in North America.

The French Empire

By the late 1600s, France was both a European continental power and an imperial power. The French Empire was the second largest in the world after the British Empire. It included large swathes of central and eastern North America, down to the Mississippi valley and the Gulf of Mexico, islands in the Caribbean Sea and most of north west Africa. French colonialism was also beginning to take root in eastern India (from Pondicherry to Bengal) and in south-east Asia (in modern-day Thailand, Laos and Vietnam).

The French Empire was supported, supplied and protected by significant naval and mercantile fleets. France’s colonies produced significant amounts of wealth for the nation, providing additional land, raw materials, commodities and labour. The income from colonial resources and profits supercharged the growth of French capitalism in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

Rivalry with Britain

France’s imperial growth also generated tension and conflict with Britain. The royal government increased its military spending dramatically in the second half of the 1600s. The ‘Sun King’, Louis XIV, used war and imperial rivalry as a means of strengthening his domestic power.

It is difficult to calculate precise figures for Louis XIV’s military spending program in the late 1600 but it certainly exceeded 600 million livres. At the king’s order, the national army was greatly expanded while soldiers were equipped with better artillery pieces and flintlock rifles, a new development in small arms. The government also improved military infrastructure. Fortresses, barracks and garrison houses were replaced, updated or built anew.

This expansion caused an explosion in government expenditure. Before 1660, for example, the government spent an average of 347,000 livres a year on fortresses. By the 1680s, this had blown out to more than eight million livres per annum.

The War of Devolution

By the mid-1660s, Louis XIV was seeking an opportunity to test his revitalised military in war. An opportunity came in the spring of 1667 when he declared war against Spain, following a territorial dispute over the Spanish Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). The king raised some 50,000 soldiers in less than a week and ordered them across the border to engage the Spaniards.

Sensing the propaganda value of this conflict, Louis accompanied his generals and spent much of the war at the front line (albeit with most of the comforts of home). He participated in several battles and sieges, and commissioned artists to capture scenes of his bravery and leadership.

The War of Devolution, as this conflict became known, lasted barely a year before Louis was forced to negotiate peace. France’s involvement produced nothing except some small territorial gains in Flanders. In return, the war drained approximately 18 million livres from the royal treasury.

The Nine Years’ War

This failed adventure did not stop Louis XIV from further expanding his national army, which reached 118,000 by 1672. He then initiated a war against the Dutch provinces, a six-year conflict that also drew in England and Sweden.

The Franco-Dutch War, also known as the Nine Years’ War (1672-78), was more successful in military terms and produced some important territorial gains, but it also proved costly. More than one billion livres was spent on this conflict. The last year of the Nine Years’ War alone cost 219 million livres.

During this war, domestic taxation in France reached its highest ever levels, yet at its peak taxes were supplying the government with just 160 million livres each year. Even after the peace of 1678, the expenditure of Louis’ government continued to exceed its income. By 1690, taxes were bringing in around 120-125 million livres per annum, which was barely enough to pay for the expenses of the royal court and its bureaucracy, let alone the other costs of government.

War of the Spanish Succession

The last of Louis XIV’s wars, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), strained France’s finances to breaking point. It began when Louis XIV installed his grandson, Philip of Anjou, on the vacant Spanish throne, a move that threatened the imperial and trade interests of Britain, Austria and the Dutch. The War of the Spanish Succession became one of the first ‘world wars’, drawing in almost all of Europe’s significant powers. It lasted more than a decade, initiated heavy spending and left all of its major combatants with unprecedented levels of debt.

As with earlier conflicts, the royal government in France offset the costs of war by borrowing heavily and raising new taxes. Louis’ finance minister Nicolas Desmaretz sustained the government and the war effort by renegotiating or extending loans and introducing a national lottery. In 1710 Desmaretz introduced the dixième, a 10 percent tax on the earnings of all individuals (the clergy excepted). Yet even an income tax of this size did little to ease France’s deficit.

When Louis XIV died in 1715 France had spent decades living well beyond its means. According to a Compte Rendu drawn up by Desmaretz after the king’s death, France was carrying a national debt of two billion livres. The annual interest payments on this debt alone (165 million livres) were more than the government collected in taxes.

18th-century wars

France’s debt crisis might have been resolved if the 1700s had been a century of peace, prosperity and economic reform. But imperial wars continued to deplete the national treasury and prolong the national debt.

In 1740, the Hapsburg princess Maria Theresa, later the mother of Marie Antoinette, ascended to the throne of Austria, Hungary and other principalities in western Europe. Her coronation led to political and territorial disputes that evolved into the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-48). One of the main protagonists in this war was Louis XV, who argued that a woman could not occupy the Austrian throne, though secretly he hoped to expand French power at the expense of the Hapsburgs.

This war proved more difficult than Louis XV had expected. It required a much larger mobilisation of troops and was fought not only in Europe but in colonial North America and India. In territorial terms, the War of the Austrian Succession was a net loss for France. It also added 200 million livres to the national debt, a figure that would have been considerably higher had the government not widened the tax base in the mid-1740s.

“France’s governments were no less keen than the British to promote trade, but [the French] were the losers of the great imperial wars of mid-century [1700s]. The Seven Years War of 1756-63 stripped France of power in North America and ended a promising venture to gain power and trade in India. Even France’s successful but costly intervention on the side of the American revolutionaries in the 1770s did not break the American habit of trading with their mother-country – one of the mainstays of British industrial growth.”
David Andress, historian

War in North America

Even more costly to France was the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63. French involvement in this war began in North America, where France controlled vast tracts of land along the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. As French settlers and traders came into contact with British colonists resident on the east coast, there was tension and conflict over territory, hunting, fishing and the rights to fur-trapping.

In May 1754, a young British-American militia colonel named George Washington ambushed a French brigade in what is now Pennsylvania. The French retaliated and within a year both France and Britain had sent standing armies to America to protect their territory. By April 1756, France and Britain were also fighting in Europe, marking the start of the Seven Years’ War.

Like other imperial wars of the 18th century, the Seven Years’ War also drew in other European powers, including Austria, Russia, Spain, Prussia and the German kingdoms. The first three years of the conflict were successful for France, which secured some important victories and at one point planned an amphibious invasion of England. But by 1759 the tide of war had turned, in part because of France’s inability to fund its military operations. By late 1762 the French government was seeking peace, which was finalised by the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

Economic losses

The Seven Years’ War produced little territorial or political change in Europe but it entailed significant losses for France, which was forced to surrender all its colonial possessions in North America. The outcome for the French treasury was even more disastrous.

France’s involvement in the Seven Years’ War cost around 1.3 billion livres. According to Brecher, the government raised 788 million livres from new loans, 386 million livres from new or extended taxes and 60 million livres by selling venal offices. Before the war Louis XV’s government was carrying around 1.2 billion livres in debt; by 1764 this had increased to 2.3 billion livres. This explosion in public debt was compounded by the loss of the American colonies, which meant millions of livres of foreign resources and trade were lost to the French economy.

A longer-term consequence of the Seven Years’ War was increased tensions between Great Britain and her own colonists in America, leading to the American Revolution between 1763 and 1783. France’s last pre-revolutionary war was the American Revolutionary War, which would cost the government a further 1.3 billion livres.

1. From the mid-1660s France fought a series of foreign and imperial wars that placed its economy under enormous strain and led to an explosion in national debt.

2. Louis XIV waged several wars – to consolidate and expand his own absolutism, to glorify himself as a military leader and to increase French power in Europe.

3. They included the War of Devolution (1667-68), the Nine Years’ War (1672-78) and the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14). They were funded by new or increased taxes and loans, yet still drained the national treasury.

4. His successor Louis XV also involved the nation in significant wars, most notably the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63).

