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  • Hi, my name is John Green;

  • this is Crash Course World History

  • and today were going to talk about The French Revolution.

  • Admittedly, this wasn’t the French flag until 1794,

  • but we just felt like he looked good in stripes. [vertical = slimming]

  • 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, anarchic messwhich

  • 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.

  • But even if the revolution was a mess,

  • its ideas changed human historyfar more, I will argue,

  • than the American Revolution.

  • [Intro music]

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  • 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 regime.

  • Thank you,

  • three years of high school French. [and Meredith the Interness]

  • And for most French people,

  • it sucked, [historical term]

  • because the people with the money

  • the nobles and the clergy

  • never paid taxes.

  • So by 1789,

  • France was deeply in debt thanks to their funding the American Revolution

  • thank you, France, [also for Goddard and The Coneheads]

  • we will get you back in World Wars I and II.

  • And 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,

  • [ah, hail]

  • 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.”

  • [while smacking folks in face w/ glove]

  • 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,

  • [I'd rather eat cake, personally]

  • 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. [expletive deleted]

  • Were gonna leave and were gonna become our own National Assembly.”

  • This did not please King Louis XVI.

  • [everything can't be an eclair, Lou]

  • So 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?"

  • […and with that, mischief managed!]

  • Shockingly,

  • the Third Estate representatives were able to find

  • a different room in France, [D'oh!]

  • this time an indoor tennis court where

  • they swore the famous Tennis Court Oath. [Like McEnroe? You can't be serious..]

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

  • So then Louis XVI responded by sending troops to Paris

  • primarily to quell uprisings over food shortages,

  • but the revolutionaries saw this as a provocation,

  • so 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 seven in jail at the time

  • but mostly to get guns.

  • But the really radical move in the National Assembly came on August 4,

  • when they abolished most of the ancien regime.

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

  • they were all abolished --

  • in the name of writing a new constitution.

  • And 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 can 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've 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 Antoinette

  • move from Versailles to Paris.

  • Which they did,

  • because everyone is afraid of armed peasant women.

  • ["hell hath no rath" and all]

  • 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.

  • And 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 this

  • 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.

  • [must've been a real partier, that one]

  • And who can blame him?

  • So he and King William Frederick II of Prussia together issued the Declaration of Pilnitz,

  • which promised to restore the French monarchy.

  • At this point,

  • Louis and the National Assembly developed a plan:

  • Let’s invade Austria.

  • [always a solid plan?]

  • 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.

  • But what actually happened is that Prussia joined Austria in fighting the French.

  • And then Louis encouraged the Prussians,

  • which made him look like an enemy of the revolution,

  • which, of course, he was.

  • And 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.

  • Oh, it’s time for the open letter?

  • [musical chairs undefeated champ rolls]

  • An Open Letter to the Guillotine.

  • But first,

  • let’s see what’s in the secret compartment today.

  • Oh, there’s nothing.

  • Oh my gosh, Stan!

  • Jeez. That’s not funny! [That's what Anne Boleyn said…]

  • 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.

  • [or have a self-cleaning function]

  • Unfortunately for you,

  • France hasn’t executed anyone since 1977.

  • But youll be happy to know that the last legal execution in France was via guillotine.

  • Plus, youve 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 the 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 cakeAntoinette

  • and Maximilien Robespierre himself,

  • who was guillotined in the month of Thermidor in the year Two.

  • Oh, right.

  • So while France was broke and fighting in like nine wars,

  • the Committee of Public Safety changed the measurements of time

  • because, you know,

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

  • So they renamed all the months

  • and decided that every day would have 10 hours and each hour 100 minutes.

  • And 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 [lol] 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 well talk about, in 1799, established Napoleon Bonaparte as

  • the First Consul of France.

  • And it granted him almost unlimited executive power

  • under yet another constitution.

  • 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.

  • And when Napoleon himself fell,

  • France restored the monarchy,

  • and except for a four-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.

  • But 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.

  • And 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 counterpart.

  • I mean, in some ways,

  • America never had an aristocracy,

  • 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.”

  • And the American Revolution did nothing to change

  • that polarization of wealth.

  • What made the French Revolution so radical was

  • its insistence on 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 slaveholding Thomas Jefferson.

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

  • what 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.

  • And were 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 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.

  • Crash Course is

  • produced and directed by Stan Muller,

  • our script supervisor is Danica Johnson,

  • the show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and myself,

  • our graphics team is Thought Bubble, [If you <3 our graphics, Blame Canada!]

  • and we are ably interned by Meredith Danko. [dba: The Interness or MTVCS]

  • Last week’s phrase of the week was

  • "Giant Tea Bag" [seriously, it totally was]

  • If you want to suggest future phrases of the week,

  • or guess at this week's you can do so in comments,

  • where you can also ask questions about today’s video

  • that will be answered by our team of historians.

  • Thanks for watching Crash Course,

  • and as we say in my hometown,

  • don’t forget, Metal Ball, I Can Hear You.

  • [slides out like an ace photobomber]

  • [music outro]

  • [music outro]

Hi, my name is John Green;

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