The People's Revolution of 1789 with Dr. Micah Alpaugh

Today's special episode is an interview with Dr. Micah Alpaugh. Alpaugh is Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri and author of four books on the French Revolution and Atlantic World, including Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787-1795 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge 2022, Winner of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Award). His latest, The People’s Revolution of 1789, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in September. He is currently writing a book about the Sons of Liberty and another on the history of protest and democracy.

Today's episode focuses on The People’s Revolution of 1789, and how the Revolution impacted everyone in France and the colonies.

Gary:    So much has been written about the French Revolution. What makes your book unique?

Micah:       So, despite the vast number of local studies about different aspects of the French Revolution, no one has brought the protest movements of Paris, France’s many provinces, and its Caribbean colonies together in a single book.

·       This is important because, despite the celebrated collective actions of 1789 – including the Fall of the Bastille, the Great Fear, and the Women’s March of the October Days – our narrative of the early French Revolution has become dangerously top-heavy, largely focused on Enlightened intellectuals’ writings and legislative events at Versailles.

·       I argue instead that it was the year’s popular movements that deserve the most credit for the form the early French Revolution took – they overwhelmed the Old Regime’s repressive apparatuses and bureaucracy, made radical demands for equality and redistribution that no one else would have advanced for them, and emboldened the legislators to go further than they had initially dared or would have on their own.

Gary:   Your book tries to interweave the various parts of France together, namely that of the cities, the provinces and the colonies. Can you describe what linked these three parts of the country together and how events in one area affected those in another?

Micah:

·       For all the diversity of France, the events of the Revolution were closely linked.

·       France’s communication infrastructure, both the postal system and the newspaper trade, had vastly improved in recent decades, and the collapse of censorship after the Bastille’s fall led to an explosion of publishing and unguarded letters, including highly detailed accounts of the various protests and related movements afoot.

·       For all of France’s linguistic and cultural differences -- a modern French speaker couldn’t understand how peasants spoke across most of the country -- this was a single kingdom long ruled by the precepts of absolutism.

o   To overthrow the system for one part of the country seemingly required overthrowing it for everyone.

o   Despite all the understandable and longstanding resentments against Paris, their revolution (particularly the Bastille’s fall and its repercussions) would be embraced across the country and used as rationales for overthrowing municipal governments, and attacking royal and aristocratic rural domains.

o   Concurrently, across the year Parisians kept close track of the revolts across France – which were also regularly reported – with the level of contention across the nation playing a particularly a central role in motivating the legislature at Versailles to Abolish Feudalism.

·       The colonies, being a 3-to-4-month sail from France, were harder to bring into conversation for a book that centrally focuses on a single year, but the study would have been woefully incomplete without a chapter examining the Revolution’s effects there: mere rumors of changes afoot in 1788 motivated revolts in Martinique and Guadeloupe, while news of the early Revolutionary upheavals set off serious contestations over who would be included in the new sphere of fraternity (with first free blacks, and soon slaves, vying for inclusion).

Gary:   You’re going to piss off some Marxist listeners, as for a long time the Marxist interpretation held that the Revolution was led by the urban-based bourgeoisie lawyers who dominated the National Assembly. These and other arguments saw the Revolution in a more limited fashion, with Paris dominating events in the provinces and colonies. How do you respond to this older interpretation of history?

Micah:       Yeah, I may be a bit closer to the Trotskyist emphasis on working people already having all the reason they needed to revolt, but I’m most sympathetic to an anarchist interpretation: that the multitude of serious protest events across France, without any central coordination or leading figure, together played the largest role in driving the Revolution forward.

·       In some respects, like how a “Bourgeois Militia” seized control of the Bastille insurrection, or how National Assembly legislators passed legislation to abolish feudalism that sought to limit the revolution as much as empower it, there’s still some Marxist influence in my work – but no professional historian in the field today is really a doctrinaire Marxist or wants backthe mid-twentiety-century Souboulian dinosaur.

·       The relative strength of Paris and the provinces is a trickier question – and maybe I contributed a bit to the problem in my first book that was a local study of Parisian protest during the revolution – but there was an intense feedback loop between events in the capital and the rest of France’s possessions that drove the revolution forward.

o   I argue it took the movements of millions to make the French Revolution what it became.

Gary:    Since we’ve talked about what makes your book unique, let’s talk about what makes the French Revolution unique compared to other revolutions. Why do you believe the French Revolution was such a singularly important event in history?