5. The last of these, the Seven Years’ War, saw France surrender all of its colonies in continental North America. It also left the nation with a national debt of around 2.3 billion livres.

Citation information
Title: ‘Imperial wars’
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/imperial-wars/
Date published: October 11, 2019
Date updated: November 8, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

All revolutions are motivated by ideas – usually new or progressive ideas that challenge existing modes of thought. The ideas of the French Revolution were largely drawn from the Enlightenment and coloured by grievances in 18th-century France. Some were encapsulated in the revolutionary slogan ‘Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!’, though French revolutionary ideas were broad and went beyond mere slogans.

Sources of revolutionary ideas

French revolutionary ideas drew heavily on the political philosophy of the Enlightenment and the writings of the philosophes (Enlightenment philosophers). This was underpinned by an interest in exploring new and potentially better ways of governing the nation.

When considering this, France’s revolutionaries often delved into other political systems. Many French revolutionaries studied British government and society. They came to admire its constitutional basis, its separation of powers and its tolerance for individual rights and freedoms. The American Revolution (1775-89) provided French reformers with a working example of revolution and a successfully implemented constitution.

The ideas of the French Revolution were also shaped by grievances that were specific to 18th-century France and its society. Some of the key ideas of the French Revolution are summarised below.

Liberty

In the context of the 18th century, liberty was freedom from oppression. This was usually taken to mean oppression by the state, by government or tyrannical rulers.

The most visible instruments of oppression in the Ancien Régime were lettres de cachet, or sealed orders signed by the king. These lettres had several functions but their most common use was to detain and imprison individuals without trial or due process. Several notable figures were imprisoned by lettres de cachet, including Honore Mirabeau (for disgracing his family) and Voltaire (for defamatory writings).

Another example of state oppression was the censorship of publications containing criticisms of the king, the aristocracy or the church. The Ancien Régime also used torture to deal with its opponents, though this declined in the late 1700s and was formally abolished in May 1788.

Equality

A desire for greater equality also underpinned the ideas of the French Revolution. The social structure of the Ancien Régime was uneven and unfair, particularly with regard to the burden of taxation.

The citizens of the Third Estate wanted equality, though some wanted greater levels of equality than others. The rising bourgeoisie wanted political and social equality with the nobility of the Second Estate. They favoured a meritocracy: a society where rank and status were defined by ability and achievement rather than birthright and privilege. For this, they looked to the newly formed United States, where revolution had transferred government to men of talent and ability.

Despite this apparent progressive spirit, the men and women of the bourgeoisie was more reluctant about sharing political equality with the lower ranks of the Third Estate. They did not support universal voting rights, holding that voting was a privilege of the propertied classes.

“The discussion of liberty equality and fraternity has been a major influence on political thought since the time of the French Revolution… The revolution marked the triumph of ‘the people’. It pronounced, in 1789, the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’. In theoretical terms, many of the ideas were ill worked out. For example, the revolutionaries proclaimed the rights of man but women were largely excluded from the process. In practical terms, revolutionary zeal turned to fanaticism and the Revolution turned on itself.”
Paul Spicker, historian

Fraternity

The revolutionary slogan fraternité is best translated as ‘brotherhood’. Fraternity suggested the nation’s citizens were bound together in solidarity. It combined nationalism with love and concern for one’s fellow citizens.

Fraternity was the most abstract, idealistic and unachievable of all revolutionary ideals. It was more prevalent in the early phase of the revolution, when the new government was churning out positive reforms like the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

Many visual sources from 1789-90 show the Three Estates cooperating and working together to improve the nation. As the revolution progressed and political divisions emerged, this focus on unity and brotherhood soon faded into memory.

Popular sovereignty

Until the modern era, Europe’s kings and governments claimed their authority was derived from God, a concept called divine right monarchy. With the emergence of the Enlightenment, this idea was challenged by the new concept of popular sovereignty.

Popular sovereignty is the idea that governments derive their authority from the consent and support of the people, rather than from God. It was based in part on the idea of a ‘social contract’ between individuals and their government, a concept advanced by writers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

A corollary of popular sovereignty is that if a government fails or mistreats its people, the people have the right to replace it. This principle was used to justify the American and French revolutions. Popular sovereignty underpinned Emmanuel Sieyès‘ What is the Third Estate?. Because the Third Estate formed the vast majority of the nation, Sieyès argued, it was entitled to representation in the national government.

Constitutionalism

When the Third Estate separated from the Estates General in June 1789, they met in a nearby tennis court and pledged to remain in assembly until France had a constitution. A constitution is a written framework that defines the structure of government and outlines and limits its powers.

The desire for a written constitution was a feature of both the American and French revolutions. Frustrated with the failures and broken promises of kings and ministers, most revolutionaries wanted a government underpinned by a constitutional document. They believed a constitutional government would spell the end of absolutism and arbitrary decision-making. It would prevent abuses of power and create a government that worked for the benefit of all.

For a working example, the French revolutionaries looked to the United States Constitution, drafted in 1787 and enacted the following year. This constitution created a democratically elected republic with branches of government and their powers clearly articulated. It also embodied Enlightenment political concepts like popular sovereignty, natural rights and the separation of powers.

Natural rights

Also emerging from the Enlightenment, particularly in the writings of John Locke, was the concept of natural rights. As the name suggests, natural rights are rights and freedoms bestowed on all people, regardless of whatever laws or governments they live under. The American writer Thomas Jefferson described natural rights as “inalienable rights” because they cannot be taken away.

According to Locke, there were three natural rights: life, liberty and property. All individuals were entitled to live in safety, to be free from oppression, to acquire property and have it safe from theft or seizure. It is the responsibility and the duty of government, Locke wrote, to uphold and protect the natural rights of individuals.

The first phase of the French Revolution was dominated by the liberal bourgeoisie, who were keen on protecting natural rights. The culmination of this was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, passed by the National Constituent Assembly in August 1789.

Anti-clericalism

The role of the Catholic church in society and government was a divisive issue in the French Revolution. Many philosophes and French revolutionaries were vocal critics of the Catholic clergy. They condemned the wealth and profiteering of the Catholic church, as well as its political influence and its exemption from taxation.

Dissatisfaction could even be found among the lower clergy, in men like Emmanuel Sieyès, who was frustrated by corruption, venality and lack of accountability within the church. Most who criticised the Catholic church and its higher clergy were not atheists seeking to abolish the church, nor were they opposed to religion. They were anti-clericalists who wanted to reform the clergy and to limit its social and political power.

Anti-clericalism shaped several revolutionary policies including the seizure of church lands, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790) and attempts to create a state religion.

1. The ideas of the French Revolution were drawn from the Enlightenment, influenced by the British political system, inspired by the American Revolution and shaped by local grievances.

2. The best-known expression of French revolutionary ideas was the slogan “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity”, though this was simplistic and did not span all ideas of the revolution.

3. The early part of the revolution was motivated by Enlightenment political concepts such as popular sovereignty and constitutionalism, which aimed to create a more effective system of government.

4. Another key revolutionary idea was the codification and legal protection of natural rights: individual rights and freedoms that could not be ignored or removed by law or government.

5. Another important revolutionary idea was anti-clericalism, which sought to reform the Catholic church, particularly the actions of its clergy, reducing political influence, interference and corruption.

Citation information
Title: ‘Ideas of the French Revolution’
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/revolutionary-ideas/
Date published: October 3, 2019
Date updated: November 7, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

The ‘diamond necklace affair’ was a public scandal in the mid-1780s that followed the theft of some extremely valuable jewellery. Those involved used Marie Antoinette‘s name as part of their swindle. This railed public opinion against the queen, despite there being no evidence of her involvement.

