French Revolution by Packwood Adams

French Revolution

This book was written by PACKWOOD ADAMS, and was first published in 1914 by METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON. The book has 270 pages and XXXII chapters, which include French revolution from antecedents of revolution until end of it.

In first V Chapters: Antecedents of the Revolution, The Old Regime, King and People, The States-General, The Victory of the Commons the author present the situation in France before the first changes to a free country.

A study of that political system helps one considerably to the understanding of the Revolution. It was a bureaucratic despotism that had been imposed upon a feudal society. That fact explains the social importance and the political absurdity of the French noble.

In the start of the first chapter the author tried to explain why the revolution starts in French and not in England. The English government had, more wisely than the French, gradually taken its creditors into partnership, the transfer of power to the middle classes in England was without revolutionary violence, and the aristocracy held their own to a very great extent. Without these problems, they have internal problems: The despot and the bureaucracy that governed France were very inefficient; the court and the officials were corrupt; the system was out of gear.

What must be explained at this point are two of the main causes of impoverishment under the old regime. These two causes of impoverishment were feudal rights and administrative confusion.

The feudal exactions alone would have strangled prosperity. First in the disastrous list come the rights of the chase. All this feudal rights together, wanted to devastate the land, whilst the taxes took from the farmer one-half or two-thirds of what they permitted him to earn. The most prominent example of another class of seigniorial exactions was the obligation to have one's corn ground at the lord's mill, and also the gabelle was a terrible scourge. Over the greater portion of France you could only get salt from government.

THE death of Louis XV in 1774 was a signal of change. During his long and apathetic rule the stream of political corruption and social injustice had been as it were frozen over.

Movement commenced in two quarters ; the King began to reform, the people to riot. To some extent the interests of the King and the poor were the same. The King's power was endangered by want of money; the money was not forthcoming because the privileged classes who owned most of the soil were unfairly favoured in taxation.

Turgot was the greatest political economist in France. He held those views on the freedom of trade. He had indeed a plan for local assemblies, but he wished them merely to have the power to make recommendations and to carry out edicts. Turgot's determination was to avoid bankruptcy, fresh taxes, and loans. He meant to save the State by reducing expenditure and reforming administration.

- 20th September 1774 he procured the issue of his famous decrees on the freedom of the corn trade. Besides abolishing restrictions on the trade in corn and some other articles, Turgot suppressed those guilds and corporations whose privileges hampered the development of industry, and took steps to free the peasantry from the corvee, a tax which was paid in labour upon the roads.

Louis withdrew his confidence from the Controller- General, and finally, dismissed the only great man he ever had for a minister.

So it happened that about this time the discontent of the peasants took the form of riots for bread and refusal to pay taxes. Crowds armed with scythes and poles invaded market towns and seizing stores of victuals forced the sale of them at a low price.

The riots increased in effectiveness and extent from the accession of Louis XVI to the Revolution itself. In 1775 the flour-mills were attacked at Dijon. The rising spread to Auxerre, Amiens, and Lille. The streets of Paris were soon swarming with peasants who pillaged the bakeries. Hanging seemed to the government the most suitable cure, but their victims quickly became martyrs. Between 1783 and 1788 nearly every part of France beheld similar insurrections. These events did at least as much as anything else to bring the King’s government face to face with the impossibility of continuing the old system of privilege.

4th May 1789, when the occupant of the most conspicuous throne on earth confessed the failure of the whole system of bureaucratic despotism under which continental Europe had lived during the three centuries which had elapsed since the faintly known Middle Ages had given place to modern civilisation.