Bias in the Coming of the French Revolution

Written for a broad, general audience—without footnotes, a bibliography, or other formalities—The Coming of the French Revolution still holds a persuasive power over the reader. Georges Lefebvre wrote The Coming of the French Revolution in 1939, carefully dividing the story into six parts. The first four are organized around four acts, each associated with the four major groups in France—the “Aristocratic Revolution,” the “Bourgeois Revolution,” the “Popular Revolution,” and the “Peasant Revolution.” Part V examines the acts of the National Assembly to abolish feudalism and write Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and Part VI presents the “October Days” (xv-xvii).

Hidden under the book’s seemingly-simple construction are many facts and events tainted by Lefebvre’s own view of the Revolution. Lefebvre is careful to weave his own ideas and beliefs into the sea of facts, but where do these biases come from? The timing of the release itself and the effect Lefebvre hoped the book would have on the public are one example of his bias. A few important omissions also alter the perspective of the book. Most of the biases however, lay in the influences of Lefebvre’s youth, especially Marxism.

As a Marxist, Lefebvre shows particular attention to the material conditions of the peoples’ lives and how these conditions affect the social relations among people. This idea of social relations is what Lefebvre sees as the crucial cause of the Revolution: the conflict between the long-standing aristocracy—with their exclusion from political power but still-existing seat at the top of the social hierarchy due merely to birth—and the newly-forming bourgeoisie—who held economic power through supplying money to the monarchy but were continuously excluded from the legal structure (1-2). “Such a discrepancy never lasts forever” (2) and the Revolution would bring about the transformation to restore “harmony between fact and law” (2). The battle between the economic and legal powers started the Revolution, but it would take the urban workers and peasants to bring about the true meaning of liberty and equality for all.

Despite the idea that the bourgeoisie was working “for the good of humanity” (48), the even lower peasants and urban workers “could not expect to win the same immediate advantages as the �notables’ from a victory of the Third Estate” (97). Due to food shortages and rising prices, rumors soon spread through the lower class of the aristocracy hoarding food and holding back grain “in order to crush the Third Estate…not merely to prevent [it] from liberating itself but to punish it by pillage and massacre” (106-107). Lefebvre sees these ideas among the lower class as obvious reasons for revolt. According to Lefebvre, if the clergy and nobility were enjoying tax exemptions, merely because of their birth into a higher social order, while the peasants suffered under the “crushing weight” (140) of manorial demands, encroachment of rights, and excessive taxes, Revolution was necessary by any means to bring emancipation and enlightenment to the French.

Aside from expressing his own views through the events of the Revolution, Lefebvre also wrote this book in response to some events in France in the late 1930’s and in hopes of inspiring current generations to protect the values of the Revolution and fight for the cause of liberty (xix). Lefebvre stresses the unity of the Third estate against the other two estates, especially at the Oath of the Tennis Court when “almost all…were united by a personal danger in a common resolution to