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Comment
Will the revolution change France in the long term or has the revolution simply interrupted long term changes? The revolution has produced a new, and self conscious France drawing nothing from the history which preceded the events.
The king and queen executed, and new forms of government will be tried in an attempt to find stability. And we can see attempts to build a new France, with a complete wiping away of seigniorial dues, aristocratic titles, a mass of taxation and tithes and a whole host of other hangovers from the supposedly ‘feudal’ government of old regime France. The idea of three ‘estates’ was abolished, as were noble and church privileges; nobility was completely ended, and church lands were nationalized and sold, causing a full tenth of all land in Franc to change hands, a massive redistribution. The clergy will become salaried officials of the state.
THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITY AND RETURN
But many changes were already in motion, the seigniorial dues were already replaced with rents, a situation ardent supporters of the revolution like to claim as being the result of events after 1789.
The claims about standardisation of weights and measures across all of France were already evolving under the ancien regime.
The church and state split will be marked with bitterness continued for decades over how priests dealt with the revolutionary laws. The end to their aid for the poor and sick meant that today there are 40% fewer hospitals in France than before the revolution. But nobles are less persecuted than previously believed and were able to either hang onto, or later reclaim, a large percentage of their land and wealth.
War has changed, for the first time a nation is mobilised en masse, here at the Bridge we shudder about what that could mean for Tomorrow’s Europe, could entire nations be at war with each other, can the birth of the nation state lead to new and terrible wars in the future.
The French economy had been growing under Louis XVI, but the growth was reduced greatly by the revolution.
THE VILLAGE
How much would a standard village have been affected by it? There is no longer a class of aristocrats at the top level, but this doesn’t mean the leading landholders would necessarily have been ejected, executed or humbled: in many regions, there was simply a social transformation from nobility to citizen, and the chance to acquire even more land in the church sales.