The Truth on the French Revolution (1789)

Theory: The French Revolution is a revolution made by the French people against a totalitarian and tyrannical royal power; its effect is the advent of democracy and the defense of the people's rights. 

Reality : The French Revolution is a revolution made by a minority of urban bourgeois against the French people andagainst an extremely weak royal power, which left a very great freedom to the regional provinces of the country; the direct effect of the Revolution is the advent of a totalitarian and uprooted regime that unifies the country through a genocidal centralization that has the effect of destroying the rights of the people and enslaving them to an interested wage-labour.

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Most Europeans have a false vision of the French Revolution. 

They have a Hollywood vision of the revolution: 

> In 1776 the Americans rebelled against the evil English imperialists in the name of freedom and the Enlightenment. 

> In 1789 the French rebel against the evil King Louis XVI, a king out of touch with the reality of the people, a bloodthirsty tyrant who has the crowd shot, and who will end up beheaded by the people.

In truth, the French Revolution is quite different from the American Revolution.

Let us look at the premises of the usual vision of the French Revolution. 

1) All the French people rebel against the king

2) The king was tyrannical, he was a monarch by divine right.

3) After the king was beheaded, France entered into Progress, Democracy and Liberalism, for the happiness of the People.

Let us debunk these elements 1 to 1. 

1) All the French people rebel against the king

This is not true. The vast majority of the country was opposed to the revolution. 

Compare with the present situation: the Hungarian elites in Budapest are against Orban; the urbanites in Moscow are against Putin . But the rural population and the bulk of the country support their leader. 

It was the same in France. The vast majority of the country supported the king. 

The revolutionaries were people from the cities: Paris and Lyon mainly. They were the bourgeois of the time. They represented a tiny minority of the country.

The French countryside, 99% of the country, was in favor of the status quo. They loved the king. And just wanted some economic reforms. 

This majority of France was nevertheless "cleaned up".

Like the Kulaks in Russia, the peasantry is being decimated by the revolutionary elites of the cities. 

See in this regard the violent events in the Vendée: the Catholic peasantry refused to serve as cannon fodder for Parisians. They refused to abandon their crops to obey the orders of the urban elite.

The poor peasants of the Vendée took up their pitchforks and formed militias to defend themselves against the armies from Paris. The peasant militias went to the priests and the local petty nobles to ask them for help: the nobles were above all career soldiers, officers. And the nobles agreed to take command of the peasants, to lead a guerrilla war that lasted almost five years, against the revolutionaries. 

Here is a fact that does not please the usual story: small peasants rebelled against the bourgeois revolutionnary elite from Paris, and these peasants chose local nobles and priests as their military leaders.

What happened then? Paris sent «columns of extermination» of the army to eradicate this rebellion and enforce "democracy". Nearly 300,000 inhabitants were exterminated by Paris army.

And the department will even be erased from the maps and renamed "Vengée" (a play on words with Vendée : which literally means avenged, sacrificed, having given a lesson, shown as an example). 

So, no, the Revolution was the work of a small urban elite, who presaged the beginning of the industrial revolution and who wanted to make a place for themselves in the business world, by abolishing the rules of the Ancien Régime, as we shall see. 

The entire french people have always supported the King.

2) The King was tyrannical, he was a monarch by divine right.

There is some truth in this statement: yes, the King of France reigned by divine right. He got his power from the coronation, which since the year 496 makes the king of France the "lieutenant of Jesus on Earth". 

So yes, political power in France was legitimized by religion. As in....... 100% of the countries of the time, on all continents. Including the United States where the Founding Fathers constructed a religious narrative of "predestination", New Eden, etc...

BUT, the "Absolute Monarchy" never existed. It is a concept invented late in history. It conveys tenacious clichés: the king makes laws as he sees fit, he celebrates, he locks up philosophers and poets! He steals the people's money to build castles...

It is true that some kings of France have spent a lot of money. François I or the Sun King for example. But they did so at a time when France's wealth was unrivalled: France was the first world power, from very very far away. 

But beyond this role of pomp and cultural influence, kings never had much power politically.

The worst of the French kings had infinitely less power than the President of Portugal or Ukraine or than any minister from a western country.

Under the Old Regime there were a lot of institutions that regulated royal power: the Church, the Corporations of Trades (unions of workers and craftsmen), the Provincial Parliaments (each region had its own parliament and its own law), the local nobles. 