Micah:

·       The French Revolution, particularly the early stage described in my book, helped establish a new paradigm for the world. The old hierarchies of birth were abolished and a new meritocratic order of equals was established in its place. Popular sovereignty rose to replace the royal right of conquest, and people became emboldened as never before to make fundamental demands for their own betterment.

·       Human rights, especially through that August’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, were instituted as a potentially universal guide for what the world could look like.

·       French politics and society were set on a new basis which, if imperfectly, has shaped its modern course down to the present day.

Gary: Among the many debates over the French Revolution there is the controversy over what started it in the first place. I personally have an hour-long episode with the Industrial Revolutions Podcast talking about the various theories over what started one of history’s most consequential revolutions. Can you provide a narrative explaining how you believe the Revolution started?

Micah:

·       Well, in some respects, the full book is a narrative of how the Revolution started, but I can provide some outlines.

·       The revolution took the form that it did as French people used the serious financial crisis of the French monarchy (resulting largely from the American War of Independence and longstanding military over-spending) to push for changes to the governing system – some with ramifications mostly local and personal, and some rapidly becoming incredibly ambitious and far-reaching attempts to restructure the kingdom.

·       After a poor harvest and frigid winter in 1788, material dearth and political uncertainty combined to provoke incredibly intense waves of protest across France around the Estates General’s spring 1789 opening that sapped confidence in the Old Regime’s ability to govern.

·       Rather than seeking concord with the commoners to sooth the crisis, the two privileged estates (the clergy and nobility) engaged in obstruction that within six weeks led the commoner Third Estate to create a revolutionary National Assembly, eliminating the veto power of the privileged.

·       Royal reaction, attempting to reenact the old Estates General system (or maybe dissolve the body altogether) then sparked the Bastille insurrection, where Parisian action – together with revolts across the countryside and unrest among France’s soldiers – made repression prohibitively difficult and led to royal capitulation to the New Regime.

·       Rather than slowing down, collective action accelerated across France, as municipal revolutions overthrew Old Regime administrators and the police, and in their place established elected councils and National Guard citizen-policing across the country.

·       The Great Fear, meanwhile, brought the new revolutionaries together (out of fear of ultimately illusory threats), and attacks on châteaux and monasteries accelerated to motivate the National Assembly to pass the Abolition of Feudalism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August.

·       So, it’s only through this panoply of acts – the movements of millions in thousands of collective actions – that the revolution came to take the form it did.

Gary: One major question that I had when reading your book is what is or is not a political act. There are a number of intellectual figures who very clearly and purposefully sought to change how society operated. Then there were often popular crowds that might assault some soldiers they viewed as abusive or raid a granary for food. What constitutes a political act and how did the combination of these actions impact the Revolution?

Micah:

·       I think it’s necessary to realize how broad the bounds of politics are – all sorts of actions have real political ramifications and should be seen as within the bounds of the political.

·       Even if many protesters may well have been primarily motivated by hunger, anger at soldiers, or long-standing antagonism at administrators, their actions wound up having enormous effects in the context of a profound political crisis.

·       Even if all actions didn’t seem immediately political (some protesters doubtlessly were focused on the grain supply, or exterminating aristocrats’ pigeons who feasted on their crops, or wanted revenge against local nobles), the sphere of politics grew profoundly as so much more came under debate.

o   The Estates General elections invited most adult males to come discuss politics together in their local assemblies, both advancing candidates for election and writing Grievance Statements (Cahiers de Doléances, as the French say) on a vast panoply of issues.

o   The Municipal Revolutions and National Guard formation then put propertied commoners in charge of local governance – making them, together with the National Assembly at Versailles, the New Regime’s arbiters.

§  So, in the transition from absolutism to the revolution, permissible political acts went from including almost nothing to almost everything in France.

Gary: There are a number of major events that I think our listeners may be familiar with, such as the Storming of the Bastille and the Women’s March on Versailles. One thing that you bring up that perhaps not as many people know about is The Great Fear. Can you explain what this was and how it impacted the Revolution? 

Micah:

·       The Great Fear may have been the French Revolution’s most unique event.

·       So much had changed so quickly by the Bastille’s fall that French people expected the other shoe to drop and a royal reaction to ensue.

·       There were fears of invasion by some combination of the Crowned Heads of Europe or marauders unleashed to put common French people back in their place.

·       Oftentimes, those believed to arrive reflected longstanding local fears – near the English Channel, locals believed the British were coming, even if they hadn’t been there since the Hundred Years’ War. Other areas feared Germans, or Italians, or Spaniards.