France’s most expensive jewellery

The diamond necklace in question was originally commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress, Madame du Barry, but the king died a year later, long before the necklace was completed.

The necklace itself was made by Parisian jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge and contained 647 flawless diamonds, some of several carats each. At the time, the necklace was the most expensive piece of jewellery in France and possibly the world. Conservative estimates valued it at 1.6 million livres, though its true value was probably higher.

Such was the size and value of the necklace that gathering the gemstones to construct it almost bankrupted its creators. Understandably, Boehmer and Bassenge were eager to sell the finished necklace, but its extraordinary cost meant the French royal family was the only potential buyer.

Royal buyers wanted

In 1778, the jewellers made an official approach to Louis XVI, offering him the necklace as a gift for Marie Antoinette. The queen was shown the necklace, tried it on and expressed some interest but the sale was not completed. According to legend, it was vetoed by Antoinette herself, who decided that battleships would be a wiser purchase. The real reason, however, is not recorded.

Boehmer and Bassenge were left to shop the necklace around to royal families and wealthy nobles outside France. They did this for a time but found no willing buyers.

“Once Marie-Antoinette became a mother, she focused most of her energy on her children. This resulted in a noticeable decline in the lavishness that had characterised her youth. She no longer bought jewellery or wore elaborate wigs. Nevertheless, her household consisted of 500 people who jealously guarded their little empires. Despite the marked decrease in her social activities, she was known as the ‘Austrian she-wolf’. Slander about her spread, scandalous stories were freely invented, many of them believed. Her reputation was already at a low ebb when she was unjustly implicated in the… Diamond Necklace affair.”
G. Fremont-Barnes, historian

Cardinal Rohan duped

In March 1784 Jeanne de la Motte, the young wife of a conman, began communicating with Cardinal de Rohan, a high ranking clergyman and diplomat. Within a few months, Motte had convinced Rohan she was a confidante of Marie Antoinette. This interested Rohan, who had been unpopular with the queen, something he felt was an obstacle to his political ambitions.

At the suggestion of Motte, the cardinal began a lengthy exchange of letters with Antoinette, in which he expressed his loyalty and devotion to her. In return, Rohan received sympathetic and affectionate replies from Her Majesty. The reality, of course, was that Motte was not in contact with Antoinette and the replies had been drafted by Motte or her husband.

The ruse was so effective that Rohan came to believe that Antoinette was in love with him. He pushed Jeanne to arrange a secret meeting with the queen. Jeanne responded by organising a nighttime rendezvous between Rohan and a Paris prostitute who bore a passing resemblance to Antoinette.

The necklace vanishes

Armed with large amounts of money borrowed from Rohan, Jeanne de la Motte became a regular in high society. With Rohan’s support, others came to believe that Motte was a close friend of the queen. Among them were the Parisian jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge.

In late 1784, they approached Motte and asked if she could persuade Antoinette to purchase the diamond necklace. Jeanne and her husband found the opportunity too good to resist. Using some forged papers, Jeanne convinced Cardinal de Rohan to acquire the necklace on Antoinette’s behalf. The 1.6 million livres fee, these papers claimed, would be paid in instalments.

In February 1785, the necklace was passed to Cardinal de Rohan, who handed it to a third party purporting to represent the queen. The necklace immediately disappeared and was never seen intact again. It was promptly broken up, its gold and diamonds sold in the black markets of Paris and London.

The scam revealed

The scam was uncovered several weeks later when one of the jewellers asked a royal chambermaid if Antoinette was yet to wear the necklace in public. An investigation soon uncovered the involvement of Jeanne de la Motte and Cardinal de Rohan.

Both were arrested in August 1785, Rohan as he was about to conduct mass at Versailles. They were tried before the Paris parlement the following spring. The trial caused a sensation in the capital, with its chain of lies, forgeries, secret letters, prostitutes, night-time meetings and Rohan’s deluded love for the queen – not to mention the missing necklace 1.6 million livres necklace.

Jeanne de la Motte was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, accompanied by flogging and branding. Cardinal de Rohan was acquitted, despite the weight of evidence against him and despite his sizeable role in the whole affair.

Antoinette implicated

Most historians concur that Marie Antoinette played little or no part in the ‘diamond necklace affair’. There was no evidence she had communicated with or even heard of Jeanne de la Motte. If anything, both Louis XVI and Antoinette had acted with caution and responsibility by refusing to buy the necklace.

In a climate poisoned by libelles, political pornography and anti-royal gossip, however, many Parisians preferred to think the queen a willing player in the necklace fiasco. They interpreted the outcome of the trial as a cover-up, a verdict engineered to protect the queen’s reputation. They chose to interpret the parlement’s acquittal of Rohan as a sign he had been ‘used’ or betrayed by Antoinette.

In the poisoned environment of 1780s Paris, it was more convenient to think Marie Antoinette guilty of conspiracy and questionable conduct, even if the evidence did not support such a conclusion.

1. The ‘diamond necklace affair’ was an incident in 1784-85, involving the theft of a highly valuable necklace, by scammers claiming to represent Queen Marie Antoinette.

2. The scam unfolded in 1784 when Jeanne de la Motte began communicating with Cardinal de Rohan, claiming to be an agent of the queen, Marie Antoinette.

3. Eager to offload the necklace, which had been rejected by Louis XVI and Antoinette, its creators approached Jeanne de la Motte, believing she was a genuine royal courtier.

4. The jewellers were provided with forged documents, claiming to arrange the purchase of the necklace for Marie Antoinette. The necklace was delivered to a third party claiming to represent the queen but promptly disappeared to be broken up and sold.

5. Those involved were arrested and sent to trial. Jeanne de la Motte was found guilty and punished, while Cardinal de Rohan was acquitted. Contrary to the evidence, many in Paris became convinced that Marie Antoinette was directly involved, further damaging her reputation.

Citation information
Title: ‘The affair of the diamond necklace’
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/affair-of-the-diamond-necklace/
Date published: September 30, 2019
Date updated: November 7, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

The works of Enlightenment theorists were not the only publications to arouse revolutionary sentiment in France. In the 1780s, French cities were also awash with a much more crude form of literature called libelles. Taking various forms and ranging from political fiction to outright pornography, these libelles attacked royals, nobles and politicians, undermining their status and authority in the old regime.

What were libelles?

Usually printed as short stories, plays or pamphlets, libelles contained vulgar and defamatory stories about public figures. There was seldom any truth to these stories, though that did not discourage either their publishers or their readers, who were predominately from the lower classes.

Libelles could target anyone of note but most honed in on royals, aristocrats and political figures. By 1789, however, the most common target was Marie Antoinette. The French queen was subject to a torrent of vile and slanderous pornography, most accusing her of outrageous and disgusting behaviour.

According to Robert Darnton, a historian and researcher of the libelles, the “avalanche of defamation” levelled at Marie Antoinette from 1789 to her execution in 1793 has “no parallel in the history of vilification”.

An old form of propaganda

The use of crude humour and pornographic satire for political purposes dates back to ancient times. Leaders and powerful figures have often been subjected to ridicule based on their appearance, personal habits and sexual proclivities.

Women have not been exempt from this, and in some cases they have suffered worse than men. Russia’s Empress Catherine the Great (1729-1796), for example, was frequently portrayed as having an insatiable carnal appetite, bordering on nymphomania and debauchery. This campaign continued after Catherine’s death which, according to popular rumour, was caused by an act of sexual congress with a horse.

Pornographic libelles in France circulated misogynistic fantasies that were no less outrageous. In the six months preceding the revolution, most political pornography honed in on Marie Antoinette. The queen – being female, of foreign birth, fond of fashion, slow to deliver a royal heir and famously strong-willed – was an easy target for satirists and pornographers. Attacking Antoinette was also a means of attacking the king, without doing so directly.

