Vivek Chibber

Bastille Day is the commemoration of the storming of the Bastille, which happened in Paris in July 1789, when the Parisian masses gathered and attacked what was, at that time, a very well-known prison and fortress. The Bastille was a kind of an emblem of the French monarchy and its despotic power.

Why did they attack it? Because they were rising up to defend a revolutionary process that was unfolding in Versailles, about fifteen miles away. And in the course of defending it, they stormed the Bastille.

So there are two questions for us: What was happening in Versailles at the time? And why did the Parisian masses feel that they had to defend it?

Vivek Chibber

At that moment, Versailles was holding a meeting of what’s called the Estates General. And this was essentially a gigantic meeting of the French elite called together by Louis XVI.

This meeting was deemed essential because over the preceding few years, the French state had found itself in a fiscal crisis. What that means is it had built up mountains and mountains of debt, and it was no longer able to pay that debt back. And this was a problem because, obviously, if you can’t pay back your debt, the state is going to go into insolvency. And in particular it meant that Louis XVI could no longer carry on his wars, which were deemed essential if France was going to be a great power.

So the French state was in a huge crisis. Why was it in crisis? Because for the preceding seventy years or so, it had been in an unceasing string of wars, primarily with England.

And while France was a larger country with a bigger population, England had the more dynamic economy because England had, in fact, a fully capitalist economy by the early eighteenth century. France did not. The result: the French economic base was much less productive, very slow-growing. There was growth, but not the level of growth that would have successfully funded decade after decade of wars with England. And France lost every war over the eighteenth century with England.

So this warfare created debt, because the only way the French state could keep up with fighting England was by taking on more and more loans. How could they pay back those loans?

They could do it by raising taxes. But the problem with raising taxes was twofold. One problem is that the people they needed to tax now were largely people with a great deal of power, which was the French nobility and large landlords. And many other French people felt that they were already paying too many taxes. And that’s not actually false. The French population was actually quite highly taxed.

What Louis XVI had to do was acquire the assent of the taxpaying population in France so that he could legitimately ask them for more money.

What the French nobility said was, “If you want this, you’re going to have to convene something like a national assembly or a constitutional body where we can come together and debate what we get in return for agreeing to allow you to tax us some more.”

Vivek Chibber

Quite literally, no taxation without representation. Now, of course, their conception of representation is what’s key here.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. The French masses are kept out of this. So Louis XVI and Jacques Necker, his finance minister, put out a call in 1788 for a convocation of what’s called the Estates General, which was a body that was formed in the early seventeenth century but literally had never met. It was something like a national assembly of French elites, and this was the first meeting of the Estates General in 175 years.

In preparation for that, they did something quite dramatic, which was that they asked localities all over France to convene in meetings and put together a list of grievances. And that list of grievances then was supposedly what was going to be announced and debated in this meeting of the Estates General.

Vivek Chibber

It was anybody who was entered in the tax rolls. That leaves out a big chunk of the population, but it went very far down into the French body politic. So in cities it wasn’t just nobles, mayors, and aristocrats but also lawyers, artisans, people who owned any small property. And in the villages, you even had the peasantry coming in and participating, even though ostensibly they had no place in this.

You essentially get a national political discourse and debate that is unfolding over the course of months and months. And the people who are then elected by the localities to represent them and go to the Estates General, they’re all elites, but first of all, they’re coming with the list of grievances. And secondly, everybody’s watching to see what happens in Versailles when the Estates General meet.

Now the Estates General came together as a collection of the three orders: the clergy, nobles, and what is called the Third Estate. The Third Estate was mostly professionals, urban notables, lawyers, merchants, industrialists, even the peasantry — anybody who’s not clergy and not a noble.

In their meeting, all the three orders had demands that they wanted to press onto the king in exchange for a new social contract, which included more taxes. Now, in this debate, as it’s occurring, there’s a confrontation between the monarchy and these guys, because the monarchy does not want to give the reforms that the Estates General are demanding.

Vivek Chibber

They converged on a very narrow set of demands, which was enough to piss Louis XVI off. And that essentially was, “We want a constitutional monarchy.” And in that, there are a couple of things, which are, “We want equality before the law,” and “We want to have some kind of broader avenues for upward mobility inside the state.”