In truth, the king's power was extremely limited. His only real field of action was foreign policy. And this is why France was at war so much. This is the only place where the king had power! Outside the kingdom. 

We talked about Regional Parliaments. They are a crucial element in understanding what happened.

By going to war with the English, France became poorer and needed urgent economic reforms. 

In the 1780s, the King of France rightly wanted to launch a major reform to liberalize a bit the country and revive the economy. 

But the king had so little power that he could not enforce the law over the country. 

Each regional parliament (about 60 in all) refused or modified the royal law.

As if California and Texas each applied their own version of U.S. law, without taking into account the orders of Washington, the President, the Supreme Court. 

As a result, each Province had a different law. And no one was forced to apply royal laws. 

So much so that all the king's attempts to reform the country were in vain: with each attempt (about ten in all), the bourgeois in the Parliaments refused to follow the law, in an attempt to destabilise the monarchy.

And the country found itself even more in crisis than ever. 

To resolve this, Louis XVI had an idea. He convoked the Estates General. 

It's a kind of Super Parliament! with representatives from all over France, from all walks of life. The aim is to hold a kind of referendum directly with the people, to override the opinion of the Provincial Parliaments. And to have a single national law for the whole country, voted by the people directly. 

But it is a failure. No solution has been found. And the Revolution breaks out.

> The Revolution did not break out because the King was tyrannical and had too much power. But precisely because he had none. He was incapable of reforming the country because each Province of France was almost autonomous and obeyed its rules. Thus following the french tradition of quasi total decentralisation / devolution.

The King was extremely weak in France. Politically and legally. He had as much power over France as the present Queen of England has over Australia: almost none except symbolic power, and influence in foreign policy.

Three anecdotes and interesting points. It is often believed that under the Monarchy the people were crushed by taxes, that they could not vote, that the king was in his Ivory Tower. 

The reality is quite different:

A) in 1780 it is estimated that the annual tax paid by a French peasant was equivalent to 18 days of work. 

In 2014, the annual tax by french workers corresponds to more than 208 days of work.

B) In 2020, a Frenchman votes on average once every two years, in elections that do not make a difference since the vote is diluted at the national level, without having any influence. 

In 1740, a French peasant voted several dozen times a week, on concrete subjects: allocation of village resources, construction of a road, a bridge, choice of a date for a celebration, conscription, taxes. And several times a month he was asked to give his opinion on more serious subjects, during plebiscites (referendums) or during sessions of grievances. 

C) The king was not in an Ivory Tower. On the contrary, any man of the kingdom, whatever his condition, could go to meet the king at Vincennes, in person, to express his concern. It was also possible to ask the king and his advisers to render justice in a specific case: the king, sitting under an oak tree, would then listen to complaints and find a fair solution. Any citizen of the kingdom could demand this. 

The king spent much of his time in rural areas so that peasants could come to him for help.

The only condition for going to see the king was to "wear clean clothes". For this reason, the kind advisors were assigned to give free clean clothes to the peasants so that they could all come to the king. 

This link between the people and the king went very far: at Versailles, the king was in "spectacle" all day long. The people were free to wander around the castle, to come and see the king get up, go to bed, sit in council, wash up, and dine with his family. 

This proximity was simply explained: the king being God's envoy on earth, he must serve as a model for his people, his kingdom is a vessel that must allow him to save the souls of his people, he must therefore set an example and be accessible to all. 

Finally, a last anecdote: before beginning to reign, each king of France had to be a "graduate" master craftsman in a field. Any field. This implied that the young king would spend entire years in a workshop and in contact with the workers, to learn the trade. In general, it takes about 10 years of work before producing his ultimate creation, the "masterpiece" that allows one to become a master craftsman. Some kings were thus shoemakers, other glaziers, other blacksmiths, cooks, bakers. Louis XVI was a genius locksmith. The apprenticeship of this manual trade was intended to transmit to the kings a practical trade, a know-how, and an understanding of the world of arts and work.

3) After the king was beheaded, France entered into Progress, Democracy and Liberalism, for the happiness of the People.

Naively, many people who do not know French history therefore think that the Revolution freed France from dictatorship. And that after the Revolution, France entered an era of progress, democracy, peace for the people. 

In reality it is quite the opposite. 