Forms of libelle

Libelles came in a range of literary forms. They could be fliers or broadsheets, pamphlets, dramatic scripts, essays or collections of cartoons. The only common trait was that their content was slanderous and offensive.

The more serious libelles took the form of essays that often presented as serious and legitimate journalism. These publications would promise to provide the ‘true story’ behind the crown, the royal family, notable aristocratic families or the goings-on at Versailles.

Many of these texts cited a newly acquired cache of letters or ‘court insiders’ (never named, of course) as the source of their information. In reality, many libelles simply repeated gossip of the day, embellished with a considerable amount of creative licence and flair.

It is not surprising that this kind of gossip flourished. Unlike modern royals, who are known to us through media saturation, the French public knew little about the people who ruled them. There was almost no public reporting on the royal family, government or Versailles. This dearth of information was eagerly filled by the rumour mongers and the gutter press.

Attempts at suppression

Inside France, state censorship and the use of lettres de cachet made publishing defamatory material a dangerous activity. The noted revolutionary Honore Mirabeau, for example, spent almost a year behind bars for writing a lukewarm satire about a powerful nobleman.

Because of these dangers, the majority of libelles were published outside France and smuggled into the country. Several French libellistes were based in London, where publishing laws were more liberal and publishers could operate beyond the reach of the French government.

Most London-based French libellistes rented rooms and printing presses on Grub Street, a notorious haunt for struggling writers, gutter journalists and smut pedlars. These expatriate publishers were sometimes referred to as Rousseaus du ruisseau (‘Rousseaus of the gutter’).

Most libellistes were more interested in making money than inciting revolution. Some libelles generated more incoming from blackmail than sales. The ‘victim’ of a new libelle was sometimes approached with the document with demands for a cash payment to prevent copies being distributed. Some found it easier to pay the ransom than deal with a firestorm of gossip.

Charles de Morande

One of the most notorious French libellistes – certainly one of the most skilled – was Charles de Morande (1741-1805). Morande’s Gazetier Cuirassé (‘Battleship Gazette’, published 1771) was a racy account of the court and government of Louis XV.

In it, Morande took particular aim at the king, his mistress Madame du Barry, the king’s chancellor René de Maupeou and his minister of state, the Duke of Vrillière. Like several of Morande’s other libelles, it contained pornographic gossip accompanied by political criticism, amateur philosophy, accusations of incompetence and stories of alleged corruption.

Morande broke new ground by attacking women as vociferously as men, perhaps more so. The wife of one French aristocrat, he alleged, frequently had sex with the butler below stairs. A group of noble ladies caught syphilis from their toy boys, Morande claimed, and the disease had caused their teeth and eyebrows to fall out.

Only a small number of these libelles were actively distributed in French cities – but those that did were wildly popular. The ordinary sans-culotte had trouble digesting Diderot or making sense of Rousseau – but when political criticism and philosophy were kept simple and accompanied with smut, he found it much more acceptable.

The campaign against Antoinette

The volume and pornographic intensity of the libelles increased after the outbreak of revolution in 1789. Much more than before, this material honed in on the king and queen. Darnton estimates that before 1789 only about 10 percent of pornographic libelles targeted Marie Antoinette. From early 1789, however, the vast majority of these publications took aim at the queen.

Antoinette had always been a figure of ridicule. The gutter press had long before dubbed her l’Autrichienne (literally ‘the Austrian woman’ but doubly interpreted as ‘the Austrian bitch’, chienne being French for a female dog).

The queen was depicted as having an insatiable sexual appetite. She needed constant satisfaction, it was claimed, but was unable to obtain this from her husband, who was either disinterested, impotent or inadequately endowed. According to libelles, the nymphomaniacal but frustrated Antoinette sought sexual favours from her brother-in-law, from various court nobles, from servants, even from her own children. Stories had her plotting behind the king’s back and taking lovers, sometimes several times a day. Some visual material showed her surrounded by gigantic penises or engaged in acts of tribadism (lesbianism).

“Marie Antoinette occupies a curious place in this literature; she was not only lampooned and demeaned in a ferocious pornographic outpouring, but she was also tried and executed… [While] the king’s trial remained entirely restricted to a consideration of his political crimes… the trial of the queen, especially in its refractions of the pornographic literature, offers a unique and fascinating perspective on the presumptions of the revolutionary political imagination. It makes manifest… the underlying interconnections between pornography and politics.”
Gary Kates, historian

Pornographic themes

One of the earliest libelles against the queen was Essais historiques sur la vie de Marie Antoinette (‘Essays on the private life of Marie Antoinette’). First published in 1781, it reappeared in several forms over the next decade.

This recurring text accused Antoinette of a litany of treacherous and immoral acts, including adultery, dalliances with the king’s own brother, lesbianism, masturbation, wasteful spending for its own sake and political intriguing against the king and the French people. In some 1789 editions, Antoinette was even accused of poisoning the young Dauphin who had died of tuberculosis in June that year.

The events of 1789 opened the floodgates for an even greater torrent of hateful and poisonous literature. Le Godmiché Royal (‘The Royal Dildo’) portrays Antoinette as a sexually frustrated user of sex toys. L’Autrichienne en Goguettes ou l’Orgie Royale (‘The Austrian bitch and her Friends in the Royal Orgy’) suggests Antoinette had a string of lovers, including the Duchess of Polignac and the Count of Artois, who was also the true father of her children.

Impact of libelles

The royal government attempted to stamp out these libelles, of course, but their efforts were in vain. In 1783, officials destroyed 534 copies of Essais historiques but as many as 30,000 copies are still believed to have circulated during the 1780s.

To outsiders, this lurid and tawdry political pornography can appear a sideshow to more significant revolutionary ideas. The libelles did not incite revolution themselves: they offered no cogent political criticism of the old order, nor did they outline or advocate changes for the future.

What the libelles did do was reflect and reinforce declining respect and affection for the monarchy. It exacerbated this decline by holding the king and queen up for public ridicule. Moreover, the booming spread of libelles in 1789 was more evidence of Louis XVI‘s incompetence. A king who could not find a way to crush the gutter press – particularly when it smeared his wife – was hardly fit to be king.

1. Libelles were crude, slanderous and usually baseless forms of literature that denigrated and attacked the behaviour of public figures.

2. Many libelles were pornographic in their tone and content. Men and women alike were often targeted and condemned for their sexual behaviour and alleged promiscuity.

3. Most libelles against French figures were produced abroad, chiefly in London’s Grub Street. They were then smuggled into France or used to extract ransoms from their targets.

4. From the spring of 1789, Marie Antoinette became a regular target for libelles, which accused her of sexual debauchery, overspending and acts of treachery against the king.

5. While libelles did not advocate revolution or contain much political criticism of the old regime, they undoubtedly eroded public respect and affection for the monarchy.

Document: a libelle about Marie-Antoinette and the King’s brother (late 1780s)
Image: Louis the Cuckold (late 1780s)
Image: Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom (late 1780s)

Citation information
Title: ‘Libelles and political pornography’
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/libelles/
Date published: September 21, 2019
Date updated: November 7, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Today, a salon is a store where someone goes for an expensive haircut. In 18th century France, salons were formal social gatherings driven by discussion, particularly around literature, politics and philosophy. These privately organised events helped to foment, circulate and popularise revolutionary ideas.

What were salons?

Salons were organised gatherings hosted in private homes, often by wealthy, prominent or influential women. Individuals were invited to salons to participate in discussion and share their views and opinions. Guests at salons usually came from the haute bourgeoisie or nobility. Most were educated, well read and informed about politics, current affairs and intellectual debates.

