CCWH29 FrenchRevolution KHAN

John: Hi, my name is John Green.

This is Crash Course World History

and today we're going to talk
about the French Revolution.

Admittedly, this wasn't
the French flag until 1794,

but we just felt like he
looked good on stripes.

As does this guy, huh?

So, while the American Revolution
is considered a pretty good thing,

the French Revolution is often
seen as a bloody, anarchich mess-

Mr. Green, Mr. Green!

I bet, like always, it's way
more complicated than that?

Actually no, it was pretty terrible.

Also, like a lot of revolutions,

in the end it exchanged
an authoritarian regime

for an authoritarian regime.

Even if the revolution was a mess,

its ideas changed human history farm more,

I will argue, than American Revolution.

(lively music)

Right, so France in the 18th century
was a rich and populous country

but it had a systemic
problem collecting taxes

because of the way its
society was structured.

They had a system with kings and
nobles we now call the Ancien RĂŠgime.

Thank you, 3 years of high school French.

For the most French people, it sucked,

because the people with the money:

the nobles and the
clergy, never paid taxes.

By 1789, France was deeply in debt

thanks to their funding
the American Revolution.

Thank you, France.

We will get you back
in World Wars I and II.

King Louis XVI was spending
half of his national budget

to service the federal debt.

Louis tried to reform this system
under various finance ministers.

He even called for
democracy on a local level

but all attempts to fix it failed

and soon France basically
declared bankruptcy.

This nicely coincided with hailstorms
that ruined a year's harvest,

thereby raising food prices
and causing widespread hunger

which really made the people of
France angry because they love to eat.

Meanwhile, the king
certainly did not look broke

as evidenced by his well-fed
physique and fancy footwear.

He and his wife Marie Antoinette

also got to live in the very nice palace
at Versailles thanks to God's mandate,

but Enlightenment thinkers like Kant

were challenging the whole idea
of religion, writing things like:

"The main point of Enlightenment

"is of man's release from
his self-caused immaturity,

"primarily in matters of religion."

So basically, the peasants were hungry,

the intellectuals were beginning to wonder

whether God could or should save the King,

and the nobility were dithering
about eating fois gras and songbirds,

failing to make meaningful
financial reform.

In response to the crisis, Louis XVI
called a meeting of the Estates General,

the closest thing that France
had to a national parliament

which hadn't met since 1614.

The Estates General was
like a super parliament

made up of representatives
from the First Estate,

the nobles, the Second Estate, the clergy

and the Third Estate, everyone else.

The Third Estate showed up
with about 600 representatives,

the First and Second
Estates both had about 300

and after several votes
everything was deadlocked

and then the Third Estate was like,

"You know what?

"Forget you guys.

"We're gonna leave and we're gonna
become our own National Assembly."

This did not please King Louis XVI.

When the new National Assembly
left the room for a break,

he locked the doors and he was like,

"Sorry, guys, you can't go in there.

"And if you can't assemble, how
you gonna be a National Assembly?"

Shockingly, the Third
Estate representatives

were able to find a different room in
France this time an indoor tennis court

where they swore the
famous Tennis Court Oath

and they agreed not to give up until
a French constitution was established.

Then Louis XVI responded
by sending troops to Paris

primarily to quell uprisings
over food shortages

but the revolutionaries
saw this as a provocation.

They responded by seizing the
Bastille Prison on July 14th

which coincidentally,
is also Bastille Day.

The Bastille was stormed
ostensibly to free prisoners

although there were only
7 in jail at the time,

but mostly to get guns.

The really radical move in the
National Assembly came on August 4th

when they abollished most
of the Ancien RĂŠgime.

feudal rights, tithes, privileges
for nobles, unequal taxation,

they were all abolished in the
name of writing a new constitution.

Then, on August 26th,
the National Assembly

proclaimed the Declaration
of Rights of Man and Citizen

which laid out a system of rights
that applied to every person

and made those rights integral
to the new constitution.

That's quite different from
the American bill of rights,

which was like, begrudgingly
tacked on at the end

and only applied to non-slaves.

