The French Revolution Turns Radical

The revolution in France, during the era of European enlightenment was not one that had its origin in the ideas of great thinkers or the writing of academics, this armed movement, at its core, was basically because the inhabitants of France, specifically the members of the Third Estate, were tired of the abuses of monarchy, nobility and clergy and demanded a change. But because they were not heard by the government, peasants and bourgeois took matters into their own hands and changing the course of the revolution to a more violent face.

Leopold II

William Frederick II

European monarchies feared the French example would destabilize their power and rule in their own countries. Monarchs like Leopold II the Holy Roman Emperor, who was the brother of Marie-Antoinette, and King Willian Frederick II of Prussia took the side of Louis XVI and promised him they would help restore his power in France with the Declaration of Pillnitz. But, little did this men know, King Louis had already planned, along with the French National Assembly, an attack on Austria (Part of the Holy Roman Empire) looking to gain control over the countries grain supply’s. This would be the downfall of the French monarchs rule in this way, France now had to worry not only about the revolt of its people, but also had to dedicate efforts in facing a war against both Austria and Prussia. 

On the domestic front, meanwhile, the political crisis took a radical turn when a group of insurgents led by the extremist Jacobins attacked the royal residence in Paris and arrested the king on August 10, 1792. The following month, amid a wave of violence in which Parisian insurrectionists massacred hundreds of accused counterrevolutionaries, the Legislative Assembly was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the French republic. On January 21, 1793, it sent King Louis XVI, condemned to death for high treason and crimes against the state, to the guillotine; his wife Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later.

The Jacobins

Officially called the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, the Jacobin Club in the period of Maximillien Robespierre embodied the most radical response to the revolutionary crisis; to defeat the forces of reaction, they found themselves compelled to take radical measures — including price controls, food seizures, and the period of tactical violence that would come to be known as the “Reign of Terror.” While in early periods the Jacobin Club had included more moderate actors, the radical wing that cohered around Robespierre — known as the Montagnards — ultimately became the dominant tendency within the Jacobins’ ranks.

Jacobins, were bourgeois who moved the stirngs of the Revolution

Politically, these Jacobins were radically different from the forces that held power in the earlier stages of the revolution — constitutional monarchists like Lafayette (who despised the Jacobins, calling them “a sect that infringes sovereignty and tyrannies citizens”). In fact the Jacobin Club — along with the networks of fraternal organizations that sprung up to disseminate revolutionary teachings — had been instrumental in producing the very  layers of radicalized working people who would later come to be known as the sans-cullottes. In the absence of political parties as we understand them today, the sans-culottes received their political education from revolutionary societies like the Jacobins, who produced newspapers and called gatherings where revolutionary propaganda was read aloud.

Above all else, the Jacobins were intensely concerned with translating the revolutionary fervor of 1789 into a durable and sustainable revolutionary society. They saw their role as to strengthen and deepen the radical ideals of the Revolution while protecting it from attack.

Who were the Sans-Cullotes?

They were the insurrectionary “movement of the laboring poor” who, in historian Eric Hobsbawm‘s words, “provided the main striking-force of the revolution.” Named for their lack of the distinguished breeches worn by elites, the sans-cullottes inhabited the political terrain of the street and the square as the bourgeois revolutionaries performed their political work in assembly halls and from within legislative bodies.

Sans-cullotte

Most fundamentally, the sans-culottes were concerned with establishing a system of direct, local democracy which could guarantee a consistent price of for vital provisions — the poor craved the same food security as the nobles, and resented the profound difference between the bread consumed by rich elites and the bread available to common laborers.

Often armed only with pikes — useful for parading the severed heads of food-hoarders or monarchists through the street, as was their habit — the sans-cullottes did more than just pose a grave threat to the old hierarchies of the monarchy. They also forced formal revolutionary bodies like the Legislative Assembly to adopt more radical positions to meet the expectations of the unsatisfied and insurgent poor.

Sans-cullotte is as sans-cullotte does. Constant confrontation with the privileged, often violently and in the street, demanding a world in which food is easily available and democracy simple and direct — this orientation, more than anything else, makes a sans-culotte.

