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 the summer of 1791 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 Constituent Assembly carried through a reconstruction of France so thorough that much of it survives to this day, and the Constitution of 1791 was a serious and sophisticated document. Yet within a year of its 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 unit.
Two forces, above all, corroded the experiment before external war finished it. First, 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 mass popular base where none had existed. Second, the collapse of trust between Louis XVI and the Revolution, sealed by the king's attempted flight to Varennes in June 1791, which exposed his professed acceptance of the new order as a fiction. The constitutional monarchy did not simply fade; it was hollowed out from within by schism and by royal bad faith, so that when war came in 1792 (the subject of the next lesson) there was little left to defend. A strong answer weighs the relative force of these pressures rather than narrating them in turn.
The organising question is therefore this: was the failure of the constitutional monarchy the inevitable consequence of an irreconcilable principle — a sovereign nation yoked to a king who rejected it — or the contingent product of specific, avoidable events, above all the Civil Constitution and the Flight to Varennes? How one answers determines whether the constitutional experiment is read as doomed from birth or as a workable settlement destroyed by particular choices.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y213 (Non-British period study): France 1774–1815 — The French Revolution and the Rule of Napoleon. Within our own teaching sequence it forms the constitutional-experiment thread, examining how the Revolution tried to build a durable settlement between 1789 and 1791 and why that settlement decayed. We have deliberately separated the internal corrosion of the monarchy (schism, Varennes, the Constitution's flaws) treated here from the external shock of war and the monarchy's fall, which the next lesson addresses, because the "why did it fail" question is clarified by distinguishing the settlement's inbuilt weaknesses from the war that finished it. This is our pedagogical arrangement, not a transcription of the specification's own order. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Because Y213 is a period study, examiners reward command of change over time and judgements that reach across the constitutional period rather than settling into the description of a single measure. Keep asking how each development altered the viability of a constitutional monarchy — and whether its collapse was written into its design.
Alongside the dramatic journées of 1789, 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, and it is easy to neglect amid the drama of Bastille and Terror — but it is precisely this constructive work that made the Revolution irreversible, and a strong part (b) essay on "change and continuity" turns on it.
These reforms reveal the Revolution's constructive, Enlightenment-rationalist face — uniformity, election, the career open to talent. But 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, a tension that runs forward into the Republic.
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 consequences rippled through the entire Revolution. The sale of Church and (later) émigré 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 successive assemblies 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. Crucially, the nationalisation of Church lands also made the state the Church's paymaster — and the reorganisation of the Church that followed was therefore entangled with finance, not merely ideology.
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 nationalisation, 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, in principle, 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, and it is worth understanding precisely why. It forced millions of devout Catholics to choose between their religion and the Revolution, and large numbers chose religion. Timothy Tackett, mapping the oath geographically, showed that areas of high refusal — much of the west, and above all the future Vendée — became the heartlands of counter-revolution. The measure thus manufactured a mass popular base for opposition where none had previously existed. Before 1790, hostility to the Revolution had been largely confined to displaced elites; after the oath, whole regions of ordinary Catholic peasants were set against it. This is a decisive point for the causation of the monarchy's fall: the schism converted the counter-revolution from an aristocratic grievance into a popular one, and it is one of the strongest candidates for the "most important" cause in a part (a) comparison.
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, the support of loyal troops, and the backing of 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 analysis of the monarchy's fall, 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. This is why the episode is so pivotal: it did not merely weaken the constitutional monarchy in the abstract, it destroyed the trust on which any constitutional monarchy must rest. 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. The "fiction of the abduction" was the Assembly's desperate attempt to paper over a contradiction that everyone could now see.
Varennes is also a model case for the relationship between contingency and structure, and it repays close attention because the two-part question so often turns on exactly this distinction. 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. Structure set the possibilities; contingency determined 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 who had led the Constituent Assembly.
| 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 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 Legislative Assembly |
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.