By the last quarter of the 18th century, the salons had become de facto universities or tutorial groups, specialising in Enlightenment ideas and philosophy. Many salons focused on an item of literature, such as a text by one of the philosophes or a recent essay or pamphlet.

The salons and their male-oriented counterparts, the cercles and cafés, were social gatherings rather than cohesive revolutionary groups or parties. Nevertheless, they served as distributors of revolutionary ideas and sentiment. The salons provided a venue for floating, sharing and discussing liberal ideas and criticisms of the Ancien Régime. They served as a precursor to the political clubs that emerged in the early 1790s.

Origins

The earliest salons date back to the early 1600s, to a literary circle hosted by the Marquess de Rambouillet, an Italian-born French aristocrat. Rambouillet’s salon was a meeting place for the Paris intelligentsia and the nation’s literary set.

These early salons were more informal than later gatherings. Discussions were less planned and structured and there were more games, light banter and socialising. By the 18th century, salons had developed a more formalised structure and a stronger focus on literature, learning and debate.

As one would expect, topics of discussion in pre-revolutionary salons revolved around politics, philosophy and Enlightenment ideas. Reports from the American Revolution electrified many salons during the 1780s.

Many of the American Revolution’s critical documents – such as the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the United States Constitution – were studied and discussed in the salons of Paris. American diplomats and visitors like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were warmly welcomed in the more prestigious salons.

Guests and procedures

The gatherings at salons followed no consistent structure or procedure. They were run by the hostess or salonnière in both the order and the manner that she preferred.

One of the most critical aspects of a salon was deciding who to invite. Most salonnières tried to construct a guestlist that provided a mix of opinions, generated challenging discussions and proved interesting for all involved. As historian Steven D. Kale puts it, invitations to salons were “selected [by the host] for compatibilities and contrasts likely to produce the most interesting and harmonious conversation. Salonnières therefore performed a difficult balancing act, cultivating individual merit without letting one guest overshadow the others”.

Salons were usually assembled in a reception room, such as a lounge, library or parlour, though smaller gatherings were occasionally held in the host’s bedroom. Most began with a reading of some kind, usually from a new or newly discovered novel, essay or philosophical text. Discussion proceeded from there, often led or encouraged by the salonnière.

Famous salon hosts

Paris and Versailles boasted dozens of fashionable salons by the 1780s. Most were dominated by women of the nobility and the haute bourgeoisie. Some salonnières became celebrities in their own right.

One was Suzanne Curchod, the wife of Jacques Necker, who ran a popular society salon in Paris in the 1770s. Some of the regulars at Madame Necker’s salon supported her husband’s elevation into the king’s ministry.

Sophie de Condorcet, the wife of the Marquis de Condorcet, ran a well-patronised salon attended by several philosophes and, at various times, Anne-Robert Turgot, Thomas Jefferson, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, Olympe de Gouges and Madame de Staël.

Perhaps the best known Paris salon was hosted by Marie-Jeanne, Madame Roland, whose home became a gathering point for republican Jacobins in 1791 and 1792.

Contribution to revolution

“Strong women remade the salons. They became central information nodes in the communication network that was 18th century Paris. Salons were soon news agencies, workshops for writers and centres for patronage. Many of the salonnières worked actively to make their gatherings simulate the classroom. Although discussion was the key mode of communication at the salon, lecturing followed by close questioning of the speaker was not uncommon… Women used the salons strategically to learn, to be entertained and to escape the boredom that characterised many of their lives.”
Susan Herbst, historian

The contribution salonnières made to revolution, French politics and also gender relationships has long been debated by historians, as it was by contemporaries.

Many 18th century thinkers considered science, politics and philosophy to be masculine pursuits. They thought the Enlightenment would benefit women but believed that women themselves should have no part in it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one Enlightenment philosophe who was opposed to salonnières and the involvement of women in political debate. Rousseau believed women, being intellectual inferiors, would drag down or taint scientific and philosophical discussion. Denis Diderot, who wrote extensively about the virtues of women, took the opposite view. According to historian Barbara Caine, Diderot “insisted that the presence of women made it necessary to discuss the driest subjects with clarity and charm.”

Circles or ‘male salons‘

The salons also had their male equivalents. One of these was the cercles sociaux (‘social circles’), or simply cercles. Unlike the salons, which were dominated by aristocrats and the wealthy, membership of the cercles was largely bourgeois.

There was wide variation between the cercles. Some were little more than gentlemen’s clubs, where the discussion was interposed with drinking and gambling. Others were more overtly political and not dissimilar from the political clubs of the 1790s.

The largest cercle sociaux was founded in Paris in 1790 and came to boast thousands of members. Formally called the ‘Society of the Friends of Truth’, it published its own newspaper called Bouche de Fer (‘Mouth of Iron’) and was dominated by men of the Girondin faction.

Cafes

Some Frenchmen preferred the lively discussion of the cafés. A few coffee shops, such as Café Procope, were trendy establishments frequented by leading philosophes like Voltaire (who, according to reports, drank dozens of cups of coffee each day).

Other cafés were low rent places that served as havens for grubby journalists, political pornographers and rabble-rousers. According to Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who penned colourful accounts of Parisian life before and during the revolution, these cafés were filled from morning to midnight with “merciless critics”, engaging in “idle talk that was always boring and revolved constantly around the newspapers and pamphlets”.

1. The salons were private gatherings where people of similar class, interests and outlook came together to discuss literature, politics, philosophy or current events.

2. Almost all salons were hosted by women (salonnières) in their private homes. The salonnières determined the guest list and, in most cases, the agenda and procedures in the salon.

3. Early salons were more social than intellectual, involving games and light conversation, however by the late 18th century salons had become more intellectual and rigorous, serving as de facto universities.

4. These salons not only served as communications hubs and avenues for revolutionary ideas and sentiment, they also allowed French women a chance to access information and education.

5. The male equivalent of the salons were the ‘social circles’ and informal gatherings in the cafés, where criticisms of the old order, Enlightenment philosophy and revolutionary ideas were discussed.

Citation information
Title: ‘The salons‘
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/salons/
Date published: September 22, 2019
Date updated: November 7, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

The philosophes (French for ‘philosophers’) were writers, intellectuals and scientists who shaped the French Enlightenment during the 18th century. The best known philosophes were Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot. Other lesser-known figures included the mathematician and political scientist Nicolas de Condorcet, religious critic Nicolas Boulanger and atheist writer Jacques-Andre Naigeon.

Impact on revolutionphilosophes had on the French Revolution is open to debate, though most historians agree it was substantial.

None of the philosophes were revolutionaries and very few advocated or even predicted a revolution. Indeed, most were intellectual elitists with little regard for the common people, believing they had little or no role in government. Most of the significant philosophes were also dead long before 1789.

Nevertheless, their writings and ideas, particularly their political theories and criticisms of the Ancien Régime, helped to create an environment where revolutionary ideas could germinate and prosper.

Montesquieu

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was an enlightened nobleman turned political philosopher, responsible for articulating a clear explanation of the separation of government powers.

Montesquieu was born into a noble family near Bordeaux in January 1689. Several of his relatives were involved in provincial politics, so the teenage Montesquieu also developed an interest in law and government. The family’s wealth gave him the opportunity to read, write and socialise.

The young Montesquieu became a vocal and charismatic regular in the Paris social set, where he spoke freely and critically about the Ancien Régime. He also travelled widely in Europe, observing and studying different forms of law and government.

By his late 20s, Montesquieu had worked as a lawyer, an academic and a history lecturer. He also began writing in earnest. His first significant public work was Persian Letters (1721), which satirised many aspects of French society.

