ABSTRACT
January 1789. France was somewhere between a state of political excitement and a more general apprehension: apprehension, due in large part to the poor harvest of 1788 and the scarcity and expense of bread across the kingdom; excitement, from King Louis XVI’s announcement that the Estates-General would meet for the first time since 1614. By the end of January the king had even announced the elections to the Estates-General and called for his subjects to compile their grievances for his attention.1
Change was coming. But in other ways, France in 1789 was a lot like France in 1779. It was a
lot like France had been for decades, perhaps for a century. It was still a monarchy, still an absolute monarchy, and any limits on the king’s authority were vague at best. It was still a society of orders, where birth determined wealth and legal status. It was still a kingdom of provinces, with its conflicting jurisdictions, where different regions had not only different traditions and languages but also different laws and institutions. It was still a Catholic kingdom, where the lines between crime and sin were not always clear and where the power of the Catholic Church entered all realms of society. By the end of 1789, things had changed. The parlements were gone. The
provinces’ legal existence was gone. One set of laws now governed the entire kingdom. And while those laws were not yet all written, that process was underway enough to make it clear that France was no longer an absolute monarchy, but a constitutional monarchy. It would still have a king, but his power would be limited by laws guaranteeing certain rights to the population. The Catholic Church would lose both its monopoly on official worship and most of its property. And Louis XVI had even approved these measures. He had done so with a heavy heart, and with the eighteenthcentury equivalent of his fingers crossed behind his back, but the king did not present himself as the opponent of the Revolution. He had even acceded to the request of the women of Paris that he leave Versailles and move into the Tuileries Palace in the center of Paris. In other words, France at the end of 1789 was no longer the same
country. A revolution had taken place.
