The French Revolution, which began in 1789, is often seen as the dividing line between the early modern era and our own modern world. The system of Louis XIV broke down, and took with it to oblivion the ideological justification for monarchy and the hierarchical society of privilege that was the Old Regime. The short-lived First Republic of France had in the meantime created a new ideal of citizenship, a concept of national identity that has remained influential ever since. The Revolution was both a test run for democratic idealism and for the techniques of modern dictatorship. This lecture will look at the collapse of the royal government, and the beginning of the revolution. I believe the collapse of royal government was a simple phenomenon. Most despotic governments fall (and most governments have been, historically, despotic) when the king cannot pay the bills and his erstwhile subordinates cannot be convinced to bail him out. A division in the ruling class allows those usually excluded from power a chance to assert themselves. This, I think, is what happened in France in the 1780s. If we accept this theory, it follows that several other things did not cause the revolution. First, the revolution was not caused by an inevitable bourgeois rising against feudalism, against a parasitic landowning nobility that was hopelessly out of date. There was, before the revolution, no simple division between bourgeois and nobility in economic terms. Neither do we find any clear dividing line if we turn from wealth to economic function . The word "bourgeois" summons up a vision of an entrepreneurial, productive class, proto-industrialists and daring merchant-adventurers. Very few 18th century bourgeois fit this description. The most respectable bourgeois, and generally the more prosperous ones were members of the professions, especially lawyers, and minor office-holders These men were not the wave of the economic future. People like this had exis...
