The French Revolution and Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism
Book Series

Editorial Board

Sébastien Budgen (Paris)

David Broder (Rome)
Steve Edwards (London)
Juan Grigera (London)
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam)
Peter Thomas (London)

volume 140

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

 The French Revolution
and Historical Materialism
Selected Essays

By

Henry Heller

leiden | boston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Heller, Henry, author.

Title: The French Revolution and historical materialism : selected essays / by Henry
Heller.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2017. | Series: Historical materialism book series,
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Contents

Preface vii

1 Introduction: French Revolution and Historical Materialism 1

2 Jaurès 24

3 Review of Guy Lemarchand, Paysans et seigneurs en Europe 39

4 The Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie 54

5 Response to Henry Heller’s ‘The Longue Durée of the French

Bourgeoisie’ 80
William Beik

6 Henry Heller and the ‘Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’ 86

David Parker

7 Response to William Beik and David Parker 94

8 French Absolutism and Agricultural Capitalism: A Comment on

Henry Heller’s Essays 104
Stephen Miller

9 Stephen Miller on Capitalism in the Old Regime: A Response 120

10 Marx, the French Revolution, and the Spectre of the Bourgeoisie 127

11 Review of Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in

the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830 154

12 Bankers, Finance Capital and the French Revolutionary Terror,

1791–4 165

Bibliography 239
Index 269
Preface

In 2006 I published The Bourgeois Revolution in France: 1789–1815. After many

years researching the Old Regime this work marked my first foray into a schol-
arly field which is the subject of much ongoing controversy. It was meant to
challenge the revisionist view of the French Revolution which has dominated
academic history since the 1970s. It was intended both as an academic as well
as a political intervention. Revisionism rejects the Marxist view that the revolu-
tion – the founding moment of modern history – was a bourgeois and capital-
ist revolution. The aim of revisionism was not only to challenge the Marxist
view of the revolution but to put into question its narrative of modern his-
tory, whose denouement looks toward a revolutionary transition to socialism.
In other words the controversy over the French Revolution is as much about
politics as history and is about the future as much as it is about the past. It is
my contention that, while there is such a thing as a community of standards
and a common methodology in every scholarly discipline, that knowledge is
inextricably connected with politics. Nowhere is this more true than in history
and especially in a field like the French Revolution.
My book took into account that the revisionists did raise some credible
objections to the Marxist view. On the other hand, my analysis suggested that
most of these could be answered and more importantly that the revisionists
offered no alternative explanation of the revolution. On the contrary, based on
current scholarship my work demonstrated that the only plausible interpret-
ation of the revolution remained the Marxist one. The positive reception of
this work, especially in France, encouraged me to continue to focus my schol-
arship on the revolution. Since 2006 I have published a series of articles which
challenge various aspects of revisionism. Doing so helped to buttress the case
against it but also served to restore the close tie between the history of the Old
Regime and the revolution, something that has tended to be lost from sight as
a result of academic specialisation. Most notably, contrary to the revisionists,
I have tried to demonstrate that the rise of a bourgeois capitalist class has a
long history dating back to the sixteenth century. Moreover, I have also shown
that the revolution itself played a large role in strengthening the bourgeoisie
politically and economically while bringing about the unification of financial
and productive capital. Indeed, I have been able to show that the rising of the
masses during the revolution, viewed by revisionism as economically regress-
ive, in fact helped to bring about the consolidation of capitalism.
Thanks to Brill Publishers these articles are now presented to readers as a
book. Taken together these pieces reinforce and extend my arguments against
viii preface

revisionism and in favour of the Marxist view. Most of the pieces have appeared
in the journal Historical Materialism. In particular I have to thank Sebastian
Budgen, a member of the editorial collective of Historical Materialism, for
encouraging me to publish these articles as a book. I would also like to thank
Pluto Press for permission to publish a piece on Jaurès which introduces a
translation of a new abridged version of his Histoire socialiste de la Revolution
française. Likewise I am grateful to Science & Society for allowing me to include
a piece, defending the notion of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolu-
tion, which appeared in that journal.
The aim of this book then is to challenge French Revolutionary revisionism
and to help restore the Marxist view of the French Revolution. It does so by
deepening and extending the arguments I made in The Bourgeois Revolution in
France. It arose out of a series of articles published in Historical Materialism
and Science & Society in the last few years.
Following an Introduction (Chapter One) which presents an overview of my
engagement with the historiography of early Modern Europe and France, the
second chapter is meant to briefly familiarise readers with the historiography
of the revolution. It does so by reprinting my introduction to a translation
of Jean Jaurès’s famous Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française.1 Chapter
Three tries to set the stage for my discussion of the rise of the bourgeoisie in
France under the Old Regime, by means of an extensive review of a monograph
by Guy Lemarchand, surveying the history of European feudalism in which
France played a central part.2 Chapter Four, ‘La Longue Duree of the French
Bourgeoisie’, then reasserts the classic Marxist view that the Old Regime saw
the slow rise of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism within the interstices of
feudalism and the absolute monarchy.3
This piece engendered a debate in the pages of Historical Materialism which
took the form of articles by William Beik and David Parker, who attempted to
disprove my claims of the rise of an economic bourgeoisie. Beik’s and Parker’s
articles and my response appear as Chapters Five, Six and Seven of the collec-
tion.4 In the wake of these pieces Stephen Miller attempted to argue that there
was no agrarian capitalism in eighteenth-century France and I argued the con-
trary. This exchange makes up Chapters Eight and Nine.5

1 Heller 2015.
2 Heller 2013a.
3 Heller 2009.
4 Beik 2010, Parker 2010, Heller 2010.
5 Miller 2012, Heller 2013b.
preface ix

The next chapters focus on the revolution itself. Chapter 10 engages with
the revisionist historian Sara Maza. Her work claimed that the revolution was
not Marxist because the concept of the bourgeoisie as a class and of a bour-
geois revolution did not exist in that period.6 To the contrary it is demonstrated
that such concepts did emerge in the course of the revolution and were much
debated. Chapter 11 consists of a review article of a book by Jeff Horn, who
stresses the role of working-class militancy in shaping the development of the
French industrial economy.7 But I argue that such is the continuing ideolo-
gical pressure of the revisionist paradigm in Anglophone academe that Horn
presents his excellent research while bizarrely eschewing discussion of the
bourgeois and capitalist context. In conclusion, Chapter Twelve attempts to
confute the revisionist view that the revolution saw no advance of capitalism
because the disjuncture between financial and productive capitalism intrinsic
to the Old Regime continued through the revolutionary period. On the con-
trary, through a study of French bankers it is shown that a key feature of the
revolution was the effective union of these two forms of capital, facilitating
capitalist accumulation.8

6 Maza 2005.
7 Heller 2012.
8 Heller 2014.
 chapter 1

Introduction: French Revolution and Historical

Materialism

Marx’s interpretation of the French Revolution is central to his understanding

of history. For Marx the revolution represented the classic example of the trans-
ition from feudalism to capitalism by means of revolution. The revolution of
1789 like no other event demonstrated the truth of the materialist view of his-
tory in which changes in a mode of production occur through the revolutionary
overthrow of one class by another. Marx saw the revolution as a model for the
proletarian revolution in which the working class would sooner or later over-
throw the capitalist class and establish socialism. Marx’s ideas on the French
Revolution were substantiated, elaborated and refined by French historians
starting with Jean Jaurès at the turn of the twentieth century and continu-
ing with Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul and Michel Vovelle.
In France the Marxist view dominated as late as the 1960s but since then has
come under attack by revisionist scholars. In the first instance, revisionists con-
centrated on raising as many objections as possible against the notion that
the revolution was capitalist and bourgeois in nature. But inspired by François
Furet’s insistence that the essence of the revolution was ideological, many revi-
sionists rejected materialist explanations and took a cultural turn. Contrary to
the Marxist view that sees culture, politics and ideas as inextricably bound up
with social and economic forces, many revisionists split the one off from the
other, arguing that the former rather than economic and social forces brought
about the revolution.
Whether the Marxist interpretation stands or falls is a scholarly matter but
it is also a political question. In the Marxist view the capitalist epoch was born
and developed through class struggle and its denouement is seen in terms of a
likely revolutionary transformation of the mode of production from capitalism
to socialism. The consequences of revisionism were not merely to put into
question the Marxist view of the events of 1789, but to raise doubts about its
overall interpretation of modern history and its prognostication of the future.
This collection of papers is meant to challenge revisionism and to reassert
the Marxist viewpoint. Against the revisionist assault on the conception of
the revolution as capitalist and bourgeois, the collection brings to bear new
historical research while employing the tools of theory to reassert the Marxist
case. Most of the pieces included have previously appeared in the pages of the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_002

2 chapter 1

journal Historical Materialism. Most address a particular historical question,

e.g., absolutism and the bourgeoisie, the financial history of the revolution,
revolutionary class consciousness, the nature of the Terror. Brought together
as a book these articles offer a substantial critique of revisionism and defence
of the Marxist viewpoint.
My interest in challenging revisionism is an outgrowth of a long career
devoted to the history of the Ancien Régime. The Marxist view has been that
in dialectical fashion a capitalist bourgeoisie slowly matured within the aristo-
cratic Old Regime and assumed power with the revolution. Fundamental to
the revisionist position is the raising of doubts about the development of a
bourgeoisie prior to the revolution. This introduction among other things is
designed to show that the existence of this bourgeoisie is confirmed as early
as the sixteenth century. Under considerable pressure it continued to develop
in the following century and then the development of this class powerfully
accelerated in the eighteenth century, advancing to the crisis of 1789. It was
the discrepancy between the denials of the revisionists and my own sense of
the long pre-revolutionary development of the bourgeoisie which led me to
confront revisionism.
It was through the support of Historical Materialism that this challenge to
revisionism was able to emerge. The birth of this journal was a godsend to me
as it opened a sorely needed new venue for Marxist history. Scholarly period-
icals that would accept Marxist-inspired historical scholarship are few and far
between in the Anglophone world. Historical Materialism was born in the late
1990s as a result of an initiative by a group of graduate students in international
relations at the London School of Economics who were inspired by the works
of Trotsky and Marx. Deliberately non-sectarian, the editorial committee took
as its objective the renewal of Marxist political economy from a pluralist and
internationalist perspective. Intellectually serious articles on philosophy, eco-
nomics, culture, contemporary politics and international relations as well as
history appeared in its pages and attracted a growing readership. Born in the
wake of the collapse of Soviet Communism, the ravages of Thatcherism, the
hypocrisies of the Blairite Third Way and the ongoing crisis of British society,
it was meant to lay the foundations for a theoretical renewal of Marxism and
revolutionary politics in Britain but also globally. Indeed, Historical Material-
ism’s high scholarly standards, its political openness and its annual conferences
attracted a growing international audience drawn both by its politics and soph-
isticated scholarship. Given my deepening commitment to Marxist history and
theory and disillusionment with liberal and positivist approaches, Historical
Materialism offered new vistas to my understanding of Marxism and a new out-
let for my scholarship.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 3

Having been won over to Marxism intellectually while in university, I was

politically radicalised by the upheavals of the 1960s along with millions of oth-
ers. Put off by the sectarianism of the Marxist-Leninist parties in Canada and
the reformism of social democracy, I affiliated myself with the left-wing nation-
alist journal Canadian Dimension. But it along with the rest of the left was in the
doldrums at the turn of the millennium. Moreover, I was not particularly happy
with that journal’s nationalist orientation. At the same time, I was increasingly
dissatisfied with the nature of my scholarship. Although it had definitely taken
a Marxist turn it still seemed too far removed from my political and ideological
convictions.
The gap between my interest in early modern French history and my political
orientation had been a fact of life for me through the Cold War. Although
universities and the scholarly disciplines in the United States and Canada paid
lip service to academic freedom, the fact remained that universities were ruling
class institutions to the administrative and intellectual parameters of which
professors were forced to conform. Leading academics in the humanities and
social science disciplines were normally politically reliable liberals who for
good measure had been thoroughly intimidated by McCarthyism. With a few
notable exceptions Marxists during the early Cold War had been largely purged
or silenced and later on were for the most part kept on the margins of academe.
This was as true in sociology, literature, economics and philosophy as it was in
history.
In the discipline of history as practised in the United States the previously
influential conflict view of American history championed by Charles Beard
was also marginalised by the 1950s. Consensus historiography championed by
liberals like Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Hofstadter generally ruled. As for
European history, its revolutionary tradition was treated as a pathological con-
dition from which America thankfully was largely immune. Western Civilisa-
tion, which bound together the anti-communist states on both sides of the
Atlantic and which the United States happened to lead, was transformed into a
history course which became the de rigueur introduction to the study of history
in many universities. The more or less tacit message of the course was that the
values of Western Civilization – individualism, human rights, political demo-
cracy and economic freedom – had to be defended against threats from the
Soviet East and the Third World.
In the United States study of European history, including that of France, had
long been an elite and conservative preserve and continued to be so. Nowhere
was this more true than in the study of the French Revolution. Reviewing the
historiography of American historians of the revolution, Keith Michael Baker
and Joseph Zizek noted that few American scholars writing in the 1950s and
4 chapter 1

1960s found writing history from below and from a Marxist perspective to be
acceptable at face value. They admitted that George Lefevbre’s Marxist study
of the French peasantry deserved respect. But they added that the same could
not be said for the communist historian Soboul’s pioneering analysis of the
Parisian sans-culottes.1 American critics of Soboul were particularly disturbed
by the explicitly Marxist perspective of his work. Regrettably, few historians
during the early Cold War were prepared to acknowledge that they too were
politically prejudiced. Indeed, it is astonishing how many historians at that
time were blind to their own class and social biases. For most professional
historians liberal consensus passed itself off as historical objectivity.
Nonetheless the 1960s and 1970s did bring change. The Crowd in the French
Revolution by George Rude, an Australian academic and former member of
the British Communist Historians Group, was widely read.2 Rude like Soboul
studied the Parisian masses but avoided the Marxist class categories employed
by Soboul which made American academics so uneasy. But in these tumultu-
ous years historical scholarship in the United States could not escape being
affected by Marxism, which pervaded the universities. This was particularly
true in American history where the influence of the British Marxist histori-
ans and the work of Eugene Genovese, Herbert Guttman and David Mont-
gomery was strongly felt. This Marxist trend in history proper was echoed by
a new historical-mindedness in other disciplines, as exemplified by the work
of Immanuel Wallerstein in sociology, Eric Wolf, Kathleen Gough and Eleanor
Leacock in anthropology and Fredric Jameson in literature.3 Indeed, the latter
pinned his Hegelian Marxist approach to the study of narrative on the dictum
‘always historicise’.4
But with the fading of the protest culture in the late 1970s the zeitgeist once
again changed. As we saw, historians in the United States had been mainly
hostile to the French Revolution and especially to its radical phase under the
Jacobins. Moreover the social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s was disturbing.
Many American historians then welcomed the rise of revisionist and anti-
Marxist interpretations of the revolution which began to appear from the 1960s
onward. It was Alfred Cobban who began the assault on the Marxist position.
Cobban was an English historian with important academic and political con-
nections who was hostile to what he referred to as the social interpretation of

1 Baker and Zizek 1998, p. 363.

2 Rude 1959.
3 Heller 2015, pp. 31–7, 42–4; and forthcoming.
4 Jameson 1981, p. 6.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 5

the revolution. He argued that the politically active bourgeoisie in 1789 were
economically hard-pressed professionals and office-holders rather than an eco-
nomic bourgeoisie. Rather than taking the lead, they were reluctantly pushed
into the abolition of seigneurial dues and feudal privileges by an insurgent
peasantry. For good measure, concluded Cobban, the revolution left the dis-
tribution of wealth, power and the economy in France largely unchanged. If
anything it was a revolution against rather than for capitalism.5 Cobban’s inter-
pretation was weakened by his stubbornly myopic empiricism and political
elitism, which led to his failure to comprehend the revolution not simply as
a political event but a deep-seated and ongoing mass movement the leader-
ship of which took things well beyond the goals of those political leaders who
were in place at the start of the revolution. The privileged bourgeoisie of 1789
who sat in the Estates-General and who preoccupied Cobban – participating
in the Old Regime certainly, but also revolting against it – were soon displaced
by more radical leaders and popular movements and a state from which an
already emergent capitalism and a capitalist class was able to develop further.
Certainly post-revolutionary France was as much a class society as was the
Ancien Régime, as Cobban notes. On the other hand, Cobban minimised the
immediate achievements of the revolution in improving the lot of the peas-
antry and strengthening manufacturing and banking. Worse, he ignored the
long-term political, social and economic changes that the revolution based on
the masses and capitalist property rights brought with it.
But it was the cultural turn that proved decisive in the rise of revisionism.
The turn to culture was itself a product of postmodernism or post-structur-
alism, which became ascendant in the late 1970s. In a work entitled The Post-
Modern Condition Jean-François Lyotard asserted that postmodernism among
other things entailed the rejection of so-called grand narratives, i.e., historical
interpretations which are simplistic in their assumption that the past is know-
able and that its direction is progressive.6 There can be no doubt that the ex-
Maoist Lyotard’s attack was directed against Marxism – the pre-eminent grand
narrative. It was Jameson who immediately and most astutely saw through this
attack on the Marxist view of history. According to him, postmodernism’s anti-
historicism was part of the postmodern zeitgeist which was striving to blot
out the possibility of understanding the present in historical perspective. Its
influence could not be dismissed because it was the cultural expression of an
all-encompassing commodity capitalism. But its rejection of history had itself

5 Cobban 1968, pp. 53, 67, 172.

6 Lyotard 1984, p. xxiv.
6 chapter 1

to be historicised, i.e., be understood in the context of late capitalism.7 Despite

such strictures, and under the influence of postmodernism, some historians
rejected positivism and foundationalism and turned to the anthropological
conception of culture. Culture in the Boasian sense, or as later reflected in
the idealist anthropology of Clifford Geertz, implied relativising rather than
historicising the past, scepticism toward overarching explanation, respect for
complexity and diversity, and distrust of both abstractions and teleology as
reductive or false. Some – after the manner of anthropological field workers
or, indeed, literary close readers – sought to concentrate on the meaning and
interpretation of historical events rather than seeking vainly for their causes.
Notable was the questioning of the idea of class, which was seen as an exclus-
ive product of consciousness formed by culture rather than both consciousness
and relationship to the means of production.8 Some even attempted to invoke
a reified understanding of culture as itself the cause of events. In these many
ways the cultural turn put the Marxist grand narrative into doubt. In doing so
it also put the French Revolution – the pivotal event of this historical materi-
alist narrative – into question. Taken to its limit it led to a questioning of the
universal importance of the revolution as a Eurocentric illusion.
François Furet did not take things that far. Indeed, initially he claimed no
more than that the radical Jacobin Republic interrupted the promising devel-
opment of moderate constitutional government. But in what proved a decisive
step Furet then asserted that this political miscarriage happened not by reason
of deep material forces but as a result of the subversive teachings of fanaticised
intellectuals.9 The parallel that Furet suggested with the Bolshevik Revolution
was not accidental, as Furet, an ex-communist, was one of the leading anti-
communist intellectuals in France at the height of the Cold War.10 Indeed, the
development of revisionism in France must be understood as part of a con-
servative reaction against Marxist cultural hegemony in that country. Many
historians, including those in the United States, disturbed by social and polit-
ical unrest, enlisted in the ranks of revisionism and under the influence of Furet
took the cultural turn. According to them it was the roots and dynamics of
pre-revolutionary culture that needed to be understood. Robert Darnton, Lynn
White and Keith Baker in the United States – to name a few – produced import-

7 Heller 2015, 4, pp. 6–7; Heller 2016.

8 Heller 2011, p. 194. This refers to my book The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First Century
Perspective, London: Pluto Press.
9 Furet and Richet 1973, Furet 1978.
10 Christofferson 2001.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 7

ant research by exploring the cultural dimensions of revolutionary politics.11

To such a degree did revisionism gain ground as a result of the cultural turn
that the Marxist interpretation was pronounced utterly discredited in many
quarters of Anglophone academe. Wittingly or not, this historiographical reac-
tion against the French Revolution and the Marxist grand narrative formed
part of a capitalist ideological counter-offensive from the 1970s onward, gaining
momentum with the collapse of Soviet Communism and the ascent of neolib-
eralism and remaining unchallenged until the 2008 crisis. In the Anglophone
world the cultural turn made itself felt through the influence of the Princeton
professor of early modern English history Lawrence Stone. In 1979 he published
what proved to be a seminal piece entitled ‘The Revival of Narrative’.12 Des-
pite his disclaimers Stone championed a turning away from social and critical
approaches to history in favour of return to narrative. In a contradictory way,
Stone claimed that a declining interest in ideology and a renewed recognition
of the importance of politics was responsible for this narrative turn. It is worth
noting that Marx, to the contrary, wrote historical narrative precisely because
he thought politics and ideology were both key elements of class struggle. Like-
wise, he saw narrative as important not as a literary alternative to critical ana-
lysis, but rather as a means of bringing together and summing up the findings of
critical and analytical investigation. Jameson meanwhile insisted that narrat-
ive as a form was finally incomprehensible without accompanying historical
materialist analysis. The downgrading of social and economic explanation in
Stone’s approach opened the door to the cultural turn and the loss from sight of
the overall unity of the historical totality in favour of petite histoire or biography.
Stone was also indirectly responsible for the most important form of revi-
sionism which appeared in England, and one which had ramifications on the
interpretation of the French Revolution. There was to be sure the not very
persuasive attempts by conservative historians to undermine the classic Marx-
ist view of the English Revolution which had been developed by Christopher
Hill. Hill’s many books and articles demonstrated that the English Revolution,
like the French Revolution, was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Conser-
vative historians attempted to confute Hill by returning to a political inter-
pretation of the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy and the establishment of
the Cromwellian republic. Like Cobban they did so by denying the connec-
tion between short-term political events and longer term social and economic
causes. Instead they dwelt on the fact that some noblemen sided with Parlia-

11 Darnton 1984, Hunt 1984, Baker 1990.

12 Stone 1979.
8 chapter 1

ment and that some of the bourgeoisie supported the King, that Puritans and
supporters of Parliament were not the same thing and that the events of 1640
were more about political contingency than anything else. On the contrary,
Stone investigated the underlying social and economic evolution of the upper
classes in the Tudor and Stuart period.13 Based on this analysis he interpreted
the English Revolution as the result of the temporary economic weakness of
the aristocracy, which made it possible for it to be challenged from below. But
even before the end of the seventeenth century the aristocrats had more than
recouped their political and social position by accelerating their conversion
from being feudal to capitalist landlords. There was a revolution from below
but it was incomplete in so far as the aristocracy remained the dominant class.
On the basis of Stone’s view of the aristocracy, Robert Brenner developed a
Marxist revisionism.14 He accepted Stone’s claim of ongoing aristocratic dom-
inance while extending its reach, so that there was never any doubt of its
ascendancy over the rest of society and especially a rising middle class dur-
ing the early modern period. According to Brenner, the English Revolution
played at best a secondary role in the transition from feudalism to capitalism,
something that Stone did not assert. Brenner claimed that that was because
the transition to capitalism had occurred much earlier. In this transition it was
the nobility rather than the bourgeoisie who assumed leadership. In making
this claim Brenner, a student of Stone’s and a professed Marxist, challenged
the Marxist interpretation of the revolution by denying its importance to the
birth of capitalism, questioning the role of the rural bourgeoisie in its gen-
esis and minimising the importance of the political and legal changes wrought
by the overthrow of Stuart absolutism. Whereas Marx had stressed the role of
agrarian capitalists in carrying through a sixteenth-century primitive accumu-
lation, Brenner dismissed this as merely the after-effect of changes in social
property relations that dated from the fourteenth century. Marx’s interpreta-
tion was based on the struggle of this rural bourgeoisie to develop capitalism.
The latter advanced by gaining ground vis-à-vis the nobility by assuming dir-
ect domination over the emerging rural proletariat through growing control of
the means of production. This progress was downgraded by Brenner as an after-
effect of earlier changes in social property relations which in no way threatened
aristocratic control.
Brenner argued that the lineaments of capitalism were already laid down
based on the social property relations established between the nobility and

13 Stone 1965.
14 Brenner 1976.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 9

would-be tenants during the class struggles of the fourteenth and the fifteenth
century. It was the nobility which then took the lead in creating capitalism
by imposing economically rational leases on tenant farmers, forcing them
to become competitive in the market place. It was these relations, based on
changes in the nature and level of rent rather than the new relations of produc-
tion based on profit, which were determinative in the development of capital-
ism. Market rationality then dictated all subsequent changes in social relations
and politics including the revolution of the seventeenth century. Between the
end of the fifteenth and the turn of the seventeenth century, class struggle and
politics played little role as competitive markets bolstered capitalism. Likewise
the role of revolution, fundamental to the Marxist view of the transition from
one mode of production to another, was at best an after-effect of inexorable
economic forces. Despite these questionable assertions, which were rooted in
the false premise that the early modern period economically was based on
the operation of a rational market rather than on its formation, the power-
ful deductive logic of Brenner’s argument won over many, and even led to the
emergence of a new school of political economy and history, ironically called
‘political Marxism’.
The implications of Brenner’s view on the understanding of the French
Revolution were quite significant. Beginning with Engels, Marxists had as-
sumed that capitalism grew in France in the interstices of the feudal and abso-
lutist regime. But Brenner claimed that based on the social property relations
in late medieval France, the economic rationality that drove capitalism for-
ward in England did not exist in France. Arguing from Brenner’s premise, his
admirer George Comninel argued that the Ancien Régime was a land of subsist-
ence farmers with no nascent working class and that capitalism did not really
take root in France until the middle of the nineteenth century.15 The French
Revolution may have been bourgeois but it was not capitalist.16 Despite Bren-
ner’s commitment to Marxism and to contemporary revolutionary politics, the
interpretation of English and French history by the political Marxist school,
in addition to being wrongheaded, had the effect of downgrading in a very
non-Marxist way the importance of class struggle and revolution in favour of
economism. Political Marxism reinforced the deemphasising of revolutionary
politics, which in part reflected the quietism that marked the academic discip-
lines in the age of post-structuralism and neoliberalism.

15 Comninel 1987.
16 Heller 2006, pp. 5, 21, 45–6.
10 chapter 1

It was in this context that I pursued my research on the Ancien Régime, which
developed into an account of the long-term rise of the French bourgeoisie. Tra-
ditionally the Ancien Régime was a field which attracted conservative scholars
who regretted the French Revolution and admired the sense of hierarchy and
order of the Ancien Régime. In the postwar period the very scholarly Roland
Mousnier of the Sorbonne, a man of rightwing politics and Catholic faith, was
the most important historian upholding this view. Fundamental to Mousnier’s
position was the denial that economic classes or class struggle in the mod-
ern sense had a place in the Ancien Régime. Rather politics and institutions
centred on the monarchical state was the basis on which society was ordered
and controlled, according to rank, status and prestige rather than wealth as in
class-based societies.17 Mousnier’s knowledge of the institutions of the Ancien
Régime was, it must be acknowledged, unparalleled. Moreover, his view that
the market economy was constrained within the limits of the political order of
the absolute monarchy remains a fundamental historical insight.
It was an insight which was perhaps not sufficiently appreciated by the
increasingly influential Annales school.18 This new school of history likewise
did not share Mousnier’s conservative politics. Annalistes, including its found-
ers Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, tended to be mildly socialist in sym-
pathy. On the other hand, the Annales shared Mousnier’s distaste for the preoc-
cupation of historians with the French Revolution. French historiography until
the 1960s was overwhelmingly dominated by the Marxist French Revolutionary
school, as seen in the work of Mathiez, Lefebvre and Soboul. This reflected in
part the key position the revolution continued to have in French politics. Study
of the revolution was linked with the central role that the radical left played in
politics and culture in the postwar period. Moreover, spotlighting the revolu-
tion underscored the importance of politically decisive events in history – a
viewpoint very much in keeping with the Marxist tradition. The Annales, which
came into its own in the 1960s, represented a turning away or downgrading
of political history or what they derisively referred to as l’ histoire evenemen-
telle and as such was an attempt to break with preoccupation with the revolu-
tion. At the same time it reflected a distancing from the revolutionary political
culture of the postwar period, in keeping with their more moderate politics.
Using the Ancien Régime as their template, the Annales put the emphasis on
continuity rather than change. Making use of anthropology, linguistics and
psychology, Febvre pioneered the study of mentalité, a concept which under-

17 Hayden 1996.
18 Heller 1996, pp. 197–219.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 11

scored the fixity and durability of fundamental popular attitudes and beliefs
which reinforced the inertial character of historical change. Braudel and his
heir Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie broke new ground with their total and ana-
lytical view of history based on the quantitative analysis of serial data. While
stressing the fundamental importance of material conditions, they minimised
the importance of class struggle and politics in favour of the long term. So far
as the history of the Ancien Régime went, change came slowly, based on the
difficulty of breaking through the ceiling imposed by the slow development of
the forces of production in the face of Malthusian constraints.
The context of early modern European studies in the United States in the
early Cold War period was yet more conservative. Until the 1960s the dominant
approach was the history of ideas, including an idealist view of the Protestant
Reformation. Control of historical teaching and research in the early modern
field was in the hands of an establishment marked by a fundamental hostility
to Marxism. Economic history was not unknown as, for example, in the work
of Earl J. Hamilton,19 but the Marxist approach to the Reformation, including
Engels’s account of the German Peasants War, was dismissed as dogmatic
and ideological. The flourishing Marxist school of Reformation studies in the
German Democratic Republic was made the special object of attack.20 Even
the materialism of the Annales was at first regarded with suspicion.
The history of ideas paradigm had been pioneered by Arthur O. Lovejoy
at Johns Hopkins. It stressed the continuity of ideas across different histor-
ical epochs more or less independently from their historical and social con-
text. While taking ideas seriously was a positive step in an American histori-
ography which tended to neglect their importance, more often than not it ten-
ded toward the reification of such ideas.21 Moreover the assumptions behind
such an approach were based on hostility to historical materialism. We can
study its effects on the study of the Italian Renaissance – a period dominated
by individualism, artistic innovation and realpolitik which proved popular in
American universities in the early decades of postwar American wealth and
power. Serious scholarship in this field as in others was greatly strengthened by
the work of two German Jewish scholars who had fled Nazi persecution, Hans
Baron and Paul Kristeller. Baron at the University of Chicago dedicated him-
self to the study of republican thought, which he thought valuable in defence
of liberal values championed by the United States in the face of Nazi dictat-

19 Hamilton 1934.
20 Friesen 1974.
21 Skinner 1969, pp. 10–11.
12 chapter 1

orship and Stalinist tyranny. Kristeller at Columbia downplayed Baron’s claim

that there was a connection between Renaissance thought and politics. He
insisted that the Renaissance was essentially about the revival of ancient Latin
and Greek thought and accordingly was an expression of a pure scholarship
and ideas divorced from mundane considerations.22
The history of science, an important subject in the age of Galileo and New-
ton, had been the subject of pioneer work by Marxist scholars Boris Hessen
and Henryk Grossman.23 In reaction an internalist approach based on a thor-
oughgoing idealism, which insisted on the independence of scientific thought
from social, economic and even technological influence, dominated Western
scholarship.24 Finally, study of the Reformation was controlled by scholars with
confessional biases. From their perspective the history of religious ideas and
the influence of great men like Luther and Calvin were determinative.25 As for
the history of the Ancien Régime, political history – as exemplified in the work
of Orest Ranum who studied the councillors of Richelieu, and by John Wolf’s
biography of Louis xiv – tended to dictate.26
By the 1960s new influences began to make themselves felt in American
scholarship. Marvin Becker, Gene Brucker, Donald Weinstein and Lauro Mar-
tines initiated the social history of the Italian Renaissance.27 Remaining within
an internalist framework, Thomas Kuhn’s work (1962) rejected the idea of evol-
utionary scientific progress in favour of the idea of revolutionary shifts in
scientific paradigms.28 In the study of the Reformation innovation came not
in German but in French history. Natalie Zemon Davis of the University of
Toronto published a groundbreaking series of studies of French artisans using
the Annales approach to the study of mentalité as well as the insights of anthro-
pology and sociology.29 The growing influence of the Annales on American
historians of the Ancien Regime opened the way finally to a Marxist analysis of
seventeenth-century France by William Beik.30 Undoubtedly Marxist in its lan-
guage, it was made respectable in the eyes of the establishment by its emphasis
on the static quality of that epoch in which, according to Beik, a bourgeoisie did

22 Muir 1995.
23 Hessen and Grossman 2009.
24 Mayer 2004.
25 Dixon 2001.
26 Ranum 1963, Wolf 1968.
27 Najamy 2005, pp. 272–4.
28 Kuhn 1962.
29 Davis 1975.
30 Beik 1985.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 13

not exist. If this were true it helped to undercut the Marxist view, which since
Engels had argued that the revolution was based on the slow incubation of a
capitalist bourgeoisie within the Ancien Régime.
My own investigations would lead me to confirm the view that not only did
such a bourgeoisie exist prior to the revolution but that it originated in the six-
teenth century, survived the seventeenth century and advanced strongly in the
eighteenth century. Intellectually I was already a Marxist at the time I gradu-
ated from the University of Michigan and entered graduate work at Cornell in
1959. In this respect the most important influence was the anthropologist Leslie
White, who while not openly proclaiming himself a Marxist nonetheless groun-
ded students in a historical materialist outlook.31 My Marxism deepened at Cor-
nell, where historical materialist approaches were being pursued by some stu-
dents in modern French history. On the other hand, such an approach seemed
to have little bearing on my thesis on the origins of the French Reformation,
which I carried out under the supervision of Eugene Rice. Rice was not closed to
the influence of social and economic forces in history, but his interests were in
the history of ideas. Moreover, the thesis topic suggested by him, i.e., a study of
the French humanist and Biblical scholar Lefèvre d’ Etaples and the reformers
of Meaux, seemed to hinge on the relationship between politics and theology
in a thoroughly conventional way.
But the impact of the civil rights movement and American war against Viet-
nam drove my hitherto intellectual Marxism in the direction of radical politics.
I was particularly exasperated by the attempt on the part of Washington’s pro-
paganda to convince the American public into believing that intervention in
Vietnam was in defence of freedom. The instrumental and propagandistic use
of lies and ideology I found particularly noxious. Yet even here I was able to
make a breakthrough based on a growing appreciation of the conspiratorial
nature of much of elite politics in the contemporary and early modern world.
Analysis of the chronology of the early French Reformation revealed a link
between the support of the royal court for evangelical initiatives and hostil-
ity to Rome, which had gone unnoticed by previous scholars. My thesis argued
that, far from the growth of reform ideas in France simply being the result of
the corruption of the Church or the influence of the German Reformation, high
Machiavellian politics had played a key role in facilitating the implantation of
such influences.32 Being inspired to pursue these links arose directly out of my
growing understanding of the conspiratorial nature of politics in the present.

31 Peace 2004.
32 Heller 1969, Heller, Henry 1969.
14 chapter 1

My conclusions in this regard were largely ignored by historians of the

Reformation. This despite the fact that they largely paralleled the early his-
tory of the Reformation in England, which likewise was more a matter of high
politics than anything else. On the other hand, in the aftermath of completing
my thesis, I was finally able to begin to tie the development of the Reform-
ation to social and economic history and in particular to the implantation
of radical ideas among the plebeian population.33 In addition to the work
of Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Les Paysans de Languedoc was perhaps
the most important work of history I had read while pursuing my doctor-
ate.34 This massive quantitative study traced the economic and social history
of Languedoc from the fourteenth through the eighteenth century. Rooted in
a neo-Malthusian perspective, Le Roy Ladurie’s study showed that the cycles
of demographic and economic growth were based on the stagnant develop-
ment of the forces of production. His pessimistic conclusion confirmed the
Annales view of the overall inertia of the Ancien Régime, which was capable
only of cyclical growth. However, Le Roy Ladurie did note the dynamism of
what he described as the beautiful sixteenth century or the capitalist upsurge
that marked the first part of the sixteenth century. Indeed, a former Marxist
and member of the Communist Party, Le Roy Ladurie interpreted the develop-
ment of the French Reformation as a foreshadowing of the French Revolution.
Its emergence was rooted in the growth of capitalism and the development of a
bourgeoisie made up of merchants, better-off artisans, officials and scholars in
the first part of the sixteenth century. In this light the Calvinist revolt could be
viewed as an early bourgeois revolution, paralleling the earlier Peasants Revolt
in Germany. Ultimately, according to Le Roy Ladurie, early capitalism and the
Reformation were still-born in Languedoc as the fulcrum of economic growth
shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic (1560–1640).
As I have noted, research had led me to the discovery that far from the
Reformation at Meaux being simply a matter of theology and high politics,
it had quickly led to popular disturbances. For Le Roy Ladurie, who studied
similar events in Languedoc, such disturbances represented premonitions of a
crisis in the expansion of the sixteenth-century economy. The crisis exploded
in the outbreak of the religious wars and coincided with the open challenge
of Calvinism to the hegemony of the monarchy and the established Catholic
Church. In this model the Reformation crisis in sixteenth-century France pre-
figured the revolution.35

33 Heller 1977.
34 Le Roy Ladurie 1966.
35 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, vol. 1, pp. 353, 357, 381. Heller 1986, pp. 239–40.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 15

Based on this template, I decided to study the development of the French

Reformation based on an analysis of its growth in six French towns.36 Although
the history of these towns, located in the four quarters of the Kingdom, signific-
antly differed from one another, investigation revealed a correlation between
increasing economic difficulties, growing social polarisation and the rise of
Calvinism. I interpreted the rise of Calvinism as a movement which tried to
break through the religious and political limits of the established religion and
the royal state. Critical junctures between the popular evangelicism of the
artisans and that of the more orthodox Calvinist elite of merchants, lawyers
and officials created the Protestant movement. Growing economic difficulties
marked by a succession of crises facilitated its development, Calvinist ideo-
logy ultimately tied the movement together and led to the outbreak of the
religious wars in 1562. Insufficiently powerful numerically and economically,
the Calvinists were unable to conquer France politically or religiously and
were consigned to permanent minority status. Indeed, although the base of
the movement remained artisans and merchants, its leadership became aris-
tocratic.
Subsequent to this book on French Protestant origins I published another
on the class nature of the religious wars.37 In this account my premise was that
although the Calvinist movement was in origin a class movement from below,
its weakness caused it to be subordinated to the nobility. The rival Counter-
Reformation party evolved in a like fashion with a popular base and noble
leaders. The leadership of both movements waged war against one another,
but also carried on a class war from above, particularly against the peasantry.
After decades of suffering the peasants and the towns reacted by organising
assaults against the nobility which helped to bring the religious wars to an
end. Aristocratic alarm at the incipient revolt among the plebeians helped the
leaders of both religious parties to rally to the monarchy under Henri iv.
The religious wars were the subject of my next book as well. Le Roy Ladurie
had portrayed the outbreak of this conflict as the beginning of the end of the
beautiful sixteenth century.38 Although economic growth continued into the
early seventeenth century, the development of capitalism eventually came to
an end as the century progressed, as landlord taxes and royal taxes choked
off agricultural profit. Indeed, this assumption was the take-off point of Beik’s
study of Languedoc, which pictured the period as one in which whatever

36 Heller 1986.
37 Heller 1991.
38 Heller 1996.
16 chapter 1

bourgeoisie there might have been was absorbed into the stratum of royal
officials under the control of the absolutist monarchy.
But I began to have my doubts about this model. Le Roy Ladurie along
with other historians had pictured the period of the religious wars as one of
unrelieved ruin. On the contrary, my research revealed that this undoubtedly
chaotic period saw considerable interest in agronomy and agricultural innova-
tion, the development of new technologies and the growth of rural industry. In
other words, the Annales view that the mentalité prevalent in the Old Regime
reflected little interest in the development of the productive forces was open
to question. The period of the religious wars was, indeed, a period of eco-
nomic regression. On the other hand, the ongoing violence and wars coupled
with debt and other difficulties led to the dispossession of large numbers of
subsistence producers and their conversion into wage workers. The increasing
availability of wage labour encouraged an interest in developing new techno-
logy, increasing agricultural output and developing rural industry. In northern
France a process of primitive accumulation comparable to that in sixteenth-
century England occurred, which strengthened the middle class and capit-
alism. Indeed, this was reflected in the growing militancy of townsmen and
peasants toward the end of the religious wars. What arrested further progress
was not a traditional mentalité, but aristocratic reaction reinforced by the fiscal
and political power of the Bourbon monarchy.
My next work, which dealt with anti-Italianism during the same period,
reached parallel conclusions.39 It dealt with the development among broad
strata of the population of hostility to the Italian merchants, bankers, courtiers
and humanist scholars who dominated French economic, political and cultural
life under the protection of the Valois monarchy. Nationalism as a mass move-
ment was of course a phenomenon born of the French Revolution and the
nineteenth century. Nonetheless, although confined to the middle class and
elements of the nobility, nationalism did develop in the sixteenth century in
France. In its negative aspect French nationalism was largely directed against
Italian dominance. But I argued that the growing strength of this xenophobic
movement was largely based on the increasingly literate middle class.
All these books published between 1986 and 2003 pointed to the rise of a
capitalist bourgeoisie in sixteenth-century France. This line of argument was
made more plausible because it developed out of the Annales notion of a beau-
tiful sixteenth century. Infused with Marxism, the publication of these works
was also made possible by a growing receptivity to Marxist approaches in the

39 Heller 2003.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 17

study of fields like the Italian Renaissance and the history of science.40 There
was even an opening in the study of the Reformation where the researches of
the historians of the German Democratic Republic were assimilated into West-
ern historiography.41 The waning of the Cold War and the political neutering of
Marxism in the West helped make this growing tolerance of Marxist research
possible.
The upsurge of the bourgeoisie which I had demonstrated in my successive
works was ultimately contained by the Bourbon monarchy, which absorbed
its upper layers into its expanding bureaucracy by the multiplication of state
offices. The consolidation of the Bourbon monarchy suggested to Beik that no
bourgeoisie to speak of existed during the seventeenth century. On the other
hand, my own research on the late sixteenth century indicated that a capitalist
bourgeoisie actually was growing stronger in the late sixteenth century. Could it
simply have disappeared in the seventeenth century? Was there not some con-
tinuity after all between this development in sixteenth-century France and the
bourgeoisie’s strong advance in the eighteenth century? Put another way, the
case for the French Revolution as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution could
be strengthened if it could be shown that the bourgeoisie had a continuous his-
tory during the Ancien Régime. Testing such a possibility was in fact inhibited
by the way the study of French history was organised in North America. It was
compartmentalised into specialties – sixteenth century, seventeenth century,
eighteenth century and French Revolution, and modern France – with separate
professional meetings, newsletters and periodicals. Thus, for example, Beik’s
conclusion that no bourgeoisie existed in the seventeenth century was reached
without him feeling the need to make any real reference to the implications of
such a view on the sixteenth century and especially on the revolution.
While these disciplinary boundaries had a certain legitimacy based on re-
search interest, they did lead to a certain narrowing of perspective – something
which was all too common in American academe. In the case of French history,
in which it is a truism to say that all roads lead to and from the French
Revolution, this state of affairs was particularly crippling. Cloistering of French
history into chronologically separate specialities inhibited research into the
connections between the Ancien Régime and the revolution. In my case this
was a real stumbling block, as along with my interest in sixteenth-century
France I had always maintained an interest in the historiography of the French
Revolution. As a Marxist I had always assumed that the French Revolution

40 Freudenthal 2005.
41 Po-Chia Hsia 1988, pp. 5–6.
18 chapter 1

was the birthplace of modern politics and the model of revolutionary change,
including eventual transition from capitalism to socialism. While the great
majority of American historians may have been put off by Soboul’s work, I
considered myself his admirer. The revisionist onslaught had advanced many
seemingly convincing arguments against the Marxist approach. On the other
hand, my research suggested that events in the sixteenth century – the rise of
capitalism and the middle class, the birth of an ideological movement opposed
to the established church and the state – foreshadowed the bourgeois and
capitalist revolution, or in other words, the coming of the revolution itself.
A breakthrough came with the publication of Jean-Marc Moriceau’s study
of the capitalist farmers of the Ile de France.42 He demonstrated that, con-
trary to the situation in Languedoc which had been stressed by Le Roy Ladurie
and Beik, a rural bourgeoisie which had come into being during the French
religious wars of the sixteenth century in the Ile-de-France had actually been
strengthened in the seventeenth century and flourished in the eighteenth. The
families which established themselves as a rural capitalist elite during the reli-
gious wars not only persisted but grew stronger on the basis of an increasingly
productive capitalist agriculture. Brenner and Comninel claimed that the per-
sistence of small-scale peasant property had blocked the development of rural
capitalism in France. Moriceau, on the contrary, showed that large-scale farms
were overwhelmingly the rule in the Ile-de-France. In the meantime, I had
gone ahead and reasserted the Marxist view of the French Revolution in a book
based on recent research.43 I followed this up with ‘The Longue Durée of the
French Bourgeoisie’, which linked the formation of the French bourgeoisie over
three centuries with the Annales concept of the long run.44 If feudal absolut-
ism endured over so many centuries in France, it also incubated over the long
term the bourgeois class which would overthrow it. The publication of this art-
icle in Historical Materialism marked the beginning of my relationship with
that journal and the confirmation of my interest in challenging the revisionist
approach to the revolution.
Today we stand at a crossroads. Hostility toward Marxism, especially in the
form of the idealist current of the cultural turn, still holds sway. But histor-
ical materialism, including Jameson’s cultural Marxism, is gaining ground, as
witness the growth of interest in Historical Materialism, the emergence of Hay-
market Press books, the circulation of the new Marxist periodical Jacobin and

42 Moriceau 1994.
43 Heller 2006.
44 Heller 2009.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 19

the growing overall market for Marxist books and periodicals. This advance is
spurred by ongoing economic and political crisis. Revisionism still dominates
study of the French Revolution, amid signs of a growing resistance to what has
become a dogma.45 Bringing together these published papers helps to advance
the arguments against this dogma. They are based on an understanding of
Marxist theory which stresses the importance of the development of capitalist
agriculture, the role of finance capital in accumulation and the decisive role of
the state in the consolidation of capitalism. In the French case capitalism in
the countryside helped to undermine feudal social relations and institutions
and strengthen a rural bourgeoisie which played a key role in the revolution,
enabling it to take control of the countryside. Although its initiatives helped
increase production in the countryside and displace more and more small pro-
ducers, turning them into proletarians, pre-revolutionary agriculture’s failure
to provide enough food helped set off the urban food riots that accompanied
the political revolution.
The existence of finance capital long predates capitalism. But it is the entry
of finance capital into production and the institutionalisation of the connec-
tion between the two that makes possible ongoing accumulation. The juncture
between financial and productive capital was underway prior to the revolution
but was greatly accelerated by it. The seizure of the state by the bourgeoisie
made possible the dismantling of feudalism and the restructuring of the state
and legal system to serve the advance of capitalism. But by confiscating and
selling off the extensive lands and buildings of the Church to the bourgeoisie
that class was greatly strengthened. Indeed, the last paper in the collection is
an extended version of an article which has recently been published in Histor-
ical Materialism.46 It amounts to a reversal of the revisionist conception of the
state under the Jacobin Terror. The revisionist view of the Terror is largely one of
political repression and economic regression based on ideological fanaticism.
I argue that the Terror also saw decisive intervention by a powerful revolution-
ary state which forced the critical connection between financial and productive
capital necessary to accumulation, inspired the financial improvisations which
saved the revolution and oversaw a massive process of primitive accumulation.
The Terror, which for the revisionists was the negation of the economic and the
harbinger of modern totalitarianism, I pinpoint as the moment of the birth of
capitalism (in France) rooted in the exertion of state power.

45 McPhee 1989, McPhee 2002, Lewis 2004, Markoff 1995, Slavin 1995, Jones 1991, Lemarchand
2008.
46 Heller 2014.
20 chapter 1

As noted, most of the papers collected in this volume were published in

order to address a particular historical question. But gathered together they
constitute a wide-ranging critique of revisionism. The work begins with a study
of Jean Jaurès, who wrote the first scholarly history of the French Revolution
based on the Marxist view of the revolution. The text is drawn from an intro-
duction to a translation of an abridgement of Jaurès’s Histoire Socialiste de la
Revoloution Francaise, which has been recently published.47 Through the lens
of Jaures’s historical and literary masterwork it seeks to help readers under-
stand the history of the Marxist interpretation of the revolution and its leg-
acy. The French Revolution was a focal point of Marx’s thinking in the early
1840s, during which he even contemplated writing the history of the Revolu-
tionary Convention (1792–5). Study of the revolution helped him liberate him-
self from the influence of Hegelian idealism, formulate his theory of historical
materialism and grasp the importance of revolutionary politics. The revolution
remained an important reference point for the rest of his life. On the other
hand, Marx only adumbrated his view of the revolution’s origins and develop-
ment without offering a full account of it. It was Jaurès who wrote the first fully
developed narrative of the revolution based on archival research and a Marxist
viewpoint. One of the strengths of Jaurès’s work is the skilful way he was able
to link the maturation of the bourgeoisie as a class with the growing force and
influence of its ideas in a manner which is completely foreign to the perspect-
ive of Furet and the cultural turn. Published at the beginning of the twentieth
century and re-published only recently, his history remains a valuable instru-
ment of scholarship.48 The essay links Jaurès’s history to the subsequent rich
historiography of the revolution, including Marxist and revisionist viewpoints.
From first to last this essay shows that the historiography of the French Revolu-
tion has been deeply entangled with the politics of France.
The revolution overthrew the feudal mode of production which had existed
for a millennium. Despite the fact that modern times date from the sixteenth
century, feudalism remained firmly in place in France and most of the rest of
France until 1789. In a massive study Guy Lemarchand recently reviewed the
history of the feudal mode of production across Europe (1500–1863).49 France
occupies a central place in Lemarchand’s wide-ranging account. The second
essay, which reviews Lemarchand’s work, provides an opportunity for under-
standing the French Ancien Régime in a wide and deeply comparative perspect-

47 Jaurès 2015.
48 Jaurès 2014.
49 Lemarchand 2011.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 21

ive.50 According to Lemarchand, the feudal system reached its perfection in the
eighteenth century and nowhere more so than in France. Why then was there
a revolution?
Lemarchand, who is a distinguished historian of the Ancien Régime and
the revolution, finds the answer in the spread of Enlightenment ideas and the
degree of class struggle, both of which were exceptionally strong in France. On
the other hand, Lemarchand fails to explain the durability of the feudal system
faced with the concurrent rise of capitalism in England and Holland and,
indeed, within France itself. In this review we show that the concept of uneven
development helps to explain the co-existence of feudalism and capitalism in
early modern Europe. Likewise Perry Anderson’s analysis of absolutism, which
fundamentally distinguishes Western from Eastern feudalism, also helps to
illuminate this question. According to Anderson, in France the bourgeoisie and
a nascent capitalism were imbricated in the absolutist and feudal system. The
maturation of the latter only strengthened the former.
The third piece, ‘The Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’, details the
development of the bourgeoisie and capitalism in France over the whole period
1500–1789.51 In doing so it helps to undermine the revisionist contention that
there was no bourgeoisie in France prior to the revolution. It reasserts the
gradual ascent of a bourgeoisie from the sixteenth through the eighteenth
century, a position traditionally espoused by Marxists ranging from Engels to
Anderson. Underscoring the progress of capitalism during the religious wars,
it notes the persistence of profit through the first decades of the seventeenth
century and beyond. It also recalls the growth of commerce and manufactur-
ing, especially in the reign of Louis xiv. Most importantly, following Moriceau,
it points to the perdurance of a rural bourgeoisie in the Ile-de-France. Con-
fronting high levels of rent and taxes, it not only survived but increased its
productivity in the seventeenth century and emerged stronger than ever in the
eighteenth. The publication of this piece occasioned an exchange in the pages
of Historical Materialism between myself and Beik and David Parker, two Marx-
ist historians committed to the view that because the Ancien Régime was feudal
there was no bourgeois and capitalist dynamic to it. Their challenges and my
responses are included in the text.52 These arguments demonstrate that what
is at issue is not merely the character of the Ancien Régime, but the class char-
acter of the French Revolution.53

50 Heller 2013a.
51 Heller 2009.
52 Beik 2010, Parker 2010.
53 Heller 2010.
22 chapter 1

There is also the challenge from Stephen Miller, who seeks to undercut
Moriceau’s work on the bourgeoisie by insisting that Ancien Régime France
was an unchanging landscape of small producers who were blocked by Neo-
Malthusian constraints and a Chaaydovian peasant mentalité. In response we
insist on the durability of Moriceau’s conclusions while also challenging the
static and unhistoric conception of petty commodity producers espoused by
Miller.54 Revisionists like Beik and Parker take the view that not only was
there no bourgeoisie prior to the revolution but not even during it. This was
the contention of Sarah Maza.55 She claimed that during the revolution the
bourgeoisie had no consciousness of itself as a class and that, therefore, the
bourgeoisie as a class did not make the revolution. The notion of bourgeois
revolution was an invention of the nineteenth century. In a rejoinder published
in Science & Society and which appears in this collection, I point out that not
only does she fail to make the necessary distinction between class for- and class
in-itself, but she also does not properly take into account the existing evidence
of bourgeois class consciousness which developed during the revolutionary
process.56 At the height of the revolution the bourgeois nature of the revolution
was recognised and debated. Its open acknowledgement was delayed, I argue,
because it threatened the political unity of the revolution.
The misconceptions foisted upon historians by revisionist hegemony are
also evident in the otherwise excellent work by Jeff Horn. In my long review
of his book I point to its nearly unprecedented acknowledgement of the signi-
ficant development of industry and the working class during the revolution.57
Its account of working-class resistance to industrialisation is particularly note-
worthy if perhaps exaggerated. On the other hand, despite acknowledging the
importance of the growth of industrial factories and a working class, the signi-
ficance of the leading role of the bourgeoisie is completely overlooked – and
this is not accidental. Acknowledgement of its presence would uncomfortably
raise the question of the bourgeois revolution which is still unmentionable in
respectable academic circles en Amerique.
The last paper in this collection deals with banking and finance during the
revolution. A much abridged version has appeared in Historical Materialism.58
But the full text published here, which is around ninety pages, sets out and
explains the history of the bankers and state finances during the revolution.

54 Miller 2012, Heller 2013b.

55 Maza 2005.
56 Heller 2010.
57 Heller 2012.
58 Heller 2014.
introduction: french revolution and historical materialism 23

That in itself is noteworthy because the story is quite important and largely
unknown (or is otherwise garbled). But more significant is that the piece chal-
lenges the revisionist view that capitalism did not exist prior to 1789 because
there was no relation between financial and productive capital and that radical
democracy represented the negation of capitalism. It shows that the relation-
ship between financial and productive capital began prior to 1789 and that
deepening this tie was central to the politics of the revolution. It was precisely
the radical democratic regime backed by the sans-culottes which cemented
this nexus. In other words there is a direct tie between capitalism and the rad-
ical revolution, contrary to the revisionist conception.
 chapter 2

Jaurès

Jean Jaurès, the leader of the French socialists, was assassinated on the eve
of World War i by Raoul Villain, a nationalist fanatic. As war approached,
Jaurès, who was the leader of the Socialist Party, fought valiantly to prevent
its outbreak, even calling for general strikes to force peace on the French and
German governments. He did so in the face of a rising chorus calling for support
of the impending war. Many in his own party, and likewise socialist leaders in
Germany, including ‘the renegade’ Karl Kautsky, succumbed to these bellicose
demands. Jaurès resisted because he believed that war would be a disaster for
Europe, the French nation and the prospects for socialism. Jaurès took the same
anti-war position as had his hero Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobin leader
during the French Revolution. Prior to the outbreak of war between France and
the absolutist regimes in Prussia and Austria, Robespierre had insisted that war
could only benefit those who opposed the revolution.1
Jaurès is remembered as a martyr to internationalism and peace as well as
a politician who was able to unite the historically fractious elements of the
French left. As the centenary of the outbreak of World War One approaches,
Jaurès’s political role is being widely celebrated on the left in France. At the
same time Jaurès pioneered the Marxist historiography of the French Revolu-
tion. His Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française was published as a series
of journal articles and then in four volumes (1901–4).2 This massive account of
the revolution, which was a highly original work of history as well as a literary
masterpiece, is almost forgotten today by the public. Its rhetorical and dramatic
character, which is the equal of that of the great nineteenth-century historian
Michelet, is felt by some to be too evocative of a bygone age of epoch narrat-
ive. Yet Jaurès’s monumental work of over three thousand pages was not only a
great work of literature, it inaugurated the scientific study of the history of the
revolution and is still of use to scholars.
Jaurès’s work analysed the revolution from the perspective of Karl Marx’s
materialist interpretation of history which viewed it as a capitalist and bour-
geois revolution. The leading professional academic historian of the revolution,
Alphonse Aulard, had established the principle that history had to be based on

1 Jaurès 1968, vol. 2, p. 168.

2 Jaurès 1901–4.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_003

jaurès 25

a critical investigation of the primary sources. But he was still writing the his-
tory of the revolution from the perspective of its politics. Jaurès, too, wrote from
a critical investigation of the sources, but he combined this approach with a
materialist view of history. The freshness of this perspective deeply impressed
contemporaries. Paul Lacombe, a contemporary critic who by no means shared
Jaurès’s politics, nonetheless conveyed his sense of the originality of Jaurès’s
approach. Commenting on the opening chapter of the work Lacombe noted
that:

In this work I have come across a ground-breaking inquiry, in large part

original, which is without equivalent among other historians of the Revo-
lution: a preliminary but step-by-step review of the economic conditions
in which the stratified classes of society, peasants, workers, petit and big
bourgeoisie, major and minor financiers, nobility, clergy, court nobility,
etc. lived in 1789. After which in logical order there follows a review of
the provinces from the perspective of commerce and industry. In short
an exposition of the economic activity of France.3

Jaurès’s subsequent narrative of the revolution then unfolds as a study of the

successive conflicts between these social groupings in the years that followed,
based on the interplay between revolutionary politics and ongoing social and
economic crisis. It was the first assertion of what came to be referred to as the
classic or Marxist view of the French Revolution in which the French people
en masse figured as the main actor. Since Jaurès, the Marxist view has been
developed by a long line of twentieth century French historians including
Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, Michel Vovelle, Claude Maza-
uric and Guy Lemarchand. All were sympathetic to the Communist or Socialist
Parties and saw their work as an intrinsic part of the political and social move-
ment which it was hoped would lead France toward socialism.4 In the 1960s
and particularly since the failure of the May 1968 revolution, this interpreta-
tion came under attack from a counter-movement called French Revolutionary
revisionism. Appearing first in England and America, this movement sought to
deny the fundamental premise of the classical interpretation that the revolu-
tion was bourgeois and capitalist. Without itself being able to articulate an
alternative explanation of the revolution, the new school initiated by the Eng-
lish academic Alfred Cobban sought to debunk the idea that capitalism or a

3 Lacombe 1908, pp. 164–5.

4 Mazauric 2009.
26 chapter 2

bourgeois class existed prior to the revolution.5 In the u.s., Cobban’s scepti-
cism was reinforced by George Taylor of the University of North Carolina, who
presented a serious case against the economic foundation of the Marxist view.6
In France revisionist views were supported by François Furet, who first took
the view that the radical Jacobin Republic aborted the development of con-
stitutional government in France. Subsequently Furet went further, asserting
that this derailment of the revolution had happened not by reason of deep
and uncontrollable social forces but as a result of the subversive ideas of fanat-
icised intellectuals.7 The parallel with the Bolshevik Revolution was deliberate,
as Furet in addition to being a historian was one of the leading anti-communist
intellectuals in France at the height of the Cold War.8
Indeed, the spread of revisionism can be understood as part of a political and
intellectual reaction against the long-standing Marxist cultural hegemony in
France and the international threat of revolution which stirred anxiety not only
in France but even in England, the United States and the rest of the English-
speaking world in the 1960s. As such revisionism was remarkably successful, to
such a degree that the Marxist interpretation was pronounced dead in the uni-
versities of the Anglophone countries. Inspired by Furet, many historians in the
United States took the so-called cultural turn, arguing that the revolution could
be explained by the peculiar political culture of France.9 Insistence on the
peculiarities of French culture had the additional advantage of undercutting
the universal significance of the revolution. French Revolutionary revisionism
must therefore be viewed in the context of the post-structuralist movement,
which became hegemonic in the humanities especially from the 1970s in the
United States. But this reaction in turn can only be understood as part of the
capitalist counter-offensive which gained momentum from the 1970s onward,
gaining force with the collapse of Soviet Communism and continuing to be
hegemonic.
Despite this apparent revisionist triumph, a strong current of Marxist-
inspired historiography persisted in France, most visible in the works of Michel
Vovelle, Guy Lemarchand and Claude Mazauric. Vovelle, occupying the presti-
gious chair of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, published a continuing
series of monographs and articles which encapsulated the new quantitative
and cultural tendencies in history inspired by the Annales school while con-

5 Cobban 1968.
6 Taylor 1962.
7 Furet and Richet 1973, Furet 1978.
8 Christofferson 2001.
9 Christofferson 2013.
jaurès 27

tinuing to interpret the revolution within a Marxist framework.10 Lemarchand

cut his teeth on a materialist study of the decline of the feudal mode of pro-
duction in the pays de Caux in Normandy, which prepared the way for the
revolution. He followed this up with a sweeping panorama of French economic
history from the 1780s until the 1830s, demonstrating that a decisive trans-
ition from feudalism to capitalism occurred during that period, at the centre
of which lay the crisis of the French Revolution.11 Finally there is Mazauric,
who spent over thirty years as a historian of the French Revolution at the Uni-
versity of Rouen. Member of the Communist Party and of its central committee
(1979–87) and a trade unionist, there has been no more staunch defender of the
classic view of the revolution. Mazauric through thick and thin has through
his many publications, including works on Rousseau, Babeuf, Jacobinism and
Marxist thought and the revolution, combined serious research with an excel-
lent command of Marxist theory and the historiography of the French Revolu-
tion.12
In the English-speaking world after many years in which cultural preoccupa-
tions have dominated there are signs of a revival of interest in the relationship
between the revolution and capitalism.13 Indeed, various scholars including
myself have taken a Marxist approach that has begun to challenge revisionist
work.14 The outbreak of the economic crisis since 2008 can only reinforce this
trend. But the truth of the matter is that the influence of Jaurès on the scholar-
ship of the French Revolution never went away. As a result of Jaurès’s influence
in 1903 the National Assembly established a permanent commission to over-
see the publication of the economic and social sources of the revolution. The
series of works published under its auspices greatly expanded knowledge of the
economic and social history of the revolution.15 Mathiez republished the His-
toire socialiste in the 1920s16 and Lefebvre looking back at the historians of the
revolution concluded that he considered Jaurès his only master.17 And Soboul
gave Jaurès’s text new relevance by providing a new edition undergirded with
an up-to-date scholarly apparatus which makes the work even now an indis-

10 See Vovelle 1988.

11 Lemarchand 1989, Lemarchand 2008.
12 Mazauric and Louvrier 2008.
13 Livesey 2013.
14 McPhee 1989, McPhee 2002, Lewis 1993, Heller 2006.
15 Peyrard and Vovelle 2002.
16 Jaurès 1922–4.
17 Suratteau 1979.
28 chapter 2

pensable point of reference.18 Even Furet expressed his admiration for Jaurès
in so far as the latter had conceived of the revolution as not simply a change in
the mode of production but a civilizational transformation.19 In the light of the
ongoing interest in Jaurès and renewal of interest in the Marxist perspective it
is a stroke of genius that Pluto Press has published an English abridgement of
the Histoire socialiste, which is both a great historical work and a literary mas-
terwork.20
Jaurès was born in 1859 in the Midi in the small city of Castres into a
bourgeois family in decline. Young Jean experienced real deprivation as the
son of a father who failed as a would-be manufacturer and merchant and
was forced to earn his living as a peasant working a fifteen acre farm. On the
other hand, Jean had the good fortune to have as his uncle Benjamin Jaurès,
an admiral and minister of the navy (1889). Louis, Jean’s brother, later became
an admiral himself and eventually a republican-socialist deputy. Meanwhile
Jean’s precocious intellect quickly made itself evident in the collège of Castres,
where he received a thorough grounding in the classics. He was rewarded for
his diligence and brilliance with admission first to the prestigious Lycée Louis-
Le-Grand and then to the École des hautes études, where he came first in
the entry exams ahead of the celebrated Henri Bergson. Having majored in
philosophy he returned to the Midi where he taught first at a lycée in Albi and
then became a lecturer at the University of Toulouse. There he made himself
known as a critic of avant-garde literature for a local radical newspaper La
Dépêche.21 In 1885 at the age of 25 he was elected to the National Assembly,
partly with the help of his uncle. He sat with the Republicans, associating
himself with Jules Ferry and other opponents of clerical influence. Having lost
his seat in the election of 1889 he returned to teaching at the University of
Toulouse, where he received his doctorate in philosophy. His complementary
thesis was on the origins of German socialism, which he purported to find in
Luther, Kant, Fichte and Hegel. He had already begun to read seriously about
socialism, familiarising himself with the first volume of Marx’s Capital.22 In 1891
he could affirm that as a left republican he was loyal to both republicanism
because it affirmed the rights of man and to socialism because its goal was to
submit property to the rights of man.23

18 Jaurès 1967–73.
19 Prochasson 2011.
20 Jaurès 2015.
21 Rebérieux 1994, pp. 31–8.
22 Rebérieux 1994, p. 52.
23 Rebérieux 1994, p. 48.
jaurès 29

His involvement in the bitter strike of the miners of Carmaux the next year
moved him definitively into the socialist camp. The strike was occasioned by
the dismissal of an employee, Jean-Baptiste Calivignac, by a local mining com-
pany because of his election as the socialist mayor of Carmaux. The miners con-
sidered this dismissal an attack on the right of the workers to take part in polit-
ics and the principle of universal suffrage. As the strike continued the President
of the Republic Sadi Carnot, head of a government racked by scandal, nonethe-
less saw fit to send the army against the strikers to defend the principle of the
right to work. In newspaper articles defending the workers Jaurès accused the
government of across-the-board siding with industrialists and bankers at the
expense of citizens. The government was forced to back down while Jaurès, who
proclaimed his conversion to socialism, was rewarded by being elected to par-
liament as an independent socialist.24 But then his principled stand in defend-
ing Dreyfus the bourgeois and Jew – something that many on the extreme
left and peasants and workers rejected – cost him his seat in the election of
1898. Jaurès then became co-editor of La Petite République, a republican and
Dreyfusard journal, sustaining the moderate socialist Alexandre Millerand in
joining the cabinet of Republican Defence of Waldeck-Rousseau.25 Lenin later
would characterise Millerand’s action as the first application on a nationwide
basis of the disastrous movement to socialist revisionism. But faced with the
threat to democracy from the right led by the army and Church during the Drey-
fus Affair, Jaurès advocated collaboration with the Radical Party or the liberal
and democratic bourgeoisie. He also believed that such an alliance permitted
reforms which, if no substitute for revolution, strengthened the working-class
movement and a necessary unity with the peasants and petty bourgeoisie. The
Republic more and more depended on proletarian democracy, around which
the peasants and petty bourgeoisie were being forced to cluster. The develop-
ment of socialism would follow as proletarian democracy became the main
political force in the Republic.26
In 1902 Jaurès was re-elected to the National Assembly and helped to pass the
anti-clerical laws in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. In assuming this position of
cooperation with the radical bourgeoisie, Jaurès came into conflict with critics
on the left – anarchists, Guesdist Marxists and Syndicalists – who argued that
the new society could not be prepared within the framework of the old.27 But

24 Rebériuex 1994, pp. 55–6.

25 Stuart 1992, pp. 52–3.
26 Gilles 2011, p. 32.
27 Engelman 1973, p. 198.
30 chapter 2

from Jaurès’s perspective the goal of the Paris Commune, the prime example of
a revolutionary workers government, could only have been the establishment
of such a democratic republic. Moreover he argued that the struggle of the
left since 1871 had been a political struggle toward the same end. By the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, France had become a republican state and the
struggle for socialism had to be defined in these terms. Only by assuming lead-
ership over the democratic republic could the socialists unite the peasants and
petty bourgeoisie under their leadership and move toward socialism.28 Non-
etheless, in order to become leader of the unified socialist movement or Section
française de l’Internationale ouvrière (sfio) [1905] Jaurès had to back away at
least tactically from what seemed to be reformist positions. An engaged and
impassioned politician of the left, Jaurès spent his last years seeking to con-
solidate the unity of the factionalised left while fighting ultra-nationalism and
social reaction.
The Histoire socialiste emerged from this context of struggle for a demo-
cratic republic. It was the democratic republic in Jaurès’s view which provided
the framework for tying together the peasants, petty bourgeoisie and workers
through the consolidation of the socialist party. It was Jaurès’s object to show
that the roots of this ongoing movement toward socialism lay in the French
Revolution. Publishing the Histoire Socialiste de la Révolution Française (1901–
7) meant for Jaurès to educate politically the party faithful and proletariat and
help to unify the still divided leaders of the socialist movement in their his-
toric role. Jaurès brought to the task his gifts as an academic and literary critic
as well as his long years of practical involvement in political and social struggle.
During the 1890s he had begun serious research on the project. He read all the
main histories of the nineteenth century – Lamartine, Thiers, Buchez and Roux,
Toqueville, Michelet and Taine – while familiarising himself with the increas-
ingly specialised research of the new century, including the works of Alphonse
Aulard. More importantly he immersed himself in the primary sources found in
the library of the Chamber of Deputies, Bibliothèque Nationale, Carnavelet and
Archives Nationales. Jaurès envisaged his work as part of a broader project on
the history of socialism embracing the nineteenth century, which would draw
in intellectual collaborators from the various currents of the socialist move-
ment including the Guedists, Allemanists and Blanquists. His aim was to use
this collaboration as a way of facilitating the unification of the socialist move-
ment. In this he was only partially successful.29

28 Labrousse 1967, pp. 10–11.

29 Rebérieux 1967, p. 36.
jaurès 31

The inclusion of the word socialist in the title, which took more positivist
historians aback, announced the work’s purpose. According to Jaurès it was
meant in the first place to educate the workers and peasants. Given the price
of the volumes it is doubtful that it could do so directly. Rather its view was
diffused over many years through the influence of socialist instituteurs whose
influence on their charges is well known. Furthermore its intent was to show
that the French Revolution was based on the people and thereby announced
not merely the establishment of political democracy but the eventual estab-
lishment of a socialist and democratic republic.30 This position contrasted
with the Guesdists, who asserted that socialism could not be established on
the basis of bourgeois institutions but only as a result of a revolution against
them. Jaurès’s revisionism expressed itself through his apparent rejection of
the necessity of a revolutionary break. The republic was founded in revolution
and the future of socialism in France depended on the development of a deep-
ening republican democracy. At the same time in his narrative Jaurès made
clear that the revolution took place under the auspices of the bourgeoisie: ‘the
French Revolution indirectly prepared the way for the rule of the proletariat. It
created the two indispensable conditions of socialism: democracy and capital-
ism. But fundamentally it represented the advent of bourgeois rule’.31 Acknow-
ledging the role of the workers in the revolution, he nonetheless underscored
that the working class remained dependent on bourgeois leadership. On the
other hand, the people en masse already played an indispensable role, opening
the way to a future socialism based on economic abundance and a deepening
democracy.32 This view is already manifest in his narrative of the revolution in
which there is a clear progression from 1789 until 1794. At the beginning of the
revolution the people are clearly subordinated within the Third Estate and see
the nobility as the common enemy. But as the revolution unfolds the people
more and more come to a consciousness that the bourgeoisie are its enemy
as well. Indeed, through thinkers like Sylvain Maréchal and Gracchus Babeuf
they come to understand that the workers have an interest which is opposed
to those who control property and means of production. But such views can
hardly directly influence the course of the revolution. They can however pre-
pare the future, as the great upheavals of the revolution contain the seeds of
future democratic and socialist development.