The DOROMAC, as I called
it in high school,

declared that everyone had the right
to liberty, property and security.

Rights that the French Revolution

would do an exceptionally
poor job of protecting

but as noted last week,
the same could be argued

for many other supposedly
more successful revolutions.

Okay, let's go to the Thought Bubble.

Meanwhile, back at Versailles,
Louis XVI was still king of France

and it was looking like France
might be a constitutional monarchy

which might have meant
that the royal family

could hang on to their awesome house

but then in October of
1789, a rumor started

that Marie Antoinette was hoarding
grain somewhere inside the palace.

And in what became known
as the Women's March,

a bunch of armed peasant
women stormed the palace

and demanded that Louis and Marie
Antoinete move from Versailles to Paris.

Which they did because everyone
is afraid of armed peasant women.

And this is a nice reminder
that to many people at the time,

the French Revolution was not primarily
about fancy enlightenment ideas,

it was mostly about lack of
food and a political system

that made economic contractions
hardest on the poor.

Now, a good argument can be made

that this first phase of the revolution
wasn't all that revolutionary.

The National Assembly wanted to
create a constitutional monarchy.

They believed that the king was
necessary for a functioning state

and they were mainly
concerned that the voters

and office holders be men of property.

Only the most radical wing, the Jacobins,
called for the creation of a republic.

But things were about to
get much more revolutionary

and also worse for France.

First, the Jacobins had a huge
petition drive that got a bit unruly

which led troops controlled not by
the King but by the National Assembly

to fire on the crowd killing 50 people.

That meant that the National Assembly

which had been the revolutionary
voice of the people,

had killed people in an attempt
to reign in revolutionary fervor.

You see this a lot throughout
history during revolutions.

What looked like radical hope and change

suddenly becomes "The Man" as
increasingly radical ideas are embraced.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

Meanwhile, France's monarchical neighbors

were getting a little nervous
about all these republic business

especially Leopold II, who in addition
to being the not holy, not Roman

and not imperial Holy Roman Emperor,

was Marie Antoinette's brother.

I should note by the
way, that at this point,

the Holy Roman Empire was
basically just Austria.

Also, like a lot of monarchs,

Leopold II liked the idea of monarchies
and he wanted to keep his job

as a person who gets to
stand around wearing a dress

pointing at nothing, owning winged
lion monkeys made out of gold.

Who can blame him?

He and King William
Frederick II of Prussia

together issued the
Declaration of Pillnitz

which promised to restore
the French monarchy.

At this point, Louis and the
National Assembly developed a plan:

Let's invade Austria.

The idea was to plunder Austria's wealth

and maybe steal some Austrian grain
to shore up French food supplies

and also, you know,
spread revolutionary zeal.

What actually happened is that Prussia
joined Austria in fighting the French.

Then Louis encouraged the Prussians

which made him look like
an enemy of the revolution

which of course, he was.

As a result, the Assembly
voted to suspend the monarchy,

have new elections in
which everyone could vote

as long as they were men,

and create a new republican constitution.

Soon, this convention decided
to have a trial for Louis XVI

who was found guilty and by one vote,

sentenced to die via guillotine.

Which made it difficult for Austria and
Prussia to restore him to the throne.

It's time for the open letter?

(wheels rolling)

An open letter to the guillotine.

But first, let's see what's in
the secret compartment today.

There's nothing.

Oh my gosh, Stan!

That's not funny!

Dear Guillotine,

I can think of no better example
of enlightenment thinking run amok.

Dr. Joseph Guillotine, the
inventor of the guillotine

envisioned it as an
egalitarian way of dying.

They said the guillotine was humane

and it also made no distinction
between rich or poor, noble or peasant.

It killed equally.

You were also celebrated for taking
the torture out of execution.

But I will remind you, you did not
take the dying out of execution.

Unfortunately for you, France
hasn't executed anyone since 1977.

But you will be happy to know

that the last legal execution
in France was via guillotine.

Plus, you always got a
future in horror movies.

Best wishes, John Green.

The death of Louis XVI marks
the beginning of The Terror.

