Jules Michelet’s history of the French Revolution is an expository work of passionate argument as much as narrative—a nineteenth-century historian’s attempt to understand the Revolution not merely as a sequence of events but as the eruption of justice into a world governed for centuries by grace, favour, and arbitrary power. Michelet writes as a Frenchman addressing his own nation’s founding rupture, moving from the philosophical and religious prehistory of the Revolution through the elections of 1789, the formation of the National Assembly, the fall of the Bastille, and the October days that brought the king back to Paris. The book is arranged in books and chapters that follow the Revolution’s opening year almost day by day, interspersed with long interpretive sections on Christianity, justice, and the meaning of the upheaval.
“It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain.”
From Grace to Justice: The Argument Beneath the Events
The Empty Plain and the Spirit of the Revolution
Michelet begins by describing his yearly retreat from academic teaching into inward contemplation, where he communes with what he calls the spirit of the Revolution—the all-powerful interpreter of his history. That spirit, he insists, lives in souls, not in monuments. The Revolution’s only monument is the empty, sandy plain of the Champ de Mars with its two tumuli, set against the Empire’s Column and Triumphal Arch, royalty’s Louvre and Hospital of Invalids, the feudal church of Notre-Dame, and the ruins of Roman baths. A forgetful generation, he laments, uses the spot for foreign-borrowed amusements and lets English racehorses gallop across it; yet a mighty spirit dwells there, and the plain will renew its verdure because the fruitful sweat of those who piled its hills is mingled in the soil—the day France from North and South embraced, when three million heroes rose as one man and decreed eternal peace.
The Revolution’s principle, he argues, was eminently pacific: it invited the world to love and peace, stretched out its hand to all, and its sword was the sword of peace, drawn to deliver nations and give them liberty. Dante held that Eternal Love founded the gates of hell; the Revolution wrote Peace on its flag of war. Its heroes—Hoche, Marceau, Desaix, Kleber—are mourned as champions of peace by friends, foes, the Nile, the Rhine, war itself, and the inflexible Vendée. Being the triumph of right and the resurrection of justice, the Revolution could not without provocation resort to violence. That pacific character now seems a paradox only because the violent efforts forced on it by a conspiring world have been mistaken for the Revolution itself, breeding among the people an adoration of force—the force of resistance in ’93, of invasion and conquest in 1800, the Alps brought low, Austerlitz. In 1815 many whispered that “they are strong, therefore they are just.” Two evils followed: France’s tradition slipped away and the image of Right grew uncertain. He blames an internal evil—corruptibility, loss of sight of the idea of Justice—not outward causes.
The Friends of Liberty and the Sects
He charges the friends of liberty with two symptoms of inward sickness. They have accepted the hand of religious tyranny, believing foes of religious liberty could be friends of political freedom—a vain scholastic distinction, since liberty is liberty. And they have proved false to the eighteenth century, which founded liberty on the enfranchisement of the mind and abolished the gods of flesh in state and religion; they did so from a sense of feeble minority. He contrasts the solitary stands of Voltaire and Rousseau, after whom the whole world came. A system of progressive refinement, he warns, turns a party into a sect—a petty church with daily new heresies—while Mahomet II stands at the gates. Multiplying revolutionary sects (Constitutionnels, Girondists, Montagnards) resemble Jansenists and Molinists replacing Christians: the Revolutionists ceased to exist. Voltaire is little valued, Mirabeau laid aside, Madame Roland excluded, even Danton not orthodox; must only Robespierre and Saint-Just remain? Rejecting predecessors, he warns, rejects those who gave the Revolution its hold on mankind.
Fraternity, he insists, must be won by a fraternal heart, not the guillotine; the word predates Robespierre and Mably. Ancient states addressed fraternity only to citizens, treating the slave as a thing—exclusive and inhuman. When slaves or freedmen governed the Empire—Terence, Horace, Phaedrus, Epictetus—Christianity said “Let us be brethren,” but man had no being; right and liberty alone constitute life, so a theory excluding them is fraternity between nought and nought. “Fraternity, or death” is a brotherhood of slaves. Liberty alone, as founded in the last century, rendered fraternity possible: philosophy found man without right and said “Let us create man, let him be, by liberty”; no sooner created than he loved. The age should attain ends so that all without compulsion wish to be brothers, the state becoming a fraternal initiation and education—a constant exchange of spontaneous ideas of inspiration and faith common to all with the reflected ideas of science and meditation found among thinkers.