30 Labrousse 1967, p. 15.

31 Jaurès 1967–73, vol. 1, p. 63.
32 Antonini 2004, pp. 119, 135.
32 chapter 2

In terms of research Jaurès fully absorbed the philological lessons of the

increasingly influential positivist history that was consolidating itself in the
French universities at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Histoire
socialiste is both an epic and dramatic narrative that is unapologetically par-
tisan in the style of the nineteenth century and a materialist history founded
on deep erudition, study of the primary sources and critical analysis. The devel-
opment of a critical and historical methodology was by no means apolitical.
It was based on the aspirations of a new generation of academics to create a
scientific historical methodology which could establish the case for the demo-
cratic republic in the struggle against political and clerical reaction at the
time of the Dreyfus Affair. It created a standard for judging the past that was
designed to undercut clerical and chauvinist myths and to intellectually rein-
force the struggle for a democratic and secular republic.33 But in Jaures’s hands
this technique became an instrument for comprehending the significance of
the events of the revolution in terms of their meaning not simply for the present
struggle for the Republic but in terms of their potential in building a socialist
future.34
The Histoire socialiste begins with an overview of the Old Regime as it
approached its crisis. It continues through the overthrow of the old order, the
establishment of the Legislative Assembly and the period of the Convention,
coming to a conclusion with the fall of the radical republic at Thermidor.
Lacombe noted with admiration the sense of coherence and continuity that
Jaurès was able to give his monumental work. He associated this quality with
Jaurès’s capacity to bring apparently disparate events and currents into order
through his oratorical powers.35 In explaining the revolution Michelet had
placed the stress on the misery of the people. According to him, the upheaval
was the result of fiscal oppression from above which reached a breaking point.
Michelet especially emphasised the role of a regressive system of taxation,
which exempted the privileged and ground down the people. Taine echoed
Michelet in this respect although he also drew attention to signs of economic
growth. Jaurès broke new ground in singling out the rise of the bourgeoisie as
the fundamental cause of the revolution. Of course there was misery, Jaurès
acknowledged. But what is striking in the eighteenth century is the growing
economic strength and confidence of the bourgeoisie.36 The revolution, he

33 Rebérioux 1976, p. 429.

34 Antonini 2004, pp. 120–1.
35 Lacombe 1908, p. 168.
36 Labrousse 1967, p. 23.
jaurès 33

was able to document in detail, was a revolution of hope more than misery.
Moreover, this advance of the bourgeoisie was registered in both town and
countryside and included a stratum of well-to-do peasants. On the growing
prosperity of the latter Jaurès pioneered in demonstrating the increasing value
of the net product of agriculture in relation to rent. This analysis of the rural
economy demonstrated his ability to explain complicated economic matters in
a simple and clear style throughout his narrative. Jaurès was able to engage the
reader in understanding complicated economic questions as well as political
crises. In stressing the ascent of the bourgeoisie, Jaurès perhaps exaggerated
the decline of the nobility. Modern research reveals that the fortunes of some
lesser nobles declined, but overall the nobility more than held their own based
on increasing rents.37
While the transformation in the countryside was of great importance the
catalyst for the revolution came from the towns. The urban world of the petty
bourgeoisie and the working class was closed to Jaurès at the time that he wrote
and would have to wait for the result of the researches of Soboul and others.
Jaurès’s focus was rather on the increasingly wealthy and confident urban bour-
geoisie of Paris and the other main cities. He begins with the elite of the world
of finance and commerce and is particularly aware of the expansion of overseas
commerce and especially of the colonial trade, singling out the progress of port
towns like Bordeaux, Marseilles and Nantes. The bourgeoisie of these urban
centres was marked not only by their wealth but by their increasing political
and cultural maturity. The development of mining, metallurgy, textile manu-
facturing and construction is taken into account. The launching of a series of
impressive real estate projects like the Palais Royale is noted.38 Stressing the
growing economic strength of the bourgeoisie, he was unaware of the success-
ive economic crises and grain shortages that marked the century, as well as of
the deterioration of the wages of workers; factors which are important to mod-
ern interpretations.39 In Jaurès’s account the revolution comes at the end of the
eighteenth century because the bourgeoisie reaches intellectual and social as
well as economic maturity. At the same time the bourgeoisie needed the sup-
port of working people and peasantry whose political consciousness was less
formed.40 While France is the focal point of the narrative, Jaurès finds space at
the end of his account of the decisive year 1792 to provide the reader with a vast

37 Labrousse 1967, pp. 17–19.

38 Labrousse 1967, pp. 20–1.
39 Labrousse 1967, pp. 21–2.
40 Labrousse 1967, pp. 23–4.
34 chapter 2

panorama of the effects of the revolution on Germany, Switzerland and Eng-

land.41 Based on his internationalism he escapes the chauvinism with respect
to Germany so typical of his times by providing a sympathetic treatment of
that country.42 Jaurès’s analysis of the crucially important colonial and slavery
question is particularly incisive.43
In Jaurès collective forces dominate the course of the revolution, but to
what degree they determine immediate events is open to question. As Jaurès
represents it, in matters political nothing is decided in advance. The collective
forces only create certain probabilities and more in the long than in the short
term. In the short term the individual plays an important role. Accordingly
human will, moral force and intelligence can affect the outcome of events.44
This view emerges from Jaurès’s own experience of politics, his study of the
revolution as well as his reading of the ancients. Plutarch’s Lives particularly
affected his own view of political action. Political figures need to be understood
within the context of their times. Indeed the dominant political figures are such
because they are most characteristically products of their times.45 Mirabeau,
Necker, Barnave, Vergniaud, Danton and Robespierre, who figure largely in
the narrative of the revolution, were all men of the hour and their decisions
mattered. More often than not Jaurès is able to penetrate to the psychological
core of such figures. During key events such as the overthrow of the monarchy
or during the struggle between the Girondins and Jacobins the actions of
individuals are seen as important to the outcome.46 Jaurès not only highlights
these individuals in context, he undertakes to judge both them and the morality
of their behaviour. His judgment achieves a certain impartiality despite his own
political commitments. He advances his own view but only in the course of
taking seriously and debating the views of others.47
Despite his attention to political leaders it is class above all which is histor-
ically determinative. It is the mediator between the economy and ideology. It
shapes the individual, including his manner of living and his feelings.48 At the
same time he offers his judgement of particular events, collective attitudes and
political responsibilities. Once again his parliamentary experience serves him

41 Rebérioux 1967, p. 434.

42 Guillet 2010, pp. 188–90.
43 Rebérioux 1967, pp. 44–5.
44 Labrousse 1967, p. 25.
45 Jaurès 1967–73, vol. 1, p. 68.
46 Labrousse 1967, pp. 25–6.
47 Lacombe 1908, p. 171.
48 Labrousse 1967, p. 29.
jaurès 35

well. The Gironde was revolutionary in terms of its ends but not in its tactics,
which became counter-revolutionary. It is the Jacobins, who based themselves
on Paris and the unity of France, that embodied the hope of the revolution.
He expresses disgust at the September Massacres and while he considered the
Terror a regrettable necessity he thought the Law of Priairial which permitted
an acceleration of the Terror atrocious and inefficacious. He condemns revolu-
tions by conspiratorial minorities in the tradition of Blanqui or for that matter
Babeuf. Among the Jacobins he sides with Robespierre rather than Cambon
or Carnot. The latter were administrators while Robespierre was a far-sighted
political leader. Historians from Michelet to Aulard had condemned Robes-
pierre as a tyrant and bigot. Jaurès treated him as a hero, a true reflection of
popular attitudes and a product of the times.49 At the same time he condemns
him for his bloodthirsty attitude at the time of the September Massacres. Like-
wise he shows little patience for the demagogy of Marat.
As we have seen, the Marxist interpretation of the revolution initiated by
Jaurès has been rejected by the French revolutionary revisionists. But Jaurès’s
interpretation and its subsequent influence on Marxist historiography has also
been attacked from the left. In the 1960s Daniel Guérin published La Lutte
de classes sous la première république, 1793–97, which argued that the French
Revolution already witnessed the mobilisation of a class conscious proletariat,
evident in the radical movement that ran from the Énrages, Hébertists to
Babeuf.50 Guérin asserted that while Jaurès acknowledged this in a grudging
way, he opposed the left in the revolution if it did not ultimately subordinate
itself to the bourgeois revolution. According to Jaurès, left extremism endan-
gered the bourgeois revolution necessary to the development of the forces of
production under capitalism and the institutionalisation of democracy with-
out which a socialist future was unthinkable. According to Guérin the principle
weakness of Jaures’s work lay

In its perpetual oscillation between the Marxist conception of the per-

manent revolution and the social-democratic conception of the bour-
geois revolution. From time to time he does perceive the embryo of the
proletarian revolution stirring in the flanks of the bourgeois revolution.
But too often he falls in with those who divide history into rigid peri-
ods and immobilize it in rigid categories. Having once pinned the label
bourgeois on the Grand Revolution he refuses to admit that the prolet-

49 Rebérioux 1967, p. 45.

50 Guérin 1968.
36 chapter 2

ariat entered into fateful struggle with the bourgeoisie in so far as the two
essential conditions for socialism and democracy had not been realized.51

In particular Guérin criticised his unconditional endorsement of the assignat

as a war measure even though it came at the expense of the mass of the popula-
tion in the form of inflation while the bourgeoisie were able to escape taxes. He
blamed Jaurès for endorsing the demagogic manipulation of the masses while
endorsing their suppression when they were mobilised by Jacques Roux and
the Hébertists.52 Protective of his hero Robespierre, Jaurès fails to acknowledge
the common bourgeois outlook of Robespierre and the opportunist Danton.53
Guérin’s critique of Jaurès and his Marxist followers excited much criticism,
especially from the professional historians who considered themselves heirs
to the legacy of Jaurès. Guérin was denounced for being schematic and not
sufficiently historical. Yet it has to be said that recent scholarship makes clear
that Guérin did not invent his criticisms out of thin air. They were rooted
in fundamental differences in the Marxist movement of the late nineteenth
century, which influenced the perspective of the Histoire socialiste and the
subsequent Marxist interpretation of the revolution. As we have seen, Jaurès
evolved toward socialism without breaking from the radical republican and
parliamentary tradition in which he was educated and to which he was deeply
attached. A socialism which entailed breaking from the fundamental institu-
tions of the republic was beyond his ken.54 The more so in that the political
fights of the fin de siècle entailed defending the republic against the immedi-
ate threat of military dictatorship and clerical reaction as well as against the
depredations of advancing capital. Even more decisively, Jaurès was convinced
that the assemblage of the coalition of workers, peasants and other petty bour-
geois into a unified French socialist party was only possible within the political
framework of the democratic republic. The Histoire socialiste was designed to
provide a historical justification for this strategy.
Following publication of the early volumes of Jaures’s work, Kautsky – later
Lenin’s infamous ‘renegade Kautsky’ – sharply criticised Jaures’s political revi-
sionism from the perspective of orthodox Marxism. Kautsky had long warned
against the pervasive influence of Jacobinism on French socialism.55 In other
words he warned against subordinating the politics of the working class to that

51 Guérin 1968, vol. 2, p. 412.

52 Guérin 1968, vol. 1, p. 130; vol. 2, p. 78.
53 Guérin 1968, vol. 1, p. 444.
54 Venturi 1966, pp. 6–7.
55 Nygaard 2009.
jaurès 37

of the radical bourgeoisie. Encouraged by French revolutionary Marxists led by

Guesde, Kautsky authored a short essay which was the first materialist account
of the French Revolution which emphasised class struggle and eschewed any
romanticism with respect to Robespierre and the Jacobins. Referring to the His-
toire socialiste, Kautsky then accused Jaurès of throwing the proletariat back to
the subordinate position it occupied during the French Revolution.
Writing in Die Neue Zeit in January 1903, Kautsky insisted that there were
two proletarian politics, one of which was autonomous and the other of which
sought to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie. According to Kaut-
sky, Jaurès was seeking to replace the class struggle by a return to the forms of
political thought of the French Revolution. His aspiration was to base socialism
on the Declaration of the Rights of Man rather than those of orthodox Marx-
ism.56 Kautsky’s view of Jaurès was echoed in France by the Guesdists, who
applauded Kautsky while clinging to a revolutionary Marxist position which
rejected compromise with the bourgeoisie and the illusions of the democratic
republic.57 Likely it was in response to these criticisms that in the introduction
to the published first volume Jaurès admitted that the revolution was after all a
bourgeois revolution and that the declaration of the rights of man even in the
Jacobin version of 1793 above all affirmed the right to property.58
The clearest view of this disagreement has been articulated by Neil David-
son, who has insisted that Marx rightly took the view that the roots of per-
manent revolution appeared during the revolution. The revolution must be
understood as having been both a bourgeois revolution and the beginning of
permanent revolution. For him the revolution was a great historical event and a
precedent for the proletarian revolution. It was an upheaval in which the bour-
geoisie undoubtedly assumed power, but also one in which the proletariat did
begin to mark out its own autonomous development and, indeed, opposition to
the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, Marx perspicaciously added that however
uncomfortable the bourgeoisie was made by the actions of the masses during
the revolution, the radicalism of the latter ultimately redounded to its benefit.
In future the fundamental need of the proletariat was to achieve an under-
standing of the independence of its interests from the bourgeoisie and to give
it political expression. This was Marx’s understanding of the idea of permanent
revolution.59

56 Ducange 2010, pp. 226, 228.

57 Stuart 1992, pp. 59, 222, 233.
58 Rebérioux 1967, pp. 46–7.
59 Davidson 2012, pp. 146–8.
38 chapter 2

In this light, Kautsky’s criticism, echoed by Guérin, amounts to saying that

Jaurès favoured the bourgeois revolution at the expense of the permanent
revolution. Moreover he did this in order to favour the politics of revisionism.
This was no small matter because it spelled out the difference between a revolu-
tionary and reformist politics.60 Furthermore his historiography shaped the
whole of the Marxist historiographic tradition on the revolution. Yet Jaurès’s
Histoire socialiste for all its reformism can still be seen as a work which can
inspire revolutionary change, something the world needs more than ever. It
is incontestable that, like Marx, Jaurès saw the Grand Revolution of the bour-
geoisie as a great example for the working class to follow. Contrary to Guérin,
moreover, Jaurès did not see the revolution as one piece, but one which could
see radicalisation or revolution within the revolution. Thus, he fully endorsed
the Jacobin coup against the Girondins based on the support of the sans-
culottes and, of course, championed the armed defence of the revolution.
Moreover, he fully approved the subsequent writing of a new and democratic
constitution by the Convention. This deepening of democracy was also import-
ant to the further development of class consciousness. It can be concluded
that the political perspective of the Histoire socialiste leaves room for mak-
ing a revolutionary rather than an evolutionary break from capitalism. This is
important in light of the wave of radicalism that has swept over much of Latin
America in which, echoing the revolution, armed defence of revolution and the
holding of constituent assemblies in Bolivia and Venezuela, for example, are
seen as revolutionary steps away from capitalism. Moreover, these unfolding
political crises must be seen as part of the ongoing capitalist crisis that marks
the new millennium in which further upheavals are in the offing.

60 Kurtz 2006, p. 273.

 chapter 3

Review of Guy Lemarchand, Paysans et seigneurs en

Europe*

It was in sixteenth-century England (and Holland) that capitalism first ap-

peared. Its origins were dealt with by Marx especially in Part Eight of Cap-
ital entitled ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation’.1 This discussion became the
foundation of Maurice Dobb’s celebrated Studies in the Development of Capit-
alism, which appeared just after World War Two.2 Dobb’s work gave rise to the
famous transition debate of the 1950s on the transition from feudalism to capit-
alism, involving Marxist luminaries such as Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Rodney Hilton
and Kohachiro Takahashi.3 Georges Lefebvre, who held the professorship on
the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, was the only French contributor. Lefe-
bvre acknowledged Dobb’s emphasis on the role of the petty producers to the
transition but, conscious of the long evolution of the Ancien Régime, insisted
on the importance of merchants and the state to the development of capit-
alism. Lefebvre underscored that the moment of transition from feudalism to
capitalism in France coincided with the revolution and that conflict between
petty producers and merchants was an intrinsic element in the revolutionary
process.4
Lefebvre was part of a line of distinguished French historians who held
to the Marxist view that the revolution was capitalist and bourgeois, a view
that gradually made itself dominant in France in the aftermath of the Russian
Revolution.5 Lefevbre’s interpretation, which came to the fore from the 1930s
onwards, was extended by his successor at the Sorbonne, Albert Soboul, whose
massive work on the revolutionary urban masses or sans-culottes of Paris was
published at the end of the 1950s.6 The Marxist interpretation of the revolu-

* Originally published as: Guy Lemarchand, Paysans et seigneurs en Europe: une histoire com-
parée, xvie–xixe siècle, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011.
1 Marx 1977, pp. 871–930.
2 Dobb 1946.
3 Hilton (ed.) 1976.
4 Lefebvre 1976, pp. 122–7.
5 Mazauric 2009.
6 Soboul 1958.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_004

40 chapter 3

tion was challenged from the 1970s onward by a revisionist trend whose most
important protagonist was François Furet.7 The revisionist view of the history
of the French Revolution was part of a broad reaction against Marxism in
scholarship, culture and politics that marked the neoliberal period. Revisionist
historiography was especially strong in the English-speaking countries but
never established itself as dominant in France despite the influence of Furet.
The Marxist interpretation in fact was convincingly reasserted by Soboul’s
successor in the Sorbonne chair, Michel Vovelle, who successfully incorporated
the quantitative and culturalist approaches of the Annales school into the
Marxist view as can be seen in a masterwork such as Religion et Révolution: la
déchristianisation de l’An ii.8
Likewise upholding the Marxist view in the closing years of the twentieth
century was Guy Lemarchand of the University of Rouen, who published La
fin du féodalisme dans le pays de Caux, a profoundly materialist analysis which
examined the roots of the crisis of feudalism in Normandy at the end of the
Ancien Régime.9 Lemarchand’s deep study of the contradictions of feudalism
which led to the revolution in the pays de Caux was published in 1989, the year
of the Bicentennial. In the face of revisionist challenges Lemarchand’s patient
and exhaustive investigation of the roots of the revolution in upper Normandy
coolly demonstrated once again how effective a Marxist approach to the study
of the revolution could be. A few years later Lemarchand followed up with an
analysis of the overall economic and social history of France during the period
1770 to 1830. Lemarchand convincingly showed that, despite continuities with
its rural and traditional past, France as a whole experienced a revolutionary
transition to bourgeois rule and the capitalist mode of production.10
The transition to capitalism continues to be an ongoing source of interest to
scholars.11 But so, too, does the nature of the feudal mode which was antecedent
to the rise of capitalism. Of particular interest is the question of whether
feudalism was in fact a mode of production unique to Europe or whether it was
common to different formations across Europe and Asia and perhaps might be
better understood as part of a more comprehensive mode of production which
includes other pre-capitalist formations.12 The question of the uniqueness of

7 Christofferson 2001.
8 Vovelle 1976.
9 Lemarchand 1989.
10 Lemarchand 2008.
11 Heller 2011.
12 Blackledge (ed.) 2011.
review of paysans et seigneurs en europe 41

European feudalism is directly connected to the transition to capitalism and

whether or not capitalism is a distinct product of modern European history –
an issue at the centre of contemporary debate on Eurocentrism.13
Lemarchand’s vast new work does not interest itself in either of these ques-
tions. Instead its focus is on the perpetuation of feudalism on the European
continent from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century – the
very period which in most historical accounts marks the ascent of capitalism.
Embracing the whole European continent from France to Russia, Lemarchand’s
work offers an immense comparative vista on the development of the feudal
system through the modern period. Starting his account with the consolidation
of the European states and the onset of economic and demographic stagnation
in the 1560s, Lemarchand sketches in succession the reconsolidation of feudal-
ism west of the Elbe and its extension to the East, the development of feudal
reaction in both its Western and East European forms during the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, the apogee of the system during the eighteenth
century and its subsequent demise (1789–1861).
Lemarchand’s account of the French Revolution in the pays de Caux was dis-
tinctive for its emphasis not so much on the rise of a new class or mode of
production but on the revolution as a crisis of the feudal mode. It was based
on an analysis of the evolution of feudalism’s essential structures from the sev-
enteenth century onwards. His new work, which begins in the late sixteenth
century, allows us to see that his previous locally-based research unfolded in
the light of an ongoing and wider investigation comparing the development of
feudalism in states across the whole of the European continent. In this monu-
mental account, with its highly developed scholarship on the Ancien Régime,
France continues to hold pride of place. But Lemarchand draws on extensive
monographic research for the whole of Europe including Russia for this new
account. Of course, he recognises that the second serfdom in Central and East-
ern Europe fundamentally distinguishes that area from Western Europe. On
the other hand, one of the themes of Lemarchand’s book is the similarity of the
feudal regime across Europe based on the common foundation of the class-rule
of the nobility, the institution of the seigneurie [lordship] and the absolutist
state.
For Lemarchand, feudalism is a mode of production based on the seigneurie,
the landlord nobility and the peasant producers. But its historical and geo-
graphical complexity in the modern period cannot be understood without
taking into account its superstructure. This includes not merely the state but

13 Heller 2011, pp. 215–39.

42 chapter 3

also the ideological representations of society and nature produced under

the auspices of the ruling class, which he considers integral to the domin-
ant mode of production rather than mere reflections of it. Lemarchand even
echoes Althusser, noting that a mode of production is a real abstraction and
that the real and concrete manifest themselves in a social formation which
may embody different modes of production at the same time. Yet his under-
standing of feudalism (pp. 12–13) – i.e., the primacy of agriculture of limited
productivity, involvement of the largest part of the population in this sector,
production for use with limited marketable surpluses, appropriation of one
part of the surplus by extra-economic means by a small juridically-defined
minority, appropriation of another part to maintain an administrative appar-
atus considered essential by this minority, social consensus maintained by an
ideology based on religion – puts the stress on the relationship between mode
of production and its means of production. I would emphasise a forces-of-
production approach which gives somewhat more emphasis to class relations,
which are partly determined by the forces of production and partly determin-
ing of them. In any case, the overall evolution of the system across the centuries
and its eventual decline was based on three main contradictions, i.e., the con-
flict between the forces and relations of production, the increasing influence
of the market which undermined the subsistence economy, and conflicts over
the appropriation of rent or taxes (p. 14).

Early Modern Feudalism

Lemarchand begins with an overview of the seigneurie, the peasants, nobility,

the state and the city in the mid-sixteenth century. The seigneurie consisted
of landed rents and social and legal rights over those peasants who were part
of its jurisdiction. Although damaged by the late medieval crisis which in
the West had led to the freeing of the peasants, the seigneurie survived into
the sixteenth century and in many places grew stronger (pp. 98–9). It was
present everywhere although there was still much allodial land, especially in
central and southern Europe. In the West serfdom continued to decline while
it began to make inroads on the seigneuries in Eastern Europe for the first time.
In southeast England and northern France, especially in the Île-de-France,
rich farmers began to accumulate a certain amount of capital. Still, economic
life throughout the continent was based mainly on an exploited peasantry of
mediocre condition. The village community was at its height in the sixteenth
century with its independence being greatest in southern Europe and least
evident in Russia, with the spread of the mir instituted by the state and firmly
review of paysans et seigneurs en europe 43

under the control of an emerging service nobility. The extent of common lands
in Europe was indirectly proportional to the density of population and fertility
of the soil in any given region.
In northwest and central Europe part of the nobility had roots that dated
back to the thirteenth century or earlier. In contrast this group was virtu-
ally extinct in northern Italy and a new nobility with strong ties to the cities
emerged there. West Germany, Castile, Poland and Hungary had dispropor-
tionally large nobilities. Everywhere the great aristocratic families tied to the
increasingly powerful princely courts distinguished themselves from the rest
of the nobility below them. A service nobility with legal, administrative and
fiscal experience became increasingly important in Spain and France. Most of
the nobility had relatively modest resources and struggled to live honourably
according to their status. Their situation improved along with the rest of the
landed class as a result of rising rents in the sixteenth century. The towns had a
juridical status as part of the feudal system and they themselves had a certain
juridical role.
Lemarchand concludes this opening discussion by an evaluation of the
classic historiographic distinction between Grundherrschaft or the seigneurie
based on free tenant producers in the West and Gutsherrschaft based on the
large domain worked by corvées of serf labour in the East. Recent research
confirms this difference while stressing that it only fully emerged in the sev-
enteenth century while also pointing out that most of the peasants in the West
were also increasingly hard-up and that the income derived from the seigneurie
in that part of Europe continued to be more important than previously believed
(pp. 97–100). Gutsherrschaft was not quite as stagnant as once thought, devel-
oping in the first place as a result of the constant devolution of royal powers in
Poland, Russia and Hapsburg territories onto the great nobles whose support
was needed owing to the incessant wars in the region. On the Iberian Peninsula
and in the south of Italy large estates exploited directly by landlords, farmed out
to sub-contractors, or let out to sharecroppers became the pattern (pp. 101–5).

Feudalism and the Absolutist State

The second and largest part of Lemarchand’s opus deals with the period be-
tween 1550 and 1720, focusing on the feudalisation or refeudalisation of the
land. The epoch was marked by wars and economic and demographic regres-
sion which were more pronounced in Central and Eastern Europe than in the
West. Especially after 1620 and for the next one hundred years the overall eco-
nomic and demographic conjuncture was negative. Faced with these troubles,
44 chapter 3

the elites responded with social and political reaction, especially through the
growing power of the state. The frequent wars between the European powers
encouraged what has been called the military revolution in the form of more
sophisticated weapons and fortifications and larger armies and navies. The
rural population paid the price in the form of the devastation of the coun-
tryside and heavy taxation.
Lemarchand agrees that the regression of Eastern Europe and Poland toward
serfdom and colonial status was affected by the increasingly unequal exchanges
between the capitalist periphery and core as emphasised by Immanuel Wall-
erstein. But Lemarchand argues that Robert Brenner has the better argument
in stressing the internal evolution of these Eastern European regimes as the
primary factor for this deteriorating situation. He gives some credence to the
argument linking the development of serfdom in the East to low population
density. The mobility of the population and the abundance of rich soils in East-
ern Europe led lords to tie down the population by imposing serfdom. Limited
agricultural output restricted the availability of capital and led to local mer-
chants and manufacturers being overwhelmed by more powerful merchants
from the West (pp. 207–8). But the author questions Brenner’s insistence that
the imposition of serfdom was the result of the weakness of the village com-
munities and their inability to resist the landlords. Moreover, Brenner’s further
contention that the possibilities of class struggle were reduced is not proven
(pp. 122–4, 209). Parallel conditions existed in the states close to the Medi-
terranean which might have led to the imposition of serfdom. But the higher
degree of urbanisation and commercial activity there and the threat of Turkish
invasion blocked such an evolution (pp. 210–11).
The nobility’s numbers increased during the seventeenth century while their
landed revenues held up at least until the second half of the century. The
survival and prosperity of this class depended increasingly on the largesse of
the state. While the great families and the service nobilities who served the
court prospered, the condition of the lesser nobility deteriorated in the course
of the century, especially as they were mainly excluded from the magic circle
of the princely court. Where they could they entered the service of the great
nobles as clients, became the rank-and-file of aristocratic political intrigues,
or even the leaders of popular revolts. Overall they troubled the peace with
their violence, banditry and duels. Even an increasingly powerful monarchy
like France suffered from the effects of noble violence through the first part
of the seventeenth century, especially in the Midi. The lesser nobles especially
resented the success of the service nobles who in France and Spain more often
than not bought their office. Those traditional nobles who could began likewise
to buy offices, especially those which brought them close to the prince, or tried
review of paysans et seigneurs en europe 45

to inter-marry with the offspring of the new nobility. Such patterns are evident
not merely in France and Spain but even in states like Bavaria, Denmark or
the Kingdom of Naples. By the second half of the century there were signs of
the weakening of the seigneuries as a result of declining revenue, inordinate
expenditure or partible inheritance (p. 156).
In the face of upper-class reaction the situation of the peasantry worsened.
Increases in rent were coupled with crushing taxation. The weight of these bur-
dens was made heavier by stagnant agricultural prices, growing indebtedness,
epidemics and violence. Landlords attacked the communal rights of the peas-
ants and a growing polarisation between better-off and impoverished peas-
ants became evident everywhere. The landless or virtually landless proletariat
increased in size while the length of landlord leases shortened. These devel-
opments and the growing penetration of market forces promoted the emer-
gence of agrarian individualism and the weakening of the village community.
Such trends were by no means confined to capitalist England as is commonly
believed. A wealthy peasantry became evident in France, Spain and Italy which
combined productive, commercial and usurious activities to different degrees
depending on the opportunities available within the constraints of the feudal
mode (p. 161). Contrariwise Eastern Europe saw the imposition of a compre-
hensive system of serfdom comparable to that prevalent in the West during
the middle ages.
These trends exacerbated the contradictions of the feudal system. Increases
in rents and taxes induced economic stagnation or even regression as surpluses
were not re-invested but spent on war and consumption. Increased exploita-
tion of the rural population and blockage of economic growth resulted in the
intensification of class conflict between peasants and landlords. In this situ-
ation the mentality of the nobility and princes looked to the past. They tended
to idealise a stability based on the maintenance of an immobile and static
order founded on a hierarchy in which each kept his place. Their aspiration
was towards the perfection of feudalism (p. 171).
In short the ruling class aimed at preserving the seigneurie as the basis of
its continued control over landed property and supremacy over the rest of
society. The substitution of the term ‘absolutist’ for ‘absolute’ monarchy in
recent historical scholarship reflects a recognition that the state of the early
modern period was far from an autonomous body. Rather, the nobility largely
succeeded in making it serve its class interest and in particular the project of
re-feudalising or feudalising society. It is true that in the seventeenth century
the practice of the ennoblement of the highest strata of the third estate by the
monarchies prevalent in the sixteenth century continued despite vociferous
opposition from the nobility. But in response to these outcries over the course
46 chapter 3

of the seventeenth century French, Spanish and even Italian princes limited
the number of the bourgeoisie able to ascend to higher status, reinforced
the privileges of the nobility, and more and more supported its caste-like
pretensions. At the same time a seigneurial reaction on the land saw landlords
make new demands or revive old ones.
As part of this trend Lemarchand notes that ‘the Catholic or Lutheran clergy,
the former re-invigorated by the Counter-Reformation, likewise nourished it-
self by cultivating traditionalism’ (p. 171). However, Lemarchand might have
pointed out that this insistence on religious tradition in fact represented some-
thing new, i.e., an active policy of confessionalisation whose purpose was to
more closely control the population through religious ideology. It was strongly
supported by the absolutist state under whose auspices these established reli-
gions operated. Indeed, Lemarchand’s failure to discuss more fully the ideo-
logical aspects of early modern feudalism is disappointing since he considers
ideology an integral feature of the feudal mode. Here and there there are refer-
ences to the contending political beliefs of the established or new nobles and
their respective views of the proper relationship between the second estate
and the monarchy, but these issues are scarcely developed (pp. 152–3, 155, 185,
188).
In the face of this seigneurial reaction Lemarchand demonstrates that peas-
ant resistance across Europe was widespread. According to the anti-Marxist
view championed by the school of Roland Mousnier, despite the frequency and
scope of rural revolts in the seventeenth century they were not directed against
the society of orders headed by the nobility but directed against taxation by the
state.14 Lemarchand shows on the basis of more recent research that the root
of such protests lay in the villages and seigneuries and included not only tax
revolts, but also subsistence riots and challenges to the incursions of the land-
lords on communal lands and rights. A veritable habitus of revolt, he points out,
took hold in the French countryside which was to have lasting consequences
(p. 198). Outside of France a similar pattern of resistance developed, although
research on such revolts elsewhere is less well-developed. The motivations of
peasant rebellions everywhere were quite similar but religion seems to have
played little role in the case of France. State authority consistently intervened
to put down rural resistance in order to protect its own fiscal power or to back
the nobility. On the other hand, the threat of rebellion by the rural population
seems to have mitigated to some extent demands for still more rent or taxation.

14 Mousnier 1967.
review of paysans et seigneurs en europe 47

Apogee and Decline of Feudalism

The third and last part of Lemarchand’s opus covers the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries and deals with the apogee and decline of the feudal system.
Following an economic recovery which set in between 1720 and 1740 thanks to
a reversal in the economic and demographic conjuncture, economic growth
increased more or less everywhere in Europe, the seigneurie appeared to have
recovered its economic strength, and the nobility seemed everywhere unri-
valled. In the face of this situation, explaining the collapse of feudalism requires
taking into account the subjective factor and especially paying attention to the
advent of the new and influential ideology of liberalism and the rising rate of
literacy among the lower classes. Above all it is necessary to dig deeper into the
structure of European feudalism at the local, national and international level to
understand its crisis. The essential problem is to understand why an apparently
stable and prosperous order more or less rapidly fell apart.
As everyone knows, the role of the market increased immensely in the
eighteenth century and the first signs of the operation of the law of value
were evident in international trade from the beginning of the new century.
Lemarchand considers the increase in the money supply as a result of the
availability of more gold and silver and the printing of money to have been
important to the prosperity of the new century, but he fails to explain why
this was so in other than monetarist terms. Agricultural prices and rents rose
especially after the middle of the eighteenth century while real wages declined.
Population increased as did the growth of rural industry in Western Europe, but
also now in Eastern Europe as well. Contrary to the view that feudalism was
synonymous with economic stagnation, growth was both real and important
in the eighteenth century (p. 244). One might add that the economy of Ancien
Régime France in its last century out-performed that of capitalist England
in certain aspects. The expansion of the colonial trade and the export not
only of manufactures but also food to the Caribbean and Latin America was
particularly notable.
Economic growth certainly led to an increase in the wealth and diversity of
the bourgeoisie. Despite this the nobility kept and even consolidated its posi-
tion. Its income, much of which still came from the seigneurie, exceeded that of
its bourgeois rivals by a considerable margin and its control over offices in the
state increased. The nobility of the sword and the service nobility strengthened
their hand by largely amalgamating. In France the nobility’s opening to the
financial bourgeoisie and growing involvement in business improved its pos-
ition. Despite this apparent supremacy the nobility’s actual power eroded, as
its numbers declined both absolutely and relatively. The biological extinction
48 chapter 3

of families, further mortality due to war, the decline of many of the impover-
ished petty nobility to commoner status, the closing of the ranks of the nobility
to wealthy upstarts from below and the dramatic expansion of the non-noble
population played their part. The political and social danger of such a decline in
numbers was obscured by the seigneurial reaction which intensified (pp. 261–
2).
In France the eighteenth century saw the strengthening of a rural bour-
geoisie which was most evident in the Île-de-France but visible elsewhere as
well. Also manifest is a growing popular impatience with what were increas-
ingly regarded as the archaic and unjust constraints of the seigneurial order.
This was all the more the case as the horizons of the rural population widened
as a result of growing education and literacy (p. 250). Respect for the hier-
archical order of society declined on what seemed a day-to-day basis amid
increasing reports of peasant insolence toward authority. The number of anti-
seigneurial revolts rose dramatically as the revolution approached (pp. 266,
270–1). This was in part a response to the renewed seigneurial reaction of the
second half of the eighteenth century. In the past incursions by the nobles
on peasant land and communal rights had been limited by the monarchy’s
paternalism. These protective policies were abandoned by the state in favour
of encouraging a liberal agrarian individualism of which the nobility took
increasing advantage. The number of landless or nearly landless peasants grew
(pp. 275–7).
The acuteness of the crisis in France proved unique. The novelty in Central
and Eastern Europe was the appearance of an enlightened absolutism which,
among other progressive steps, attempted to improve agriculture. Lip-service
was given to the idea that serfdom was an evil and certain timid reforms were
attempted. These went furthest in the Habsburg lands but were aborted faced
with the French Revolution and growing noble resistance. The dependence of
the monarchies on their nobilities if anything increased, as did the burdens
on the peasantry. The number of the landless and the growth of rural industry
in Central and Eastern Europe was noteworthy. Parallel to the trend in France,
failure on the part of government to ameliorate the lot of the peasants and the
outbreak of subsistence crises led to large-scale peasant uprisings especially in
Russia, but also in Croatia, Bohemia, Galicia, Transylvania and Saxony (pp. 308–
10).
The abolition of feudalism came from revolution from below in France
and from revolution from above in other places such as Prussia. Lemarchand
attempts to nuance this model of revolution inherited from Lenin by pointing
out that in many cases a third force – the invading French army – brought
about the demise of the system. In fact in many places the liquidation of
review of paysans et seigneurs en europe 49

feudalism was only partial and redemption payments were more the rule than
the exception. Furthermore in the period of reaction which followed the fall of
Napoleon efforts were made to reverse the process. The continuing weakness
of the bourgeoisie in Central and Eastern Europe reinforced this reaction.
The revolutions of 1848 were decisive to the destruction of Central European
feudalism. The liberation of the serfs had to wait until 1861 in the Russian
Empire. Lemarchand points out, however, that the dissolution of the feudal
system, while it destroyed the seigneurie, did not bring land reform in the form
of serious redistribution of the land from the landlords to the have-nots in
France or anywhere else (p. 351).

Feudalism and Uneven Development

Immense achievement though it is, Lemarchand’s synthesis fails to locate this

perduring feudal mode of production within the historic context of the overall
evolution of modern history. It was capitalism that was the transformative
element from the sixteenth century onwards, but the relationship between the
development of this newer mode of production and the older feudal mode over
four centuries is not articulated by the author. Lemarchand earlier noted that
feudalism evolved as a result of class conflict as well as the conflict between the
forces and relations of production. Furthermore, in the course of the work he
especially points to the social differentiation of the peasants, the emergence of
a rural bourgeoisie and the growing influence of the bourgeoisie as leading to a
crisis in the mode of production. At the end of the work he underscores that the
unprecedented ascent of capitalism in the eighteenth century put the system in
question (p. 328). But there is no systematic study of the impact of the evolution
of capitalism on feudal relations of production over the whole period. There is
no discussion of the link between this system and the feudalism of the middle
ages or how it differed from it. The case of England is dealt with by viewing it as
the great exception. According to Lemarchand, the latter country was marked
by the development of capitalism from the sixteenth century onward with the
initiative coming from the landlords, who were consequently too divided to
defend their interests as a class. This development was capped by a political
revolution against absolutism in the seventeenth century (pp. 200–5). Once
again, how this innovative English capitalism might have affected the rest of
Europe is not explored.
Lemarchand’s failure to explain the relationship between the reconsolida-
tion of feudalism in the late sixteenth century, the late medieval crisis and the
spectacular revival of Europe in the Renaissance is especially notable. What
50 chapter 3

relationship was there between the feudal revival after 1560 and the earlier
spectacular innovations that occurred during the Italian Renaissance, the over-
seas discoveries, the crisis of the Reformation and the rise of financial and
trading centres like Genoa, Augsburg, Lyons and Antwerp? It is the birth of
capitalism that these advances have in common, a capitalism rooted in the
first place in the creation of value on the farms of the Po Valley, in the mines
of Germany and Hungary and on the newly enclosed farms of southeast Eng-
land based on transformed capitalist relations of production. But this emerging
capitalism was also founded on the generalised production of commodities
especially in proto-industrial manufacturing – which established itself in the
towns and countryside of England as well as in the Netherlands, Italy, France
and Germany – in which wage labour played a central role. This new capital-
ist system was by no means limited to new productive relations but entailed
the simultaneous expansion of markets. Much of this new commodity produc-
tion including the production of gold and silver was aimed at realising itself
in the emerging world market, whose inherent tendency was toward indefin-
ite expansion to Africa, America and Asia. Moreover, the financial profits from
these ventures were being concentrated in centres like Genoa, Augsburg, Ant-
werp, Lyons and London not simply as money but as money capital which was
available for re-investment. Capitalism had appeared as a totality defined as
value capable of indefinite self-expansion through a repeated and widening cir-
cuit of production, sale of commodities in the market and realisation as capital
in the money-form.
The question is what is the relationship between this capitalism of the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth century and Lemarchand’s revived feudalism? Part
of the answer is to be found in the concept of uneven development. It was
Eric Hobsbawm who first applied the conception of uneven development to
the historical development of capitalism. He did so as his contribution to the
celebrated debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism back in the
1950s.15 In this highly original contribution informed by a dialectical view of
history – a contribution which has been largely ignored – Hobsbawm put the
emphasis on the role of uneven development in the development of capitalism
throughout its history.
West European advance came directly at the expense of Eastern Europe
and Asia, Africa and Latin America. The process of West European transition
throughout its early history entailed turning other areas into dependent eco-
nomies and colonies. Seizing resources from less advanced areas or later on

15 Hobsbawm 1976.
review of paysans et seigneurs en europe 51

from colonised regions became an intrinsic feature of West European devel-

opment. In other words, the emergence of capitalism has to be understood
in terms of an ongoing world-wide process of appropriation based on uneven
development both within and outside Europe. Hobsbawm concludes that ‘the
net effect of European capitalism was to divide the world ever more sharply
into two sectors: the “developed” and the “under-developed” countries, in other
words the exploiting and the exploited’.16 Hobsbawm’s conception of the trans-
ition is a dialectical one in which unevenness plays a central part. Gain in one
place is invariably at the expense of other places, even those that were initially
more developed. In this schema the advance of Holland and England toward
capitalism entails the refeudalisation of Italy and Germany and the feudalising
of Poland, Hungary and Russia as conceived by Lemarchand.
Wallerstein develops this conception further with his notion of the emer-
gence of an early modern capitalist world-system with different labour regimes:
coerced labour at the periphery; tenant farming, sharecropping, craft produc-
tion and usury predominating in the semi-periphery; and wage labour at the
core with surpluses flowing toward the capitalist centre.17 Lemarchand’s feud-
alised European states would belong to the semi-periphery and periphery.
Moreover, Wallerstein pinpoints the time of emergence of the European state
in a way which coincides with Lemarchand’s own dating. The collapse of
Habsburg imperial hegemony at the end of the reign of Charles v (1556) was
the moment when the independent territorial feudal monarchies began to
emerge.18 Indeed, it is from this point on that the European-wide system of bal-
ance of power was born and the Netherlands began its long war of liberation
which saw the emergence of the capitalist Dutch Republic. The revolt in the
Low Countries testifies to how powerfully sixteenth-century capitalism began
to challenge the feudal order and required its re-organisation in the form of the
absolutist state.
But Wallerstein’s view has problems which make it difficult to link it to
Lemarchand’s perspective. In Wallerstein’s conception, from the sixteenth cen-
tury there is a single capitalist world-system which questionably makes the
Russian noble extracting labour from a serf, a French noble collecting rent
from a subsistence peasant in the Auvergne, and an English noble collecting
rent from a capitalist farmer in Kent equally capitalist. But French and Rus-
sian nobles cannot remotely be considered capitalists from the perspective of

16 Hobsbawm 1976, p. 164.

17 Wallerstein 1974, pp. 86–7.
18 Wallerstein 1974, pp. 181, 184–5.
52 chapter 3

Lemarchand. Likewise untenable is Wallerstein’s notion of strong states at the

centre and less strong ones toward the periphery, which does not fit the histor-
ical evolution of absolutist states as outlined by Lemarchand.
The most serious weakness of Lemarchand’s work is its failure to theorise
the relationship between the evolution of feudalism and the development of
capitalism from the perspective of the development of the absolutist state.
As we have seen, Lemarchand acknowledges how important the state was to
the survival and perpetuation of feudalism in the modern period. Moreover,
in passing he recognises the plausibility of the Althusserian idea that a mode
of production can co-exist with other modes of production within a given
social formation. It is surprising, therefore, that Lemarchand has ignored the
important work of Perry Anderson, published more or less coincidentally with
the work of Wallerstein and Brenner with which he is familiar.19 In Ander-
son’s work the co-existence of modes of production within the same social
formation plays a primary theoretical role. Covering more or less the same
ground as Lemarchand, Anderson traces the history of the absolutist state as
the ultimate defensive rampart of feudalism – a conception identical to that of
Lemarchand’s. But while Lemarchand stresses the similarity between feudal-
ism in the East and West, Anderson emphasises their differences. The preval-
ence of serfdom in the East fundamentally marks its feudalism off from that
of the West. A related and no less essential distinction is that Anderson sees
the Western absolutist state as the cradle of capitalism: a mode defined by the
existence of free labour. As Anderson expresses it, ‘thus when the Absolutist
States were constituted in the West, their structure was fundamentally determ-
ined by the feudal regroupment against the peasantry, after the dissolution of
serfdom; but it was secondarily over-determined by the rise of an urban bour-
geoisie which after a series of technical and commercial advances was now
developing into pre-industrial manufactures on a considerable scale’.20 In other
words the structure and evolution of these Western absolutisms was shaped
not simply by the fact that they protected the interests of the noble class, but
that they contained within them and provided a space for the emergence of a
capitalist bourgeoisie. Anderson concludes that ‘the threat of peasant unrest,
unspokenly constitutive of the Absolute State, was thus always conjoined with
the pressure of mercantile or manufacturing capital within the Western eco-
nomies as a whole, in moulding the contours of aristocratic class power in the
new age. The peculiar form of the Absolute State in the West derives from this

19 Anderson 1974.
20 Anderson 1974, pp. 22–3.
review of paysans et seigneurs en europe 53

double determination’.21 Moreover while recognising the exceptional strength

of capitalist forces in Tudor and Stuart England Anderson rightly considers it
an absolutist state along with those on the other side of the English Channel.
Anderson’s formulation captures the double character of Western absolutism
in stressing its dominant purpose of safeguarding noble class-power but in
simultaneously underscoring its provision of a framework for the growth of
capitalist elements which were latent inside it. While in Lemarchand the pres-
ence of capitalist elements in the absolutist state is additive and cumulative,
in Anderson such features are intrinsic to the absolutist states in the West. In a
curious reversal, Anderson, born into an English-speaking empirical tradition,
brilliantly applies Althusserian theory to European history. On the contrary, the
Frenchman Lemarchand appears a prisoner of empiricism. Anderson’s work
cannot match the overwhelming wealth of Lemarchand’s scholarship. On the
other hand, its theoretical and dialectical power continues to make it more
than a match for the latter.

21 Anderson 1974, pp. 23–4.

 chapter 4

The Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie

Marxists in academe sometimes complain about how hard done-by they are
by non-Marxist scholars. They gripe that their work is dismissed, marginalised
or misinterpreted by mainstream academics. But this can hardly be said to be
the case when we look at the current state of historical studies of France in the
seventeenth century. At the moment, it seems as if Marxist perspectives are
taken very seriously, especially in the English-speaking world. In particular, the
works of two Marxist scholars, William Beik and David Parker, have found great
resonance among scholars both favourable and unfavourable to Marxism.1
Likewise, in the study of early modern England, the work of the avowedly
Marxist historian Robert Brenner is held in great esteem. His accounts of the
development of capitalism in early modern England and of the English Revolu-
tion have attracted much favourable attention.2 Beside their shared commit-
ment to Marxism, all three scholars have in common a similarly sceptical view
of ancien régime France. Beik, Brenner and Parker agree that early modern
France was unable to break the fetters of feudalism and absolutism. More sig-
nificantly, they are unable to discover a capitalist bourgeoisie in France in the
early modern period. As a result, these Marxist scholars – unwittingly or not –
have greatly reinforced the currently popular revisionist view that rejects the
notion of the French Revolution as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. The
essay which follows does not reject the view of France as being under the thrall
of feudalism during the ancien régime. But it does argue that these scholars
have over-stated the dominance of feudal relations of production to the point
of erasing the bourgeoisie and the dynamic of class struggle. To the contrary,
it re-asserts the view that a capitalist bourgeoisie appeared in France in the
sixteenth century, persevered in the seventeenth and took the offensive in the
eighteenth century leading to the revolution of 1789.3

1 Beik 1985; Parker 1996. Beik’s work is extolled, for example, in reviews by Wood 1986 and
Ranum 1986 while Parker’s book is highly praised by Rowlands 1999; Lewis 1998.
2 Brenner 1985, 1993. For reviews of the latter work see Morrill 1994; Miskimin 1994; Callinicos
1994.
3 Needless to say, the existence of such a capitalist bourgeoisie has to be grasped within the
legal and political modalities of the ancien régime. The most sophisticated and historically
informed discussion of the place of the bourgeoisie in the ancien régime from a Marxist
perspective is in Robin 1970, pp. 18–52.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_005

the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 55

The Rejection of the Classical-Marxist View of

Seventeenth-Century France

Beik takes his point of departure from the well-established fact that seven-
teenth-century France was, at best, a slow-growth economy. In contrast to the
sixteenth century, when agricultural profits were high, Beik notes that the sev-
enteenth century was an age of high rents and oppressive taxation. Under such
circumstances, nobles and officers benefitted while entrepreneurial activity
in town and country was crippled. Money moved out of productive activity
toward financial dealings.4 According to Beik, in Languedoc ‘a hidden bour-
geoisie of dealers in grain and wine, cloth merchants, silk entrepreneurs, and
organizers of rural industries made its presence known from time to time, but
these were still political small fry whose importance was limited unless they
acquired offices in church or state’.5 An economically weak bourgeoisie enjoyed
a twilight existence, but was largely invisible socially and politically. Under such
circumstances, the bourgeoisie, weak as they were, were unable to mount a sig-
nificant opposition to the rule of privileged nobles and landlords. Meanwhile,
co-operating more often than competing with the officials and agents of the
absolutising monarchy, the landed ruling class enjoyed a virtual monopoly of
power in Languedoc and the rest of France until the death of Louis xiv.
In the first instance, Beik’s view of seventeenth-century France represented
a challenge to the viewpoint of Roland Mousnier who, in the early decades
of the Cold War, argued for the autonomous existence of the Bourbon state.
According to Mousnier, the absolute monarchy was dominated neither by the
aristocracy nor the bourgeoisie.6 Rather, the centralising monarchy enjoyed an
independent political position located above the competing social orders.
Marxist that he is, Beik argued instead that ‘the story of seventeenth-century
absolutism was … the story of a restructured feudal society’.7 The absolute
monarchy was an outgrowth of and embodied the perspective of the ruling
noble class. Rather than conflicting, as Mousnier would have it, the centralising
monarchy and the still locally powerful nobility, more often than not, mutually
reinforced one another.
But, in insisting on the class basis of the seventeenth-century monarchy,
Beik took his distance from classical-Marxist interpretations of the period.

4 Beik 1985, pp. 40–1.

5 Beik 1985, p. 41.
6 Mousnier 1979, 1984.
7 Beik 1985, p. 31.
56 chapter 4

He rejected the view espoused by Engels that the absolute monarchy held
the balance between the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Engels had maintained
that with the virtual disappearance of serfdom there began a period of petty-
commodity production and primitive accumulation signalling the appearance
of early capitalism. According to Beik, such a view makes sense with respect
to England, but not for France, where the society of landlords and dependent
peasants persisted for centuries.
It is from this perspective that Beik then criticised the viewpoint of two
Soviet scholars, Boris Porshnev and A.D. Lublinskaya.8 Porshnev had become
known to Western historians as a result of his discovery of the recurrent waves
of peasant and urban revolts that marked the first part of the seventeenth cen-
tury in France. In the course of recounting this history, Porshnev echoed the
view of Engels: ‘“French society in the seventeenth century was already pro-
foundly affected by the new distinction among men based upon the oppos-
ition between labour and capitalist property which was breaking down the
old feudal and corporative barriers”’.9 Porshnev regarded the emergent French
bourgeoisie as behaving in a contradictory fashion in the seventeenth century.
On the one hand, he saw the bourgeoisie acting as an independent and, at
moments, revolutionary class. On the other hand, he recognised that the bour-
geoisie at this stage of its development was ultimately captive to the feudal aris-
tocratic system. It was subordinated to this system politically through venality
of office, socially by acquiring titles of nobility, and economically through tax
farming, involvement in state finance and dependence on mercantilist priv-
ileges.
In characteristically dialectical fashion, Porshnev saw this class as caught
between these two positions, alternating between submission and revolt. Beik,
however, refuses to accept this dialectical perspective. Instead, he insists on the
total economic and political subordination of the bourgeoisie. While endors-
ing Porshnev’s recognition of the relative weakness of the bourgeoisie, he
rejects the Soviet historian’s notion of its economic independence or occa-
sional rebelliousness. He dismisses this view by rhetorically demanding ‘where
is the capitalistic side of his [Porshnev’s] bourgeoisie?’ According to Beik, Por-
shnev provides little evidence of its economic independence and strength. As
to its political force, Beik notes that Porshnev can point only to its revolutionary
behaviour during the Fronde.10

8 Porshnev 1963; Lublinskaya 1968.

9 Porshnev 1963, cited in Beik 1985, p. 24.
10 Beik 1985, p. 25.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 57

In a similar fashion, Beik gives short shrift to the views of Porshnev’s col-
league Lublinskaya. According to Beik, Lublinskaya downplayed Porshnev’s
notion of the revolutionary political or social stance of the bourgeoisie. Yet, if
anything, she insisted even more strongly than Porshnev on its independent
economic existence. According to Lublinskaya, the royal officials and finan-
ciers were feudalised, but there was also a trading and industrial bourgeoisie
distinct from them. The latter economically active class needed absolutism
to protect and develop its potential for capital accumulation. This indigenous
class of merchants and traders was geographically subdivided, split by religion
and imperfectly developed. But it was slowly rising without having reached
the point where its interests would be incompatible with the feudal régime.
Its influence was great enough to push the state towards developments which
prepared the way for the rise of capitalism.11
Beik’s view of this is equally dismissive. According to him, the very exist-
ence of Lublinskya’s trading and industrial bourgeoisie is open to question.
Beik complains that Lublinskaya uses only circumstantial evidence – economic
treatises and a few isolated cases – to argue for the importance of a group which
is exceedingly hard to find in the sources.12 Like Porshnev, Lublinskaya admits
that the seventeenth-century bourgeoisie was subordinated to the nobility and
absolutist state. But Beik will not admit even this much. For him, the bour-
geoisie did not exist. On this point, Beik supports himself with the scholarship
of another Anglo-Saxon historian, David Parker. In his work on La Rochelle,
Parker underlined what he asserted to be the scant evidence for the existence
of an independent bourgeoisie in La Rochelle and, indeed, in France.13 Parker
reiterates this view in his recent study of seventeenth-century France, Class and
State in Ancien Regime France.14 Parker’s new work, it should be said, represents
an important and persuasive new synthesis of seventeenth-century French his-
tory. At the same time, his book powerfully reinforces Beik’s overall view.
According to Parker, aristocratic control of the state apparatus as well as
continuing seigneurial domination over the land ensured noble domination
over French society to the end of the ancien régime. As for the bourgeoisie
and capitalism, they were crippled by the absence of absolute property rights,
by a parasitic and stifling bureaucracy and tax system, as well as by overall
aristocratic control. A rural or urban bourgeoisie can hardly be said to have

11 Beik 1995, p. 27.

12 Ibid.
13 Parker 1971, pp. 67–89; Parker 1980, pp. 180–5.
14 Parker 1996.
58 chapter 4

existed. Especially brilliant is Parker’s demonstration of the ongoing ideological

dominance of the nobility and its enduring control of the machinery of the
state. As for capitalism, Parker compares France and England, asserting that
the political and legal basis for capitalism did not exist in the former country.
As a result of his enquiry, Parker reaches conclusions of considerable import.
According to him, ‘the conception of bourgeois revolution derived from the
Communist Manifesto is significantly modified. This postulated a growth of
capitalism inside the womb of feudalism and the birth of a bourgeois class
which then seized power from its feudal masters’.15 Based on his study, Parker
finds that, compared to seventeenth-century England, it is ‘difficult to identify
a bourgeois class in late eighteenth century France’.16 Capitalism and the bour-
geoisie were weak in the seventeenth century. The weakness of the bourgeoisie
continued to the eve of the French Revolution. Parker’s inescapable conclusion
is that the revolution of 1789 could not have been based on the bourgeoisie. His
view thus dovetails with what has come to be called the revisionist view of the
French Revolution.
While Beik does not take things so far in this direction, the implications of
the work of both historians are far-reaching. It has been a common premise of
both liberal and Marxist historians that the history of the ancien régime was
marked by the slow rise of a bourgeoisie based on capitalism. Beik and Parker
reject the notion of a long historical gestation of the French bourgeoisie within
the tissues of the French absolutist regime. Directly or indirectly, their view
amounts to a discounting of the idea of a nascent bourgeoisie and capitalism
within the ancien régime. Indeed, with Beik’s dismissal of any notion of simple
commodity production or primitive accumulation as applicable to France prior
to the seventeenth century, such a notion is explicitly rejected.

The Dialectic of Rent and Profit

Regarding France from the perspective of English development, Brenner’s

views powerfully support those of Beik and Parker.17 England was the place
where a capitalist breakthrough first occurred. This was the outcome of the
class struggle between lords and peasants which took place in that country

15 Parker 1996, p. 280.

16 Ibid.
17 The concordance between Brenner’s and Beik’s views is pointed out in Miller 2008, pp. 8–
10.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 59

at the end of the Middle Ages. According to Brenner, these conflicts saw the
English landlord class gain control of the greater part of the arable land at the
expense of the subsistence peasantry. Such landlord control made it possible
for them to re-organise agriculture on the basis of large farms rented out on
short-term and competitive leases to enterprising farmers. The latter increas-
ingly were able or were compelled to exploit displaced peasants as wage-labour
and, by systematic improvement, initiate a process of capital accumulation
which transformed the English economy.18
According to Brenner, this breakthrough toward capitalism occurred
uniquely through a change in the social relations of production in the six-
teenth-century English countryside. This emphasis on the rural roots of cap-
italism is Brenner’s key insight in the debate on the origins of capitalism. But,
in the course of arguing this point, he has turned France into the foil or neg-
ative example to make the case. According to Brenner, France experienced the
same upsurge of class struggle as England in the late Middle Ages with a quite
different outcome. In the former case, the peasants were able to keep control
of roughly forty-five or fifty percent of the land as against only twenty, twenty-
five or thirty percent in England.19 As a result of the greater share of property
retained by the peasantry, no restructuring of agriculture along English lines
was possible in France. Whatever tendency there was towards capitalism in
sixteenth-century France was aborted. From Brenner’s perspective, the prob-
lem of an absent bourgeoisie in France is not merely a reflection of the dearth of
manufacturers and traders. It is also, and above all, about the lack of a rural cap-
italist bourgeoisie. It is the differing allocation of property and the contrasting
relations of production which determined the divergent evolution of the two
countries in the early-modern period. In the eyes of Brenner, France is seen as
the counter-example to England’s success in terms of the early development
of capitalism. England is the normative example of capitalist origins. France is
the Other.
But, then, as in the case of Beik and Parker, the question arises, what of the
French Revolution? The traditional Marxist view of that revolution was that,
like the English Revolution, the French Revolution was a bourgeois and capit-
alist revolution. The Brenner thesis could suggest that, given the non-capitalist
evolution of France under the ancien régime, such a notion of a bourgeois
and capitalist revolution was, on the face of it, dubious. In a curious way, it
should be pointed out that Brenner’s view (based on Marxism) like those of

18 Brenner 1985, pp. 48–9; Brenner 1986, pp. 23–53.

19 Brenner 1985, p. 61.
60 chapter 4

Beik and Parker dove-tailed with the developing scholarly and political trend
against the Marxist view of the French Revolution known as French revolu-
tionary revisionism.20 This historiographical current which became ascendant
by the 1980s attacked the idea that the revolution in France could be under-
stood as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Among those who denied the
capitalist basis of the revolution was George Comninel, also a self-professed
Marxist.21 According to him, the bourgeoisie in France prior to the revolution
was not capitalist because it based itself on rent rather than on profit. Moreover,
wage-workers were dependent not on their wages but on their own sources of
subsistence.22 This view coincided with Brenner’s notion of the ongoing hold of
the French peasantry on the land. Indeed, it is probable that, in assuming this
viewpoint, Comninel was substantially influenced by Brenner.23 In the case of
the account of capitalist origins by Comninel’s teacher Ellen Meiksins Wood,
the influence of Brenner is explicit. As Brenner has established – according
to Wood – the origins of capitalism are to be found exclusively in the social
relations of production of the English countryside. Under French absolutism,
feudal rent dominated to the point that there was no capitalist bourgeoisie. The
French Revolution was a bourgeois but not a capitalist revolution.24
The conception of France as a society ruled by a nobility which exercised
its power over the peasantry through the absolutist state thus has gained, if
not unanimous acceptance, then serious consideration among leading English-
speaking Marxist scholars as well as others. Far be it for me to criticise this
conception with which I basically agree. As to the bourgeoisie, although they
exaggerate its impotence, Beik and Parker are correct to insist on the ongoing
absorption of the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie into the political apparatus
of the state. At the same time, some profits from industry and commerce were
transformed through commercial privileges, venality of office, tax-gathering,
the purchase of rentes and ennoblement. Indeed, the liquefaction of peasant
surpluses on which the regime depended was based on these quasi-commercial
processes.
In the light of this perspective, Beik and Parker refuse to accept Porsh-
nev’s ideas of class struggle. The latter portrayed the bourgeoisie as suspended
between a position of subordination and one of opposition to the bourgeoisie.

