You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The period from October 1789 to August 1792 saw France attempt something unprecedented: to convert an absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy in which a king, retaining real executive power, would govern alongside an elected legislature under a written constitution. For a time the experiment seemed plausible; the Constitution of 1791 was a serious and sophisticated document, and the Constituent Assembly's programme of reform reshaped France so thoroughly that much of it survives today. Yet within a year of the constitution's completion the monarchy lay in ruins. Explaining why the constitutional settlement failed — and whether its failure was inevitable or contingent — is the central problem of this lesson and one of the richest causation questions in the whole course.
Three forces, interacting, destroyed the experiment. First, the mutual distrust between Louis XVI and the Revolution, which the king's own conduct repeatedly justified. Second, the religious schism opened by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which converted devout Catholics into enemies of the Revolution and handed the counter-revolution a popular base. Third, the coming of war in April 1792, which transformed every internal tension into a question of treason and national survival. The constitutional monarchy did not simply collapse; it was destroyed at the intersection of these three pressures, and a strong answer weighs their relative force rather than narrating them in turn.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson sits within Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 2, Option 2C.1 (Route C depth study): "France in revolution, 1774–99." It covers the constructive work of the Constituent Assembly, the religious crisis, the breakdown of trust after Varennes, the Constitution of 1791, and the slide into war. Within our own teaching sequence it is the reform and its unravelling stage: the Revolution at its most constructive and, simultaneously, sowing the seeds of its own radicalisation into the war and Republic of Lesson 4.
Because Paper 2 is a depth paper, the reward is for fine command of a short period and for source judgements set firmly in context. (For the precise weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
Alongside the dramatic journees, the Constituent Assembly carried through a constructive reordering of France so thorough that much of it survives to this day. This was the Revolution as rational reconstruction.
These reforms reveal the Revolution's constructive, Enlightenment-rationalist face — uniformity, election, the career open to talent. They also created winners and losers: the Le Chapelier Law, by banning workers' combinations, would later set the Revolution's liberal economics against the demands of the sans-culottes.
The Revolution had been born of fiscal crisis, and the Constituent Assembly had to confront the same mountain of debt that had destroyed the monarchy. Its solution was momentous and double-edged. In November 1789 the Assembly nationalised the vast landholdings of the Church — the biens nationaux — declaring them 'at the disposal of the nation'. Against the security of these lands it issued the assignats, initially interest-bearing bonds but rapidly transformed into a paper currency. The logic was elegant: the state would pay its debts and fund its operations in assignats, which holders could use to buy nationalised land, after which the notes would be retired.
The consequences rippled through the entire Revolution. The sale of Church and (later) emigre lands created a large class of new proprietors — peasants and bourgeois — with a direct material stake in the Revolution's survival, since a counter-revolution might reclaim their purchases. This was perhaps the single most important guarantee of the Revolution's irreversibility. But the assignats also carried the seeds of disaster: as the Assembly and its successors printed ever more to meet mounting needs, the currency depreciated steeply, fuelling the inflation and dearth that would radicalise the urban poor and drive the sans-culotte demand for price controls. The fiscal expedient that secured the Revolution's social base thus simultaneously generated the economic instability that destabilised its politics — a tension that runs through the entire decade. It also entangled the Revolution with the Church in the most direct way: once the Assembly had seized Church lands to back its currency, it had effectively made itself the Church's paymaster, and the reorganisation of the Church into a salaried department of state followed with a certain fiscal logic.
The most damaging measure of the entire constitutional period was the reorganisation of the Catholic Church. Driven partly by ideology and partly by the fiscal logic of the nationalisation of Church property, the Assembly recast the Church as a department of state.
| Provision | Detail |
|---|---|
| Bishops and priests elected | Clergy chosen by the same electorate as civil officials, including non-Catholics |
| Dioceses reorganised | Reduced to match the 83 departments, severing historic boundaries |
| Clergy paid by the state | With Church lands nationalised, clergy became salaried public servants |
| Papal authority curtailed | Rome's jurisdiction over the French Church was effectively denied |
In November 1790 the Assembly required all clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, including the Civil Constitution. The consequence was a national schism:
Many historians judge the Civil Constitution the Revolution's gravest self-inflicted wound. It forced millions of devout Catholics to choose between their religion and the Revolution, and large numbers chose religion. Timothy Tackett, in Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture (1986), mapped the oath geographically and showed that areas of high refusal — much of the west, and above all the future Vendee — became the heartlands of counter-revolution. The measure thus manufactured a mass popular base for opposition where none had existed. This is a decisive point of causation: without the schism, the counter-revolution would have lacked the popular foundation that made the risings of 1793 so formidable.