Reign of Terror

Following the king’s execution, war with various European powers and intense divisions within the National Convention ushered the French Revolution into its most violent and turbulent phase. In June 1793, the Jacobins seized control of the National Convention from the more moderate Girondins and instituted a series of radical measures, including the establishment of a new calendar and the eradication of Christianity

The Reign of Terror was a period of 10 months of intense violence led by Robespierre’s Jacobins, during which the guillotine became the most potent political tool of expression, any suspected enemy of the revolution would face death. Though far fewer than the millions who lost their lives during the Napoleonic Wars, 17,000 people counter-revolutionaries as well as dissident thinkers within the revolution — were executed by the guillotine. Tens of thousands more were killed without trial or died in jail historian Timothy Tackett estimates a total death toll closer to 40,000.

Many of the killings were carried out under orders from Robespierre, who dominated the draconian Committee of Public Safety until his own execution on July 28, 1794. His death marked the beginning of the Thermidorian Reaction, a moderate phase in which the French people revolted against the Reign of Terror’s excesses.

The legacy of this period is still much debated. But it is hard to dispute that the terror emerged in response to the urgent need for political and military defense. The old figureheads of the ancien regime were more than mere symbols of opulence or historical tyranny; many were active antagonists of the revolution, working to dismantle its progress and assassinate its soldiers precisely at the time when the revolutionary transformation was most vulnerable.

French Revolution Ends: Napoleon’s Rise

Napoleon Bonaparte became the 

Emperor of France and extended 

French territory during the 19th 

century

On August 22, 1795, the National Convention, composed largely of Girondins (one of many political groups in France) who had survived the Reign of Terror, approved a new constitution that created France’s first bicameral legislature. Executive power would lie in the hands of a five-member Directory (Directoire) appointed by parliament. Royalists and Jacobins protested the new regime but were swiftly silenced by the army, now led by a young and successful general named Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Directory’s four years in power were riddled with financial crises, popular discontent, inefficiency and, above all, political corruption. By the late 1790s, the directors relied almost entirely on the military to maintain their authority and had ceded much of their power to the generals in the field. On November 9, 1799, as frustration with their leadership reached a fever pitch, Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “first consul.” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, in which France would come to dominate much of continental Europe.

Please, watch the following video:

Sources:

https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution Consulted on October 24, 2018

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/french-revolution-bastille-day-guide-jacobins-terror-bonaparte/ Consulted on October 24, 2018

The French Revolution Begins 1789

Aristocratic Revolt

Lithography describing the relationship
between the Three French Social States

The Revolution took shape in France when the controller general of finances, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, arranged the summoning of an assembly of “notables” (prelates, great noblemen, and a few representatives of the bourgeoisie) in February 1787 to propose reforms designed to eliminate the budget deficit by increasing the taxation of the privileged classes. The assembly refused to take responsibility for the reforms and suggested the calling of the Estates-General, which represented the clergy, the aristocracy, and the Third Estate (the commoners) and which had not met since 1614. The efforts made by Calonne’s successors to enforce fiscal reforms in spite of resistance by the privileged classes led to the so-called revolt of the “aristocratic bodies,” notably that of the parlements (the most important courts of justice), whose powers were curtailed by the edict of May 1788.

During the spring and summer of 1788, there was unrest among the populace in Paris, Grenoble, Dijon, Toulouse, Pau, and Rennes. The king, Louis XVI, had to yield. He reappointed reform-minded Jacques Necker as the finance minister and promised to convene the Estates-General on May 5, 1789. He also, in practice, granted freedom of the press, and France was flooded with pamphlets addressing the reconstruction of the state. The elections to the Estates-General, held between January and April 1789, coincided with further disturbances, as the harvest of 1788 had been a bad one. There were practically no exclusions from the voting; and the electors drew up cahiers de doléances, which listed their grievances and hopes. They elected 600 deputies for the Third Estate, 300 for the nobility, and 300 for the clergy.

Events of 1789

The Three Estates conformed
The new National Constituent Assembly

The Estates-General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789. They were immediately divided over a fundamental issue: should they vote by head, giving the advantage to the Third Estate, or by estate, in which case the two privileged orders of the realm might outvote the third? On June 17 the bitter struggle over this legal issue finally drove the deputies of the Third Estate to declare themselves the National Assembly; they threatened to proceed, if necessary, without the other two orders. They were supported by many of the parish priests, who outnumbered the aristocratic upper clergy among the church’s deputies. When royal officials locked the deputies out of their regular meeting hall on June 20, they occupied the king’s indoor tennis court (Jeu de Paume) and swore an oath not to disperse until they had given France a new constitution.  The king grudgingly gave in and urged the nobles and the remaining clergy to join the assembly, which took the official title of National Constituent Assembly on July 9; at the same time, however, he began gathering troops to dissolve it.

