to realize their potential rationality, need proper education and institutions promoting freedom. Cf. Kant (German): "What is Enlightenment": "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding, is therefore the motto of the enlightenment...The enlightenment requires nothing but freedom...freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters."
History as progress. Condorcet: "The perfectibility of man is indefinite...No one can doubt that, as preventive medicine improves and food and housing become healthier, as a way of life is established that develops our physical powers...the average length of human life will be increased and a better health and a stronger physical constitution will be ensured....Would it be absurd [t]o suppose that...the day will come when death will be due only to extraordinary accidents [a]nd that ultimately the average span between birth and decay will have no assignable value?"
Laissez-fairre: Physiocrats (Quesnay, Turgot)
Germany Aufklaerung (Kant): departs from French Enlightenment
Different conception of freedom (cf. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom)
Pietism
Neo-humanism: Johann Winckelmann (mid-18th cent)
Reactions to the Enlightenment
German romanticism, nationalism (Herder, Fichte, Wagner)
Background: two complementary systems of authority
'patrimonialism': A king has absolute secular authority, given him by God; king is bound by divine law. His authority is legitimate insofar as it is exercised in the name of God. By 18th century, absolutist rule in most of Europe. In France, Louis XIV, a Bourbon, (1643-1715), founds a unified, imperial state administration with 30 'intendants' in the provinces who collect taxes. The king controlled municipal offices, and developed an absolutist structure.
'feudalism': A competing structure of authority, based on a 'contract' between master and servant. A fief is granted by the lord to the vassal, on the understanding that by exploiting it economically the vassal would be enabled to render the services he owed the lord. The lord was obliged to leave the vassal undisturbed, or 'immune', in the possession or governance of the fief, and the vassal was obliged to aid and counsel the lord. The vassal had dependents and social inferiors (serfs), a relationship denoted as seigneurie. The vassal had the right to lead, control, exploit and oppress his dependents. These relationships were different than that between lord and vassal, since often the vassal and serf were of a different ethnic or linguistic group. Relationships are personal and not 'abstract' or merely legal. They are based on oaths of fealty.
This complex structure of Pre-Revolution French politics led to conflicts: Prior to the rise of the absolutist state, there are struggles among fiefs, and between fiefs and king. Authority is decentralized. With the rise of the absolutist state, the feudal system remains and coexists with absolutist rule. There are:
peasants (in 1787, 85% of the 26 million people were peasants)
The First Estate (Church)
The Second Estate (landed aristocracy, or nobility, who extracted surplus directly from the peasants)
The Third Estate (bourgeoisie--merchants, property-owning city dwellers, etc.)
The monarchy
Conflicts occur not simply between the Estates and the monarchy; the Estates depended on the absolutist administration to protect their own interests against peasants--Medieval rights were preserved under the umbrella of absolutism.
The French Revolution
A fiscal crisis due to war expenses. King needs to tax the bourgeoisie, they resist.
July Revolution (July 14, 1789 and the Fall of the Bastille): The bourgeoisie called the 'Estates-General', which led to a political revolution and the fall of the Bourbon monarchy. A bourgeois revolution against the king.
Limits of July Revolution: it was merely a political revolution, and paved the way for a more radical social revolution of the peasants. The peasants still had to pay tithes to church (8%), dues to the bourgeois landowners, rent to landlords, and royal taxes (5-10%). Peasants often had to supplement income by day labor. As a result, there were many waves of peasant uprisings.
August 1789, at Versailles, government decrees abolished many feudal rights and privileges.
1793: National Assembly (the newly established governing body) gave peasants relief from paying tithes and dues.
Points to note
Not yet a proletarian revolution. After the French Revolution, citizens have equal rights to vote and to property; but there is still property. Marx is critical of this in 'On the Jewish Question': "the so-called rights of man, are simply the rights of a member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community."
Burke's criticism: p.90: "But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion."
Aftermath of the Revolution:
Pressure on the National Assembly a. sans-culottes: workers concerned with the price and sheer availability of basic necessities. They pressured the National Assembly from within.
Foreign enemies pressured the National Assembly from without (including counter-revolutionaries)
Led to the Jacobin solution, with Robespierre at the helm: strong centralization, a police state, mass military mobilization, and what is known as The Terror (which Dickens writes about in A Tale of Two Cities)--bloody and violent 3. 1794, Jacobins fall. A Directory was installed that established a centralized bureaucracy with army support.
Napoleon in 1799: with army support, establishes himself as defacto dictator and dynastic emperor. Brings further administrative centralization, and the Code Napoleon (a detailed legal code based on rational principles). Established a national army, and a council of experts.
For an easy to follow overview, see Connelly and Hembree, The French Revolution.