The Fathers of the Revolution Vindicated
He defends the fathers of the Revolution: they found despotism in heaven and earth and instituted law; found man disarmed and lost in apparent unity; and faced the dogma that injustice is transmitted with blood from father to son. They vindicated man’s rights—he is something, cannot be annulled even in God’s name, and is responsible only for his own actions. Thus the unjust transmission of good (nobility’s rights) and of evil (original sin, the civil brand of descent from sinners) are effaced by the Revolution. He rejects the charge of individualism or egotism: without these individual rights man had no existence and could not fraternize; the fraternity of death had to be abolished to found that of life. History confirms it: at the first moment of proclaiming individual rights, France embraced the whole world, offering peace and liberty to all; like a newborn, young French Liberty cried “I am!” and extended her life and hope to mankind, loving even her enemy England. She strove to save royalty and the Church, remaining wilfully blind to the contradiction between Arbitrary Grace and Justice.
Salvation by Faith Alone
The argument turns to what God requires in return for the sacrifice of Christ: only that people believe themselves saved by his blood. Faith, not works of righteousness, is the condition of salvation. Whoever does not believe is unrighteous, and righteousness without faith is useless. Saint Paul, by laying down salvation by faith alone, has nonsuited Righteousness, reducing her to an accessory or effect of faith. Having quit righteousness, the system descends into Necessity: “Believe, or perish!” Salvation is attached to a condition independent of the will, since we do not believe as we will. Saint Augustine demonstrates the insufficiency of faith itself: God alone gives it, gratuitously, requiring neither faith nor justice. This free grace is the sole cause of salvation; God gives grace to whom he pleases. Augustine said “I believe, because it is absurd,” and might add “I believe, because it is unjust.” The system is consummated: God loves whom he pleases, the least deserving, the sinner; love is its own reason and requires no merit. Merit becomes being loved, elect, predestined; demerit becomes damnation, being hated and condemned beforehand. Justice seemed drowned in Christ’s blood, yet judgment reappears harsher—a judgment without justice, hidden forever. Justice is now passive, a gift transmitted from God to the elect. This doctrine, more severely formulated by Protestants, is no less that of the Catholic world as acknowledged by the Council of Trent: if grace were not gratuitous it would be righteousness, not grace. This is the groundwork of Christianity; beyond it there is philosophy but no religion.
The Third Estate Forces the Question of Union
Rabaud de Saint-Etienne, a Protestant deputy from Nîmes and son of the old martyr of the Cévennes, proposed a conference to bring the orders together in mid-May. Chapelier wanted something sharper: a notification of the Third Estate’s astonishment at the other orders’ absence, asserting that deputies must judge the validity of all titles, and that once the States-General opened there were no deputies of order or province, only representatives of the nation. Rabaud’s moderate motion carried, but the conferences only embittered things. On May 27 Mirabeau renewed a motion to detach the clergy from the nobility, inviting them to union “in the name of the God of peace.” Many curés waited impatiently to unite; the prelates obtained a delay, then ran to the castle and the Polignac party, and through the queen procured a royal letter declaring the king desired conferences resumed before the keeper of the seals and a royal commission—blocking the clergy’s union and making the king visibly the agent of the privileged orders. Mirabeau called the letter an unworthy snare: accept it and the king could quash the question; refuse it alone and the Third bore the odium. He advised appearing duped—accepting while protesting by an address.
The Failure of Conciliation and the Famine
Necker then appealed to sentiment, advising each order to entrust the validity of its returns to the others, with the king judging differences. The clergy accepted; the nobility, led by the Polignac committee, refused, declaring deliberation by orders and each order’s veto constituent principles of the monarchy. Cazalès and d’Eprémesnil helped reject this last means of salvation on June 6. A month was lost amid famine; starving gangs roamed, killing and burning; brigands were said to be paid by the court, which blamed the Duke of Orleans. A prelate produced a lump of black bread as “the bread of the peasant,” proposing a commission on food—a snare to consecrate the separation of orders. Obscure deputies Populus and Robespierre forcefully invited the clergy to the common hall. The king told the clergy’s president he would welcome a commission of the States-General.