Vivek Chibber

At the time, there was an absolutist state, which basically means, in theory, that the king calls the shots. The king was the state. This is a technical definition. In reality, there was lots of negotiation that had to go on, but nothing was written in law about that negotiation. And that’s what they wanted to have for themselves.

While there’s a thin patina of agreement around some version of a constitutional monarchy, beyond that, the Third Estate and the nobility really don’t agree, because they want different things.

What the nobility wants is to preserve its local rights and privileges against the monarchy. What the Third Estate wants is to do away with some of those privileges, because part of those privileges is the monopoly over state office and over public power.

So these people coming — the lawyers, the merchants, the industrialists — who were part of the Third Estate are saying, “Look, the state’s been expanding for the last hundred years. There are more and more offices being created, but all of them are going to the very wealthy and to the nobles. And while we work our butts off, we’re not really given many avenues to advance.” So it’s essentially a glass ceiling. And what they want are more openings for careers based on merit rather than careers based on status and rank.

Vivek Chibber

So this was a conflict that was brewing. But before this conflict within the Estates General can actually explode, what happens is Louis XVI says, “I’ve had just about enough.” And he starts closing the doors, quite literally, on the functioning and institutionalization of the Estates General.

On June 20, when the members showed up to convene in the morning, they found that the doors to the assembly were locked. And upon this, the Third Estate and some part of the nobles gathered in an indoor tennis court in Versailles. And they declared that they would now be a National Assembly, and they constituted the authentic representatives of the French nation.

Very quickly, Louis XVI agreed. He said, “Fine, you are the representatives of the French nation.” And he seemed to gesture toward the institutionalization of a constitutional monarchy. The model for all this was England, because England had a king, but Parliament really had all the power. This is what the French elite were trying to go for.

So look what’s happening: this was a negotiation for a redistribution of power somewhat downward from the king into a newly emerging political elite, right? No mention of the masses, no mention of democracy, no mention of popular suffrage, nothing. That’s what the fight and the debate was over.

But while Louis XVI appeared to give in, something else happened. Fifteen miles away in Paris, people noticed that there was a mass of mercenaries and royal militia gathering outside the city. And all the indications are that Louis was moving to militarily oust the self-proclaimed National Assembly and take over the cities of Paris and Versailles. Another indication is that he fired his finance minister, Jacques Necker, who was very popular because he’s the one who called for the Estates General.

So two things were happening. These militia — many of whom were foreign, German-speaking — were gathering. And Louis XVI fired the guy who’s actually responsible for expanding the role of the Third Estate in the Estates General. So all the indications were that he was looking to roll back whatever small gains were made. The Parisian masses, therefore, saw this as an attack upon the National Assembly and themselves.

Now, this is where it’s important to remember that, in the lead-up to the Estates General, the entire French nation had been involved in airing their grievances. So in the villages and in the big cities, the masses of French people looked at the Estates General, and later the National Assembly, as an institution where they would finally get a voice for themselves. So they saw a personal stake in it. And here comes Louis XVI apparently about to stage a military takeover.

This is the backdrop to Bastille Day. So on July 14, the Parisian masses essentially get riled up and overtake the local authorities in Paris. In the course of that, they capture around twenty thousand guns, but the guns have no powder. All the powder is stored in the Bastille. And this then is why they stormed the Bastille. They wanted to arm themselves to fight off the militia, to save Paris as a hotbed of anti-monarchical dissent and to carry forward the process of negotiation. That’s Bastille Day.

But once they did that, it completely changed the nature of the French Revolution. Up until that point, it was an elite negotiation between these two Estates, the clergy and the monarchy, around a very narrow set of demands to basically renegotiate the power constellation at the top of society. Once the masses in Paris stormed the Bastille, it turned from an elite negotiation into a mass event. And at this point, it became a revolution, because the moment they intervened, what’s being demanded completely changed.

Vivek Chibber

It’s the first step. There are no legal legislative or constitutional changes that come right on the heels of Bastille Day. What comes on the heels of Bastille Day is Louis XVI immediately drawing back. And he says, “Okay, there will be no military takeover.” He called Necker back and reinstituted him. And it was a sign from him of contrition.

But something else happened in the very final week of July. The urban revolt started in Paris, but there were municipal rebellions all over France because they heard about what happened in Paris. They also heard that Louis XVI might be trying to institute a military takeover. So there were Paris-like events in smaller towns all over the country. There’s what one would call a municipal or urban revolution.