·       The fear commonly spread in chain-reaction, with messengers arriving on foot or horseback breathlessly telling the new municipal authorities that their enemies were over the next hill, looting and pillaging as they went – setting off chain-reactions that could spread over hundreds of miles.

·       Yet, the Great Fear wound up strengthening the bonds amongst revolutionaries – the chain-reaction panics led to the mobilization of local populations, calling out their new National Guard units.

o   Revolutionaries came to believe they could face down their enemies – while the lack of actual royal reaction emboldened them to continue pushing further.

Gary: One thing that you note in your work is that the Revolution was strengthened as much by its successes as by its failures. Documents such as the Rights of Man and of the Citizen inspired people to support the revolution while the threat of royal veto of popular measures kept people ready to agitate. Can you give our listeners a picture of how success and failure furthered the revolution?

Micah:

·       Hopes and fears together played a central role in pushing the revolutionaries onwards.

·       The late-summer and early-fall of 1789, after the August declarations, had seen the rise of a moderate faction in the National Assembly called the Monarchiens (literally, Monarchists – calling for a broad restoration of the king’s prerogatives), seeking to contain and consolidate the revolution.

o   Meanwhile, the King held up the August decrees with the threat of veto (even though the new French constitution that would give him that right was still being debated).

·       One of the ironies of the French Revolution was how individuals and groups kept proclaiming “The Revolution is Over,” even as it never would be.

·       Groups continued to contest the Revolution’s meaning and bounds, fearing that all could quickly be lost if they didn’t, motivating lurches forward like the October Days that forced the royal family’s move to Paris and new rounds of château-sacking across the fall and winter that concluded 1789.

·       The Federation ceremonies of July 14, 1790 (in Paris, on the spot where the Olympics just opened) which saw hundreds of thousands of militiamen and citizens taking an ecstatic oath alongside the king, would have been a fitting conclusion to most National Assembly legislators’ ambitions, but history would prove more complex.

·       The King would be caught attempting to flee the country less than a year later, while the French Constitution that the legislature placed such hopes in wound up being a dead letter on arrival in September 1791, lasting less than a year until the ‘Second Revolution’ of August 1792, which swept away the monarchy and established the First Republic.

Gary: One thing that I was pleasantly surprised to read about in your account was that you did not just cover the impact of the Revolution in Saint-Domingue, what would become Haiti, but also in Martinique and Guadeloupe, as you describe a ‘Caribbean Revolution.’ Can you talk a bit about how the whole French Caribbean participated in the French Revolution?

Micah

·       The French Revolution’s principles were too big and profound to readily accommodate a deplorable slave society like France’s Caribbean possessions.

·       First rumors, and then the even more radical new realities, arriving from France destabilized the colonial caste system – leading Free Men of Color to seek full rights, and slaves to increasingly revolt.

·       Not surprisingly (in context), this led whites to re-assert their racial prerogatives to superiority, sparking race-riots and the marginalization or (often) elimination of Free Blacks from the new revolutionary governing structures – which in turn would help provide the spark for the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791.

·       The Caribbean acts as an important mirror for the French Revolutionary project, showing the reach AND insufficiency of the Revolution’s rhetorically “universal values” – and also how common people there also took it upon themselves to expand its purview to try to address their own needs.

Gary: Finally, you speak about an Unfinished Revolution. Such a phrase reminds me of when reporters asked Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in the 1970s about what he thought about the French revolution and he said, “It’s too early to say.” Now, he was referring to the May ’68 movement, but many incorrectly thought he was talking about the French Revolution. Likewise, former prime minister of France, Georges Clemenceau once said that the “The Old Regime has no beginning but an end, while the Revolution has a beginning but no end.” What do you mean when you say the Unfinished Revolution and is it still unfinished today?

Micah:

·       The French Revolution of 1789 created ideals so vast that no regime has, nor probably ever could, fulfill them all.

·       Ultimately, as we’ve discussed, France’s new legislators settled on a more bourgeois program than what most protesters would have preferred, and sought to bring the protest movements to an end much more than sponsor thoroughgoing democratization -- though important experiments in so-called ‘direct democracy’ would follow, especially under the early First Republic between 1792 and 1794.

·       “Unfinished” also relates to my various frustrations with contemporary politics – and the seeming inability of democratically elected governments or extra-systemic movements to prompt us to address so many of the most important systematic issues that bedevil our present and future.

·       Much of what fascinates me about 1789 is how the volume of protests surmounted the absolutist government of France and forced the authorities to grapple (if not always successfully) with fundamental issues that had previously seemed impossible to address.