France

THE MODERN HISTORY of France and its liberal heritage could be said to begin with the revolution in May 1789. For the first time in French history, the middle class and the common people began to mount an effective challenge toward the king, nobility, and clergy who had dominated their lives. In France, the first estate was the nobility, the second the clergy, and the third estate what Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto(1848) [Page 169]called the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the working class. Because of the way that the first and second estates, in alliance with the monarchy, controlled France, the real financial burden for the country rested upon those who could often afford it the least: members of the third estate. Vladimir I. Lenin, who founded Russian communism, quoted Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator in writing the Manifesto, “society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.” This, in fact, would be the condition of France for much of its modern history.

King Louis XVI summoned the three estates to meet collegially as the Estates-General to help solve the growing French financial crisis. But the same “irrecon-cilable antagonisms” that had plunged the last meeting of the Estates-General into disarray in 1614 happened again. However, this time the third estate did not retreat meekly back into its shops and factories. It demanded a say in its own governing, something that successive kings had systematically denied it.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in The Old Regime and the French Revolution how any efforts at representative government were stifled even at the municipal level. Tocqueville observed that before 1789, “it was but an empty show of freedom; these assemblies had no real power.” Rural society at large, commented Pierre Goubert, remained a society where “the struggle for daily bread remained the over-riding consideration.”

Refusing to bow to pressure, the third estate met in defiance of royal authority on June 20, 1789, to declare in the Oath of the Tennis Court that it would not disband until representative government was granted to France. This was a direct challenge to not only the king, but to his supporters in the second and first estates.

However, as with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the upper class still only sought its own advancement. Those at the lower levels of society were expected to remain content with their lot in life. Yet, as Marx and Engels noted, by raising itself up against the opposition of the feudal nobility, the bourgeoisie had also raised up its most obdurate opponents. Wrote Marx and Engels, the bourgeois had not only “forged the weapons that bring death to it self … it also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons, the modern working class or proletariat.”

On July 11, the third estate (soon known as the Constituent, or later the National Assembly) had become the main legislative power in the country. On that day it passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but still the document reflected the political needs of the bourgeois, not the very real material concerns of the working class.

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