And in all these reforms the middle-class legislators avoided too much centralisation. The election of judges was left to the people. The army was reorganised so were the courts of justice. Lastly, they took away from the Church her rich possessions, and they made the members of the clergy simple functionaries of the State. And by the departmental law of December 1789, they did something which helped on the Revolution enormously: they abolished every representative of the central authority in the provinces. They avoided also the formation of an Upper Chamber, which would have been a stronghold for the aristocracy.
They abolished all the titles of the nobility and the countless privileges which then existed, and they laid the foundations of a more equal basis for taxation. They destroyed for ever the political distinctions between the various "orders"-clergy, nobility, Third Estate, which for that time was a very great thing we have only to remember how slowly this is being done in Germany and Russia. They worked out a local self-government which was capable of checking the governmental centralisation, and they modified the laws of inheritance so as to democratise property and to divide it up among a greater number of persons.
#Peasants for plutocracy how to
They knew how to undermine the power of the nobility and how to express the rights of the citizen in a middle-class Constitution. And when the legislators in both these Assemblies undertook to express, in the form of laws, the new Constitution of the Third Estate, it must be confessed that they went to work with a certain energy and sagacity. Of course it must be recognised that while the Constituent Assembly, and after it the Legislative, opposed the revolutionary abolition of the feudal rights and popular revolution altogether, they nevertheless accomplished an immense work for the destruction of the powers of the King and the Court, and for the creation of the political power of the middle classes. And it was in utter despair that the revolutionist "leaders of opinion" decided at last, in June 1792, once more to appeal to popular insurrection. The beam of the balance wavered between the two. People were asking if it was the Revolution which was going to get the upper hand or the counter-revolution. The reality was that for two years, from the summer of 1790 to the summer of 1792, the whole work of the Revolution was suspended. And soon they felt themselves so well supported and so powerful that they began to see whether it would not be possible to crush the Revolution, and to re-establish the Court and the nobility in their rights.Īll the historians undoubtedly mention this reaction but they do not show all its depth and all its extent. As soon as the first panic, produced by the unexpected breaking-out of the people, had passed, the Court, nobles, the rich men and the clergy promptly joined together for the reorganisation of the forces of reaction.
They were such that if the peasant insurrections had not gone on, in spite of all, the peasants, freed in their persons, would have remained economically under the yoke of the feudal system-as happened in Russia where feudalism was abolished, in 1861, by law, and not by a revolution.īesides, all the political work of the Revolution not only remained unfinished in 1790, but it actually suffered a complete set-back. WE have seen what the economic conditions in the villages were during the year 1790.
(Original work published 1909) Chapter XXVIII ARREST OF THE REVOLUTION IN 1790 Insurrections necessary-Extent of reaction-Work of Constituent and Legislative Assemblies-New Constitution-Local government opposed to centralisation-Difficulties in applying new laws- Directoires on side of reaction-"Disorder wanted"-Active and passive citizens-The gains of insurrection-Equality and agrarian law-Disappearance of manorial courts-Workers' demands answered by bullets-Middle classes' love of order and prosperity- "Intellectuals" turn against people-Success of counter-revolution-Plutocracy-Opposition to republican form of government-Danton and Marat persecuted and exiled-Discontent and dishonesty in army-Massacres at Nancy-Bouillé's "splendid behaviour" Dryhurst, Trans.) New York: Vanguard Printings.
The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793 (N. Chapter XXVIII: ARREST OF THE REVOLUTION IN 1790 Kropotkin, P.