The best known or at least the most
sensational phase of revolution.

I mean, if you can kill the king,

you can kill pretty much anyone
which is what the government did

under the leadership of the
Committee of Public Safety.

Motto, we suck at protecting public
safety, led by Maximilien Robespierre.

The terror saw the guillotining of
16,000 enemies of the revolution

including Marie "I never actually
said let them eat the cake" Antoinette

and Maximilien Robespierre himself,

who was guillotined in the month
of Thermidor in the year 2.

Right, while France was
broke and fighting 9 wars,

the Committee of Public Safety
changed the measurements of time

because the traditional measurements
are so irrational and religion-y.

They renamed all the months and decided
that each day would have 10 hours

and each hour 100 minutes.

Then after The Terror, the
revolution pulled back a bit

and another new constitution
was put into place

this one giving a lot more
power to wealthy people.

At this point, France was still
at war with Austria and Britain

wars that France ended up winning

largely thanks to a little
corporal named Napoleon Bonaparte.

The war was backdrop to a bunch
of coups and counter coups

that I won't get into right now
because they were very complicated

but the last coup that
we'll talk about in 1799,

established Napoleon Bonaparte
as the First Consul of France.

It granted him almost unlimited executive
power under yet another constitution.

When he was declared First Consul
of France, Napoleon proclaimed,

"Citizens, the revolution is established
on the principles with which it began.

'It is over."

By which he presumably meant
that France's government

had gone all the way from
here to here to here.

As with the American revolution,

it's easy to conclude that France's
revolution wasn't all that revolutionary.

I mean, Napoleon was basically an emperor

and in some ways, he was even
more of an absolute monarch

than Louis XVI had been.

Gradually, the nobles came back to France

although they had mostly lost
their special privileges.

The Catholic Church returned too

although much weaker
because it had lost land

and the ability to collect tithes.

When Napoleon himself fell,
France restored the monarchy

and except for a 4-year
period between 1815 and 1870,

France had a king who was
either a Bourbon or a Bonaparte.

Now, these were no
longer absolute monarchs

who claimed that their
right to rule came from God.

They were constitutional
monarchs of the kind

that the revolutionaries of
1789 had originally envisioned.

The fact remains that
France had a king again

and a nobility and an established religion

and it was definitely not
a democracy or a republic.

Perhaps this is why the French
Revolution is so controversial

and open to interpretation.

Some argue the revolution succeeded
in spreading enlightenment ideals

even if it didn't bring
democracy to France.

Others argue that the real
legacy of the Revolution

wasn't the enhancement of
liberty but of state power.

Regardless, I'd argue that the
French Revolution was ultimately

far more revolutionary than
its American couterpart.

I mean, in some ways, America
never had an aristocrasy

but in other ways it
continued to have one.

The French enlightenment thinker, Diderot,

felt that Americans should fear
a too unequal division of wealth

resulting in a small
number of opulent citizens

and a multitude of
citizens living in misery.

The American Revolution did nothing
to change that polarization of wealth.

What made the French Revolution so radical

was its insistence upon the
universality of its ideals.

I mean, look at Article 6
of the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen:

"Law is the expression
of the general will.

"Every citizen has a right
to participate personally

"or through his representative,
in its foundation.

"It must be the same for all,
whether it protects or punishes."

Those are radical ideas that
the laws come from citizens

not from kings or gods

and that those laws should
apply to everyone equally.

That's a long way from
Hammurabi and in truth,

it's a long way from the slave
holding Thomas Jefferson.

In the 1970s, the Chinese
President Zhou Enlai was asked

what he thought the affects of the
French Revolution had been and he said,

"It's too soon to say."

And in a way, it still is.

The French Revolution asked new questions
about the nature of people's rights

and the derivation of those rights.

We're still answering those questions

and sorting through how our
answers should shape society today.

Must government be of the
people to be for the people?

Do our rights derive from the
nature or from God or from neither?

And what are those rights?

As William Faulkner said,

"The past is never dead.

"It's not even past."

Thanks for watching.

I'll see you next week.