By the end of July, that is now joined by a massive rural revolution as well. Why? Well, one thing the cities and the countryside had in common was that the winter of 1788 had had a brutal harvest, enormous crop failures. And so prices of essential goods had gone up. So there was a lot of simmering anger about the economic situation at a time when Louis XVI was spending money like it was going out of fashion. Another thing is that, just like the urban masses, the peasants also felt they had something at stake in the survival of the Estates General and the National Assembly.

So what happened by late July were two things. There were rumors flying around that the French nobility and the landlords were conspiring to clamp down on the villages and to brutalize the peasantry. The second thing was that there was this fear that whatever opening there was about their grievances was being shut down by Louis XVI. So this causes what’s called the Great Fear, where French peasants started attacking their local landlords, emptying the granaries, and freeing up the wheat and the crops they had. And that now brings the second element into the mass uprising: first the cities, now the countryside.

And the single biggest demand that’s coming out of the countryside is what’s called the abolition of feudalism.

Now what was the “feudalism” at the time? What they called feudalism was the naked power of landlords in the villages over the persons of the peasantry. They not only took rent from the peasants, which was very high, but they also had all kinds of arbitrary powers over them for free labor, for exactions, that is monetary payments over and above the rent, the tax that the monarchy took on top of all these things. Peasants felt like they were hanging on by a thread.

Vivek Chibber

No, by this time serfdom was gone, but you had all kinds of other exactions. What the peasants wanted was their rights to the land recognized, and the landlords’ powers over them to be dissolved. That was called the abolition of feudalism.

This now became the first truly mass demand in the French Revolution. And as the rural uprisings unfolded at the end of July and in early August, and specifically on August 4, in the legislature, under duress and under the pressures of the movement, the National Assembly finally declared that all of those extra exactions, demands, and monetary payments that French peasants had to make would now be abolished, and that property rights would be installed. At this point, it was not yet actually enacted. It was simply announced.

Vivek Chibber

There was not yet coordination between the countryside and the city at this point, but they were all converging around a similar set of demands. A few days after that, on August 26, you get what’s called “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” And this was finally the French elite saying there’s going to be equality before the law, and there will be the end of arbitrary seizures and power on the part of the French state.

These two demands — the abolition of feudalism and The Declaration of the Rights of Man — put the French state firmly on the path of being a bourgeois democracy, a bourgeois republic, which now brings together the Third Estate’s demand for doing away with the sanctity of office, noble purchase of office, and status-based movement upward, with the rest of the masses demands for the dissolution of what’s called feudal power and for some degree of political equality. That is what turns this elite negotiation into an actual social revolution. And by the end of August, you actually have a social revolution.

But it doesn’t end there because, while they announced it, Louis XVI was still in power. And every time a new measure was announced to deepen the revolution, more and more members of the National Assembly defected, because they never wanted this. They didn’t want the abolition of feudalism. They didn’t want equality before the law. The nobility just wanted their power recognized by the monarchy. And they wanted the absolutist character of the state to be reformed so that the king didn’t have all the power vested in him. He had to share the power with the nobles.

The Third Estate, for its part, wanted to have equal access to state offices, but they weren’t very crazy about the abolition of feudalism because a lot of them had their wealth in land, even though they were urban officers. Nor did they want this stuff about equality before the law; only a small section of them did.

Every time a new set of demands came up in the French Revolution, the elite sections who were supporting it got smaller and smaller. And this is what unfolded over the next three years or so. And what came to be known as the Jacobins were that section of the Third Estate that stuck with the urban masses and, to a smaller but still substantial degree, the rural masses.

This means that there was an interactive process with the French masses pushing the process forward, and a chunk of the political elite dwindling over time with every wave of radicalization, taking cues from the social revolution and trying to give it a legislative, constitutional form to embed it within the state.

This really peaked in 1793 because for the first time anywhere, any time, you get the declaration of universal suffrage. For the first time, every male can vote regardless of property, regardless of wealth. That was rolled back immediately thereafter, but it is the first time we’ve ever seen it. And that only happened because the section of the French political class that was in Versailles, that was being radicalized, responded to the demands coming from below.