These two months of prevarication (dishonesty) at a time when the problem of maintaining food supplies had reached its climax infuriated the towns and the provinces. Rumors of an “aristocratic conspiracy” by the king and the privileged to overthrow the Third Estate led to the Great Fear of July 1789, when the peasants were nearly panic-stricken. The gathering of troops around Paris and the dismissal of Necker provoked insurrection in the capital. On July 14, 1789, the Parisian crowd seized the Bastille, a symbol of royal tyranny. Again the king had to yield; visiting Paris, he showed his recognition of the sovereignty of the people by wearing the tricolour cockade (a rosette, knot of ribbon, etc., usually worn on the hat as part of a uniform, as a badge of office, or the like).

Storming of La Bastille

Lithography of a Angry mob attacking La Bastille

On July 14^th, 1789, a state prison on the east side of Paris, known as the Bastille, was attacked by an angry and aggressive mob. The prison had become a symbol of the monarchy’s dictatorial rule, and the event became one of the defining moments in the Revolution that followed. A medieval fortress, the Bastille’s eight 30-metre-high towers, dominated the Parisian skyline. When the prison was attacked it actually held only seven prisoners, but the mob had not gathered for them: it had come to demand the huge ammunition stores held within the prison walls. When the prison governor refused to comply, the mob charged and, after a violent battle, eventually took hold of the building. The governor was seized and killed, his head carried round the streets on a spike. The storming of the Bastille symbolically marked the beginning of the French Revolution, in which the monarchy was overthrown and a republic set up based on the ideas of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ (the French for liberty, equality and brotherhood). In France, the ‘storming of the Bastille’ is still celebrated each year by a national holiday.

In the provinces, the Great Fear of July led the peasants to rise against their lords. The nobles and the bourgeois now took fright. The National Constituent Assembly could see only one way to check the peasants; on the night of August 4, 1789, it decreed the abolition of the feudal regime and of the tithe (Sometimes tithes. the tenth part of agricultural produce or personal income set apart as an offering to God or for works of mercy, or the same amount regarded as an obligation or tax for the support of the church, priesthood, or the like). Then on August 26 it introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming liberty, equality, the inviolability of property, and the right to resist oppression. The decrees of August 4 and the Declaration were such innovations that the king refused to sanction them. The Parisians rose again and on October 5 marched to Versailles.

Women’s March of 1789

The Women's March on Versailles, which took place in October 1789, is often credited with forcing the royal court and family to move from the traditional seat of government in Versailles to Paris, a major and early turning point in the French Revolution. In May of 1789, the Estates-General began to consider reforms, and in July, the Bastille was stormed. A month later, in August, feudalism and many of the privileges of the nobility and royalty were abolished with the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” modeled on America’s Declaration of Independence and seen as a precursor to forming a new constitution. It was clear that major upheaval was underway in France.

In some ways, this meant that hopes were high among the French for a successful change in government, but there was reason for despair or fear as well. Calls for more radical action were increasing, and many nobles and those who were not French nationals left France, fearing for their fortunes or even their lives. Because of poor harvests for several years, grain was scarce, and the price of bread in Paris had increased beyond the ability of many of the poorer residents to buy bread. Sellers also were anxious about the shrinking market for their goods. These uncertainties added to a general anxiety.

This combination of a bread shortage and high prices angered many French women, who relied on bread sales to make a living. On October 5, one young woman began beating a drum at the market in eastern Paris. More and more women began to gather around her and, before long, a group of them were marching through Paris, gathering a larger crowd as they stormed through the streets. Initially demanding bread, they shortly began, possibly with the involvement of radicals who had joined in the march, to demand arms as well.

By the time the marchers arrived at the city hall in Paris, they numbered somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand. They were armed with kitchen knives and many other simple weapons, with some carrying muskets and swords. They seized more weapons at city hall, and also seized the food that they could find there. But they were not satisfied with some food for the day. They wanted the situation of food scarcity to end.

Attempts to calm the march

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

Stanislas-Marie Maillard, who had been a captain and national guardsman and helped attack the Bastille in July, had joined the crowd. He was well known as a leader among the market women, and is credited with discouraging marchers from burning down the city hall or any other buildings. The Marquis de Lafayette, meanwhile, was trying to assemble the National Guardsmen, who were sympathetic to the marchers. He led some 15,000 troops and a few thousand civilians to Versailles, to help guide and protect the women marchers, and, he hoped, keep the crowd from turning into an uncontrollable mob.

