From Bankruptcy to Terror: How the Revolution Radicalized

The idea

The exam's fifth band asks what the Revolution in France was, and the anchor's answer is a chain in which each link forced the next. It began with money. A century of war financed by private loans left sixty percent of revenue going to interest, by the anchor's figure, while two hundred thousand nobles and the church held the land and paid almost nothing, and the American victory of unit 04 emptied what was left. Louis XVI's ministers could not tax the privileged, so in seventeen eighty-nine he revived the Estates General, unmet since sixteen fourteen, and the act of asking ended absolutism. The election drew up grievances, bread prices soared, and the question of voting by estate or by head became the constitutional question, which Sieyès answered by calling the Third Estate everything. In June the Third Estate became the National Assembly and swore the Tennis Court Oath; in July Paris took the Bastille as the army defected; in the villages the Great Fear burned the debt ledgers. The Assembly answered on August fourth by abolishing feudal privilege and on August twenty-sixth with the Declaration of the Rights of Man: born free and equal, sovereignty in the nation, law the same for all. Church lands were sold, titles abolished, the clergy made state employees, and equality's logic reached Protestants, Jews and, by force from St. Domingue, the enslaved, while women were refused. Then the chain radicalized. The king fled toward the border in June ninety-one and was caught at Varennes, and a constitutional monarchy with a king who had tried to leave it could not last. Radicals declared war on Austria in April ninety-two; defeat and invasion brought the Convention, the republic and universal manhood suffrage in September; the king's execution in January ninety-three brought Britain into the war; and invasion, shortages and the Vendée brought the Committee of Public Safety, the levée en masse, price controls, the guillotine, a new calendar and temples of reason, with the anchor's thirty-five to fifty-five thousand dead. Victory in summer ninety-four removed the emergency, and Thermidor removed Robespierre. The Directory of ninety-five restored property's rule. Bankruptcy made the Assembly, the flight made the republic, the war made the Terror, and the Terror's success ended it.