Montesquieu’s views on government

His early writings reveal Montesquieu as a liberal, a deist and a supporter of constitutional monarchy. He was less receptive to republicanism or democracy. Like other intellectual giants of his age, Montesquieu believed government was best left to educated and enlightened elites. Common people, he argued, were too shiftless and poorly equipped to discuss either law or the business of government.

Montesquieu also believed that political systems must be organised so that those in government could not accumulate or abuse power. He expanded on this point in his best-known work, De l’Esprit des Lois (‘The Spirit of the Laws’), which was published anonymously in 1748. The Spirit of the Laws compared different systems of government, with a particular focus on how each system protected individual liberty.

Expanding on ideas previously explored by the English philosopher John Locke, Montesquieu decided the best means of protecting individual liberty was through the separation of government powers. The different functions of government – executive or monarchical, legislative and judicial – must be carried out by different people and different departments. The power of each branch of government must be limited, ideally by a constitution.

The Spirit of the Laws was despised by the church and placed on its list of prohibited books, however it proved very popular and sold thousands of copies across Europe. Montesquieu died seven years after the first edition, however The Spirit of the Laws became arguably the most significant work of Enlightenment political theory, shaping the outcomes of the American and French revolutions.

Voltaire

Voltaire was the pen name of the French writer Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778). He was born in Paris to a moderately wealthy family, the son of a government official. Arouet received a Jesuit education in Greek, Latin and the law. A free-spirited character in his youth, at age 20 Arouet attempted to elope with a young French émigré  but the plot was discovered by his father.

After arriving back in Paris, Arouet spent a year imprisoned in the Bastille for writing libellous poems about members of the aristocracy. Around this time he adopted the pen name Voltaire, a Latinised anagram of his real name.

While detained in the Bastille, Voltaire penned Oedipus, a tragic play that hints at sexual debauchery and incest among members of the French aristocracy. Oedipus was a literary and dramatic success, later performed to packed houses in Paris, while Voltaire adopted writing as his profession.

Voltaire and England

In 1726 a lettre de cachet was issued against Voltaire. Rather than face another long stint in the Bastille Voltaire went into voluntary exile in England, where he remained for three years.

During his stay, Voltaire became fascinated by English society, government and law. He came to admire English literature, particularly Shakespeare; its constitutional monarchy; its freedom of speech and the press, particularly the open criticism and mockery of political figures in London newspapers and pamphlets.

Voltaire returned to France in 1729 and published Letters on the English Nation. It caused considerable controversy in France, comparing the English system with the French system and finding the latter wanting. Voltaire was particularly severe on organised religion, which did not dominate or define English society as it did in France.

“Voltaire was essentially a crusader like [Martin] Luther, always stronger in destruction than in positive construction. He was, says one historian, “the Spirit of the Enlightenment incarnate, with all its virtues and all its faults. Everything he said and wrote was as stimulating as the coffee on which he lived”.”
Frederick Artz, historian

Voltaire’s writing

Voltaire continued to write prolifically and in a range of formats, producing novels, novellas, essays, plays, satires and open letters. He could write in many voices, with profound seriousness, great subtlety or clever wit – or he could pour scorn and vitriol on his targets.

Politically, Voltaire was no democrat. He had no faith in the ordinary people, who he considered apathetic and too concerned with trivialities. Generally liberal in his views, Voltaire was an advocate for individual freedom, informed choice and religious tolerance.

Throughout his life, Voltaire was a fierce critic of the Catholic church, condemning its endemic corruption and the greed and depravity of high ranking clergymen. He wrote sourly about the church’s vast land holdings and the large tithes it imposed on the struggling peasantry. He condemned venality in the church, criticising the practice of nobles buying positions in the clergy, and complained about the Vatican intervening in French civil matters.

Supporters of the church damned Voltaire as a heretical atheist but like many other philosophes he was a deist, meaning he believed in a more constrained and less interventionist form of God.

Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was another Enlightenment writer whose political and philosophical ideas shaped the French Revolution.

Rousseau was born in Switzerland to a successful middle-class family. His mother died a few days after Rousseau’s birth; his father was a third generation watchmaker. The young Rousseau was raised around craftsmen and artisans. He became an avid reader, though he had little in the way of formal education.

Rousseau spent most of his 20s travelling, working a variety of menial jobs while studying and educating himself. In his 30th year, he moved to Paris, where he later befriended fellow philosophe Denis Diderot and had an article published in Diderot’s famous Enlightenment work Encyclopédie.

Rousseau’s political views

Much of Rousseau’s writing was undertaken in the last two decades years of his life. He wrote on a broad range of topics and addressed many social, political and philosophical issues.

Rousseau’s 1755 work Discourse on Inequality offers Rousseau’s ideas about why individuals live in and tolerate profoundly unequal conditions, particularly in civilised societies. One of his most famous works was Emile (1762), a novel that explores the nature of education and the corrupting influences of society on young individuals.

Probably Rousseau’s most significant contribution to Enlightenment political theory was his 1762 work The Social Contract. In this book, he made a simple but now famous statement: “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in fetters [chains]”.

Rousseau pondered why people voluntarily submitted to the rule of kings and governments, surrendering their freedoms and liberties in the process. The answer, he concluded, was that humans are essentially good and desire peace, stability and good order. Civilised human society cannot exist without government and laws to keep order.

“That crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour the substance of the state to no benefit whatsoever… they smile disdainfully at those old words ‘patrie’ and ‘religion’ and devote their talents and their philosophy to destroying and debasing all that is sacred among men. Not that they hate either virtue or dogmas; they are enemies of public opinion, and banishing them among atheists would be enough to bring them back to the foot of the altars.”
Rousseau on political pamphleteers

The social contract

During this exploration, Rousseau articulated the idea of the ‘social contract’, an unwritten agreement that exists between governments and individuals. He also articulated the concept of popular sovereignty, suggesting that the true power of government was derived from the consent of the people.

Popular sovereignty was a critical idea that was used to justify the American and French Revolutions. Many revolutionaries embraced Rousseau’s belief that political systems, while never perfect, must strive to progress and improve.

One of Rousseau’s more contentious claims was that private property was an impediment to good political leadership. Property interests, Rousseau suggested, distracted politicians from their primary roles: representing the people and ensuring morality. Rousseau also advocated the concept of a civic religion, a religion to worship God and uphold morality rather than served vested interests.

Diderot

Denis Diderot(1713-1784) was another prominent figure of the French Enlightenment. The son of a cutlery maker, Diderot was born in Champagne, northern France. He received a Jesuit education and moved to Paris with the intention of joining the clergy, before choosing to study law instead.

Soon after, Diderot turned to writing. He spent his early years undertaking small writing and translation jobs and filling clerical positions. His lack of connections prevented Diderot from obtaining any significant writing roles and, as a consequence, he was frequently broke.

Among his early writings were a history of Greece, an anthology of short stories and essays containing criticisms of the Catholic church. One of Diderot’s essays was condemned as heretical and in 1749 he was arrested and imprisoned for several months.

“It has been said that we are all born equal, but this is not so… Among men there is an original inequality that nothing can resolve. It must last forever. All that one can obtain from the best legislation is not to destroy this inequality, but to prevent abuses arising out of it.”
Denis Diderot

The Encyclopedie

Diderot’s most famous literary contribution was Encyclopédie. Commenced in 1750 but not completed until 1772, Encyclopédie was an ambitious project that aimed to gather and organise all of the world’s essential knowledge.

When completed, Diderot’s work contained hundreds of articles and essays across a myriad of subjects, including the physical and natural sciences, mathematics, astronomy, religion, theology, history, politics, society, literature, music and the visual arts. Unlike other books of its kind Encyclopédie also contained entries on artisanship and work, covering fields like farming, architecture, engineering, carpentry, masonry and manufacturing. The articles in Encyclopédie were written by dozens of well qualified experts and philosophes, most of whom were politically progressive.