20 The varieties of revisionism are described in Vovelle 1990, pp. 749–55.

21 Comninel 1987.
22 Comninel 1987, pp. 190–1, 200. Comninel does not explain why workers would work for
wages if they could assure their own subsistence.
23 Comninel 1987, pp. 160, 192.
24 Wood 2002, pp. 50–63.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 61

On the contrary, Beik and Parker are at pains to deny the strength and con-
tentiousness of the bourgeoisie. In so doing, they succeed in demonstrating its
weakness and largely refuting Porshnev’s conception. But, in rebutting Porsh-
nev, they have gone too far: Beik and Parker have rejected the notion of oppos-
ition or conflict between the bourgeois and noble classes. It is this denial of
the conception of class conflict between nobility and bourgeoisie in the seven-
teenth century that this chapter questions. It contends that their dismissal of
such class conflict deprives seventeenth-century France of a sense of dynamic
development. Moreover, it cuts this century off from any real connection with
developments which occurred later and, in particular, the revolution of 1789.
Finally, in so far as it would deny the continued existence of a bourgeoisie in
seventeenth-century France, their view is not in accord with the historical evid-
ence. The views of Brenner, Wood and Comninel are likewise not sustained by
current research in French history.

Class War from Above

The starting point of Beik’s analysis of class relations is his view of the French
agrarian economy. In this respect, his discussion is mainly dependent on the
work of Le Roy Ladurie. Yet, it would seem that he has misconstrued the latter’s
overall view. In accord with Le Roy Ladurie, he notes that the sixteenth century
had been a great age of agricultural profits. It was an age, to re-iterate Beik,
that ‘favoured the initiative of enterprising middle-to-large-scale farmers’. In
contrast, he underlines that the seventeenth century was an age of increasingly
high rents and oppressive taxation. Citing Le Roy Ladurie, Beik argues that
demographic pressure and land hunger played a part in the increase in rents.25
But such increases in rents, we would emphasise, cannot simply be accounted
for by the play of the market. As Le Roy Ladurie also points out, in Languedoc as
in much of the rest of France, increases in rent were connected to increases in
state taxation as proprietors linked rent increases on tenants to tax increases.26
Indeed, the decline of profits and rise of rent must not be understood as merely
the inexorable struggle of reified economic concepts. Rather, as Le Roy Ladurie
suggests, the respective level of rent and profit should be seen as economic
metaphors expressing the outcome of a struggle to impose a new political and
social order.

25 Beik 1985, p. 40.

26 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, i, p. 468.
62 chapter 4

If we follow Beik, rent constituted the only form of rural surplus extraction
from the beginning to the end of the seventeenth century. Rural capitalism,
from his perspective, is nowhere to be seen. If this were so, we would be dealing
with a society of seigneurial power and subsistence farming little different from
the twelfth century. In fact, the age of merely feudal rent had long since passed.
In accord with Le Roy Ladurie, Beik is certainly correct to conclude that rents
were step-by-step driven higher. What he fails to appreciate is the implications
of Le Roy Ladurie’s correlation of rents in relation to profits (and wages)
through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Le Roy Ladurie’s comparison
is rightly premised on the ongoing existence of a class of profit-minded rural
capitalists. The rural middle class, he explains to us, ‘play an important role in
the seventeenth century under Louis xiii and Mazarin’.27
No doubt, the great majority of French peasants were subsistence farmers or
even farm labourers, but, while small in numbers, the capitalist element noted
by Le Roy Ladurie and which had originated in the sixteenth century owned or,
more typically, rented a disproportionately large part of the arable land which
it exploited with the help of its own operating capital and wage-labour.28 Capit-
alist rent collected from profit-minded peasants thus constituted a substantial,
if indeterminately large, element of the rural surplus throughout the period.
Beik’s misreading of Le Roy Ladurie’s dialectical appreciation of the ongo-
ing relationship between rent and profit leads to a fundamental distortion in
his appreciation of the seventeenth century. In Beik’s view, the triumph of rent
can be dated to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Profit apparently dis-
appeared, and the social and political effacement of the bourgeoisie followed.
Le Roy Ladurie’s account is more evolutionary and dialectical. Where Beik sees
a sudden and definitive victory for rent, Le Roy Ladurie offers the perspective
of a long-drawn-out struggle. According to the latter, the sixteenth century had
seen an offensive of profit against rent that went on through most of the cen-
tury.29 The tendency began to reverse itself in 1580 or 1600. In the Île-de-France,
Jean Jacquart dates the reversal to as late as 1620.30
But, at this point, this new direction is only a reversal of a tendency, a
counter-offensive or reaction, not yet a triumph. In other words, half or two-
thirds of the next century is marked by a long and continuing offensive of
rent against profit. The advance of rent was as prolonged an affair as was the

27 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, i, p. 172.

28 Goubert 1990, p. 1167.
29 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, i, pp. 291–313.
30 Jacquart 1990, pp. 68–9, 196.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 63

preceding offensive of profit. It is only in the reign of Louis xiv that rent and
taxes may be said to have overwhelmed profits as a result of this long-drawn-
out and sustained offensive.31
Beik appears to see class conflict only as overt rebellion from below. With
the leading elements of the bourgeoisie having been co-opted into the ruling
class, the popular revolts of the period were not class-based uprisings.32 Parker,
somewhat paradoxically, insists that such rebellions did have a class basis,
albeit based on the hopeless revolts of the craftsmen and peasants.33 He takes
this position while arguing as strongly as Beik that there was no bourgeoisie.
Yet, if there was little or no class-based challenge from below, the offensive of
rent against profit makes it evident that there was a strong and ongoing class
offensive from above. It took the form above all of the relentless pressure on
profits of increasing rents and taxes.
Beik and Parker take the triumph of rent as an established state of affairs
that determined all other facets of the seventeenth century. In truth, the seven-
teenth century was characterised not by a given condition – the static weight
of rent – but, rather, by a process in which rents advanced and profits were
progressively eroded. The subtlety of Le Roy Ladurie’s conception of this rela-
tionship is expressed in the following passage:

The expansion of the sixteenth century was favourable to the profit of

enterprise: that of the following [century] prolongs it [profit], but bears
rent with it and the surplus value it radiates goes toward the enrichment
of the landlord.34

A class of rural capitalists remained in existence, albeit increasingly burdened

by the imposition of higher rents. In other words, the class struggle continued,

31 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, i, pp. 585–92; Postel-Vinay 1974, p. 17.

32 Beik puts his viewpoint rather cryptically. Citing Porshnev’s view of the popular revolts,
he notes that ‘I am not convinced that they constituted the primary class struggle in
seventeenth-century France’ (Beik, 1985, p. 190). Beik does not say what the primary class
struggle was. A class struggle involves a conflict between at least two classes. Having
dismissed the economic and political significance of a bourgeoisie, Beik obviously does
not believe that they were part of either the primary class struggle or popular revolts.
At the same time, it is not clear from his subsequent work on popular revolts in the
seventeenth century (Beik 1997) whether or not he regards the peasants and artisans who
did participate in popular revolts as members of a class.
33 Parker 1996, p. 95.
34 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, i, p. 467.
64 chapter 4

with the initiative coming from above rather than below. Moreover, such an
assault did not assume the shape of a violent social confrontation. On the con-
trary, it took the form of increases in rent to be sure, but also state construction,
the increasingly more complex hierarchies of society, a growing sophistica-
tion of upper-class manners, and corresponding social and religious disciplin-
ing of the lower classes. Despite this offensive, the rural bourgeoisie may be
said to have been bowed, but by no means broken, and they emerged from
this onslaught with renewed strength in the eighteenth century. It is Le Roy
Ladurie himself who takes note of this durability toward the conclusion of his
great work: ‘On the whole it is indeed the fermier class, the group of substan-
tial labourers which collapses (in Languedoc) from 1680 (but not forever to be
sure)’.35

Whither the French Bourgeoisie?

Beik and Parker systematically minimise the existence of the bourgeoisie, ques-
tioning its very existence. Engels had postulated a period of petty-commodity
production and primitive accumulation as initiating the origins of capitalism.
Beik rejects this, maintaining that it makes sense for England but not France.
Although there was a decline of serfdom, no period of petty-commodity pro-
duction, let alone primitive accumulation, occurred. In Beik’s view then, there
is no evidence of proto-capitalist or capitalist activity in France. Beik makes
this claim despite his quite contradictory acknowledgement of Le Roy Ladurie’s
view that the sixteenth century was a period in which the initiative in the coun-
tryside lay with middle- to large-scale profit-seeking farmers.
One wonders what the basis is for his denial of an initial period of petty-
commodity production and primitive accumulation. Even Brenner is struck by
the parallel between French and English development at this stage. The eco-
nomic recovery in France from the late-medieval crisis, which began around
1450 and continued in more or less uninterrupted fashion to about 1520, closely
approximates to the Marxist conception of a period dominated by simple-
commodity production. In this phase, which was common to Languedoc as
well as the rest of France, there was a proliferation of markets and market
exchange. Merchants were active, but they did not yet fully dominate the mar-
ketplace. Taxes and rents were still relatively low. As a result, small-scale rural
and urban producers were an important factor in exchange and enjoyed unpre-

35 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, i, p. 592.

the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 65

cedented prosperity.36 The following period from 1520–60 saw the definitive
triumph of merchant capitalism focused on Lyons. The financial power and
control associated with the import of silk cloth and spices gave the Italian-
Lyonnais merchant-bankers a remarkable degree of influence over regional
and local markets throughout France.37 Meanwhile, in the countryside, the
possibility of substantial profits prompted the development of agrarian cap-
italism. From Normandy and the Île-de-France in the north to Languedoc in
the south, the tendency was for the peasantry to become increasingly dif-
ferentiated between a mass of producers dependent on wages and a kind of
rural bourgeoisie. Pace Beik, primitive accumulation was an integral and neces-
sary aspect of this process.38 Certainly, this emergent agrarian capitalism was
immature and incomplete. The continued strength of the middle peasantry,
the persistence of seigneurial forms of domination and communal rights, the
consolidation of the bureaucratic state and a kind of mental inertia or habitus
in favour of agricultural routine inhibited this emergent rural capitalism.
Despite fetters on its development, capitalism grew in strength in the coun-
tryside during the religious wars. The process of peasant expropriation which
had begun in the first part of the sixteenth century accelerated. Pillaging, heavy
taxation and indebtedness led to a dramatic acceleration of the concentration
of land into the hands of wealthy peasants and the urban rich. The partial or
complete loss of land experienced by producers, which continued into the sev-
enteenth century, entailed a growing dependence on wage labour.39
Summing up this transfer of land from the mass of the peasantry to the rural
and urban bourgeoisie on a national level, Jacquart notes that:

the great wave of appropriation of the soil by the bourgeoisie took place
between 1530 and 1600. Afterwards there ensued a continuation and con-
solidation of a hold which has never since been brought into question
despite political, economic and social revolutions.40

It was the bourgeoisie who most benefitted from the expropriation of part
of the peasants’ land, the appropriation of their property and its inclusion in
the circuits of commercial exchange. At the end of this process, the peasantry
was left with, on average, fifty percent of the soil and, in some places, with

36 Bois 1984, pp. 348, 351–3, 361–2; Fourquin 1971, p. 182.

37 Gascon 1971, i, pp. 320–6.
38 Bois 1984, pp. 289–90.
39 Heller 1996, pp. 28–32.
40 Neveux, Jacquart and Le Roy Ladurie 1975, p. 274; Jacquart 1992, pp. 282–3.
66 chapter 4

as little as one third.41 According to Jacquart, ‘one can affirm that from the
seventeenth century three-quarters of the French peasantry were not able to
exploit enough land to reach let alone to approach what we today call the vital
minimum’.42 Cooper concludes that ‘in open field France there was a trend to
larger farms and the pauperization and proletarianization of small peasants as
marked as anything claimed for England’.43 The increased dependence of this
expropriated peasantry on wages ensured the availability of abundant supplies
of cheap labour for agricultural work. In the wake of these developments, the
closing decades of the sixteenth century saw the flowering of an unpreceden-
ted interest in agricultural improvement in the form of the introduction of new
crops, agricultural implements, irrigation and other methods to increase out-
put. Of 600 works on agricultural improvement published in sixteenth-century
Europe, France published 245 as compared to 41 for the Low Countries and a
mere 20 for England.44
It should be noted that Brenner, along with Beik and Parker, has failed to
notice this process of primitive accumulation, social differentiation and grow-
ing bourgeois strength in the French countryside in the latter half of the six-
teenth century. Brenner placed the emphasis on the class struggle and the dis-
tribution of landholding as between landlords and peasants in the late Middle
Ages. He was certainly correct to stress the importance of class struggle in
France and England at that time. But he overestimated the durability of the vic-
tory of the French peasantry at the end of the Middle Ages. By the latter half of
the sixteenth century, most of this class in northern France was clearly placed
on the defensive by both the nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie. In this
context, what proved structurally determinant was the redistribution of prop-
erty among the commoners themselves, at the expense of the lesser peasants
and to the benefit of the bourgeoisie, both urban and rural. Brenner rejects the
importance of the process of peasant social differentiation to capitalist origins
in the case of English agriculture. Single-mindedly insisting on the importance
of class struggle, he rejects the idea that social differentiation among peasants
might have been important to the establishment of capitalist social relations.45
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, we can conclude, an agrarian
capitalism had partially implanted itself on French soil. This was especially the
case in the vast grain lands of the Île-de-France and the northern provinces –

41 Neveux, Jacquart and Le Roy Ladurie 1975, p. 275.

42 Jacquart 1990, p. 34.
43 Cooper 1985, p. 171.
44 Heller 1996, pp. 65–84.
45 Brenner’s view is criticised in Byres 2006, pp. 17–68.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 67

capitalism in the Midi was in the process of aborting for the time being.46
Parker discounts the implications for capitalist development of the massive
transfer of property that occurred during this period. Given the co-existent
progressive and regressive economic tendencies in rural society, the responsib-
ility of the historian is to strike a balance between retarding factors and those
elements fostering capitalism. Yet, Parker’s approach is to underline all those
factors which inhibited the development of capitalism in agriculture, while
minimising those aspects which favoured its growth.47 He insists on the decis-
ive importance of ongoing feudal constraints on the transfer of property and
of the absence of an explicit recognition of absolute property rights.48
Parker would have it that property rights in the sense of an absolute right
to property did not exist in the ancien régime. It is the absence of full rights
to property, according to Parker, which in part explains the weakness of cap-
italism in France in comparison to England.49 Still, it should be pointed out
that, in England, no such absolute property rights existed until the Glorious
Revolution,50 yet capitalism had clearly begun to develop there two hundred
years earlier. In fact, in sixteenth-century France, feudal rights over the man-
agement, sale and acquisition of property were increasingly attenuated. In a
practical sense, peasants were more or less able to dispose of property as they
pleased. The growing influence of Roman law only accentuated these tenden-
cies.51 Parker’s comparison of England and France would make sense if con-
fined to the period 1500–1640, but to insist on the comparison after 1640 is to
compare two societies which were essentially incomparable. As a result of the
Puritan Revolution and Interregnum, England largely disencumbered itself of
an absolutising monarchy and seigneurial nobility. Capitalism could develop
relatively unhindered. On the contrary, these elements were reconsolidating
themselves in seventeenth-century France and capitalism could only develop
in the interstices of the ancien régime. A more apt comparison would perhaps
be between France and Tokugawa Japan, where, in both cases, an incipient
capitalism developed dialectically within the pores of a strongly seigneurial
régime.52

46 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, i, pp. 326–8.

47 Parker 1996, pp. 58–74.
48 Parker 1996, pp. 232–3.
49 Parker 1996, pp. 56, 153, 232–3.
50 Norht and Weingast 1989, p. 814; Larkin 1930, p. 52.
51 Ourliac and Gazzaniga 1985, pp. 226–8.
52 Anderson 1975, pp. 435–61; Nakane and Oishi 1991.
68 chapter 4

Primitive Accumulation in Sixteenth-Century France

The development of rural capitalism in sixteenth-century France helped to

support the activity of a growing commercial and manufacturing class. Mer-
chants and merchant manufacturers headquartered in such cities as Paris,
Lyons, Rouen, Amiens, Tours, Nantes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux prospered in
the first part of the sixteenth century.53 Under their direct or indirect influ-
ence, the manufacture of wool, silk, linen and canvas cloth, books, iron and
steel and mining ores all forged ahead.54 To be sure, the religious wars brought
serious demographic decline and economic devastation. The eclipse of the fin-
ancial and commercial centre of the Kingdom, Lyons, dates from the 1570s. The
other great pole of the economy – Paris – suffered during the latter stages of the
conflict. At the same time, trade and manufacture prospered in coastal towns
like Marseilles, La Rochelle, Saint-Malo and, more unevenly, in Rouen and Ami-
ens.55 Industries such as wool, linen and canvas, and iron and steel manufacture
appear to have more than held their own. At the same time, new manufactures
like glass and crystal, faience, cotton, ribbon, satin and lace appeared.56 With
the accession of Henri iv, a general demographic and economic recovery began
which persisted into the late 1620s.57
Major infrastructural programmes, protective tariffs and state financial aid
to manufacturers under Henri iv assisted the recovery of commerce and man-
ufacture. Toward the close of the reign of Henri iv, French exports to the Otto-
man Empire, especially silk cloth, eclipsed those of the Italians, Dutch or Eng-
lish.58 The great cloth manufacturing centre of Amiens saw production reach
levels which surpassed those of the preceding century.59
It was in the period of the religious wars that primitive accumulation and
the offensive of profit reached their climax. Despite extensive rural devasta-
tion, these processes strengthened the middle class. It is precisely in this period,
for example, that the class of rural capitalists numbering no more than a few
hundred families consolidated its control over the Île-de-France.60 Many urban
bourgeois meanwhile made killings through the buying and, in some cases,

53 Chaunu and Gascon 1977, i, pp. 235–66; Le Roy Ladurie 1994, pp. 39, 47.
54 Heller 1996, pp. 8–19.
55 Heller 1996, pp. 122–3.
56 Heller 2000, pp. 248–51.
57 Heller 1996, pp. 157–8; Le Roy Ladurie 1994, pp. 257–61.
58 Israel 1989, pp. 99–100; Molà 2000, p. 62.
59 Deyon 1963, p. 947.
60 Moriceau 1993, pp. 353–86; Moriceau 1994, pp. 145–341.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 69

resale of rural properties.61 In 1602, a petition was drawn up asking the gov-
ernment of Henri iv to re-admit foreign merchants to the Kingdom in order
to help rejuvenate the economy following the religious wars. These proposals
were rejected by Barthélemy de Laffemas’s Commission du Commerce. The
Commission noted that the wars had only devastated the villages and coun-
tryside. The towns not only were not depopulated, but were full of money
that had accumulated during the wars. The foreigners were only interested in
the towns and were hence of little use to France.62 We have in this passing
comment an important confirmation of the vitality of the middle class at the
conclusion of the religious wars and beginning of the seventeenth century.
Indeed, the growing strength of the middle class helps to explain its pugnacity.
In Languedoc and Dauphiné in the 1570s, the growing assertiveness of the bour-
geoisie menaced the nobility and its allies and provoked a seigneurial reac-
tion.63 The period of the rural leagues and the 1590s saw a broadening scale
of similar revolts. Indeed, the strength and organisation of rural leagues, not-
ably in Dauphiné, Normandy, Brittany and Guyenne, appear to have been based
on the growing weight of a rural middle class made up of richer peasants and
small-town bourgeoisie.64
The recent work on the rural league by Jean-Marie Constant makes clear the
predominantly urban and bourgeois base of this major political and religious
movement.65 Only a minority of the nobility participated in it and its noble
leaders had trouble keeping it under their control. Even more to the point,
Constant makes clear that, as important as religion was to the movement
and, as anarchic as it later became, it initially did have a coherent political
programme. This was embodied especially in the demands of the third estate
at the Estates-General of Blois of 1588. These grievances included vehement
attacks on the privileged Italian merchants and financiers who were seen as
dominating and stifling the initiatives of the indigenous middle class. Beyond
these complaints, the third estate went so far as to demand constitutional
limitations on the monarchy. Its politically radical demands made the estates
of the nobility and clergy ill at ease.66
The ongoing sale of offices, the elaboration of a mercantilist programme
and the exclusion of the Italians from the ranks of the increasingly powerful

61 Neveux, Jacquart and Le Roy Ladurie 1975, pp. 273–5.

62 Fagniez 1908, p. 10.
63 Le Roy Ladurie 1979, pp. 108, 122, 127–8, 339–70; Heller 1991, pp. 60–3, 86–101.
64 Heller 1991, pp. 111–15, 120–36.
65 Constant 1996, pp. 259–312.
66 Constant 1996, pp. 188–9.
70 chapter 4

French financiers appears to have temporarily calmed the aggressiveness of

the bourgeoisie under Henri iv. Even so, the end of Henri iv’s reign brought a
renewed surge of bourgeois radicalism. The aspirations of the bourgeoisie were
embodied in Louis Turquet de Mayerne’s La monarchie aristodémocrate.67 In
this work, Mayerne called for the abolition of the traditional aristocracy as a
ruling class and the institution of a constitutional monarchy based on an elite
whose power was rooted both in trade and ownership of land.68 The Estates-
General of 1614, furthermore, was marked by bitter conflict between the third
and second estates.
That same year saw the overthrow of the urban oligarchy of La Rochelle
and establishment of a new more democratic commune. In line with his view
of the effacement of the bourgeoisie, Parker’s description of this revolt rules
out any involvement by substantial elements of the bourgeoisie. For him, this
rebellion was an affair of shopkeepers and artisans. There was no participation
by substantial merchants.69 The authoritative recent history of La Rochelle by
Kevin Robbins places Parker’s assessment into question. According to Robbins,
‘Parker mentions the 1614 events only in passing and offers no detailed analysis
of the social origins and course of the revolt’.70 Robbins, like Parker, concludes
that the petty bourgeoisie constituted the mass base of the movement. But the
leadership included elements who were engaged in wholesale and overseas
trade, some of whom were as rich as or richer than the members of the ruling
oligarchy.71

The Endurance of the Bourgeoisie

This revolt in Huguenot La Rochelle, led in good part by merchants, raises the
important matter of the role of Protestants in seventeenth-century France, a
matter sorely neglected by Beik and Parker. It was the American economic his-
torian Warren C. Scoville who treated the matter extensively in his work on the
economic expulsion of the Huguenots from France published some forty years
ago.72 Scoville reached the conclusion that the migration of Huguenots follow-
ing the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes did not seriously damage the French

67 Mayerne 1611.
68 Mousnier 1955, pp. 1–20.
69 Parker 1980, pp. 44–5.
70 Robbins 1997, p. 242.
71 Robbins 1997, pp. 253–6, 260.
72 Scoville 1960.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 71

economy. In so far as the economy suffered, it was mainly because of war and
adverse economic trends. Moreover, although some two-hundred thousand
Huguenots emigrated, some 600,000 others remained in France.73 Interesting
as Scoville’s conclusions are, it is his study of the place of the Huguenots in the
French economy which is of special concern to us. His work includes a remark-
able survey of the manufacturing and commercial sector of the seventeenth-
century French economy. Among other things, Scoville discovers a substantial
manufacturing sector which included several hundred factories involving con-
centrated manufacture.74 In many towns and cities, it was a Protestant middle
class which dominated this activity.75 There were, of course, Huguenot artis-
ans, office-holders, nobles and even peasants, especially in the Midi. But what
is notable about the Huguenots of the seventeenth century was their over-
representation in commerce and manufacturing.76 These entrepreneurs did
not confine their activities to the restricted market of the Midi or the King-
dom of France. In Languedoc and Dauphiné before 1685, such businessmen
exported salt, grain, pastel and cloth to Geneva and beyond.77 Through the port
of Marseilles, French and Genevan merchants created an important interna-
tional network for distributing trans-Atlantic products. Indeed, many of those
who exiled themselves, particularly to Geneva after 1685, continued to have
close business and religious connections with their commercially-orientated
brethren in Lyons and throughout Languedoc and Dauphiné. These relation-
ships with the Huguenot diaspora helped to maintain and expand the connec-
tion between the French and the European centres of commerce and increas-
ingly of banking. Indeed, the Huguenots who remained in the Kingdom were
to play an important role in the expansion of the French economy under Col-
bert and in the eighteenth century.78 Geneva constituted a kind of free-trade
zone which animated and, ultimately, transformed the French economy of the
late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Huguenots were by no means the only merchants and manufacturers in
seventeenth-century France. But, contrary to Beik and Parker, their existence

73 Scoville 1960, pp. 434–47.

74 Scoville 1960, p. 161.
75 Scoville 1960, pp. 133–42.
76 Benedict 2002, pp. 1–2, 27–32, 142–4, 146–8; Ligou 1968, pp. 197–200; Lüthy 1959, i, pp. 68–
72; Krumenacker 2002, pp. 16–18, 33, 149.
77 Chaussinand-Nogaret 1970, p. 19; Mottu-Weber 1985, pp. 342–4.
78 These connections in the latter half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are
traced in Chaussinand Nogaret 1970, pp. 32–3, 35; Lüthy 1959, i, p. 44; Piuz and Mottu-
Weber 1990, pp. 527, 542, 595.
72 chapter 4

alongside their Catholic counterparts as an urban middle class can hardly be

doubted. In any event, Beik and Parker know, or wish to know, little or nothing
of the whole earlier phase of advancing bourgeois power at the beginning of
the seventeenth century. It is this neglect which helps them to sustain the
audacious claim that this class barely existed and more or less disappeared in
the following century. It is true enough that, despite a last upsurge of bourgeois
radicalism at the conclusion of Henri iv’s reign, the offensive of agrarian profit
(if not profit itself) appears to have come to an end. A new trend in favour
of rent appeared. As we have tried to make clear, this reversal did not occur
overnight, was only at its inception during this reign and was part of a long-
drawn-out process completed only in the reign of Louis xiv. The offensive of
rent was an ongoing movement at least as prolonged as the previous offensive
of profit.
Nonetheless, it is true that a reversal of trend did set in during Henri iv’s
reign, signalled by the propensity of profits to decline and rents to rise on
the land. As we have suggested, this trend, which deepened in the following
reign, was not merely a response to the play of the market and has itself to
be explained. Non-economic factors were at least as important as the inter-
action of supply and demand. A new social and political context emerged
which encouraged rent and began to undermine profit. Above all, the alliance
between crown and nobility, which had broken down during the religious wars,
gradually grew more solid. To be sure, the loyalty of the nobility toward the
crown was not unquestioned, especially in the early years of the reign of Louis
xiii. But, by means of a combination of coercion, bribery and indulgence, such
fidelity was re-established in the period of Richelieu’s ascendancy.79
The context in favour of rent was reinforced by the continuing expansion
of venality of office and expansion of the size of the state apparatus. Venality
had already reached impressive levels in the reign of Henri iii and continued
to expand in the reign of his Bourbon successors. The creation and purchase
of tens of thousands of offices during this period shifted significant amounts of
capital from productive to non-productive economic activity.80 This movement
was strengthened by the perfection of the system of financiers which redirected
still more capital into the channels of state credit. The complementary expan-
sion of the army to 50,000 men capped the spectacular expansion in the power
of the state. The spiritual recovery of the Catholic Church and the containment

79 On the adherence of the nobility to the crown see Parker 1971, pp. 67–78; Kettering 1986,
pp. 154–61; Jouanna 1989, pp. 218–22.
80 Le Roy Ladurie estimates the number of officers in 1610 at 25,000 and at 46,000 under
Colbert (1994, p. 274).
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 73

of the Protestant threat reinforced the social and political order. All of these ele-
ments provided a context which made it possible for the state to successfully
impose a progressively higher level of taxation. The accretion of state power, in
turn, reinforced landlords, facilitating the imposition by them of higher rents.
At the same time, the expansion of the number of offices and diversion of cap-
ital toward the state entailed a massive co-optation of the upper reaches of the
bourgeoisie. Growth of state power, reinforcement of the rule of landlords, co-
optation of the upper levels of the bourgeoisie constituted a form of political
and social reaction or class war from above. It is this which is the principal
characteristic of seventeenth-century French history. Naturally, it provoked a
response from below in the form of waves of urban and rural popular protests.
But these, in comparison with the popular revolts of the sixteenth century,
clearly have a defensive character. Contrasting the fiscal revolts of the seven-
teenth century with the revolts in Guyenne in the 1590s, Le Roy Ladurie makes
an interesting observation. He notes the comprehensiveness of the ideological
challenge to the existing order in the case of the rebels of Guyenne, including
attacks on the divisiveness of the League as well as on the tithe, rent, royal taxes,
usury, excessive commercial profits and low wages. He contrasts the ideological
ambition of this programme with the narrowed horizons of the popular insur-
gents of the seventeenth century.81 The latter reduced their agenda to one of
fiscal protest. Clearly, it is a case of diminished expectations based on a sense
of reduced strength. The forces of order were more powerful, while the capa-
cities of the insurgents were weaker.
Porshnev tried to show that such upheavals entailed a somewhat schizo-
phrenic attitude on the part of the bourgeoisie, alternating between fidelity
to authority and rebellion. Beik and Parker were at pains to deny the latter. In
this argument, the two Anglo-Saxon historians were more right than wrong.
As a class, the bourgeoisie was clearly in retreat – its most advanced elements
were co-opted to the side of the state. But Beik and Parker have overstated
their case. Among the mass of subsistence peasants, artisans and labourers who
rebelled as a result of higher taxes, there surely were some substantial peas-
ants or merchants who rebelled as a result of a squeeze on profits.82 Contrary
to the view of Parker, this was almost certainly the case with respect to the
Ormée of Bordeaux.83 In any case, too much has been made of whether or not

81 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, i, p. 495.

82 See the traces of such involvement in Bercé 1990, p. 215; Foisil 1970, pp. 223–4, 226, 250–1;
Porshnev 1963, pp. 364–5.
83 Parker 1970, pp. 44–5. See the lists of participants in the Ormée in Birnstiel 1895, iii,
pp. 218–19; Sarrazin 1996, pp. 177–82.
74 chapter 4

the bourgeoisie were involved in the seventeenth-century popular revolts. The

issue of the existence of class conflict does not stand or fall on this question.
The main trend in this respect was one of class warfare from above, of which
profit-seeking entrepreneurs among others were the victims, whether they
participated in revolts or not.
In the reign of Louis xiv, the fortunes of the enterprising labourers and
fermiers reached their low point. High taxes and rents crushed their profits,
forcing many into bankruptcy. But some did survive. Among these were the
so-called fermiers of the Île-de-France studied by Jean-Marc Moriceau.84 His
path-breaking work follows this class from the time it consolidated itself in the
Île-de-France in the late sixteenth century until it assumed power in the course
of the French Revolution. In the course of this long trajectory, the latter part
of the reign of Louis xiv was clearly the nadir. Some members of this group
were weeded out. But its overall survival is what impresses. Family solidarity
and the strict rationalisation of operations made it possible for many of them
to maintain their profits, while preparing the way for the great prosperity and
expansion of their power in the next century.85 Among notable improvements
introduced by such farmers were a successful consolidation of land holdings, a
greater degree of specialisation, more intensive manuring and greater traction
through improved harnessing of animal draught power.86 It should be pointed
out that these processes of rationalisation and improvement were carried out
in response to the relentless compulsion of increasing rents and taxes in a way
which is entirely comparable to that experienced by English farmers described
by Brenner. Turgot, for example, noted that it was the practice to determine the
price of leases of large farms in the region of northern France by competition
between capitalist farmers.87 Recently published works by Guy Lemarchand
and Anatoli Ado likewise make clear that the agricultural capitalism of the
eighteenth century was rooted in a stratum of rural capitalists which had
persevered in the course of the seventeenth century.88
In the course of discussing sixteenth-century capitalism, we have noted that
flanking the class of rural capitalists a substantial merchant and manufacturing
class emerged. Despite adversity, it survived the religious wars and re-emerged

84 Moriceau 1994.
85 Moriceau 1994, pp. 611–23.
86 Moriceau, 1994, pp. 631–42; Postel-Vinay 1974, pp. 26, 27, 29 stresses the concentration of
land-holding in bourgeois hands and the proletarianisation of the marginal peasants in
Soissonais in this period.
87 Cooper 1985, p. 146.
88 Lemarchand 1989, pp. 138–45; Ado 1996, pp. 51, 53.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 75

with renewed vigour in the reign of Henri iv. Its prosperity seemed to have
survived longer than that of rural capitalists, being prolonged into the late
1620s. Beik and Parker, as we have seen, have little to say about the fate of this
sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century inheritance. Falling back on the work
of Parker on La Rochelle, Beik notes that the latter has been unable to loc-
ate a significant commercial and industrial bourgeoisie there or anywhere else
in France. In Parker’s work the subsumption of manufacturing by commerce,
the parochialism, disunity and feudalisation of the bourgeoisie and finally its
integration into the state is stressed.89 As we have seen, in Languedoc, Beik
admits to only a hidden bourgeoisie of small-scale merchants and manufac-
turers of little economic and political account. This enables him to discount
Lublinskaya’s notion of a trading and manufacturing class independent of the
financial elite. Indeed, Parker’s discussion of the same group in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries is cursory and dismissive.90 We would have to con-
clude from them that the commercial and manufacturing base that supported
it, created by the sixteenth century, either never existed or was more or less
annihilated in the following century. In the latter case, little or nothing was car-
ried over in the way of trade and manufacturing. Under such circumstances,
the continued existence of an independent merchant class seems out of the
question.
A quite different view of the fate of the French merchant class is adopted
by Jacques Bottin.91 Bottin admits the tendency of merchants to assimilate
to finance and to move toward office and a higher status. Yet Bottin insists
on the continued existence of an independent stratum of merchants in the
major towns of the Kingdom. According to Bottin, treatment of this group has
suffered from a readiness to view them from the perspective of the regime’s
mercantilist policy or from the point of view of royal finances. Likewise, they
have tended to be seen as a social group in the perpetual process of transition
toward banking, office and ennoblement.92 Yet a lexical analysis of the word
‘merchant’ as used in the first part of the century supports the view of them
as a distinctive social element. Thus, retail merchants or merchants engaged in
specialised commerce were referred to with more precise designations: wine
merchant, wood merchant, merchant draper, épicier. The term ‘merchant’ used

89 Parker 1980, pp. 180–5.

90 Parker 1996, pp. 37–9.
91 Bottin 1990, pp. 962–4.
92 Brunelle notes that ‘in reality only a minority of merchants, even in so important and
prosperous a city as Rouen, migrated from commerce to the ranks of the officiers’ (1991,
p. 163).
76 chapter 4

without qualification was reserved for merchants engaged in wholesale non-

specialised commerce, usually of an international dimension. Frequently, such
large-scale trading was combined with an interest in banking. Such entrepren-
eurs might involve themselves in loans to the king. But their interest in finance
cannot be seen as limited to non-economic kinds of investment. In reality, their
involvement in banking was intrinsic to their needs as merchants to transfer
funds and settle accounts as well as to facilitate the negotiation of commercial
bills of exchange.
As to the overall level of commercial activity, Jean-Pierre Poussou concludes
his survey of seventeenth-century French trade by stressing the continuities
between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He notes:

the gap between the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries was less great
than has been often asserted, that the latter prepared the way for the
former especially in France thanks to the conclusion of a great reign
which was much more dynamic and prosperous than is often thought.93

Approaching these matters from the point of a comparative and in-depth ana-
lysis of Protestant and Catholic populations in Montpellier in the seventeenth
century, Philip Benedict notes a surprising increase in wealth in the urban pop-
ulation overall across the century, among whom merchants certainly had their
part. His study and others, he concludes, offers further evidence that the larger
cities of seventeenth-century France may have been more dynamic centres of
economic growth and transformation than was previously thought.94
Toward the conclusion of his work, Beik concedes the existence of a consid-
erable textile industry in Languedoc and its success down to 1650. But, faced
with this reality, Beik underlines the commercial and manufacturing depres-
sion of the next 40 years in Languedoc, conceding that recovery occurred after
1690. He concludes by emphasising ‘how little impact this mercantile activ-
ity had on the power brokers of Languedoc’.95 But this conclusion, however
true, has no bearing on the question of the continued existence of a merchant
class based on trade and manufacturing, the point insisted on by Lublinskaya.
Indeed, it would seem that this merchant class had not only survived through
the seventeenth century, but was actually growing stronger as the century drew
to a close. The internal market being restricted, external markets offered more

93 Poussou 1990, p. 365.

94 Benedict 2001, pp. 133–4.
95 Beik 1985, p. 288.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 77

attractive possibilities. It was in foreign commerce and export-oriented man-

ufacture rather than in internal trade or agriculture that substantial profits
remained to be had.
Beik and Parker depreciate the importance of the survival and ongoing
development of capitalism within the interstices of the seventeenth-century
absolutist regime. Indeed, the notion that contradictory economic and polit-
ical processes could be at work within a given social system appears difficult
for them to accept. As to state policy, according to them, seventeenth-century
mercantilism was simply a revenue-raising device for a state controlled by
aristocratic-minded ministers. From the point of view of economic develop-
ment, it was a failure.96 No doubt there were many failures, as Beik insists.97 We
are to understand from Beik’s perspective that, like their Prussian counterparts
in the eighteenth century, aristocrats qua aristocrats could not comprehend
the relationship between economic development and state power. Going in
the other direction, Parker even goes so far as to suggest that the institution of
the Conseil du Commerce in 1700 reflects the weakness rather than the grow-
ing strength of the commercial and manufacturing bourgeoisie.98 But Beik and
Parker’s notion that state-inspired economic protectionism, canal construc-
tion, administrative rationalisation and New World colonialism did not also
serve the interests of French merchants in the seventeenth century is simply
untenable. In this connection, the recent positive re-evaluation of Colbert’s
economic initiatives by Le Roy Ladurie serves as an instructive corrective.99
Beik does acknowledge that the state’s dependence on the rapaciousness of
financiers made it possible to form large pools of capital out of which were
constituted the fortunes of some of the major French bankers of the eight-
eenth century.100 He ignores the significance of these same financiers in Col-
bert’s programme for the development of manufacturing and overseas com-
mercial expansion.101 A figure such as Dalliez de la Tour, receiver-general of
finances of Dauphiné and director of the Company of the Levant, for example,
provided a major impetus to the development of the wool cloth, canvas, metal-

96 Parker 1996, pp. 28, 29–30, 43.

97 Beik 1985, pp. 288–91.
98 Parker 1996, p. 262. For a contrary, more positive, view of the economic significance of the
creation of this body see Schaeper 1983, pp. 179–80.
99 Le Roy Ladurie 1996, pp. 169–77; Stein and Stein is particularly insightful on the close
connection between private French commercial interests and the state (2000, pp. 109–
116).
100 Beik 1985, pp. 251–2.
101 Chaussinand-Nogaret 1970, pp. 103–4.
78 chapter 4

lurgical and mining industries in that province. Moreover, the impulse that
he provided to these sectors helped to lay the basis for Dauphiné’s industrial
progress in the eighteenth century.102 Chaussinand-Nogaret concludes that
the financiers of the seventeenth century were far from being simply blood-
suckers. While it is true that a part of national revenue was diverted into
unproductive activities, a significant portion was channelled into productive
purposes.103 According to this scholar, in the seventeenth century, the finan-
ciers of Languedoc correspond only very imperfectly to the notion of finan-
ciers as a corps of office-holders divorced from commerce and manufacture.
Overwhelmingly Huguenot, dominant in regional banking, they were fully
integrated into the emergent sector of international banking.104 While per-
haps aware of the unintended connection between oppressive taxation and
finance-capital, Beik appears oblivious to the important progressive economic
consequences of such predatory state finance at the grassroots level of French
society. In discussing primitive accumulation during the sixteenth-century reli-
gious wars, we noted an increased availability of wage labour. Throughout the
succeeding period (1598–1715) the transfer of land from the peasantry to the
urban bourgeoisie engendered by a relentless state fiscalism continued. Inevit-
ably, this deliberate state policy prompted a still greater and irreversible devel-
opment of wage labour. The unrelenting fiscalism of the seventeenth-century
state was thus a major factor behind this steady process of proletarianisa-
tion.105 This increase in the wage-labour-force is all the more remarkable in
the face of the terrible plagues and demographic sluggishness that marked
this period.106 Indeed, the availability of growing pools of cheap wage labour
became a structural feature of the French economy. The further expansion of
this wage-earning class in the eighteenth century helps to explain the agricul-
tural, commercial and manufacturing dynamism of that period.107 Consciously
or unconsciously basing themselves on the very Anglo-Saxon notion that state
and market are always in conflict with one another, Beik and Parker view the
French state of the Ancien Régime as standing in the way of the development
of capitalism. It is very important that this conception be seen as the half-truth
that it is.

102 Léon 1954, i, pp. 107–8, 118.

103 Chaussinand-Nogaret 1970, p. 22.
104 Chaussinand-Nogaret 1970, p. 312.
105 Lemarchand, 1989, pp. 189–90; Dupâquier and Cabourdin 1988, ii, pp. 439–41.
106 Brockliss and Jones 1997, pp. 53–63.
107 See the remarkable chapter by Léon 1970, ii, pp. 651–89 on the development of the working
class in eighteenth-century France.
the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie 79

Conclusion

Based on this review, we can conclude that Beik and Parker’s report of the death
of the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century has clearly been exaggerated.
Driven onto the defensive, rural capitalism survived a century-long onslaught
of increasing rents and taxes. Commercial and manufacturing capitalism sim-
ilarly endured a prolonged period of depression through the middle years of
the century. Yet, it did prosper into the 1620s and emerged stronger than ever
towards the close of the period. In their insistence on the hegemony of the
nobility, Beik and Parker have both thus overshot and undershot the mark. They
have overshot it by denying that a bourgeoisie continued to exist in the face
of an assertive ruling nobility. They have undershot it in underestimating the
degree of upper-class reaction. The construction of the Bourbon state serving
the interests of the nobility was not simply a creation of the predominance of
rent. It was, in fact, a long-term social and political reaction to the previous
century’s offensive of profit. Their insistence not merely on the exclusive rule,
but on the exclusive existence, of one class not only belies the historical evid-
ence, it cuts seventeenth-century French history off from what came earlier
and what later transpired. Finally, it presents a monolithic and immobile view
of the century itself.
In insisting on the survival of the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century, we
in part re-assert the classical Marxist view of the absolute monarchy holding
the balance between the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Admittedly, this equilib-
rium was, in fact, tipped in favour of the nobility. Still, this analysis does restate
the traditional liberal and Marxist assumption of a long and continuous devel-
opment of the French bourgeoisie within the framework of the Ancien Régime
down to the revolution. However beaten and bruised, the rural and urban bour-
geoisie which had emerged in the sixteenth century survived and regained the
offensive in the eighteenth century.108

108 For the further development of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, see Heller 2006,
pp. 31, 54–60.
 chapter 5

Response to Henry Heller’s ‘The Longue Durée of

the French Bourgeoisie’*

William Beik

In ‘The Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’1 Henry Heller devotes an

entire article to criticising David Parker, Robert Brenner and myself for our
approaches to social relations in early modern France. I am pleased to be
invited by this journal to respond. I will leave it to Parker and Brenner to speak
for themselves. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that, while I am
honoured to find myself in the company of distinguished Marxist scholars such
as Parker and Brenner, I cannot myself claim to be a Marxist. Class-analysis and
the insights of Marxist historians have been central to my thinking, but I have
not studied the principal works of Marx, nor have I consistently adhered to
Marxist methodology in my work.
Heller charges that I have undervalued, indeed eliminated altogether, the
crucial role of the bourgeoisie in the evolution of class-relations leading up
to the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution: ‘For [Beik] the
bourgeoisie did not exist.’2 He argues that, in distancing myself from ‘clas-
sical Marxist interpretations’,3 I have joined the ranks of the so-called revi-
sionists who deny the bourgeois origins of the French Revolution. I have also
misunderstood Le Roy Ladurie’s discussion of feudal rents and land-rents. I
have ignored the insights of Soviet historians Boris Porshnev and A.D. Lublin-
skaya.4 I have rejected the class struggle between nobility and bourgeoisie, and
thereby lost a sense of ‘dynamic development’. I have abandoned the concept
of a ‘nascent bourgeoisie and capitalism within the Ancien Régime’ along
with ‘any notion of simple-commodity production or primitive accumulation’.5
Moreover, I have missed the importance of markets, merchant-capitalists and

* Originally published as: William Beik, ‘Response to Henry Heller’s “The Long Durée of the
French Bourgeoisie”’, Historical Materialism, 18, 2 (2010): 117–22.
1 Heller 2009.
2 Heller 2009, p. 35.
3 Heller 2009, p. 33.
4 Porshnev 1963; Lublinskaya 1968.
5 Heller 2009, p. 36.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_006

response to ‘the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie’ 81

international trade, and failed to understand the rise of ‘profit-minded rural

capitalists’ exploiting ‘operating capital and wage labour’. I also need to be
reminded that ‘the age of merely feudal rent had long since passed’.6
Henry Heller deserves commendation as one of the few historians who has
continued to defend the merits of a Marxist approach, most recently in his pro-
vocative history of the French Revolution.7 But his charges here are way off
the mark and surprisingly old-fashioned. His evidence for my neglect of the
bourgeoisie is based almost entirely on my 1985 book Absolutism and Society,
which was about something quite different – the channels of political power
and shared influence that linked the royal government and the ruling class
of the province of Languedoc.8 Seen in this context of political influence, the
bourgeoisie had hardly any influence. The towns were run by oligarchies of
royal officers either enjoying nobility or on the way to acquiring it. Taxes and
public expenses were run by the provincial estates, which were, in turn, dom-
inated by twenty-two bishops and a handful of locally-based noble potentates.
Of course, Languedoc had markets, merchants, entrepreneurial farmers, even
rural manufactories. But those involved were relatively powerless, except in
matters of commerce and some local governance. The province was run by
noble commanders with delegated powers of command, by an array of top
churchmen, and by a circle of elite-families who controlled the principal royal
offices and profited from the royal fiscal system. Similar situations prevailed
in other provinces.9 Those who made their fortunes in manufacturing or com-
merce usually abandoned their businesses after one or more generations and
purchased offices for themselves or their sons in order to gain privileged status.
These power-brokers were landowners who mostly drew their wealth from the
labour of the peasants who paid them rent and dues. This was indeed a ‘feudal’
situation inherited from the distant past, but it was not static. On the con-
trary, the tenants continued to resist and obstruct from below, while, within
the nobility, a long-term struggle was going on between regional magnates and
the centralising royal state over distribution of the agricultural surplus, which
came directly from rents and indirectly from taxes. I am in agreement with
Porshnev about the fundamental class-orientation of this society, although I
have criticised him for overstating the influence of the bourgeoisie.10 Heller

6 Heller 2009, p. 39.

7 Heller 2006.
8 Beik 1985.
9 Collins 1994; Swann 2003.
10 Porshnev 1963.
82 chapter 5

has no grounds for claiming that I ‘deny an initial period of petty-commodity

production and primitive accumulation’, since this topic was beyond the scope
of my project and consequently was not discussed.
Heller concedes that he ‘basically agrees’ with me that France was ‘ruled by
a nobility which exercised its hold over the peasantry through the absolutist
state’.11 Where, then, is the problem? It lies in our differing approaches to
the agents of change. In a sense, our discussion recapitulates the old Dobb-
Sweezy debate of the 1950s.12 What was behind the dynamic and dramatic
transition from feudalism to capitalism? For Sweezy, it was the external push of
international trade and the circulation and accumulation of merchant-wealth.
For Dobb, it was class conflict emerging within the system from contradictions
between social forces and relations of production. Heller, closer to Sweezy,
continues to see evidence of capitalism in every economic fact. Wherever he
finds merchants, manufacturing, markets, extensive wage labour, agricultural
consolidation or technological improvement, he declares that capitalism is on
the rise.
To be sure, all these economic and social facts can loosely be designated
‘capitalistic’ and be attributed to the rising middle class. No one denies that
the economy was developing in early modern France. But how was their profit-
making different from that of the ancient Greeks or the merchants of any
other society? A good Marxist definition should indicate what is distinctive
about a given form of class-exploitation and explain its dynamic capacity to
transform social relations. We need to know how labour was managed by the
dominant class and how the fruits of that labour were distributed. Merely citing
merchants or profit-making does not fill the bill.
Heller can certainly cite progressive forces at work here and there, such
as the landlord who invests his revenues back into farm improvements and
raises production by hiring cheap labour; the merchant-partners who take over
and transform the market for a product, say woollens, by employing cheap
cottage-labour and taking advantage of economics of scale to produce larger
quantities at lower cost; or the banker whose international contacts enable
him to transfer money on paper over long distances without moving actual
coins, thus lowering transaction costs. All these techniques existed in France,
although the French often lagged behind other countries. But the big question
is how widespread these new practices were and how much impact they had on
social change. We need the whole picture rather than focusing only on certain

11 Heller 2009, p. 38.

12 Harman 2008; Sweezy et al. 1976.
response to ‘the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie’ 83

dynamic elements. And it is equally important to ask what obstacles kept the
innovators from achieving their potential and what contradictions kept the
society from reproducing itself without mutating into something else.
Heller claims that I have missed Le Roy Ladurie’s depiction of the ‘offensive
of rent against profit’. Heller takes ‘rent’ as signifying traditional payment to
the owner for the use of the land, an archaic payment which he at one point
assimilates with seigneurial dues, and ‘profit’ as the net proceeds of a farmer’s
rural capitalist enterprise. Rent and profit then become stand-ins to measure
the struggle of the two sides – the landed nobility and the bourgeoisie. The
enterprising farmer gains in the sixteenth century, falls back in the seventeenth
century, and triumphs in the eighteenth century. But Le Roy Ladurie is not
speaking in Marxist terms. He is talking in market-terms about a conjunctural
balance-sheet comprised of land-rent, taxes, wages, and what was left – profit.
The changes in rent and profit were determined largely by demographic and
political factors, which, in turn, affected supply and demand. Left out of the
equation is any consideration of whether the profits were invested in growth
which brought fundamental change in yields or in class-relationships. In other
words, the process describes the relative prosperity of owner, tenant, and hired
employee, but not necessarily the progress of the rural bourgeoisie.
Heller consistently elides the meaning of his terms, seeing a bourgeois under
every bush. He finds evidence of a growing bourgeoisie in ‘a proliferation of
markets’, ‘merchant-capitalism’, ‘peasant-expropriation’, ‘dependence on wage-
labour’, the ‘strengthening of the middle class by the religious wars’, ‘the grow-
ing assertiveness of the bourgeoisie’ in Dauphine and Languedoc in the 1570s,
the strength of the Catholic leagues in the 1590s, the demands of the Third
Estate in 1588, the quarrels of the Third and Second Estates in 1614, the ‘demo-
cratic commune’ of La Rochelle, and the Huguenots’ extensive business deal-
ings. In the popular revolts of the seventeenth century, he speculates, ‘there
surely were peasants or merchants who rebelled as a result of a squeeze on
profits’. He argues the same for the Ormée-rebellion in Bordeaux in 1651–2.13
There were indeed merchants involved in the Ormée-movement, along with a
cross-section of artisans, legal functionaries and a few nobles, but their griev-
ances were about representation, good government and popular control. There
was no hint of concern over profits, or even foreign trade. The more character-
istic seventeenth-century tax-riots were conducted largely by the menu peuple
over illicit taxes. The merchants were usually targets, not participants.14

13 Heller 2009, p. 50.

14 Beik 1997.
84 chapter 5

With these issues in mind, I see much of Heller’s evidence as problematic.

First, it is no longer adequate to speak of the bourgeoisie, or indeed any class, as
a unified force playing a single purposeful role in history. Second, it is crucial to
weigh the forces of resistance and blockage as well as the influence of change.
Evidence of an urban investor who was consolidating rural properties does not
necessarily show that he was shifting to intensive cultivation of capitalist crops,
if the landlord was absentee and the farms were leased out in small plots to
local peasants, as we see in Jacquart’s study of the Hurepoix.15
Evidence of growing masses of landless villagers does not necessarily indic-
ate the emergence of capitalist wage labour. Merchant successes and active
markets do not necessarily demonstrate a rise in the rate of production due to
improved methods. The rise of new wealth does not automatically transform
the system if it is sunk into royal offices and into ownership of traditional farms
leased out to traditional peasants. My contention is that much of the potential
progress was absorbed into the existing social system, even while new forces
were growing and influences from abroad were provoking change. The bour-
geois were on the stage but they still had a relatively small role.
Formulae drawn from the Communist Manifesto or the writings of Engels do
not provide adequate tools for a thorough analysis of the early modern period,
which was not, after all, their central concern. A reflective Marxism needs to
delve deeply and critically into the forms of exploitation and the uses of capital.
Recent scholarship provides ample evidence of the subordinate role played by
the bourgeoisie in early modern France. It appears that, contrary to Heller’s
‘classical-Marxist’ focus on the dynamic leadership of the bourgeoisie, this class
was not strong enough or conscious enough to seize power. This loosely defined
‘middle class’ was still made up of groups with contradictory interests. Many
were royal officials, professionals of various sorts, craftsmen and artisans with
distinctive skills. Many of those who could be defined as bourgeois were still
deeply tied to the existing power structure, and, as a group, were not yet strong
enough to bring about revolutionary change.
Stating this does not put us in the ranks of the revisionists. There are other
ways to think of class conflict in the revolution. The dramatic development of
capitalist forces in the later eighteenth century may have altered the situation
by 1789. The revolution might be seen as being made not by the bourgeoisie
but for the bourgeoisie. One might postulate that the revolution was caused
by the collapse of the old system under the weight of its own contradictions:
a new study by Steven Miller on eighteenth-century Languedoc, for instance,

15 Jacquart 1974.
response to ‘the longue durée of the french bourgeoisie’ 85

finds the collaboration of royal and noble forces still in place.16 The provincial
nobles were still allied with the crown in defence of their privileges, but they
were becoming alienated from other aspects of the royal administration and
some were leaning towards constitutional resistance. They would both gener-
ate demands for change and lead the resistance to change, as the revolution
approached.17
In the end, Heller and I agree that French society was structured by the
class conflict between landlords and peasants and that the bourgeoisie was
growing more powerful within it. In his recent book on the revolution, Heller
describes these conflicts better. Here, in his haste to defend the concept of
a rising bourgeoisie, he holds on to weak equivalencies and overly simplified
notions.

16 Miller 2008.
17 Miller 2008.
 chapter 6

Henry Heller and the ‘Longue Durée of the French

Bourgeoisie’*

David Parker

Heller’s central argument is that Beik and I have underestimated the weight of
an ‘independent’, that is capitalist bourgeoisie in France. He believes that my
treatment of the trading and manufacturing class is ‘cursory and dismissive’1
and amounts to no less than a declaration of the ‘death of the bourgeoisie
in the seventeenth century’.2 Yet, in the passages to which Heller alludes, I
observed that, despite the relatively depressed economic conditions of the
seventeenth century, maritime trade continued to expand even if more hes-
itantly than during the preceding hundred years; notwithstanding significant
geographical and institutional obstacles there were, I wrote, identifiable suc-
cessful ‘merchant capitalists’ who contributed to a slow integration of local,
regional and international-commercial networks.3
Heller’s view that I have killed off the bourgeoisie is buttressed by the further
claim that I have ‘failed to notice the process of primitive accumulation, social
differentiation and growing bourgeois strength in the French countryside’.4
This involved the expropriation and pauperisation of a substantial propor-
tion of the peasantry and the concentration of land into the hands of a bour-
geoisie both urban and rural. It is Heller himself who is guilty of not noticing.
I dealt at some length with these developments in twenty or so pages devoted
precisely to ‘The Dispossession of the Peasantry’ and ‘Agrarian Class Relations’.5
I even observed, as many others have done, that, despite the remorseless frag-
mentation of peasant landholdings over the best part of two centuries and the
well-documented decline in the number of substantial peasant-holdings, every

* Originally published as: David Parker, ‘Henry Heller and the “Long Durée of the French
Bourgeoisie”’, Historical Materialism, 18, 2 (2010): 123–31.
1 Heller 2009, p. 52.
2 Heller 2009, p. 55.
3 Parker 1996, pp. 31–2, 36–7.
4 Heller 2009, p. 43.
5 Parker 1996, pp. 51ff.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_007

henry heller and the ‘longue durée of the french bourgeoisie’ 87

community still contained a small group of rural notables who occasionally

founded farming dynasties which lasted into the twentieth century.
In similar vein, Heller asserts that I concluded that ‘there was no particip-
ation by substantial merchants’ in the extraordinarily successful revolt at La
Rochelle of the lesser bourgeois in 1614, a view, he says, disputed by the later
work of Kevin Robbins.6 If I had actually reached such an unqualified conclu-
sion, Robbins would undoubtedly have put me right. In fact, I had been very
careful to say that a definitive view of the social composition of leaders of the
revolt would require a systematic investigation of the notarial records at La
Rochelle.7
Robbins subsequently carried out the necessary research and was indeed
able to reveal the significant role played by some wealthy merchants in direct-
ing and sustaining a movement rooted in the middling groups of the Rochelais
community. The coalition of forces which he describes has a striking similarity
to those which contributed to the earlier establishment of the Dutch Republic
and the imminent revolution in England. Heller might have made more of this,
but he was perhaps aware that Robbins’s analysis contained a significant rider.
‘After 1614’, he observed, ‘La Rochelle became even more anomalous among
French provincial cities, combining a majority of religious schismatics with a
substantial influential number of innovative political actors drawn from the
middle ranks of urban society’.8 In other words, developments at La Rochelle
during the 14 years in which the lesser bourgeois secured a leading role in the
municipal government were not typical of French towns in general; except, it
should be stressed, in the sense that the rebellion of the lesser bourgeoisie was
itself a reaction to the emergence of a self-perpetuating, increasingly venal,
urban patriciate – a process replicated virtually everywhere. No doubt, Heller
is right, though he produces no evidence, in suggesting that merchants also
played a part in the most celebrated urban revolt of all in mid-century Bor-
deaux. Antipathy to the office-holding elite was again a significant factor.
In presenting a caricature of my view of French economic and social devel-
opments, Heller misses the point. The existence of those whom we may de-
scribe as capitalists or bourgeois is not and has never been in dispute. The
picture I offered is sufficiently nuanced to accommodate both the discovery of
merchants who were not only wealthy but hostile to authority and the exist-
ence of the hundred or so gros fermiers of the Ile de France identified by

6 Heller 2009, p. 47.

7 Parker 1980, p. 44 & note 3.
8 Robbins 1997, p. 329.
88 chapter 6

Moriceau to whom Heller appeals. Whether they formed part of a bourgeois

class is another question. If one assumes, as Heller appears to do, that it is suf-
ficient to define a class by virtue of a common relationship to the means of
production, then both merchants and fermiers may be said to form two identi-
fiable classes by the mere fact of their existence. But this is clearly inadequate
if we wish to be more precise about either the progress of the bourgeoisie or
the extent of capitalist development. The key questions are what happened
to the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century, what role did they play in the
formation of the absolute state and what merit was there in Engels’s view that
the monarchy was able to achieve a certain independence because the bour-
geoisie now offered a counterpoise to the traditional nobility. On the first of
these questions, it transpires that Heller and I are at least in agreement about
the way in which capitalist development was arrested in the seventeenth cen-
tury. He accepts that ‘as a class the bourgeoisie was clearly in retreat’ and that
‘its most advanced elements were co-opted to the side of the state’.9
Yet there is more to be said about the way in which the political autonomy
and economic vitality of France’s urban communities was subverted and con-
strained by the drive to restore the integrity of the monarchical regime after
decades of civil strife. To this end, the crown employed a combination of
strategies depending on local circumstances: direct military or political inter-
vention, fiscal pressure and the sale of offices on a vast scale. The latter diverted
productive capital to an incalculable extent, offering thousands of willing pur-
chasers the prospect of greater status, influence and security. The bourgeoisie
had neither the resolve nor the means to resist what proved to be a very effect-
ive combination of carrot and stick. Their uncoordinated and often sectional
responses reflected the low level of economic integration and the fragmented
character of France’s political institutions. Local interests were paramount and,
as the capitalist thrust of the sixteenth century stressed by Heller ebbed away,
they remained a formidable obstacle to the formation of the bourgeoisie as
a class with a clear sense of its own identity. The rebellious Rochelais bour-
geois did not constitute part of a cohesive class but a highly localised – indeed
isolated – movement within the confines of an exceptionally privileged urban
enclave which wanted nothing more than to preserve this position. Of course,
in the right circumstances, as in the Low Countries, defence of traditional priv-
ileges could acquire a more radical character, but France was not Holland –
although the royal apologists found it useful to castigate the Huguenots as
would-be republicans.

9 Heller 2009, p. 51.

henry heller and the ‘longue durée of the french bourgeoisie’ 89

It is nonetheless true that the social and political stresses of the sixteenth
century had encouraged a certain development of constitutional ideas and a
critique of noble mores and values. Heller cites Louis Turquet de Mayerne’s
La Monarchie aristodémocratique, written in 1591 and published in 1611, as an
expression of bourgeois aspirations.10 Given that Heller takes me to task for
underestimating the bourgeois thrust of the sixteenth century, it is surprising
that he has nothing to say about my own discussion of Turquet, which acknow-
ledged its significance in unambiguous terms. Turquet’s ideas, I said, could ‘be
seen as a manifestation of the dynamic economic and social impulses of the
sixteenth century before they faded away and the implementation of which
would have destroyed the ancien régime’.11
I went on to discuss the ‘hegemonic tour de force’ by which the nobility
recovered the ideological high-ground. If this is what Heller means by ‘class-
war from above’12 then there is little between us; but it might be thought that a
class-war really requires two sides. Urban oligarchs, though often vexed by the
threats to their privileged position, showed less and less inclination, once the
Protestant towns had been defeated or isolated, to join either dissident nobles
or artisans and peasants in their endemic resistance to the crown. In the end,
not being able to produce much more than stray and tenuous references to
a rebellious bourgeoisie, Heller virtually concedes as much, declaring that the
involvement of the bourgeoisie in popular uprisings is not really an appropriate
test of class-conflict.13
Given that Heller agrees that the seventeenth century was, on the whole,
one of relative economic stagnation with the bourgeoisie in retreat, its upper
layers absorbed into the state-machine, and the nobility on the offensive, it is
difficult to understand why he persists with the notion that absolute monarchy
was in some way the product of a balance between two contending classes.
His conclusion is indeed hesitant, defending the classical Marxist view ‘only
in part’ and acknowledging that the equilibrium was tipped in favour of the
nobility. This is very wise, given that no one has ever been able to show that
an independent, capitalist bourgeoisie possessed anything like the same social
and political clout as the nobility. The only Marxist analysis which attempted
to do this in any depth was produced by Lublinskaya, who argued that the
recovery of monarchical authority in the early seventeenth century and its

10 Heller 2009, p. 47.

11 Parker 1996, p. 139.
12 Heller 2009, p. 51.
13 Ibid.
90 chapter 6

success in overcoming the Huguenots depended on the support of the towns.

