1789 French National Assembly

Episode 8: Peasant Revolt and Abolition of Feudalism

Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon

Dr Suzanne M Desan

Film Review

Historically, the political reforms the French won in their revolution were far more radical than Americans won in the American Revolution. Following the Paris uprising on July 4, 1789, French peasants revolted between July 20th and August 16 in an insurrection known as the “Great Fear. In a few regions, peasants (mainly those who evicted them from common lands) put their feudal lords under popular arrest.

Desan identifies three main causes of this insurrection:

1) Hunger – worsened by aristocratic hoarding to increase prices.

2) An increase in organized pillaging of farms by brigands (10% of the population were vagabonds and there were rumors aristocrats were paying them to steal grain).

3) Rumors the king’s brothers were organizing foreign mercenaries to invade France and restore the king to sovereignty.

Rumors were still the main source of information in the countryside as the majority of peasants were illiterate and two-thirds of them still spoke regional dialects (such as Gascon, Occitan, Provençal, etc) rather than French.

In the National Assembly on August 4, 1789, several nobles stood up and called on their fellow aristocrats and church officials to renounce their feudal dues, hunting rights and tithes. The Assembly adopted most of these proposals, only to recant a week later and water down the reforms they had agreed to.

The reforms they ultimately approved included the abolition of

• feudal dues, for using manorial ovens, grain mills, wine presses, etc
• seigniorial court
• dovecotes (housing the lords pigeons and/or doves)
• all unpaid peasant labor

At the same time they set up a committee to

• explore the abolition of all aristocratic titles and to establish a government bureaucracy based merely on merit and equality (abolishing the sale of bureaucratic offices and a merit based system to allow any (male) person to enter the ranks of the church and army.
• guarantee complete religious freedom in all the professions
• explore the complete abolition of the nobility.

They rejected proposals (by a right wing group called the monarchiens) to create an upper chamber in France comparable to the British House of Lords and to give the king an absolute veto of any legislation they passed.

Meanwhile the wives of artisans donated their jewels and merchants their silver shoe buckles to the National Assembly to pay off the national debt. In the countryside, peasants tore open their lords’ dovecoats* and shot the pigeons and doves that were damaging their crops.

By 1793 the National Assembly had effectively abolished feudal dues and peasants now paid rent  or bought small parcels of land they owned outright.

*A small, decorative shelter for pigeons or doves, often built on top of a house.

**Church tithes were eliminated in 1791, when the French government began paying the salaries of priests.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/149323/149339