March to Versailles

A new goal began to form among marchers: to bring the king, Louis XVI, back to Paris where he would be responsible to the people, and to the reforms that had begun to be passed earlier. Thus, they would march to the Palace of Versailles and demand that the king respond. When the marchers reached Versailles, after a walk in driving rain, they experienced some confusion. Lafayette and Maillard convinced the king to announce his support for the Declaration and the August changes passed in the Assembly. But the crowd did not trust that his queen, Marie Antoinette, would not talk him out of this, as she was known by then to oppose the reforms. Some of the crowd returned to Paris, but most remained in Versailles. Early the next morning, a small group invaded the palace, attempting to find the queen’s rooms. At least two guards were killed, and their heads raised on pikes, before the fighting in the palace calmed.

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France

When the king was finally convinced by Lafayette to appear before the crowd, he was surprised to be greeted by the traditional “Vive le Roi!” The crowd then called for the queen, who emerged with two of her children. Some in the crowd called for the children to be removed, and there was fear that the crowd intended to kill the queen. The queen stayed present, and the crowd was apparently moved by her courage and calm. Some even chanted “Vive la Reine!”. The crowd now numbered around sixty thousand, and they accompanied the royal family back to Paris, where the king and queen and their court took up residence at the Tuileries Palace. They ended the march on October 7. Two weeks later, the National Assembly also moved to Paris.

Importance of the March

The march became a rallying point through the next stages of the Revolution. Lafayette eventually attempted to leave France, as many thought he’d been too soft on the royal family; he was imprisoned and only released by Napoleon in 1797. Maillard remained a hero, but died in 1794, only 31 years old. The king moving to Paris, and being forced to support the reforms, was a major turning point in the French Revolution. The marchers’ invasion of the palace removed all doubt that the monarchy was subject to the will of the people, and was a major defeat for the Ancien Régime. The women who initiated the march were heroines, called “Mothers of the Nation” in the Republican propaganda that followed.

Sources:

https://www.thoughtco.com/womens-march-on-versailles-3529107 consulted October 22, 2018

http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item106472.html Consulted October 22, 2018.

The French Revolution

1787-1789

French Revolution, also called Revolution of 1789, the revolutionary movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and reached its first climax there in 1789. Hence the conventional term “Revolution of 1789,” denoting the end of the ancien régime in France and serving also to distinguish that event from the later French revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

Origins of the French Revolution

The French Revolution had general causes common to all the revolutions of the West at the end of the 18th century and particular causes that explain why it was by far the most violent and the most universally significant of these revolutions. The first of the general causes was the social structure of the West. The feudal regime had been weakened step-by-step and had already disappeared in parts of Europe. The increasingly numerous and prosperous elite of wealthy commoners—merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, often called the bourgeoisie—aspired to gain positions of political power in those countries where it did not already possess it. The peasants, many of whom owned land, had attained an improved standard of living and education and wanted to get rid of the last vestiges of feudalism so as to acquire the full rights of landowners and to be free to increase their holdings. Furthermore, from about 1730, higher standards of living had reduced the mortality rate among adults considerably. This, together with other factors, had led to an increase in the population of Europe unprecedented for several centuries: it doubled between 1715 and 1800. For France, which with 26 million inhabitants in 1789 was the most populated country of Europe, the problem was most acute.

A larger population created a greater demand for food and consumer goods. The discovery of new gold mines in Brazil had led to a general rise in prices throughout the West from about 1730, indicating a prosperous economic situation. 

The Ideas of the Enlightenment had a deep impact in
the French academic circle

From about 1770, this trend slackened, and economic crises, provoking alarm and even revolt, became frequent. Arguments for social reform began to be advanced. The philosophes—intellectuals whose writings inspired these arguments—were certainly influenced by 17th-century theorists such as Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, but they came to very different conclusions about political, social, and economic matters. A revolution seemed necessary to apply the ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Rousseau. This Enlightenment was spread among the educated classes by the many “societies of thought” that were founded at that time: masonic lodges, agricultural societies, and reading rooms.

It is uncertain, however, whether revolution would have come without the added presence of a political crisis. Faced with the heavy expenditure that the wars of the 18th century entailed, the rulers of Europe sought to raise money by taxing the nobles and clergy, who in most countries had hitherto (until this time) been exempt of paying. To justify this, the rulers likewise invoked the arguments of advanced thinkers by adopting the role of “enlightened despots”. 