> Democracy: France will have no real democracy after the Revolution, on the contrary, it is an oligarchic regime where the bourgeoisie holds the country that is being established and that will last until.... 1940 and the German invasion that trigger the Vichy Regime, and then the IVth Republic and then eventually the Vth one in 1958, the only one that can be called a democracy. It took 150 years.

> End of tyranny: in truth, the bourgeoisie in 1789 knew very well that if the situation was so serious, it was only because the King did not have the power to rule. They know it. And their first reflex once in power, will be to totally reform the country in order to centralize it completely and avoid any counter revolt from the people. The King wanted to keep the federal form of the state, with provincial parliaments, local rules, customs, languages, different cultures. But the first reflex of the revolutionaries in Paris was to destroy the Local Parliaments that could counterbalance their power, and to centralize EVERYTHING in Paris. A single law. A single culture. Everything comes from Paris. And everything imposes itself everywhere. Without limit. All local cultures are attacked, Parliaments and village councils are destroyed, local voting is forbidden. 

Everything is decided in Paris, by a college of about ten people, unelected. France, once divided into historical provinces (Aquitaine, Brittany, Alsace, Corsica, Savoy...) is redivided into squares of the same size, with numbers instead of names.

> Progress for the people: the first three laws of the Revolutionaries supposed to serve the people are not the ones we believe. The first three decisions are the following:

- prohibition of the strike (Loi d'Allarde)

- Dissolution of trade guilds that protected workers (unions) (Loi Le Chapelier)

- Putting for sale all the goods that belonged to the nobility or the church, at derisory prices..... A few gold francs for dozens of castles and hectares of land. It's as if Central Parc or Sunset Boulevard were for sale for 10€. Literally the whole country is privatized, all the land is bought back by bourgeois from the cities, the peasants are forced to work, without being able to strike, and without being able to regroup in corporations to protect their interests. (Bien Nationaux)

In a few days, we go from a quasi-socialist country to an ultra-liberal country. We go from Royal France, protecting workers, to the Liberal Republic.

Like the USSR in 1991. This is necessarily done in blood and for the benefit of a small minority of urbanites who get rich without counting the cost. 

Conclusion : 

The French Revolution was an extremely violent phase in French history. And above all a phase filled with lies.

The French Revolution did not take place against a tyrannical and absolutist king, against a centralist and dictatorial regime. 

The French Revolution did not take place by the people and for the people. 

The French Revolution can be summed up very simply: it is the replacement of one elite by another. The revolution hides only that. 

The military and religious elite (the nobility) had a traditional vision of France: peasantry, religion, corporations protecting the workers, Provincial Parliaments that certainly blocked the reforms but were also a useful counter-power, defense of the culture of each region....

But at the dawn of the industrial revolution and the economic boom, this elite was replaced by another one: urban, acquired to liberal ideas, atheist, eager to destroy social barriers in order to expand the market.

That's all there is to it. On the one hand a king eager to preserve the traditional plural France. And therefore incapable of reforming it. 

On the other, a nascent economic elite eager to wipe out the past, to attain political power in order to liberate the economy, to expand the market, while imposing dictatorial uniformity. 

Anyone who knows the history of liberalism KNOWS that liberalism always needs an iron fist to impose itself.

Yesterday Pinochet, Friedman, Reagan, Tchatcher, Yeltsin.

In 1789 it was called the French Revolution, the Terror, the Vendée, several millions dead.

So this is what the revolution hides. 

It is not the fall of a tyrant to defend the people. 

It is the enslavement of the French people, the sale of the country to industrialists and the beginning of the destruction of the cultural and religious base of traditional France, in the name of Parisian centralization. 

The "Republic" of Paris knows that it is uprooted and illegitimate. That it is anti-French. That it holds only by the power of money. 

And that is why it needs to control everything, to standardize everything. To destroy everything that is French. 

The French Revolution is only French in name. 

The Revolution did not save the people. 

The Revolution did not destroy the elite. 

The Revolution is the first regime to change. 

The Revolution is the first colored revolution. 

The Revolution is the replacement of one elite by another. 

The Revolution is the replacement of a military, religious, racial, rooted, local elite (based on the criterion of ancestral tradition), by an urban, liberal, atheist elite, selected on purely economic criteria.

France did not decapitate a king. 

It decapitated itself.