While Encyclopédie was not itself a political text, some of its entries contained implied criticisms of traditional beliefs. Moreover, making knowledge available to everyone helped to undermine the authority and dominance of both France’s absolutist monarchy and the Catholic church. Encyclopédie was published openly in France until 1759 when it was outlawed, mainly at the behest of the church.

1. The philosophes were writers and intellectuals of the French Enlightenment, whose writings contributed to revolutionary ideas and criticisms of the Ancien Régime.

2. Baron de Montesquieu was a political theorist whose 1732 book The Spirit of the Laws articulated and popularised the idea of the separation of government powers as a means of preventing tyranny.

3. Francois-Marie Arouet, or Voltaire, was a prolific writer on a range of subjects. Voltaire was particularly known for his criticisms of organised religion and his condemnations of its venality and corruption.

4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Swiss philosopher whose writings focused on education, government and natural rights. Rousseau is best known for developing the theory of a ‘social contract’ between individuals and their government.

5. Denis Diderot was a French writer who compiled the Encyclopédie, an Enlightenment text that assembled all existing human knowledge and made it available to all, undermining the authority of the monarchy and the Catholic church.

Citation information
Title: ‘The philosophes‘
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/philosophes/
Date published: September 26, 2019
Date updated: November 7, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Both the French Revolution and the American Revolution before it were inspired by ideas from the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, or Age of Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement that began in Western Europe in the mid-1600s and continued until the late 18th century. It created an environment where traditional structures, ideas and practices were questioned and challenged.

Motivation

The Enlightenment was driven by scepticism about traditional ideas and beliefs, intellectual curiosity and a desire for social, political and scientific progress.

Enlightenment thinkers and writers challenged existing knowledge and assumptions, seeking new information and a better understanding of humanity and the natural world. Most were empiricists: they expected new discoveries to meet certain standards of proof and verifiability before being accepted as fact. To achieve this, they developed a new system of thinking and investigation, the beginnings of what we now call the ‘scientific method’.

Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was largely derived from religious teachings, supposition and the writings of ancient forebears. During and after the Enlightenment, knowledge was produced by scientific processes, logic and reasoning.

The scientific Enlightenment

Today we know the Enlightenment chiefly for its scientific thinkers and their wonderful discoveries. In Italy, Galileo Galilei (1654-1742) developed an improved type of telescope that brought advances in astronomy. In the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) conducted a series of experiments involving electricity, battery power and lightning, the most famous involving Franklin flying a kite in the middle of an electrical storm.

In Britain, men like Isaac Newton (1642-1727) made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics and physics, most notably Newton’s theory of gravity, which according to legend was inspired by a falling apple.

Other notables of the scientific Enlightenment included Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Edmond Halley, William Herschel, Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Though they operated in different fields, these men sought scientific explanations to natural phenomena, where previous information had come from religion and folklore.

The political Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was not just concerned with the physical sciences. While scientists were exploring and investigating the natural world, other thinkers of the age were questioning the nature of humanity and human society.

These figures gave particular scrutiny to the nature of government and political power. Previously, rulers had legitimised their power and authority through the doctrine of ‘divine right’. They claimed their political power was a divine responsibility, a gift given to them by God.

In Europe, the Catholic church supported the notion of divine right by disseminating it among ordinary people. Because the power of kings and emperors came from God, it was beyond challenge; to engage in rebellion or disloyalty against one’s king was to disobey the will of God. The French king Louis XIV (1638-1715), great-grandfather of the doomed Louis XVI, was a devoutly religious leader who worked to expand and strengthen the doctrine of divine right in France.

Divine right challenged

Several Enlightenment philosophers questioned and challenged archaic political beliefs like the divine right of kings.

The men who did this were not revolutionaries or radical democrats. They had no wish to destroy the authority of kings and governments or to level social hierarchies. Nevertheless, they did not believe that political power emanated from God. In their view, governments existed to guard the nation, to protect the people and to secure their individual rights.

The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was in favour of strong government and absolutist monarchy. This type of government, Hobbes believed, was necessary to protect its citizens. Another Englishman, John Locke (1632-1704), argued that every individual was born with three inherent rights (life, liberty and property). These views about the relationship between government power and individual rights formed the theory of a ‘social contract’. In France, the best-known exponent of this theory was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).

The Enlightenment in France

The Enlightenment differed from country to country and was shaped by local conditions and grievances. In France, the Enlightenment began to take shape in the early 1700s, reaching its peak by the middle of the century. The writers of the French Enlightenment were referred to as philosophes (‘philosophers’). Their number included Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Baron de Montesquieu and François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire).

Politically, most of these philosophes were concerned with two issues: how to improve French law and government, and how to create a better society based on reason, logic and merit.

Some philosophes looked for ideas abroad, particularly in England. Montesquieu’s conception of the ‘separation of powers’, for example, was largely derived from the British political system. Voltaire spent three years in voluntary exile in England and later praised its democratic processes, its rule of law, its freedoms of religion and speech and its lack of arbitrary arrests and imprisonment. This stood in striking contrast to France, where royal power was often used to silence or punish critics, dissidents and free thinkers.

Views on religion

Voltaire and a couple of others aside, most Enlightenment thinkers did not engage in attacks or sustained criticism of the Catholic church. Most philosophes were Christian deists, not atheists. They maintained a belief in God but considered him a more benign figure than the vengeful, interventionist God of the Old Testament.

The analogy favoured by some was that God was a ‘cosmic watchmaker’, an all-powerful deity who had constructed the universe but left it to run according to natural laws. This reimagining of God, along with other tenets and practices of the Enlightenment, was criticised by the Catholic church.

Theological opposition to the Enlightenment was hardly surprising. For centuries the church had served as Europe’s largest repository of wisdom and knowledge. The political Enlightenment challenged the church’s stranglehold over knowledge, information and education. It also threatened the privileges and protections it enjoyed from the state.

Contribution to revolution

“Historians have long debated the exact relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In the minds of contemporaries, the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the Revolution’s most important ideas and agendas. Within two years of its outbreak in 1789, it sparked radical movements in Britain, Haiti, and finally Ireland and Egypt.. The days of the Enlightenment seemed halcyon – a war of words, a battle of books – in comparison with the reality of trying to live in a republic and keep faith with its principles.”
Margaret C. Jacob

The Enlightenment had a profound effect on the ideology of the French Revolution. Most of the notable Enlightenment philosophes were dead long before the fiscal crisis of the 1780s. Many of their writings pre-dated the revolution by decades (Diderot’s first Encyclopedie was published in 1752, Voltaire’s Letters on England in 1734, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1748).

No significant Enlightenment texts predicted or suggested a revolution in France. Nevertheless, the Enlightenment certainly created an ideological context for revolution. Its political treatises triggered a wave of discussion and debate, some of it taking root in France’s salons and circles. This upsurge of political ideas created an environment where questioning and criticising the old order was not only possible, in many circles it was expected.

Importantly, the political philosophy of the Enlightenment stripped away much of the magic and mystique of the Ancien Régime. The Bourbon kings were no longer seen as representatives of God, they were simply men. France’s social hierarchies and inequalities were stripped of their ideological defences. According to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ordinary people were born not only with rights but the right to expect better government. It was on this platform of ideas and assumptions that the French Revolution was constructed.

1. The Enlightenment was a long period of intellectual curiosity, scientific investigation and political debate. It began in western Europe in the mid 17th century and continued until the end of the 18th century.

2. The Enlightenment was marked by a refusal to accept old knowledge, ideas and suppositions. Enlightenment writers and thinkers preferred to use logic, reason, experimentation and observation to reach conclusions.

