per se but to a cluster of occupations that had in common only what they were not: neither peasant nor laborer, these persons belonged to moneyed strata outside the nobility.36 They could be industrialists, merchants, shopkeepers, urban professionals. In fact, the typical bourgeois in eighteenth-century France belong to the last category, simply because of its growing importance in the political economy. Hence, it comes as no surprise that in the contemporary histories of the French Revolution, the leaders were often referred to as bourgeois, since the strata to which they belonged were typically subsumed under that banner.37
Given the task of this book, the French leadership’s middle-class origins is no small matter. Guha repeatedly castigates the Indian bourgeoisie for falling short of the boldness and revolutionary ardor of the “bourgeois” leaders of the French Revolution. Yet the Indian counterparts to the Jacobins, or delegates of the Third Estate more generally, are not the Birlas or Tatas. They are, rather, the middle-class elements of the Congress leadership. It is not semantic nitpicking to say that French predecessors to the Birlas simply did not exist in the late eighteenth century. In comparing the two groups—the French “bourgeoisie” and the Indian bourgeoisie—we are in fact looking at strata in two very different sets of social relations. The Indian bourgeoisie was a class that obtained its income and wealth by commanding the labor of others; the French groupings were either themselves the employees of others, or were independent producers. One group (the Indian) is, in the Marxian framework used by Guha, an exploiting class, while the other (the French) is not. It would therefore be quite astonishing if the Indian capitalists turned out to be as revolutionary as the French lawyers.
Even while the Third Estate was not itself a dominant class, it showed no inclination in the early weeks of the convention to overthrow the monarchy, much less unleash a social revolution. As noted earlier, its basic goals were to turn the absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy and to drastically scale back or even abolish the privileges granted to the nobility. Its agenda was thus primarily to increase the political and social space for its own advancement. In the initial weeks of the convention in the summer of 1789, these goals seemed to have been achieved. In June the Third assumed leadership of the three estates represented at Versailles, declaring the formation of the National Assembly. It was joined quickly by the clergy and a plurality of the noble delegates. The newly formed assembly quickly declared that it—not Louis—most directly represented the French nation and could not be dissolved without the nation’s consent. By so doing, it pronounced the death of the absolute monarchy. Once a significant segment of the nobility came over to the National Assembly, Louis had no choice but to concede defeat. In late June, he agreed to recognize the assembly, rescind unpopular taxes, and confer with the Estates-General on future taxation; he also promised freedom of the press and individual liberties.38 The delegates had achieved their goal. Absolutism was dead.
It is important to be clear, however, about what did not change in June 1789. Louis had expressly preserved seignorial rights, and so feudalism had not been abolished; basic liberties had been promised but not yet enumerated; more directly, there had been no extension of the franchise to the workers and peasants. Neither the abolition of feudalism nor the extension of democratic rights to subaltern classes had been demanded by the Third Estate. What they had demanded, and been granted, was greater rights for themselves. What they had garnered, therefore, was an elite pact, much as the English gentry had forged in the winter of 1640–1. And this, really, was all that the vast majority of delegates in the National Assembly had aspired to. There was no call to go further.
THE POLITICAL COALITION
What drove the events in France from being merely an elite pact to being a true revolution was, as in England, the combination of a recalcitrant monarch and the intervention of the popular classes. It was not, as Guha would have it, driven by elites reaching out to producers and soliciting their participation in a social mobilization. It was not, in other words, part of an elite hegemonic strategy, in Guha’s terms. Rather, the subaltern classes forced their concerns onto the elite project—a project that had been based largely on the exclusion of those interests. Further, the representatives of the Third Estate only reluctantly acted on popular demands for inclusion and reversed some of the central legislation as soon as threats from below subsided.
In late June 1789, Louis agreed to recognize the National Assembly as well as a battery of civil liberties. Within days, however, it became clear that this might well be only a temporary concession, as news reached the assembly that he had begun to amass thousands of troops outside Paris and Versailles. He seemed to be preparing a military strike to disperse the National Assembly. It was at this point that the popular classes intervened in Paris, most famously in the capture of the Bastille. France became engulfed in popular uprisings. In urban centers across the country, local committees quickly formed in defense of the National Assembly. Perhaps even more significant was the coalescence of this urban movement with a massive rural uprising that spread across much of the country.
The rural revolts did not come out of the blue. Episodic, though noticeable, unrest had been in evidence since 1775, driven at least in part by a squeeze exerted on the peasantry by landed proprietors.39 The uptick in peasant actions amounted to something of a counterattack against the seignorial regime, remarkably consistent in tempo. Peasant insurgency was further fueled by a failed harvest in 1788-9 and the inevitable deprivations that followed in its wake. Already in early 1789, before the Estates-General had met, peasant actions had begun to escalate, with demands not just for a reduction in seignorial dues but also for the opening of food stockpiles in lordly granaries. There was widespread suspicion that landed proprietors, both secular and ecclesiastical, were hoarding grain. By summer, rumors of grain hoarding mingled with fears of violent migrants and of aristocratic plots against the Third Estate.40 These rumors added yet more fuel to the fires of rural insurrection, and by late July 1789, much of France was gripped by a spiraling peasant revolt.
The immediate effect of the popular intervention was that it once again forced Louis to retreat. He hastily announced the withdrawal of the troops amassed outside Paris, thereby appearing to abdicate power to the National Assembly. The more fundamental consequence of the national uprising, however, was to impel the assembly to more radical measures. In the countryside, peasant actions had taken on an explicitly antiseignorial character, and the months of June and July saw something of a crescendo in the uprising.41 While the delegates to the assembly were overjoyed to have the revolution come to their rescue, their relief gave way to a deepening apprehension as news of the movement’s escalating radicalism surfaced. The initial response from most of the delegates was consternation, bordering on revulsion. But as the days went by and word of the movement’s episodic violence reached them, the apprehension turned to fear and panic.42 By early August, it seemed as though the mass movement might spin out of control.
Up to this point, more than a month after Louis XVI had conceded defeat, little had transpired in the National Assembly. Delegates had agreed in principle on the need for reform but drew back from crafting the needed legislation—partly because of the deep divisions between them and partly because of the sheer overwork of running the new regime. The exploding mass movement shook them out of their torpor. In a matter of days during the first half of August, the assembly issued two sets of declarations that seemed to dismantle the pillars of the social order: the abolition of feudalism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The first promised to dismantle the entire seignorial regime, and the other to incorporate the laboring classes into the political order.
What are we to make of the promulgation of these revolutionary decrees? Were they evidence of a bourgeoisie finally coming into its own and embracing its historic project, as Guha suggests? Apparently not. Recall that although the delegates were of privileged, moneyed origins, there was virtually no capitalist grouping in the National Assembly. Even if the delegates had come with a fully formed agenda to dismantle the feudal regime, it would be of limited relevance for Guha’s attempted parallels between the “bourgeois” representatives to the Estates-General and the Indian capitalist class. But even if we admit the possibility