Those demands coming from below turned the elite pact into a social revolution and pushed more and more and more of the erstwhile reformist elite back into the arms of the monarchy.

So there are two sides by 1793. There are the Jacobins and the radicalized masses on one side and, on the other, the forces of reaction, part of whom were in the Estates General as a reformist elite but coming over to the forces of reaction, because what they were seeing unfolding on the street and in the countryside absolutely terrified them.

Vivek Chibber

The real rollback starts in 1794, in what is called Thermidor, which was the month of July in the Revolutionary calendar. And that’s the point at which universal suffrage is reversed, the property franchise is brought back, and it is decided that the land that had been taken away from the nobles would not be given back to them. But above and beyond that, peasants would have to pay their way out of feudalism. So you would say 1794 is the beginning of the end of the French Revolution.

Vivek Chibber

You should care because this revolution was one of the truly epochal breaks from a premodern political and economic era, where your birth, your rank, your status was what determined your fate; where it was understood that the poor have absolutely no right to demand inclusion in the political order; where it was understood that the king is literally connected to God and you can’t question his authority in any way. This was one of those pivotal events that not only questioned these nostrums, but blew them apart once and for all.

The American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. Just think about this: within a thirteen-year period, you have these two massive social upheavals, and both of them institutionalized an entirely new order. Whatever its flaws — and the flaws were many — the key thing is not that the flaws existed but what the achievements were in spite of those flaws.

The French Revolution is, along with the American Revolution, the opening act in enfranchising and empowering ordinary people to participate in public affairs, even though it was partial, even though its full completion took years to actually bring about. Nevertheless, most of what we today take for granted in a democratic order was raised in that revolution, momentarily institutionalized, and rolled back. But the dream that they fought for, and which they successfully institutionalized, became the dream of revolutionaries, of democrats, of anti-colonial fighters, of national liberation movements across the world for another two hundred years.

Vivek Chibber

For the longest time, this was the approved interpretation of the revolution by the French state itself. And it’s really a term that starts up in the early nineteenth century, in the 1830s and ’40s, by the historians and the politicians of the time. And it gathers steam throughout the nineteenth century.

Marxists have always referred to it as a bourgeois revolution. And then in the twentieth century, after the Russian Revolution, that generation of Marxists — Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin — all of them think of it as a bourgeois revolution. And then this was enshrined in the global left through the Third International as being the appropriate way to understand it.

And across the twentieth century, the most prestigious chairs in French history, that is to say in the discipline of history, starting with Georges Lefebvre all the way down to Albert Soboul, all of them refer to it as a bourgeois revolution.

Now the question is: What does that mean?

The literal meaning that was given to it, starting in the early nineteenth century, and especially in the twentieth century — and in particular among Marxists — was that it was a bourgeois revolution in the sense that the people coming to the National Assembly in the Third Estate were the bourgeoisie. It was the bourgeoisie who fought against the monarchy, and it was the bourgeoisie who established a new liberal order in France.

And this liberal order had two components to it. It had a democratic liberal component to it as embodied in The Declaration of the Rights of Man, and it had an economic liberalism.

Why did they fight for both of those things? Because this bourgeoisie had grown within the interstices of French feudalism in the cities, primarily as merchants, as industrialists. And they found that the absolutist state and the power of the nobility was holding them back. They couldn’t expand economically. And as part of their cosmopolitan and expansive political and cultural outlook, they wanted to fight for an equality before the law, which is the essence of what political liberalism is.

So they were fighting for both economic liberalism and political liberalism. And this revolution was their revolution, insofar as they were the protagonists who were pushing it forward. And so this is a revolutionary act through which a new mode of production and a new state form is institutionalized that replaces the decaying feudal order.

Vivek Chibber

In the interpretation as I’ve laid it out, yes, it is a capitalist revolution in two senses. It is a revolution led by the capitalist class, and it further expands and institutionalizes the capitalist order. So it’s a capitalist revolution both in terms of what causes it, what drives it forward, and in terms of the consequences.

It’s a rising bourgeoisie that is waging revolution because it sees the French state, the absolutist state, as a constraint on its further expansion. And in order to then win that revolution and bring the masses to its side, it is willing to give them liberal democracy. And that liberal democracy is part of its own worldview anyway. It’s capitalist in that sense.

