The French Revolution, 1788-1792 by Prof. Gaetano Salvemini I. M. Rawson

Author:Prof. Gaetano Salvemini, I. M. Rawson [Prof. Gaetano Salvemini, I. M. Rawson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789120721
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Borodino Books
Published: 2018-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

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The more uncompromising prelates, however, and those royalists who were most active, lost no time in organizing energetic opposition to the new ecclesiastical laws, in a hope of forcing the Pope to come out openly on their side. The lower clergy, who until now had favoured the revolutionary cause, were deeply perturbed. The Assembly had improved their economic condition by giving the parish priests a minimum stipend of 1200 limes a year, but the upheaval in ecclesiastical discipline troubled the conscience of all sincere believers. Anxiety increased when the Assembly refused to accept a proposal made by the Right, on April 13th, 1790, to declare Catholicism the State religion.

In Alsace the bishops ordered prayers to be said, as in times of national calamity, and publicly condemned the ‘predatory laws’ dispossessing the clergy. In southern France, at Montauban and Nîmes, the age-old hatred between Protestants and Catholics flared up and led to riots and bloodshed during the whole period from April to June.

Agrarian disorders still continued here and there. The army’s mood was openly mutinous, and in April 1790 revolutionary forces and aristocratic regiments came to blows at Lille.

The lesser nobility, too, went over to the cause of counter-revolution in the spring of 1790. Until then, only the great lords had been directly and seriously affected by the destruction of the châteaux and the campaign against Court extravagance. The humbler provincial nobles had remained uncertain which cause to espouse, since the loss of their feudal dues had been fully made good by the suppression of tithe, and their hostility towards the great aristocrats was so pronounced that they were ready to welcome anything injuring the higher ranks. Two of the Assembly’s decrees brought their uncertainties to an end. By the first, passed on March 15th, 1790, the rights of primogeniture and of male succession in feudal inheritance were abolished, and all heirs were given equal rights, without distinction of age or sex. With the second, enacted on June 29th, titles of nobility were suppressed. It meant an end to the whole centuries-old system of the feudal family, and a challenge to all the pride of the old nobility: the aristocracy, as a class, were to disappear, submerged by the plebeian flood, just as the clergy had disappeared as an independent class by being absorbed into the new elective civil hierarchy.

But a great majority of the people still remained favourable towards the revolutionary parties. Abolition of tithe, the end of feudal dues and the breakdown in tax-collecting, represented an annual saving for the rural classes of more than 300 million, and freed the land from innumerable obstacles to agrarian development. High food-prices made such development a matter of urgency, and the sale by auction of Church lands was awaited with impatience. An enthusiasm for work and an optimistic faith in the future were spreading throughout the countryside. The beneficial effects of the revolution had not so quickly been apparent in urban centres, where the crisis of 1787 and 1788 had continued well

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