“Let Us Cut the Cable”: The National Assembly Proclaimed
On June 10 Sieyès said, “Let us cut the cable; it is time,” proposing a last summons in judiciary form, default being sentence for non-appearance. Only three, then seven, then ten clergy joined. On June 15 Boissy d’Anglas uttered “National Assembly” only to set it aside. The Assembly adopted “Communes”; on the 16th Sieyès demanded the title “Assembly of the known and acknowledged representatives of the French nation.” Legendre and Galand proposed constituting as National Assembly; Sieyès proposed the title. Mirabeau, a royalist at heart, opposed, wanting the king’s veto, preferring Constantinople to France without it. Mounier proposed “Representatives of the Major part of the Nation”; Mirabeau preferred “Representatives of the French People”; Target and Thouret exposed the equivocation; Malouet’s acceptance of “people” revealed it. Camus replied that the veto cannot prevent truth from being one. Mirabeau’s speech met thunders of indignation. At nine in the evening votes were taken; over four hundred deputies favored constituting that night, about a hundred against; tumult prevented calling names; a man seized Malouet by the collar. After midnight the vote was postponed. Next morning the king’s letter arrived; the Assembly refused it and forbade its president to leave before voting. Sieyès’s motion won 491 to 90; the Assembly was proclaimed National Assembly; deputies swore the oath standing with raised hands before four thousand spectators. It asserted the right of taxation, declaring imposts collected provisionally till the Assembly’s separation, guaranteed the public debt, used royal formulas (“The Assembly intends and decrees”), and concerned itself with subsistence.
The Tennis-Court and the Royal Session
Necker was astonished; he received identical advice from the royalist Bertrand de Molleville and the republican Durovray: the king should annul the decree, deprive the Assembly of its name, command union of orders, and declare himself Provisional Legislator. On the evening of the 17th Cardinal de Larochefoucauld and the Archbishop of Paris hastened to Marly; on the 19th the curés transferred the majority of their order to the Third; the cardinal and archbishop cried “Religion is ruined!” and the Parliament people “The monarchy is lost, unless the States be dissolved.” Necker’s project was agreed at the council of Friday June 19, but a royal servant whispered to the king, who rose; Montmorin said the queen alone could have interrupted the Council of State; the princes had circumvented her. The king ordered the hall shut next day, pretext being preparations for a royal meeting. The president learned by chance; young Brésé, master of ceremonies, sent a note; Bailly protested at the door; young members threatened to break it open; the officer ordered soldiers to arm. Guillotin moved to repair to the Tennis-court; they remained standing all day. In the Tennis-court all were royalist; Mounier proposed the declaration that wherever forced to unite there was the National Assembly, and the oath never to separate till the constitution was established. Bailly took the oath first, loudly; shouts of Vive le Roi arose. At Marly Necker contended with the Parliament people, who converted his project into a simple coup d’état; the royal meeting was postponed to Tuesday.
“Only by Bayonets”: The King’s Session and the Assembly’s Resistance
The king departed, followed by the nobility and clergy. The commons remained seated, calm and silent. The master of ceremonies entered and told the president in a low tone that he had heard the king’s order. The president replied that the Assembly had adjourned after the royal meeting and could not be dismissed until it had deliberated, adding that the assembled nation could not receive orders. Mirabeau took up this sentence, addressing the master of ceremonies with powerful voice and terrible dignity: he said they had heard the intentions suggested to the king, and told Brésé that he could never be the king’s organ to the National Assembly, had neither place, voice, nor right to speak there, and was not a man to remind them of the king’s discourse; he should tell those who sent him that the Assembly was there by the will of the people and could be driven thence only by bayonets. Brésé was disconcerted and thunderstruck, felt the power of that new royalty, and retired walking backwards as was the custom before the king.
The court had imagined another way to disperse the commons—merely to have the hall dismantled and the amphitheatre and king’s estrade demolished. Workmen entered, but at one word from the president they stopped, laid down their tools, contemplated the Assembly with admiration, and became respectful auditors. Camus laid down forcibly that the sitting was but a ministerial act and the Assembly persisted in its decrees. Barnave, the young member for Dauphiny, said: “
The Hôtel de Ville and the Killing of Foulon
The old legal order, hollowed out by its own formation, now stood with only Bailly as mayor and Lafayette commanding a national guard barely organised, facing a necessity it could not evade. Word came almost at once that Berthier had been arrested at Compiègne and that Foulon was being brought back. For Berthier the authorities took a bold responsibility, telling the people of Compiègne there was no cause to hold him; the answer came back that he would surely be killed there and could only be saved by carrying him to Paris. For Foulon it was decided that delinquents of his kind should henceforth be lodged in the Abbaye, over whose door would be inscribed: prisoners entrusted to the care of the nation. That general measure, taken for one man’s sake, secured the ex-counsellor a trial by his friends and colleagues, the ancient magistrates, the only judges of the time.