3. The political Enlightenment examined the nature of human society, government and power. It also questioned the relationship between the state and individuals, who were assumed to be born with natural rights.

4. In France, the Enlightenment emerged in the early 1700s and was driven by writers and intellectuals called philosophes. Among their number were men like Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.

5. The philosophes of the French Enlightenment were mostly dead by the late 1700s so did not play a direct role in the revolution. Their ideas and writings lived on, however, stimulating discussion, sparking curiosity and creating an environment where revolutionary ideas could emerge and flourish.

Citation information
Title: ‘The Enlightenment’
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/enlightenment/
Date published: September 25, 2019
Date updated: November 7, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

To understand the political causes of the French Revolution, one must first understand the nature of royal government. France’s government and bureaucracy had been expanded and modernised by Louis XIV in the second half of the 1600s. This created the foundations for a modern national government but it also left future kings with some critical problems, most notably the cost of maintaining the state.

Rule by divine right

According to the political doctrine of the era, France was an absolutist, divine right monarchy. It was governed by kings who believed they were sovereign and all-powerful because their authority was drawn from God.

In practice, however, the exercise of royal authority was neither perfect or unlimited. The French monarch certainly wielded considerable power but it was not absolute nor unchecked. The king could make appointments, formulate policy and issue arbitrary orders, such as lettres de cachet – but the king’s authority extended only as far as his power to implement and enforce his orders.

Between 1643 and 1792, France was ruled by just three Bourbon kings, all named Louis. Under the first of these kings, Louis XIV, royal power was increased and extended across France. His successors, however, found it difficult to assert similar levels of royal power over a nation that was rapidly changing and approaching bankruptcy.

The ‘Sun King’

The French monarchy reached its zenith under Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, who ruled between 1643 and 1715. As a child of nine, Louis was driven from his palaces during a bitter civil war that was instigated by the nobility and Paris parlements against the crown and royal ministers.

In 1661, shortly after Louis reached adulthood, he shocked the royal court by assuming absolute control of the government. He refused to select a high ranking aristocrat as his chief minister, instead choosing his ministers and officials on merit, including several commoners.

The new king took a close interest in matters of government, administration, policy, law and the military. He insisted on reviewing and signing important orders personally. He also ordered a series of military reforms and expanded the national standing army, ending his reliance on the armies of provincial noblemen.

Louis used religion to justify and reinforce his growing absolutism. The French monarchy, Louis claimed, was empowered by God, an endowment of divine right. When asked by a political emissary about the nature of the French state, Louis XIV is reported to have replied “Le t’at? C’est moi!” (‘The state? That’s me.’)

“Louis XIV design his government to ensure his authority. True enough, the mechanisms of authority were becoming increasingly bureaucratic, yet the monarch dominated. While Louis XIV sought to rule in a rational manner, he crafted his bureaucracy not to govern in his stead, but to ensure that he alone ruled… To a considerable degree, Louis limited or suppressed independent action among the agents of his authority, particularly in the case of his military commanders. More authority concentrated at court, under the direct supervision of the king. This made the roles of the king and those ministers around him all the more important, for at the top of the power structure stood very few individuals.”
John A. Lynn, historian

The power of Versailles

To enhance his own power, the ‘Sun King’ developed ways to marginalise his rivals and dilute the power of provincial nobles. The royal court at Versailles would become his greatest weapon.

In 1682, Louis XIV moved his court from the fortified castles of Paris to a newly constructed palace at Versailles, about 12 miles (19 kilometres) south-west of the capital. Versailles became one of Europe’s grandest palaces, with 2,153 rooms, 230 acres of gardens and 20 miles of roads and pathways.

Versailles was not just a royal showpiece, however, it became a de facto political prison for France’s provincial nobles. The king demanded the near-permanent attendance of significant noblemen at Versailles. Held at court, these nobles became politically ineffectual, idle and leisure loving. They spent most of their days engaging in frivolous court intrigues, gambling, hunting, balls and sexual romps. Customs and rituals at Versailles evolved to emphasise the king’s political supremacy and mystique.

Kept distant from their provincial bases, the nobles were unable to plot and scheme against the monarchy. Under Louis XIV, Versailles became a working model of the political idiom ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’.

Foreign wars and campaigns

Louis XIV also strengthened his monarchical power by involving France in several foreign wars and campaigns. During his reign, France was engaged in the War of Devolution (1667-68), the Franco-Dutch War (1672-78), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) and other lesser conflicts.

These wars had a transformative effect on the nation. France’s national army became one of the most professional and successful military forces on the European continent. Territories like Flanders, Artois, Hainault, Alsace and Lorraine were acquired and absorbed into the French state.

Military victories consolidated Louis XIV’s authority in France and increased it abroad. They fuelled French nationalism, increased Louis’ personal prestige and strengthened public faith in the monarchy. War also provided Louis with a premise for expanding the national government. Military mobilisation required a national bureaucracy to collect revenue, organise and supply the army.

As a consequence, government departments and agencies grew rapidly during the reign of Louis XIV. It was said that at the beginning of Louis’ reign his foreign ministry could fit into a carriage but his death they filled a ballroom.

State debt and oppression

Most of these policies and changes were made arbitrarily by Louis XIV. He relied on experts for advice and entrusted ministers and administrators to implement his decisions. He did not stop to consult the parlements (France’s once powerful high courts) or the Estates General (the nation’s occasional assembly).

While these measures extended Louis XIV’s personal power, they left a litany of problems for France’s future monarchs. The Sun King’s constant warmongering, along with his grandiose spending and empire building at Versailles, drained the royal treasury. His wars were funded by state borrowing and increasing taxation, the burden of which invariably fell on France’s lower classes.

Secondly, with growing absolutism came an increase in state oppression. The royal government became ruthless in suppressing criticism, political dissent and religious heresy. Censorship of books and pamphlets increased under Louis XIV and his successor, Louis XV; so too did the use of lettres de cachet to arbitrarily detain individuals. Many radical and revolutionary writers, including Voltaire, Denis Diderot and Honore Mirabeau, fell foul of the state and spent time in prisons or exile during the mid 18th century.

A bloated bureaucracy

Thirdly and finally, the expansion of the national government under Louis XIV, while effective in the short term, was both haphazard and inefficient. New departments and offices were created but traditional and obsolete ones were rarely abolished.

The outcome was that France acquired a modern bureaucracy but it was created atop antiquated systems of privilege and inequality. While government expanded and the French economy modernised and capitalised, the social order remained dominated by the three Estates. The cost of maintaining this expanded national government increased but state revenue was dwindling.

By the time Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, governing France had become extraordinarily difficult. In the absence of a legislature, the royal court remained the political heart of the nation – but its ability to develop and implement policy on a national scale was extremely limited. Tradition and mythology may have declared the new king an absolutist monarch – but his power was absolute in name only.

1. France before the revolution was an absolutist monarchy, in theory though not in practice. All political power and sovereignty were said to reside with the monarch, who derived his authority from God.

2. Royal absolutism was largely defined and expanded by Louis XIV, who ruled between 1643 and 1715. Louis moved the royal government to Versailles, involved France in several wars and greatly expanded the military and the state bureaucracy.

3. Louis XIV also minimised threats to his authority by requiring powerful provincial nobles to attend court at Versailles, where they were they became occupied with mundane activities and intrigues.

4. Louis XIV also reinforced his authority by not summoning the Estates General, bypassing the parlements and using instruments of state oppression, such as censorship and lettres de cachet.

5. By the time Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, France’s economy was growing and modernising but its political and social systems had scarcely changed. Government had become extremely complex and the royal authority established by Louis XIV had dwindled.

Citation information
Title: ‘Royal government’
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/royal-government/
Date published: September 19, 2019
Date updated: November 6, 2023
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.