The bourgeoisie, she suggested, was grateful for the government’s programme
of economic protectionism. This interpretation founders on objections which
I set out at some length.14 The critical one is that it was the defection of the
Huguenot nobility, rather than that of the principal Huguenot towns, which
resulted in the royal victory. Despite the social and political conservatism
of the urban elites, which may, as at La Rochelle, have been under pressure
from the middling sort, the major towns continued to resist after having been
abandoned by the great nobles. In any event, such conservatism had little
to do with gratitude for the government’s mercantilist policies which were
rightly perceived to be a threat to urban autonomy. These were certainly not
developed at the behest of, or in conjunction with, the merchant-community.15
Heller, though evidently convinced that Beik treats Lublinskaya in a dismissive
fashion, makes no attempt to engage with these questions. What precisely, we
are justified in asking, is the evidence to support the view that the trading
and industrial bourgeoisie had sufficient influence ‘to push the state towards
developments which prepared the way for the rise of capitalism’?16
Heller introduces Engels’s view of the class-equilibrium, which supposedly
made possible the rise of absolute monarchy in one brief sentence. The follow-
ing one moves on to Engels’s picture of the dissolution of serfdom, the growth
of petty-commodity production and primitive accumulation.17 Heller does not
elucidate the connection between the first and the second, although we might
reasonably infer that he sees the latter as a basis for the former. He certainly
gives the impression that he sees the dispossession of the peasantry, accom-
panied by a growing bourgeois strength in the countryside and creating a pool
of wage labour, as fundamental. Far from ignoring this development, as Heller
claims, I explicitly recognised that the proletarianisation and expropriation of
the peasantry was an essential precondition for the development of capital-
ism.18 Nonetheless, because of the immense burdens placed on the productive
population and the inability of French manufacture to absorb more than a frac-
tion of the potential labour force, the net result was not a rapid development of
capitalism but a period of stasis. Le Roy Ladurie’s famous study of the Langue-
docian peasantry, to which Heller mistakenly appeals in order to buttress his
view of the progress of rural capitalism, was a major influence in leading me

14 Parker 1971.
15 Parker 1980, pp. 71–80; 1966, pp. 29–31.
16 Heller 2009, p. 34.
17 Heller 2009, p. 33.
18 Parker 1996, p. 58.
henry heller and the ‘longue durée of the french bourgeoisie’ 91

to this conclusion. Le Roy Ladurie was unambiguous about the consequences

which flowed from the polarisation of rural landholding and the concomitant
decline of the middle-ranking peasants, stressing that ‘capitalism is not built
on poverty’.19
Nor did the concentration of larger properties in the hands of aspiring
urban bourgeois and officeholders of itself introduce capitalism, because these
were frequently broken up into smallholdings manageable by their tenants,
the use of wage labour was frequently partial and intermittent, whilst capital-
investment was low. The gros fermiers, to whom Heller refers, undoubtedly
displayed entrepreneurial qualities, managing the holdings which they ren-
ted with an eye to the profits to be made from selling produce to nearby
urban markets. But they were a tiny fraction of a rural population overwhelm-
ingly devoted to subsistence-farming within the constraints imposed by both
seigneurial and communal regimes. There was no equivalent in seventeenth-
century France to the English yeomanry and resident gentry who were the
driving force behind a significant rise in agricultural productivity, which left
most French regions lagging far behind. In the following century, there were
greater signs of agricultural progress which Heller has assembled to much bet-
ter effect in his recent study of the French Revolution. Even then, however, he
notes that productivity remained low, that most peasants had small amounts of
land or none at all and that progress towards capitalist relations was generally
‘halting and tentative’.20
Absolute monarchy in France emerged at a time when economic conditions
make it impossible to explain this by reference to a rising bourgeoisie endowed
with the social and political weight to perform the function attributed to it by
Engels. Heller, however, is concerned that by denying the central importance
of conflict between nobility and bourgeoisie we have deprived seventeenth-
century France of ‘a sense of dynamic development’.21 This is a telling com-
ment, indicative of Heller’s attachment to a reductionist Marxism which seeks
to make the evolution of the French state directly dependent on the balance
of class forces. The French state undoubtedly fulfilled a class-function, drain-
ing the countryside and towns of their surplus-wealth to the benefit of those
with power, influence and status. But this function does not, of itself, explain

19 Le Roy Ladurie 1969, p. 163.

20 Heller 2006, pp. 28, 29, 31. Doyle estimates that, in the eighteenth century, the peasant-
elite numbered at most 600,000, that is less than three percent of the population. Doyle
1997, p. 197.
21 Heller 2009, p. 38.
92 chapter 6

the forces which brought absolute monarchy into being. I have set out in vari-
ous publications, and at some length, the dynamics which pushed France in
an absolutist direction, so, here, a rather mechanical list will have to suffice:
tension between the decentralising and centralising elements in a feudal body-
politic; the pressures of large-scale warfare on an inelastic economy; the drive
to religious conformity; economic nationalism and dirigiste economic policies;
the intense competition for place, influence and a share of the wealth chan-
nelled in ever-increasing amounts through the growing state-apparatus. The
dialectics of this competition lead both to a concentration of power in the
hands of the great royal favourites and then to an appreciation of the need for
a ruler who could rise above the fray. The endemic rebellions of the populace
further reinforced the willingness of the upper classes to settle their own dif-
ferences. How convincingly I managed to develop these arguments and how
successfully they were incorporated within a Marxist conceptual framework
is for others to judge. But it is absurd to suggest that I have ended up with an
immobile seventeenth century denuded of dynamics.
By comparison with the seventeenth century, the following one was eco-
nomically much more dynamic, and, in some areas, notably overseas-trade, the
rate of growth was truly remarkable. Heller is therefore on stronger empirical
ground in his recent work which seeks to rescue the idea of bourgeois revolu-
tion. Economic growth there certainly was and its relationship to the revolution
is far from settled, despite the efforts of those who would gut it of its social and
economic content. Bourgeois culture and ideas, both political and economic,
were increasingly evident, particularly from the 1760s, and affected the think-
ing of many who were certainly not merchants or manufacturers. Nonetheless
the allied question of whether a bourgeois class made the revolution in 1789
remains deeply problematic. Right until the last, the bourgeoisie aspired to
join the nobility rather than destroy it, whilst the feudal property-regime was
abolished only under duress from an insurgent peasantry. Although the capit-
alist bourgeoisie grew in numbers and wealth over the course of the eighteenth
century, they formed only part of the six percent of the population who could
be classified as bourgeois.22 If the outbreak of revolution had been dependent
upon a capitalist bourgeoisie chafing at the limitations of an aristocratic polity,
it would not have occurred in 1789. It was the crisis itself and what followed
which crystallised latent values and pushed the bourgeoisie into a sense of its
own identity. Yet, even when the bourgeois revolution was won, the hegemony
of the bourgeoisie remained fragile, its rule subject to fracture and instability

22 Doyle 1999, p. 122.

henry heller and the ‘longue durée of the french bourgeoisie’ 93

for many decades to come. In contrast, the British ruling class first absorbed
demands for political reform and then successfully avoided the revolutions
which swept across Europe in 1848.
All this may confirm Heller in his conviction that revisionism has swept the
board, disfiguring Marxism in the process. In response, I would simply say that
Marxism does not presuppose that class antagonisms are the only contradic-
tions to be addressed, either when explaining the formation of absolute mon-
archy or when analysing its demise. As Lenin (who knew more than most about
making a revolution before the ‘objective’ conditions had matured) observed,
a revolution happens when the old order cannot carry on in the old way. By the
1760s, many Frenchmen, and not just the bourgeoisie, were coming to under-
stand that the monarchy could not carry on in the old way. Central to this
realisation was the experience of defeat in their colonial rivalry with Britain,
which not only bankrupted the regime but reinforced awareness of the lat-
ter’s economic superiority. Such awareness stretched back to the mercantilist
writers of the early seventeenth century, but now the idea that protectionism
offered a solution was discarded in favour of laissez-faire. English agriculture
and industrial techniques set the benchmark. In a significant sense, it was the
comparative backwardness of French capitalism that precipitated the crisis of
1789 rather than the collision of a rising class with the limits of the existing
order. This is not a new idea.23 Here is what Marx and Engels wrote in 1845,
although not specifically about the French Revolution:

… [A]ll collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the
contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse.
Incidentally to lead to collisions in a country this contradiction need not
necessarily have reached its extreme limit in that particular country. The
competition with industrially more advanced countries is sufficient to
produce a similar contradiction with a less advanced industry.24

23 Cf. Skopcol 1979; Parker 1996; Teschke 2002.

24 Marx & Engels 1975, pp. 74–5.
 chapter 7

Response to William Beik and David Parker

In ‘The Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’ I argued that, despite the
ascendancy of the Bourbon monarchy and nobility, a capitalist bourgeoisie
continued to exist in seventeenth-century France.1 As the title of the article
suggests, what is in question is the long-term development of a capitalist bour-
geoisie through the three centuries of the ancien régime. What is at stake is the
notion of the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution cul-
minating this long-term development. Such a view represented the standard
interpretation of early modern French history among liberal and Marxist his-
torians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to this interpreta-
tion, the revolution cleared the way for capitalism to flourish in the nineteenth
century.
In the last generation, this narrative has been challenged by revisionism.
Strongest in the English-speaking countries, this tendency has its followers in
France as well. Mercurial in its approaches, revisionism’s main focus is to attack
the idea that the revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution.
It has become my project to argue against such revisionism from a Marxist
point of view by reasserting the old view of the rise of a capitalist bourgeoisie
through the history of the ancien régime. The first part of this plan emerged
in the course of researching a book entitled Labour, Science and Technology
in France 1500–1620.2 In that work, which was published in 1996, I offered a
new interpretation of the religious wars that shook France in the late sixteenth
century (1562–98). That period was, for the most part, interpreted as a com-
plex period of fanatical and irrational violence which led to a serious demo-
graphic and economic regression. While not completely rejecting this con-
sensus on the religious wars, I highlighted the role of class-conflict in the form
of noble reaction, but also of bourgeois and popular resistance. More import-
antly, I argued that the violence, heavy taxes, usury and economic decline of
that period provoked an acceleration of primitive accumulation which led to
a substantial decline in landholding by the poorer peasantry and the transfer
of much of its property into the hands of rural and urban elites. The con-
sequence was a notable increase in the availability of wage labour and an

1 Heller 2009.
2 Heller 1996.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_008

response to william beik and david parker 95

unprecedented spurt of interest in both technological innovation and agricul-

tural improvement.
My findings were reinforced by the pioneering research of Jean-Marc
Moriceau who found that it was precisely in this period that an elite of wealth-
ier peasants consolidated itself as a stratum of capitalist tenant-farmers in
the Ile-de-France. Already endowed with some land, fixed capital and cash
reserves, rich peasants were able to lease the farms controlled by the nobles,
urban bourgeoisie and Church while using the wage labour of their hard-
pressed neighbours.3 In other words, far from simply being a period of mere
economic regression, the late sixteenth century in France was a period of prim-
itive accumulation quite comparable to what occurred in England in the six-
teenth century as classically outlined by Marx in the concluding chapters of
the first volume of Capital.4 In those chapters, Marx demonstrated that as a
result of such processes the sixteenth century must be regarded as the found-
ing moment of English capitalism. My work, in addition to that of Moriceau,
led me to the conclusion that the late sixteenth century must be regarded as a
comparable period in France.
The second part of my plan was completed with the recent publication
of The Bourgeois Revolution in France: 1789–1815.5 In that work, I analysed the
current historiography on the French Revolution and showed that, despite
the arguments of the revisionists, an analysis of the evidence overwhelmingly
pointed to the fact that the French Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist
revolution. In the revolution, the upheavals in the agrarian sector proved to
be crucial. Pushed by mass protest from below, capitalist farmers assumed
leadership over the rural revolution which saw the overthrow of feudalism.
The third part of this triadic design is found in the article in question. It seeks
to tie together my findings on the late sixteenth century with my analysis of the
French Revolution. It argues that, since there was a capitalist bourgeoisie in the
sixteenth century, and an even stronger one in the eighteenth century, it is likely
that there was continuity in the development of this class in the intervening
period. My hypothesis was reinforced by the doctoral thesis of Moriceau, which
showed, not only that a rural bourgeoisie took root in the sixteenth century,
but that it persisted through the seventeenth century, getting stronger rather
than weaker through its engrossing of the land and the rationalisation of its
operations.6 At the same time, I argued that merchant-capital also held its

3 Moriceau 1993.
4 Marx 1977, pp. 874–913.
5 Heller 2006.
6 Moriceau 1994.
96 chapter 7

own during the seventeenth century. As a result of this persistence of the

bourgeoisie, it was in a position to resume its progress during the boom of the
eighteenth century. In consequence of this analysis, I re-asserted the view that
the dominant role played by the bourgeoisie in the revolution was the outcome
of a long period of gestation over the three centuries of the ancien régime.
In the course of advancing this argument, I challenged some of the principal
contentions of the prominent English-speaking historians William Beik and
David Parker.7 Beik and Parker claimed that a capitalist bourgeoisie barely
existed or existed not all in seventeenth-century France. In the light of this
class’s weakness, Beik and Parker inferred further that, although there was a
considerable amount of popular unrest in seventeenth-century France, class-
war was largely absent. Beik denied that there was a period of petty-commodity
production or primitive accumulation prior to the seventeenth century in
France, in contrast to England. Parker acknowledged a decline of feudalism in
the late middle ages, but insisted that no capitalism emerged in the sixteenth
century. According to both Beik and Parker, a mercantile and manufacturing
bourgeoisie was scarcely evident in the seventeenth century. In other words,
both Beik and Parker denied the existence of a bourgeoisie as a class-in-itself
(an economic class) let alone a class-for-itself (an economically-formed and
conscious class). Indeed, Parker took this a step further, arguing that it was
difficult to identify a capitalist bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century France, thus
throwing doubt on the notion that the French Revolution could have been a
capitalist revolution.
The point of departure of my objections to the views of Beik and Parker was
their neglect and underestimation of the achievements of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Basing my analysis on the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,8 Moriceau
and others, I claimed that the two historians had ignored or dismissed the
emergence of a rural and urban capitalism and capitalist bourgeoisie in the six-
teenth century, bolstered particularly by the consequences of primitive accu-
mulation. Indeed, I asserted that not only was there evidence of the existence
of a bourgeoisie as a class-in-itself, but also one-for-itself, reflected in urban and
peasant-protest, demands of the third estate at the Estates-General of 1588 and
the anti-feudal writings of figures such as Turquet de Mayerne. This so-called
offensive of profit lasted until the late sixteenth or even the early decades of
the seventeenth century. On the other hand, the seventeenth century was to be
mainly characterised by an offensive of rent.

7 Beik 1985; Parker 1996.

8 Le Roy Ladurie 1966.
response to william beik and david parker 97

It is this notion of an offensive of rent, derived from the work of Le Roy

Ladurie, upon which Beik and Parker depend as the basis of their interpret-
ation of the seventeenth century. But such an offensive of rent, I argued, has to
be understood as coming at the expense of profit, which continued to exist
although in retreat. In other words, a capitalist bourgeoisie endured, albeit
thrown on the defensive by a class-war carried on from above by the nobil-
ity and Bourbon state. Indeed, based on the work of Moriceau, which was
admittedly founded on research confined to the Ile-de-France, I pointed out
that capitalist farmers successfully adapted to this assault by rationalising and
improving their operations, emerging stronger than ever at the beginning of
the eighteenth century.9 At the same time, I brought forward a growing body of
research reflecting the continued existence of a mercantile and manufacturing
bourgeoisie. In short, whilst agreeing that the sense of a bourgeoisie as a class-
for-itself faded in the seventeenth century, I insisted that the bourgeoisie as a
class-in-itself continued to exist. It constituted the soil out of which grew the
increasingly large and powerful bourgeoisie that developed in the eighteenth
century and which eventually assumed leadership over the revolution of 1789.
In his response to my article, Beik claims that his book was not about
the bourgeoisie, but rather ‘the channels … that linked the royal government
and the ruling class of … Languedoc’. This is fair enough, as this nexus is
fundamental to understanding the political structure of the ancien régime. But,
in the course of making the argument for a virtual symbiosis between the
civil society of the ancien régime and the Bourbon state, Beik made a point
of dismissing the existence of a capitalist bourgeoisie living off profit. He was
perfectly correct to discount the influence of the bourgeoisie politically, but, in
doing so, he wrongly erased its continuing economic existence.
As part of his argument he wrote that ‘Heller has no grounds for claiming
that I “deny an initial period of petty-commodity production and primitive
accumulation” since this topic was beyond the scope of my project, and con-
sequently was not discussed’. Yet, in noting the development of Marxist views
of the ancien régime, Beik approvingly observed that once serfdom, which was
intimately associated with feudalism, disappeared, a new mode of production
was called for – if not capitalism directly, then a period of ‘petty commodity
production’ or ‘primitive accumulation’. This association of the early modern
period with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the rise of capitalism made con-
siderable sense for England, where most attention was directed, but not for
France, where the society of lords and dependent peasants persisted for cen-

9 Moriceau 1994.
98 chapter 7

turies, the aristocracy consistently renewed itself, and absolutism became a

powerful force instead of a hollow shell.10
Beik asserts that the difference between us rehearses the old debate between
Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb, in which the former invoked trade as the
external prime mover and Dobb insisted on the importance of class struggle.
Beik intimates that he somehow stressed Dobb’s relations-of-production
approach (class struggle?) while I mistakenly emphasised the importance of
trade which Dobb regarded as a regressive force. Actually, Dobb regarded prim-
itive accumulation on the land and the changes in the social relations of pro-
duction that came with it as fundamental to capitalist beginnings. As noted
above, Beik dismissed primitive accumulation in France, while I regard it as the
starting point of capitalist origins in France as well as England. It is true that I
highlight the evidence for the existence of a trading bourgeoisie as Beik noted.
But this is because, once capitalist production begins, exchange is essential to
the realisation of surplus-value as capitalist profits. Trade is two-sided, playing
a regressive role reinforcing feudal relations of production and blocking innov-
ation, but, once capitalism has entered productive relations, market-exchange
is necessary to the realisation of profits and eventually to the emergence of
capitalist competition. Of course, Dobb fully understood this.
Beik asserts that my claims of an early-modern French capitalism are super-
ficial and that I need to probe deeply into the relations of production that
existed under the ancien régime if I want to show that a real agricultural capital-
ism existed. If he read my analysis of Olivier de Serres’s Le théâtre d’agriculture
et mesnage des champs (1600) in Labour, Science and Technology he would real-
ise that I have offered just such an analysis.11 In Serres, who was reprinted many
times and widely read down to the revolution, he would have discovered the
reality of a French rural capitalism which has eluded him.
In criticising Beik and Parker, I counterposed their notion of an unopposed
seventeenth-century offensive of rent with Le Roy Ladurie’s conception of a
struggle between rent and profit, stressing that the advance of the one was
always relative to the other. As such, profit and a rural capitalist class cer-
tainly survived in the seventeenth century, although put on the defensive. In
response, Beik claims that the neo-Malthusian Le Roy Ladurie deployed the
terms rent, profit and wages in a way that has nothing to do with the vocabulary
of Marxism. But the fact is that classical political economy starting from Adam
Smith and continuing through Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and Karl Marx

10 Beik 1985, p. 21.

11 Heller 1996, pp. 168–73.
response to william beik and david parker 99

used a common terminology with respect to rent, profit and wages, although
they differed with respect to the historical premises and the consequences of
their inter-action.
It is true that Le Roy Ladurie in the past expressed intense hostility to Marx-
ism, as was the wont with some former members of the French Communist
Party. But the intensity of the Cold War having dissipated, Le Roy Ladurie has
called for reconciliation with Marxist colleagues and has expressed admira-
tion for the work of eminent Marxist historians such as Albert Soboul and Guy
Lemarchand.12 Even in the 1970s, the then-Cold Warrior Le Roy Ladurie found
it possible to give high marks to the doctoral thesis of the Marxist Guy Bois on
late medieval and early modern upper Normandy. In his review of Bois in the
pages of Annales, he makes clear that he and Bois are speaking about the same
thing and from a congruent perspective:

Under the cloak of a Marxist vocabulary which speaks to us of feudalism

and even of centralised feudalism (the name ascribed to the modern
royal state) we arrive with Guy Bois finally at the basic facts: they imply a
Ricardian-Malthusian (or neo-Malthusian) equilibrium of the eco-system
in a more than two centuries longue durée and at one and the same time
the drift of the said eco-system towards a family-based capitalism. This is
what makes this powerful and frequently admirable doctoral thesis truly
interesting.13

The idea that Le Roy Ladurie employs a terminology which has no relation to
Marxism therefore holds no water.
Beik denies that we can see the urban and peasant-unrest of the religious
wars and the immediately following decades in class terms. As for the French
Revolution, Beik claims that the revolution might be seen as being made not
by the bourgeoisie but for the bourgeoisie. This is but part of his larger view
that ‘… it is no longer adequate to speak of the bourgeoisie, or indeed any class,
as a unified force playing a single-purposeful role in history’. It is interesting,
in this regard, that Beik has had no problem speaking about the nobility as a
class. Rather, it is the notion of a class that is an agent of change which appears
problematic.
Early in his writings on history and politics, Marx made the distinction
between the existence of such a class in terms of its relation to the means of

12 Le Roy Ladurie, Lemarchand and Rance 2008.

13 Le Roy Ladurie 1978, p. 124.
100 chapter 7

production and the degree to which it has consciousness of itself. The former
notion of a class-in-itself, in my view, continues to be a fruitful and important
one in both historical and economic analysis. From the perspective of history,
the notion of a class-for-itself and its relation to that of a class-in-itself appears
more problematic. Yet it seems to me that the notion of a class-for-itself can
be usefully applied to particular historical conjunctures. The three centuries of
the ancien régime each have their concrete and particular characteristics which
must be carefully taken into account. But the relationship of these phases to
their denouement in the French Revolution must also be borne in mind.
In the French Revolution, the dominant discourse became that of sans-
culotterie and classical republicanism. Nevertheless, it is significant that some
revolutionaries did interpret the revolution as a revolution of the bourgeoisie,
the middle class and even the capitalist class. Such a discourse did not take hold
because it was regarded as too divisive by the revolutionary elites attempting
to establish leadership over the common people. The populist idea of the com-
mon people united against the aristocrats and of republican virtue appeared
more appealing and politically palatable.14 But it cannot be denied that the
notion of a bourgeois revolution was certainly present in the minds of revolu-
tionaries. This was because the revolution of 1789 was, in fact, a revolution
in which a bourgeoisie based on a growing capitalism took state power. In
other words, there was a convergence between the sense of a class-in-itself
and class-for-itself. In this light, it seems appropriate to examine the ferment of
the late sixteenth century when, in more tentative and less organised fashion,
an emerging capitalist bourgeoisie expressed itself politically, or as a class-for-
itself. Le Roy Ladurie, for example, unselfconsciously compared the call of the
third estate of Languedoc for confiscation of the temporalities of the Church
in 1560 with the passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy by the National
Assembly in 1791.15 In seeing the one event as a prefiguration of the other, Le
Roy Ladurie, like any good historian, was pointing to the common underlying
social dynamic active in both periods.
With respect to the French Revolution, Parker asserted in his book that it was
difficult to find a bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century France.16 But, in light of
my work, Parker now grudgingly concedes that a bourgeoisie, however feeble,
took power in 1789. Yet he insists that this class was not the product of the long
evolution of the ancien régime but only of its last years. On the contrary, I assert

14 Heller 2010.
15 Le Roy Ladurie 1966, pp. 360–1.
16 Parker 1996, p. 280.
response to william beik and david parker 101

that great events like the French Revolution have proportionally deep causes,
in this case the longue durée of the bourgeoisie. Parker complains that I ignored
his treatment of maritime trade and references to primitive accumulation and
social differentiation in the countryside. In fact, his references to maritime
trade were cursory. Furthermore, his notion of a dirigiste state overriding the
views of local entrepreneurs does not square with the emerging consensus on
the way that seventeenth-century French mercantilism operated.17
As for his discussion of primitive accumulation and social differentiation,
I did not ignore them, but complained instead that ‘… Parker’s approach is to
underline all those factors which inhibited the development of capitalism in
agriculture, while minimising those aspects which favoured its growth’.18 Parker
eventually admits this by noting that, despite the expropriation of the peas-
antry and their proletarianisation, ‘because of the immense burdens placed on
the productive population and the inability of French manufacture to absorb
more than a fraction of the potential labour-force, the net result was not a rapid
development of capitalism but a period of stasis’.
In drawing these conclusions, the authority of Le Roy Ladurie looms large
in the eyes of Parker. Indeed, as the absolute master of the history of the
ancien régime, it could hardly be otherwise. In any case, Parker invokes Le Roy
Ladurie as ‘a major influence in leading me to this conclusion’, i.e., the non-
development of capitalism. But we have already cited Le Roy Ladurie to the
effect that there was in fact a slow drift to capitalism throughout the course of
the ancien régime.
Le Roy Ladurie’s definitive statement on this question is found in his great
summing up of 2002, the Histoire des paysans français de la peste noire à la
Révolution.19 Much of this enormous work simply reprints his earlier contribu-
tion to the Histoire de la France rurale and the Histoire économique et sociale de
la France.20 But about a third embodies new material including an up-to-date
bibliography. In a quite dialectical way, Le Roy Ladurie points to the role of the
nobility in creating large farms while underscoring the role of the tenants of
these farms in the development of agrarian capitalism:

… [T]he accumulators of land of the classical age of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries played the role of sorcerers’ apprentices. In creat-
ing large domains they saw fit at the same time to create tenants who one

17 Reynard 1999.
18 Heller 2009, p. 44.
19 Le Roy Ladurie 2002.
20 Le Roy Ladurie 1975; Le Roy Ladurie 1977, pp. 483–865.
102 chapter 7

day, in the eighteenth century, would challenge their descendants. From

the midst of the peasants the amassers of land singled out an élite of farm-
ers who for the times were already modern. In the very long term the latter
traversed the French route toward agricultural capitalism, a route which
itself preceded the ‘agricultural revolutions’ in the French mode. It is true
that this ‘route’ was especially characteristic of northern France in which
grain-farming on its fertile and muddy open fields dominated.21

Based on recent scholarship, including the work of Moriceau, Le Roy Ladurie

ascribes this evolution towards capitalism to the whole of the north, the most
productive agrarian region of France. In contrast, Parker defends his view of a
non-capitalist France by falling back on Le Roy Ladurie’s thesis of 1966, whose
findings were explicitly limited to Languedoc, to the effect that capitalism
failed to consolidate itself in that region. Forced to address the research of
Moriceau on the capitalist tenant-farmers of the Ile-de-France, Parker attempts
to minimise its import for the rest of northern France by noting their relatively
small number, which he compares unfavourably to the in-depth strength of the
capitalist gentry and yeomen of England. That the gentry or even the yeomen
were in the vanguard of English rural capitalism is questionable. But, in any
case, an acknowledged expert on English agriculture, J.P. Cooper, has noted that
the number of large farms in northern France was entirely comparable to the
number in lowland-England.22
In challenging Beik and Parker, my primary purpose has been to re-assert
the old view that, from the sixteenth century onwards, there existed a capitalist
bourgeoisie in France. Moreover, it eventually provided leadership to the mass
of the population during the revolution, assuming control over the state. The
leadership and hegemony of such a bourgeoisie was particularly decisive in
the crucial revolution in the countryside. But my purpose extends beyond this
question to the history of capitalism itself. Far too often, the early history of
capitalism has been seen to be an exclusively English affair. This is a mistakenly
parochial approach. Capitalist relations of production began at more or less
the same time in England and France. In the one case, such relations were able
to advance as a result of the success of the Puritan Revolution. In the latter
case, feudal and absolutist reaction under the Bourbons was able to hold back,
if not extinguish, capitalism in the seventeenth century, delaying its advance
until the next century. It is important to note that capitalism, which always

21 Le Roy Ladurie 2002, p. 391.

22 Cooper 1985, pp. 143, 152.
response to william beik and david parker 103

was a single system, in fact began in Italy in the late middle ages and extended
into Germany, the Netherlands, France and England in the sixteenth century.
Robert Brenner has recently demonstrated the particularity of the Dutch route
to capitalism.23
The responsibility of European historians is to appreciate that there were
different paths to the development of capitalism in the various states of West-
ern Europe. The strengths and weaknesses of its development in each case has
to be taken into account if we are to do justice to capitalism’s development and
to the concrete history of separate states.

23 Brenner 2001.
 chapter 8

French Absolutism and Agricultural Capitalism: A

Comment on Henry Heller’s Essays*

Stephen Miller

Friedrich Engels argued, in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the
State, that absolute monarchies took shape in a period of equilibrium in the
class struggle between the old feudal nobility and the class of townspeople.
The warring classes balanced one another so nearly that although the state
appeared to mediate between them, it momentarily attained autonomy from
both. This argument long informed Marxist thought on the development of the
bourgeoisie, capitalism, and absolutism. Yet it did not result from a systematic
painstaking analysis, because Engels and Marx devoted nearly all of their
attention to their own capitalist society.1
Perry Anderson, the first Marxist to carry out a thorough investigation of
absolute monarchies, argued, in a revision of Engels, that these states amoun-
ted to ‘A redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination …’2 Ander-
son further argued that the discrete autonomous authorities characteristic of
feudalism made it possible for towns, capitalism and the bourgeoisie to emerge
in the interstices.3
Conversely, Robert Brenner made the case that capitalism came into being
in agriculture as an unintended consequence of feudal class struggle. In the
fourteenth century, English serfs fought and won freedom from lordly domin-
ation. The lords, however, retained the right to enhance the feudal fees for the
use of land. Over the following centuries, the lords began to raise the fees to
as much as the farmers would pay. They adjusted the fees to economic condi-
tions and, in this way, involuntarily propelled themselves, their tenant farmers,
and the agricultural workforce into a system of commercial rents and capitalist
competition. Across the Channel, the peasants of France and most of Western

* Originally published as: Stephen Miller, ‘French Absolutism and Agricultural Capitalism: A
Comment on Henry Heller’s Essays’, Historical Materialism, 20, 4 (2012): 141–61.
1 Engels 1972, p. 1.
2 Anderson 1974, p. 18.
3 Anderson 1974, p. 422.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_009

french absolutism and agricultural capitalism 105

Europe not only won freedom but also the right to pay fixed monetary dues to
the lords for the use of the land during the thirteenth century. Inflation eroded
these dues over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and put
pressure on lordly incomes. The nobles responded, in a long convulsive process,
by building up their feudal capacity, under the aegis of absolute monarchs, to
appropriate the peasants’ surpluses.4
William Beik and David Parker refined this line of Marxist analysis in care-
fully researched works on the ways in which the French aristocracy renewed
itself through the absolutist state. Rather than harbour a triangular struggle, as
Engels had indicated, between the bourgeoisie, nobility and crown, the mon-
archy retained feudal trappings for the benefit of the ruling class and for the
oppression of the peasant masses that had emerged from the direct lordly
exploitation of the medieval period. The bourgeoisie did not develop as a class
opposed to the monarchy. In England, by contrast, gentry landlords gained
income through agricultural capitalism and did not rely on the absolutist form
of governments.5
In the article ‘The Long Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’, Henry Heller
agrees with Brenner that capitalism originated in agriculture. But against this
whole line of Marxist analysis, Heller highlights a comment of Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie about the limits of the offensive of rente against profit in
seventeenth-century agriculture. Heller argues that rente (by which he seems
to mean the levies of the state and seigneurs) had not entirely eradicated profit
(which, for Heller, indicates capitalism).6 He writes, in his ‘Response to William
Beik and David Parker’,

[A] rural bourgeoisie … persisted through the seventeenth century, get-

ting stronger rather than weaker … As a result of this persistence of the
bourgeoisie, it was in a position to resume its progress during the boom of
the eighteenth century … [T]he dominant role played by the bourgeoisie
in the revolution was the outcome of a long period of gestation over the
three centuries of the ancien régime.7

Heller actually devotes most of ‘The Long Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’
to the economic and political significance of urban capitalists rather than to
agriculture. But since he writes more concretely about agrarian relations in his

4 Brenner 1985, pp. 242–6, 286, 288–9, 293, 295–6, 301.

5 Beik 1985, pp. 21, 25–6, 31; Parker 1996, p. 280.
6 Heller 2009.
7 Heller 2009, p. 134.
106 chapter 8

‘Response to William Beik and David Parker’, and since he founds his entire
argument, in both essays, on the resiliency of agricultural capitalism in early
modern France, I direct these comments solely at this aspect of Heller’s work.8
I premise my argument on the logic of Capital. In the chapter ‘The Trans-
formation of Surplus-Value into Capital’, Marx argues that accumulation con-
sists of the use of surplus product to create more surplus product and surplus-
value. The never-ending drive for more production is a social mechanism of
which the capitalist is but a cog. Individual capitalists must necessarily procure
new means of production with each new round of accumulation. Competi-
tion subordinates each capitalist to the law of capitalist production, compelling
each one constantly to extend capital so as to preserve it, and by this exten-
sion to beget progressive accumulation. Marx further argues, in ‘The General
Law of Capitalist Accumulation’, that in this cycle of reproduction, competi-
tion forces capitalists to produce relative surplus, that is, not profit by extract-
ing more value from the variable component of capital, or labour power, but
by adding to the constant component of capital, or means of production,
to cut costs. As accumulation proceeds, the variable component of capital
increases but in a diminishing proportion in relation to the constant. From this
premise, I argue, capitalism did not determine the evolution of French agricul-
ture.

Peasant Agriculture in France

The research on early modern England demonstrates a steady rise in relat-

ive surplus, as labour became more productive through the accumulation
of constant capital in agriculture. Tenant farmers increased yields, improved
implements for sowing, weeding and harvesting, concentrates corn-growing
on the lands most suited to it, enhanced farm sizes to economise on the work-
force, and, where appropriate, turned to pasture farming, which economises on
labour far more than does cereal-growing. In the centuries following the later
middle ages, the amount of working capital in arable farming, measured in the
number of draft animals relative to sown acres, increased dramatically. At the
end of the eighteenth century, French farmers had about 2.1 man-hours of horse
labour-power for each one of their own, whereas English farmers had 3.5. The
total agricultural labour force slightly declined from about 1.1–1.2 to 1.1 million
between 1300 and 1800, while output per head grew approximately three times

8 Heller 2009 and 2010.

french absolutism and agricultural capitalism 107

over. It is estimated that labour productivity rose 4.4 times in cereal agriculture
in South Eastern England between 1300 and 1850.9
The key to this rise in productivity was the transformation of peasant com-
munities into individual free labourers, variable components of capital, whose
costs were calculable and always had to diminish on account of the tenant
farmers’ competition against one another. Marx called this transformation
primitive accumulation, or the dispossession of the rural population. It was
absolutely crucial to his argument, because members of peasant villages, in
possession of the means to reproduce themselves, do not have to find work
and so do not form proletarian labour power abstracted from the community of
human existence and made into a variable component of capital. Marx devoted
the entire eighth part of Capital to this very issue.
Heller argues that, in France, the violence, usury and economic decline of
the sixteenth-century religious wars caused ‘an acceleration of primitive accu-
mulation which led to a substantial decline in landholding by the poorer peas-
antry and the transfer of much of its property into the hands of rural and
urban elites’.10 This analysis of the Wars of Religion makes the fundamental
class-relationships of capitalism an unintended consequence of the political
conflicts of absolutism. It has much to recommend for Marxists, because oth-
erwise, if capitalism were the deliberate design of sixteenth-century people,
it would then seem to form part of the human dna in the manner of Adam
Smith’s ‘… necessary … consequence of … a propensity in human nature … to
truck, barter, and exchange …’11 How otherwise could sixteenth-century people
have had the idea to bring capitalist relations of production into being? And
if capitalism were ‘human nature’, how could people ever hope to supersede
it?
Disappointingly, Heller then hitches his line of reasoning to the work of Jean-
Marc Moriceau, a historian of the Paris Basin, and makes the argument that the
bourgeoisie got stronger in the seventeenth century ‘… through its engrossing of
the land and the rationalisation of its operations’.12 Moriceau is an unabashed
adherent of Smith. In the opening pages of his doctoral thesis, which Heller
approvingly cites, Moriceau writes:

9 Allen 1994, pp. 96, 121; Allen 1992, pp. 214, 224–5; Brenner 2007, p. 106; Brenner 2001, p. 321;
Campbell and Overton 1993, p. 83; Clark 1999, pp. 208–9, 238–9; Thirsk 1978, pp. 161–4;
Wrigley 2006, pp. 454–6.
10 Heller 2010, p. 133.
11 Smith 1999, Book i, Chapter ii.
12 Heller 2010, p. 134.
108 chapter 8

The Parisian attraction favoured a type of agriculture precociously en-

gaged in capitalism. In an all-encompassing fashion, it incited the shaking
off of the old framework of the feudal organisation. More importantly, it
diffused an aura of modernity in the nearby countryside.13

In other words, the urban market presented baubles, à la Adam Smith, and
the spellbound feudal lords ceased to concentrate on building up their power
by gaining the loyalty of knights, and the peasants ceased to concentrate on
subsistence agriculture. The class relations of capitalism require no further
explanation than the compelling opportunity of the towns.14
I argue, by contrast, that these relations did not come into being in early
modern France. If one looks at the period from the middle ages through the
nineteenth century, one notices that the peasantry made available landless
labourers and paupers, but not proletarian labour power. By the 1200s, although
the peasants had won de facto rights over the greater part of the land, they
never fully controlled their livelihood, because they faced a lordly class deeply
ingrained in the political and social fabric of the country. The lords came to
accept the legality of the peasants’ plots over the following two centuries, at the
same time as they made periodic surveys of seigneurial inventories to define
their perquisites. Duties that had fallen into abeyance were discovered in the
unnoticed implications of customs, others were invented and added to the
tangle of levies, and a heavy seigneurial burden accumulated on the peasants.
These also had to pay tax collectors and vendors of essential goods, and often
had to sell their produce when prices were lowest in order to make ends meet.
After a long period of economic and population growth, from the end of the
1400s until the 1670s and 1680s, peasants faced mounting difficulties, as the
subdivision of their plots among offspring left them with parcels inadequate for
their subsistence. They faced debts and foreclosures, and the nobles ended up
with estates as large as 300 hectares in the Paris Basin amid an overall context
of stagnation which lasted into the eighteenth century.15
These estates did not represent the outcome of primitive accumulation so
much as solutions by default, when peasant communities abandoned the land
in a time of crisis. What is more, when prices rose again in the second half of
the eighteenth century – when, according to Heller, capitalist farmers emerged

13 Moriceau 1994b, p. 72.

14 For Smith’s description of the dissolution of feudalism, see Smith 1999, Book iii.
15 Bloch 1966, pp. 128–34, 140–3, 217, 233; Fourquin 1970, pp. 175–9; Fossier 1968, pp. 555–6;
Bois 1976, pp. 203–4, 217, 355; Meuvret 1987, pp. 75–6, 86, 88–9; Beaur 1984, pp. 270, 336,
339; Jacquart 1975, pp. 362–5, 373–5; Brenner 1985, pp. 312–13.
french absolutism and agricultural capitalism 109

stronger than ever – the estates shed peasant farms. Every carefully researched
measurement of property from about 1730 or 1740 through the 1800s shows that
the nobles lost ground, and the bourgeoisie found itself on the defensive, as
peasants racked up debts to acquire land. The extent of peasant property varied
from one region to another and overall amounted to around 40 percent of the
total at the end of the eighteenth century.16
The peasants succeeded in extending their share of the soil by exploiting
their household labour. They had more family members than could be put to
work on their plots, and rather than cast off this labour, and make the land yield
income relative to the time spent working it, they used the members in labour-
intensive lines in which their superabundant capacity for work gave them a
competitive advantage.17
In the Lyonnais, where the population grew in the eighteenth century into
one of the densest concentrations in the realm, peasants possessed more and
more of the land, maybe even a majority of it, in farms of fewer than five, often
fewer than two, hectares. Many of these resulted from the peasants’ indefatig-
able work converting woods and stony soils into vineyards with the aim of
complementing their holdings in rye and wheat for bread, hemp for cloth, and
oats for animals. Vineyards did not require outlays of household income on
cattle, animal fertiliser, ploughs or carts, and brought in two-and-a-half to five
times more income per hectare than did grains. In contrast to grain cultivation
and its dead seasons, viticulture filled the calendar year with hewing, layering
to multiply the base of the vines, three ploughings with hoes, putting in stakes
for vine shoots, preparing vessels and basins, harvesting, fermenting, pressing
the wine, and many other tasks, which permitted households to put their stores
of labour to use generating additional income for their subsistence.
The Lyonnais countryside buzzed with tiny vineyards spread through the
larger arable fields of the landed classes.18 The peasants of Poitou, in the West,
had from as little as 2 percent of the land around Poitiers to as much as 25
percent in areas of the Vendee. Yet they had around 40 percent of the land

16 Heller 2010, p. 135; Meuvret 1987, pp. 88–9; Beaur 2000, pp. 32, 38–9; Tulippe 1934, pp. 110,
161–3, 241, 318–19; Jarnoux 1996, p. 268; Lefebvre 1924, pp. 47–50, 57; Berenson 1984, pp. 9–
10, 18, 20, 22–3; Price 1975, p. 271; Brennan 2006, pp. 183, 186, 189–90, 193, 197–8; Grantham
1975, pp. 292–306, 324–5; Labrousse 1966, pp. 48–51.
17 My line of reasoning is inspired by a comparative article on England and China by Brenner
and Isett 2002.
18 Berger 1985, pp. 183–4; Tomas 1967, pp. 409–10; Gutton 1971, p. 172; Jomand 1966, pp. 126–7;
Durand 1979, pp. 230, 291–2, 447, 507–8; Brenot 1980, p. 235; Dupaquier 1995, p. 76; Bianchi
1999, p. 53.
110 chapter 8

in hemp and 30–85 percent of the land in vines. Hemp required much labour
soaking the stems, grinding the dried ones a month later, cleaning and combing
the material, spinning it, and then putting the hanks on winders for the making
of cloth. Artisans usually worked a quarter of the year in rural cloth workshops,
the rest on their parcels of land. They planted turnips after the hemp to bring
nutrients to the topsoil and prepare it for rye. This crop, which predominated
on the peasants’ fields, did not fetch as high a price as did wheat but did better
on land lacking fertiliser and helped assure their subsistence.19
Cereals covered at least 70, and usually 80–90 per cent of Poitevin fields,
especially those of the landed classes. They also took up the main part of the
peasants’ work. Even so, fodder crops, for commercial cattle, began to appear
on the farms of peasants and sharecroppers in the wooded countryside with
small irregular-shaped fields and many hedges and copses. The smallholders
developed crop rotations of buckwheat to clean, loosen and break down the
soil, and then broom, gorse bush, vetches, and sainfoin, along with barley and
oats, after the harvest of wheat. The gorse bush on the heaths fixed lime and
phosphorous acid (in the same way that legumes do) in these acidic soils natur-
ally deficient in such nutrients. Peasants left the broom and gorse on uncultiv-
ated paths to be saturated in rain and animal droppings, and trampled by cattle
and people. They obtained excellent fertiliser in this way and had fodder to rear
about one draft animal per two hectares, a proportion superior to that obtained
on the commercial cereal domains and open fields of northern France.20
This animal husbandry required the peasants of Poitou to till plots for several
years, abandon them, and then clear the unplanted land. The peasants used
resistant hoes to divide the broom and gorse, and to plough several times with
the aim of breaking up the roots and taking out the weeds. The husbandry
required huge amounts of labour of both sexes and all ages. It appeared as time
wasted to observers but actually added up to a means of putting excess labour
to use and maintaining a dense population.21
The peasants of the Berry, in central France, reared oxen. Horses did farm-
work more rapidly but cost more to buy and maintain. Since the peasants did
not face pressure to maximise the market value of their labour-time, they saw

19 Peret 1998, pp. 43–4, 94, 98; Guillemet, Pellegrin and Peret 1981, pp. 11, 14–15; Merle 1958,
pp. 40–1, 64; Autexier 1947, p. 83; Benoist 2005, p. 120; Benoist 1985, pp. 163–4; Bossis 1980,
p. 143; Bossis 1972, pp. 132–3, 135–6; Elie 2003, p. 238; Pichon 2004, pp. 149, 152, 154; Pellegrin
1987, pp. 380–1; Martin 1988, p. 64.
20 Benoist 2005, pp. 184–5, 294–5; Benoist 1985, pp. 163–5, 167; Antoine 1999, pp. 121, 124–6,
128–9, 131; Bossis 1980, p. 143; Tilly 1964, p. 33; Gerard 1990, pp. 42–4.
21 Antoine 1999, p. 129.
french absolutism and agricultural capitalism 111

the horses as a needless expense. They reserved the best land for subsistence
crops rather than fodder, and their oxen did not produce optimal amounts
of fertiliser. Yet the peasants still had more manure for their fields than the
landed classes of the Berry had for their commercial cereal domains which
had extensive sheep grazing, fallow and few farm animals. The peasants intens-
ively applied household labour farming peas, broad beans, and turnips, which
renewed the soil and raised yields. Fallow receded from their plots long before
it did from the large domains. The peasants laid out gardens and vineyards,
and farmed hemp for domestic clothing and sales of the surplus garments.
They used spades and hoes, which went deeper into the soil, and turned, vent-
ilated, and weeded it better than did ploughs. Spades and hoes required far
more labour, but the peasants only had to take wood from the forests to make
them and did not incur costs to maintain and replace them. The peasants saved
instead for new parcels to assure their families’ livelihood.22
In the Paris Basin, the population grew 31 percent in the eighteenth century,
making the region the second most densely inhabited of the realm. The Paris
Basin is known for large farms of 10 to 40, 120, and even 300 hectares in certain
areas. Yet peasant farms, mostly smaller than two hectares, existed in nearly
every parish and covered anywhere from 5 to 45 percent of the farmland. These
small holdings grew at the expense of the large farms of the bourgeoisie and
nobility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the peasants took on
debts to buy as much land as possible in the hopes of attaining self-sufficiency
and security in old age.23
The expansion of peasant agriculture in the decades following 1740 stemmed
from the rural population’s ability to put unpaid family members to use in
labour-intensive lines such as market gardening in the parishes bordering Paris
to the northeast. Peasants gardened with spades and sickles, even though these
did not accomplish much work relative to the labour expended, because repla-
cing these implements with more efficient ones would not have increased out-
put but would have increased the outlays of family income. Peasants of the Par-
is Basin also created vineyards, which, like the gardens, generated more income
per hectare than did wheat fields. They had far fewer prairies and woods than
did the urban landowners, yet had nearly all of the regional vineyards.24

22 Gay 1967, pp. 159–60, 162–3, 169, 184–5, 308.

23 Loutchisky 1933, pp. 121, 123, 134; Jacquart 1974, pp. 104–5, 107, 117; Brunet 1960, p. 284; Vovelle
1980, pp. 85, 217, 202; Ganiage 1988, p. 54; Dupaquier 1995, p. 76; Dupaquier 1956, pp. 145–6,
214, 255; Tulippe 1934, p. 110; Beaur 1984, p. 128; Beaur 1991, pp. 285, 287.
24 Peru 2003, pp. 68–9, 71; Dion 1959, pp. 32, 466–7; Labrousse 1990, pp. 554, 558; Baulant 1979,
p. 96.
112 chapter 8

In short, if any economic vitality existed in rural France it came from the
peasantry, not the bourgeoisie. In fact, it was because the peasants possessed
so much of the land, and acquired even more of it as prices rose in the decades
following 1740, that the upper classes accumulated political power. Politically
constituted private property – seigneurial rights, venal offices, tax farms, noble
titles, and bonds sold by office holders, municipal magistracies, and provincial
estates – redistributed income from the peasantry to the nobility and bour-
geoisie. It is well documented that the bourgeoisie rented the right to collect
seigneurial dues from nobles and bishops, and purchased lordly rights, venal
offices, titles and state bonds, down to the end of the ancien régime. Politically
constituted private property amounted to the sole means of appropriating the
surpluses from the mass of resources possessed by the peasantry.25

The Exploitation of Peasant Labour

The most widespread and fundamental form of appropriation was the extra
work taken from the entire families of the smallholders. To understand this
point, one must keep in mind that the peasant economy gave up poor and dis-
possessed, but not variable proletarian components of capital. From the 1730s
and 1740s onward, increases in output did not take the form of capital accumu-
lation so much as additional outlays of household labour by a growing numbers
of peasants eager to eke out income and acquire land. The peasants actually
gained less income per time working. In the Paris Basin, their discretionary
income for consumer goods shrank, as their growing numbers competed for
scarce resources in land, food, and jobs. The majority of peasants did not have
the surpluses to speculate on grain markets, and had to buy their subsistence
at a time of rising prices. While no one actually starved, the population’s mal-
nutrition is well documented.26

25 Robert Brenner developed the concept of ‘politically constituted private property’; see
Brenner 2003, pp. 652–3, P. Jones 2003, pp. 28, 73–5; Doyle 1996, pp. 233, 237; Lüthy 1998,
pp. 9–10, 15, 17–18, 23; Porshnev 1963, pp. 112–13, 122, 563–6, 572; Althusser 1972, pp. 99–104;
Anderson 1974, pp. 18–20, 47–8, 54–5, 97, 125–6, 138–9; Goubert and Roche 1984, pp. 66,
243, 356; Dessert 1984, pp. 43, 46, 59–60, 63, 316, 331, 341, 355, 367; Beik 1985, pp. 21, 245–
78; Comninel 1987, pp. 195–6, 198, 200–3; Collins 1988, pp. 111, 122, 136, 144, 146, 155, 164, 214;
Descimon and Jouhaud 1996, pp. 78, 155, 173, 189–90; Parker 1996, pp. 100–1, 263–5; Miller
2008, pp. 42–4, 46, 59, 71, 74–81, 93–4, 96.
26 Aymard 1988, p. 235; Bouton 1993, pp. 57–9; Ganiage 1988, p. 41.
french absolutism and agricultural capitalism 113

In the Lyonnais, only a third of the vintners owned the minimum of two
hectares needed to support a family in wine production. The rest had to get
resources in other ways, commonly by labouring on the arable fields of the
landed classes. The growing population, and its reliance on labour markets for
income and on grain markets for food, drove up the price of rye, the staple crop
of the region, higher than the agricultural wages. Growth came to a halt as a
result of the saturation of vineyards in the region of Lyon. Wine prices rose
over the course of the eighteenth century, as consumption regained the levels
it had reached prior to the crisis of the end of the seventeenth century. But
output eventually surpassed demand, as the urban population sacrificed wine
purchases to necessities in years of high prices. Harvests expanded excessively,
drove down wine prices from 1776 to 1785, and plunged the peasants into
precariousness.27
After 1770, rising land rents and rural poverty diminished the market for non-
essential goods and provoked a severe downturn in artisanal activity affecting
all the households of the Poitou-Charentes that earned ancillary income from
hemp. While the price of grain and other products rose, that of wine and flax fell
on account of all of the vineyards and hemp fields carved out of the hillsides
and poor lands, where cereals did not grow. The vintners of northern Poitou
saw the value of their plots decline in the 1780s. The sale of livestock grew
exponentially in the fairs of Fontenay and other towns of lower Poitou from
1758 to 1776 but then faced a brutal recession. The lack of fodder made animal
fattening impractical, forced sales amid falling prices, yet still led merchants
to turn away from markets. The after-death inventories of Poitou, measured
against the regional food grains, show a 20 percent decline of fortunes over the
course of the eighteenth century and a particularly sharp decline among day
labourers and ploughmen without much property. The number of poor and
beggars grew in lower Poitou, and the population of the Fontenaysien actually
declined in the years preceding the revolution.28
The peasants, in a word, faced mounting difficulties wringing subsistence
from their plots. Only a minority had the land and livestock to avoid reliance on
wages, on leasing small plots to combine with their own insufficient holdings,
or even on leasing whole units of production to provide for their families’
subsistence. The nobility and bourgeoisie had no thought of expropriating the
peasants and turning them into proletarians. The routine practice of pinning

27 Durand 1979, pp. 41–2, 291–2, 507–8; Gutton 1971, pp. 70–1.
28 Peret 1988, pp. 16, 20; Peret 1998, pp. 47, 157; Martin 1988, p. 177; Bossis 1972, p. 136; Dehergne
1963, p. 23: Gerard 1990, p. 55.
114 chapter 8

down ever more of the peasants’ labour to the soil – by dint of overlapping
forms of tenancy and remunerated work – generated much wealth for the
landed classes. This form of appropriation did not involve the calculation of
labour costs, the competitive pressure to reduce them, or the accumulation of
surpluses.
The rental agreements of the Lyonnais, Poitou, and Berry, drawn up for the
benefit of merchants, office holders and nobles, had traditional, quasi-feudal,
arrangements for the payment of seigneurial dues, and for labour services
carting agricultural goods to market or to the landowner’s table in the towns.
They contained many indications that the tenants were bound to the soil in
debts they could never redeem. Leases spelled out traditional methods and
crop rotations, and restricted the lands for seeding through binding rotations
of grains and fallows so as to prevent soil exhaustion. The landowners and their
stewards did not worry much about meagre harvests, because these increased
the value of their supplies of wheat. Besides, customary rotations suited the
purpose of ensuring that the crops amenable to seigneurial dues would be
available at harvest time. As the eighteenth century wore on, the leases obliged
the tenants to cede more and more, over half in some cases, of their harvests
and gave the proprietors little reason to accumulate livestock, stables, fields
of fodder crops, and other forms of constant capital. The economy showed no
evidence of capitalist cycles of accumulation, in which, according to Marx, ‘…
a part of the annual surplus labour must have been applied to the production
of additional means of production and subsistence …’29
This extractive, non-capitalist sort of feudal landlordism also prevailed in
the Paris Basin. Heller makes much of Moriceau’s research, but what does it
actually indicate? Moriceau claims that wheat yields grew 10 to 25 percent in
various parts of the Paris Basin, and attained relatively high levels at the end of
the eighteenth century, through improved rotations with fodder crops and the
application of animal fertiliser. He claims, above all, that tenants accumulated
two or three leases of large farms, and added horse-power to carting and

29 Marx 1990, p. 727; Couturier 1909, pp. 22, 288, 295–7; Guillemet, Pellegrin and Peret 1981,
pp. 12, 14; Benoist 2005, p. 144; Louis (ed.) 1877–80, pp. 26, 70, 226–7; Remondiere 1894,
pp. 74–6; Masse 1956, pp. 24, 28; Elie 2003, p. 236; Autexier 1947, pp. 85, 104, 145, 147–8, 169,
195; Peret 1976, pp. 101, 132–3, 194, 225; Peret 1988, p. 16; Dehergne 1963, p. 45; Cathelineau
1912, p. vii; Legal 1995, pp. 331–2, 348–9; Brossard and Delapoix de Freminville 1904–7, p. 51;
Fournial and Gutton 1974–5, p. 10; Tomas 1968, p. 395; Tomas 1965, p. 116; Berger 1985, p. 178;
Garnier 1982, pp. 363, 381; Vignon 1978, pp. 451–2; Dontenwill 1963, pp. 123, 127; Zeller 1990,
p. 70; Gay 1967, p. 276; Gay 1955, pp. 36, 38–9; Surrault 1990, p. 197; Menault 1991, p. 118;
Meuvret 1987, pp. 103–4.
french absolutism and agricultural capitalism 115

ploughing, all with the intention of economising on farm buildings and hired
labourers and thus of increasing profit.30
If one unpacks this research, one notices, first of all, that the tenants’ large
farms reached their maximum extent of about 200 hectares in 1675–99 but then
diminished to 160–70 in 1775–99. This sequence resulted from the vagaries of
the peasant-subsistence economy rather than cost-cutting responses to cap-
italist competition. Landlords were stuck with properties in the crisis of the
seventeenth century – as the peasants could no longer make ends meet amid
falling prices – but then sold property to peasants willing to take on debts,
deploy additional family labour, and wring more from the land as prices rose
in the eighteenth century.31
Second, looking at Moriceau’s figures, one sees that 35 percent of the large
holdings of the tenant farmers remained fallow down to the end of the ancien
régime. Such a vast area plainly shows the lack of capital accumulation. It shows
that farmers did not put into practice the interconnected undertakings that
made up the hallmark of early modern agricultural revolutions. Specifically,
the tenants did not replace fallow with nitrogen-restoring fodder crops, build
stables, rear livestock, amass manure fertiliser, and expand the arable surface
for the purpose of accruing surpluses and cutting relative costs.32
Third, the yields documented by Moriceau resulted from the growth of
the market and population, not capitalist development. Feudal lords of the
thirteenth century, at a time of population increase and the growth of the urban
market, did not accumulate means of production, but rather non-capitalist
modes of accumulation. They extracted additional labour, output and revenue
from the peasantry. The lords secured profit by enhancing their domination of
the rural population and thereby actually contributed to the depletion of the
agricultural capital.33
One observes the same tendency in the eighteenth century. Arthur Young,
the most respected agricultural writer of the time, remarked,

The greatest fabrics … are the cottons and woollens of Normandy, the
woollens of Picardy and Champagne, the linens of Bretagne, and the silks
and hardware of the Lyonnois. Now, if manufactures be the true encour-

30 Moriceau 1994a, pp. 33–4, 50–1, 53, 58; Moriceau 1994b, pp. 460–1, 631, 635, 640–3, 659–60,
779–80; Moriceau and Postei-Vinay 1992, pp. 172–3, 184–5. 191–5, 197–8, 204–6, 209–12, 318,
322.
31 Moriceau 1994b, p. 631; Jacquart 1975, pp. 362–5, 373–5.
32 Moriceau 1994b, p. 640.
33 Brenner 2007, pp. 50–1.
116 chapter 8

agement of agriculture, the vicinity of those great fabrics ought to be the

best cultivated districts in the kingdom. I have visited all of those manu-
factures, and remarked the attendant culture, which is unexceptionably
so execrable, that one would be much more inclined to think there was
something pestiferous to agriculture in the neighbourhood of a manufac-
ture, than to look up to it as a mean of encouragement.34

The proliferation of smallholders and their critical need for income led farm
managers to squeeze extra labour out of the peasantry for intensive hoeing
and tilling in the pursuit of extra output for the Paris market. This extract-
ive landlordism explains the yields recorded by Moriceau. Jean-Michel Chevet
has gone over Moriceau’s evidence and shown that it does not demonstrate
the consolidation of landholdings. He has shown, significantly, that Moriceau’s
evidence does not indicate the addition of horse power and improved plough-
ing. Moreover, the tenant farmers used more labourers, not fewer, in the herd-
ing of sheep and the harvesting of oats and hay. Chevet has shown, in short,
that the tenant farmers controlled the labour of peasant families and com-
munities and thus did not have to calculate and curtail their costs through
investment in constant capital. For this reason, the profitable crop-growing
detailed by Moriceau coincided with the abysmal state of agriculture noticed
by Young.35 Fourth, Gerard Beaur has also gone over Moriceau’s findings and
pointed out that Moriceau’s typical tenant farmer did not amass surpluses. In
contrast to this distinguishing feature of capitalists, as described by Marx in the
chapter of Capital titled ‘Money, or the Circulation of Commodities’, the tenant
farmer depleted his profits in an apparently fierce quest for land. The tenant
undertook risk, used up revenues, even went into debt, and sterilised invest-
ment so as to secure landholdings for the maximum number of offspring. He
adhered to a traditional economic logic of assuring social respectability for his
sons.36
Lastly and most importantly, the body of research on the Paris Basin, beyond
Moriceau’s, a long list of empirical studies, points to traditional seigneurial
relations, not to an emergent capitalist agriculture. In the eighteenth century,
as the rural population and grain prices increased, landlords were in a powerful
position to force extra work from peasant families. They added many stipula-

34 Young 1969, pp. 432–3.

35 Chevet 1994, pp. 118–19, 123–7, 136, 138–9; Beaur 1996, p. 374. For Young’s negative assess-
ment of farming in the Paris Basin, see Young 1969, pp. 14, 267, 299, 307, 441–2.
36 Beaur 1996, pp. 381–3, 385.
french absolutism and agricultural capitalism 117

tions of a feudal character to leases with the aim of extracting produce, work
and money. Peasants often had to provide the landlord with seigneurial dues,
fruit from gardens, and chickens or other animals on Christmas Day. Leases had
stipulations for rents in kind and in money, and often resembled debts forcing
the lessee to submit to all sorts of burdens, such as obligatory carting services,
hardly distinguishable from medieval servitudes and the feudal corvees.37
The tenant farmers of the Paris Basin resembled seigneurial stewards more
than they did rural capitalists. They threw their weight around in the lord’s
name, managed his farms, hired local labourers, engaged artisans, collected
dues, and stored grain for charity, wages and other sorts of influence. They
often held the peasantry in debt and benefited from the lord’s tax privileges.
Landowners and their stewards relied on traditional leasing practices to appro-
priate extra work and produce from the peasantry and thus to profit from rising
grain prices. They did not build up stocks of nitrogen-restoring fodder, facilit-
ies for animal rearing, and other means of production necessary to cut costs.
The Paris Basin showed no evidence of a ceaseless drive toward more means of
production, more commodities, and capital accumulation on an ever-greater
scale.38

Class Conflict

The fact that the rural economy did not evolve according to a capitalist logic
does not mean that we should eschew a dialectical approach to its study. One
of the best recent works on the period shows the pervasiveness of class conflict.
About 8,500 popular revolts shaped the period from 1660 to 1789. Nearly 40
percent of them targeted the royal tax farms, not to mention hundreds of
further revolts against direct taxes.39 Royal taxation, we have seen, was crucial
to the class relations in redistributing revenue from peasant communities to
aristocrats of the royal court, as well as to noble and bourgeois investors in state
bonds and offices. It sustained the royal judiciary and army, which, in turn,

37 Jacquart 1974, pp. 272–4, 757–8; Jacquart 1975 pp. 359, 362–3; Lejosne 1989, pp. 61–2; Parker
1996, pp. 63–4; Venard 1957, pp. 72–3, 83; Mireaux 1958, pp. 112–13; Loutchisky 1933, pp. 141–
2; Fromont 1907, pp. 522, 526–7, 578–9.
38 Bouton 1993, pp. 44–5; Beaur 1996, pp. 381–3, 385; Mireaux 1958, pp. 117–18, 120–1; Aymard
1988, pp. 222, 225; Fromont 1907, pp. 517, 519; Jacquart 1974, p. 317; Grantham 1978, pp. 332–
3; Ado 1996, pp. 57–8. George Comninel provides a good description of this non-capitalist
commercial agriculture of the Paris Basin; see Comninel 1987, pp. 183–93.
39 Nicolas 2002, pp. 29, 56, 12.
118 chapter 8

upheld the entire complex of seigneurial domination. The revolts obviously

limited the monarchy’s options as it sought to cope with financial difficulties
and keep the regime afloat in the 1780s.
Bread riots, though not as common as fiscal revolts, grew in number over the
course of the eighteenth century, especially in the Paris Basin. They occurred
more often in the towns than in the countryside. The riots not only speak to
the failure of agriculture to raise output sufficiently to bring down relative
food prices. They also speak to the trends of population growth, the subdivi-
sion of landholdings, the inability of households to make ends meet on tiny
farms, their movement into labour-intensive lines of cash crops, and their grow-
ing reliance on tenancy, sharecropping and day labour. Although the peasants
increased output, they still grew more dependent on grain markets for their
subsistence. They undoubtedly found it unjust that landlords took saleable
crops from increasingly oppressive terms of tenancy, wage labour and seigneur-
ial rights.40
Most importantly, the popular revolts show that the passing of time did not
change the character of violent episodes. The cohesion of the common people
remained everywhere the norm. Village solidarities persisted. The peasants had
not seen their work abstracted from the community of human experience into
a variable component of capital.41

Conclusion

In Heller’s view, the line of argument of Beik and Parker, by neglecting the
development of the bourgeoisie in early modern France, abets the revisionist
challenge to the idea that the revolution of 1789 was bourgeois and capitalist.
I would argue, however, that currently the main focus in early modern and
revolutionary studies is not, as Heller argues, ‘… to attack the idea that the
revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution’.42 On the contrary, the
latest Penguin history of eighteenth-century France, a work of over 600 pages,
fully supports the idea of bourgeois revolution. Like Heller’s ‘The Long Durée of
the French Bourgeoisie’, it focuses on the dynamism of ancien régime society.43
Liberal and Marxist historians, Heller states, long had argued that 1789 was
a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Today it is the liberals who revive this

40 Nicolas 2002, pp. 227, 252–3.

41 Nicolas 2002, pp. 76–7; Comninel 1987, p. 193.
42 Heller 2010, p. 132.
43 Jones 2003.
french absolutism and agricultural capitalism 119

thesis. In fact, the only common theme discernible in the recent historiography
is not a rejection of bourgeois and capitalist revolution so much as an aversion
to class analysis or conflict. The latest Penguin history leaves aside the seigneur-
ial regime and gives no indication that the political actions of the 90 percent of
the population residing in the countryside contributed in any way to the evol-
ution of the country.44
As for the rural economy, the current consensus – represented by Philip Hoff-
man, whose work concurs in every respect with Moriceau’s – is that a transition
to capitalism requires no explanation whatsoever. Agriculture became pro-
ductive when stimulated by the economic demand of the towns. Rural social
history and conflict between peasants and lords have no place in the studies of
Moriceau and Hoffman.45
Market dynamism and bourgeois revolution permit liberal historians to
present the essential relations of capitalism without any explanation, as the
inherent response to prospects for gain. The social structures, which beget
inequality and poverty, need not concern historians, who can assume them to
have developed naturally as unfortunate results of progress. This is the current
consensus which Marxists ought to challenge.46

44 Heller 2009, pp. 33, 36; Heller 2010, p. 132; Jones 2003.
45 Mouriceau 1994b, pp. 54, 72; Hoffman 1996, pp. 144–6.
46 Heller 2009, pp. 33, 36; Heller 2010, p. 132; Comninel 1987, pp. 192–3.
 chapter 9

Stephen Miller on Capitalism in the Old Regime: A

Response

The relationship between the ancien régime and the French Revolution lies at
the core of the dispute between Stephen Miller and myself. At the conclusion
of his critique Miller announces the startling news that liberal historians like
himself accept the view that the French Revolution was bourgeois and capital-
ist. On the other hand, lest I pop the champagne too soon, Miller hastily offers
a caveat. Liberal historians accept that the revolution was bourgeois and capit-
alist but do not accept that class and class-conflict were primary factors behind
the revolution.1 However if class and class-struggle had little or nothing to do
with the revolution it would seem incumbent on him to suggest some other
explanation for the transition from feudalism and aristocratic rule to capitalism
and bourgeois dominance that even he agrees marked the revolution. Adding
to the puzzle, a page earlier Miller acknowledges that class conflict was chronic
in the period from 1660 until 1780, embodying an ongoing struggle between
peasants and plebeians and seigneurial and state power.2
This might have provided the basis for an explanation. But Miller refuses
to explore the connection between such struggles in the ancien régime and
the revolution or even to logically reconcile his own contradictory assertions
regarding class conflict. The objective of his piece is rather to try to insist on the
non-capitalist nature of the whole French countryside so as to forestall the idea
that a bourgeoisie might have assumed leadership over the peasant revolution.3
Marx argued otherwise, asserting that the bourgeoisie who led the revolu-
tion arose dialectically within feudal society. Although study of Marx is today
experiencing a revival, the view still lingers that his understanding of history
is dépassé, that ‘new’, ‘archivally’-based scholarship has long since superseded
his work. Marx in fact extensively studied the scholarly works and published
documents of the French Revolution, and, more importantly, brought to bear
on them unequalled theoretical insight.4 On the question of the capitalist and
bourgeois nature of the revolution his most valuable observations are to be