Keen-sighted men watched all this closely—attorneys and the Basoche, annuitants who hated the minister of bankruptcy, holders of public securities ruined by the fall in the funds. An attorney filed an indictment against Berthier over his deposits of guns; the Basoche maintained he had removed one of those deposits with the abbess of Montmartre and obliged a search. La Grève filled with men strangers to the people, of decent exterior, some very well dressed; the Exchange itself was at La Grève. People came to the Hôtel de Ville to denounce Beaumarchais, another financier, who had stolen papers from the Bastille; they ordered them taken back. It was thought the poor might be kept silent by filling their mouths, and the price of bread was lowered: at a sacrifice of thirty thousand francs a day it was fixed at thirteen sous and a half the four pounds.
The multitude did not vociferate the less. At two, Bailly descended; all demanded justice. He expounded the principles and made some impression on those within hearing; others shouted hang, hang him. Bailly prudently withdrew and shut himself in the Bureau des Subsistances. The guard was strong, he said, but Lafayette, relying on his ascendancy, had the imprudence to lessen it. The crowd was in a terrible fever of uneasiness lest Foulon escape. He was shown at a window; nevertheless they broke open the doors, and it became necessary to place him in a chair in front of the bureau, in the great hall of Saint-Jean. There they began to preach again, to expound the principles, that he must be judged. Judged instantly, and hung, cried the crowd. They appointed judges, among others two curés, who refused. Make room for M. de Lafayette. He arrived, spoke in his turn, avowed that Foulon was a villain, but said it was necessary to discover his accomplices: let him be conducted to the Abbaye. The front ranks who heard him consented; not so the others. You are joking, exclaimed a well-dressed man, does it require time to judge a man who has been judged these thirty years? A shout was heard and a new crowd rushed in; some said it was the faubourg, others the Palais Royal. Foulon was carried off and dragged to the lamp opposite; they made him demand pardon of the nation, then hoisted him. The rope broke twice; they persisted and went for a new one. At length, having hung him, they chopped off his head and carried it through Paris.
Berthier’s Procession and Trial
Meanwhile Berthier had just arrived by the Porte Saint-Martin through the most frightful mob ever seen; he had been followed for twenty leagues. He sat in a cabriolet whose top they had broken to pieces in order to see him. Beside him sat an elector, Etienne de la Rivière, who was twenty times near being killed defending him and shielding him with his body. A furious mob danced on before him; others flung black bread into the carriage: take that, brigand, that is the bread you made us eat. What had exasperated the whole population around Paris was that amid the scarcity the numerous caraby collected by Berthier and Foulon had destroyed or eaten a great quantity of young green corn. The havoc was attributed to the intendant’s orders, to his firm resolve to prevent any crop and starve the people. To adorn that horrible procession of death they carried before him, as in a Roman triumph, inscriptions to his glory: he has robbed the king and France, devoured the substance of the people, been the slave of the rich and the tyrant of the poor, drunk the blood of the widow and the orphan, cheated the king, betrayed his country.
At the fountain Maubuée they had the barbarity to show him Foulon’s head, livid, the mouth full of hay. At that sight his eyes glazed; he smiled a ghastly smile. They forced Bailly at the Hôtel de Ville to take his examination. Berthier alleged superior orders; the minister was his father-in-law, it was the same person. And if the hall of Saint-Jean was inclined to listen a little, La Grève neither listened nor heard.
The Assembly After August 4
The court failed in the affair of the Presidency; Thouret, alarmed by popular exasperation and the menaces of Paris, retired. Malouet made a third, more serious royalist attempt: he proposed vast relief-and-work bureaus, funded first by charitable establishments, then by a general tax and an unlimited loan. This would give the king a threefold fund and make him king of famine, leader of the poor against the Assembly—restoring him to a more absolute throne. To reduce alarm Malouet lowered the number of poor to four hundred thousand, evidently false. Even in failure he won his party the glory of charity, and proposed consulting chambers of commerce and manufacturing towns to augment work and wages. The clergy’s earlier hypocritical display of black bread to the Third Estate was now imitated.
