ABSTRACT
The France that stood on the verge of revolution in the 1780s did not know that it was standing on the verge of revolution. Nor did it know, in the way that we do now, what a revolution entails. Many of France’s inhabitants knew that some things were changing, about which they were concerned or not, happy or not; and there were things that were not changing, about which they were concerned or not, happy or not. By the standards of eighteenth-century Europe France was a large kingdom, and it was not expected that reforms that pleased one group would please others, nor was it expected that traditions that favored one group would enjoy the approval of the rest of society. And make no mistake – countless traditions existed designed to benefit certain parts of the kingdom, traditions that the holders had to defend jealously. Among the most notable at the time was the relative tax exemption for members of the nobility. But while that tax exemption was a prime example of the nature of privilege that the wealthiest members of French society enjoyed, it grew as much out of the fractured nature of French laws and regulations as it did out of the long tradition of social inequality. Different towns had different rights, depending largely on how long they had been part of the kingdom. Different neighborhoods – particularly in Paris – had different regulations concerning who could work at what job and how much they could expect to be paid. Peasants in some regions paid much lower taxes than peasants in other regions. But do not expect the origins or causes of the Revolution to come from the most downtrodden of the peasants, or the most poorly paid of the workers. The most privileged could feel threatened when those privileges were attacked – and, moreover, they tended to have more resources with which to defend them. What is today known as la France métropolitaine, or mainland France, has
for most of the last two centuries enjoyed relatively stable boundaries. Aside from the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which were part of Germany from 1870 until the end of the First World War, and the occupation of France during the Second World War, the roughly hexagonal shape of modern
France has become established enough to forget that it was a lengthy process establishing it. Many parts of mainland France had some legacy of independence from the French crown, whether that went back to the seventeenth century, as was the case for some parts of eastern France, or back to the medieval era, as was the case for Provence, Brittany, and other regions. Some parts of France still had governing institutions that predated that region’s incorporation into the kingdom, institutions which coexisted with more recent government bodies. The various boundaries that covered France, from the dioceses of the Catholic Church to the administrative units known as généralités to the traditional provincial borders, rarely coincided. Local political institutions varied both in name and in influence. Eighteenth-century France was far more than just the hexagon, however.