French Aristocrat

This provoked reaction throughout Europe from the privileged bodies, diets, and estates. In North America this backlash caused the American Revolution, which began with the refusal to pay a tax imposed by the king of Great Britain. Monarchs tried to stop this reaction of the aristocracy, and both rulers and the privileged classes sought allies among the non-privileged bourgeois and the peasants.

Although scholarly debate continues about the exact causes of the Revolution, the following reasons are commonly adduced: (1) the bourgeoisie resented its exclusion from political power and positions of honor; (2) the peasants were acutely (intensely) aware of their situation and were less and less willing to support the anachronistic and burdensome feudal system; (3) the philosophes had been read more widely in France than anywhere else; (4) French participation in the American Revolution had driven the government to the brink of bankruptcy; (5) France was the most populous country in Europe, and crop failures in much of the country in 1788, coming on top of a long period of economic difficulties, compounded existing restlessness; and 

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, kings of France, 1789

(6) the French monarchy, no longer seen as divinely ordained, was unable to adapt to the political and social pressures that were being exerted on it.

Source:

https://www.britannica.com/event/French-Revolution/Aristocratic-revolt-1787-89, consulted on october 17th, 2018.

From Absolutism to Liberalism

Enlightened Thought and its Transformative Effect

What's the Enlightenment?

Also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith. Using the power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Voltaire questioned accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation, and religious tolerance throughout Europe and the Americas. Many consider the Enlightenment a major turning point in Western civilization, an age of light replacing an age of darkness.

The diffusion of the Illustrated thought

In the eighteenth century, the spread of knowledge was much slower than now, there were no computers or internet for the intellectuals of the time to share and consult information. the books, gazettes and newspapers were their main link, but they had a very limited scope, since the majority of the population was illiterate (they could not read or write), for that reason, the enlightened thinkers tried to get their ideas to a larger public, through different means and with the support of money from public funds (government) as well as private funds (bourgeois). They emphasized the scientific, literary or artistic societies and the academies, that is to say, the aristocrats and the bourgeois. They met to discuss the latest studies, works or research of their contemporaries.

One of the ways in which the thinkers of the Enlightenment managed to spread their ideas to that public they longed for, was through the Encyclopedia or Reasoned dictionary of science, arts and crafts, published in 1751 and 1772. In this monumental work, the enlightened ones sought to make a systematic synthesis of all human knowledge.

The compilation of so much information would prove to be a titanic task, but the project directors Denis Diderot and Jean D'Alambert, devoted 20 years to its elaboration. The encyclopedia was made up of 28 volumes. And in addition to the two directors, more than 100 men of science and letters of the 18th century participated. Why did they do it? Because they wanted to lay the foundations to transform European society.

                                                              Criticisms of the Old Regime and Absolutism

It is very likely that among the thinkers of the 18th century there were differences in their ideologies, but one feature that all the enlightened shared was the criticism of the predominant political regime during the 17th century in Europe, known as Ancient Regime. That is why, in its place, they proposed to establish a new model of political and social organization based on the principles of freedom and equality. They criticized absolutism and refuted the established idea that all the power of government resided in the figure of the monarch, who had been chosen by God as ruler through the divine right of kings.

A clear example of this criticism was manifested in the works of Montesquieu (1689-1755) who advocated a division of powers (legislative, executive and judicial) that limited the power of kings, with special emphasis on the judicial power being totally independent against the other two.

Rousseau (1712-1778), for his part, defended the need for the establishment of a Social Contract between the governed and the rulers, which guaranteed the defense of the basic rights of each individual, as Locke had previously proposed. He also introduced the principle of Popular Sovereignty,  which established that power emanates from the consent of the governed expressed freely by means of the act of voting.

The enlightened thinkers defended several other principles that for the time had a revolutionary effect on the European society of the 18th century and that still today are a fundamental part of current democracies.

Perhaps the man who had the greatest impact with his ideas was Jena-Marie Aroute, better known as Voltaire (1694-1778). An ingenious and mocking man, he showed the weakness of the arguments of those who still defended the absolutist regime. Voltaire was characterized by his social and political criticism during the reign of Louis XV. His irony, with which he always attacked the French nobility, attracted a large number of artists, intellectuals and bourgeois.