The problem with this interpretation is factual. Starting in the 1950s, but really by the 1960s and ’70s, among historians of France of that period in France and in the English-speaking world, it’s found that this interpretation really can’t stand up to scrutiny.

Vivek Chibber

Every component of it. And I should say, there has been a very, very serious and vigorous debate about this among historians. And — except for a few pockets of resistance here and there — among left-wing historians, mainstream ones, and even right-wing ones, the basic facts are no longer in dispute.

And the basic facts are the following: If we go back to that interpretation in which I said capitalism both causes the revolution and also is the effect of the revolution, on both sides of it, it’s very hard to sustain the argument.

Let’s start with the causes of the revolution. Is it the case that the people leading the revolution, the people in the Third Estate, are in fact a bourgeoisie?

Semantically, there seems to be lots of evidence for this, because in France, at the time and later, you see the term “bourgeois” being used to describe them. The question is, does the word latch on to what people think it’s referring to, which is what we call the bourgeoisie — capitalists who employ labor, who are trying to maximize profits and doing it through reinvesting their surplus in a productive way?

Well, there’s been a study of what the Third Estate was inside the Estates General, these six hundred people who come as a Third Estate. And what the numbers show is that the overwhelming majority of them were what we today would call urban professionals, not capitalists — basically lawyers, civil servants, things like that. Of the six hundred that came in, less than twenty are merchants or involved in industry at all.

So if by “the bourgeoisie” we’re referring to people who today we would call bourgeois, and if you’re saying that is the class of people who are now fighting in the revolution, it’s just not true. They’re not there at all. Everybody who’s there in the Estates General is linked to a precapitalist economy in some way.

Now you might say, “Well, lawyers and professionals are not feudal.” But that’s just not true. It’s an uninformed understanding of the feudal state. Feudal states had plenty of room for what we would call clerks, professionals; and cities had plenty of room for lawyers within feudalism. It doesn’t betoken capitalism at all. So in terms of the people leading the revolution, there’s no bourgeoisie that’s doing it, if by bourgeoisie we mean what today we call the bourgeoisie.

So what’s propelling the revolution forward? As I said, it wasn’t them at all. It was the French masses. It was the peasants and it was the urban artisans who were doing it.

Vivek Chibber

That’s exactly right. Even if you think that the Third Estate inside the Estates General is bourgeois in the modern sense of the term, you just can’t say they were leading the revolution. What they were doing was responding to the revolution.

Vivek Chibber

There is something of a case to be made that the effects are connected to the rise of capitalism, but it’s a very, very weak case. What does the revolution do? Well, it certainly sweeps away noble power and a lot of the arbitrary demands that were being made on peasants by landlords. And that looks like feudalism. And of course, if you sweep away the hallmarks of feudalism, you’ve laid the foundation for something else, which is called capitalism.

But the catch is the following: French agriculture didn’t really become what you would call capitalist agriculture, by which we mean either rural farms owned by landlords that they lease out to capitalist farmers, who in turn hire in wage labor, or middle farmers, middle peasants, or medium-sized farmers competing with each other on the market — and through that, accumulating land for themselves because some farmers are driven out of the market.

Vivek Chibber

Neither of those things happens. What happens, in fact, is that the revolution strengthens the property rights of French peasants, which is what the peasants wanted. But in so doing, it actually hinders the rise of a market in land.

Vivek Chibber

Because peasants do everything they can to hold onto their land. They’re not being consolidated. They’re not turning into large farmers through a process of competing dissolution of their farms. Nor do you get anything like a capitalist farmer class that is deploying the land to the use of wage labor.

What you get is what you might call petty commodity production that takes over French agriculture. And the result is, instead of having a dynamic growing agriculture the way you had in England, you have a fairly slow growing agriculture, which not only limits the growth of capitalism in the countryside but also puts very severe constraints on the growth of urban capitalism.

These small peasants who are hanging onto their land, who are not plowing back whatever surplus they have in a productive fashion, constrain the size of the domestic economic market. They constrain the size of the home market, which means that French manufacturers don’t really have a domestic market to sell to. And this is also very different from England, in which growth between 1600 and, say, the mid-1700s, up to the Industrial Revolution, is overwhelmingly driven by the domestic market.

