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Today is the 226th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, which triggered the French revolution in 1789. The mark the occasion, Jacobin magazine has a thorough guide to the upheaval, illuminating its historical causes and legacy. The guide answers question such as: “What was France like before the revolution?,” “What happened on July 14, 1789?,” and “What did the Bolsheviks think about the Jacobins?” Check out an excerpt below. The full guide can be found here.
What was France like before the revolution?
The vast majority of people in France lived in destitution, with little chance of escaping their condition. Peasants were entirely at the mercy of the nobility, who had preserved much of the fundamental power relationship of feudalism. As Jean Jaurès described in 1901, the economic subjugation in the countryside was profound:
There was not one action in rural life that did not require the peasants to pay a ransom… Feudal rights thus extended their clutches over every force of nature, everything that grew, moved, breathed […] even over the fire burning in the oven to bake the peasant’s poor bread.
This led to near-universal poverty in the countryside. English agriculturalist Arthur Young remarked at the time:
The poor seem poor indeed; the children terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than if with no clothes at all; as to shoes and stockings they are luxuries… One third of what I have seen of this province seems uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery. What have kings, and ministers, and parliaments, and states, to answer for their prejudices, seeing millions of hands that would be industrious, idle and starving, through the execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility?
The urban population of artisans and journeymen laborers experienced similar hardship. Economic reorganizations in the kingdom threatened the apprenticeship system, jeopardizing the ability of craftsmen to control their own work. Day laborers — permitted to exist in the cities only when they could produce papers proving their employment — were stalked by royal police.
At the same time, a wave of immigration brought dramatic demographic changes to Paris. Historian Eric Hazan estimates that in 1789 immigrants numbered about two thirds of the city’s population, and they each had to “request a passport in their region of origin to avoid being arrested en route as vagabonds and sent to beggars colonies.”
The clergy and nobility, together comprising about 1.6% of the population, were doing just fine — most nobles lived in extreme opulence and inherited their positions hereditarily. The Catholic Church controlled by some estimates 8% of total private wealth.
Image: Henry Singleton, The Storming of the Bastille, via Jacobin