In June 1791 Louis XVI, his confidence in the Revolution exhausted by the religious crisis, attempted to flee Paris with his family for the eastern frontier and the support of loyal troops and Austrian power. The party was recognised and halted at Varennes, short of the border, and brought back to Paris under guard.
| Consequence | Significance |
|---|---|
| Royal credibility destroyed | The flight exposed Louis's professed acceptance of the Revolution as a fiction; he left behind a written declaration repudiating its reforms |
| Republicanism surfaces | For the first time republican demands became a mass phenomenon, led by the Cordeliers and the radical press |
| The Champ de Mars 'massacre' | On 17 July 1791 the National Guard under Lafayette fired on a republican crowd petitioning against the king, killing dozens and splitting moderates from radicals |
| The fiction of 'abduction' | To save the constitutional settlement, the Assembly officially pretended the king had been kidnapped — a transparent fiction that fooled few |
The declaration Louis left behind is, for the historian, the decisive piece of evidence. In it the king repudiated the very reforms he had publicly sanctioned — the constitution, the new administration, the religious settlement — and made plain that his acceptance of the Revolution had been extracted under duress. The flight therefore converted suspicion into proof. Before Varennes, revolutionaries could debate whether the king was a reluctant partner or a secret enemy; after it, his own words settled the question. A king believed to be plotting with foreign powers and domestic counter-revolution could not credibly head a revolutionary state, yet the 1791 Constitution required exactly that. Timothy Tackett, in When the King Took Flight (2003), stressed the emotional rupture: subjects who had invested deep, almost familial trust in the king felt personally betrayed, and that betrayal corroded the monarchical principle far faster than abstract argument could.
Varennes is a model case for examining the relationship between contingency and structure. Structurally, Furet is right that a sovereign-nation-plus-hostile-king was an unstable compound. But it was the contingent event of the flight — and the king's careless candour in his declaration — that detonated the instability when it did. A king who had reconciled himself to the Revolution might have made the 1791 settlement work; the contradiction was latent, not necessarily fatal, until Louis's own choice activated it. The strongest answers use Varennes to show that structure sets the possibilities while contingency determines the outcome.
The Constitution was completed in September 1791 and reluctantly accepted by the king. It embodied the political vision of the moderate, propertied revolutionaries.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Constitutional monarchy | The king headed the executive and held a suspensive veto, able to delay legislation for up to two legislatures |
| Legislative Assembly | A single-chamber legislature of 745 deputies, elected indirectly |
| Active vs. passive citizens | Only male taxpayers ('active' citizens) could vote; the poorest ('passive' citizens) were excluded — millions of men had no vote |
| Separation of powers | Distinct executive, legislative, and judicial branches, after Montesquieu |
| Self-denying ordinance | On Robespierre's motion, sitting Constituent deputies barred themselves from the new Assembly |
The Constitution embedded two fatal tensions. The active/passive distinction betrayed the universal language of 1789 and alienated the sans-culottes, who would later overthrow it. The self-denying ordinance, though high-minded, stripped the new Legislative Assembly of the Revolution's most experienced figures, leaving an inexperienced body to face the gravest crisis — war. The settlement was thus, from the outset, a compromise that satisfied neither the popular movement (excluded from the vote) nor the king (reduced to a subordinate executive he did not accept).
The Legislative Assembly (October 1791 – September 1792) was shaped by the political clubs and increasingly polarised between defenders of the 1791 settlement and those who wished to push further.
| Group | Leaders | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Feuillants | Lafayette, Barnave | Constitutional monarchists defending the 1791 settlement |
| Girondins (within the Jacobins) | Brissot, Vergniaud | Advocates of war against Austria; deeply suspicious of the king |
| Montagnards / Cordeliers | Danton, Desmoulins, Marat, Robespierre (in the Jacobin Club) | Radical democrats, increasingly republican |
The Brissotins (Girondins) drove the campaign for war against Austria, expecting that it would expose the king's treachery if he was secretly colluding with the enemy, spread the Revolution across Europe, and unite the nation behind the Revolution. Paradoxically, Louis XVI also wanted war — but in the hope that French defeat would discredit the Revolution and restore his authority. Almost alone, Robespierre opposed the war from within the Jacobin Club, warning presciently that it would empower generals and lead toward military dictatorship.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.