So what you get in France after the revolution is, in some ways, a foundation for the ultimate rise of capitalism. But French agriculture and French manufacturing really don’t become identifiably capitalist and dynamic until the final quarter of the nineteenth century — that is after, say, 1870.

Now, if you’re going to say that an event in 1789 caused what happens in 1870, that’s a very large gap.

The other problem with that is, for that capitalism in the 1860s and ’70s to come about, it required a host of other measures on top of what had happened from 1790 to 1793. If nothing happened in between, maybe you could make the case that it was a lagged effect. That is, an effect which took a long time to play itself out. But in fact, the French state had to take all kinds of additional measures in the mid-century and later for capitalism to emerge.

So while there is some foundation for saying that the consequences of the revolution were that it unleashed capitalism, “unleashed” is the wrong word. You can just say that it took away some of the barriers to capitalism, but it still left intact and even strengthened other barriers to capitalism. So the revolution itself, I think both in terms of its causation and in terms of its consequences, cannot be characterized as a bourgeois revolution in the strict sense of the term.

Vivek Chibber

Peasants don’t care about that. They wanted to have security against the vagaries of the market. There’s not a country in the world where peasants willingly said, “Yeah, let’s have capitalism.” Because what capitalism is in its essence is people having to depend on the market for their survival. Nobody wants that. Everywhere where you’ve seen capitalism sweep through the countryside, it’s been against the resistance of the peasantry.

So the French peasants are no different from any other peasants. What they wanted was security. And what they wanted was freedom from illegitimate authority, which is what for a thousand years their landlords had been. They got that. They got their security and they got freedom from the landed classes, from the arbitrary exactions of the landed classes.

Regarding the macroeconomic consequences of that, no peasant thinks about that. They think about their family, their own future, their village, and how they’re going to live. So they were acting according to their material interests. It just had the consequence of leaving the French economy mired in a slow-growth regime for the next three generations.

So the idea of a bourgeois revolution doesn’t hold water. And this is not exclusively my view. This is where the consensus is among historians of the French Revolution and nineteenth-century French history, both to the left and the right, except as I said, for a few pockets of people who continue to hold onto it, but they haven’t met with a lot of success within the wider discipline.

Vivek Chibber

I think so. You may not have a defensible description of the revolution as “bourgeois” in the sense that I’ve just said. But the essence of a Marxian account of history and politics is class analysis.

What you can legitimately say about the revolution — and again, here, everybody agrees — is that the revolution was propelled by a forcible intervention of the exploited classes into the whole process, primarily the peasantry but also the lower ranks of the artisans.

Some of these artisans are just owner operators; they’re not exploited. But there is a chunk of the French urban population that was in the ranks of the exploited workers: not strictly speaking proletarians, but smaller artisans who are forced to produce at suppressed prices so that some of their labor is being appropriated in the form of surplus.

If that’s the case, then what you have is not any longer a revolution that is a conflict between a rising bourgeoisie and a nobility, but a revolution that started out as an elite renegotiation and turned into a mass revolution because of exploited classes — or people in danger of being exploited, like the artisans — propelling it and forcing their demands on the agenda.

In many ways, this is a more firmly Marxian account than the classical one, because the most recognizably Marxist account of large historical events is through the prism of class struggle.

A fight between the bourgeoisie and the nobility isn’t class struggle. It’s an intra–exploiting classes or intra-elite conflict, not a conflict between exploiters and exploited. If you conceptualize the French Revolution as essentially being driven by the lower orders, then it becomes an event explained through class struggle. And what’s more Marxist than that?

Essentially, I think the verdict is that, while the word of Marx may have been mistaken in characterizing this aspect of the French Revolution, you can use his framework to correct his errors. And ultimately what you want is not to be a little religious sect that hangs onto every word of your founder — although a lot of Marxists see themselves doing exactly that. What you want is to see him as a brilliant person who launched a research program, and that research program actually can be used to correct some of the mistakes that he as a social scientist made in his own pronouncements.

Vivek Chibber

Clearly it was not. What it did have were some elements of what we call republicanism: equality before the law, a restricted franchise, and a rolling back of arbitrary power on the part of the state and the nobility. It did have that.

But it also restricted democratic participation in myriad ways. Two important ones: After 1794, you got a return to the restricted franchise, which meant only people who held property or wealth above a certain threshold were allowed to vote, which meant that the vast majority of the French masses were now again pushed out of the political system.