1 Miller 2012, p. 155.

2 Miller 2012, p. 154.
3 Miller 2012, p. 145.
4 Lowy 1989.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_010

stephen miller on capitalism in the old regime: a response 121

found in Volume One of the Theories of Surplus Value, the so-called fourth
volume of Capital referred to by him as the historical, historico-critical or
historical-literary part of Capital.5 In this work Marx attributes the discovery
of surplus value in the sphere of production to the Physiocrats, whose

system is presented as the new capitalist society prevailing within the

framework of feudal society. This therefore corresponds to bourgeois
society in the epoch when the latter breaks its way out of the feudal
order. Consequently, the starting-point is in France, in a predominantly
agricultural country, and not in England, a predominantly industrial,
commercial and seafaring country.6

In England where capitalism was already highly developed, the attention of

economic thinkers like Adam Smith was focused on circulation. In France,
on the contrary, the sudden rise to prominence of capitalist relations of pro-
duction in agriculture prompted the Physiocrats to recognise that the source
of surplus-value lay in the exploitation of agricultural workers. Some of the
Physiocrats, reflecting the interests of the bourgeoisie, went so far as to urge
that taxes be imposed on rent and not on profit-generating activity since, they
argued, rent was the only real form in which the surplus was embodied. Accord-
ing to Marx, this position anticipated the legislation of the French Revolution.7
In Marx’s view, then, the decisive arena in which capitalism developed and
the capitalist bourgeoisie emerged was the countryside, and he saw this occur-
ring in France prior to the revolution, just as he describes the earlier break-
through of capitalism in sixteenth-century rural England in the eighth part of
the first volume of Capital. In putting forward this perspective, Marx was espe-
cially influenced by Turgot who, alongside Quesnay, was the most influential
of the Physiocrats. Turgot was aware of the evolution of France toward cap-
italism and attempted to theorise it within the terms of a society which was
still politically and socially feudal. Never quite abandoning his Physiocratic
assumptions, which stressed the importance of agriculture, Turgot nonethe-
less arrived at the view that value or wealth derived from the surplus labour of
workers which produced capitalist profit both in agriculture and manufactur-
ing. In his principal work, the Reflexions sur La formation et la distribution des
richesses (1766), Turgot repeatedly underlines his fealty to the basic principles

5 Marx 1963, p. 13.

6 Marx 1961, p. 50.
7 Marx 1963, p. 52.
122 chapter 9

of Physiocratic doctrine. Nonetheless, in a backwards and forwards fashion, he

moves toward recognition of the value-creating potential of both industry and
agriculture, of the essential role of capital to the activity of both farmers and
manufacturers, and to the common condition of both agricultural and indus-
trial workers in competition to sell their labour to employers in return for a
wage.8 The primary focus in Turgot’s work becomes not land as a material entity
which produces wealth but capital as a value which attempts to expand and
realise itself whether in farming or manufacture.9 While Turgot harked back to
the original Physiocratic definition of wealth as the net product from agricul-
ture at various points in the Reflections, he increasingly acknowledged the role
of the category of profit in capitalist activity.10 Turgot also underscored that
the more productive and advanced form of farming based on capitalism had
become prevalent throughout the north of France.11 Turgot’s economic prin-
ciples, we conclude – like those of other French theorists of the time – was a
reflection and theorisation of the new capitalist relations which had begun to
emerge and which he hoped would develop further.
Both Turgot and Marx believed that in the eighteenth century a capitalist
bourgeoisie had emerged among the farmers of northern France. The source
of their wealth was the exploitation of the labour of rural wage workers. Jean-
Marc Moriceau’s thesis on the farmers of the île-de-France offers an important
historical reinforcement of this viewpoint.12 According to Moriceau, it was
in the latter part of the sixteenth century that an elite of wealthier peasants
first consolidated itself as a stratum of capitalist tenant-farmers in the île-de-
France. Already endowed with some land, tools and cash reserves, they leased
farms held by the nobility and Church while using the wage labour of their
hard-pressed neighbours.13 During the heyday of the Bourbon absolutist state
in the seventeenth century, family solidarity and the strict rationalisation of
operations made it possible for many of these farmers to sustain profits in
the face of increased taxes and rents while preparing the way for the great
prosperity and expansion of their power in the next century. Among notable
improvements introduced by such farmers were a successful consolidation of
land holdings, a greater degree of specialisation, more intensive manuring, and

8 Morilhat 1988, pp. 158–9, 164, 168–9, 171.

9 Morilhat 1988, pp. 156, 173–4.
10 Morilhat 1988, pp. 167–8.
11 Turgot 1898, p. 24.
12 Moriceau 1994a.
13 Moriceau 1994a, pp. 145–351.
stephen miller on capitalism in the old regime: a response 123

greater traction through improved harnessing of animal draught power.14 By

the beginning of the eighteenth century this elite had engrossed the greater
part of the land in the île-de-France and had reduced the majority of producers
to wage workers.
These rich peasants lobbied in favour of a free market in grain as intro-
duced by Turgot during his brief tenure as minister of finance in the 1770s. They
organised production using their own tools and equipment and employed a
workforce paid in wages. Based on their operations, they derived a profit and
as a result paid their landlords what amounted to a capitalist rent.15 Indeed,
the farmers of such enterprises had to pay not only these rents, but usually
also seigneurial dues, taxes, and tithes. But since their farms were on fertile
lands that were close to good roads and towns, they were able to take advant-
age of high prices and to enjoy profitable returns. They often enhanced their
revenues by farming ecclesiastical tithes and seigneurial obligations. As such,
the incomes of such farmers were made up of both capitalist profits and feudal
rents, something that Miller finds perplexing. Through their business and social
connections and their lifestyle, these farmers constituted part of the bour-
geoisie alongside those of the middle class who lived in the surrounding bourgs
and towns.16 Peasant differentiation, including the existence of a rural capital-
ist bourgeoisie that dominated the rest of the rural population, is something
else that Miller has difficulty coming to terms with.
Looking for a moment at northern France as a whole, this elite of wealthy
farmers constituted a smaller fraction of a more numerous and broader group
of prosperous peasant ploughmen or labourers. On a lesser scale than the
wealthy farmers, they, too, hired wage labour and loaned grain, ploughs, wag-
ons, and money to their less well-off neighbours. As such, they, too, were part
of an emergent class of rural capitalists. More generally we can say that the
French countryside, especially in the north, saw a halting and tentative progress
toward capitalist relations in agriculture and the development of an agrarian
bourgeoisie.17 Moriceau notes that in the île-de-France and over much of the
rest of the north of France genuine agricultural improvement took place. Espe-
cially in regions close to cities that were affected by new agronomic ideas and
by the growing availability of manure, productivity significantly increased in
the second half of the eighteenth century.18

14 Moriceau 1994a, pp. 611–23, 631–42.

15 Ado 1996, p. 51.
16 Moriceau 1994a, pp. 703–69; Moriceau 1989, pp. 46–7.
17 Ado 1996, p. 53.
18 Moriceau 1994b.
124 chapter 9

Undermining Moriceau’s perspective is the principal objective of Miller’s

critique, bent as he is on showing that capitalism did not exist in France prior to
the revolution. Miller claims that the large estates of the nobility were not the
result of primitive accumulation but rather of defaults due to the widespread
abandonment of the land in the crisis of the late seventeenth century.19
Apparently Miller does not realise that defaults which were the result of
economic crisis as well as other factors like heavy rents and taxes and violence
are at the crux of the long-term historical process of primitive accumulation.
Miller does seem to be aware that this process of primitive accumulation was
not confined to the late seventeenth century but went on from the sixteenth
through the eighteenth century.20 But it is a process the consequences of which
he refuses to engage with or outright denies in the name of the idea of the
peasant’s persistent and enduring connection to the land. Despite his attempts
to cover up the results of expropriation by pointing to the partial comeback
of small property in the eighteenth century,21 the overall result of the secular
process of primitive accumulation was an unprecedented concentration of
property in the hands of rich farmers and the transformation of most of the
producers into full or part-time wage earners.
Miller’s pointing-out of the persistence of small holdings in the île-de-France
is part of his attempt to assimilate agriculture in the north to that of the Midi.
His account of the latter is rooted in Chayanovian conceptions of a sempiternal
economy of subsistence and Annaliste notions of neo-Malthusian cycles that
have nothing to do with capitalist development but rather are redolent of the
conservative populist ideology of the agrarian myth.22 In fact he would do bet-
ter to understand the evolution of the situation in the Paris basin and elsewhere
in France by developing Kautsky’s insight into the historic and persistent role
of small farmers in supplying wage labour to larger agricultural enterprises –
the secret of the long-term survival of this stratum and one of the keys open-
ing the door to an understanding of the evolution of feudalism and capitalism
in France and Continental Europe and indeed in the rest of the world.23 As a
matter of fact, Kautsky’s views have become part of a sophisticated attempt to
redefine the complicated and ever-changing relationship between the exploit-
ation of wage and non-wage labour in the history of capitalism.24

19 Miller 2012, p. 146.

20 Miller 2012, pp. 145–6.
21 Miller 2012, p. 148.
22 Brass 2000.
23 Kautsky 1988, pp. xiii–xvi.
24 Brass 2011.
stephen miller on capitalism in the old regime: a response 125

All the more so as Miller is at pains to insist that ‘if one looks at the period
from the middle ages to the nineteenth century, one notices that the peasantry
made available landless labourers and paupers, but not proletarian labour-
power’.25 Evidently this included the majority of the French rural population,
since Miller is forced to admit that in the eighteenth century ‘only a minority
had the land and livestock to avoid reliance on wages …’26
For Miller, the essence of the accumulation of capital is the generation of
increasing amounts of surplus value as a result of the creation of more and
more relative surplus value attendant on the progressive substitution of fixed
capital for variable capital – a process driven by market competition. Such a
transformation is evident in England but not in France, according to Miller.27
Actually, accumulation in the first instance involves an increase in the
amount of both fixed and variable capital employed by capitalists and in this
light the farmers of the Paris basin were undoubtedly capitalists. The substitu-
tion of relative surplus for absolute surplus value, which is never complete, is
a by-product of this process and in this respect there is no doubt that England
was ahead of France especially in the eighteenth century. On the other hand,
that there was also agricultural progress in the île-de-France, as noted above,
is unquestionable. In a selective and tendentious way Miller brings forward
the research of Jean-Michel Chevet on the île-de-France to try to suggest that
Moriceau is wrong on all counts.28 Interesting as Chevet’s research is, it does
not cast into doubt the radical polarisation between landholding and the land-
less and the concomitant process of accumulation as outlined by Moriceau. It
merely questions the latter’s understanding of how one measures gains in pro-
ductivity. Even so, Chevet reaches the important conclusion that the eighteenth
century saw a fifty percent gain in the productivity of agricultural workers.29
Miller offers a backhanded compliment by noting that my account of prim-
itive accumulation at least has the merit of arguing that the inception of
sixteenth-century capitalism was the unintentional result of religious viol-
ence and seigneurial reaction rather than Moriceau’s view that it was the con-
sequence of the intentional logic of growing market demand.30 In fact I argued
that both factors helped to initiate capitalist accumulation. In any case, Miller
condemns me for hitching my wagon to Moriceau whom he dismisses as being

25 Miller 2012, p. 145.

26 Miller 2012, p. 150. The pervasiveness of wage labour is stressed in Heller 2006, pp. 46–7.
27 Miller 2012, pp. 143–4.
28 Chevet 1994.
29 Chevet 1994, p. 140.
30 Miller 2012, p. 144.
126 chapter 9

unapologetically Smithian in his account of the inception and development

of capitalism.31 In fact Miller misrepresents Moriceau’s approach, in which the
ongoing influence of his training in the Annales school is evident, embracing in
its striving for total history human geography, technological innovation, demo-
graphy, family history, class and class-struggle as well as the history of primitive
accumulation and capitalist accumulation proper and finally the role of the
market to explain the long-term development of capitalism in the Paris basin.
It is doubly ironic that in his conclusion Miller insists that today historians
are concerned with the dynamism of the Old Regime rather than the revolu-
tion.32 For while his own view is marked by a sense of historical immobility,
the discounted Moriceau, as editor of the vanguard Histoire et societes rurales,
has placed himself in the lead in creating a new kind of rural history which
is interested in the long-term evolution of the French countryside – a history
which includes its capitalist phase but predates it and is a history not of stasis
but of movement.33

31 Miller 2012, p. 145.

32 Miller 2012, p. 155.
33 Moriceau 2002.
 chapter 10

Marx, the French Revolution, and the Spectre of

the Bourgeoisie

Revisionism has been the dominant trend in the study of the French Revolution
since the 1970s. This is especially the case in the English-speaking countries,
but its influence is felt as well in France as a result of the authority of François
Furet. As is well known, the object of revisionism has been to challenge the
long-established Marxist view of the revolution. The Marxist school of his-
torians, which included Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul,
flourished in the first part of the twentieth century. It looked upon the revolu-
tion as a bourgeois revolution whose power was based on the development of
capitalism in the eighteenth century. In a multitude of ways revisionists have
attempted to deny the significance of the bourgeoisie and capitalism in the
revolution. They have questioned the link between the two terms. They have
cast doubt on the strength of both capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Some have
even sought to deny the meaning of the terms. Finally they have questioned the
significance of the revolution to French history, which, it is claimed, is a history
of continuity rather than change.
Among prominent historians who continue to defend the Marxist view has
been Michel Vovelle. In his recent work Les mots de la Revolution, Vovelle
puts forward the following assessment of the still evolving character of the
bourgeoisie at the time of the revolution:

It is a bourgeoisie of a mixed sort. It associates the ‘self-defined’ ren-

tier bourgeoisie with the representatives of the commercial bourgeoisie
which is beginning to become industrial and is connected to the world of
services.

This balanced view of the evolving and changing nature of the bourgeoisie
allows Vovelle to conclude: ‘With due caution and with a consciousness of the
evolution of language it does not misrepresent things to maintain the classic
designation of the revolutionary historiography of the French Revolution of a
bourgeois revolution based on popular support’.1

1 Vovelle 2004, p. 16.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_011

128 chapter 10

Revisionism has multiple and contradictory threads, as I have noted. Some

adherents have argued that capitalism was weak or even that it did not exist.
Others allow that it was strong but derailed or retarded rather than advanced
by the revolution. Still others argue that capitalism had nothing to do with the
revolution. As for the leading role of the bourgeoisie, it has been asserted by
revisionists that this class was non-capitalist, or even that the nobility rather
than the bourgeoisie were capitalism’s avant-garde. The implication of the lat-
ter point is that the overthrow of this class was in retrospect a retrograde step.2
Such revisionist arguments have in common their focus on trying to refute the
social and economic aspects of the Marxist interpretation of the revolution.
The present chapter focuses on cultural revisionism, an approach pioneered
by Furet. Turning his back on attempts to explain the revolution’s causes by
trying to tie together a multiplicity of factors including the social and eco-
nomic, Furet and other cultural revisionists lay emphasis on the development
of a radical political culture which had its own internal momentum and logic.
A cataclysmic event like the revolution could not have been the result of the
mere oscillations or cycles of French social and economic history as detailed
ad infinitum by the Annales school. To the contrary, the revolution was the
consequence of a fundamental cultural and ideological shift. In consequence,
historical understanding comes through the hermeneutical analysis of the new
revolutionary discourses, political cultures, and identities which in themselves
are seen as the causal agents of this transformation.
Perhaps the foremost advocate in France of this view is Mona Ozouf, who
with Furet is the editor of a revisionist historical encyclopedia entitled Dic-
tionnaire critique de la Revolution française (1988). Ozouf has been described
as a sentinel who guards the gates against the intrusion of any kind of social
explanation that could contaminate the closed realm of discourse analysis. For
Ozouf all attempts to link discourse to social and economic forces are arbitrar-
ily dismissed as discredited, inherently constraining, and reductionist.3 As the
Marxist school perhaps did not pay sufficient attention to the creation of a new
revolutionary and republican culture, this current of revisionism in reaction
has gained credibility among some historians who take seriously the import-
ance of culture. This line of interpretation gains intellectual credibility from the
fact that all parties agree that the revolution represented a change of epic pro-
portions. The depth of cultural transformation inherent in this profound event,
it is then argued, cannot be reduced to economic and social factors. Not only
can this momentous event not be reduced to the socioeconomic, argue these

2 Heller 2006, pp. 9–23.

3 Kaplan 1995, pp. 54, 61–2.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 129

revisionists, but the socioeconomic is essentially irrelevant to it. Without the

existence of a revolutionary political culture, revolution cannot occur regard-
less of the socioeconomic context. Hence a spate of historical work on the
political culture of the revolution, which de-emphasises or deliberately ignores
the material basis of the upheaval.
Never mind that Marxists have always insisted that analysing political con-
sciousness or the so-called subjective factor in politics is indispensable to
understanding the occurrence of revolutionary change. Without the develop-
ment of a revolutionary politics and consciousness, there is no revolution. But,
however indispensable, political consciousness is not a sufficient condition
for a revolution, according to Marxists. In a balanced way, they have generally
stressed that the strength of political consciousness – revolutionary or other-
wise – must be related to the social and economic context. Ideology and cul-
ture by themselves could never induce a revolution. Nor could merely material
factors bring about a revolution, which by definition entails a political and ideo-
logical transformation. It is a combination of material and non-material factors
that lie behind a revolution. Accordingly, Marxists insist that the social and eco-
nomic context was far from irrelevant to the French Revolution.

Cultural Revisionism

Thus, from the Marxist point of view the French Revolution was quintessen-
tially the result of the developing strength of the bourgeoisie as a class in itself
and for itself. Put simply, the bourgeoisie developed both as a class econom-
ically and socially and in terms of its consciousness of itself. Given the matur-
ation of this class during the eighteenth century, it was able to seize political
power by revolutionary means in the crisis of 1789. To the contrary a preoc-
cupation with discourse in the case of some cultural revisionists has led to a
virtual flight from historical and material reality toward a pure idealism. A case
in point is an American historian of the revolution with more than a little cred-
itability, Sarah Maza, who denies the economic and social development of the
bourgeoisie as a class as a factor in the French Revolution. Fixing on the devel-
opment of bourgeois consciousness of itself as a class and, indeed, fetishising
the term ‘bourgeoisie’, she insists that the French Revolution was not a bour-
geois revolution.
In her recent book, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, Maza makes her cent-
ral thesis the memorable notion ‘that the French bourgeoisie did not exist’.4

4 Maza 2003, p. 5.
130 chapter 10

Justifying this position, Maza asserts her belief ‘that language is not pass-
ive but performative: identities are constructed by the cultural elements they
absorb and then articulate as individual and collective stories’.5 Designating
this approach cultural constructionism, Maza insists ‘that the thesis of bour-
geois nonexistence derives from my belief that classes only exist if they are
aware of their own existence’.6 According to her account, there is no sign of
a sense of the bourgeoisie as a class in French discourse until after 1820, and
then mainly in a negative sense. As such, the existence of a bourgeois class was
largely mythical. It follows that there was no bourgeois revolution in France. In
taking this position, Maza evidently seeks to put a last nail in the coffin of the
Marxist interpretation of the revolution.

Marx and Classical Republicanism

In my view it certainly is important whether or not there existed a notion

of the bourgeoisie as a class at the time of the revolution. The existence of
such a concept is in part related to the actual strength of that class in French
society. But the existence of the concept ought to be properly considered in
conjunction with the question as to whether or not such a class had a social
and economic basis in French society rooted in profit-making commercial and
industrial activity. In other words, the existence of such a class for itself goes
hand-in-hand with its existence as a class in itself.7 If there was such a class
in France that carried through the revolution, we should expect that it would
make its weight felt politically and socially and that contemporaries further-
more would be aware of and refer to its existence. On the other hand, it would
be quite wrong to allow our discussion to fixate merely on whether or not the
term ‘bourgeoisie’ was or was not employed by contemporaries. We should not
view the use or non-use of the term ‘bourgeoisie’ as determining our under-
standing of the historical reality. On the contrary, Maza herself seems obsessed
with the currency or not of a term which she fetishises or endows with a life
of its own. Other terms such as ‘middle class’, ‘capitalists’ or even ‘merchants
and bankers’ should properly be considered as evidence for the existence of a
bourgeoisie in the Marxist sense. Moreover, we should realise that along with
all other aspects of French society language itself was undergoing rapid change

5 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

6 Ibid. p. 6.
7 Heller 2006.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 131

during this tumultuous period. The appearance or disappearance of the notion

of a bourgeois class had a great deal to do with the evolution of the politics
of the revolution.8 Moreover, it should constantly be borne in mind that the
term ‘class’ is always as much a political as an economic and social one. In this
perspective, to speak of a bourgeois class is to speak of it in opposition to other
classes and in terms of an evolving historical and political context.9
In undertaking this critique of Maza’s denial of the French Revolution as
a bourgeois revolution it is only fitting to begin with the views of Karl Marx,
the foremost proponent of the idea of bourgeois revolution. As is well known,
Marx inherited his notion of bourgeois revolution from earlier historians like
Augustin Thierry, Francois-Auguste Mignet and François Guizot.10 He most
fully asserted his conception of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution
in the celebrated and poetic opening passages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Napoleon. We find there a view of the revolution which at first sight is
surprisingly congruent with that of Maza:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising
themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed,
precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up
the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-
cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history
in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther
donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped
itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the
revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789,
now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795 …

Consideration of this world-historical necromancy reveals at once a sali-

ent difference. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just,
Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old
French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume

8 Lafargue, 1894; Guilhamou, 1989; Guilhamou, 1989a.

9 Camfield 2004.
10 Nygaard, 2007, p. 154.
132 chapter 10

and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern
bourgeois society. The first [of these heroes] knocked the feudal basis to
pieces and mowed off the feudal heads which had grown on it. The last
[of these, Napoleon] created inside France the conditions under which
free competition could first be developed, parcelled landed property,
exploited and unchained the industrial productive forces of the nation,
and beyond the French borders everywhere swept the feudal institutions
away, so far as was necessary to furnish bourgeois society in France with
a suitable up-to-date environment on the European Continent. The new
social formation once established, the antediluvian Colossi disappeared
and with them resurrected Romanity – the Brutuses, Gracchi, Publicolas,
the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its
sober reality had begotten its true interpreters and mouthpieces in the
Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots; its real
commanders sat behind the counter, and the hogheaded Louis xviii was
its political chief. Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in
peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer comprehended that ghosts
from the days of Rome had watched over its cradle. But unheroic as
bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil
war and battles of peoples to bring it into being. And in the classically
austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals
and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to con-
ceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their
struggles and to maintain their passion on the high plane of great his-
torical tragedy.11

The importance of classical republicanism as the dominant ideology of the

revolution has long been a commonplace of revolutionary historiography. But
preoccupied by culture and ideology as it is, the recent historiography of the
revolution is giving it renewed attention.12 Unlike Marx, Maza fails to deal with
the hegemony of classical republican ideology during the revolution. But in
complete accord with Maza, it is noteworthy that Marx recognises that the
revolutionaries of 1789 appear to have had no sense of themselves as cham-
pions of a bourgeois revolution. Based on his own extensive reading of the
texts of the revolution, he observed that the revolutionary bourgeoisie had no
consciousness of itself as a class in itself. Instead, right down through the Napo-

11 Marx 1978, pp. 103–4.

12 Monnier 1994, 2003, 2005, 2006.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 133

leonic period they wrapped themselves in the heroic mantle of classical repub-
licanism.13 It is only in the aftermath that the heirs of the revolution began to
understand it as a bourgeois revolution. Maza and Marx apparently are in full
agreement and Maza’s attack on Marx appears to be tilting at windmills.
Of course the real difference between Marx and Maza is not over the appear-
ance of things but over what, if anything, lies below. According to Marx, the
protagonists of the revolution had an ideological or illusory sense of their
actions, based on the weight of tradition upon them. Marx characterises this
tradition of classical republicanism inherited from past generations negatively,
as a nightmare lying on the brains of the living. In any case, it is this classic
republican ideology inherited from the past that Marx sees as dominating con-
sciousness during the revolution. It is this deeply political kind of thought that
helped obscure the social and economic realities of the revolution.14 This is
a particularly celebrated illustration of Marx’s notion of false consciousness.
Underneath this illusory surface lies Marx’s bourgeois revolution, which only
rises to the surface to be consciously articulated in the aftermath of the revolu-
tion. Maza, on the contrary, is content with studying the surface of things.
Indeed, for her nothing exists apart from appearance. Nothing lies below or can
be abstracted from the way things appear. What is represented, namely culture,
engenders everything else.15 On the face of things, then, she finds no ideology
of bourgeois revolution. In the absence of any apparent evidence of bourgeois
self-consciousness, she concludes that there was no bourgeoisie and no bour-
geois revolution.
Marx’s emphasis on the weight of tradition and the importance of false con-
sciousness continues to make a certain amount of sense in the interpretation
of the French Revolution. In his view revolutionaries at first did not rationally
understand the consequences of their own actions. It is only when the smoke
cleared in the wake of the revolution that a realistic understanding of the signi-
ficance of the event emerged. It has recently been suggested that Marx’s notion
of bourgeois revolution must be understood in terms of his conception of the
central role of the state as the forcing house of bourgeois revolutionary trans-
formation.16 This insight helps to account for the prominence in the revolution
of this socially alienated political language of classical republicanism.

13 Boudon and Bourdion 2006.

14 Furet 1988, p. 25.
15 Maza 2003, pp. 3–4, 67, 163–4.
16 Nygaard, 2007, pp. 162–4.
134 chapter 10

Revolution and the Bourgeoisie

On the other hand, I will argue in opposition both to Maza and Marx that a
sense of the bourgeoisie as a class and of a bourgeois revolution did develop in
the immediate wake of the taking of the Bastille in 1789. In the early politically
and socially tense years of the revolution, I will show, some revolutionaries did
in fact understand the revolution in these political-economic terms. A Marx-
ist understanding of the bourgeoisie as a class did not emerge. Nor should we
expect it to. But the class conflicts and successive crises of the revolution led
revolutionary leaders to begin to refer to the better-off among the supporters
of the revolution as the bourgeois class. Moreover, the foundations of this class
was understood to be its economic power. Further, I will argue that the decline
of this kind of class-based discourse and its replacement by that of classical
republicanism was not the result simply of the influence of the classical repub-
lican tradition, as Marx would have it. The weight or power of a certain tradition
on consciousness is itself a historic circumstance that needs to be explained.
Rather, the triumph of the ideology of classical republicanism came about in
response to the specific and urgent political and social circumstances gener-
ated by the revolution. In particular, the emergence of a language of class and of
class conflict threatened bourgeois leadership over the revolution.
The question is then whether at the time of the revolution a sense of the
bourgeoisie as a class and of a bourgeois revolution existed. Contrary to the
assertions of the revisionists, current research demonstrates the existence of
economic foundations for the emergence of the eighteenth-century bourgeoi-
sie as a class-in-itself.17 In northern France, an increasingly well-off rural bour-
geoisie consolidated itself prior to the revolution. Commerce, especially over-
seas trade, grew prodigiously during the eighteenth century. There was an
enormous expansion of rural industries but also the beginning of a concen-
tration of manufacture into mechanised factories. The bourgeoisie was the
overwhelmingly dominant element in this economic advance, and the benefi-
ciaries of it in the form of enhanced profit.18 Moreover, this economic advance
continued during the revolution when money was made through the seizure of
land, war-profiteering and eventually a renewed expansion of trade and man-
ufacturing.19 In the revolutionary crisis that broke out in 1789, merchants and
manufacturers strongly backed the National Assembly, which reflected their

17 Heller 2006, pp. 14–16.

18 Heller 2006, p. 53.
19 Heller 2006, pp. 27–37, 54–6, 133.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 135

interests.20 Bourgeois control of the state and cultural life after 1789 made that
class stronger and more confidently aware of itself.21
Having however briefly established the existence in the revolution of the
bourgeoisie as a class-in-itself, we must turn to the question of the degree
of its existence as a class-for-itself. In order to do so, we must first assure
ourselves as to whether or not people at the time had a sense of class, in
the sense of society divided into economically differentiated social groups.
Dallas Clouatre has shown that the notion of economic and social classes
became widely prevalent from the middle of the eighteenth century onward.
By the time of the revolution there was indeed a widespread sense that French
society was divided into such classes. Contrariwise, the older notion of orders
and estates which was rooted in the legal and political distinctions of the
ancien régime was increasingly less used. The influence of the Physiocrats
was particularly important in bringing about this change of perspective.22
Indeed, the increasing use of economic categories was the result of the rise of a
political-economic discourse in late eighteenth-century French society, which
was related to the notion of the reform and renewal of the ancien régime.23
The notion of economic classes had thus developed prior to the revolution.
On the other hand, although the word ‘bourgeoisie’ already had a long history,
the concept of the bourgeoisie as constituting a class was not evident before the
revolutionary crisis. The word ‘bourgeoisie’ prior to the revolution had varied
connotations. It could refer to a member of the third estate, to a member
of the ruling elite of a town or to one of its inhabitants or citizens. It could
mean a person who lived off rent, someone engaged in contemptible economic
activities, or someone who was a boss (who hired and employed the labour
of others). Among these definitions the last would be closest to the Marxist
conception. But the term ‘bourgeois’ had yet to be used to describe a social and
economic class.24 It was the convulsions of the revolutionary process that would
produce the sense of the bourgeoisie as a class.
In the political debate prior to the meeting of the Estates-General the term
‘bourgeoisie’ was absent. It was rather the political-legal term third estate that
occupied the foreground of discussion. By far the most popular expression of
the claims of the so-called third estate was the Abbe Sieyès’s Qu’ est-ce que le

20 Heller 2006, pp. 71–9.

21 Heller 2006, 110–11, 127–9; Jessenne 2007, pp. 11–12.
22 Clouatre 1984, pp. 232–4; Shovlin 2006, p. 106; Piguet 1996, pp. 65, 87–8, 95.
23 Shovlin 2006, pp. 11–12, 50.
24 Piguet 1996, pp. 93–4.
136 chapter 10

Tiers-etat?.25 This text is justly considered the foundational text of the elites
who assumed leadership of the revolutionary process in the spring of 1789. In
his manifesto Sieyès sought to present not the bourgeoisie but the commoners
or mass of the non-privileged population making up the great majority of
the French populace as the third estate. He put forward the notion of the
commoners as the real nation united in their political demands against the
privileged orders of the nobility and clergy. Sieyès’s conception of the third
estate was in part a strategic choice in response to the exigencies of the political
situation. The nobility and clergy defended their privileges on the basis of their
political and legal rights under the ancien régime. Sieyès, in reaction, advanced
the demands of the commoners in the name of the third estate, which already
had a definite legal and political existence within the context of the same
regime. Made up of agriculturalists, those engaged in manufactures, those in
trade and those devoted to providing services, these elements of the third estate
stood together as constituents of the nation in opposition to the privileged
orders. In Sieyès’s conception, there is no distinction according to rank between
members of these four groups of commoners. The class devoted to service, for
example, includes domestic servants as well as lawyers and physicians.26
Faced with the obduracy of the nobility and clergy, it was evidently in
Sieyès’s interest to represent the third estate as united and socially equal.
Indeed, Sieyès insisted that such unity should continue to be the case in a new
political order based on representative rather than democratic government. In
this representative order the so-called ‘available class’ made up of the leisured
and educated among the commoners could effectively represent the rest.27
It is evident that Sieyès’s conception assumed that future leadership of the
third estate would be permanently vested in educated members of the middle
class. Not all agreed with him. An engineer with democratic proclivities, Louis
Pierre Dufourny de Villiers, published Les Cahiers de Quatrieme Ordre, which
appeared in April 1789, asking:

Why is it that the immense class of day labourers, wage labourers, and
un-employed, that class which has so many grievances to bring forward,
why is it rejected from the midst of the nation? … We belong to the third
estate but not one of its representatives is from our class and it appears
that everything has been done in favour of the rich.28

25 Sieyès 1970.
26 Sewell 1994, pp. 57, 58; Forsyth 1987, p. 85.
27 Sewell 1994, pp. 60, 68–9, 149–52; Forsyth 1987, p. 85; Sonenscher 2007, pp. 67–94.
28 Roux 1951, p. 259.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 137

From the inception of the revolution, Dufourny de Villiers among others

questioned the notion of a unified third estate by invoking the language of
class to advance the claims of day labourers, labourers and the unemployed.
If perhaps Dufourny de Villiers’s sense of a working class is not quite the same
as our own, it nonetheless represents a step in that direction. Moreover, we
should note that the use of a language of class in this context was by its nature
disruptive and was meant to be so.
Still, the use of the term ‘bourgeoisie’ in reference to a class was absent
prior to the revolution of July 1789. But it appeared almost immediately after
the upheaval. In the wake of the revolutionary violence of the summer, the
restoration of order by the mobilisation of moderate and politically reliable
supporters of the revolution became an urgent matter. A debate ensued in
which a variety of opinions about the recruitment of a National Guard was
offered. In a text dating from August 1789, an anonymous author openly avowed
that he looked at the question of the recruitment of the National Guard from
the perspective of the bourgeoisie. The document’s author insisted that the
Guard should be recruited exclusively from the bourgeoisie, none of whom
should be exempt from serving. Those who would serve for wages (the lower
orders) should be excluded. At the same time, the author insisted that the
regime that has been established is that of equality.

But it is an equality which agrees with that class which we form in the
state, I mean, the Bourgeoisie: to whom it essentially and exclusively
belongs. The same spirit, the same interest ties us together. Our families,
our enterprises and our fortunes depend on our surveillance.29

According to this anonymous author, the new state is based on an equality

from the perspective of the bourgeoisie who form a class within the state,
indeed, to whom the state now belongs and who have a stake in preserving
property and wealth. One could hardly wish for a more direct articulation of
the notion of bourgeois revolution in the sense of a class assuming political
control over the state and in particular its means of violence. This immediately
throws into doubt Maza’s notion that the sense of the bourgeoisie as a class or
of a bourgeois revolution was unknown at the time of the revolution.
It should be said, however, that the forthright articulation of a notion like
the one above was a rarity at that moment. In the early years of the revolution
the idea of the bourgeoisie as a class was not common and the term’s meaning
was still up in the air. In 1791, for example, Adrien Duquesnoy used the term

29 Genty 1993, pp. 67–8.

138 chapter 10

‘bourgeoisie’ as an inclusive one to distinguish all the middling sort from both
the great in society and the riff-raff and brigands. According to him, the people
are made up of the bourgeoisie, of that mass of employed and virtuous men
who are corrupted neither by opulence or misery. They are truly the nation,
the people.30 But in a revealing aside Duquesnoy admits that his use of the term
bourgeoisie to refer to the middling sort is something of a novelty: ‘I make use of
the word bourgeois because at present there doesn’t exist any other word which
expresses my thought’.31 Clearly the term ‘bourgeoisie’, like many others, was in
flux and was in the process of being redefined or even invented in response
to the social upheavals of the revolution. Duquesnoy understands the word as
referring to all those who either by their labour or their legitimate possession
of property produce means of existence. He excludes only those who do not
work, ‘those who are part of the court or that mass of brigands who are paid
by them. The latter steal for a living, whether they are in rags or wear cloth of
gold’.32
Duquesnoy’s use of the term ‘bourgeoisie’ doesn’t conform to any pre-revo-
lutionary usage. In it there are still echoes of the term as referring to a member
of the third estate or to the citizens of a town. But it is clear that he is using the
term in a sense that passes beyond these pre-revolutionary usages. His inclu-
sion of even those who work, including those who work for wages, clearly con-
tradicts pre-revolutionary usage. In the latter case it was used to refer to a boss
who employed labour, excluding those who might labour for wages. It suggests
that Duquesnoy was interested in maintaining a sense of solidarity between
employers and employees, especially as between the former and skilled work-
ers.

The Economic Power of the Bourgeoisie

The complex evolution of the term ‘bourgeoisie’ is illustrated by its appearance

in the writings of Joseph Antoine Barnave. Barnave, a lawyer with roots in the
merchant class of Dauphiné, played a major role as a member of the National
Assembly in the early years of the revolution. In a letter dating from October
1789, Barnave described the mobilisation of the Parisians that culminated in the
march on Versailles. He distinguished the attitude of the bourgeoisie, who were

30 Gruner 1976, p. 415.

31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 139

incensed at the King’s obstruction of the work of the National Assembly, from
that of the people, who he says were also agitated by the high price of bread.33
In this case Barnave uses the term bourgeoisie to distinguish the upper class
inhabitants of Paris from the lower class, whom he calls the people. Barnave is
making a distinction which can be viewed as a familiar one under the ancien
régime.
But in the following few years Barnave was able to extrapolate this usage
to a more abstract level in which the term ‘bourgeoisie’, or its somewhat more
abstract synonym ‘middle class’, undoubtedly refers to a class that has both an
economic and a political existence. By 1793 Barnave had not only fallen from
political grace but in fact sat in prison under the Terror. There he worked on a
manuscript which was posthumously published as the Introduction a la Revolu-
tion Française.34 Barnave had compromised himself by continuing to cham-
pion the cause of constitutional monarchy in the face of growing demands for
the establishment of a political democracy and a republic.35 Indeed, he was
alarmed by the growing threat of popular government. Faced with increasing
pressure for a democratic franchise in the wake of the King’s flight to Varennes
in June 1791, Barnave rejected the idea that participating in elections was a civic
right. In a speech to the Legislative Assembly, he insisted that the right to vote
should be reserved to the middle class (classe mitoyenne) which was educated,
was more interested in public affairs and had independent economic means.
According to Barnave, in the wake of the revolution only this class should have
the right of suffrage.36 A month earlier, Barnave had been at pains to fore-
stall the end of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. The king’s
attempted flight had opened the floodgates of demands for the establishment
of a republic.37 He denounced those who pointed to the American republic as a
model which France should emulate. America is sparsely populated, has a large
territory mainly devoted to agriculture and is not threatened by foreign rivals.
As such, Barnave insisted, it is totally unlike France, which needs to remain a
monarchy.38
In 1792 France moved toward the creation of the republic of which Barnave
disapproved. Therefore, while acknowledging the economic causes of the rev-

33 Barnave 1906, p. 24.

34 Barnave 1971.
35 Bates 2001, p. 445.
36 Monnier 1989, p. 82; Chagny 1990, p. 142; Gueniffey 1990, p. 163.
37 Monnier 2003, pp. 93, 99–100.
38 Barnave 1971a, p. 11.
140 chapter 10

olution, he was bent on demonstrating that the middle class could not directly
rule France by establishing a republic. Referring now to the bourgeoisie rather
than to the middle class, Barnave acknowledged the possibility of rule by a
new aristocracy, albeit a bourgeois and commercial aristocracy, arising from
the triumph of industrial property: ‘In small states the power of the people
will allow it to become master of the government. A new aristocracy, a kind of
bourgeois and merchant aristocracy, can arise from this new form of wealth’.39
Elsewhere he explains that by aristocracy he means government by the rich.40
But he insists that such a republican elite could only rule over small states like
those in Italy. Political and military necessity, he argued, demanded that a great
state like France continue to be ruled by a monarch, albeit a constitutional one:

the progress of capital [propiete mobiliere] which is the element of demo-

cracy and the cement of the unity of states in Europe has successively
transformed all political regimes … Where it has progressed the most …
it explodes assuming its place in government while establishing limited
monarchy.41

Writing at the moment that the republic was taking shape in France, Barnave
realistically discussed its prospects, while predicting its fracture into at best a
federation of smaller republics.42 Nonetheless, for our purposes, it is important
to understand that his reference to a new aristocracy of a ‘bourgeois’ and
industrial kind is not merely a dismissive reference to an insignificant Italian
state but what was being increasingly discussed and advocated in France.
Barnave’s deployment of the term bourgeoisie still has the connotation of an
urban ruling class in the fashion of the ancien régime. But used as an adjective
in conjunction with the term industrial to describe a ruling political elite of the
rich it takes on a meaning that transcends the usage of the ancien régime.
Barnave, as I have noted, had meanwhile used the term ‘middle class’ and
insisted that this class alone should have political rights in France. Indeed, a
contemporary to Barnave had already asserted that the revolution had been
made by this class. In 1789 Philippe Antoine Grouvelle spoke of the middle
class, ‘a class insufficiently recognized’, as ‘the focal point of morality and public
rationality out of which stems common sense, justice and liberty. The present

39 Barnave 1971, pp. 9–10.

40 Barnave 1842, p. 51.
41 Ibid., p. 14.
42 Barnave 1971, pp. 9–10.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 141

revolution is its work and it is it which gives to it its moderate character’.43

Grouvelle’s middle class should certainly be taken as a synonym for the bour-
geoisie.44

The Workers and the Bourgeoisie

Meanwhile, workers began to use the term ‘bourgeoisie’ in ways that passed
beyond the simple idea of a boss or employer of labour, and began to approx-
imate the notion of exploiter of labour and political master. George Rude was
one of the scholars of the last generation who took note of the development
of working-class agitation independent of the rest of the Parisian population.
Accounting for this upsurge in the fall of 1789, Rude pointed out that workers in
the luxury trades and domestic servants suffered particularly after the revolu-
tion as a result of a decline in employment brought on by the political crisis.
But in the immediate wake of the revolution, it is a significant reflection of their
growing political consciousness that the demands of these domestic employ-
ees were political rather than economic. Already in the late summer a large
number assembled, asking among other things for rights as citizens, the right to
attend district assemblies and the right to enrol in the National Guard. It is true
that the National Guard was likely open to the most skilled and well-paid of the
100,000 workers in Paris. But it is fair to say that joining the National Guard was
beyond the means of most workers. Workers were in fact under-represented
and their membership was discouraged by the dominant bourgeoisie.45 In any
case, the authorities persuaded these domestics to disperse quietly and they
did not carry out their original threat to assemble en masse, 40,000 strong. But
the feelings that had been aroused could not so easily be suppressed.
A few days later an unemployed cook, Eugene Gervais, was arrested in the
Palais Royal for inciting domestic servants and workers against the National
Guard. He allegedly declared that

the garde bourgeoise and all those who wore the uniform were all j.f. [Jean
Foutres, buggers] and that ten thousand servants could take all the j.f.
with their blue suits and white facings and make them dance: that all the
bourgeois … were j.f. with no exceptions … that there were sixty thousand

43 Monnier 2005, pp. 130–1.

44 Staum 1996, p. 196.
45 Clifford 1990, pp. 849–78; Devenne 1991, pp. 50–65; Genty 1993, pp. 61–88.
142 chapter 10

servants in Paris who could get together with the workers in different
trades, and then you’d see all those j.f. go hide away at home with their
f[ucking] uniforms.46

It is possible to interpret the reference to the bourgeoisie in the text as refer-

ring simply to bosses, in other words, in terms of a traditional usage of the old
regime. Maza, who quotes this text taken from Rude at length, does precisely
that.47 But this attempt at containment flies in the face of much new scholar-
ship, which reflects growing unrest and self-awareness among workers at the
time of the revolution. Part of the reason for the unhappiness of workers lay in
a reduction in their salaries. David Weir tends to minimise this. He notes only
a slight decline in wages in the period 1726–87. Instead, he stresses a sense of
grievance arising from wage-workers’ awareness of the substantial increase in
the level of profits and rents in this period as against a slight decline in workers’
wages.48 On the contrary, Steven Kaplan claims that the decline in wages was
substantial, between 20 percent and 30 percent in the period between 1725–41
and 1785–89.49 Technological innovation was also a cause for worker dissatis-
faction. There had already been scattered protests against the introduction of
machinery during the eighteenth century. The riot at the Reveillon wall paper
factory which initiated the violence of the revolution in the French capital in
April 1789 was sparked not only by the threat of lower wages, but by the threat
of a new technologically innovative capitalist industry to the traditional crafts
workers in the city.50 Indeed, by the time of the revolution the growing intro-
duction of machinery was provoking widespread protest. Between 1788 and
1791 in Normandy, Champagne, Lille, Paris, Troyes, Roanne, and Saint-Etienne
there were riots by workers that involved the breaking of machines.51 At Rouen,
Darnetal and Sotteville attacks on machinery constituted one element in the
popular revolutionary uprising of the summer of 1789. It was those employed
in the traditional sectors of the cloth industry rather than those who worked in
the new mechanised factories who took the lead in such Luddite attacks.52
The region to the north and east of Paris meanwhile was hard hit by so-called
bacchanales or rural strikes on the capitalist farms. Such strikes in the Parisian

46 Rude 1959, p. 65.

47 Maza 2003, p. 89.
48 Weir 1991, pp. 920–1.
49 Kaplan 1979, 192.
50 Rosenband 1997, pp. 481–510.
51 Ballot 1923, pp. 19–22; Chassagne 1991, pp. 220; Horn 2006, pp. 90–125.
52 Mazauric 1985, pp. 511–16.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 143

countryside had increased in frequency and intensity in the years leading up to

the revolution. Word of the revolution aroused further militancy in Paris that
continued over the next two years.53 The most militant among workers in the
years after the taking of the Bastille proved to be the companion printers, who
formed the Club typographique et philanthropique, this organisation combined
political radicalism with highly effective demands for improvements in wages
and working conditions.54 In the Faubourg Saint Marcel, long-simmering salary
disputes came to a head in the wake of the revolution. Workers at the Gobelins
tapestry manufacture and the Paris stone quarries were able to make signific-
ant gains in their wages as a result.55 The construction site of the Church of
Sainte Genevieve became a major focus of worker unrest. There the workforce
combined demands for higher wages with agitation for political democracy and
calls for the democratisation of the workplace.56
Kaplan has recently argued that the widespread working-class unrest, both
urban and rural, in fact represented the birth of modern working-class polit-
ics in the midst of the revolution.57 Such a politics entailed a sense of self-
identification as a worker, as for instance Gervais’s consciousness of the com-
mon interest of workers in all the trades of the city. It also included a sense of
the enemy, which Gervais clearly identified as the bourgeoisie who were seen
as not merely economic bosses as Maza would have it, but as in control of the
National Guard. Dufourny de Villiers’s notion of wage workers as constituting
a class or fourth estate not represented in the third estate is also indicative of
a sense of a working class in gestation, in opposition to the rich and proper-
tied. In 1791 Jean-Paul Marat produced a still more mature sense of the working
class. He denounced the Le Chapelier Law as an attempt to prevent the ‘innu-
merable class of wage earners and workers’ to ‘meet to discuss their interests in
an orderly fashion’.58 According to Marat, their rights as workers and citizens
were being denied. The sense of the bourgeois class as collectively repressive
of the popular element in the revolution is clearly reflected in the assertion by
Marat in the same year that ‘we won’t allow ourselves to be lulled to sleep by
the bourgeoisie as we have been until now’.59

53 Bernet 1999, pp. 153–86; Moriceau 1985, pp. 421–33.

54 Minard 1989, pp. 25–33.
55 Burstin 2005, pp. 175–9.
56 Ibid, pp. 306–9.
57 Kaplan 2005, pp. 449–50, 546, 550, 564.
58 Marat 1963, p. 40.
59 Roux 1951, p. 261.
144 chapter 10

Growing hostility to the bourgeoisie is reflected in an anonymous article in

the radical and popular Revolutions de Paris, published in the spring of 1791.60
The bourgeoisie is described in this piece as a class of citizens in Paris and
the other towns of France that had little or no role in the revolution. The
bourgeoisie did not take part in the events going on around them and based
their behaviour on calculations of personal security and interest. According to
the anonymous author,

they are preoccupied by minutiae and a view of the whole almost always
eludes them. For them only the present moment exists. Their view of
things is too short-term to allow them to see into the depths of the
future.61

Most are honest enough, but such probity often cannot resist the hope
of gain, however modest. Grand passions, elevated feelings and all that
involves energy, strength and pride of self are foreign to them. They are
egoists by education and habit.

The bourgeoisie are not democrats. They are monarchists by instinct.

Sheep likewise bleat for the authority of a master. Nothing can detach
them from their shepherd who nonetheless fleeces them to the point of
skinning them alive.62

The grand bourgeoisie imitate the nobility, although they lack its sense of loy-
alty and energy. Having denounced the bourgeoisie in general and the upper
bourgeoisie in particular, the author of the text relents a bit and adopts a more
positive view of the middle and lesser bourgeoisie. The so-called bonne bour-
geoisie, which includes some lawyers, magistrates, intellectuals and merchants,
behaves more honourably. But it is the petite bourgeoisie, the author concludes,
who have openly sided with the revolution and who have ranged themselves
on the side of the people.63

60 Revolutions de Paris 1791, pp. 453–57.

61 Ibid, p. 453.
62 Revolutions de Paris 1791, p. 454.
63 Revolutions de Paris 1791, pp. 456–7.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 145

The Debate on the Bourgeoisie

But the climax of the discussion of the place of the bourgeoisie in the revolu-
tion came about as a result of a letter by the democratically inclined mayor
of Paris, Jerome Petion. The letter was published in Le Patriote Français on
10 February 1791, and attracted national attention.64 At this point Petion had
broken with his erstwhile friends the extreme Jacobins, including Robespi-
erre, and would emerge as an influential figure among the Girondins. On the
other hand, he insisted on the need for the bourgeoisie to reunite with the
people.65
According to Petion, it is the privileged, i.e., the nobility, who continue
to represent a danger to the revolution. When the privileged argue that the
monarchy has been overthrown, that the king no longer has any authority,
aren’t they really saying that the privileges which exist do not exist, and that
they wish to fight to reestablish them?

The bourgeoisie, that large and well-off class, is splitting itself off from the
people. It is placing itself above it. It thinks of itself as the equal of the
nobility. The nobility meanwhile disdains it and only waits for a favorable
opportunity to humiliate it.66

For Petion a clear line continues to separate the bourgeoisie from the priv-
ileged. The bourgeoisie would be blind not to perceive a truism based on this
evidence: it would have to be mad not to make common cause with the people.
Based on its misperception it thinks that the nobility no longer exists and can
no longer exist. As a result, it has no sense of distrust of them and does not
perceive their intentions. According to Petion,

The people are the sole object of its suspicions. The bourgeoisie have
been told so many times that a state of war exists between those who
have property and those who don’t that this idea has taken possession
of them … On the other hand, the people have become exasperated
against the bourgeoisie. They are indignant at its ingratitude. They recall
the services the people have provided to them. They remember that
they were all brothers during the heady days of liberty. The privileged

64 Guihaumou 1998, p. 209.

65 Burney 1995, pp. 33–44; Burney 1996, pp. 100–7; Tackett 2003, pp. 40, 82–3.
66 Chenier 1872, p. 366.
146 chapter 10

are secretly fomenting this war which is leading imperceptibly to our

ruin. The bourgeoisie and the people together made the revolution. Their
reunification alone can preserve it.67

In the eyes of Petion,

All kinds of factions and parties have developed which confuse and dis-
tract citizens. Those hostile to the revolution seek to divide them. But
there are really only two parties and they are the same as they have been
since the Revolution. One wants the constitution and has created it. The
other side does not want it and is opposed to it. Do not be deceived. Things
haven’t changed. It is time that the third estate opened its eyes and rallied
together or it will be crushed. All good citizens should give up their petty
personal grievances, silence their particular feelings and sacrifice all to
the common good. We should have only one cry, ‘alliance of the bour-
geoisie and the people’; or if one likes, ‘union of the third estate against
the privileged’.68

The third estate for Petion is composed of both the bourgeoisie and the people.
In accord with the view taken by Vovelle, which is not at all an anachronism,
the revolution is seen as the product of the union of the bourgeoisie and the
people. The role of the people in the revolution is as essential as that of the
bourgeoisie. Indeed, the latter cannot do without the former, and vice versa.
Petion’s letter elicited a diversity of reactions. Duquesnoy accused him of
wanting to set one class against another, i.e., proletarians who have no property
and whose numbers are limited, against property owners, a class which every-
where in France is the most populous and which wishes to eliminate anarchy.
Petion risks blaming the proprietors, accusing them of incivisme. Those who
are known as the bourgeoisie are already becoming known as enemies of the
people. The citizens are already showing themselves to be against a part of
themselves. In every town they are arbitrarily dividing between bourgeoisie
and people, to use the terminology of Petion. As a result a war, a new division,
will be born, one that will be particularly tragic.69
If Duquesnoy criticised Petion for fostering class conflict, the Girondin
leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot defended him, while trying to reassure prop-

67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Guilhaumou 1998, p. 209.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 147

erty owners. Toward the end of February he wrote in the pages of Le Patriote
Français that Petion in no way sought to create a new class, i.e., that of the bour-
geoisie. On the contrary, he preached union and fraternity. The principal aim
of Petion’s letter was to restore the consciousness of citizens to what it was at
the time of the revolution, giving it the same high purpose and energy.70
Andre Chenier’s critique of Petion went way beyond that of Duquesnoy.
Duquesnoy accused him of encouraging class conflict between the bourgeoisie
and the people. Chenier, on the other hand, threw down the gauntlet, champi-
oning the bourgeoisie while altogether dismissing the popular element in the
revolution which Petion had defended.71 As a moderate revolutionary adher-
ing to the so-called Feuillants, Chenier like Barnave was by 1792 increasingly
disturbed by the radicalisation of the revolution. Like many other moderates
he was more and more worried by the growing power of the Jacobins and
the Parisian masses. Replying to Petion, he offered the following definition of
the bourgeoisie: ‘he should consider that this class which he designates by the
word bourgeoisie, being that which is placed at an equal distance between the
vices of opulence and those of misery, between the prodigalities of luxury and
extreme need, is made up essentially of the true people in all places and times
where words make some sense’.
Notable is the fact that Chenier, like Duquesnoy, has the sense that the use
of the term bourgeoisie to refer to the middle class is something of a novelty.
For all that, Chenier asserts that the bourgeoisie is the middle class between
the nobility and masses, the one marked by the vice of extravagance and the
other by poverty. This middle ground is seen as the location of virtue, as Chenier
makes evident by insisting that they are in effect ‘the people’ in any meaningful
sense of the term. Chenier accords them the title the ‘true people’. Chenier is
of course harking back to a conception of a well-ordered polity dominated
by the middle class first articulated by Aristotle. According to Chenier, ‘this
class is the most serious, most intelligent, most active and the one most filled
with what honest industry can create of what is good and laudable’. Chenier’s
conception of this class then would include the economic bourgeoisie, but also
the professional and rentier element. He concludes that ‘when this whole class
is discontented it is necessary to point to some secret vice in the laws or the
government’.
For Chenier the laws are not at fault. He is full of praise for the Consti-
tution of 1791. According to Chenier, its statutes have re-established equality

70 Ibid., p. 210.
71 Chenier, 1958, 277–8.
148 chapter 10

among men. At the same time, the Constitution opens the way for the most
.

ambitious and unfettered enterprises. No doubt these laws have their imper-
fections. All human endeavours do. Yet these laws were destined to establish
concord and happiness for all on the basis of the common interest. It follows
that these laws cannot be the basis of the discontent of this class. The problem
lies with the government. Either the government is not governing according
to the law or does not have the power to do so. Chenier then proceeds to a
list of complaints that alienate the bourgeoisie: the courts have no authority,
the administrators command no power or respect, and the public finances,
level of debt and taxation cause alarm. As a result, individuals are anxious
about their private affairs. In consequence fear and a lack of confidence are
putting a stop to or forcing overly hasty commercial transactions, the most
legitimate of speculations have become dangerous, prices have increased and
money devalued. In short, the bourgeoisie have lost confidence in the govern-
ment.
A year earlier Chenier had published Reflexions sur l’ esprit de Parti, direc-
ted against the Patriot Party. There he made clear his sense of the difference
between this class of the bourgeoisie and the rest of the populace. Accord-
ing to Chenier, the majority of the nation, the sage and industrious class of
merchants, retailers and farmers, require that peace be based on good laws.
They wish it so. It was for them that the revolution was made. They are truly
the French people.72 In other words, the revolution was a bourgeois revolution
founded on an economically based middle class. As for the rest of the popula-
tion, Chenier notes in passing, ‘the largest class of citizens’, ‘the last class of the
people’, ‘they know nothing, have nothing and take no interest in anything’.73
It seems clear that in the initial years of the revolution a language of class
developed in France which included the conception of the bourgeoisie as a
class and even the notion that the revolution was made by this class or by this
class together with the people. The evidence of a discourse of a bourgeoisie in
itself, of a bourgeoisie conscious of its role, tends to confirm the existence of
the reality of the revolutionary bourgeoisie as a class both for and in itself. I
conclude that Maza’s denial of this reality is simply untenable.

72 Ibid., p. 228.
73 Quean 1989, p. 87.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 149

The Triumph of Republican Discourse

Yet this terminology of class did not become the dominant discourse of the
time. This was likely because it was too divisive. Indeed, it emerged as part
of the growing conflicts within the revolution. By 1792 economic divisions
between the peasants, artisans, workers and bourgeoisie were becoming
acute.74 Duquesnoy’s complaint that Petion was trying to set one class against
another is particularly pertinent in this respect. So, too, was Brissot’s assurance
that Petion was not trying to set the bourgeoisie up as a separate class. What
was needed from the perspective of those who aspired to dominate the revolu-
tionary process was a discourse of reconciliation and unity among its support-
ers. Kaplan has suggested that the language of sansculotterie and indeed the
language of citizenship became one of the means of achieving this.75 Indeed,
Michael Sonenscher has recently argued that it was in the wake of the Petion-
Chenier dispute that the republican notion of sans-culotte was born.76 A lan-
guage that could tie together those who supported the revolution became all
the more necessary following the royal flight to Varennes. The discrediting of
the monarchy opened up a huge political and ideological space in the heart
of the revolution.77 The language of classical republicanism proved to be the
answer to both the political and social fractures besetting the revolution. This
kind of discourse had begun to be used as early as 1789, if not earlier. It became
the preferred discourse as the Jacobins assumed political control. The primary
goal of the Jacobins once in power was to crush counter-revolution at home
and abroad and to consolidate the revolution. But in order to do so they needed
to suppress developing class divisions and to promote unity within the ranks
of the revolution by taking populist and egalitarian measures as well as by
resorting to outright repression. Resort to the language of republicanism was
an obvious alternative in the face of the stubborn refusal of the monarchy
and its closest allies to accept the revolution. It was also a language that, hav-
ing suppressed the political differences between active and passive citizens,
could insist on the equality of all citizens. The enemies of the revolution could
still be denounced as nobles, privileged, even rich, or as anarchists and terror-
ists. But among those considered loyal to the Republic the stress was put on
the people, citizenship, heroism, patriotism and sacrifice, a language of virtue

74 Vovelle 1984, pp. 215–17.

75 Kaplan 2001, pp. 548, 557.
76 Sonenscher 2008, 355–9.
77 Monnier 2005, p. 83.
150 chapter 10

rather than of class. At the same time the Jacobin state did all it could to
minimise class differences among citizens.78
Marx saw this use of the language and forms of classical republicanism as
a way of justifying and giving a pedigree to what in the end turned out to be
a not so heroic bourgeois revolution which based itself on production and the
market. Marx explains this resort to the language of classical antiquity as the
result of the weight of tradition upon the revolutionaries, which he describes as
a kind of self-delusion or even a nightmare. The essence of the nightmare was
the attempt to force the communitarian ideals of ancient republican politics
onto a society that was moving toward market individualism. The ideals of the
ancient city-state masked the emergent individualistic and egotistical reality
of civil society based on the relations of the market. This is a brilliant insight,
which still holds much truth. So much so that it has been lately revived as the
basis for a new interpretation of the Terror by Patrice Higonnet.79 But, as I have
attempted to show, in the initial years of the revolution some at least were
prepared to use the language of class and to understand the epochal events they
were enmeshed in as a revolution presided over by the bourgeoisie. Indeed, in
my view Marx’s interpretation is too idealist. He sees the ideology of classical
republicanism as effectively postponing the issue of class conflict. In fact it
was used to repress it. The triumph of republican ideology was a response to
the political and social crisis of the regime in the transition from monarchy to
republic. A political-economic discourse of class and of bourgeois revolution
had itself become divisive and dangerous to the survival of the regime, and so
it was eclipsed.
But suppose that a sense of the bourgeoisie as a class and even of bourgeois
revolution emerged in the period of the national legislative assembly (1789–92).
Barnave’s adumbration of an economic interpretation of the French Revolution
and Chenier’s assertive defence of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois revolu-
tion are perhaps its outstanding manifestations. They and other acknowledge-
ments of the role of the bourgeoisie are admittedly important confirmations of
a sense of class-based revolution. But these utterances were after all responses
to the exigencies of the moment. They are far from a full-fledged theory of
bourgeois revolution. Indeed, as part of her thesis discounting the notion of
bourgeois revolution, Maza claims that such theories only make their appear-
ance retrospectively in the 1820s. Come to think of it, as Marx suggested, should
one expect otherwise? Yet, surprisingly, in the writings during the revolution of

78 Gros 1987; Daline 1960, p. 397; Tonneson 1960, p. 418.

79 Higonnet 2006, pp. 121–64.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 151

Pierre Louis Roederer it is possible to discern the emergence of an increasingly

clear consciousness of the historic role of the bourgeoisie.

A Theory of Bourgeois Revolution

Roederer played a major political role in the period of the national legislative
assembly (1789–91). As a political democrat he was among the leaders of the
most radical elements of the Girondin Party. Under the Jacobin dictatorship
he was discredited politically and abandoned his democratic ideas. Instead,
he became preoccupied with liberal economic theory and with developing a
sociology of order that could help to stabilise a new postrevolutionary regime.
Indeed, he played a significant part in the coup d’ etat of 18th Brumaire (1799)
and became an influential figure in the subsequent Napoleonic regime. Living
through the entire revolutionary period and playing a major role through most
of it, no one had a better appreciation of its meaning than Roederer.
Prior to the revolution Roederer had already championed the rights of non-
landowning capitalists. During the height of the Terror, when private property
appeared threatened, he defended private property rights in a series of lectures
before the newly created Lycee des Arts.80 At the beginning of the Consulat he
reappeared before the Lycee to deliver a second set of lectures on what ought
to be the rightful role of capitalists in the new order established under Napo-
leon.81 In the new conservative environment the doctrines of physiocracy were
being used to try to reserve political power exclusively in the hands of land-
lords. On this occasion Roederer defended the critically important productive
role of both industrial and agricultural capitalists and their consequent right to
enjoy political rights.82 It is significant that throughout this text Roederer does
not refer to political rights per se but rather to droit de la cité, which translated
properly means bourgeois right. In making this argument it is noteworthy that
Roederer also claimed that the National Guard in 1789 and in 1800 was made up
overwhelmingly of capitalists.83 It is capitalists who were the guardians of the
new revolutionary order. Indeed, he went so far as to note that under the Ter-
ror – a regime controlled by proletarians according to him – capitalists tended
to stay in France, while it was landlords who were prone to flight.84

80 Scurr 2000, pp. 105–26.

81 Roederer 1840.
82 Allix 1913, pp. 297–348; Whatmore 2000, p. 100.
83 Roederer 1840, p. 61.
84 Ibid., pp. 63–4.
152 chapter 10

Roederer summed up his view of the revolution in a work published in 1831

entitled L’esprit de le Revolution de 1789.85 In the preface Roederer notes that he
had actually composed the work toward the end of 1815, but renounced the idea
of publishing it under the weight of the censorship of the restored Bourbon
monarchy.86 According to him, to understand the coming of the revolution
one must comprehend that movable capital gradually arose alongside land as a
form of wealth. Over time, the value of such capital overtook that of the land as
it expanded throughout industry and labouring activity. In the same way it soon
flowed back from the towns into the countryside, where it gave an immense
impetus to agricultural production. Capital became the unit in which the value
of all kinds of goods, including land, was measured.87

At that point, the bourgeoisie, the leading possessors of capital – just

as the seigneurs had been the leading possessors of land – held in their
power the greater part of the national wealth. The unique owners of all
kinds of industry, they became landowners as well … Seigneurs became
the vassals, indeed, the subjects of wealthy plebeians.88

Roederer clearly saw the importance of the bourgeoisie in both the urban and
rural sectors. The revolution was self-evidently a capitalist revolution, both in
town and country. Moreover, he specifically names the bourgeoisie for the first
time not as simply capitalists but as the bourgeoisie.
Roederer had a clear understanding of the decisive role of the economic
bourgeoisie. But reflecting his mature sense of class, it is noteworthy that he
gave equal stress to the historical development of the cultural capacity of the
same class. According to him, both the development of the mentality and the
increase in the capital or moveable wealth of the bourgeoisie over time gave
it more power: ‘The development of its intellectual power and the increase
of its capital enhanced the importance of a part of the third estate’.89 Only
they were capable of providing the needs of society; to make known and to
savour the higher pleasures. Only they could tighten the connections of society
by means of communications of the mind and through the moral force of
a public opinion which included all persons and actions. It is only from the
estate of commoners that all public and private services came to be provided.

