Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Thomas E. Kaiser is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Dale K. Van Kley is Professor of Early Modern European History at The Ohio State University.

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FROM DEFICIT TO DELUGE

The Origins of the French Revolution

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7281-5

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................ixIntroduction Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. Van Kley............................................................................11 Financial Origins of the French Revolution Gail Bossenga....................................................................372 The Social Origins of the French Revolution Revisited Jack A. Goldstone.....................................................673 The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 1560–1791 Dale K. Van Kley............................................1044 From Fiscal Crisis to Revolution: The Court and French Foreign Policy, 1787–1789 Thomas E. Kaiser.....................1395 Enlightenment Idioms, Old Regime Discourses, and Revolutionary Improvisation Keith Michael Baker............................1656 Gender in Pre-Revolutionary Political Culture Jeffrey Merrick...............................................................1987 Saint-Domingue, Slavery, and the Origins of the French Revolution Jeremy D. Popkin..........................................220Conclusion: From Old Regime to French Revolution Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. Van Kley........................................249Notes..........................................................................................................................271Index..........................................................................................................................323Contributors...................................................................................................................343

Chapter One

Financial Origins of the French Revolution Gail Bossenga Few would dispute that the immediate cause of the French Revolution was the impending financial bankruptcy of the royal government. In 1786 the controller-general, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, announced that although the government's total revenue was only approximately 474 million livres, expenditures were running around 575 million, leaving a deficit of 101 million. Nearly half of the crown's expenses, furthermore, stemmed simply from the cost of servicing its enormous debt. Two years of feverish attempts by the king's finance ministers, first Calonne and then Etienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, to solve the pressing financial problem came to naught. On August 16, 1788, Brienne was forced to suspend payments on short-term loans falling due at the royal treasury and gave creditors interest-bearing notes instead, a measure commonly perceived as a partial bankruptcy. He also moved up the convocation of the Estates-General to the following May in order to put France's financial house back in order. Absolute monarchy was to be no more.

In attempting to explain the financial origins of the Revolution, the question of why the monarchy went bankrupt has not posed a great mystery to historians. The French monarchy had suffered for centuries from structural problems that left it unable to overcome its financial difficulties. The basic issues were threefold: French kings constantly engaged in expensive wars; the unwieldy French system of taxation was unable to generate sufficient revenues to pay for those wars; and finally, to make ends meet, the French monarchy borrowed large sums of money at relatively high interest rates, which eventually left it unable to meet its financial commitments. Given this unhappy situation, it had become a long-standing tradition for French monarchs to use default to solve, so to speak, their financial woes. Bankruptcies of some sort during or after wars were common. In France they can be found in the years 1559, 1598, 1634, 1648, 1661, 1716, 1722, 1759, 1770–71, and 1788.

The government's descent toward bankruptcy in 1788, therefore, is hardly cause for surprise. France had, after all, fought two extremely expensive wars in the two decades before the Revolution: the Seven Years' War (1756–63) and the American War of Independence (1776–83), the first costing around 1.325 billion livres, and the second almost as much, between 1 and 1.3 billion livres. Meanwhile, the royal government had not been able to overhaul the French tax structure and therefore had to borrow large sums at high interest rates. The financial problems of the French monarchy on the eve of the Revolution might be seen, therefore, as a predictable consequence of long-standing institutional difficulties. What was not predictable was the path that the monarchy took. In 1788, instead of defaulting on part of its obligations, the monarchy convoked the Estates-General, the kingdom's representative body, which had not met in 175 years. It was this act, the calling of the Estates-General to solve a financial crisis, and not impending bankruptcy per se, that was novel in French history. This fateful decision opened the way to a whole new era in politics, in fact, to revolution.

The convocation of the Estates-General in response to royal financial distress thus poses a problem for historians looking at long-term patterns. It does not really fit. Economic historians have argued recently that the institutional structure of France was more modern than is usually assumed. The implication is that the financial situation of France in 1788 did not require such drastic measures as calling the Estates-General. The French system, contended one economic historian, could have survived the crisis of 1788 with a package of defaults "only slightly worse than that of 1770." "Only gradual administrative tax reforms were necessary to save the monarchy, not the politically difficult, perhaps impossible, radical fiscal changes proposed by some reformers," stated another. Could the French monarchy have survived with some "gradual" tax reforms, or with yet another round of defaults? The ministers in charge of the royal treasury obviously did not think so, or they would not have called the Estates-General. Bankruptcy had never been a simple financial option for the monarchy, and its effects cannot be evaluated in financial terms alone. Traditionally, bankruptcy occurred during highly unstable political situations, such as the seventeenth-century revolt of the Fronde, or in times of monarchical weakness, such as the minority of a king. Bankruptcy always presented the possibility, as Philip Hoffman observed, of political consequences that "were considerable and not always predictable." Until the end of the Old Regime, those outcomes had always ended ultimately with the survival, and even seemingly increased authority, of absolute monarchy. In 1788 that pattern changed.

Financial systems both respond to and produce interest groups. This essay argues that although bankruptcies were a continual problem for the French monarchy, the pattern of borrowing shifted over the period of Louis XIV to the Revolution and gradually gave rise to different interest groups. A well-known feature of the Old Regime was that new practices and institutions were placed on top of existing ones, thereby allowing institutions with potentially contradictory principles to develop simultaneously. This process occurred in the realm of credit. The French monarchy was originally built on an institutional network that could be described as absolute, patrimonial, and corporate....