And secondly, it instituted economic liberalism in such a way that it restricted people’s political freedoms as well. In particular, it outlawed economic associations like guilds.

Now, in some ways, that’s great. Guilds were an anti-capitalist, feudal institution. So it’s progressive banning them, but it also banned associations of workers. In France, unions were illegal throughout the nineteenth century.

So the French political economy is one in which the poor do not have any entrée into the state, nor are they allowed to organize themselves as workers. That’s not a liberal political order.

Vivek Chibber

Let’s just say it’s less authoritarian than it was before. But the way I would describe it is that it’s no longer a feudal oligarchy. It’s a bourgeois oligarchy.

“Bourgeois” in the sense that the state is increasingly looking like a state that is now overseeing a liberal economy. The problem is that the liberal economy is constrained by French agriculture, which is still very backward, petty production. It’s constrained by a very small home market that can’t sustain manufacturing. And so urban manufacturing is also constrained.

Legally, you’ve got a defensive property, but economically, the property isn’t generating anything like a modern surplus economy. So economically, it’s a bourgeois state. It’s preserving rights. Politically, it is very much an oligarchy. That’s why I call it a bourgeois oligarchy.

And it’s not until later in the nineteenth century that you finally get trade unions legalized. And it’s not until the turn of the century that you get actual democratic rights across the board for French people.

Therefore, the idea that the French Revolution put a liberal bourgeois democratic order into place is really quite mistaken.

Vivek Chibber

It legitimizes and institutionalizes, in a very narrow sense, the idea that there has to be equality before the law, and that offices in the state — public offices, political offices — should not be distributed on the basis of rank or birth or nobility. That’s a big step. That’s not trivial at all.

But there are two things you have to remember about this. That is only institutionalized through mass pressure. So it’s class struggle that puts it in place. And the reason it remains partial is that the class struggle failed at that time.

And it takes another seventy, even a hundred years before those same social forces that were propelling this revolution — urban and rural social forces — are able to gather enough power and enough leverage for themselves to actually democratize the country. So, in my view, you should see the French Revolution as a very important break from the premodern economic and political order. But it should be seen as the opening act in a longer saga of democratization and the enfranchisement of the masses of people into the state, which took decades of further struggle to actually bring to fruition.

It was the event that inspired people, that motivated them, that gave them a picture of something new. The very fact that you had universal suffrage, even if only for a year, inside the French Republic; the very fact that you had The Declaration of the Rights of Man. These became absolutely crucial cultural and political anchors for struggles that came down the line. And that’s why it remains an absolutely pivotal event in the modern era.

Vivek Chibber

And it should not be surprising. As I said, this is also another way in which we can use Marx’s framework to correct pronouncements that he might’ve made.

You should be a little bit suspicious that a class of propertied people is described as mobilizing huge masses of people underneath them to destroy another property, which is feudal property. We’ve never seen that happen. I don’t know any time that that’s actually happened.

It’s less surprising when we see the destruction of property coming from below by people demanding its destruction because they’re the ones being harmed by it.

So what is socialist politics today? Socialist politics is trying to organize working people who are exploited to try to do away with those forms of property that are exploiting them.

The traditional Marxist and Third International interpretation of a bourgeois revolution was strange, in that it centered people who were in the middling or higher orders, which is how they conceived of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is an exploiting class — even in that twisted Marxian framework — that is now reaching out and trying to top another wing of the exploiting classes by mobilizing people from below.

If that’s your vision of politics, it’s extremely paternalistic. It’s basically saying that the masses were duped into doing this. And then when they’re done doing their job, they’re pushed back into submission by the bourgeoisie.

That is both factually wrong, but it’s also a pretty depressing understanding of how you want to wage your politics.

Instead, if you see that the French Revolution is an act in which the peasants and workers take over a political event where they were not supposed to, and they’re the engine that drives it, it kind of gives you a parallel to what we’re trying to do today. The bourgeois state also primarily consists of fights within the political and economic elite as to how they’re going to wield power.

And things like social democracy, things like progressive reform have come about in the twentieth century only when working people have intervened in a forcible way to push the political agenda beyond what elites have intended it to be.

And in that sense, the French Revolution gives you real lessons for how to do your politics today, because it’s the same kind of politics, even though the eras are different.