85 Roederer 1831.
86 Ibid., p. ii.
87 Ibid., pp. 15–16.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid., p. 20.
marx, the french revolution, & the spectre of the bourgeoisie 153

It is from this estate that those who practice literature and art came: ‘Brilliant
savants and great writers contributed to the rise of the third estate not only
through their ongoing effusions of enlightenment and feeling but through
the eminence they achieved in society’.90 With the development of science
and philosophy in the eighteenth century a new nobility of the human race
developed alongside the old nobles. They further contributed to the rise of
the third estate and the emergence of public opinion.91 ‘The revolution was
the indestructible product of the growth of civilization which itself was the
result of the growth of riches and enlightenment’.92 Roederer thus views the
relationship of the emergence of the economic and non-economic bourgeoisie
as unproblematically intertwined with one another. The growing prominence
and power of both are understood as part of a single process. By 1815 Roederer
was able to see that the significance of the revolution was that it had seen the
triumph of this bourgeoisie.93

90 Ibid., p. 24.
91 Ibid., p. 26.
92 Ibid., p. 14.
93 Guizot 1860, iii, pp. 152–3.
 chapter 11

Review of Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French

Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830

Jeff Horn’s new work on French industrialisation during the age of revolution
unfortunately reflects the anti-Marxist bias we have come to expect from most
English-speaking scholars of the French Revolution. In the early pages of his
book, Horn complains of a class-based Marxist reductionism which fails to
capture the more positive aspects of the ancien régime’s policing of labour.1 This
means that Marxists lay too much stress on the repression of workers prior to
the revolution. He then applauds the collapse of the Marxist paradigm and the
recent emergence among American scholars of more cultural approaches to
the development of class and the factory-system.2 Noting these comments, a
reader might legitimately conclude that Horn adheres or pays necessary lip-
service to the consensus among most English-speaking academic historians
known as French-revolutionary revisionism. The sine qua non of this view is
a rejection of the Marxist idea of the French Revolution as a bourgeois and
capitalist revolution. The sense of an anti-Marxist bias is strengthened by the
fact that, in his narrative of the take-off of French industrialisation, Horn
seldom if ever uses the term capitalist or bourgeoisie. The farthest he ventures
in this direction is to refer delicately to the activity of entrepreneurs. In lieu of
the capitalist or bourgeois class as the agent of French industrialisation, Horn
instead emphasises the primary role of the state.
Given this approach, Horn’s work would appear to offer little which would
compel the interest of those who cling to the view of the French Revolution
as bourgeois and capitalist. Yet there are aspects in his approach which can
interest those who continue to espouse a Marxist approach to history. Having
eschewed any discussion of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, Horn surprises by
placing the violent struggle of workers at the focal point of his discussion of
French industrialisation during the revolution. It is their violent resistance to
technical innovation in the form of machine-breaking which forced the new
revolutionary state into assuming a central role in fostering and controlling the
industrial process. In contradiction to the views of most revisionist historians,

1 Horn 2006, p. 18.

2 Ibid., p. 20.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_012

review of jeff horn, the path not taken 155

furthermore, Horn rejects the notion that the period of Jacobin rule was a
political and economic disaster. On the contrary, he insists that it was the
economic policies of the Jacobins which helped save the revolution and opened
an alternative path to industrialisation.
Horn’s stress on the significance of the industrialisation process during the
revolution represents a breakthrough from the perspective of an area of schol-
arship dominated, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, by revisionism. French
scholars such as Serge Chassagne and Denis Woronofff, untainted by revision-
ism, have taken the lead in demonstrating the importance of industrialisa-
tion during the eighteenth century and the revolution.3 A limited number of
English-speaking historians have likewise bravely interested themselves in the
history of French industry during this period.4 But from the perspective of an
Anglo-American historiography which in the last decades has been preoccu-
pied with culture or, at best, with the culture of the market, Horn’s insistence
on the importance of industrialisation and questions of class during the revolu-
tion is something of a departure. Horn’s work is thus of interest to Marxist
scholarship because it concedes in a back-handed fashion the progress of capit-
alism in France in the wake of the revolution. Furthermore, while largely ignor-
ing the bourgeoisie, no doubt to avoid so-called class-based Marxist reduction-
ism, Horn in paradoxical fashion underlines the key role of the working class
and class-struggle to the industrialisation process in France. In a contradict-
ory way, and despite himself, Horn ends up speaking the language of Marxism
instead of culture.5
Horn’s primary objective is to counter the Anglo-centric view of modern
economic history as exemplified in David Landes’s highly influential Unbound
Prometheus.6 From the latter’s perspective there was only one path to indus-
trialisation, based on the pure laissez-faire economy of the English type. In
this view, France was a second-best economy held back by cultural or irra-
tional constraints, especially an emphasis on the family-firm which failed to
value profit-maximisation and relentless expansion of output. Horn to the con-
trary points out that France experienced high growth-rates between 1815 and
1850, that French per-capita income was only 20 percent below that of Eng-
land in 1914, and that the French economy adapted well to the so-called second
industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century. France successfully pur-

3 Chassagne 1991; Woronofff 1994.

4 Among others, Lewis 1993; Johnson 1993; Hafter 2007.
5 It is of course not necessary to choose between the two.
6 Landes 1969.
156 chapter 11

sued industrialisation along its own path, he concludes. It must not be judged
according to the English pattern which was the path not chosen.7
Horn argues in the first place that, prior to the revolution, policy-makers
in France attempted to follow what they understood as the English model
of industrialisation. But contrary to a preconception which was common in
the eighteenth century and has been ever since, economic experts in the
French government regarded the English state not as laissez-faire but as every
bit as mercantilist or interventionist as the state in France. Moreover, while
they acknowledged some English commercial and industrial advantages, they
thought it possible for France to compete successfully in many other economic
sectors. In a fashion that can only be welcomed, Horn insists on the import-
ance of politics to the process of industrial development in both France and
England.
Horn then claims that French attempts to emulate English policies were
interrupted by the radicalism of the French Revolution. The possibility of rad-
ical revolution in the period 1789–94 on the part of the labouring classes
ensured that neither the French state nor entrepreneurs could easily pur-
sue profit-maximisation or introduce technological innovations in response
to labour militancy. On the contrary, in England the state brutally and sys-
tematically repressed working-class resistance to industrialisation, allowing
industrial entrepreneurs to pursue the accumulation of profits without real
hindrance.
Unable to pursue the ‘liberal’ path to industrialisation of the English, Horn
argues that the French state embarked on a different path forged first by the
Jacobins in the midst of war, national mobilisation and the reign of terror. In a
context of economic distress and the threat of counter-revolution, the state was
put at the heart of the economic process. The statist command-economy of the
Year ii (1793–4) represented both a return to the dirigiste policies of the ancien
régime and under new and revolutionary circumstances a powerful alternat-
ive model of economic development. The Jacobin regime was swept aside by
the Thermidorean reaction, but a more moderate version of the interventionist
state was perfected by Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior Jean-Baptiste Chaptal
(1800–4). Chaptal kept the threat from below at bay while encouraging the
growth of industry through state-support of science, technology and entre-
preneurship, cautious subsidisation of industry, and cartelisation of the heights
of the economy. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Continental System
and the Napoleonic regime, Chaptal’s interventionist economic policies were

7 Horn 2006, pp. 3–5.

review of jeff horn, the path not taken 157

adopted by the Bourbon Restoration and subsequent French governments in

the nineteenth century with considerable success.
Horn’s treatment of government economic policy under the ancien régime
in Chapters 2 and 3 reflects much of the current historiographic consensus.
In response to English competition it is agreed the regime combined ongoing
state intervention with increasing moves in the direction of laissez-faire. But
viewing these efforts from the perspective of the government elites, Horn
minimises the responsibility of economic liberalism in bringing on the popular
upheavals of the revolution. The first great experiment in liberalism came
with the appointment of Turgot as Controller-General. The physiocrat minister
attempted to introduce free trade in grain (1774) and dissolve the guilds (1776).
Horn deals with the attempt to dissolve the guilds without really relating it to
the consequences of the freeing of the grain-trade. On the contrary, as Turgot
realised, the fate of the first initiative, freeing the market for subsistence, and
the second, opening the labour market, were closely connected to one another.8
The freeing of prices precipitated a massive rebellion (the ‘guerre des farines’ of
1775) which anticipated the social upheavals of the revolution. Liberalism was
temporarily discredited, the dissolution of the guilds became a dead letter and
the state was required to re-regulate the labour market on a national basis.
Horn treats the signing of the commercial or free-trade treaty of 1786 with
England again without relating it to the previous liberal experiment under Tur-
got. In fact, the treaty was nothing but a second attempt to liberalise, but this
time through the back door – introducing free trade from without. There is an
uncanny mirror-image of these episodes in the recent French experience with
neoliberalism running from Mitterand to Sarkozy – plus ça change, plus c’est
la même chose. Horn concludes that the treaty was good policy unfortunately
interrupted by the revolution. In fact, while it did not cause the revolution,
there is little doubt that it deepened the economic recession which brought
massive popular revolution. In the light of these events only a liberal ideo-
logue could consider this treaty good policy. People in the streets seem to have
a recurrent problem with the impeccable logic of economic liberalism.
If Horn does not deal adequately with popular violence in the closing years
of the ancien régime, he more than makes up for it in the next chapter, which
becomes the keystone of the work. Entitled ‘The Other “Great Fear”: Labor Rela-
tions, Industrialization, and Revolution’, it lays out the results of Horn’s detailed
research on machine-breaking during the early phase of the French Revolution.
As part of the massive peasant and urban upheavals of 1789, textile-workers as

8 Kaplan 2001, p. 120.

158 chapter 11

well as other wage-earners carried out damaging attacks on factories, mines

and machinery in the textile-regions of Normandy, but also in Champagne and
in the coal and iron-region around Saint-Etienne (Lyonnais). While machine-
breaking largely died down in subsequent years, the persistent fear of such
incidents played a major role in retarding further investment in mechanisation
and the intrusion of large-scale capital into industry.9
Horn’s assertions seem to be contradicted by French experience under
Napoleon. As Horn himself notes in Chapter 6, the output of machine-spun
cotton at least quadrupled between 1806 and 1810. Wool, silk, mixed textile-
materials and hardware-production all also notably expanded production.
There was a major retooling of French industry during this period, often with
the latest technology. Mechanisation of the cotton-industry was the most spec-
tacular success in this upward surge. In 1789 there were six large-scale mechan-
ised cotton-mills in France. By 1814 there were 272. At the highest point of the
Napoleonic Empire, industrial production was at least 50 percent higher than
under the ancien régime.10
It is admirable that Horn takes note of this industrial progress, as it reflects
the post-revolutionary boom of capitalist industry which is swept under the
carpet in contemporary revisionist history. But a hundred pages earlier, Horn
had stressed the retardation of the mechanisation and capitalisation of indus-
try owing to labour-militancy. Yet other than noting in passing that the surge
was made possible by the quiescence of labour owing to military conscription,
Horn does not seriously account for this Napoleonic industrial boom in terms
of his thesis. At the very least, Horn would seem to have overstated his initial
claims of the influence of labour-resistance on the path of French industrial-
isation. Indeed, there are those who question at least part of the retardation-
thesis. Recent firm-based research has shown that French industry was much
more expansive and technologically advanced in the nineteenth century than
once thought. In certain sectors, French industries were entirely competitive
with England and Germany.11
At best, we can continue to entertain Horn’s thesis as a claim of the overall
retardation of French mechanisation and concentration of industry relative to
England. Yet, even on these terms, his monocausal explanation based on the
persistent threat of machine-breaking seems to be an exaggeration. In passing
he notes the frequency of strikes in the first decade of the revolution.12 We

9 Horn 2006, p. 120.

10 Ibid., p. 223.
11 Smith 2005, p. 4.
12 Horn 2006, p. 120.
review of jeff horn, the path not taken 159

know that there was at times a close relation between such militancy and the
threat from technological innovation as suggested by the causes underlying the
riots at the Reveillon wallpaper-factory in the spring of 1789.13 Yet, compared
to his treatment of machine-breaking, he does not probe into how strikes and
other kinds of labour militancy may have had a bearing on the progress of
industrialisation. Indeed, although he mentions it, Horn does not do justice
to the wide extent of working-class unrest in this period – an unrest that goes
beyond machine-breaking. Strikes and indiscipline on the part of workers in
the period 1787–9 were especially notable in Paris and its region leading up to
the revolution. Following the taking of the Bastille, strikes multiplied and new
forms of worker-militancy and sociability appeared.14 In reaction, the National
Assembly enacted the Le Chapelier Law of 1791, prohibiting combinations.15
The Jacobins made real efforts to placate workers, especially by passage of
the maximum on prices. But the containment of ongoing working-class unrest
became a focal point of the agenda of the Jacobin regime, especially after the
imposition of the maximum on wages. Contrary to Horn’s view of labour unrest
inhibiting technological innovation, the Jacobins fostered such innovation in
the national armories as a way of overcoming worker unrest.16
The subsequent Conspiracy of Equals led by Babeuf (1796) has been dis-
missed by most historians as insignificant, its membership not even based on
workers. The recent researches of Jean Marc Schiappa have revealed that it
advanced a communist ideology and had a considerable working-class follow-
ing in many places in France. The Babouviste political conspirators were fully
conscious of the misuse of technology to exploit workers.17 Horn’s emphasis on
machine-breaking as inhibiting mechanisation is no doubt a point well taken.
But it should be seen as part of a larger picture of working-class resistance that
tended to inhibit the capitalisation of industry and forced the intervention of
the state.
How necessary a wider view of worker resistance is to Horn’s argument is
illustrated by his unconvincing comparison of machine-breaking in France and
England. His account shows that Luddite violence in the latter country was
far more extensive and prolonged than it was in France. Horn quite rightly
points out how important the brutal repression by the so-called liberal English

13 Rosenband 1997.
14 Sibalis 1986.
15 Burstin 1993; Kaplan 2001, pp. 548–50.
16 Alder 1997, p. 277.
17 Schiappa 2003.
160 chapter 11

state was to breaking this resistance and clearing the way for industrialisa-
tion there. Strangely, Horn asserts that the danger in France was greater, but
fails to demonstrate the ongoing threat in the absence of major outbreaks of
machine-breaking after 1789. It is only in the context of evidence of working-
class militancy, strikes, and revolutionary conspiracy in the 1790s that Horn’s
argument can hold water.
Emphasising the resistance of the working class to industrialisation, Horn
does not even begin to take into account the difficulty large-scale industry had
in recruiting a workforce as a result of the revolution. The fact is that while
the revolution in the French countryside may have been led by a capitalist
element, its radicalism reinforced the grip of the lesser peasantry and even the
previously landless on the land. While in England the process of enclosure was
being pursued to the bitter end and issued in the emergence of the industrial
working class, the revolution made the peasantry cling ever more fiercely to
the land. Peasants who went to the mines and factories on a temporary basis
stubbornly resisted permanent proletarianisation.18 Primitive accumulation
continued in France but at a much slower pace than in England, inhibiting the
formation of the large and permanent pools of unskilled and low-wage labour
that industrialists and mine-owners required.
The accumulating evidence of working-class agitation in the form of
machine-breaking, strikes and conspiracy is in a way a vindication of Daniel
Guérin’s La lutte de classes sous la Première République, bourgeois et ‘bras nus’
(1793–1797) of 1946.19 In that work, Guérin stressed the working-class charac-
ter of the popular movement in Paris and underlined Jacobin repression of
its demands. Guérin’s view arose in part from his commitment to the idea of
permanent revolution and his opposition, along with fellow Trotskyites, to the
post-liberation Parti communiste français’s policy of cooperation with that part
of the bourgeoisie untainted by Vichy. Guérin at that time came under attack
from the French historical establishment and especially from Albert Soboul.
The latter was a member of the Communist Party who was in the process
of becoming the historian of the sans-culottes or the popular movement of
the revolution.20 Soboul and others castigated Guérin for his provocative and
anachronistic assertions which, it was claimed, lacked a scholarly foundation.
No doubt there is some truth to this critique.21 At the same time, there was a
certain prescience to Guérin’s view as reflected in recent research.

18 Woronofff 1994, p. 290.

19 Guérin 1946.
20 Soboul 1973.
21 Berger n.d.
review of jeff horn, the path not taken 161

Soboul did not deny that there was a proletarian element to the popular
movement. But, in fact, leadership over it rested with well-to-do craftsmen,
small-scale merchants and manufacturers who lived and worked with their
workers and were able to dominate and subordinate them in the so-called sans-
culottes movement.
The ideology espoused by them and which they imposed on their workers
and the rest of the plebeian population in Paris was focused around questions
of subsistence, productive work and democratic politics. From Soboul’s per-
spective Guérin’s stress on the proletarian character of the Parisian masses
seemed overstated. Soboul’s view has itself been questioned by Richard Mow-
ery Andrews, who carefully delineated the incipient class-differences between
what we can call the petty-bourgeois leadership and the plebeian element in
the popular movement.22
Soboul’s position nonetheless continues to make a certain amount of sense.
Faced with constant threats to the revolution from counter-revolution abroad
and internal subversion, as well as ongoing problems of subsistence, it seems
plausible to see the sans-culottes as a popular movement no doubt riven by ten-
sions but with a common ideology and programme. How fruitful this approach
has been was demonstrated in the recent work of Haim Burstin, who has pro-
duced an unprecedentedly sweeping and minutely-detailed political history of
the movement.23
We mention Soboul and Burstin in the context of this review because their
historical studies of what can be described as an emergent lower middle-class
with a capacity for revolutionary action points to a fundamental weakness in
Horn’s approach. It was not only workers who found themselves opposed to
technological innovation and the capitalisation of industry. During the revolu-
tion and through the first part of the nineteenth century, well-to-do craftsmen,
small-scale family-manufacturers and lesser merchants fought an important
rear-guard action against large-scale industry and big business in a struggle
that was both economic and political. In dismissing Landes’s critique of the
influence of the family-firm, Horn too hastily dismisses the inter-class rivalry
between big and little capital in explaining French resistance to the English
path to industrialisation.
Horn likewise makes little or nothing of the international division of labour
in explaining the French path to industrialisation. French industry was cer-
tainly less capital-intensive and mechanised than most of industry in England.

22 Andrews 1985; Kaplan 2001, pp. 572–3.

23 Burstin 2005.
162 chapter 11

But it could be argued that English success along the path of mass-production
and achieving economies of scale tended to force France back on its tradi-
tional strength in more labour-intensive and higher-quality production for
the export-market. France inserted itself differently but successfully into the
international marketplace, stressing the manufacture of higher-end and better-
quality products. Its industrialisation was comparable to England’s, but based
more on craftsmen and small manufacturers than on large-scale industry.24
Praiseworthy as Horn’s research is on machine-breaking, we conclude that
it is insufficient to explain the French path to industrialisation. The latter was
clearly the product of a multiplicity of factors that Horn does not sufficiently
take into account. On the other hand, Horn deserves credit for rehabilitating
the economic reputation of the Jacobins. Horn’s fifth chapter, entitled ‘La patrie
en danger: Industrial Policy in the Year ii’, recalls the history of the Jacobin dic-
tatorship (1793–4). But instead of harping on the excesses of the Terror as do
the revisionists, Horn emphasises the success of the interventionist state of
the Jacobins, which marshalled the material and moral forces of the nation
in order to overcome economic and political crisis. According to Horn, ‘the
raw, almost unbridled economic necessities that gave rise to the Reign of Ter-
ror allowed the revolutionaries to tame rampant inflation, feed the nation, and
equip an army that dominated Europe for more than a generation’.25 Based on
extensive archival research, Horn offers us a detailed review of this period of
sweeping economic mobilisation, including an account of the maximums on
prices and wages, state-directed or controlled war-production, the creation of a
scientific and technological brains-trust, unprecedented initiatives in techno-
logical education and technical innovation, the politics of labour-control, and
the role of representatives on mission in implementing the industrial and eco-
nomic policies of the central government. Coupled with political repression
and mass-mobilisation, these policies enabled the Jacobins to defeat counter-
revolution and save the revolution. Chaptal never went so far in controlling
the economy as did the Jacobins. Nonetheless, as Horn details in Chapter 6,
he, too, championed state-intervention whose success he had personally wit-
nessed during the Year ii. According to Chaptal, the state must promote com-
merce and industry while mediating the varied private interests in behalf of
the public good.
Horn’s positive treatment of the industrial policies and record of the Jac-
obins and of Chaptal in the Napoleonic period is welcome. But focused as he

24 O’Brien and Caglar 1978.

25 Horn 2006, p. 128.
review of jeff horn, the path not taken 163

is on the state, he fails to fully contextualise these policies. He thereby fails to

completely grasp the limits and choices of French industrial development in
the revolutionary period. The latter cannot finally be grasped without taking
into account the still-dominant agrarian sector of the economy and the role
of revolutionary class-struggle. We have already noticed this failure in Horn’s
treatment of economic liberalism in the dying years of the ancien régime. It
persists in his one-sided account of the industrialisation-process under the
revolution. It is the theoretically informed work of the Russian Marxist histor-
ian Anatoli Ado that we have to turn back to in order to find such an adequate
analysis.26
According to Ado, the fundamental obstacle to the development of indus-
trial capitalism was the overwhelming dominance of rent and the constriction
of profit under the ancien régime. The popular violence of the revolution in
country as well as city which reached its peak under Jacobin rule destroyed
feudalism and seigneurialism and allowed even poor peasants some access
to the land. Ado sees the agrarian radicalism of the Year ii as opening the
way to the emergence of a dynamic market dominated by petty producers.
According to him, this could have constituted the starting-point for an accel-
erated process of capitalist accumulation based on the emergence of a power-
ful class of agrarian and industrial capitalists and the eventual proletarianisa-
tion of the mass of producers. Following its successful revolution, the United
States became the most outstanding example of this developmental path. More
recently, Mao’s China appears to have taken a similar direction.27
In Horn’s view, revolutionary violence inhibited capital accumulation and
forced the intervention of the state. To the contrary, Ado regards class-struggle
as opening a wider path toward the development of capitalist forces of pro-
duction. Some supporters of the Jacobins and members of the Directory paid
lip-service to fostering the strength of petty producers, but failed to support
a sufficiently radical or thoroughgoing land reform. The result was that, while
feudalism and seigneurialism were abolished, rent continued to have an excess-
ive influence inhibiting the accumulation of profits in both the agricultural and
industrial sectors following the revolution. The implication of this view is that,
however laudable the initiatives of Chaptal, they were fundamentally constric-
ted by the regime of landed notables that consolidated itself under Napoleon
on the basis of the persistence of rent. The sweep and power of Ado’s view
demonstrates the force of the Marxist mode of analysis. Welcome as Horn’s re-

26 Ado 1996.
27 Byres 1996.
164 chapter 11

engagement with the economic and social history of the revolution is, there is
no mention of Ado in his work. Horn’s inability or unwillingness to take Marx-
ism seriously fundamentally constrains his viewpoint.
 chapter 12

Bankers, Finance Capital and the French

Revolutionary Terror, 1791–4

The production of commodities bearing surplus value is at the heart of the

accumulation of capital. But the financing of production and the realisation of
profit in the market depends on the availability of credit in the form of liquid
capital. Fully functioning capitalism requires the integration of the productive
and commercial economy with a credit system which serves to facilitate its
expansion. In the absence of a system of credit a full-blown capitalist economy
cannot exist. The absence of such a system of capitalist finance prior to the
revolution was the principal point of an important article by George V. Taylor
on the Paris stock exchange prior to the revolution which appeared in the
American Historical Review in 1962.1 It alongside several other articles on the
forms of property and types of enterprise under the Old Regime made it
possible for Taylor to argue that the Marxist idea that the French Revolution
was a capitalist revolution was wrong.2
Taylor was a historian for many years at the University of North Carolina,
and he approached the history of the French Revolution from an unabashedly
Christian perspective. In the context of Cold War America his version of Chris-
tianity brought him into open opposition to Marxism.3 His work proved impor-
tant to the consolidation of the anti-Marxist or revisionist school of the French
Revolution, which began to emerge in defiance of the revolutionary mood of
the 1960s. Taylor appeared to provide serious economic arguments backing up
the political and cultural critique of the Marxist interpretation of the revolu-
tion made by historians like Alfred Cobban and François Furet. Taylor’s work, it
is not too much to say, constituted the economic basis of the revisionist school
of French revolutionary history that flourished from the 1970s onward. The revi-
sionist school challenged the Marxist method and its view of the trajectory of
European and world history based on the idea of revolutionary change. Taylor
in particular challenged the Marxist conception of the revolution as a creative
response by the French bourgeoisie and people in which the long term progress

1 Taylor 1962.
2 Taylor 1963; Taylor 1964; Taylor 1967.
3 Taylor 1956.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_013

166 chapter 12

of capitalism was threatened by fiscal, political and economic crisis. According

to Taylor, the revolution did not eliminate the obstacles to the further advance
of capitalism since capitalism did not really exist.
This chapter disputes Taylor’s view, claiming that a proper appreciation of
the evolution of the relationship between financial and productive capital
between 1760–1830 demonstrates that the revolution was both capitalist and
bourgeois. Taylor asserts that because investment banks did not exist prior
to the revolution and the small amounts of capital that were available for
investment were raised locally, capitalism barely existed. We take the position
that Taylor’s view is fundamentally anachronistic. According to Taylor, the
absence of what later came to be called La Haute Banque or investment banking
prior to the revolution largely precluded the formation of productive capital.
On the contrary, we argue that the development of investment banking in the
first half of the nineteenth century was the outcome of a long history which
included the period of the revolution, in the course of which the link between
financial capital and a growing mass of productive capital slowly was forged.
Investment banking in the nineteenth century was an outcome of this process,
not a pre-condition of it.
As we have noted, Taylor argues that credit for enterprise was only avail-
able locally. That capital for productive investment was available at the local
level is no argument against capital in sufficient amounts being at hand to
foster accumulation. As is well known, most of the initial capital behind the
early Industrial Revolution in England came from the pooling of local capital
through country banks.4 Prior to the revolution a similar pattern is discernible
in France. Even more important is the fact that Taylor completely ignores the
role that commercial credit provided by Parisian banks played in the financing
of the burgeoning overseas trade during the eighteenth century. Furthermore,
as a result of this trade there developed an increasing market for manufac-
tures, which provided an important stimulus to the development of French
manufacturing. In the initial development of such industries it is well known
that the most important requirement was not fixed capital but affordable com-
mercial credit.5 The Parisian banks played an important role in providing this
capital.
Taylor furthermore ignores the degree to which bankers themselves both
before and during the revolution began to invest their capital in productive sec-
tors of the economy. We argue that the money capital of the bankers which

4 Pressnel 1956.
5 Blackburn 1997, pp. 541–2.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 167

was closely tied to commercial capital began to be invested in land, mines

and manufacturing prior to 1789 and that this trend gained momentum during
the revolution, in part owing to radical and popular political pressure which
narrowed opportunities for speculative investment. Popular political pressure
which restricted speculation helped to force finance capital toward productive
investment. Especially notable was the purchase during the Terror of national
properties by bankers in the form of capitalist farms and ecclesiastical build-
ings which were turned into factories. This rapprochement between finance
and productive capital continued under the Directory and was reflected in
the composition and mandate of the Bank of France, at least as conceived by
Napoleon.6 Under the revolution and especially under Napoleon industry grew
rapidly and came increasingly under the control of the bankers.7

The Progress of Capitalism

Like other historians, Taylor characterised the speculative bubble that de-
veloped in the 1780s in Paris as an aspect of the impending political and
economic crisis of the Old Regime. But for him the bubble emerged not from
the gap between finance capital running ahead of productive capital, which
is typical of a capitalist crisis, but because of the growth of finance capital
in the virtual absence of productive capital. In a companion piece published
a few years later Taylor backed up and explained this argument by insisting
that the greater part of wealth in eighteenth-century France came from what
he described as ‘proprietary sources’, i.e., rents on land, bonds and annuities
which he described as non-capitalist.8 According to Taylor’s categorisation,
land cannot be considered productive capital and the absence of significant
productive capital signified that capitalism did not exist prior to the revolution.
Hence he concluded that describing the revolutionary crisis in terms of a
bourgeois and capitalist revolution was mistaken.
Rent of course was the major source of wealth prior to the revolution.
Moreover, a significant portion of rent was admittedly non-capitalist or feudal
(although Taylor did not like the term). Taylor seemed not to know or chose
to ignore that the definition of capitalist wealth is surplus made up of profit,
interest and rent derived from the surplus value generated by producers who

6 Jacoud 1996, pp. 31, 52, 67, 71, 283–6.

7 Bergeron 1978, p. 319.
8 Taylor 1967, p. 471.
168 chapter 12

work for wages. Such profits are by no means limited to the manufacturing
sector but are also produced from land if the land is treated as a capitalist
means of production. Indeed, in the Marxist view the development of capitalist
relations on the land is decisive to the development of capitalism. In the case
of France much of the agricultural land in the île-de-France and elsewhere in
northern France prior to 1789 had already become capitalist, i.e., worked by
capitalist farmers or tenants employing wage labour.9 Pace Taylor, rents paid to
landlords were rents of a capitalist nature.
Capitalist production relations had also developed in the agriculture of
the Midi although not so generally.10 Capitalist coal mining, iron mining and
iron and steel manufacture and fabrication likewise experienced significant
expansion. Particularly noteworthy was the expansion of cotton manufactur-
ing, especially Indian cotton manufacture, the latter imitating and replacing
the hitherto popular imported Indian cottons.11 Although the construction of
large fully integrated factories in this sector was only in its early stages prior
to the revolution and only took off with the revolution, nonetheless the rising
number of so-called cotton proto-factories reflected the increasing importance
of growing investment of significant amounts of capital, the expansion and
concentration of wage labour, growing division of labour and a continuous
stream of new production techniques in this sector.12
As the revolution approached the spread of capitalist relations of produc-
tion seems to have destabilised French society both in the towns and coun-
tryside. By then many French producers worked either part- or full-time for
wages in agriculture, but also increasingly in manufacturing and mining for
employers who sought profits from the commodities so produced. Part of the
surplus generated under such circumstances might be paid to owners or cred-
itors not in the form of profit but in the form of rent or interest. If so such
rents or annuities themselves must likewise be considered capitalist. The rest
of the surplus produced in this way would be retained as profit which would
remain in the hands of capitalist farmers, merchant-manufacturers, factory or
mine owners. Given the expansion of grain production and the accompany-
ing growth of industry both based on the increased use of wage labour, we can
say that the role of profit and capitalist wealth generated from agriculture and
industry significantly expanded as the eighteenth century unfolded. As a result
of this evolution there is little doubt that after 1750 the French economy began

9 Lefebvre 1954a, p. 61.

10 Heller 2006, pp. 29–30.
11 Lemarchand 2008, pp. 97–101.
12 Chassagne 1991, pp. 92, 169, 181–4.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 169

to transcend the limits of merely reproducing the feudal economy.13 Prior to

the revolution these new economic relations of course remained constrained
within feudal structures and much of agriculture, especially south of the Loire,
continued to be carried on at the level of subsistence production.

The Attack on Speculation

Taylor’s research on the Paris stock exchange was based on the earlier invest-
igations of Jean Bouchary.14 Bouchary’s works, which were mainly published
around World War ii, while eschewing theoretical analysis, were empirically
rich. What emerged from his scholarship was a stress on the speculative rather
than the productive character of the activities of the Parisian bankers and stock
brokers, many of whom had close ties to the court and government. Taylor,
who added to Bouchary’s research, noted that the bankers dealt with foreign
exchange, state loans and the shares of joint-stock companies like the newly
formed Paris Fire Insurance, Water, Life Insurance, and Lighting Companies.
These were essentially speculative ventures which in large part were designed
to attract the money of investors. Stocks in these companies rose and fell on
the stock exchange based on the puts and calls of stock jobbers and bankers
trying to manipulate prices and to take advantage of runs on the market. Like
Bouchary, Taylor saw the speculative bubble of the 1780s largely as a recapitu-
lation of John Law’s Mississippi Company Bubble of the early eighteenth cen-
tury.15
Taylor took this position because he claimed that most economic assets in
pre-revolutionary France were non-capitalist, the financial sector existed apart
from productive activity and commercial capitalism barely existed. According
to Taylor, the merchant capitalism of the pre-revolutionary period mainly con-
sisted of family firms and modest partnerships rooted in small-scale putting-
out enterprises. Among conservatively-minded merchants who controlled
such enterprises, speculators were fundamentally distrusted and most mer-
chants raised their own capital as needed. Taylor did concede that the speculat-
ors of the pre-revolutionary period were in advance of their age, resembling in
inspiration and technique the finance capitalists of the post-1830 period with
its railways, canal and large-scale manufacturing requiring large-scale invest-

13 Perrot 1975, p. 31.

14 Bouchary, 1937; Bouchary 1939–43; Bouchary 1942; Bouchary 1940–2; Bouchary 1946.
15 Taylor 1962, pp. 967–7.
170 chapter 12

ments based on loan capital. But he also argued that there was a fundamental
difference between the speculators of the Old Regime and the finance cap-
italists of the Orléanist monarchy. The latter were laying the foundations of
industrial capitalism in France, while the former had nothing to do with it.
On the contrary, the financiers of the pre-revolutionary decade were involved
with the debts of the French state, the privileges that could be obtained by
serving the court and speculating with the floods of capital accumulating in
Paris in the decades leading to the revolution. The joint stock companies which
were created had more to do with stock jobbing and price-fixing than pro-
ductive or commercial activity: ‘the boom of the 1780s … was built on the aris-
tocratic and monarchic institutions of the old order rather than the unborn
industrial and financial system of the nineteenth century. It exemplified not
the so-called Industrial Revolution but the court capitalism of early modern
Europe’.16
Taylor’s conclusions with regard to capitalism were three-fold: first, that the
opportunity to place capital in substantial productive investments did not exist
because up to 1789 large-scale capitalist enterprises in France were scarcely to
be found. Second finance was confined to speculative investments or loans to
the government and aristocracy. Investment banks did not exist and capital
for enterprise was raised locally by merchants. Third, industrial capitalism
dates from the third decade of the nineteenth century and has no relationship
with the French Revolution. Capitalism in France prior to 1789 was weak and
consequently the revolution cannot be considered a capitalist revolution.
The evidence of the tumultuous first years of the revolution at first glance
reinforces this view. Bankers were widely seen as speculators who operated at
the expense of the productive elements of the population. The words ‘spec-
ulator’ and ‘banker’ were virtually synonymous in the eyes of the lesser mer-
chants, craftsmen and workers of Paris and other towns who constituted the
rank-and-file of the revolution. A constant refrain against the bankers was that
they were essentially parasites living off the productive activities of peasants,
workers and craftsmen, failing to add anything to the real economy. Bankers
along with rich merchants furthermore were accused of collaborating with the
nobility and the court, being in league with foreign enemies, conspiring with
counter-revolutionaries to the left and right, illegally transferring gold and sil-
ver outside France and speculating against the new national currency.
The enragé Jacques Roux’s Discours sur le jugement de Louis le dernier (1792),
for instance, demanded not only that the king be punished for treason follow-

16 Ibid.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 171

ing his flight to Varennes, but that economic traitors too be summarily dealt
with. Addressing the sans-culottes, he asserted that ‘you ought not be starved,
ruined, rendered frantic and attacked by poisonous reptiles, parasitic speculat-
ors and vampires, who through the deadly combination of monopoly seize hold
of the food trade and consume properties, manufactures and liberty itself and
through usury make one arrive at the gates of counter-revolution’.17 According
to Roux, implacable war must be made on monopolists and speculators and
all others who were discrediting the assignats and who were carrying the price
of goods of the first necessity up to unreasonable levels.18 For Roux the truly
productive element in the economy were the small producers who were being
victimised by wholesale merchants and bankers.
Jacques Hébert, the leader of the extreme Jacobin faction known as enragés,
similarly denounced the bankers as ‘jean foutres’:

privileged beings who would like the right to seize hold of everything. Oh
fuck we know how to abolish the privileges of the speculators, we know
how to reduce you to the level of the rest of the people from which you
come, messieurs jean foutres. Seeing your carriages clog the rue Vivienne
one would take you for important people. But I only see a crowd of beggars
… Only repeated thrashings … will drive you people off.19

Hébert further claimed that if one got rid of the so-called merchant and farmer
‘aristocracy’ and gave land to the urban sans-culottes, productivity would in-
crease and grain shortages and high food prices would disappear.20
The productive part of the population worked with their hands and pro-
duced real goods which were of use to people. On the contrary, the bankers
and speculators, not to speak of the nobility and clergy. lived off other people’s
labour and were essentially parasitic.21 Such views of course echo those of the
petty producers and had little to do with capitalist accumulation. But in the
context of the revolution in which the sans-culottes achieved extraordinary
political influence they deeply influenced Jacobin politicians and those who
had money to invest and were running scared.
In less extreme form these attitudes were shared by many Jacobins, includ-
ing Robespierre and Saint Just. In their view the normal and natural economy

17 Roux 1792, p. 7.
18 Roux 1792, p. 8.
19 Hébert 1791, no. 14.
20 Hébert 1792, no. 341 cited in Walter 1968, p. 394.
21 Sewell 1980, pp. 110–11.
172 chapter 12

was one in which the rights of property and unimpeded exchange in the mar-
ket ought to be the rule. But unfortunately bankers and wholesale merchants
were using their financial power to fix the market, taking advantage of war-
time conditions and their privileged economic position in order to manipulate
and disrupt normal exchange through speculation, monopoly and hoarding.22
The revolutionary regime’s initial reply to growing fiscal and economic dis-
order was to try to create a new national paper currency and then to impose
controls on prices – measures strongly favoured by the sans-culottes. Bankers,
not to speak of merchants and rich farmers, tried to resist and undermine
these policies which threatened their interests. The Jacobins responded with
the Terror, which was directed not only against the political but also against
the economic enemies of the revolution. Jacobin and sans-culotte hostility to
speculation should be seen as an aspect of their commitment to what they
considered the productive elements of the economy whose needs they were
determined to protect.
Already in August 1792 the actor turned revolutionary Fabre d’ Eglantine
denounced bankers as part of an English plot to speculate against the assignat –
the new paper currency – in order to undermine it. The next year representat-
ives on mission invited patriots to seize bankers’ assets and hand the bankers
over to the guillotine. In June 1793 the Paris Bourse, on which many bankers
traded, was suspended.23 Two months later the government ordered the closing
of France’s first national bank, the Caisse d’Escompte, compromised on account
of being mixed-up in speculation and no longer of service to the finances of
the state. At the beginning of September 1793, as the Terror took hold, a decree
ordered all operations by banks and exchange agents halted and their busi-
ness premises and assets sequestered. Although this decree was never fully
enforced, many bankers were imprisoned, their assets were seized and over
twenty met their death. Under the Terror the primary functions of the bankers
under the Old Regime – financing loans to the government and facilitating for-
eign trade – disappeared. Indeed, with the ordered dissolution of all private
companies, which included such entities as the East India Company and the
Paris Life Insurance, Water and Lighting companies, the apparently limited role
that bankers had in economic life seemed to have vanished.
Under the Terror bankers were imprisoned and killed. Among bankers who
became victims the brothers Gabriel and Louis Tassin were among the most
important. The Tassins, adherents of the Feuillants, members of the municipal

22 Hincker 1993, pp. 211–24.

23 Crouzet 1993, p. 246.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 173

government of Paris and officers of the national guard, were condemned by

the Revolutionary Tribunal for having tried to defend the royal family in the
Tuilleries from the attack of the sans-culottes (10 August 1792). Perhaps the
most powerful banker who suffered death was the Girondin Etienne Clavière,
who made a fortune in the stock market prior to the revolution, and as revolu-
tionary Minister of Finance then tried to defend the assignat from speculators.
Following the fall of the Girondins he was imprisoned and then committed sui-
cide rather than face the guillotine. On the news of his death, his wife Marthe-
Louise Garnier immediately poisoned herself. Among the most interesting of
the guillotine’s victims were two Jewish bankers, the brothers Emmanuel Junius
and Simon Junius Frey. French Jews, especially those living in the provinces
of Alsace and Lorraine, were initially bewildered or suspicious of the eman-
cipation that the revolution offered. The Frey were not French but Moravians,
bankers to the Habsburgs, who moved from adherence to orthodox Judaism
to the heresy of Frankism and then to Free Masonry. Responding to the new
freedom offered by the revolution with unreserved enthusiasm, the brothers
ended up in Paris, befriending the Hébertists, the extreme faction of the Jac-
obins. The Frey are fascinating because in important respects they anticipate
the emancipatory experience of much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Jewry on the way to modernity. However, their ties to the Hébertists, suspected
involvement in speculation and a growing xenophobic reaction encouraged by
Robespierre doomed them. All told over twenty-two bankers and stock brokers
were executed under the Terror.24 Perhaps as many as forty or fifty others
suffered imprisonment. Some bankers avoided confinement or the guillotine
by suspending their operations, fleeing into exile, expatriating their capital or
safeguarding it by purchasing so-called national properties.25 In the eyes of the
Jacobins and their supporters the sans-culottes bankers stood for speculation,
hoarding and parasitic rather than productive economic activity. The Jacobin
and sans-culottes view of bankers as essentially opposed to productive activity
would appear to confirm Taylor’s view that the finance of the pre-revolutionary
period was essentially non-capitalist.

24 Rabourdin 1988. Wholesale merchants suspected of cornering the market in one way or
another likewise suffered. 97 were executed under the Terror. See Greer, 1935, p. 154. Plessis
1989, pp. 107–8. See Greer, 1966, p. 133.
25 Plessis 1989, pp. 107–8.
174 chapter 12

Overseas Trade

But as we have already seen, Taylor’s view that capitalism did not exist is unten-
able. In fact capitalism’s rapid progress in a still largely rural feudal society
was largely responsible for the destabilisation of the towns and countryside
at the onset of the revolution. Scepticism is likewise warranted when it comes
to Taylor’s view of commercial life. His treatment of this economic sector is
to say the least incomplete, incorrectly insisting that commerce was a relat-
ively small-scale affair. His understanding of commerce under the Old Regime
is based on study of small and medium-sized commercial enterprises in Lyons,
which were largely financed by merchants raising their own capital from other
local merchants and investors. His view of such merchants is one of deep eco-
nomic and social conservatism.26
But if we consider what commerce’s and especially overseas trade’s role in
the French economy actually was, we get an entirely different picture, and one
that reflects spectacular dynamism. At the beginning of the reign of Louis xv,
the value of France’s external trade had been less than half of Great Britain’s.
Between the years 1716–20 and 1784–8, French external commerce multiplied
by a factor of 3 compared to a British expansion of 2.4. By 1788 French foreign
trade was superior to that of its British rival dominating the sale of manufac-
tures to Spain, Italy and the Levant. France’s colonial trade was growing at an
annual average rate of 2.8 percent and it was leading in the re-export of colo-
nial products to the northern European countries. Especially striking was the
expansion of trade through the port of Bordeaux as well as other Atlantic and
Mediterranean ports. The slave trade and the sugar plantations of the West
Indies were the most profitable part of trade. Overall the increase in wealth in
the hands of the merchants involved in overseas trade in the eighteenth cen-
tury was dramatic and their importance to the French economy can hardly be
overstated.
Taylor leaves the impression that the activities of pre-revolutionary financi-
ers were essentially speculative, having to do only with stock market manipula-
tion, loans to government and the handling of foreign exchange. But in addition
to speculating in rents, stocks and other financial instruments including gov-
ernment bonds, bankers played a key role in financing this overseas expansion
through providing letters of credit and loans. Indeed, it is difficult to see how
overseas trade on such a scale could have developed without access to a well-
developed system of credit as provided by the Parisian bankers. It was the finan-

26 Taylor 1963, p. 60: Taylor 1967, pp. 482–4.

bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 175

cing of trade rather than loans to courtiers or speculation on the stock market
which was the chief source of their profits. And as we have stressed it was
the expanding colonial and overseas trade which these bankers helped finance
which was the major source of the dynamism in the French economy of the
eighteenth century.27 In Lille the rise of the all-important cotton manufacture
was admittedly initially the result of the pooling of local financial resources.28
But this does not confirm Taylor’s notion of economic parochialism. It rather
reflects the local basis of the process of industrialisation in its early stages,
which we have noted is observable on both sides of the Channel. Moreover,
from the beginning the commercial credit extended by the banks of Lille as well
as Paris was indispensable to the development of the long-distance operations
of these manufacturers.29 Indeed, the further growth of Indian cotton manu-
facturing in Lille was financed in part by the profits of the colonial trade and
the slave plantations.30 We see a like pattern in the emergence of manufactur-
ing in Dauphiné. The growth of canvas, paper and metallurgical manufacturing
and its eventual development into large-scale industry was directly tied to the
expansion of the West Indian market. The important Dauphinois Perier bank
appears to have been an outgrowth of such operations.31 The commercialisa-
tion of the products of the iron and steel manufacturers in Burgundy appears
likewise to have been dependent on local banks tied in with the Parisian credit
market.32 Taylor’s failure to consider the weight of overseas commerce is seri-
ous as it relates to the major role of banking prior to the revolution. Most of the
growth of the export sector was based on commercial credit and the greater
part of this credit was supplied by the Parisian bankers.

The Crisis of Public and Private Finance

Taylor’s turning a blind eye to the role of Parisian commercial credit in fin-
ancing overseas trade must lead us to fundamentally question his analysis of
capitalism and the role of finance prior to the revolution. All the more so as we
know that banking and credit was one of the central political and economic
issues in the period of speculative fever leading up to the revolution. The cre-

27 Antonetti 1963, pp. 249–50, Potofsky 2011, pp. 92–4, Forestier 2011, pp. 55–6.
28 Hirsch 1991, pp. 114–15, 330–1.
29 Hirsch 1979; Claeys 2011, p. 1927.
30 Hirsch 1991, pp. 114–16.
31 Léon 1963, pp. 25–7, 33.
32 Woronoff 1984, p. 511.
176 chapter 12

ation of the Caisse d’Escompte in the 1770s was not only intended to address
the immediate problem of financing government debt.33 It also was meant
to respond to the growing demand for more accessible commercial credit on
a national scale, as the relationship between confidence in the public debt
and the availability of commercial credit was close. A system of public finance
which would allow the state to finance its need to fight wars and at the same
time maintain and expand the economy became a central issue as the revolu-
tion approached.34
In the course of the 1780s it became evident that the credit made available
through the Caisse was restricted to the government, court and elite of big
merchants and bankers and failed to meet national commercial needs. In
a similar manner the last ditch attempt by Calonne to save the finances of
the French state by inflating economic demand and thereby generating more
fiscal resources aborted because the expansion of credit during his ministry
extended to only a narrow circle and failed to increase the purchasing power
of the mass of the population. The failure of Calonne’s experiment in demand-
creation was in turn rooted in the more fundamental problems of social and
economic inequality. Meanwhile the flagrant political manipulation of the
finances of the Caisse d’Escompte as well as the French-controlled Bank of Saint
Charles in the same decade helped to undermine the legitimacy of the regime.
Indeed, the scandals surrounding the political manipulation of the market,
the stock exchange and the banks prepared the way for the constitutional
crisis of 1789.35 There developed an increasing awareness that excessively high
government debt was driving up interest rates and discouraging the investment
of capital in new enterprises, complicating the economic crisis that struck
in the late 1780s and becoming part of the developing political crisis.36 The
solution to the problem of government debt and the creation of a proper
national bank which would in principle be at arms-length from the government
became part and parcel of the question of the establishment of a constitutional
or responsible government.37 At the local level the restoration of the credit
of the state was understood to be tied directly to resolving the problem of
commercial credit.38

33 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 701.

34 Laffon de Ladébat 1807, pp. 3–4, Legay, Félix and White 2009, pp. 183–201.
35 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 703.
36 Root 1994, p, 180; Butel 1974, pp. 206–7; Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, pp. 77–81.
37 Root 1994, pp. 170–210; Luckett and Lachaier 1996, pp. 291–2; Bosher 1970, pp. 257–75;
Whatmore 2012, pp. 21, 213–16, 219; Sonenscher 1997, pp. 268–325.
38 Hirsch 1991, p. 194.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 177

The development of a more appropriate system of banking and finance was

not only key to the future operations of the government but also to hopes for
the renewed growth of the French economy. A wide-ranging debate around
the creation of a national bank developed which drew in not only Necker
and Clavière but also the banker François Louis Jean-Joseph de Laborde de
Mereville, Dupont de Nemours, Olympe de Gouges, Marat and Condorcet,
among many others, reflecting the centrality of the issue of public and private
finance to the revolution.39 Condorcet’s views were particularly insightful,
calling for reducing the power of the Parisian financiers by decentralising
control of banking into the hands of provincial assemblies which could better
serve the credit needs of local enterprises. Condorcet furthermore made the
sophisticated observation that not only could the existence of a national bank
or public debt have an effect on all aspects of an economy but that these effects
could be calculated.40 That the question of a national bank was at the centre of
political discussion in the revolutionary crisis must lead us to question Taylor’s
view that the crisis of finance had little to do with capitalism and was simply
an expression of the recurrent financial problems of the Old Regime. Among
the forces that impelled the revolution was not only the issue of the immediate
crisis of government revenues, but the need to create a more efficient system of
public and private finance in response to a French economy which had reached
a turning point. In 1789 the government’s inability to pay its debt helped to burst
asunder the existing political system while the future of banking and credit
remained one of the central questions facing the new revolutionary regime.
The fact that after the temporary suppression of private banking during the
period of the Terror the government of the Directory went on to experiment
with free banking and then under Napoleon moved to create the Bank of
France (1803) – which brought together most of the leading French capitalists,
including bankers and industrialists, to create a bank of banks – reflects the
centrality of the question of finance to the revolutionary process.41 A clear
evolution toward the creation of a new financial system more effectively tied to
the new capitalist political and economic order emerged during the revolution.
This overall evolution leads us to delve more deeply into the role of banking and
state finance at the height of the revolutionary crisis.

39 Stasavage 2003, p. 148.

40 Condorcet 1793–4, vol. 1, p. 570.
41 Jacoud 1996, pp. 255–66.
178 chapter 12

The Bankers

There were about seventy private bankers in Paris at the time of the revolu-
tion. Some were French, but most foreign – Dutch, English, but principally
Swiss, especially Genevan. Most of the Genevans came from Protestant fam-
ilies which had abandoned France following the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. But descendants of these exiles filtered back into the Kingdom and
set themselves up as bankers in Paris in the course of the eighteenth century
in response to expanding economic opportunities and growing religious tol-
erance. The Parisian town houses of these bankers served as both residences
and places of business and were located mainly between the Place Vendôme
and the rue Beaubourg. As noted above by Hébert, the centre of activity for
most of the bankers was the rue Vivienne in the quarter named for the monas-
tery known as the Filles de Saint-Thomas.42 Under Napoleon the site of this
monastery became the location of the Parisian Bourse – a building built by
the revolutionary architect Alexandre Théodore Brogniart. Set on fire during
the events of May 1968, it is today, in the age of the internet, a shopping
centre.
The new townhouses of the bankers built in this quarter reflected the Par-
isian construction boom in the years leading up to the revolution, which was
mainly based on profits from the Atlantic trade. The substantial investment in
Parisian real estate signalled the prosperity enjoyed by overseas merchants and
bankers. At the same time the real estate boom perhaps also reflected the still
limited opportunities for profitable investment within the productive sectors
of the French economy.43 In a typical operation on the eve of the revolution,
the Parisian Insurance Company, a company initially floated to cash in on the
stock market boom of the 1780s, agreed to pay off the debts of the Duke de
Choiseul. In return the company acquired a set of houses owned by the duke
in and around the new Théâtre des Italiens, located in this same quarter where
real estate was booming.44
Speaking of the rue Vivienne, Sebastien Mercier noted: ‘There is more
money on this street than in all the rest of the city. It is the pocketbook of the
capital. The big banks and notably the Caisse d’ Escompte are to be found there.
The bankers, money changers and stock brokers and all others who trade in
money are located there. As the whole of their science consists of buying low

42 Bourdin 1937, pp. 16–17.

43 Potofsky 2009, p. 11.
44 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 713.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 179

from some in order to sell high to others, everything favours their avarice … All
things which constitute speculation and that by nature is hostile to the sanc-
tity of agriculture is to be found in proximity to this street’.45 Mercier shared
the common view that bankers had no interest in the productive side of the
economy and that their trade in money was hostile to it.
As early as September 1789 Marat, responding to attacks on the inflammat-
ory stories in his new journal L’Ami du people that were emanating from the
district of the Filles de Saint Thomas, noted that: ‘I would have believed such
a thing impossible if I had not known that the district is that of the stock
exchange agents, bankers, financiers and speculators, that is, men who build
their fortune on the ruin of others, who drink the blood of people and whose
rapacity which is a real plague of humanity is one of the principal causes of
public misery’.46 In the aftermath of the revolution the rue Vivienne and the
monastery of the Filles-Saint Thomas were included in the new municipal sec-
tion known as La Bibliotheque (later Lepeletier), embracing most of the finan-
cial district. About a quarter of the active citizens of this section were made
up of bankers, money changers, treasurers and financial clerks. Based on this
electorate in 1791, the section elected Etienne Clavière and the banker Jean-
Louis Monneron as delegates to the Legislative Assembly.
A Protestant sensibility diluted somewhat by Enlightenment rationalism
persisted in the Parisian banking families and was reinforced by a strong endo-
gamy.47 Some formed part of the Calvinist or Lutheran congregations in Paris
while most focused their faith on family devotions discreetly confined to the
home.48 Although the Protestantism of the bankers was no longer held against
them by most Parisians, the bankers remained aware of their embattled herit-
age. During the revolution counter-revolutionaries reminded them of this. In
the debate in the Constituent Assembly leading to the expropriation of eccle-
siastical property Cardinal Jean Maury alluded to the religion of the bankers by
denouncing the ‘Genevan’ or ‘foreign’ bankers who wanted to usurp the lands of
the Gallican Church to guarantee the national debt.49 Later on a royalist paper
the Annales monarchiques more directly accused the Protestant bankers of
being the money behind the revolutionary agitation which was being whipped
up in the wake of the flight to Varennes:

45 Mercier 1994, vol. 1, pp. 730–1.

46 Marat, L’ami du peuple, no. 20, 30 September 1789.
47 Biancarli 1995, pp. 137–9.
48 Lods 1992, p. 273.
49 Maury 1827, vol. 4, pp. 171–4.
180 chapter 12

The Protestants, the patriots in the sense of the revolution, are at work
realizing enormous gains. Monsieur B.de M. (François Louis Jean-Joseph
de Laborde de Méréville) at Bordeaux has seized hold of all the coin and
numeraire there. All of the former rebels of Holland, a large number of the
Protestants of England and all of the beggars of the Constituent Assembly
who have enriched themselves at the expense of our misery, have united
to create a fund of 150 million livres and with this tainted money are
getting ready to once more rouse the people who at this moment are
afflicted by misery and by that means to draw them into a new course
of crimes more vast and atrocious than all of the precedent ones.50

The importance of the overseas trade to the Parisian bankers is reflected in

their reaction to demands for the abolition of slavery, which began to be
voiced from 1789. The growing chorus against slavery led the Caribbean plant-
ers and the merchants of Bordeaux to demand that the National Assembly
and the city of Paris support the slave trade and the continuation of slavery
in France’s West Indian colonies.51 In February 1790 a resident of the Section
Filles Saint-Thomas, Louis Lizin de Mily, who was born into a prominent fam-
ily in Martinique, published a warning that abolition would set off a race war in
France’s West Indian islands.52 The appearance of this work immediately won
the plaudits of the Club Massiac or Parisian pro-slavery lobby.53 A resolution
was then passed in the assembly general of the Section Filles Saint-Thomas by
an overwhelming majority noting that calls for the abolition of slavery were at
the very least premature. The end of black slavery would mean the loss of these
islands as colonies and the forfeit annually of 300 million livres in cash and 250
million in sugar and other commodities. It would mean the loss of a further 150
million livres in exports. Such losses would lead to the collapse of the maritime
towns and the merchant fleet. It concluded that Paris, like the rest of France,
had a stake in the prosperity of these colonies. The resolution called on the
other districts of Paris to likewise endorse the maintenance of the slave trade
and slavery and noted that Rouen has already done so. Very few other districts
of Paris heeded this appeal. On the other hand, the resolution backed by the
Parisian bankers and financial community reflects a sophisticated understand-
ing of the importance of the West Indian slave economy to their interests.54

50 Bouchary 1939–43, vol. 2, p. 22.

51 Liébart 2006.
52 Lizin de Mily 1790.
53 Challamel 1895, 1974, p. 74; Debien 1953, pp. 185, 193, 322, 323.
54 Lacroix 1894–1955, vol. 4, pp. 374–5; Antonetti 1963, p. 209.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 181

Lüthy distinguishes between the private bankers and the financiers of the
Old Regime. The latter were directly tied to government finances, holding state
office and adhering to the Catholic faith.55 The former had to do mainly with
international trade, operated at a remove from the state, and were mainly Prot-
estants. Jean Bouvier, on the other hand, insists that the differences between
the groups ought not to be exaggerated. There was an overlap between the two,
according to him, private bankers who made or organised loans to the court
and government and financiers who became involved in discounting letters of
exchange.56 The Caisse d’Escompte had as its administrators both financiers
and Protestant bankers. The above mentioned François Laborde de Mereville,
who was the son of the marquis Jean-Joseph de Mereville, the celebrated court
banker, was himself a merchant banker and a deputy for the third estate in
the Estates-General of 1789. Father and son were deeply involved in the over-
seas Caribbean trade and sugar plantations centred on the port of Bordeaux.57
Perhaps the clearest instance of this overlap were the Lecouteulx of Rouen and
Paris, an old bourgeois Catholic family which combined an interest in the debts
of the court with overseas trade and even the financing of mines and manufac-
tures.58 The Lecoutuealx experienced massive losses on their Western Indian
investments as a result of the Haitian revolution.59 Many of the private bankers,
on the other hand, were not even subjects of the French king. Clavière, a citizen
of Geneva, for example, at first could not directly participate in French politics
and only obtained naturalisation after the revolution. Like Clavière many had
migrated to Paris as a result of the growing financial needs of the monarchy,
the development of overseas commerce and the increasingly tolerant attitude
of the government toward the Protestant religion.

The Revolution of 1789

When the revolution arrived most bankers supported it. The fact that these
powerful men – the financial mainstays of the Old Regime – did so was of
incalculable importance to the initial success of the revolution. Their support
for the party of constitutional government and civil and human rights as
against the party of absolute monarchy and privilege was of immense import

55 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 774.

56 Bouvier 1964, pp. 118–19.
57 Potofksy 2011, pp. 93, 106; Claeys 2011, vol. 2, pp. 1204–24; Fourbert 1990.
58 Zylberberg 2001, pp. 163, 167.
59 an f7 4774.
182 chapter 12

in redefining their own social and economic functions. But at first sight their
support for the revolution is surprising, since many were deeply involved in
buying or selling royal debt and were by instinct conservative. Nonetheless
some had undeniably been affected by the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment.
The sympathetic attitude of others like Clavière may have been shaped by the
anti-oligarchic revolution which had shaken their native city of Geneva (1782).
Many had supported the Genevan revolution which had then been suppressed
by the intervention of the French monarchy. In their eyes the revolution in
France seven years later vindicated their previous failure.60 More decisive in
determining the attitude of most bankers was the dire nature of the crisis.
They were alarmed by the court’s dismissal of one of their own, the Genevan
banker Jacques Necker, as minister of finance. They feared that the ouster of
Necker foreshadowed the monarchy’s repudiation of the national debt and
imminent and catastrophic financial loss from which they could not extricate
themselves – an important point.61 As a result, abandoning their usual caution,
they were led to support the taking of the Bastille and the establishment
of the Paris Commune. The banker Etienne Delessert, for example, who had
befriended Rousseau and had employed him as a tutor, encouraged his son,
clerks and servants to participate in the ransacking of the Invalides for arms
prior to the assault on the Bastille. The basement of Delessert’s townhouse
in the rue Coq-Héron near Palais-Royal was turned into an arsenal during
the siege. Delessert then provided money to support the unit of the national
guard established in his district. The bankers Aimé Gabriel Fulchiron, Jean-
François Perregaux, Gabriel and Louis Tassin, Jean Cottin and Théodore Jauge
became national guard officers. Joseph Lefebvre, a banker who lived in the
rue Beaubourg, meanwhile was appointed commissioner of enrollments for
his district. Among the rumours circulating in the wake of the taking of the
Bastille was that the rue Vivienne, in other words, the bankers, had secretly
bought the loyalty of the king’s own guard – the so-called gardes francaises.62
According to Marat, a few months later, on the arrival of the king at the Hôtel
de Ville following the March on Versailles, the bankers, money changers and
speculators assembled and fiercely acclaimed Necker. He was considered their
idol, someone ever ready, as Marat puts it, to sacrifice the happiness of the
nation to themselves.63

60 Whatmore 2012, pp. 5–12.

61 Caron 1907, pp. 666–7.
62 Bourdin 1937, p. 17.
63 Marat, L’ami du peuple, no. 28, 8 October, 1789.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 183

As a result of the revolution’s abolition of legal privilege the power of the

bankers, who based their influence essentially on money, dramatically in-
creased. The sudden rise in the status of the bankers following the revolution
is reflected in a report of the Ambassador of Saxony. At the conclusion of his
account of the March on Versailles, which according to the ambassador was
a day filled with outrages, he notes that one of Lafayette’s aides-de-camp, the
banker Jauge, dressed in military uniform, saw fit to enter the cabinet du roi
uninvited in a way that no duke or peer would have dared to do prior to the
revolution. Addressing himself to the Foreign Minister Count Montmorin de
Saint Herem, Jauge noted that the Count’s carriage had not been allowed into
the courtyard of Versailles and explained that he had ordered the gates be kept
closed. ‘Under the circumstances’, he explained, ‘it is necessary to learn how to
suffer’. The ambassador concluded: ‘My head is still unable to comprehend this
change of circumstances’.64 Indeed, in abolishing the privileges of the nobility
and the influence of the court financiers and by reducing step-by-step the
government’s involvement in the economy, the revolution greatly increased
the influence and power of the private bankers, giving them every incentive
to continue their support.
The bankers tried to use their newfound influence to shape the politics
of the revolutionary regime. Their primary concerns during the peaceful two
year interlude which followed Louis xvi’s return to Paris was guaranteeing the
national debt through the confiscation of the lands of the Church and the
drawing up of a liberal constitution. They pursued these objectives by means
of their participation in moderate political clubs like the Société de 1789, the
Feuillants and the Club de Valois. In the meetings of these clubs could be
found such leading figures in Parisian banking circles as Perregaux, Walter
Boyd and John William Ker, Jean Cottin, Laurent-Vincent and Jean-Barthélemy
Lecouteulx, Guillaume Mallet, Louis Greffuhle, Jean Marc Montz, Jean Boscary,
Etienne Delessert, Jean Girdardon and Théodore Jauge.65
It was reassuring to the bankers that while the monarchy lasted, two Ge-
nevans, the bankers Necker and Clavière, were ministers of finance. In an
effort to continue to retain the bankers’ confidence following the overthrow
of the monarchy, Clavière was named finance minister once more under the
short-lived Girondin republic. Summing up the cause and consequences of the
revolution, Edmund Burke argued that as a result of the enormous national
debt, ‘a great monied interest had insensibly grown up, and with it a great

64 Mathiez, Albert 1913, 1989, p. 75.

65 Challamel 1895, 1974; Bouchary, 1939–43, vol. 2, p. 14.
184 chapter 12

power’.66 According to him, the revolution marked the triumph of this

moneyed interest over the traditional landed interest. Seizing the lands of the
Church then made possible a vast expansion of public credit through the cre-
ation of the assignats: ‘by this means the spirit of money-jobbing and specu-
lation goes into the mass of land itself, and incorporates with it. By this kind
of operation, that species of property becomes (as it were) volatized’.67 Burke
concluded that a new Paris-based financial oligarchy had come to power: ‘it is
through the power of Paris, now become the center and focus of jobbing, that
the leaders of this faction direct, or rather command the whole legislative and
the whole executive government’.68 Burke’s conception of the revolution fails
to capture the popular and class nature of the revolution, and does not prop-
erly grasp the contradictory effects of the institution of the assignats on the
operation of the private banks. But pace Taylor and other revisionists, the view
of Burke, the leading counter-revolutionary theorist of the time, is impressive
in its grasp of the new political power of finance capital and the concomitant
transformation of landed property into capital which followed the revolution.
Likewise Burke understands the link between the immediate crisis and the
longer term conflict between rival economic orders, the one based on tradi-
tional control over land and the other on finance capital.
In addition to writing a new constitution and securing the state debt, finan-
cial reform including the creation of a national currency and bank were import-
ant goals of this initial liberal stage of the revolution. As a remedy to bankruptcy
and in order to restore economic confidence, Necker proposed that the Caisse
d’Escompte be transformed into a national bank whose notes would be backed
by the free gift of wealthy citizens and especially the property of the king and
clergy.69 Clavière planned a central bank based on mono-metallism and the
abolition of the long-standing distinction between real money and money of
account. Clavière was the primary agent behind the assignats in their first form,
i.e., convertible bonds used as a means of guaranteeing the national debt. At the
same time he envisioned a national bank as a bank of deposit for individuals or
for other regional banks which would create money, issue government-backed
bonds and serve as a clearing house at the national level for loans and debts. It
is noteworthy that Clavière’s scheme included further provisions which would
have smoothed the way toward the fuller development of private investment

66 Burke 2001, p. 274.

67 Burke 2001, p. 360. See Pocock 1985, pp. 193–212.
68 Burke 2001, p. 365.
69 Necker 1789, pp. 160, 168; Crouzet 1993, p. 206; Dorigny 1985, pp. 99–100; Antonetti 2007,
pp. 74, 91.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 185

banking. Claviere’s scheme indicates an awareness of the need to link finance

capital with investment in productive activity. The plans of Necker and Clavière
make clear that the establishment of a national bank was not simply a question
of restoring the finances of the government but part of an overall plan for over-
coming the political and economic crisis which had intensified as a result of
the revolution and which could only be ended by the restoration of confidence,
especially among those with money.
Among those with money whose confidence needed to be restored the
bankers were foremost. Their initial support for the new regime was
strengthened by a renewal of economic expansion after the crisis of 1789.70
Many bankers and merchants at first assumed that after the upheavals of 1789
the political and economic problems facing France would be resolved. In their
view the revolution had created the possibility of an unobstructed path toward
the development of a productive, commercial and financial capitalism whose
different sectors would operate in concert. Indeed, far from the revolution fos-
tering an atmosphere of commercial and financial caution, the years which
immediately followed the storming of the Bastille were marked by renewed
economic growth, expansion of foreign trade and a flurry of speculation.71
True, over the course of the next three years the propertied classes step-by-step
began to dump the newly established national currency in exchange for gold
and silver. Yet the gradual erosion of the exchange rate at first served to quicken
economic life. Seeking safety, investors and savers exchanged the new French
paper currency for commodities and thereby boosted demand. Likewise the
depreciation of the currency actually favoured exports, which prospered dur-
ing 1791 and 1792.
The expansive liberalism of Adam Smith made itself fashionable and even
became briefly hegemonic, eclipsing the hitherto dominant Physiocratic
school.72 In the name of laissez-faire regulations over the buying and sale of
property, monopolies and barriers to commerce of all sorts including regula-
tions on prices and wages were relaxed. The Law of Allarde (2 March 1791)
took a decisive step toward a much vaunted economic freedom as corporations,
guilds, and royal manufactures were abolished. The Goudard Decree of the fol-
lowing September lifted all regulations on manufacturing.73 Many journeymen
and apprentices, evidently inspired by the notion of economic freedom, took

70 Perrot 1975, p. 32.

71 Poussou 1993, p. 102.
72 Whatmore 2002, pp. 65–89.
73 Hirsch 1989, pp. 1286–7, Fitzsimmons 2010, pp. 51–6.
186 chapter 12

the opportunity to leave their masters to try to set up in business for them-
selves.74 The loosening of the economic reins also made possible the multiplic-
ation of new small private banks and other financial institutions amid general
acclaim.75 Important in fostering the creation of these latter bodies was the
demand for credit and the opportunity some of these new institutions offered
small producers, shopkeepers and skilled workers to buy annuities.

