“The French Revolution opened the curtain on the modern world.” ― Albert Soboul
A magnificent narrative of the French Revolution, depicted with unparalleled clarity.
A modern classic that elevated Albert Soboulle to the position of the greatest historian of the French Revolution.

Albert Soboul (1914-1982) was an outstanding revolutionary historian who broadened and deepened our knowledge of the French Revolution.
Sobul's masterpiece, "History of the French Revolution," has been translated into numerous languages ​​and is a classic work read around the world. It is also recognized as the best introductory book on the history of the French Revolution, culminating in the achievements of research up to that time.
Sobule inherited the tradition of French revolutionary history studies from Jean Jaures, Albert Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre, and compiled the true nature of the French Revolution as a great social revolution on a grand scale.

Sobule answered the real questions of the revolution through a delicate and passionate exploration of the ten years of the French Revolution.
How was such a profound transformation possible? How did the leaders of the revolution change the world and transform themselves? This book, in a clear and unpretentious style, vividly illustrates the whys and hows of the French Revolution.
This book, an excellent guide to the French Revolution accessible to everyone, will enable readers to grasp the unfolding of the French Revolution and its historical and current significance.

In the 18th century, living conditions for the urban poor deteriorated.
The increase in urban population along with rising prices has exacerbated the imbalance between the cost of living and wages.
In the late 18th century, even the impoverishment of the wage earners began to appear.
… … The fundamental problem of the common people’s livelihood was wages and purchasing power.
The pressure of inflation has been felt unevenly across different segments of the population, depending on the composition of their cost of living.
The rise in grain prices was most severe, especially among the lower classes, who naturally suffered the most, as the population grew and bread accounted for a very large portion of the cost of living.
… …

It was seasonal price fluctuations that led to the tragic results.
In the run-up to 1789, amidst the general inflation, food expenditures already accounted for 58 percent of the expenditures of common households, and by 1789, this had soared to 88 percent.
Disposable income other than food expenses is only 12 percent.
The surge in prices did not have much of an impact on the wealthy, but it hit the poor hard.

--- p.61~62

The people's fundamental demand was still bread.
The extreme political aggression of the masses in 1788-1789 was also due to the severity of the economic crisis that was making their livelihood increasingly difficult.
The riots that broke out in most cities in 1789 were caused by poverty, and their first effect was a reduction in the price of bread.
The crisis in ancien régime France was essentially an agrarian crisis.
Whenever crop failures or crop failures continued, an agricultural crisis invariably occurred.
Then, grain prices rose dramatically, and the purchasing power of the majority of small farmers who had to buy grain decreased.
In this way, the agricultural crisis spread to industrial production.
The agrarian crisis of the entire 18th century reached its peak in 1788.
That winter, famine struck and begging increased rapidly due to unemployment.
These hungry unemployed people formed one axis of the revolutionary crowd.

--- p.64

From poverty and group mentality, 'riots' and rebellions erupted.
On April 28, 1789, the first riot broke out in Paris against the wallpaper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon and the limestone manufacturer François Henriot.
The two men were accused of making unscrupulous remarks about the poverty of the people at the electoral college.
Leveyong said that a worker can live comfortably on 15 sous a day.
There were protests on April 27th, and on the 28th the homes of two manufacturers were looted.
When the police chief sent in the military, the rioters resisted and there were deaths.
Thus, the first revolutionary uprising was clearly economic and social in origin, not political.
The people had no clear views on political issues.
The reason they took action was because there were economic and social reasons.
However, these popular unrests were bound to have political consequences that threatened power.

--- p.65

Rousseau, with the soul of a commoner, stood against the tide of the century.
In his first essay, [If the Revival of Science and Arts Contributed to the Purification of Morals] (1750), he criticized the civilization of his time and defended those who had not benefited from it.
“Luxury feeds a hundred paupers in our towns, but in fact kills a hundred thousand in our country.” In his second essay (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men) he attacked property rights.
And in The Social Contract, he presented the theory of popular sovereignty.
While Montesquieu and Voltaire confined power to the privileged classes and the upper bourgeoisie respectively, Rousseau liberated the lowly and gave power to the entire people.
Rousseau assigned the role of the state to restrain the abuse of private property rights and maintain social balance through inheritance legislation and progressive taxation.
This call for equality in the social as well as the political sphere was new in the 18th century.

--- p.82

The French Revolution, according to Jean Jaurès, was not a “bourgeois and conservative” revolution in the narrow sense, like the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, but a “bourgeois and democratic” revolution in the broad sense.
The great revolution took on this character because it was supported by the masses of people who, driven by a hatred for privilege and unable to endure hunger, yearned to be free from the oppression of feudalism.
One of the fundamental tasks of the Great Revolution was to destroy feudalism and liberate the peasants and their land.
Not only the total economic crisis at the end of the old regime, but more fundamentally, the structure and contradictions of the old society explain these characteristics of the revolution.
The French Revolution was truly a bourgeois revolution.
However, it was a bourgeois revolution supported by the people, especially the peasants.