To destroy feudal rights, castles had been burned; great proprietors grew uneasy, seeing detested property as a burden. The nobles had made no campaigns except garrison evolutions and the Seven Years’ and American wars, yet were individually brave; the petty nobles of Vendée and Brittany showed themselves heroic. They were dispersed, isolated, and many secretly opposed the old feudal tyranny even while heirs to it.
The Night of August 4
The Duke d’Aiguillon, richest seigneur after the king, leader with Duport and Chapelier of the Breton Club, proposed permitting peasants to purchase exemption at a moderate price. Viscount de Noailles filched the honour of first proposing, demanding abolition without redemption of corvées and personal bondage. About two hundred deputies applauded. D’Aiguillon then declaimed violently against feudal tyranny—against himself. At eight in the evening, feudality abdicated after a thousand years. Le Guen de Kerengal, a Bas-Breton deputy, reproached the Assembly for not preventing the burning of castles and demanded an expiatory pile for infamous parchments. M.
What the Revolution Was Fighting Against
The book’s central claim is theological before it is political. Michelet argues that Christianity, by founding salvation on grace rather than justice—on faith alone rather than works of righteousness—undermined the very basis for human judgment. If God loves whom he pleases and damns whom he pleases, then earthly judges who claim to act in his name can only perform a terrible comedy: the church judges yet judges not, kills yet kills not, handing the culprit to another to burn while adding a prayer as if to intercede. From this contradiction Michelet derives the whole structure of the old order. Conquest becomes authorised because conquerors are the elect and the conquered the damned; monarchy governs for its favourites; the Bastille stands as the instrument of a rule answerable to no law. The Revolution, in his account, is nothing but the tardy reaction of justice against the government of favour and the religion of grace.
The People’s Long Disillusionment
Michelet traces how the people’s faith migrated and failed. They loved their lords and clergy with an artless confidence, calling themselves the baron’s man or the serf of a famous monastery—but the chateau gate stood shut, the hearth cold, the lord at Versailles. The Church withdrew from the world, handed schools and hospitals to the laity, and when the State begged the clergy to pay their taxes in 1788, they answered that the people of France was not taxable at pleasure, invoking the people to excuse themselves from succouring the people. Faith then passed to the king, the Well-beloved of 1744, until ten years later the same people believed he took baths of children’s blood. Michelet marks those ten years as the crisis of the century: the dogma of regal incarnation perishes, and the sovereignty of the mind arises. The peasant carrying a bier in the forest of Sénart, asked what the man died of, answers “Hunger”—and Michelet reads that bier as the coffin of the ancient monarchy. The two saviours of the people, priest and king, had destroyed them beyond restoration.
Mirabeau and the Divided Assembly
The book’s human centre is the National Assembly itself, which Michelet calls ripe for dissolution almost from the moment of its birth: created before the Revolution, heterogeneous and confused like the ancien régime whence it sprang, it remained feudal even under Sieyès’s name for it, representing a few hundred thousand nobles and priests as much as the nation. Mirabeau embodies the discord of two principles in one man—royalist at heart, wanting the king’s veto, preferring Constantinople to France without it, yet carried by the rising Revolution he feared. What corrupted him more than money, Michelet writes, was fear of that young giant prevailing over him; from the fruitless struggle he was saved by death. Around him the court manoeuvres, the queen triumphs and says of the dauphin “I intrust him to the nobility,” and the king, told of the deputies remaining seated, answers in the tone of one tired to death: “Very well; leave them alone.”
Why the Book Still Matters
Michelet’s history endures less as a neutral record than as an interpretation with a thesis: that the Revolution was eminently pacific in principle, that its sword was the sword of peace drawn to deliver nations, and that the violence later mistaken for the Revolution itself was forced upon it by a conspiring world. He defends the fathers of the Revolution against those who would keep only Robespierre and Saint-Just, insisting that rejecting predecessors rejects those who gave the Revolution its hold on mankind. His insistence that liberty alone rendered fraternity possible—that the fraternity of death had to be abolished to found that of life—gives the book its moral architecture. Written by a historian who revisited the Tennis-court in 1846 and communed annually with the spirit of the Revolution, it remains a foundational expression of how the French came to understand the event that made them a nation.