Private Money

The creation of new banks was above all meant to find an immediate remedy
to the increasing shortage of small change to pay workers and to buy and sell
goods in local retail markets.76 The paucity of small metallic coins initially was
the result of the import of large amounts of grain to deal with the subsistence
crisis and also the consequence of the commercial deficit due to the economic
and political upheavals attendant on the revolution.77 But over the longer term
it reflected the fact that despite enormous popular support for the revolution
the possessing classes – including well-to-do peasants and merchants – began
to hedge their bets by hoarding or expatriating bullion or metallic coinage,
especially following signs of accelerating inflation that became evident in
1791. A shortage of coin backed by gold or other precious metal is no mere
technical matter. Without sufficient coin not only is foreign trade inhibited
but the capacity of productive capital to employ and pay workers and realise
profits in a money form is fundamentally constrained. In any case, in France
the growing shortage of numeraire began to stir popular unrest, especially
among workers, who increasingly found themselves not being paid or not being
paid in full. As the crisis deepened the regime tried to counter the lack of
liquidity by gradually transforming the assignat, which had begun life as a kind
of convertible bond meant to guarantee the national debt, into a new paper
currency issued in smaller and smaller denominations. But even aside the
fact that the assignat lacked the backing of sufficient liquid and exchangeable
metallic coin owing to increased hoarding and expatriation, the distribution of
the assignats lagged behind demand and markets became increasingly flooded
with new local currencies, private as well as public, backed by little or nothing
in the way of reserves.

74 Heller 2006, p. 88.

75 Bouchary 1939–45, vol. 3, pp. 9–10.
76 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, pp. 9–11, 15.
77 Bouchary 1937, p. 61.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 187

Meanwhile the French economy took a turn for the worse in the aftermath
of the revolution in Haiti. Cut off from the continuing flow of sugar, coffee and
cotton from the West Indies from the late summer of 1791, it was impossible
for France to offset the ongoing entry of English manufactures and to pay for
the inflow of Spanish coin while stemming a growing flight of precious metals.
The expatriation of gold and silver accelerated in the face of declining political
confidence and growing inflation. Among those most immediately affected
were the bankers Laborde, closely tied to the West Indian trade, as well as
the Parisian banker Jauge, linked to the important wholesale firm owned by
his father, the Bordeaux merchant Simon Jauge.78 In the crisis that followed
several Parisian banks went under. In the meantime the detention of Louis xvi
following the disastrous flight to Varennes led to the outbreak of war between
revolutionary France and its neighbours in April 1792.79 The growing scarcity
of liquid capital and the outbreak of war made the maintenance of the export
trade increasingly difficult. The financing of overseas trade had been the life
blood of the bankers and the source of the exchange necessary to keep the
assignat stable. The revolution began as a crisis of credit. It entered a new stage
when it became a crisis of money, circulation and exchange.
In the face of the shortage of coinage in 1791 the government allowed hun-
dreds of so-called caisses patriotiques to open across France, which issued their
own currencies known as billets de confiance.80 The existence of a multiplicity
of different monies was nothing new in France. It should be remembered that
under the Old Regime there had never been a national currency. Save only for
money of account calculated in livres and sols, trade had long been carried
on using different kinds of numeraire both foreign and domestic. The French
therefore to begin with were comfortable with the idea of different local mon-
ies.
These largely public local banks it should be noted were approved by the
Legislative Assembly, which was in principle strongly attached to the idea of
political decentralisation and local economic initiatives. Most of these new
banks were organised under the aegis of municipal or departmental authorities
and were required to maintain a reserve in assignats to back the local issue.
These currencies appear at first to have functioned well, helping to sustain
local markets. They were of course established and dominated by the local
bourgeoisie but enjoyed support at first from the small producers and workers

78 Butel 1974, pp. 200, 216, 308, 315.

79 Antonetti 1963, pp. 197, 209; Crouzet 1993, p. 199.
80 White 1990, pp. 251–76.
188 chapter 12

as well.81 Indeed, they were very much in accord with the laissez-faire spirit of
the early phase of the revolution, which sought to minimise state interference
in the economy with the belief that unleashing the market, especially at the
local or regional level, would foster growth.
In Paris revolutionary sections like the Section Bibliothèque created their
own caisses patriotiques.82 But the situation in the capital and in other major
centres like Lyons, Lille and Bordeaux and in manufacturing centres appears
to have been different from less important centres in that private interests
played a larger role in the circulation of billets de confiance. In Paris alone
some sixty-three distinct billets de confiance were issued, including those cre-
ated by private bodies like manufactures, bakeries and even theatres. Profits
came from charging fees to exchange assignats at a discount for billets. Likewise
money was made by speculating with the accumulated funds in the absence
of safeguards ensuring adequate reserves.83 The problem of a lack of even-
tual accountability is suggested by the fact that the Girondin leader Brissot,
while he was president of the Section Bibliothèque, casually appropriated 580
livres from his section’s account in the caisse patriotique and did not pay it
back.84
Several of the new banks in Paris were able to achieve a wide reach, allowing
their notes and currencies to circulate at a national level. The Banque Mon-
neron was the most ambitious of these schemes. Founded by the brothers Mon-
neron, who were important merchant bankers involved in the Caribbean trade,
the new bank exchanged assignats for stamped copper coins known as mon-
nerons which circulated throughout the country.85 Also operating on a national
scale was the so-called Maison de Secours whose notes circulated in the mil-
lions throughout northern France.86 Notable, too, was the Caisse Lafarge, which
accumulated 50 million livres in savings and had nearly 120,000 subscribers at
its height in 1793.87 Also important was Antoine Lacornée’s Caisse de Com-
merce, which put itself forward as an alternative to the big banks designed
to serve the needs of small-scale producers in Paris. Threatened with clos-
ure, Lacornée was able to fend off critics by mobilising the support of some
merchants and sans-culottes, who claimed that the institution represented an

81 Bloch 1910, pp. 143, 45, Houssay 1907, pp. 33–40, Becchia 2000, pp. 387–8.
82 Bourdin 1937, p. 53; Burstin 2005, pp. 302–4.
83 Mathiez 1927, p. 53.
84 Brissot de Warville 1877, p. 448.
85 Bruguière 1986, p. 87.
86 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, pp. 73–156.
87 Thullier 1999, pp. 3–4.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 189

alternative to the hated speculators. It was able to attract the savings of thou-
sands of investors.88
The fact that the men who controlled the state in 1791 would allow the
creation of a multiplicity of private currencies to circulate throughout France
attests to the limitations of the unfettered liberalism which characterised the
immediate post-revolutionary period. In adhering to the principle of laissez-
faire to the point of allowing money itself to become a matter of private
enterprise, they demonstrated that they did not understand the necessity of the
state regulating the means of exchange and the market for credit in developing
a capitalist economy. Paradoxically it was the Jacobins who understood this
better.
We know that influential Parisian bankers became involved in these private
operations. Guillaume Sabatier, a director of the East India Company, later
imprisoned under the Terror, was a principal backer of the Caisse Lafarge.89
Another important private bank, the Caisse patriotique de Paris, with an
initial capitalisation of more than three million livres, had as its principal share-
holder Delessert.90 Another investor in this caisse was Jean-Pierre Germain,
a close associate of Delessert, director of the Paris Insurance Company, part-
ner with Delessert in the acquisition of national properties and future regent
of the Bank of France.91 Jacob Bidermann, who headed the important Senn-
Bidermann Bank, was implicated in the affairs of the Monneron Bank. Mon-
neron coins, the numeraire issued by the bank, were machine-manufactured
in England at high cost and because of their significant metallic content were
hoarded by the French public while the assignats they exchanged for them
depreciated. As a result the Monneron Bank was in crisis by January 1792 and
had to be re-financed by Bidermann’s Bank as well as those of Bontemps, Mal-
let, Tourton and Ravel, and Rivier and Jean Louis Baux. In the absence of any
controls the Monneron Bank then clandestinely speculated against the assig-
nat on a massive scale, with the help of an intermediary, the Lyonnaise banker
Johannot Léozat. This proved a miscalculation, forcing the bank to declare
bankruptcy at the end of March 1792.92 The failure of the Monneron Bank pro-
voked widespread consternation.93

88 Seligman 1904, pp. 49–50.

89 Claeys 2011, vol. 2, pp. 2168–9.
90 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, p. 59.
91 Szramkiewicz 1974, pp. 129, 134.
92 Antonetti 2007, p. 81.
93 Antonetti 2007, pp. 80–1.
190 chapter 12

Meanwhile rumours of the failure of the Maison de Secours created its

own panic. Le Moniteur reported that news of the bankruptcy spread rapidly
throughout France, with merchants in many towns refusing to accept its notes,
provoking popular commotions.94 In Paris there were threats of riots against
speculators and bankers in the wake of the failed operations.95 Bidermann does
not appear to have been directly involved in the Bank’s failure. However, as the
executor of the bankruptcy he helped its director François Guillaume escape
from prison and flee abroad. His associates were not so lucky. They were killed
in the September Massacres, which led to a scandal and Bidermann’s temporary
detention.96 Meanwhile Lacornée’s Caisse de Commerce not only proved itself
insolvent, it became involved in royalist intrigues to try to keep itself afloat. It
was shut down once the Jacobins took power and one of its directors, Pierre-
Paul Kolly, a bankrupt ex-farmer-general and royalist sympathiser, ended on
the guillotine as a counter-revolutionary.97
Already in the port city of Nantes in September 1791, workers took things
into their own hands. Starting in the naval yards, workers throughout the city
rebelled against being paid in billets de confiance and demanded the suppres-
sion of the local caisse patriotique, which they had come to see as a creature of
the local employers. According to their complaints, payment in paper as against
hard currency had fuelled inflation, effectively enabling employers to cut their
wages. So far as they were concerned the billets were a confidence trick being
played at their expense. Nostalgia for the more stable currencies of the Old
Regime was voiced. Moreover, in the minds of the workers bourgeois members
of the national guard sent to repress them were directly involved in keeping this
oppressive and fraudulent set-up in place.98 Similar events occurred at Lille,
where wholesale merchants and local bankers established a private bank which
issued a currency to pay workers. When the workers rebelled against being paid
with this private money, demanding payment in assignats, the municipality
was forced to take the private bank under its protection.99
The excesses of the caisses patriotiques provoked a like reaction in Paris.100
According to Camille Desmoulins, writing in Marat’s L’ ami du peuple on 8 June
1791:

94 Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur … 1789–99 (1843), pp. 66, 132.

95 Jaurès 1968–73, vol. 2, pp. 385–6.
96 Mathiez 1929, pp. 577–89.
97 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 1, pp. 165–7; Seligman 1904, passim; Claeys 2011, vol. 2, pp. 1177–80.
98 Guicheteau 2008, pp. 214–19.
99 Hirsch 1991, p. 211.
100 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, pp. 16–20.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 191

A company made up of vampires (the Caisse Patriotique de Paris) at

the head of which are the said (Etienne) Delessert, the so-called Count
d’Estaing (Admiral Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector), and several dep-
uties of the National Assembly has been formed to suck the blood of the
people to the last drop. These greedy speculators contend that there is
not enough numeraire and have perhaps themselves contributed to its
scarcity by hoarding. You know that a formal decree has ordered that 100
million assignats worth 5 livres apiece be put in circulation. This measure
if well-directed could benefit the arts, agriculture and commerce. Those
backing the caisse have done all that they could to block this measure.
Being unable to do so they have established a caisse that they call patriotic
but which in fact is a disastrous enterprise. It exchanges assignats worth
50, 100, 200 and 300 livres against notes signed by who knows who … The
operation of these speculators is to discount the assignats against letters
of exchange or against prospective gains on the stock market with the
purpose of benefiting from the rise and fall of values while monopolizing
national properties, perhaps in order to pay for the 20 millions livres
worth of national properties that Delessert has already monopolized.101

Delessert, who socialised with the Girondin leaders Brissot and Clavière, was
arrested under the Terror and barely escaped with his life.102 Among the
charges against him was that in the face of his misdeeds in the management
of the Caisse patriotique the public treasury had had to step in and assume the
losses. He was also suspected of colluding with foreign agents and the Girond-
ins of Lyons while undermining the assignats through speculation: ‘it is to be
feared that this man whose fortune exceeds the limits of hope can become very
dangerous in a moment of crisis … there is reason to believe that he could serve
the interests of foreign powers with money and credit’. In his defence Delessert
reminded the Revolutionary Tribunal of his role in the taking of the Bastille, his
purchase of national properties and the fact that his son Benjamin was serving
as an officer in the revolutionary army, all reflecting patriotism.103
The link made between revolutionary patriotism and productive investment
was a noteworthy response to the criticism emanating from the Jacobin radicals
and sans-culottes. The bourgeoisie, both rural and urban, already held about
thirty percent of the land prior to the revolution. But the sudden acquisition

101 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, pp. 61–2.

102 Brissot de Warville 1877, p. 343.
103 an f7 4667, de Coninck 2000, p. 26.
192 chapter 12

of ten percent more assured them of political and social hegemony. It also
amounted to a massive investment of money capital in productive activity.
As we have seen, Burke noted the political and economic significance of the
sudden and large-scale entry of financial capital into the land, freeing it of
feudal entailment and ‘volatilising’ or transforming it into capital. Bankers
obtained a significant proportion of this capital.
Overall the purchase of such national properties on the part of bankers was
most evident in the nearby île-de-France. Most of the properties acquired by
them took the form of large capitalist farms formerly held by ecclesiastical
corporations, which were beyond the financial reach of affluent farmers and
labourers. As a group the bankers of Paris – Delessert, Giradot de Marigny,
Sabatier, Guillaume and Jacques Mallet, Louis Julien, Jean Dupont, Thomas-
Simon Bérard – acquired the largest amount of such properties.104 Delessert
was accused of using his ill-gotten gains from speculation to buy twenty mil-
lion livres worth of national properties. This was undoubtedly an exaggera-
tion for at his death in 1816 he held only six farms whose worth was estim-
ated at 1.5 million francs.105 Bérard bought almost 1.5 million livres worth of
such properties, which represented the repatriation and re-investment in the
French economy of a substantial amount of colonial wealth.106 Purchase of
these properties was represented as an act of patriotism showing on which
side of the revolution one stood.107 But of course acquisition of a national
property was more than an act of patriotism or even a hedge against uncer-
tain economic times. Acquisition of these highly productive farms also made
good business sense, as the confiscation of national properties put more on the
market, significantly lowering their price while the rents on them remained at
about the same level.108 Purchase of such capitalist farms reflected a significant
step toward tying productive and finance capital together. It is noteworthy that
the movement of capital in this direction was not merely an economic matter
but was encouraged by the increasing political restrictions placed on specula-
tion.

104 Moriceau 1989, pp. 218–19, Moriceau 1990, pp. 442, 444–7, 463, 465.
105 Bergeron 1978, p. 71.
106 Claeys 2011, vol. 1, p. 197.
107 Bernard Bodinier and Eric Teyssier 2000, p. 310. See also the testimony of the banker
Girardot de Marigny before the Parisian Revolutionary Tribunal, following his arrest in
an f7 4226.
108 Perrot 1975, pp. 32–3.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 193

Assignats

A month after Desmoulins’s denunciation of the caisses in the press the first
signs of opposition to the billets de confiance appeared in the local revolution-
ary organisations of Paris. On 12 July the Section Mauconseil passed a resol-
ution calling for the establishment of a single Parisian currency in place of
the billets de confiance. The executive of the section then took up the matter.
According to its deliberations the absence of a proper money in small denom-
inations had led to disorder and a breakdown in relations between buyers and
sellers in the market. The problems were being exacerbated by the manipula-
tions of the merchants of money who were attempting to profit from the exist-
ing confusion, especially by controlling the availability of billets de confiance.
Numeraire is only a representative sign of money and paper only a represent-
ation of numeraire. The existence of many different billets de confiance in the
city’s sections is compounding the problem. The solution is the creation of a
single paper money in small denominations issued in the name of the united
revolutionary sections of Paris.109 Based on the subsequent discussion of the
issue that took place in the Section des Postes it becomes clear that the idea
began to take hold that the new currency for Paris should be the basis of a
single new currency for France as a whole.110 In other words, in response to
the economic crisis that had been exacerbated by the billets de confiance, the
productive citizens of revolutionary Paris began to press for the rapid trans-
formation of the assignat into a national currency.
The reaction against the billets de confiance was intensified by the outbreak
of the Parisian sugar riots. Jean-Marie Boscary, a member of the Legislative
Assembly who directed the wholesale merchant house of Choll Boscary and
Company, found himself the focal point of popular anger during the riots which
rocked the popular quarters of the Faubourg Saint Marcel and Saint-Antoine
in January 1792. Boscary’s father Jean was a banker, a director of the Paris
Life Insurance Company and of the Caisse d’Escompte, while his brother Jean-
Bapiste-Joseph Boscary Villeplaine was a broker on the stock exchange. His firm
Chol Boscary and Company was involved in the West Indian trade as well as
in the export and re-export trade all over Europe. In addition Boscary and his
partner and relative Chol operated a hat manufacture in Paris which employed
150 workers. Following the taking of the Bastille Jean-Marie became politically
active, getting himself appointed secretary of the assembly of representatives

109 Lacroix 1894–1955, vol. 7, pp. 433–4.

110 Braesch 1911, pp. 54–5.
194 chapter 12

of the Paris Commune and elected to the Legislative Assembly. A supporter

of the constitutional monarchy, he was a member of the Club de la Sainte
Chappelle.111
As we know, the question of the price of grain driven up by speculation and
hoarding was central to the mentality of the popular classes in Paris during the
revolution.112 But in fact sugar had also become a regular part of the diet of
Parisian artisans and workers and the sudden increase in its price provoked
deep anger. Along with other wholesalers Boscary Chol and Company sud-
denly raised the price of sugar to an unprecedented level, claiming shortages in
the wake of the Haitian Revolution.113 The result was that their warehouses as
well as several other wholesale merchants were pillaged by the sans-culottes
over several nights in late January.114 Boscary complained to the Legislative
Assembly ‘… my fortune and those of my friends are in danger. I call upon the
law – the safeguard of property – not only on my account but for the sake of
all the merchants of Paris’.115 Writing in the journal L’ Assemblee nationale on
23 January, Charles-Frederic Perlet, by no means a radical, noted ‘that it is prin-
cipally the merchants of money and the companies of so-called patriotic billets
who have hoarded sugar and other commodities through the enormous profits
they have made on their capital as a result of speculating on paper money’.116
Widely execrated, Boscary was singled out as a hoarder in the Jacobin Club
by Le Clerc de Saint-Aubin, another merchant and friend of Danton.117 As a
result of this humiliation Boscary was forced to resign his seat in the Legis-
lative Assembly. The radical press meanwhile raged against the secret hoards
of sugar and other goods allegedly being kept by merchants in warehouses in
Paris and in the main ports. A reporter for one of these papers, the Revolutions
de Paris, sarcastically noted that it was incorrect that, as rumoured, there was
a vast stash of sugar hidden in the cellars of the Abbaye of Saint-Germain-
des-Près. Rather the banker François-Sylvain Laurent de Mézières, rue Saint-
Benoît, had an immense store of wine, spirits, wax and coffee which he kept
there.118 Indeed the banker Laurent de Mézières’s agent Louis Desisnard ended
up on the guillotine.119

111 Bouchary 1942, pp. 9–11, 13.

112 Kaplan 1982, pp. 1–79; Burstin 2005, pp. 169, 800–11.
113 Jaurès 1968–73, vol. 2, pp. 328, 332–9.
114 Burstin 2005, pp. 332–4.
115 Quoted in Jaurès 1968–73, vol. 2, pp. 342–3.
116 Bouchary1940–2, vol. 2, p. 20.
117 Bouchary 1942, p. 14.
118 Jaurès 1968–73, vol. 2, p. 352.
119 an w 431.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 195

As a result of the rioting the first hesitant voices were raised in the Legislative
Assembly questioning the use of billets de confiance and calling for the rapid
dissemination of assignats in smaller denominations as a way of undercutting
the activities of speculators.120 Then on 26 Jan 1792 a deputation from the
militantly revolutionary Faubourg St. Antoine presented a petition in the name
of more than 10,000 citizens demanding measures to suppress speculation.
It called for the issuing of a decree ordering stricter control of the caisses
patriotiques which were issuing billets de confiance and measures to assure the
use and availability of assignats in their place.121 Addressing Boscary’s charge
that his property had been damaged, the petition warned: ‘let the disturbers
of the public peace tremble! The patience of the people is at an end. We
denounce hoarding of whatever kind. Everything including commodities of the
first necessity is under the control of these greedy assassins of the people. These
brigands speak of property. Isn’t this property itself a crime of lèse-nation?’122
In response to this petition, which had wide backing, the Assembly voted to
put the caisses patriotiques under closer scrutiny. The Assembly was in fact
responding to what was becoming a grassroots movement toward the creation
of a single money which was spreading through parallel resolutions being
passed in more and more of the revolutionary sections of Paris. The increasing
fear that the revolutionary commune of Paris might act independently from
the Convention, posing the threat of dual power, appears to have influenced
the attitude of the politicians in the Assembly.
The growing clamour against the billets de confiance intensified with the
entry in opposition of Clavière and Brissot, who were the leaders of the increas-
ingly ascendant Girondin party.123 They were not in principle hostile to the
bankers, with whom they were closely associated, but rather concerned about
the chaos reflected in the multiplication of local caisses patriotiques. Their
opposition to the billets also reflected their understanding of the shift in the
popular mood which had become utterly exasperated by financial specula-
tion and which the Girondin leaders now repudiated in principle.124 By Feb-
ruary 1792, Cambon, to the left of the Girondins but still committed to laissez-
faire, voiced reservations at the continued existence of the billets de confiances.
Created amid general enthusiasm, he now claimed that the billets de confi-

120 Lacroix 1894–8, vol. 8, pp. 94–5.

121 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, p. 20.
122 Lacroix 1894–8, vol. 8, p. 95.
123 Antonetti 2007, p. 76.
124 Bouchary 1939–43, p. 63.
196 chapter 12

ance issued by the caisses patriotiques were undercutting the assignats, caus-
ing a shortage of numeraire, the decline of the French currency on foreign
exchanges, and the hoarding of goods including necessities. It was even pos-
sible that they were being used by counter-revolutionaries to buy up assignats
in order to send them abroad, with the aim of causing shortages of currency.
In any case, they lent themselves to counterfeiting operations and their circu-
lation should be terminated.125
Following Cambon’s critique a lengthy petition from the Section des Lom-
bards underscored that the multiplication of billets de confiance had facilitated
the operations of speculators buying up and hoarding goods and by this means
gouging the people.126 At the end of March 1792 the question of the billets
de confiance was debated at length in the Legislative Assembly. On 29 March
the Jacobin Jean-Francois Crestin delivered a wide-ranging and stinging indict-
ment of the caisses patriotiques in which the behind-the-scenes intrigues of the
Parisian bankers were especially underscored. Like Cambon, Crestin acknow-
ledged that the billets de confiance at first had had the enthusiastic support
of the people. However, he insisted that by now they had become a maledic-
tion. They have become the pivot of hoarding and speculation and as such
were pumping the substance out of the people. It is well known that specu-
lation is one of the most dangerous enemies of France and of the new Con-
stitution. As a result of the ongoing speculation of the banks and financial
companies, the standing of the new national money has been depreciated in
the eyes of public opinion. In particular speculation has led to an excessive
decline in the value of French currency in foreign exchange markets. ‘By vir-
tue of speculation metallic currency has virtually disappeared, the hoarding
of commodities of the first and second degree of necessity has been facil-
itated and the price of goods made exorbitant. This is why the anxieties of
the people have been intensified, feeding the troubles which are the con-
sequence of these anxieties while nourishing the hopes of the enemies of
liberty’.127
It is well know that the billets de confiance make possible such speculation.
It is not the exchange agents of the Place des Victoires nor the stockbrokers
of the Bourse who are the fundamental source of this blood-sucking. They are
merely its secondary agents. It is the bankers who are the particular adepts in
this kind of activity. Only by getting rid of the primary cause of speculation

125 Cambon 1792, p. 5; Lacroix 1894–8, vol. 8, pp. 100–1.

126 Lacroix 1894–8, vol. 8, pp. 105–7.
127 Crestin 1792, p. 4.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 197

can public credit be restored. The art of speculation consists in provoking a

rise or fall in exchanges by dint of personal interest and at the expense of
the public good. It is the bankers who are particularly skilled in this kind of
activity. When bankers get together and under cover of professed patriotism
and devotion to country put forward plans for public institutions, such offers
should be looked at askance. It is inconceivable that the initial proposals for
the establishment of caisses patriotiques did not conceal a carefully calculated
project of speculative gain in the interest of the bankers and at the expense of
the people.128
At the moment that the caisses were established there was a shortage of
metallic currency because of the flight of the emigres and the vagaries of the
revolution. The Caisse d’Escompte contributed to the difficulties by continuing
the practices of the ancien régime under the guise of utility and with the sanc-
tion of the Minister of Finance (Clavière). The bankers offered to make billets
de confiance available based on the reserves or backing of assignats which at
the time were only available in large denominations. The people desperately
seized on the idea and the Constituent Assembly evidently accepted it uncrit-
ically. Since the establishment of the caisses all the above problems have only
been compounded.129 The caisses have multiplied, even divided into branches,
billets de confidence of all types have been established throughout the country
and the activities of the caisses have gone so far as to include the issuing of
coins. All told some 400 million livres worth of billets de confiance are in circu-
lation with the state having no idea of the resources that back up such notes. In
the space of ten months all means of exchange including assignats and metal-
lic currency have been largely replaced in the form of the circulating notes of
the Caisse d’Escompte, Caisse Patriotique de Paris, Maison de Secours, bankers’
letters of exchange and the billets de confiance issued by the towns of France.
The reserves of the Caisse Patriotique de Paris, it should be pointed out, consist
not of assignats or metallic currency, but in notes on national properties, the
East India Company and other enterprises which lend themselves to further
speculation.130
The caisses patriotiques exchange their notes and bills for assignats or ex-
change assignats of higher denomination for those of lower, both discounted
at a certain rate of interest. The caisses use those of higher denomination to
discount letters of exchange or to make loans on the collateral of the notes

128 Crestin 1792, pp. 5–6; Baker 1979, p. 279.

129 Crestin 1792, p. 6.
130 Crestin 1792, p. 7.
198 chapter 12

of private companies or deposits of bullion. In other words, the caisses patri-

otiques were carrying on the business of fully-fledged banks and were closely
associated with them. The Caisse d’Escompte has been involved in this busi-
ness but it at least has significant reserves. The lack of reserves in the Caisse
Patriotique de Paris and the Maison de Secours should be particularly noted.131
In the meantime the expansion of credit made available through these insti-
tutions has allowed merchants to hoard enormous quantities of necessities,
driving up prices and striking fear in the population.132 The fall in the value
of the assignat on foreign exchange has in similar fashion increased the prices
of imported goods. It is said that this is the result of the lack of confidence in
the assignat on the part of foreigners. But the truth is ‘that it is not the for-
eigner who has lacked confidence in our paper. It is the capitalist, it is the
Parisian banker, they are the ones who have speculated to the point of ima-
gining a lack of confidence, a lack of confidence fostered and disseminated
by themselves and fed by means of the caisses of which I speak’.133 This has
been done so that the banks and the caisses can speculate more assuredly
in numeraire and foreign exchange. The negative political convictions of the
counter-revolutionaries have been used to facilitate and cover up these opera-
tions. Crestin concludes that the way to end such speculation is to cancel the
semi-official status of the billets de confiance and instead to defend the new
paper money.
On 30 March, the day following Crestin’s speech, the Assembly forbade the
circulation of further quantities of billets de confiance by private entities while
ordering a verification of the accounts of the public caisses which should be
undertaken by the municipalities. But a report by André-Daniel Laffon de
Ladebat in early June noted that despite these decrees the situation was getting
worse.134 On 10 August 1792, the day on which the Tuilleries was attacked by
the sans-culottes, Nicolas Haussman, deputy for the Seine-et-Oise, denounced
the Caisse Lafarge, concluding that: ‘it is time to close down all these gambling
ventures, lotteries, caisses and tontines where speculators’ exorbitant profits
are guaranteed and where those who join have a chance of a return only if
there are large numbers of early deaths or there are a sufficient number of
fools among those who participate. If the poor and workers are able to save
something they should invest what they save in their art or craft which is a

131 Crestin 1792, pp. 8–9.

132 Crestin 1792, pp. 10–11.
133 Crestin 1792, p. 12.
134 Archives parlementaires 1879, vol. 44, p. 695.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 199

solid, pure and fruitful source of wealth. It is from a love of work that prosperity
accompanied by good morals issues’.135 Once again the productive labour of the
small producers was invoked in contrast with the unproductive commerce of
those involved in money and finance. It is in investment of capital in the latter
which is the source of wealth and a virtuous life.
The caisses patriotiques were finally ordered shut down in November 1792
by the Jacobin government, which by then had assumed power. It decreed
that losses incurred by local caisses were to be made good by a special tax
on the rich imposed locally.136 In the mind of the radical politicians and the
mass of the public the experience of the caisses had been a bitter lesson of the
consequences of unregulated speculation. Moreover, it seems clear that in the
popular mind, bankers large and small were responsible for this episode. The
public attitude toward bankers had been negative prior to the revolution. The
animus that developed on the part of the public as a result of the experience
of the caisses patriotiques helps to explain popular support for the attack on
the bankers and the suppression of most kinds of speculative activity under
the government of the Terror. Moreover, it serves to explain why the Jacobin
government attempted to create a highly regulated and centralised system of
public finance in which private banking could find little place.
Crestin had put his finger on the role of the bankers in the operation of the
caisses patriotiques and the speculative excesses their activities made possible.
But he also identified the bankers as the principal opponents to the consolid-
ation of the assignat as the national currency. Yet using interest-bearing bonds
guaranteed by land instead of gold and silver as the backing for a national paper
currency had its own problems, especially with respect to maintaining liquid-
ity and carrying on foreign trade. On the other hand, the establishment of the
assignat as a national money represented an audacious scheme on the part
of the leaders of the revolution in response to popular demands. The estab-
lishment of the assignat was associated with restoring not only the market but
also the productive economy. It was likewise aimed at overcoming the fiscal and
economic parochialism that had characterised the French economy under the
Old Regime, which whatever tendencies it had toward political centralisation
had never come close to creating a national currency.137 Furthermore, the assig-
nat backed up by the reserves of the confiscated national properties represen-
ted a serious threat to the previously unregulated speculative exchange and

135 Archives parlementaires 1879, vol. 47, p. 629.

136 Herrmann-Mascard 1990, p. 22.
137 Blanc 1994, pp. 81–111.
200 chapter 12

loan operations of many bankers and, particularly, to the latter’s long-standing

ability to profit from the financial instability of the French state. The institution
of the assignat which was opposed by the bankers is a perfect illustration of the
principle that private interests may profit from capitalism but cannot create its
framework. Only the power of the state can do so. Indeed, it is impossible to
understand the nature of capitalism without understanding the indispensable
tie between the modern state and the creation of a level economic playing field
for the accumulation of capital. Such a playing field requires that the state be
able to regulate private finance. It was especially for this reason that the private
bankers resisted the assignat as a national currency.
The idea for the assignats had initially developed in reaction to the problem
of looming state bankruptcy as we have noted. As the financial crisis which
brought on the revolution reached its climax, there were more and more out-
cries against the direct involvement of bankers in the financing of govern-
ment through private loans controlled by them. As early as 1789 the National
Assembly began to consider measures to remove all private enterprise from
direct involvement in the system of public credit. It was asserted that the
government should be able to borrow on the basis of its own credit. Fingers
were pointed at the private and court bankers who advanced the government
money while profiting from administering the accumulated debt. The Caisse
d’Escompte which was run by a committee of such bankers was viewed as
being at the centre of such machinations. As we have seen Necker had proposed
that a reconstituted Caisse d’Escompte be used to issue a new set of securities
backed by the state. But the National Assembly more and more lost confidence
in the Caisse. Based on the national properties taken from the Church, assig-
nats began to be issued by the government as early as 1790 in place of notes
from the Caisse. Mirabeau strongly endorsed this move, noting the resistance
of the bankers whom he claimed were accustomed to receiving ten percent
interest on their loans. The issuing of the assignats would open up a new source
of credit. The resulting competition would lead to lower interest rates. The
objections of the banks are a signal of hope to the manufactures whose enter-
prises, according to Mirabeau, would be restored as a result of access to cheaper
credit.138 Based on such conceptions aimed at restoring the economy based on
cheapening the cost of borrowing, the National Assembly worked out a scheme
for paying off the national debt held by financiers, bankers and other credit-
ors based on public rather than private credit.139 There seemed less and less

138 Levasseur 1903, 1969, Vol. 1, p. 148.

139 Bosher 1970, pp. 262–5.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 201

place left for an institution like the Caisse d’Escompte, especially following its
role in the speculative excesses involving the billets de confiance. The Jacobins
were to order its dissolution in 1793. In its place the Jacobins would eventually
come up with the idea of a public mortgage bank which would reduce interest
rates forcing capitalists to make available credit to agriculture and commerce
at competitive interests rates.140
Meanwhile raising revenue through taxation was foreclosed by the contin-
ued reluctance of the population, especially the well-off, to pay taxes – a fact
of astonishing import when one considers it. Despite the absence of a fiscal
foundation the revolutionary government abandoned step-by-step the policy
of trying to finance its growing expenditures by borrowing from the bankers,
whose past involvement in financing debt made them suspect. Between 1789
and 1793 the new regime instead issued currency backed in the first place by
the confiscated national properties and then more and more resorted to using
the assignat as fiat money in the face of an absence of sufficient numeraire
and the growing need to finance war expenditure. The contrast between the
policies of Clavière and Cambon in this regard illuminates the evolution toward
fiat currency. As a result of the debacle of the billets de confiance, Clavière and
the Girondin leadership wholly committed themselves to the establishment of
a unified national currency. In the course of his tenure as minister of finance
(1791–2) Clavière increasingly resorted to defending the assignat by speculating
in its favour while fostering its consolidation as a unique and credible paper
money. At the same time as minister of finance he called for the cessation of
the circulation of any other form of money in a circular to the departments
(20 October 1792):

The circulation of all billets de confiance issued by caisses patriotiques

must cease. The emission of assignats in small denominations, the large-
scale fabrication of copper sous … has rendered the billets de confiance
useless. And the abuses and disorder to which they have given rise must
end as soon as possible. Act with the greatest dispatch so that nothing
appears in circulation any longer which is not national.141

But faced with the increasing and concerted attempts by foreign governments
to undermine the assignat, he came to agree with Brissot that a war policy
against the Habsburgs, which would among other things impose the assignat on

140 Archives parlementaires 1879, vol. 90, p. 220.

141 Leroux 1922, p. 231.
202 chapter 12

conquered territories, was a necessary means of bolstering the currency. Only

those who think that economic assets alone determine the value of a cur-
rency in international markets will find this policy incredible. Resort to war and
imperialism in the past and the present can provide governments with both
real and intangible assets including confidence in the value of their money.142
The immediate aim in this case was the imposition of the assignat on the territ-
ory of France’s enemies and, as Daniel Guérin has suggested, the disruption of
the English entrepôt in Belgium. But more deeply it may be seen as the begin-
nings of a reorientation of the French economy away from the colonial trade
in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and toward expansion on the Contin-
ent. In any case, the ultimate result, namely, the French conquest of Belgium
(1794) was suddenly and dramatically to unleash the potential of capitalism
there. In the wake of the French occupation the abolition of internal barriers
to trade, the opening of the French market and transformation of ecclesiast-
ical property into national properties overnight opened this highly developed
country to capitalism.143 As occupier, France benefited enormously from this
transformation.
On the other hand, Claviere clung to the idea that the assignat had to be
backed by the possibility of land redemption through purchase of national
properties and on that basis called for the sale of government bonds to fin-
ance the rising costs of war and other government expenditure.144 Meanwhile
behind the scenes the regime was being strengthened by the rising power of
new elements of a bourgeoisie that was buying up the confiscated national
properties confiscated from the Church and émigrés while tying themselves to
the future of the revolutionary government.145 Cambon, who assumed power in
1793, took matters a step further. Faced with insufficient revenue, internal polit-
ical crisis and mounting war expenditure, Cambon concluded that the solu-
tion was to print money: ‘we must resort to our assignats and to our assignats
without stopping’.146 Clavière’s policy reflected an astute grasp of the relation-
ship that should be struck between politics, war and a sound currency.147 On the
contrary, Cambon recognised that in time of war and revolution the salvation
of the state and the consolidation of the new order was the highest priority. The
credit of the state and the guarantee of the new national paper currency would

142 Patniak 2009, p. xvii.

143 Bodinier Bernard and Eric Teyssier 2000, pp. 280–97; Godechot 1958, p. 7.
144 Antonetti 2007, pp. 75–6, 81.
145 Guérin 1968, vol. 1, pp. 341–3.
146 Antonetti 2007, p. 88.
147 Whatmore 2012, p. 246.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 203

be founded on victory against the counter-revolution at home and abroad.148

In a report to the National Convention, Cambon retrospectively justified his
policy with considerable eloquence:

Since the creation of this money that covers the whole of France it has
rendered great service to the revolution, allowing the value of the national
properties to enter into circulation, providing the means of nourishing,
equipping and maintaining an army of 1,100,000 men, creating fleets,
scouring the land to extract saltpeter, manufacture arms and providing
work for all our citizens … From the introduction of the assignats until
the beginning of 1793 national wealth has increased … when minds will be
reassured or feel themselves at peace national industry will take another
leap upwards.149

What stands out in this statement is the emphasis Cambon puts on using the
new money to mobilise the productive forces of the nation, including its labour,
in order to overcome crisis and defend the revolution.
At the same time as galvanising the economy and the finances of the state
on behalf of the revolution, Cambon consolidated the national debt, which he
explained would help to block speculators from playing on the depreciation of
the assignat and rising price of commodities while trying to profit by imposing
exorbitant interest charges.150 Cambon’s Grand Livre de la dette publique, like
the indiscriminate printing of the assignat, appears to have been an impro-
visation in the face of crisis. Among its immediate objectives it was designed to
achieve a partial repudiation of state debt while meanwhile raising some rev-
enue by a transaction tax on trading in the new issue and by imposing a forced
loan.151 But unlike the assignat, which fell by the wayside, the establishment of
the Grand Livre proved decisive in the systematisation of the public debt, which
became the float against which all future private debt could be measured – an
essential step in the direction of the emergence of a capitalist credit market.152
Meanwhile, in the shorter term the printing of money and the rampant infla-
tion which followed amounted to a tax on those forced to buy their subsistence
and a further opportunity for profit for those who sold means of subsistence.

148 Antonetti 2007, p. 154.

149 Cambon 1795, p. 2.
150 Cambon 1793, pp. 8–9.
151 Hermann-Mascard, L’emprunt forcé, pp. 48–51.
152 Redlich 1948, p. 141.
204 chapter 12

When confronted by mounting resistance from the popular classes, whose sup-
port was indispensable to the revolution in the short run, Cambon tried to
sustain the assignat and manage the course of inflation and its political and
economic consequences by resorting to the fixing of prices.153
It was only by coercion that the revolutionary government was able to
enforce these policies. As is well known, the most severe and widespread
punishments fell upon those who violated the maximum or hoarded grain.154
But harsh measures were also taken against those sabotaging the value of the
assignat by trading in money. On 25 February 1793 Cambon introduced a plan
calling for a blanket prohibition on the sale of gold and silver. The assignat
should become the only money in circulation and the army paid only in the
new paper money. At first the Girondists succeeded in blocking the plan. But
in April the Assembly passed measures to pay its bills only in assignats. Then
with the ouster of the Girondins the way was open to impose the assignat
by draconian measures. On 1 August it became a crime to refuse to accept
assignats or to accept them at a discount and in September it was decreed that
such a crime could be punished by death. In November it was declared that
all specie which was being kept hidden should be confiscated to the benefit
of the Republic. As a result there was a rush to exchange specie for assignats.
The value of the assignat strengthened and even foreign observers remarked on
the efficacy of these extreme measures. Similar steps were taken with respect
to foreign exchange. By the end of November it was reported that the buying
of foreign currency had abruptly ceased as those who tried to do so were held
suspect. It was decreed that all sums held by French citizens abroad were to be
repatriated and requisitioned and to be reimbursed at par.155
Based on these successes, some radical Jacobins advanced the idea of sup-
pressing the circulation of gold and silver altogether. In October Chaumette
proposed the substitution of labour for gold as the measure of value: ‘in the sys-
tem based on the people one carries out tasks with labour and nothing is done
with gold’.156 According to the Journal de la Montagne, in order to make factor-
ies and manufactures operate, ‘working hands rather than gold are required’.157
At the end of November the Cordelier Society demanded that no new coinage
be struck until peace was concluded and this was seconded by a deputation of
the Paris Commune which presented its petition to the Convention. In order

153 Antonetti 2007, p. 134; Crouzet 1993, pp. 144, 46, 154–5, 160–8.
154 Guérin 1968, vol. 1, pp. 175–89.
155 Guérin, 1968, vol. 1, pp. 164–9.
156 Quoted in Guérin 1968, vol. 1, p. 169.
157 Ibid.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 205

to curb inflation Cambon himself proposed to limit the circulation of gold and
silver. On 1 December Cambon presented a proposal which recommended that
gold and silver no longer be exchanged for assignats but only be accepted to
pay taxes and forced loans, to pay for the purchase of national properties and to
meet the obligations of the state. To many sitting in the Convention such a pro-
hibition seemed to go too far. Forbidding the use of gold and silver in exchange
seemed tantamount to the confiscation of property, and Cambon’s proposal
was shelved.158
For a state controlled by the middle class to try to force acceptance of
its currency in the absence of the agreement of bankers seems quixotic in
the long term. This is especially true if we are speaking about the eventual
establishment of a functioning capitalism, as indeed we are. On the other
hand, the imposition of a national currency by the French state made a certain
amount of sense in the midst of a state of emergency faced by a revolutionary
regime struggling for its existence. The political and social base of the Jacobins
were small producers and an emerging class of manufacturing and landed
capitalists, most of whom had no love for bankers. Moreover controlling the
price of subsistence while allowing inflation to wipe out the debts of producers
served to reinforce this support. In the long run the attempt to create a national
currency represented an important step toward creating a national market and
eventually an effective system of money and credit. Running the printing press
enabled the regime in the short run to free itself from dependence on the
bankers, to partially repudiate the debt and successfully to finance the wars
and mobilise the economy. At the same time fixing prices allowed the Jacobins
to keep the support of the urban artisans and workers as well as rural wage
earners.
But the price was the discrediting of this first attempt to create a paper cur-
rency. As we have seen, inflation was undoubtedly a problem as early as 1791 and
intensified when war broke out. But the accelerating inflation that developed
from then on was undoubtedly caused by this excessive printing of money.
The effects of this increase in the money supply were compounded by short-
ages of supply and increasing demand stemming from crop failures, labour
shortages, the hoarding of commodities, mounting war expenditure, increased
overall consumer demand and supply bottlenecks. By the time of the Jacobin
takeover (July 1793) the assignat had lost 80 percent of its value on interna-
tional exchanges and Parisian banks had ceased operation.159 While inflation

158 Ibid, p. 170.

159 Antonetti 1963, pp. 210, 220, 234, 235.
206 chapter 12

alienated workers, rentiers and other creditors, borrowers like wealthy peas-
ants and tradesmen benefitted by paying off loans in depreciating currency.160
The state’s response in the form of growing control over exchange, including
foreign trade and prices and insistence on fostering the assignat as a paper
currency, were incompatible with the speculative profits of the bankers, who
turned decisively against the revolutionary government.

Bankers and Counter-Revolution

The discrediting of the monarchy as a result of the flight to Varennes was an

important milestone. Contrary to the growing radicalisation of public opin-
ion, the bankers responded with growing impatience with popular unrest and
increasing estrangement from the revolution.161 This alienation is reflected in
the private correspondence of the banker Jean-Louis Grenus, who although
long resident in Paris was eventually forced to flee to his native Geneva as
an alternative to prison under the Terror. In a letter to a foreign correspond-
ent dated 19 July 1792, at the moment when the Prussian army was massing
around Coblentz, Grenus remarked: ‘our exchanges reflect no great movement
although our situation is getting worse and people expect the entry of foreign
troops from one day to the next: but many see that as a boon and think that
business will improve’.162 In the wake of an outburst of popular turbulence in
the wake of the Declaration of Brunswick (25 July 1792), Grenus opined that ‘it
is to be feared that it is only foreign armies that can put us in accord’.163 Shortly
after the fall of the monarchy (10 August 1792) he advised a correspondent not to
refer to politics because at present discretion is necessary.164 In the throes of the
September massacres he identified himself to the head of the section Grange-
Batelerie as a foreigner who had lived in France since the beginning of the
revolution. He dispatched 2000 livres to be distributed to citizens serving the
republic with the wish that all of France’s enemies be defeated.165 On rumours
of further popular unrest in the Vendée he commented to a correspondent
(19 March 1793): ‘it is impossible to continue business with this regime. I am
doing nothing but liquidating my positions and I am counting on being clear

160 Hoffman 2000, pp. 186–7.

161 Mathiez 1929, p. 398; Zylberberg 1993, pp. 422–3.
162 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, p. 170.
163 Ibid.
164 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, p. 170.
165 Bouchary, 1940–2, vol. 2, p. 173.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 207

by May’.166 An important letter on 15 April informs us ‘that at the point where

the exchanges are at today I fear to offer credit, for government expenditures
are growing as a result of the depreciation of the assignats and as the emission
of them is increasing each month the deterioration of this currency can lead
us to the point that the system will collapse of itself … The assignats made the
revolution, I fear that they can make the counter-revolution’.167
While Grenus expressed growing misgivings, the attack on the Tuilleries
(10 August 1792) saw several bankers openly break with the revolution. Indeed,
it was this event which saw the collapse of the faction of constitutional mon-
archists or Feuillants made up of liberal nobles and rich bourgeois, including
many bankers. The banker Etienne François Gallet de Santerre appears to have
been part of this group accused of being close to Lafayette as well as having
contact with foreign enemies. Eventually consigned to the prison in the Con-
vent of the Carmelites des Carmes, he was accused of becoming involved in a
prison conspiracy during the last stages of the Terror and was guillotined.168
More politically prominent were Gabriel and Louis Tassin, commanding
the Battalion des Saintes-Filles de St. Thomas formed out of citizens of the
Section Bibliotheque (Le Peletier). As officers of the Battalion their primary
responsibility was the defence of the residence of the royal family. Having
openly sided with the counter-revolution during the attack on the Tuilleries,
the Tassin brothers were subsequently arraigned and sent to the guillotine by
the Revolutionary Tribunal on 3 May 1794.169 The Tassin were Parisian bankers
connected to a wealthy and established Orleannais family whose fortune was
based on refining sugar from the islands of the Caribbean.170 Gabriel Tassin
was promoted to the council of administration of the Caisse d’ Escompte in
1786.171 Following the revolution the brothers were alternate delegates to the
Third Estate of the National Assembly and officers of the Batallion des Filles
de St. Thomas, while continuing their role as partners in one of the wealthiest
Parisian banks.172 Gabriel was a member of the Society of 1789 and then the
Club of the Sainte-Chapelle, which was absorbed into the Feuillants. As attacks
increased on the monarchy Gabriel proved to be a passionate defender of
royalty and vehemently anti-Jacobin.173

166 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, p. 186.

167 Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 2, p. 188.
168 an w 429.
169 an w 357.
170 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, pp. 313–4.
171 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 699.
172 Antonetti 1963, p. 23.
173 Cointet 1965, p. 457.
208 chapter 12

The Tassins lived in the Section Bibliothèque, which we have seen was inhab-
ited by a substantial number of employees of the financial institutions located
in the quartier including the Bourse, Caisse d’Escompte, Hôtels des Domaines
et Trésor, Régie générale, Hôtel des Loteries and Compagnie des Indes. These
bodies were dominated by an elite of money managers made up of bankers,
money changers, farmers-general and receivers-general of finance.174 By 1792
the restaurants, cafes, gambling houses and book stores of the adjacent Palais-
Royal had become the focal point of counter-revolutionary talk and plotting.175
The headquarters of the increasingly suspect pro-slavery Club Massiac lay in
the nearby Place des Victoires. Marat noted that the Section was politically
dominated by speculators, bankers and lawyers who were open enemies of
the revolution. It was from this section that counter-revolutionary proposals
emanated which supported the plans of the government, the Paris mayor Jean
Sylvain Bailly and the commander of the National Guard Lafayette and other
counter-revolutionary army officers.176
Prior to the attack on the Tuilleries, Brissot, who lived in the Section, com-
plained ‘that the section was divided between the part that was patriot and the
other which was the infected part made up of financiers, exchange agents and
speculators who since the beginning of the revolution have done more damage
to the establishment of liberty than all the armies of Prussian and Austria’.177
Having organised the defence of the Tuilleries against the attack of the sans-
culottes as commander of the Battalion des Saintes Filles, Louis Tassin and
Gabriel were imprisoned along with other members of the Battalion. At his trial
Louis was accused of mounting patrols along with other bankers, stock brokers
and bank employees in order to harass and intimidate citizens prior to the
attack on the Tuilleries.178 He tried to buy support for his counter-revolutionary
activities by offering hospitality to likely supporters and recruited as many
counter-revolutionaries as he could into the Battalion. He was violently hos-
tile in opposition to the Jacobins.179
Jean-Philippe Weinmaring, a bank clerk and captain of the Batallion de
Saintes Filles, who also participated in the defence of the Tuilleries, went to
the guillotine along with the Tassin brothers.180 Weinmaring, who for a time

174 Cointet 1965, p. 453.

175 Schmidt 1867, vol. 1, p. 41; Gendron 1993, p. 41.
176 Marat, L’ami du peuple, no. 369, 2 December, 1791, Lacroix Sigismond 1894–8, Vol. 3, p. 704.
177 Coudart 1990, p. 201.
178 Lacroix 1894–8, vol. 2, pp. 140–1.
179 an w357.
180 Ternaux 1866–81, vol. 2, pp. 472–3.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 209

served as secretary to the Parisian Committee of Subsistence, which was made

up largely of bankers, was accused of recruiting criminals into the Battalion
in concert with the Tassin. Etienne Delessert’s son Jacques-Etienne, likewise
a member of the Battalion, had to flee to New York following the attack on
the Tuilleries, where he attempted to set up a bank, dying shortly thereafter.181
Another member of the Batallion and victim of the guillotine was Antoine
Gregoire Geneste. He was chief clerk of the bankers Boyd and Ker, who doubled
as spies for the English government in Paris. The two Englishman were able
to avoid arrest by fleeing across the Channel. But the agents they left behind
to act for them suffered in their place. Boyd and Kerr pretended to liquidate
their business while arranging to have Geneste serve as their front man. He
was guillotined during the Terror for his part in the defence of the Tuilleries
as part of the Batallion as well as illegally transferring funds outside of France
in concert with Kerr.182 Another agent of the Boyd and Kerr Bank was Thomas
Simon Bérard. No mere clerk, he was a major overseas merchant partnered with
the merchant-banker Pourtalès and became the director of the Company of
the Indies prior to its liquidation. Bérard was a founding member of the Club
Massiac and likely helped draw up the pro-slavery petition that emanated from
the Section Bibliothèque.183 As we have seen, he acquired massive amounts of
national properties in the île-de-France.184 As an officer of the Battalion he was
condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal.185
Among those who escaped the guillotine for his part in the events of
10 August was Boscary de Villepain, second in command of the Batallion and
brother of Jean-Marie Boscary, the disgraced wholesale merchant. While his
father was a banker and brother a merchant, Boscary de Villepain became a
major figure on the stock exchange. Following the revolution he joined the
Society of 1789. During the events of 10 August he is reported to have advised
the King to escape Paris under an armed escort. Increasingly under threat,
the two brothers and the father fled Paris and took refuge on their estate in
the nearby Brie. The revolutionary committee of Melun accused them of pre-
paring to emigrate, of being supporters of Lafayette and of being part of a
club of bankers who were engaged in nothing but speculation. An inform-
ant told the committee that their cook said of them ‘they make semblance of
being patriots which perhaps they once were but they are not friends of the

181 de Coninck 2000, pp. 30–1.

182 an w182, an w348; Claeys 2011, vol. 2, p. 1205, n. 7501.
183 Claeys 2001, vol. i, p. 198.
184 Moriceau 1990, pp. 445, 409–528.
185 an w357.
210 chapter 12

revolution although they have gained the major part of their fortune from
it. They are quite adroit and calculating’.186 The father and Jean-Marie were
brought back to Paris and imprisoned while Boscary de Villepain crossed the
border into Switzerland.187 All three were rehabilitated under the Directory.
While the Tassin and other officers of the Batallion openly sided with the
monarchy on the barricades, in secret the bankers Jean Barthélemy and Laurent
Lecouteulx, heads of one of the most important banks in Paris, engaged in
more serious conspiracies behind the scenes. While centring their commercial
activities in their home town of Rouen, they became deeply involved in the fin-
ances of the court and through this connection developed close ties to banking
interests in Spain and its colonial empire.188 As a result, on 29 November 1793
the Committee of General Security accused the two directors of Lecouteulx &
Company of corresponding with and passing money to the enemies of France.
They were sent to the Concergerie in February and were not to be liberated
until after 9 Thermidor.189 Shortly thereafter Laurent succumbed to the effects
of his imprisonment.190 Their lawyer Pierre-Nicolas Berryer claimed that they
had been spared the guillotine by the fact that they had offered the notorious
head of the Revolutionary Tribunal Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville a job at
the beginning of the revolution.191
The Lecouteulx connection with Spain was well known to revolutionary
radicals. The brothers were named in a pamphlet, the Complot d’une ban-
querote generale de la France, de l’Espagne, et par contre-coup de la Hollande
et d’Angleterre ou les horreurs de l’ancien et nouveau regime, published in 1791
by the provocateur and later police agent Louis Heron. The tract detailed
a pre-revolutionary conspiracy organised by Calonne to control the whole
of Europe’s finances through the Bank of Saint Charles. The scheme in fact
was part of the wave of speculation that marked the early 1780s, which were
designed to inflate the shares of the Bank of Saint Charles as well as the Caisse
d’Escompte.192 Heron had served as an intermediary in this scheme, being sent
to Havana in order to arrange the transfer of bullion from Spain to France in
return for a widely subscribed French loan organised by a syndicate of bankers
including the Lecouteulx. Prior to becoming an agent in the service of Robes-

186 Bouchary 1942, p. 27.

187 Bouchary 1942, pp. 27–8, 37.
188 Claeys 2011, vol. 2, pp. 1333–9.
189 Zylberberg 2001, p. 316; Flamein 2010, p. 11.
190 Claeys 2011, vol. 2, p. 1337.
191 Berryer 1839, vol. 1, pp. 138–9.
192 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 702.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 211

pierre, Heron came under the protection of Marat, who published his pamph-
let.193 The tract argued that the machinations of the bankers such as that
organised around the Bank of Saint Charles had not ceased with the revolution
but were intensifying.194 In the hearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal the
Lecouteulx were denounced for using the funds of the Bank of Saint Charles to
buy shares in the Caisse d’Escompte. Abraham Ducange, a Jacobin sympathiser
who had lived in Madrid, testified that the Lecoutuealx had been able to buy
these shares for 2.7 million livres and sold them at more than twice their value.
Ducange demanded that the nation confiscate at least 4–5 million livres from
the Lecouteulx as such transactions ‘[were] all that one can expect to get from
men of this class for whom hearing the very word republic is a martyrdom’.195
Indeed, suspicion of the financial dealings of the Lecouteulx is further reflec-
ted in the report by those who evaluated their income in response to the forced
loan imposed by the Jacobins (1793). The commissioners charge that the broth-
ers had under-reported their real incomes in their tax declaration by at least
a factor of five.196 On the other hand, Fouquier and the Committee of Gen-
eral Security remained unaware that the Lecouteulx, who sympathised with
the Feuillants, were involved in a major plot to save the King by attempting to
bribe the members of the Convention with money from the Spanish court.197 At
the same time they put themselves forward as earnest republicans, publishing
a pamphlet arguing that immediate execution of the King would be politically
inexpedient for the republic.198
The wives of the Lecouteulx published a defence of their husbands, who
were languishing in prison. In their pamphlet they flatly denied that their
spouses were bankers at all. In order to appeal to the prejudices of the Jac-
obins they played up their commercial or industrial interests. According to this
apologetic, Lecouteulx & Co. was really a firm of merchants and industrial-
ists. The Parisian branch of the company carried on several activities useful
to the industry of the nation. The branch at Rouen was involved in importing
raw materials for manufacturing and for finding markets for the manufactured
products of the burgeoning industries of Normandy. The branches at Cadix and
Le Havre were engaged in competition with English rivals to extend the market
for French manufactures. Furthermore they had established a manufacture of

193 Heron 1791, p. 2; Zylberberg 1993, p. 318.

194 Heron 1791, pp. 29–30.
195 an f 7 4774.
196 Hermann-Mascard 1990, p. 216, n. 219.
197 Zylberberg 2001, p. 317; Zylberberg 1993, p. 424.
198 Lecouteulx 1792.
212 chapter 12

fish oil in a suburb of Rouen, a tobacco factory at Morlaix and a foundry for
laminating copper at Romilly-sur-Andelle.199
Meanwhile in December 1793 another banker, Louis Pourrat, who was a
business partner of the Lecouteulx and was related to them by marriage, was
abruptly arrested and, after languishing in prison, guillotined. Pourrat had
played an important part in speculating in government debt prior to the revolu-
tion and had become notorious for getting into a fist-fight with Clavière on
the floor of the Paris stock exchange.200 His connections to the Lecouteulx, his
daughter Fanny marrying Laurent Lecouteulx, seems to have played a critical
role in his condemnation.201 Fanny had been the muse of the Feuillant poet
Andre Chenier, who also was guillotined. Known to be in sympathy with the
Feuillants and Girondins, Pourrat was denounced and arrested while sitting on
the benches of the Jacobin Club. After languishing in prison for seven months,
he was executed in July, shortly before 9 Thermidor.202 According to the mem-
oirs of Berryer, Pourrat ‘perished precisely because of the extreme caution that
he took to preserve his life. Although he was a banker he arranged to be admit-
ted to the Society of the Jacobins in order to avoid being put on the Index.
Nonetheless he was arrested in the midst of a Jacobin meeting, thrown into
prison and sent to his death. It was as if the Jacobins wished to avenge them-
selves for the fact that he had attempted to cover himself by donning the mantle
of patriotism’.203
The Dutch bankers Antoine Auguste, Jean Baptiste and Jean-Baptiste Van-
denyver were also denounced by Heron as being involved in the Spanish loan
advanced by the Bank of Saint Charles in the previous decade.204 Like many
other bankers the Vandenyver initially sympathised with the revolution. They
were closely related to Anarchasis Cloots, the scion of an ennobled German
banking family who moved to Paris and became a Jacobin. Cloots became
celebrated as the foremost champion of a cosmopolitanism whose object-
ive was to universalise the ideals of the revolution. He was later guillotined
as a Hébertist sympathiser. The Vandenyver Bank was one of the most well-
established and important banks in Paris.205 But in 1789 the Vandenyver quietly

199 an f 7 4774; Zylberberg 2001, p. 163; Bergeon 1978, p. 302.

200 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 696.
201 an f 7 4774, an w 437.
202 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 727.
203 Berryer 1839, vol. 1, 139.
204 Heron 1791, pp. 3, 18.
205 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 322; Claeys 2011, vol. 2, pp. 1259–64. On the growth of Dutch
investment in French debt, see Riley 1973, pp. 732–60.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 213

renewed their ties to the court and once the revolution radicalised they began
to supply Madame Du Barry and other nobles with money. Their trial and con-
demnation before the Revolutionary Tribunal was designed to be an object
lesson to those bankers guilty of aiding aristocrats. They were executed by the
guillotine on 17 frimaire an. ii.206 An example was also made of the banker
Jacques Henry Wiedenfeld, originally from Aix-la-Chapelle, who in defiance of
the prohibition against the export of bullion was discovered to be sending gold
outside the country secreted in pots of pomade. Brought before the Revolution-
ary Tribunal, he was condemned and executed 26 pluviose an ii.207
With the fall of the monarchy many bankers who sympathised with the
Feuillants now pinned their hopes on the Girondins as the more moderate
element among the republicans. It was reassuring to them that Clavière, one
of the Girondin leaders, had served as Minister of Finance in the last few
months of the constitutional monarchy. In order to build confidence in the
new republican state he was once again given charge of the finances. But he
was arrested along with other Girondins a year later. The announcement of
his upcoming hearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal on 8 December led
him to suicide, followed by the suicide of his wife. A month later Jean Andre, a
banker and merchant from Nîmes, was guillotined for Girondin sympathies.
Faced with an increasing challenge from the sans-culottes to his business
interests and elite political position in Nîmes, Andre compromised himself by
showing sympathy for the federalist revolt. When the Jacobins seized power in
Nîmes in January 1794, Andre was arrested and transferred to Paris for trial and
execution.208
Two other bankers, Théodore Jauge and his associate and brother-in-law
Jean Paul Marie Cottin, were accused of involvement in the attempted assassin-
ation of the scourge of the Girondins, Collot de Herbois. Cottin had pioneered
in the development of French cotton manufacturing. Through his marriage to
Marie Risteau, Jean Cottin became connected by marriage to the Bordeaux
overseas merchant community.209 His tie to Jauge represented a further rein-
forcement of his links to textile manufacture and Bordeaux overseas commer-
cial interests. Before coming to Paris Jauge had been a banker in Bordeaux who
alongside his father had a major interest in the French colonial trade while
holding estates in the Bordelais. As we have seen, Jauge became an aide-de-
camp to Lafayette in the wake of the taking of the Bastille. His bank provided

206 an t 508, an 1671, an w 300.

207 an w324.
208 Lehideaux-Vernimmen 1992, pp. 128–37.
209 Claeys 2011, vol. 1, p. 553.
214 chapter 12

large credits to the revolutionary government.210 Initially associated with the

Feuillants, the flight to Varennes led Jauge to shift his support to the Girondins
more out of prudence than conviction.211 In 1792 Jauge, along with his wife, vis-
ited England in order to buy grain for the revolutionary government. The fact
that his wife remained in England instead of returning to France aroused sus-
picion. At the end of January 1793 he was arrested, interrogated and released
as part of a large-scale round-up of bankers. They were accused of monarch-
ist sympathies, associating with counter-revolutionaries, speculating against
the assignat and in some cases of being implicated in the Massacre of the
Champs de Mars.212 In September Jauge was re-arrested. Cottin meanwhile
was found dead in his bed by those who came to arrest him.213 Jauge went to
the guillotine on 17 June 1794 as part of a mass execution of suspected con-
spirators.214
Fundamental to the Girondin viewpoint as analysed in recent scholarship
was a belief in private property as not merely a social but also a natural right.
Indeed, as the right to property came to be questioned more and more, the
Girondins put the emphasis on property as a natural right antecedent to society.
Property was the fruit of labour but also without it society itself was threatened
with destruction.215 The views of Clavière may again be taken as representat-
ive. Like many other Girondins, Clavière was a fervent advocate of the separ-
ation of the market from government, believing that government interference
hampered economic growth, corrupted morals and fettered individual liberty.
In taking this view Clavière had the practice of the Old Regime before his eyes.
The economic sphere flourished if it was regarded as a private matter, while
government intrusion was inherently corrupting.216 The national bank which
he advocated would be authorised by the government but was designed to
provide the sound currency and public credit necessary to the functioning of
the private market. Investment would be left the responsibility of bankers, mer-
chants and manufacturers.