--- p.132~133

The provinces watched the Third Estate's struggle for privileged status with the same uneasy eye as the capital.
The news of Necker's dismissal caused as much excitement in Paris as in the rest of the country.
News of the fall of the Bastille reached Paris between July 16th and 19th, depending on distance from Paris.
The news sparked a frenzy and spurred movements that had been emerging in several cities since early July.

The 'urban revolutions' actually began in early July, as in Rouen, due to food shortages, and continued for nearly a month, as in Hoche and Bourges, until August.
In Dijon, the news of Necker's dismissal became the trigger for revolution, and in Montauban, the news of the fall of the Bastille became the trigger for revolution.
… …

Whatever the nature of these urban revolutions, the results were the same everywhere.
The monarchy was abolished, centralization collapsed, almost all governors gave up their posts, and tax collection ceased.
In the words of the time, “the king, the high court, the army, and the police ceased to exist.” New municipalities took over the old powers.
Local autonomy, which had long been suppressed by absolutism, began to function freely, and the vitality of local governments was enriched again.
France became an autonomous community.

--- p.169~171

On August 1, 1789, Parliament resumed its debate.
The debate raged on this very point, as the delegates disagreed over the need to draft a declaration of human rights.
Some speakers even questioned the very timeliness of the declaration.
Moderates, like Pierre-Victor Malouet, who were alarmed by the disorder, considered the Declaration of Rights useless or even dangerous.
Those like Father Gregoire hoped to add a declaration of obligations to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Finally, on the morning of the 4th, the National Assembly decided to insert the Declaration of Rights at the beginning of the Constitution.
The discussion progressed slowly.
… … On August 26, 1789, Parliament adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became a 'death certificate of the old regime', an implicit condemnation of the evils of a privileged society and monarchy.
But at the same time, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, inspired by the doctrines of the Enlightenment, expressed the ideals of the bourgeoisie and laid the foundations of a new social order applicable not only to France but to all humanity.
--- p.179~180

Those who were called 'sans-culottes' at the time of the revolution were this old popular category that was the basic element that constituted the revolutionary crowd.
… … On April 10, 1793, Pétion said to the National Convention:
“When we speak of sans-culottes, we do not mean all citizens except the nobles and the privileged.
Rather, to distinguish those who have not, they are called sans-culottes.”

The sans-culottes defined themselves by their actions, their hostility to the privileged classes, to commerce, to wealth, if not to affluence.
… … A counter-revolutionary worker could not be a good sans-culottes.
The patriotic bourgeoisie gladly qualifies as sans-culottes.
The social dimension becomes clear when it is defined politically.
The two were inseparable.
The key here was not lip service to patriotism or a mere mentality, but a political attitude.
The sans-culottes took part in all the great events that took place during the Revolution.

--- p.747

Although the revolutionary government, faced with an imminent danger, agreed to an alliance with the sans-culottes and made some concessions to maintain that relationship, it by no means accepted the social aims or political methods of sans-culottes democracy.
Moreover, for the two government committees, it was justifiable, in the light of the struggle against the Great Alliance and the counter-revolution and in the light of the political conceptions of the two committees, to control the popular organizations and integrate them into the Jacobin framework of the bourgeois revolution.
So when the Cordelier faction's opposition threatened this equilibrium, the revolutionary government responded with repressive measures.
However, the sans-culottes began to distrust the revolutionary government after witnessing the elimination of [Pére Duchene] and the Cordeliers, who had represented and supported their aspirations.
The revolutionary government also removed the party leader, but it was in vain.
The repressive measures that followed these high-profile trials, though limited, instilled fear in the fighters and paralyzed political activity in the district.
Direct and friendly contact between the revolutionary authorities and the old sans-culottes was now severed.
Soon after, Saint-Just wrote, “The revolution is frozen.”

--- p.440~441

We can obtain an accurate picture of the composition of the revolutionary masses, which are at once heterogeneous and unified wholes.
These are the 'common people' of Paris.
… … These revolutionary crowds were neither marginalized or “independent” individuals with severed social ties, nor were they proletarians without stable jobs, prone to disorder due to poverty, easily mobilized by agitators, and lacking professional technical training.
They were artisans and journeymen, clerks, shopkeepers and retailers – a collection of small business owners and wage earners who were equally agitated by the rising cost of living and the political crisis.

In this way, sans-culottes took up an overwhelming proportion.
But there were also small numbers of 'bourgeois', rentiers and free professionals who took part in the uprising.
These included the fall of the Bastille, the Champ de Mars (July 17, 1791), the attack on the Tuileries Palace, and the uprising that erupted in Prairie in 1793.
Women played a particularly important role in the March on Versailles, the food riots and looting of 1792–1793, and the Prairie Uprising.

--- p.744~745

Revolution, it cannot be forced 'from above'.
If ‘reform’ can be given ‘from above,’ revolution is inevitably forced ‘from below.’
Reforms do not shake the basic structures of society, but rather support them for the continued benefit of dominant social categories.
Reform becomes clear about its raison d'être within the framework of the existing society it seeks to strengthen.
Moreover, reform is not a revolution that extends over a long period of time, and reform and revolution are distinguished not by their length of time but by their content.
Reform or revolution? The question here isn't whether to choose a faster or slower path that leads to the same result, but to clarify the goal: the creation of a new society or a superficial revision of the old.

--- p.776