HTAV

21 February 2014

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: INTERNATIONAL CAUSES AND OUTCOMES

Peter McPheeUniversity of Melbourne

Perspective I

Slavery and empire in eighteenth-century France and the Americas

Mercantilism/”l’exclusif”

St-Domingue - 31,000 whites, 27,500 freed slaves and mulattoes, 465,000 slaves

Nantes

Nantes

La Rochelle

Bordeaux

Perspective II

The clash of global empires

Jacques NeckerController-General1777-81, 1788-89

By Joseph Duplessis

Estates-General 5 May 1789

Declaration of Independence 4 July 1776

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

(American Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776)

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 27 August 1789

“1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights ...

2. ... these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, or individual may exercise authority that does not expressly emanate from it.”

Perspective III

An international conflagration

Goethe

Valmy

Tuileries 10 August 1792

21 January 1793

Vendée,March 1793

300,000 conscripts

Committee of Public Safety, April 1793

RobespierreJuly 1793

‘Levée en masse’ - August 1793

Fleurus – 26 June

Napoleon 1800

David1803

Perspective IV

Revolutionary emancipation?

Amis des noirs

Grégoire

The National Assembly, 16 May 1791, granting ‘active’ citizen status to free blacks with free

parents and the necessary property, but avoiding the issue of slavery:

“The National Assembly decrees that it will never deliberate on the station of people of colour who are not born of free father and mother, without the prior, free and spontaneous wish of the colonies; that the colonial assemblies currently in existence will stay on; but that people of colour born of free father and mother will be admitted to all future parish and colonial assemblies, if they moreover have the required qualities. (The hall echoes with applause).”

May 1791

Barnave

Club Massiac

Barnave’s speech to the National Assembly, 15 July 1791

‘Any change today is fatal, every prolongation of the Revolution disastrous. I am posing the question here, for it is a question of the national interest. Are we going to end the Revolution, or are we going to start it all over again?... If the Revolution takes one more step, it can only be a dangerous one: if it is in line with liberty its first act could be the destruction of royalty, if it is in line with equality its first act could be an attack on property. ... It is time to bring the Revolution to an end. ... It must stop at the point where the Nation is free and all men are equal

‘Massacre of the Champ de mars’, 17 July 1791

St-Domingue, August 1791

St-Domingue, 1793

Nantes

La Rochelle

Bordeaux

5 February 1794

Type here …

Toussaint L’Ouverture

1802

1804

Haiti

Slave trade 1818

Victor Schoelcher

Second Republic1848

Perspective V

The international repercussions of the French Revolution.

Robert R. Palmer/Jacques Godechot 1950s

1760-1800: an Atlantic Revolution?

‘Republic of letters’

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of

Happiness”.

(American Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776)

“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. … man’s natural and imprescriptible rights … are

liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”

(Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, August 1789)

French honorary citizenship, 26 August 1792

Thomas Paine James MadisonGeorge Washington Alexander

Hamilton

Joseph Priestley James Mackintosh

William Wilberforce Jeremy Bentham

David Williams Thomas Clarkson

Cornelius de Pauw Anarcharsis Cloots

Campe PestalozziGorani Friedrich Klopstock Thaddeus

Kosciuszko

Gordon RiotsPugachev

Problems - and alternatives

‘Grande Peur’ July-August 1789

Albert SOBOUL

Marshall PlanNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Eric HOBSBAWMGeorge RUDE

Slave society

Feudalism

Capitalism(Limited democracy)

Socialism

Communism

From England, a letter in 1789: ‘The Revolution produced a very sincere and very general joy here — all join in sounding forth the praises of the Parisians and in rejoicing at an event so important for all mankind’.

From Russia, a letter in 1789: ‘The cry of freedom rings in my ears and the best day of my life will be that when I see Russia regenerated by such a Revolution’.

Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831 (2009)

William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, 1805 [1850]:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at onceThe attraction of a country in romance!

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, ...

Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, The beauty wore of promise ...

What temper at the prospect did not wakeTo happiness unthought of?

Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Thaddeus Kosciuszko,

Poland 1794

Paul Strzelecki, 1839:

“Although in a foreign country, on foreign ground, but amongst a free people, who appreciate freedom and its votaries, I could not refrain from giving it the name Mt Kosciuszko.”

Wolfe Tone,United Irishmen

1798

The concept of an Atlantic Revolution renewed1. The history of slavery and ‘black consciousness’

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)

2. The History of Human RightsLynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History

(2007)

3. New international perspectivesDavid Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds),

The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, 1760-1840 (2009)

Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson (eds), The French Revolution in Global

Perspective (2013)

Dates ofIndependence

Simon Bolivar

Coronation 1804