Among his attacks stand out those he did against the Church because of its dogmatic nature, its obstruction of knowledge and the inequality it caused in society. In fact, the need to separate the interests and beliefs of the Church from those of the State, a principle known as Laicism, was another common element among the enlightened thinkers. Likewise, these intellectuals firmly opposed to the establishment of a stratified society that was conformed by closed groups (Nobility, Clergy and the Third State) to which it was acceded only by birth, independently of the economic level.

In this ancient model, the relationship between subjects and kings, or between subjects only, was based on inequality, since the obligations and rights varied depending on the social class level to which each individual belonged.

The enlightened defended, instead, equality of origin, social mobility and that individuals could stand out based on their value and intelligence.

Thus, they proclaimed that no one could inherit or enjoy honor, prestige or privileges in the name of their ancestors. This questioned the origin of the monarchical power through the divine right of kings, theory defended by thinkers like Jacques Bossuet (1627-1704). These theories had constituted the justification of absolutism as a model of government, since under the premise of the divine right of kings, they were the representatives of God and had no necessity of justifying their decisions and acts before anyone.

Liberalism

By 1750, enlightened thought had evolved, incorporating new ideas and was enriched by proposals from different fields of knowledge. The philosophical approaches of the Enlightenment became part of a broader and more complex doctrine known as liberalism, which represented the political and economic interests of the bourgeoisie, its main driving force. In politics, liberalism was characterized by the defense of individual freedom, legal equality among citizens, the division of powers, secularism, private property, suffrage (vote) and parliamentary representation. It was precisely this political tendency that was responsible for the great revolutions of the 18th century: the independence of the Thirteen Colonies and the French Revolution as examples.

Enlightened despotism

The illustration traveled outside of France and crossed the borders of the entire European continent, also reaching some American colonies, including New Spain and the English colonies in North America, where they were well received. Its influence was felt in the European courts and had special reception among some kings who were aware that absolutist policies were unable to solve the economic and social problems that were generated within the kingdoms.

Conscious that the possible social revolts would jeopardize the survival of the absolute monarchy, the kings were forced to adopt a series of reforms that, at least in appearance, modified the situation and would reassure the bourgeoisie and the rest of the population. Most of these reforms were based on enlightened ideals and constituted a movement known as enlightened despotism. This political doctrine, of a reformist nature, sought to establish a monarchical system in which society should be organized and led in a scientific manner; that is, that the king should have decisions guided by reason and not by ancient precepts and customs such as divine right. Many monarchs adopted these reforms and promoted education and development of science within their nations. This gave origin to the creation of many great academies in the 18th century.

Although most of the absolutist reforms of government remained, officials and bureaucrats began to call themselves state servants and said to work for the public good and to improve the living conditions of the communities, so that everyone could reach the goal, happiness. The actions of the enlightened despots were effectively reforming, although the communities did not participate in the political decision making and were never consulted. In reality, the monarchical authorities only served their own interests. Therefore, the illustrated despotism was summarized in the following formula: "Everything for the people, but without the people".

Friedrich of Prussia, Louis XV of France, Charles III of Spain and Catherine the Great of Russia, were some of the main exponents of this movement.

Many of them acted as patrons and protectors of men of science, philosophers or writers and artists, whose company disputed and offered them attractive economic conditions and high positions at the head of a scientific institute or academy, such as the French academy.

Class society in the Old Regime, Humanism and Renaissance

Stratified Society in the Old Regime

A class society is one organized in levels. In the Old Regime these constituted closed groups that were accessed mainly by birth. Although there could be some small possibility of transfer from one group to another (merit-based ennoblement, purchase of noble titles, etc.), what characterized that society were its stability. Unlike the capitalist system, in which we live in, that is divided into groups according to their wealth and, therefore, more variable and dynamic, the social classes in this social organization of the Old Regime was almost immutable (did not change).

Legally, it was unequal. Each one of the people who composed had or not privileges, according to its place inside of the stratified structure of the society. The privileges consisted in the exemption of obligations ( payment of taxes) and the right to exclusive advantages. There was a privileged class that included the nobility and the clergy and another non-privileged that  was compassed by: bourgeois, artisans, peasants and marginal groups.The privileged class was accessed (except in the case of the clergy) by birth or by special concession of the monarch. But, from the 17^th century, it became more common for bourgeois individuals to achieve ennoblement by buying titles from monarchs.

Social stratification:

Nobility

Clergy

Bourgeois

Peasants