210 Bouchary 1939–43, vol. 3, pp. 113, 116, 117.

211 Bianciarli 1995, pp. 142, 179, 199.
212 Bouchary 1939–43, vol. 3, pp. 121–2; Claeys 2011, vol. 1, p. 553.
213 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 310; Bianciarli 1995, p. 213.
214 an w389.
215 Dorigny 1983, pp. 16–20.
216 Whatmore and Livesey 2000, pp. 1–26.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 215

War Capitalism

The Jacobin policies which led them toward more and more control over the
market were driven partly by their egalitarian ideology and partly by necessity
in a context of war, economic crisis and counter-revolution. A willingness to use
the state in order to mobilise the economic and military defence of the revolu-
tion differentiated them from those committed to a policy of laissez-faire. The
Girondins falsely accused the Jacobins of threatening private property. On the
contrary, their notion of equality led them to believe that everyone should own
property. They distrusted large landed property but were not hostile to substan-
tial industrial enterprise. But the Jacobins were divided. The Jacobin regime
included not simply ideologues suspicious of laissez-faire like Robespierre and
Saint Just, but also politicians like the Montpellerians Joseph Cambon and
Francois-Victor Aigoin and the associate of Bidermann Jean Johannot, who des-
pite their banking and manufacturing interests and belief in the freedom of the
market were prepared to regulate the economy to defend the new revolutionary
state. They were backed by an influential stratum of financial administrators in
the state bureaucracy carried over from the Old Regime, who on the contrary
believed in principle in state regulation of the economy.217 Moreover many Jac-
obin clubs during the radical phase of the revolution contained a small but
important minority of the grand bourgeoisie, including manufacturers who
saw the necessity of a strong national government.
The most interesting example of a backer of the Jacobins from among the
bankers was Claude ‘Milord’ Perier. Born into a prosperous merchant dynasty
in the Dauphiné, Perier moved from trade and the manufacture of canvas
into banking. Expanding his activities into importing sugar via Marseilles, he
also began manufacturing Indian cottons on his estate at Vizelle. The link
between overseas trade and manufacturing in Dauphiné alluded to earlier
seems clear, as does the development of local investment capital through
Perier’s bank. On the eve of the revolution Perier was the richest man in
Grenoble. Remarkably, he held aloof from the local nobility despite having
acquired a title and estates. He then became the principal backer of the revolt
of the representative assemblies that emerged in Dauphiné and elsewhere in
France from 1788 and then an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution. On the
other hand, his ongoing banking activities led to attacks on him by radicals.218
In August 1790 the Jacobin Journal patriotique attacked ‘this banker rolling in

217 Brugière 1986, pp. 73–107.

218 Barral 1964, pp. 23–32.
216 chapter 12

money who nonetheless is extracting a premium on the exchange of assignats

on which the salvation of the Kingdom depends’.219 He was also denounced for
speculating by buying and hoarding commodities.220
Unlike most others involved in banking Perier took the side of the Con-
vention in the face of the Girondin revolt. But even this was not enough
to secure him from further attacks. He found himself being denounced as
a Crassus by the radical Jacobins advocating the institution of the Terror in
Grenoble. He was warned that he would have to demonstrate loyalty by gen-
erous acts towards the revolution, which he duly came up with in the form
of substantial amounts of cash.221 The war and the Law of the Maximum led
to major losses on his commercial ventures. In 1793 he prudently dissolved
his bank and saw the bankruptcy of his Indian cotton manufacturing busi-
ness. But in a calculated move he then opened an arms factory, ‘the Société
des Sans-culottes Republicains’, employing 140 workers in a national prop-
erty which had been the Convent of the Minimes in Grenoble. This venture,
too, failed. Perier undoubtedly suffered financial reverses but he also later
clearly exaggerated the losses he experienced during the period up to 9 Ther-
midor.222 In any event, his subsequent activities make it clear that his reserves
must have been enormous. At the head of a consortium which included the
Lecouteulx and the bankers Guillaume Sabatier and Pierre Desprez, in 1794
he took control of Anzin, the largest and most technologically advanced coal
mine in France, which was acquired as a national property. Most of the cap-
ital involved in this transaction derived from the now liquidated Company
of the Indies, another instance of the re-investment of colonial profit dir-
ectly into the French economy.223 Moving to Paris and resuming his bank-
ing activities under Napoleon, Perier came to write the rules of the Bank of
France.224
Another success of this tumultuous period was that of the Burgundian
banker Jean Baptiste Bureau. Head of a regional transport company, Bureau
invested in a multiplicity of iron and steel works in the Burgundian region.
During the decades leading to the revolution he established ties to the Mal-
let and Lecouteulx banks while taking up residence in Paris. In 1793, like Perier,
he prudently abandoned banking. On the other hand, during the same crisis he

219 Barral 1964, p. 33.

220 Barral 1964, p. 36.
221 Barral 1964, pp. 32–3.
222 Barral 1964, p. 37.
223 Prunaux 2006; Claeys 2011, vol. 2, pp. 2168–9.
224 Szramkiewicz 1974, p. 301.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 217

used his accumulated capital to lay the financial and commercial foundations
for the Messageries Nationales, the first national transportation company. At
the same time he formed a syndicate which took control of one of the choicest
of national properties, Le Creusot, a technologically advanced iron and steel
works and coal mine.225 While exceptionally successful, the careers of Claude
Perier and Jean Baptiste Bureau under the Jacobins demonstrate that Jacobin
rule, despite its economic interventionism and populism, was not incompat-
ible with the development of capitalism in the long term.
The construction of the Jacobin state was not simply based on counter-
ing the threat of counter-revolution from within and without. It was in fact
a regime of war capitalism, which suspended the normal rules of the market
in order to create the framework and foundations of a capitalist state. The
creation by the Jacobins of a nation in arms, the weapons, munitions and
uniforms of which were supplied by private and public manufacturers, went
with the establishment of a strongly protectionist regime aimed at reinfor-
cing the national economy. Prohibition of English manufactures, the encour-
agement of French industries and control over the export of grain and raw
materials sealed the close alliance between manufacturing – the core of the
emergent national economy – and the popular classes.226 Indeed, the Jacobins
were explicitly committed to protecting the nascent capitalist industries which
had already emerged prior to the revolution, especially cotton manufacturing.
Low-cost food was essential to keeping wages in check, ensuring the survival
of the industrial sector. It goes without saying that price controls on food also
favoured self-employed artisans and artisan manufacturers.227 While place was
found for capitalists who were interested in production rather than specula-
tion, Robespierre and his faction believed in a republic dominated by small-
scale property.228 He and his adherents stood for political democracy and a
market based on small-scale property owners. As such they were hostile to
big merchant and banking capitalists, whom they regarded as parasitic and
monopolistic. But there is a difference between intended and unintended con-
sequences. As a matter of fact a capitalist economy based on the production of
petty producers, as in the early history of the United States, is likely to produce
a particularly strong agricultural and industrial base for the full development
of capitalism. Capitalist development along this path has been explored by

225 Woronoff 1993, pp. 63–76.

226 Démier 1990, p. 286.
227 On the relationship between food costs and industrialisation in this period, see Patniak
2011, pp. 17–27.
228 Gross 1997.
218 chapter 12

Lenin, Terrence Byres and Anatoli Ado.229 It was this path that the Jacobins
also favoured. The politics of the Jacobin state therefore cannot be seen as
entirely anti-capitalist in the short run and certainly not in the long term. In
fact in the face of the ongoing largely negative impact of rent and interest on
the expansion of the French economy from the Directory onwards, Jacobin
economic policies opened up a crucial space for rural and urban small-scale
producers and for emergent manufacturing industry, without which French
capitalism might have been even more retarded than it was – especially as
compared to England. What was at issue in the aftermath of the revolution
was not the emergence of capitalism but whether that capitalism would be
more or less dynamic. In other words, the short-term interests of bankers or
big merchants should not be seen as necessarily coincident with the long-run
development of a capitalism with a significant productive and industrial poten-
tial.

Speculation and Terror

While they governed, the Jacobins tied the hands of capitalist bankers and
wholesale merchants who controlled not the production but the circulation
of commodities. In response to the subsistence crises, war and counter-revo-
lutionary revolts that troubled France during the Terror, the Jacobin leaders
firmly insisted that the right to property should not include things vital to
subsistence. Subsistence being vital, it could not be considered private prop-
erty. What is sacred to life is as precious as life itself. As such food could not
be thought of as private property but must be regarded as common property.
The right to subsistence precedes all other rights and all other rights are sub-
ordinate to it. Property itself exists for the purpose of subsistence to which it
must be subordinated.230 In the form of the Maximum on prices the Jacobins
placed fundamental constraints on the trade in grain – overwhelmingly the
most important food product and most important market commodity. During
the national political and economic emergency of the Terror speculative activ-
ity, i.e., the playing of the market by capitalist farmers, millers, grain merchants,
big merchants and last but not least bankers was considered criminal.231 Such
restrictions on the operation of merchant and finance capitalism was enforced

229 Lenin 1964, vol. 3, pp. 32–3; Lenin 1972, vol. 13, pp. 238, 423; Byres 1996; Ado 1996; Heller
2006, pp. 101–3; Heller 2011, pp. 141–2.
230 Gauthier 1992, p. 73.
231 Aulard 1889–97, vol. 1, p. 285.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 219

in order to protect the interests and secure the political support of workers,
craftsmen and other small producers and in order to sustain the nascent indus-
trial sector. In lieu of the market, the state fixed prices, including the price of
labour, and suspended the operation of credit markets.
Being attacked for speculation and hoarding by a populace made up largely
of craftsmen and workers was a serious impediment to the activities of the
bankers. But their difficulties were compounded by growing government inter-
ference in foreign exchange transactions. In defiance of threats of punishment,
bankers attempted to evade government prohibitions by continuing to specu-
late against the assignat and illegally exporting bullion.232 Bankers were sus-
pected of assisting the royal family and court aristocrats in transferring money
abroad or by being in collusion with the English, Prussian and Austrian govern-
ments in counterfeiting and undermining the value of the assignat. With the
fall of the monarchy, popular hostility to those who traded in money became
more intense. In February 1793 a petition against the sale of money was presen-
ted to the National Convention, claiming it was responsible for the depreciation
of the assignat and growing inflation. At the beginning of March a similar peti-
tion from all the revolutionary sections of Paris was presented. By a decree of
11 April 1793 the assignat was made the only legal currency and exchange in the
market; using any other numeraire was made illegal. Cambon in a speech to the
National Convention attacked the very idea of money as a commodity which
could be speculated upon.233
But the surreptitious trade in money did not end.234 In the Convention on
27 June, the Jacobin Georg Friedrich Dentzel denounced the speculators still
operating in the rue Vivienne. On 29 August the Section Unité complained of
speculators exchanging money in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. Agents of the
Jacobin regime meanwhile kept constant surveillance on bankers, speculators,
money changers, suspect aristocrats and jeunesse dorée, especially in the Sec-
tion Bibliothèque where such types still congregated.235 On 21 February 1793
the Conseil général of Paris adopted a motion of the Cordelier Club calling for
restrictions on the circulation of numeraire until the signing of a peace. In par-
ticular the Cordeliers called for all merchants and others dealing in money to
hand their gold and silver over to the mint in order to block any exchange of
bullion for assignats. Beyond attacking the trade in money, the sans-culottes

232 Antonetti 1963, pp. 134, 138, 159; Crouzet 1993, pp. 181, 185, 201; Tuetey 1890–1914, vol. 2,
pp. 141, 148.
233 Soboul 1958, p. 475; Crouzet 1993, pp. 243–4.
234 Bouchary 1937, p. 73.
235 Coudart 1990, p. 204.
220 chapter 12

denounced the institutions which supported commercial and financial cap-

ital. At the beginning of May 1793, the Sections Faubourg-du-Nord and Contrat
Social demanded the Bourse be closed. With the Girondins purged and under
pressure from the sans-culottes, the Assembly decreed its closing on 27 June.236
The sans-culottes displayed a like hostility to other financial enterprises. At the
end of July a citizen of the Section Sans-Culottes expressed astonishment to see
‘on the one hand a Caisse d’Epargne, on the other the Tontin of the Elderly, in
one direction the Tontin of Life Insurance and at that gate the Patriotic Lottery
of the rue du Bac’. These businesses, he concluded, are simply means to hoard
money. ‘These rich men, masters and entrepreneurs of caisses are those which
one must fear the most’. They harm ‘commerce and contribute to the difficulties
of the Republic. The Convention should seize the caisses of these rogues’.237 On
24 August the assembly ordered all financial companies shut down. The follow-
ing April all companies of whatever sort were ordered closed.238

Foreign Conspiracy

The hostility of the Jacobins toward bankers was not merely an economic mat-
ter. It developed as part of a deepening suspicion of foreigners and fear of
counter-revolutionary conspiracy inspired by France’s enemies. At the begin-
ning of the revolution in 1789 the dominant mood in Paris and elsewhere had
been one of generous cosmopolitanism. The common opinion was that the
revolution was not merely a French affair but an event of universal significance.
Many citizens in other countries enthusiastically agreed. A host of foreigners
were attracted to the new revolutionary France and took up residence in Paris.
They were welcomed especially by moderate revolutionaries inside and outside
government who were proud of their country.239
By the fall of 1793 the mood had shifted radically. The Girondins who had
championed liberalism and cosmopolitanism were discredited while the Jac-
obins now in power became increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic. The
growing suspicion of foreigners fed on the threat of invasion and faction fights
within the ranks of the government. Measures against the bankers, many of
whom necessarily had close ties outside of France, must be seen as part of a

236 Soboul 1958, p. 476; Crouzet 1993, p. 246.

237 Soboul 1958, p. 477.
238 Ibid.
239 Mathiez 1918, pp. 15–17.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 221

growing distrust toward foreigners, which extended to include merchants, for-

eign residents, volunteer soldiers and clergy and other revolutionary exiles who
aroused suspicion.240 But foreign bankers who had great economic and finan-
cial influence in France were particularly suspect.
The French populace had long held to conspiracy theories. The notion that
the increasingly frequent and serious food shortages were the result of a plot –
the famous famine plot persuasion – was the main idée fixe.241 It was a com-
mon theme during the eighteenth century in both the countryside and the
towns and became greatly accentuated during the revolution. The Great Fear
that initiated the rural revolution was essentially conceived of as an aristo-
cratic plot against the peasantry. The king’s summoning of troops to Versailles,
the court’s suborning of politicians, as well as Louis’s and his wife’s flight to
Varennes and suspected collusion with Austria in a war against France magni-
fied the idea of counter-revolutionary conspiracies against the revolution.242 By
the time the Jacobins assumed power the notion of conspiracy focused on the
idea of the foreign plot or the notion that those who opposed the government
were in the service of foreign enemies. It was an idea which was commonplace
among members of the government. As the Terror developed suspicions came
to centre on the opponents of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety,
i.e., the radical faction known as the Hébertists as well as the right-wing Jac-
obins clustered around Danton.
Suspicions of a foreign plot revolved around the directors and principal
shareholders of the East India Company, many of whom were bankers. Accus-
ations against the company combined suspicions of hoarding and speculation
with counter-revolutionary conspiracy organised by France’s enemies. Prior to
the revolution the company had known great prosperity, paying extraordinary
dividends to its shareholders. Its profitability was due to the fact that it enjoyed
a monopoly of trade with Asia. But in conformity to the principles of laissez-
faire, in early 1791 the National Assembly declared the company’s monopoly
over the Asian trade at an end. Despite this reversal, in May of the same year
the stockholders, attracted by the ongoing profitability of the trade, decided
to resume commercial operations and appointed commissioners to draw up
new statutes for the company of which three of four – Delessert, Sabatier
and Aimé-Gabriel Fulchiron – were Parisian bankers. In addition its leading
shareholders included 20 other leading bankers including Perier, Grenus, Per-

240 Rapport 2000, pp. 191–2, 206–7, 189–258.

241 Kaplan 1982.
242 Hardman 2007, pp. 63–84.
222 chapter 12

regaux, Louis Greffulhe and Jean-Marc Montz, Jean Barthélemy and Laurent
Lecouteulx, Balthasar-Elias Abbema and Boyd and Ker. Despite difficulties the
company continued to return substantial profits, especially as the goods in the
warehouses of the company appreciated as a result of inflation. The price of
shares in the company actually rose as investors exchanged assignats for them
in the wake of the depreciation of the latter.243
But on 26 July 1793, in the midst of growing popular paranoia about hoard-
ing, Joseph Delaunay d’Angers, a Jacobin close to Hébert, accused the company
of secretly stashing vast amounts of goods in its warehouses at Lorient for the
purposes of speculation and in order to undermine the assignat.244 As a follow-
up, on the 6 August the revolutionary playwright Fabre d’ Eglantine, an ally of
Danton and himself suspected of corruption, denounced the speculation of
the bankers in the following terms: ‘Pitt has many agents in Paris, especially
in banking. The majority of the bankers and the richest of them are foreign-
ers – English, Dutch, German and Genevan. All of these bankers have no ties
to France whatsoever … Pitt has opened an unlimited line of credit for these
… bankers’.245 The point of such credits, according to Fabre, was to speculate
against the assignat in order to destroy it. In the meantime, he concluded, the
shares of the Company of the Indies have sky-rocketed as a result of hoard-
ing and speculation inspired by Pitt.246 On 24 August, as we have noted, the
activities of the company as well as all other joint stock companies, including
the Caisse d’Escompte and the recently created Parisian Insurance, Water and
Lighting Companies, were suspended.247
But the bankers who were especially signalled out by the Terror were not
advocates of the Feuillant or Girondin cause. It was foreign bankers who pro-
fessed to identify with the Jacobin Republic who were compromised. In the first
place suspicion focused on two Moravian bankers of Jewish origin, Junius and
Emmanuel Frey, who were attracted to France by the freedom promised by the
revolution.248 The family, the Dobruskas from Moravia, had made a fortune as
wholesale merchants and military suppliers to the Hapsburg court and were
strongly attracted to the syncretic ideas of the Sabbatarian and Frankist Jews.
Influential among the Frankists, the family converted to Catholicism and were
raised to the nobility by the Habsburgs, while the elder brother Junius became

243 Lefebvre 1954, p. 171.

244 Mathiez 1920, 1971, p. 35.
245 Mathiez 1920, 1971, p. 36.
246 Mathiez 1920, 1971, p. 37.
247 Mathiez, 1920, 1971, pp. 52–3; Bouchary 1940–2, vol. 3, pp. 42–3.
248 Scholem 1981; Wölfle-Fischer 1997.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 223

a member of the Masonic Order. As a youth Junius had been educated in the
Talmud and wrote Hebrew poetry while developing an enthusiasm for the Ger-
man classics. The French Revolution drew Junius, his brother Emmanuel and
sister Leopoldine to Strasbourg in 1792, from where Junius wrote to an Austrian
friend: ‘my beloved best brother Voss I have lived here in Strasbourg for three
weeks, or to express myself better, I live in heaven, for to live in freedom no
one can deny is to live a heavenly life, and the land of freedom is a heaven on
earth’.249
From Strasbourg, Junius Frey moved along with his brother and sister to
Paris, rented a mansion and began to associate with the Jacobins, lavishly enter-
taining some of their leaders. Based on his lengthy treatise Philosophie sociale
dédiée au peuple, François Junius’s commitment to the Jacobin democratic
republic seems entirely genuine.250 At the same time he seems to have retained
an interest in Masonic ideas and Jewish philosophy.251 Like many better-off
Parisians, he undertook to support a widow whose sans-culotte husband had
been killed in the attack on the Tuilleries, and also adopted a little boy whose
father had likewise been killed.252 On the other hand, like other Jacobins he
appears to have carried over into the new epoch the corrupt practices of the
former regime.
Fatefully, the Frey brothers entered into a close relationship with the politi-
cian and scoundrel François Chabot. A Capuchin monk prior to the revolution,
Chabot studied theology at Rodez and Toulouse while developing anti-clerical
opinions based on Enlightenment ideas.253 In May 1790 he founded the Société
des amis de la Constitution at Rodez. Elected to the Legislative Assembly from
Loir-et-Cher, he adhered to the Jacobins in September 1791. Opposing the war
policy of the Girondins, he helped rally the populace in the attack on the
Tuilleries. After voting for the execution of the King he was sent as a represent-
ative on mission in the Tarn and Aveyron in March 1793. Over the next months
he entered into increasingly close social and business contact with the Frey
brothers and in September married their sister in return for a dowry of 200,000
livres.
As we have seen, growing hostility toward speculative profits had led to a
decree of the National Convention calling for the liquidation of the Company

249 Wölfle-Fischer 1997, p. 88.

250 Frey 1793.
251 an t 1524.
252 an f7 4713.
253 Bonald 1908.
224 chapter 12

of the Indies (8 October 1793).254 The Frey brothers were viewed as Chabot’s
principal financial backers, using his political influence to advance their fin-
ancial interests. Chabot got himself named to the committee overseeing the
liquidation of the assets of the company, while demanding an enormous payoff
from the directors in order to protect the principal shareholders. At the same
time Chabot and more than likely also the Frey brothers were profiting from
shorting the shares of the company.
In the context of growing paranoia over foreign conspiracies, Chabot’s role
in the liquidation of the Company of the Indies inevitably drew attention to
the Frey brothers, who after all were Austrian. By then Robespierre suspec-
ted Chabot of attempting to extort money from the company by offering to
use his Jacobin connections to arrange for the liquidation of the company in a
way which favoured the interests of its principal shareholders. Throughout the
spring of 1793 Robespierre and other militant Jacobins urged more stringent
measures against foreigners.255 In July the moderate Cambon joined the attack.
In a report to the Convention, Cambon asserted that foreigners were respons-
ible for the growing economic crisis. According to him Pitt had deployed five
million pounds sterling for secret purposes and as a result had been able to
sow disorder throughout the country. Pitt had hold of millions in assignats,
by means of which he was waging a fearsome monetary campaign which was
ravaging France by spreading monetary chaos.256 In the following weeks there
were widespread reports of English agents undermining the French currency,
promoting price rises, hoarding, speculation and even arson. It seems that the
English, Austrian and émigré agents were in fact conducting counterfeiting
operations in various places across the frontiers.257
By the end of summer the Convention was considering the suspension of
the activities of all bankers and especially foreigners, who because of their ties
abroad were more and more linked to subversion.258 But contrariwise Chabot
urged caution in cracking down on bankers and as a result he was increasingly
viewed as acting on their behalf. In early October a motion by Robespierre
ordering the arrest of all English residents and seizure of their property passed
the Convention.259 Two weeks later Robespierre called for the extension of
these measures to all foreigners while bitterly attacking Chabot and what he

254 Claeys 2011, vol. 2, p. 979, n. 141.

255 Rapport 2000, pp. 121, 126, 131, 134.
256 Rapport 2000, pp. 136, 139.
257 Crouzet 1993, pp. 140, 220; Bouchary 1946, pp. 61–77.
258 Crouzet 1993, pp. 149–50.
259 Crouzet 1993, p. 157.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 225

called the Austrian faction. According to Robespierre, since the beginning

of the revolution there had been two factions hostile to the revolution, the
Anglo-Prussian and the Austrian, each opposed to the other. The Convention
has struck a powerful blow against the first, but the Austrian faction was still
alive and had to be smashed.260 The English faction was led by Brissot and
other Girondins. The other group was the Austrian faction, including the Frey
brothers, who were being protected by Chabot:

I distrust all these strangers whose face is covered by the mask of patri-
otism and who attempt to appear more republican and energetic than
us. It is these ardent patriots who are the most treacherous artisans of
our troubles. They are agents of foreign powers because I know that our
enemies have resolved that agents ought to affect an ardent patriotism in
order to insinuate themselves into our committees and assemblies. They
are the ones who spread discord, who undermine our most estimable cit-
izens. It is these agents that it is necessary to strike at. They come from
every country. There are Spaniards, English, Austrians and they all need
to be struck down.261

Denounced in the Convention on 15 November, Chabot vainly attempted to

convince his audience that the bribery scheme had been launched by the aris-
tocratic financier and royalist intriguer the Baron de Batz in order to discredit
the republican regime and that he had entered the conspiracy not for his own
gain but in order to expose it.262 Chabot and his allies adhered to the Hébertists,
but they began to be denounced by them in the pages of the Père Duchesne
in November, 1793 especially following Chabot’s incautious condemnation of
the Law of the Maximum.263 Arrested shortly afterwards the Frey brothers and
Chabot were guillotined on 25 April 1794, executed ironically at the same time
as the Dantonists, their erstwhile enemies.264
The Frey brothers and Chabot were part of the Hébertist faction. Although
they espoused the radical economic programme of the enragés, many of the
Hébertists were not craftsmen or workers but for the most part educated mem-
bers of the lower middle class, who sought entry into the echelons of the

260 Crouzet 1993, p. 158.

261 Quoted in Crouzet 1993, p. 158.
262 Mathiez 1920, 1971, pp. 79–93.
263 Crouzet 1993, p. 156; Guérin 1968, vol. 2, p. 194.
264 Rapport 2000, p. 235.
226 chapter 12

expanding revolutionary state. They based their claims on their ardent patri-
otism and populism, designed to appeal to the sans-culottes.265 But like the
brothers Frey some of the principal backers of the Hébertists were politically
well-connected foreign bankers like Pierre-Jean Berthold de Proli, Don Andrés
de Guzmán, Edward de Walckiers and Jean Conrad de Kock, who supported a
policy of war. These men who were exiled from their own countries favoured a
policy of no compromise with the enemy and a war of liberation vis-à-vis their
own states. Accordingly they called for an all-out mobilisation. In order to gain
political credibility among the sans-culottes they supported government con-
trol over the economy. This entailed control over prices, exchange rates and
foreign trade, forced use of the assignat and government requisition of private
property where necessary. At the same time, some like Walckiers benefitted
from the policy of war by becoming suppliers to the French army.266 But their
affiliation with the extremism of Hébert, their direct involvement in internal
French politics and their foreign origins rendered them suspect in the eyes of
Robespierre.267
Proli was perhaps the most influential member of this faction. A most
unlikely revolutionary due to his foreign birth and aristocratic background,
as well as his profligate lifestyle, Proli was born in Brussels the son of Count
Balthazar Proli, head of an important bank in Antwerp and receiver-general of
the domains and finances of the Austrian Empress. It was widely believed that
Proli was the bastard son of the Prince of Kaunitz, the Austrian first minister.
Educated in Paris and Nantes, he sailed to India and created a company trading
in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Settling in Paris in the 1780s, he became
involved in many of the spectacular financial ventures of that decade and
notably those of the East India Company.268 By the time of the revolution he
was a ruined man and had turned to buying and selling paintings along with his
friend the banker Joseph Laborde de Mereville. In the wake of the revolution, he
took up residence in the Palais-Royal and frequented its salons and gambling
houses, later installing himself in the rue Vivienne and then the rue Saintes-
Filles de St. Thomas. While carrying on a dissolute life, he enlisted in the ranks
of the Hébertists and helped lead the attack on the National Convention at the
end of May and beginning of June 1793, which saw the ouster of the Girondins.
The Dantonists were unable to prevent him from organising the radical clubs
of the Parisian sections under the command of a central committee – a form

265 Guérin 1968, vol. 1, pp. 279–84.

266 Godechot 1958, p. 7.
267 Mathiez 1920c, pp. 139–40.
268 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, pp. 654–5.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 227

of dual power which threatened the authority of the Convention. In the wake
of the fall of Chabot, Proli was denounced in the press and Convention as an
Austrian. Robespierre took the lead in pointing the finger linking him with
other foreign bankers:

How does it transpire that Proli, a foreigner and son of the mistress
of the Prince Kaunitz and for this reason suspect of being the bastard
and pensioner of that Austrian prince, can pass himself off in Paris as a
thirty-six carat patriot, and that, despite appearances, he has not been
unmasked as the intriguer that he is? How does it come about that Proli,
who is a nobody and who ought to concern himself with nothing, should
involve himself in all aspects of political business? How can it be that Proli
and his associate the wine merchant (François) Desfieux and their cabal
know all the secrets of the government two weeks before they are known
to the National Convention; that they know who will be promoted and
at any given point know everything about public matters and conduct
themselves so as to take advantage of their knowledge? How does it
come to pass that Desfieux and Proli, great patriots that they are, are the
constant companions of the most dangerous of the foreign bankers …?269

Closely associated with Proli was the Spaniard Don Andrés de Guzmán y Ruiz
de Castro t’Serclaes de Tilly, count de Guzmán, like Proli scion of an illustrious
family. He studied at the military school of Sorèze and then did military service
in Spain and France. He moved to Paris in 1778 and was naturalised three years
later. In Paris he spent lavishly and gambled recklessly, accumulating enormous
debts. In the course of pursuing these excesses he became fast friends with the
bon-vivant Proli. Perregaux lent him large sums of money throughout the 1780s
and continued to supply him with loans after the onset of the revolution. As
a result Guzman acted as Perregaux’s financial and political go-between with
the Jacobins. Guzman’s mansion on the rue Neuve-des-Mathurins was opened
to the Jacobin leadership and it was there apparently that the radical Hébert
met his wife, a friend of the celebrated Parisian beauty Mlle Louise Descoings.
Guzman became an important investor in several gambling establishments in
the Palais-Royal while continuing his relationship with Perregaux as well as
the bankers Laborde and de Joseph Pestre de Séneffe. It is said that Perregaux
provided Guzman with cash to help foment the Parisian revolutionary sections
during the anti-Girondin movement of the spring of 1793. As part of the Jacobin

269 Robespierre 1828, pp. 75–8.

228 chapter 12

conspiracy on 31 May he sounded the tocsin which led to the final ouster of the
Girondins.270 Guzman was arrested, condemned and executed (15 prairial an.
ii) as part of the purge of the Hébertists instituted by Robespierre.271
Another Hébertist who went to the scaffold was the Dutch banker Jean
Conrad de Kock. He likewise was born into a noble family but fled Holland
in 1787 in the wake of invasion by the Prussian army. He and his wife ended
up in Paris. His wife having died, De Kock quickly re-married into a banking
family from Switzerland and became associated with the Sartorius-Chockard
Bank. Ongoing hostility to the Prussians and their Austrian allies led him to
travel to the camp of the French army of the North in Belgium. He journeyed
there on behalf of the Batavian Committee of Paris which had sent a legion of
volunteers to back up the French forces. After the defection of de Kock’s friend,
the general-in-command Charles François Dumouriez (5 April 1793) – an event
which greatly increased Jacobin fears of conspiracy – de Kock returned to
France, stopping at Lille and then returning to Paris. His primary goal was
to rejoin the Section Bonne Nouvelle where he had first encountered Hébert
and where they had become close friends. De Kock was rounded up along
with other Hébertists and was condemned and executed (24 March 1794). His
fellow Hébertist, the banker Edouard de Walckiers, named by Robespierre as
an associate of Proli and as such denounced as one of the most dangerous of
the foreign bankers, was also condemned but escaped.
Walckiers had been head of the most important bank in Holland, but faced
with the triumph of a feudal and clerical reaction in 1790 fled to Paris and
put himself at the head of the Belgian exiles, who espoused a democratic and
liberal programme for their country. At the same time he became a contractor
for the growing French Army of the North. While a French army marched into
the Netherlands in March 1794, Walckiers was denounced as an Austrian agent
and fled to Hamburg.272

The Controlled Economy

The revolutionary governments had step-by-step limited the ability of bankers

to make money by manipulating government finance, engaging in specula-
tion against the national currency, hoarding commodities and making profits

270 Senar 1978, p. 86.

271 Mathiez 1926, pp. 221, 226, 227.
272 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, pp. 663–4.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 229

off foreign exchange. But the most serious blow against them was the Jacobin
seizure of control of foreign commerce. Despite the outbreak of war, foreign
trade by the summer of 1793 was at a peak, as growing government interfer-
ence in the market seemed to excite commercial activity in fear of the future.
The decree of 26 July directed against hoarding, the imminence of the Law of
the Maximum, the imposition of a forced loan and the growing interventions
of the revolutionary armies led merchants to throw their goods onto the mar-
ket in order to rid themselves of stocks. But faced with runaway prices and
scarcity, the sans-culottes forced the government in August 1793 to prohibit
export of goods and raw materials deemed indispensable.273 Already from the
beginning of the war in April 1792 until the formation of the Commission des
subsistances in October 1793, exports and imports had been gradually choked
off.274 Through the Commission foreign commerce was essentially national-
ised for the duration. This move, which radically centralised the export trade,
drastically curtailed the operations of the private banks, whose principal func-
tion was the provision of credit to finance external commerce. In November the
Committee of Public Safety attempted to restart foreign commerce but under
its strict control. It demanded that the assets of bankers resident in France be
used to finance necessary imports. On 6 nivoise ii the Committee of Finances,
Public Safety and General Security decreed the requisition of the industries
and the assets of the bankers and capitalists of the Republic.275 Five citizens
including Cambon and another member of the Committee of Public Safety,
Robert Lindet, were to see to the execution of this decree in concert with the
Commission des subsistances.276 Two days later the Commission decided to
call the principal bankers of Paris before it. Cambon explained to them the
intent of the government to institute an equal balance in trade and to repatriate
all funds that had been expatriated out of fear or unscrupulous calculation of
self-interest. A decree followed ordering all bankers, merchants, capitalists or
others holding funds or merchandise abroad to declare these within four days.
In order to block all manipulation of exchange rates no transfers of funds to or
from France were allowed without permission. A committee of ten bankers and
stock brokers was named to superintend the operation and among the bankers
selected the foremost proved to be Perregaux.277

273 Lefebvre 1954, p. 172.

274 Poussou 1993, p. 103.
275 Bouchary 1939–43, Vol. 3, pp. 28–33, Caron 1913, pp. 182–3, 191–3.
276 Brugière 1986, pp. 84–6.
277 Mathiez 1920, pp. 242–52; Mathiez 1920a, pp. 237–43; Ducoudray 1989, pp. 836–7; Alain-
Jacques Tornare and Claeys 1996, vol. 1, pp. 207–12.
230 chapter 12

Perregaux, who figures so largely in the revolution, was born in the canton
of Neuchâtel to a father who was a lieutenant-colonel in French service. He
apprenticed as a banker in Mulhouse, Amsterdam and London, establishing
himself in Paris in 1765, where he worked for Necker. With the help of his com-
patriot, the banker Isaac Panchaud, he founded his own bank in 1781. He quickly
accumulated a fortune and became a familiar figure in Parisian high society, as
well as a patron of the arts. When the revolution arrived he joined the national
guard, became a member of the Valois Club and appeared to favour the con-
solidation of a constitutional monarchy. He speculated particularly in grain,
while surreptitiously facilitating the movement of the gold and silver of aristo-
crats and émigrés outside the country, especially to London. As the revolution
radicalised it seems incontestable that he served as an English spy while being
closely associated with the banking house Boyd and Ker. But it also seems clear
that Perregaux backed members of the extreme radical faction the Hébertists
through agents like Proli and Guzman. Perregaux successfully assumed the role
of the éminence grise of both the revolution and counter-revolution, surviving
through all the vicissitudes of the revolution while prospering and carrying on
into the Napoleonic period. Arrested at the beginning of September 1793, he
was quickly released by the intercession of Barère, a conservative member of
the Committee of Public Safety. Arrested again 14 December 1793 by order of the
Committee of General Security, who accused him of aiding the fugitive Duke
du Chatelet, he was released on the intervention of Cambon. In the winter of
1794 he directed the commission of ten bankers and exchange agents charged
to survey and requisition the foreign debts that the banks held in neutral coun-
tries, by means of which the government sought to pay for foreign food and raw
materials.278
In response to the demands of the Commission des subsistances on the 14
nivoise, Perregaux proposed that bankers and stock brokers offer the govern-
ment a credit of 50 million livres on their foreign holdings. Moreover a long
list of bankers, stock brokers and merchants was drawn up as more or less will-
ing subscribers to the plan.279 Four days later the Commission des subsistances
met to consider the offer. One of its members vehemently denounced the idea,
claiming that the Republic was abasing itself ‘by putting itself in the hands of
these men without a country who despise and hate liberty’. He insisted that
‘one could have little confidence in the operations of these egotists whose least
fault among others is to doubt the strength and power of the Republic’. But the

278 Bouchary, 1939–43, vol. 3, p. 33.

279 Bouchary, 1939–43, vol. 3, pp. 77–8.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 231

offer was not at once rejected.280 Lindet, a moderate among the members of the
Committee of Public Safety, claimed that it was the spurning of the offer a few
weeks later which set off the major wave of arrests of merchants and bankers
in Paris.281 Nonetheless France needed to import war supplies and grain, espe-
cially to meet the essential needs of the population of the Midi, Paris and the
revolutionary army in the field, and it did so by tightening its control. On 28
Brumaire the Committee of Public Safety ordered that all authorisation to buy
grain abroad, all export of numeraire, all voyages by French merchant ships
were to be authorised by it. On 10 Frimaire it was decreed that all exports were
to be under its control. By two decisions of 29 Pluvoise the disposition over all
imported grain was placed in its hands.282 In centralising foreign trade the role
of private banks in financing overseas trade was more or less completely under-
mined. The scope for circulating capital whether commercial or financial had
been reduced to virtually nil.
The ongoing war of course played an important role in interrupting com-
merce. During the conflict Basle remained the sole point of exchange between
France and the rest of Europe, at which French provisioners would exchange
assignats for foreign currency.283 At Bordeaux the situation was complicated
by the Girondin revolt. On the night of 29–30 November, more than two hun-
dred merchants were arrested ‘in order to purify commerce and exterminate
speculators and hoarders’. In February 1793 an embargo was placed on enemy
vessels while the coalition meanwhile instituted a blockade against French
goods and shipping as well as French funds. The French government in turn
sought especially to bar entry of English goods.284 As time wore on the gov-
ernment’s control of external trade was more and more relaxed. Nonetheless
it was only after Thermidor that government restrictions on foreign commerce
were definitively lifted. Chaffing over the remaining restraints, the disabused
Jacobin regicide Charles Cochon de Lapparent, a member of the Commission
des subsistences, could write in December 1794: ‘the commission carries on the
whole trade of the Republic. Seven or eight individuals undertake or wish to
undertake what forty or fifty thousand merchants in other times could scarcely
accomplish’.285

280 Bouchary, 1939–43, vol. 3, p. 33.

281 Pascal 1999, p. 221.
282 Lefebvre 1954, pp. 175–7.
283 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 739.
284 Lefebvre 1954, pp. 173–4.
285 Quoted in Crouzet 1993, p. 288.
232 chapter 12

Bankers and Productive Investment

At its height the revolutionary government had progressively suppressed the

court loans, the foreign exchange operations and finally even the commer-
cial activities of the bankers. At first glance the fate of the bankers during
the revolution substantiates Taylor’s perspective. Much of their activity seems
external to the productive economy and was speculative and even parasitical,
as the Jacobins and sans-culottes insisted. We can concede this with the import-
ant reservation that Taylor did not appreciate that the banks played a large role
in the financing of external commerce, which was the most dynamic sector of
the pre-revolutionary economy. Still, even this important export and import
sector can likewise be seen as external to the internal economy. Taylor’s point
that banking operated mainly in the sphere of finance and circulation, divorced
from production, appears tenable, and his conception of the French economy
as non-capitalist at least discussable.
Yet we are brought up short by the case of Jacques Marc Montz, denounced
by Robespierre as one of the most dangerous bankers in France. With Louis
Greffuhle Montz he was head of one of the most important banks in Paris,
operating through a vast network of international contacts.286 As the Jacobins
consolidated their power, Greffuhle moved to London, taking with him the
bulk of the bank’s assets. Meanwhile Montz tried to carry on but found himself
under arrest in October 1793. According to testimony given against him in
front of the Revolutionary Tribunal by one of the inhabitants of his section,
Montz had contacts with many different kinds of people in his district, but
since he never came to his section’s assembly general, his political opinions
were not really known. But the character and opinions of the class of men
to which he belongs, concluded this testimony, leaves little doubt of his lack
of revolutionary patriotism. Testifying in his own defence before the same
tribunal, Montz claimed that he had done nothing wrong. Moreover setting
him free was essential to more than 100 ‘brave sans-culottes’ whom he was
employing in his glass works in Sèvres. Without his presence the manufacture
was in danger of shutting down.287 This manufacture it turns out had long been
under the control of Genevan and Parisian banks and had fallen under the
control of the Greffulhe and Montz Bank.288 In other words, Montz claimed
that his revolutionary zeal was proven by the fact that he employed over a

286 Antonetti 1963, p. 8.

287 an f7 4774.
288 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, pp. 294–8.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 233

hundred productive workers in Sevres and that their future employment was
jeopardised by his detention.
But Montz’s awakening interest in productive investment was not confined
to his own factory. In 1791–2, Montz, along with his partner Greffulhe, loaned
300,000 livres to the so-called Chancellor of the Duke of Orleans, the liberal
noble Levassor de la Touche, to establish a sugar refinery and cotton factory at
Montargis.289 This loan to Levassor de la Touche for the purpose of investing in
industry points us initially away from the immediate pressure of the popular
revolution in looking for the sources of the connection between financial and
productive capital. It reminds us that the court financiers were at least until
the middle of the eighteenth century deeply involved in textile manufacturing
and armaments production, in close conjunction with the Bourbon state.290
Although these financiers eventually became more and more preoccupied
with state debt and for the most part removed themselves from involvement
with productive activity, it was the nobility that replaced them. The latter
played a large role in the growth of the cotton, mining, metallurgical and
glass-making industries, making investment in manufacturing respectable in
the decades leading up to the revolution.291 Indeed, to the last of its days
manufacture was closely associated with the system of privilege during the Old
Regime.292 The high nobility’s interest in capitalist enterprises formed part of
the noble reaction of the pre-revolutionary period. Among other aspects of this
phenomenon was their drive to put their hands on capitalist mines, metallurgy,
public works, financial companies and colonial plantations, often by gaining
special privileges. Bankers among others were drawn into these ventures.293
An important example of the link between privilege and industrial develop-
ment is the history of the De Dietrich family of Strasbourg. Mayor of Strasbourg
at the time of the revolution, Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich was a committed
Girondin who was arrested and guillotined under the Terror. He was heir to
a banking, mining and iron and steel company which was the third largest
producer of iron in the Kingdom at the time of the revolution.294 Philippe’s
grandfather was Jean de Dietrich, a banker at Strasbourg who in 1694 acquired
the metallurgical factory at Jägerthal, in which he installed the first blast fur-
nace. His son Jean extended the firm’s activities to the nearby metallurgical

289 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 632.

290 Chaussinand-Nogaret 1970, pp. 102, 217–18, 225–30, 248, 251.
291 Chaussinand-Nogaret 1976, pp. 140–56.
292 Horn 2012, pp. 149–85.
293 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, p. 697.
294 Hau 1993, pp. 77–92.
234 chapter 12

works at Niederbronn and Reichshoffen and to the forges of Reichshoffen.

Among other products the firm manufactured arms for the French army as
well as loaning the monarchy large amounts of money to fight wars – a service
for which Jean de Dietrich was ennobled and showered with economic priv-
ileges. His son and heir Philippe was accordingly able to receive appointments
to a series of high offices in the French state. A gifted geologist and friend to
the philosophes, he was appointed head of all mining development in France
on the eve of the revolution. Renouncing his noble status, Philippe became a
staunch Girondin. He became the patron of Roger de l’ Ile’s Marseillais, which
reputedly was played for the first time in his Strasbourg town house. Strasbourg,
of which he was mayor, was key to the defence of France’s eastern border. His
Girondist sympathies aroused suspicion and cost him his head following the
treason of Dumouriez. Nonetheless, Philippe’s heirs survived the revolution-
ary period and made the iron and steel works they controlled one of the great
industrial firms of the new century.
In its early stages cotton manufacturing – the point industry of the period –
developed largely through self- or local financing. Industrialists at first were
wary of the control of bankers and other outside investors.295 Nonetheless
we note an early commitment of the Cottin family to cotton manufactur-
ing.296 In this they were joined by their eventual partners the Jauge of Bor-
deaux. Delessert started out as a merchant banker in Lyons and there he
provided loans to textile manufacturers interested in developing the produc-
tion of gauze.297 Lecouteulx and Co. developed a variety of industrial interests
in the later half of the eighteenth century. Among their investments was a loan
to help finance a cotton factory at Beauvais.298 Perier likewise became involved
in cloth making and sugar refining. Even the Boscary, for all their speculative
activity, were invested in a hat factory. The Mallet Bank bought a large number
of shares in the Amboise steel works, which was an ambitious establishment
of the 1780s employing hundreds of workers.299 As the revolution drew closer
we note the growing involvement of bankers from Geneva, including Clavière
and Bidermann in the textile sector.300 Indeed, in the decades prior to the
revolution a massive wave of Swiss capital was invested in French state debt
and overseas commerce, but also the manufacture in France of Indian cottons,

295 Chassagne 1991, pp. 81, 118–9, 136–8, 282–3.

296 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, pp. 81–4.
297 de Coninck 2000, pp. 17, 32.
298 Chassagne 1991, p. 119.
299 an t 149. See Jagnaux 1891, vol. 2, pp. 249–53.
300 Lüthy 1959–61, vol. 2, pp. 104–6, 616, 665–7.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 235

with capital flowing both from Geneva and other Swiss cities as well as through
the Parisian branches of these banks.301 By taking control of the Wesserling
manufacture in Alsace, Bidermann put himself and his bank at the head of the
largest cotton manufacturing and distributing complex on the European Con-
tinent.302 We have noted furthermore that cotton manufacturers became more
and more dependent on credit from Paris to finance their long-distance trade.
We can conclude that a certain rapprochement between financial and product-
ive capital is evident prior to the revolution.
If we look across the whole revolutionary period from 1789–1815 we note a
highly uneven economic expansion, with considerable growth especially in the
cotton and associated chemical industries. The Terror, during which the new
regime was fighting for its life, saw no great economic expansion. On the other
hand, the expropriation of the properties of the Church and the émigré nobles,
which mainly fell into the hands of the bourgeois, can be described as an
enormous process of primitive accumulation which reached its peak under the
Jacobins. It is certainly comparable to the sixteenth-century primitive accumu-
lation in England described by Marx in the first volume of Capital. Properties
confiscated and transformed into private property included mainly agricultural
land, the best of which was made up of capitalist farms. Most of these proper-
ties fell into the hands of the urban bourgeoisie, including bankers. As we have
noted, the Parisian bankers bought land mainly in the île-de-France. But the
Parisians were active much further afield. The Monneron family, for example,
acquired a huge amount of national properties in the Ardèche, largely it seems
for speculative purposes.303 In the Haute Marne two bankers were among
the largest purchasers of national properties. The Parisian banker Caroillon
Vandeuil in particular bought 1,000 hectares owned by the Abbey of Auberville,
which he transformed into a manufacture. He likewise bought the forge at
Chateauville.304 To the north the Lillois banker Placide-Joseph Panckouke, cor-
respondent of the Parisian Bank Bontemps-Mallet, bought a vast number of
national properties.305 Closer to home following his release from prison at the
end of the Terror, Delessert devoted himself to improving his newly acquired
properties in the île-de-France, using fertilizers, crop rotation and machines,
some of which were his own invention. He played a major part in the develop-
ment of sugar beet production in place of West Indian cane sugar, from which

301 Veyrassat 1977, 145–59; Veyrassat 1982.

302 Lambert-Dansette 2001, vol. 1, p. 21.
303 Bodinier and Teyssier 2000, p. 424.
304 Bodinier, and Teyssier 2000, p. 259.
305 Brugière 1986, p. 83.
236 chapter 12

France was cut off. On the national level, he led an effort to import and dis-
seminate thousands of merino sheep – dissemination designed to improve the
quality of French wool and therefore to advance the development of wool cloth
manufacturing.306
Indeed, it should be underscored that many ecclesiastical buildings which
became national properties were transformed into factories, of which sixty
became cotton factories, twenty-three metallurgical workshops, and nineteen
chemical plants. Others became sugar refineries, breweries, oil-processing
plants and saw and paper mills.307 The transformation of many of the mon-
asteries of the Cistercian Order into cotton factories was particularly notable.
Of 148 cotton factories operating between 1785 and 1815, five percent were
owned outright by bankers.308 We should also recall that Le Creusot and Anzin,
the largest industrial properties in France, fell into the hands of groups led
by bankers. Analysis of the holdings of the initial directors of the Bank of
France reveals that most combined financial holdings with an interest in indus-
trial enterprises.309 Although the tie between financial and productive capital
would deepen in the course of the nineteenth century, such institutional and
personal links had already been established by the Napoleonic period, with the
bankers largely in control of these industries.310
Looking back we can conclude that Taylor was clearly incorrect in assert-
ing that capitalism barely existed prior to the revolution and that banking
was essentially speculative. Contrary to Taylor it seems that bankers were
clearly involved in the development of both mining and metallurgy as well
as large-scale commercial capitalism, the latter being the most dynamic sec-
tor of the economy prior to the revolution. It was in this sector in particular
that industrial enterprises developed prior to 1789. The revolutionary period
further advanced the development of capitalism and the development of the
capitalist class. While the establishment of a national currency during the Jac-
obin period failed, the politically enforced development of a national market
and rationalisation of the national debt were to prove important to the future
development of both public and private finance. But the single most import-
ant event of the revolution was the primitive accumulation of capital brought
about by the expropriation of the property of the Church and émigré nobility.

306 de Coninck 2000, pp. 17, 32.

307 Perrot 1975; Chassagne 1991, p. 230.
308 Chassagne 1991, p. 274.
309 Szramkewicz 1974, pp. xlvi–vii.
310 Bergeron 1978, p. 319.
bankers, finance capital and the french revolutionary terror 237

The transfer of ownership from clerical and noble hands into those of the bour-
geoisie was of fundamental significance to strengthening the bourgeoisie. An
important aspect of this process was the willing or coerced investment of the
finance capital of bankers and other bourgeois in the process. Measures against
speculation forced finance capital toward investment in production. The bias
of the Jacobins and the sans-culottes toward production clearly helped pres-
sure bankers and other investors toward productive investments when faced
with a narrowing of their other financial and economic opportunities under
the Terror. Indeed, part of the motive behind the purchase of national proper-
ties by bankers, the importance of which we have pointed out, was precisely to
show where they stood with respect to the revolution. In other words, an essen-
tial thrust of the popular revolution seems to have been toward policies which
would promote growth and the employment of productive labour. The popu-
lar revolution helped to force capital into investments in productive activity,
buying labour power and furthering the advance of capitalism.
Bibliography

Manuscripts

Archives Nationales (an)

f7 4667
f7 4713
f7 4774
t 149
t 508
t 1524
t 1671
w 182
w 300
w 324
w 348
w 357
w 389
w 429
w 431
w 437

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Index

Absolutism 2, 18, 21, 79, 91, 98, 102, 104, 105, Bouchary, Jean 169
106, 122 Bourbon monarchy 16, 17, 102, 122, 152
Ado, Anatoli 74, 139, 164, 218 Bourgeoisie vii, viii, 2, 12–13, 21, 22, 79, 81, 84
Aigoin, François Victor 215 rise of 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 26, 31,
Albi 28 32, 33, 35, 37, 68–9, 82, 86–93, 94–103,
Allarde, Law of 185 127–53
Ancien Regime 2, 5, 10, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 32, 54, Bourse 172, 178, 208, 220
79, 89, 94, 97, 100, 105, 120, 126, 135, 136, Bouvier, Jean 181
139, 165, 181, 214, 215 Braudel, Fernand 10, 11
Anderson, Perry 21, 104 Brenner, Robert 8–9, 18, 54, 103, 104, 105
Annales 10–11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 26, 30, 34, 50, 74, Brissot, Jacques-Pierre 146, 201
99, 124, 128, 185, 228, 235 Brogniart, Alexandre Théodore 178
Anti-Marxism 11, 18, 154 Brucker, Gene 12
Anti-Italianism 16 Buchez, Philipe 30
Anzin 216, 236 Budgen, Sebastian viii
Assignats 171, 184, 187–91, 195–7, 200, 202–5, Bureau, Jean-Baptiste 216–17
207, 216, 219, 222, 224, 226, 231 Burke, Edmund 182–3, 192
Aulard, François Victor Alphonse 35 Burstin, Haim 161
Austria 24 Byres, Terence 218

Babeuf, Gracchus 27, 31, 35, 159 Caisse d’Escompte 172, 176, 178, 181, 184, 197,
Bailly, Jean Sylvain 208 198, 200, 201, 207, 208, 211
Baker, Keith Michael 3, 6 Caisse Lafarge 188, 189
Bank of France 216, 236 Caisses patriotiques 187, 191, 195–99
Bank of Paris 177 Calvin, John 12
Bank of Saint Charles 210 Cambon, Pierre-Joseph 35, 202–5, 215, 219,
Bankers ix, 22, 75, 165–236 224, 229
Barnave, Antoine 34, 138–9, 150 Canada 3
Baron, Hans 11 Canadian Dimension 3
Beaur, Gerard 116 Capitalism 6, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 26, 31, 82, 104
Becker, Marvin 12 agriculture 33, 66, 79, 87–8, 91, 101, 102,
Beik, William viii, 12–3, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 80–5, 104–19, 120–1, 121–2, 126, 152, 155, 184,
94–103 193
Benedict, Philip 76 transition from feudalism 1, 8, 82, 119
Bérard, Thomas-Simon 192 war and 217
Bergson, Henri 28 Capitalist crisis 38
Bidermann, Jacob 189, 190, 215, 234, 235 Capitalists 68, 74, 151
Billets de confiance 187–8, 193–8, 201 Carmaux 29
Blanqui, Auguste 30, 35 Carnot, Lazare Nicolas Marguerite 35
Bois, Guy 99 Carnot, Sadi 28
Bolivia 38 Castres 28
Bonaparte, Napoleon 131, 132, 156, 158, 178, Chabot, François 223–5
216 Chaptal, Jean-Baptiste 156, 162, 163
Bontemps-Mallet Bank 189, 235 Chassagne, Serge 155
Boscary, Jean Marie 193, 194, 209–10 Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy 78
Bottin, Jacques 75 Chayanov, Alexander 22, 124
270 index

Chenier, André 147–8, 150, 212 Dreyfus Affair 29, 32

Chevet, Jean-Michel 116, 125 Dufourny de Villiers, Pierre 136, 143
China 163 Dupont, Louis 192
Civil Constitution of the Clergy 100 Dupont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel 177
Civil Rights Movement 13 Duquesnnoy, Adrien 137–8, 148–9
Class 34, 72, 150, 152, 155
Class consciousness 38, 100, 129–53 East India Company 189, 221–4
Class struggle 15, 21, 37, 54, 73, 74, 84, 85, 89, Edict of Nantes 70
94, 98, 104, 117–9, 120, 126, 142–3, 157– Engels, Friedrich 9, 11, 13, 21, 84, 89, 93, 104
8 England 16, 21, 34, 40, 87, 103
Classical Republicanism 100, 132, 133, 134, English Revolution 7, 8, 67, 102
149–50 Enlightenment 21
Clavière, Etienne 173, 177, 182, 185, 191, 197, Enragés 35
202, 212–4, 234 Estates-General (1588) 69, 83, 96
Cloots, Anarchasis 212 (1614) 70, 83
Clouatre, Dallas 135
Club Massiac 180, 208 Fabre d’ Eglantine, Philipe 172, 222
Cobban, Albert 4–5, 7, 25–6, 165 Febvre, Lucien 10
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 77, 134, 145 Ferry, Jules 28
Cold War 3, 4, 6, 11, 26, 99, 165 Feudalism 20, 21, 97, 99, 104
Colonialism 34 Feuillants 141, 213, 214
Commerce 76, 81, 86, 92, 134, 174, 180, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 28
231 Filles de Saint-Thomas, Batallion 207, 208
Comninel, George 9, 18 Monastery of 178, 179
Condorcet, Marie Jean, marquis of 177 Financiers 77, 78
Constant, Jean-Marie 69 Foreign Conspiracy 220–4
Conspiracy of Equals 159 Frey, Emmanuel and Simon Junius 173, 222–
Continental System 156 6
Cordelier Society 204 Fulchiron, Aimé Gabriel 182, 221
Cottin, Jean 182, 183, 213, 214, 234 Furet, François 6, 20, 26, 28, 128, 165
Counter-Reformation 72
Crestin, Jean-François 196–99 Geertz, Clifford 6
Cultural Turn 5–6, 18, 20, 26, 128–53, 155 Geneva 71, 178, 182, 206
Genovese, Eugene 4
Danton, Georges 34, 36, 131 Germain, Jean-Pierre 189
Darnton, Robert 6 German Democratic Republic 11, 17
Davidson, Neil 37 German Peasants Revolt 14
Davis, Natalie Zemon 12, 14 Germany 34, 103, 158
De Cock, Jean Conrad 228 Girondins 34, 35, 38, 145, 146, 151, 173, 188,
Delaunay d’Angers, Joseph 222 195–6, 201, 202, 213–6, 220, 222–3, 225–6,
Delessert, Etienne 182, 183, 189, 191, 192, 209, 228, 233
222, 234, 235 Gouges, Olympe de 177
De Marigny, Giradot 192 Gough, Kathleen 4
De Mézieres, François-Sylvain Laurent 192, Grefuhle, Louis 221–2, 232
193 Grenus, Jean-Louis 206–7, 221
Deprez, Pierre 216 Grossman, Henryk 12
Desmoulins, Camille 131, 190 Grouvelle, Phlippe Antoine 140–1
Dietrich Philippe-Frédéric de 233–4 Guesde, Jules 29, 37
Dobb, Maurice 82, 98 Guérin, Daniel 35, 36, 38, 160, 202
index 271

Guttman, Herbert 4 Kautsky, Karl 24, 36, 37, 38, 124

Guzmán, Don André de 226, 227, 228 Kolly, Pierre-Paul 190
Kristeller, Paul 11–12
Hamilton, Earl J. 11 Kuhn, Thomas 12
Hébert, Jacques 171, 178
Hébertists 35, 36, 173, 212, 225, 226 Laborde de Mereville, Francois Louis Jean-
Hegel, George 28 Joseph 177, 181, 226, 228
Henri iv 69, 70, 128, 130, 132, 136, 141 Lacombe, Paul 24, 32
Heron, Louis 210–11 La Dépêche 28
Hessen, Boris 12 Laissez-faire 156, 157, 163, 185, 215
Higonnet, Patrice 130 Lamartine, Alphonse de 30
Hill, Christopher 7 Landes, David 155
Historical Materialism Journal viii, 2, 18, 19, La Petite République 29
21, 22 La Rochelle 83, 87, 90
Historiography viii, 10–11, 17, 34 Latin America 38
American 3–4, 11–13, 155 Law of Priarial 35
Marxist vii, 1, 3–4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 18, 20, 24, Leacock, Eleanor 4
25, 26, 32, 35, 37, 38, 54, 81, 95, 127 Lechapelier Law 143, 159
Revisionist vii, ix, 1, 2, 4–9, 17, 19, 20, 26– Lecouteulx Bank 181, 183, 210–11, 212, 216, 234
7, 35, 84, 94, 95, 128, 158 Le Creusot 217, 236
History of Science 12, 17 Lefebvre, Georges 1, 4, 10, 25, 27, 127
Hoffman, Philip 119 Lefebvre, Joseph 182
Hofstadter, Richard 3 Lefevre d’Etaples, Jacques 13
Holland 21, 88, 103 Lemarchand, Guy viii, 20, 21, 25, 26, 39–53,
Horn, Jeff ix, 22, 154–64 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 86, 88, 91–4, 96, 98,
Huguenots 83, 88, 89, 132–5, 147, 166, 169 99–100, 139, 185
Lenin, Vladimir Illich 36, 93, 218
Industrialization 22, 155, 161 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 11, 14, 15, 16, 18,
Italian Renaissance 11–12, 17 61, 63, 64, 73, 77, 80, 83, 90, 91, 96, 98, 99,
Italians 68 100, 101, 102
Italy 103 Lille 175
Lindet, Jean Baptiste Robert 231
Jacobins 34, 35, 37, 38, 145, 149, 155, 156, 159, London School of Economics 2
162, 163, 172, 173, 189, 190, 191, 201, 204, Louis xiii 72
205, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216–8, 220, 221, 223, Louis xiv 21, 74
226, 232, 235, 237 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 11
Jacobinism 27 Lublinskya, A.D. 75, 89, 90, 105, 107, 141, 143,
Jameson, Fredric 4, 5–6, 7 150, 168, 169
Jacquart, Jean 84, 117, 123, 125, 158 Luddites 159
Japan 67 Luther, Martin 12, 28, 131
Jauge, Théodore 182, 183, 187, 213–4, 234 Lüthy, Herbert 181
Jaurès, Benjamin 28 Lycée Louis Le Legrand 28
Jaurès, Jean viii, 1, 20, 23–38 Lyotard, Jean-François 5
Jaurès, Louis 28
Johannot, Jean 215 Machine-breaking 142, 157–8, 160
Julien, Louis 192 Maison des Secours 188
Mallet, Guillaume and Jacques 183, 189, 192,
Kant, Immanuel 28 216, 234
Kaplan, Steve 142, 143, 149 Malthus, Thomas 98
272 index

Malthusian limits 11, 14, 22, 98, 124 Perier, Claude 175, 215–6, 234
Manufacturing 33, 71, 156, 168, 233 Permanent Revolution 35, 37, 38, 65, 69, 70,
Marat, Jean-Paul 35, 143, 179, 208 71
Maréchal, Sylvain 31 Perregaux, Jean François 182, 183, 221, 227,
Martines, Lauro 12 229, 230
Marx, Karl 1, 2, 7, 20, 24, 28, 37, 38, 80, 93, 99, Pétion, Jerome 145–6
104, 106, 114, 120–1, 127–53 Physiocrats 121–2, 135, 151
Marxism 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18–9, 26, 27, Plutarch 34
28, 80, 83 Political Marxism 9
Mathiez, Albert 1, 10, 25, 27, 127 Porshnev, Boris 105–7, 114–5
Maury, Jean, Cardinal 179–80 Postmodernism 5–6
Maximum, Law of 159 Post-structuralism 9, 26
Maza, Sara ix, 22, 128–53 Poussou, Jean-Pierre 76
Mazauric, Claude 25, 26, 27 Primitive Accumulation 16, 19, 30, 72, 105,
Mayerne, Louis Turquet de Mayerne 70, 89, 109, 121, 123, 125, 128, 147, 150, 154, 161,
96 169, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 189, 200, 202,
McCarthyism 3 231, 234
Meaux 13, 14 Proletariat 15, 55, 57, 65, 69, 84, 101, 160
Mentalité 10, 12, 16, 22 Proli, Pierre-Jean Berthold de 226–7
Mercantilism 68, 93, 105, 131, 141, 169, 175, Protestants 179–80
189, 156 Prussia 24, 77
Mercier, Sebastian 178 Pourrat, Louis 212
Messageries Nationales 217
Michelet, Jules 24, 30, 32, 35 Quesnay, François 121
Mignet, François-Auguste 131
Miller, Stephen viii, 22, 84, 120–6 Ranum, Orest 12
Millerand, Alexandre 29 Reformation 11, 12, 14, 17
Mirabeau, Honorée Gabriel Riqueti, count of France 13, 14
34, 200 religious wars 15–16, 21, 94, 99, 107
Montgomery, David 4 Reveillon factory 142, 159
Monneron Bank 179, 188, 235 Revolution of 1848 93
Montz, Jean-Marc 222, 232 Ricardo, David 98
Moriceau, Jean-Marc 18, 21, 34, 40, 42, 139, Rice, Eugene 13
165, 178, 180, 182, 191, 200, 213, 215, 217, Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis
222, 227, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235 12, 72
Mousnier, Roland 10 Rivier and Baux Bank 189
Mowery, Richard 161 Robbins, Kevin 70, 87
Robespierre, Maximilien 24, 35, 36, 37,
Nantes 190 131, 171, 173, 215, 217, 221, 224–8, 228,
National Guard 137, 141, 143, 173, 196, 208 232
Necker, Jacques 34, 177, 182–4, 200, 230 Roederer, Pierre Louis 151–3
Neoliberalism 7, 9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 27, 182
Nîmes 213 Roux, Jacques 170
Nobility 8, 15, 16, 33, 69, 79, 83, 88, 99, 105, Roux-Levergne, M. 30
109 Rude, George 4
Russian Revolution 6, 26
Panckouke, Placide-Joseph 235
Parker, David viii, 21, 22, 86–103 Sabatier, Guillaume 189, 192, 216, 221
Peasantry 32, 66, 108–114, 123 Saint Just, Louis Antoine de 131, 171, 215
index 273

Saint Paul 131 Turgot, Anne Jacques Robert 121–2, 123, 139,
Sans-culottes 23, 38, 100, 143, 160, 171, 191, 225–7, 229
220
Santerre, Etienne François Gallet de 207 United States 217
Schiappa, Jean-Marc 159 Universities 3, 17
Schlesinger, Arthur 3 University of Toulouse 28
Scoville, Warren C. 70–1
September Massacres 35 Vandenyver Bank 212–3
Serfs 104 Vandeuil, Caroillon 235
Serres, Olivier de 98 Venezuela 38
Sièyes, Emmanuel Joseph 135–6 Vergniaud, Pierre Victornien 34
Slavery 34, 180 Vietnam War 13
Smith, Adam 98, 107, 108, 121, 126, 185 Villain, Raoul 24
Soboul, Albert 1, 4, 10, 18, 26, 27, 33, 99, 127, Vivienne, Rue 178, 179, 226
160, 161 Vovelle, Michel 1, 26, 127, 146
Socialism 1, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36
Socialist revisionism 29, 31, 36, 37, 38 Wage labour 30, 94, 96, 123, 125, 147, 152, 154,
Sonenscher, Michael 149 158, 169, 178, 220, 227, 229, 231, 232
Soviet Union 2, 7, 26 Waldeck-Rousseau, Pierre 29
Stone, Lawrence 7, 8 Walkiers, Edward de 226, 228
Strikes 142–3, 158–9 Wallerstein, Immanuel 4
Sweezy, Paul 82, 98 Weinmaring, Jean-Philippe 208
Switzerland 34 Weinstein, Donald 12
Weir, David 142
Taine, Hippolyte 30 White, Leslie 13
Tassin, Gabriel and Louis172, 207–10 White, Lynn 6
Taylor, George 26, 165–70, 173–5, 177, 184, Wiedenfeld, Jacques Henry 213
232, 236 Wolf, Eric 4
Terror 2, 19, 35, 139, 151, 156, 165–237 Wolf, John 12
Thatcherism 2 Workers 36, 136–7, 138, 141–3, 154
Thermidorian Reaction 156, 231 Working Class 22, 23, 33, 36, 38, 137, 157–8
Thiers, Adolphe 30 Woronoff, Denis 155
Thierry, Augustin 80, 131
Toqueville, Alexis de 30 Young, Arthur 115, 116
Tourton and Ravael Bank 189
Trotsky, Leon 2 Zizek, Joseph 3