The Explosion of 1789 357
high official in the naval administration, refused to accept the royal peace offering,
and insisted on pursuing the plan for a new constitution according to the oath in
the Tennis Court.
The King now began to assemble troops around Versailles and Paris. The only
reasonable supposition was that he intended to disperse the recalcitrant assembly
and perhaps start over with new estates more carefully selected. A few soldiers could
easily have put the leaders under arrest and sent the others fleeing for home or into
exile. This was prevented by the violent mass upheaval which now took place.
Until July 1789 the revolution had been mainly an orderly process, an affair
largely of lawyers and writers, taking place in assemblies convened by the King
himself. It now became a popular movement, and the popular revolution, by in-
fecting the army, disarming the government, and disabling the nobility in the ulti-
mate strongholds of their own landed estates, made it possible for the National
Assembly to remain in existence, while at the same time forcing it in some ways to
go beyond what its boldest members had intended.
It is here that economic and demographic conditions must be brought into the
explanation of what occurred. Peasants had long objected to high taxes, to tithes,
to payments due to the owners of manors. Those who owned land wished to get rid
of encumbrances upon what they considered to be their own property. The landless
demanded the chance to work land on terms that would enable them to live. Prices
of agricultural products had been declining for more than a decade, so that the
burden of rents, dues, tithes, and taxes was heavier on the peasants; and by the
phenomenon known to French historians as the “feudal reaction,” the owners of
manorial rights—who might be nobles, church bodies, bourgeois, or even well-
to- do peasants—were attempting to maintain or enlarge their incomes by a more
exact collection of dues that had sometimes fallen into disuse. Conditions in the
mid- century had been more favorable to the bulk of the agricultural population, so
that unrest in the 1780’s was due not merely to poverty but to a sense of pauperiza-
tion. In addition, all western Europe in 1789 was in the grip of an economic de-
pression; trade was bad, so that there was much unemployment, not only in the
towns but also in the country, where many peasants gained part of their living by
industrial occupations. The harvest of 1788 had been disastrously bad, so that
bread was scarce. In the limited diet of the lower classes bread was a principal item,
and by the purely short- run fluctuation, due to shortage, its price was momentarily
higher than in almost a hundred years. Unemployment, poverty, restlessness, des-
peration, all were made abnormally explosive by the political situation. Poor as well
as rich had been stirred by the summoning of the Estates General, by the town and
village assemblies of March and April, by the news of the meeting of the Estates
in May and June. If the lower classes had no interest in a constitution, and cared
little for the disputes between nobility and bourgeoisie, they did expect the Estates
General to do something to relieve their own misery. Here again there was an air
of universal expectancy. It was easy to believe that good King Louis was sur-
rounded by evil advisers.
The whole Third Estate began to feel itself plotted against and betrayed. The
idea of an aristocratic conspiracy, as Professor Lefebvre has said, is a necessary key
to the understanding of the whole Revolution, not only in the days of the Terror