French Revolution
- For the animated short, see French Revolution (Rob Zombie).
- "Charles Dorian: "Old... Connor and his Assassins... The American Revolution undid your Templar business."
Shay Cormac: "Then perhaps we shall start a revolution of our own." - ―Last conversation of Charles Dorian, Versailles, 1776
The French Revolution was a period of far-reaching social and political upheaval in France that began in 1789 and ended in 1799 with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte. During this period, French citizens razed and redesigned the country's political landscape, uprooting centuries-old institutions such as absolute monarchy and the feudal system. Like the American Revolution before it, the French Revolution was influenced by Enlightenment ideals, particularly the concepts of popular sovereignty and inalienable rights. Although it failed to achieve all of its goals and at times degenerated into a chaotic bloodbath, the movement played a critical role in shaping modern nations by showing the world the power inherent in the will of the people.
The Revolution was orchestrated in part by the radical faction of the Parisian Rite of the Templar Order led by François-Thomas Germain, a Sage, a reincarnation of the Isu Aita, who wanted to achieve the Great Work of Jacques de Molay, another Sage and Grand Master of the Templar Order who was executed by the King Philip IV of France. Germain profited of the Revolution to reform the Templar Order and destroy the French monarchy, avenging de Molay's death and shaping a new society to be control by the Templars.
Prelude to the Revolution
The conception of the Revolution began at the end of the 18th century, when François-Thomas Germain, a silversmith and a member of the Templar Order in Paris, was haunted by visions which led him to the Jacques de Molay's vault under the Temple. There, he found the Codex Pater Intellectus, a book where de Molay wrote his thoughts about the First Civilization and his views about the future of the Templar Order and the human kind. For him, the Templar Order needed to be more secret and rule the society in the shadows using a capitalist system and the middle class as a mean to assure the Great Work. Germain understood that, in some ways, he was connected to de Molay and he was his prophet. The two were in fact Sages, human person with the memories of Aita, a member of the Isu and husband of Juno, who wanted to control humanity.
Germain returned before the other Templars and explained that the Templars needed to reform, retire from the aristocracy, the offices of Church and the State which corrupt their true purpose and to end the French monarchy, who had arrested and execute Jacques de Molay and the Templars. The Grand Master of the Parisian Rite, François de la Serre, saw Germain as an extremist and a heretic and expelled him from the Order. However some of the Templars were convinced by the words of Germain. One of them, Marie Lévesque, helped Germain to create his own faction of Templar. Together, they began to plan to take over the leadership of the Parisian Rite and finish the French monarchy.
At the end 18th century, the political and social situation in France gave the perfect opportunity for the radical faction to take control. The France’s costly involvement in the American Revolutionary War and extravagant spending by King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette and their predecessor had left the country on the brink of bankruptcy. Not only were the royal coffers depleted, but two decades of poor cereal harvests, drought, cattle disease and skyrocketing bread prices had kindled unrest among peasants and the urban poor. Many expressed their desperation and resentment toward a regime that imposed heavy taxes yet failed to provide relief by rioting, looting and striking.
In the fall of 1786, Louis XVI’s controller general, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, proposed a financial reform package that included a universal land tax from which the privileged classes would no longer be exempt. To garner support for these measures and forestall a growing aristocratic revolt, the king summoned the Estates-General, an assembly composed of representants of Church, nobility and the Third Estate. The meeting was scheduled for the 5 May 1789; in the meantime, delegates of the three estates from each locality would compile lists of grievances (“cahiers de doléances”) to present to the king.[1]
Estates-General of 1789
On the 5 May 1789, the deputies of the different Estates assembled at the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs in Versailles to open the Estates-General with a speech from the king. During the speech, the noble deputy and Grand Master Templar François de la Serre secretly met the deputy of the Third Estate and Mentor of the Parisian Brotherhood of Assassins Honoré Mirabeau. Together, they spoke about the future of France and decided to make a truced between their factions. During the night, François de la Serre organised a ball at the Palace of Versailles for the induction of his daughter, Élise de la Serre, as a member of the Templar Order. But after the ceremony, the Grand Master was murdered by Charles Gabriel Sivert and the Roi des Thunes, two members of Germain's faction. With the death of de la Serre, a civil war between the Templars began, Germain taking the title of Grand Master for the extremist faction, and Élise taking the role of his father for the old guard.
During the meeting, the primary problem was the voting process: a vote by order, which favorised the nobles and clergymen, or by head, which favorised the Third-Estate. The highly public debate over its voting process had erupted into hostility between the three orders, eclipsing the original purpose of the meeting and the authority of the man who had convened it. On June 17, with talks over procedure stalled, the Third Estate met alone, invating members of the others two orders and formally adopted the title of National Assembly; three days later, they met in a nearby indoor tennis court and took the so-called Tennis Court Oath, vowing not to disperse until constitutional reform had been achieved. Among the deputies, there were Mirabeau, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, and also Maximilien de Robespierre, a Templar from Germain's faction. On June 23, the king ordered to disolve the Assembly, but the Mentor stated that they would "yield to nothing but bayonets". Within a week, most of the clerical deputies and 47 liberal nobles had joined them, and on June 27 Louis XVI grudgingly absorbed all three orders into the new assembly.[1]
Popular revolt
On July 12, as the National Assembly continued to meet at Versailles to work on a new Constitution, fear and violence consumed the capital. Though enthusiastic about the recent breakdown of royal power, Parisians grew panicked after the news of the remplacement of the Controller-General of Finances Jacques Necker, who have sympathy with the Third Estate, by the more conservatist Joseph Foullon de Doué, and also as rumors of the arrestation of the Assembly and an impending military coup in Paris by the royal troops began to circulate. At the Palais-Royal, the journalist Camille Desmoulins called the parisian population to take ups the arms. The popular insurgency also have the supports of the militaries of the French Guard, and the 13 July was created the National Guard, which have for purpose to restore order in the capital. The Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of the American Revolution and an ally of the Assassins, was elected as the commandant of the new guard.[1]
On July 14, rioters took riffles in the Invalides but need gunpowder. So the insurgent went to the Bastille to reclame gunpowder to his governor Bernard-René de Launay. After he refused, he crowd stormed the Bastille. Among the rioters there was Élise de la Serre, who wanted to liberated Arno Dorian, her step brother and lover who was wrongfully imprisoned for François de la Serre's murder.[2]The young man succeeded to escape from the prison with the help of Pierre Bellec, a Master Assassin who had trained Arno's father, Charles Dorian. After the storming, the prisonnners where liberated and the governor de Launay was killed, beheaded and his head placed on pike. The events of this day, now commemorated in France as a national holiday, as the start of the French Revolution.[1]
The wave of revolutionary fervor and widespread hysteria quickly swept the countryside. Revolting against years of exploitation, peasants looted and burned the homes of tax collectors, landlords and the seigniorial elite. Known as the Great Fear (“la Grande peur”), the agrarian insurrection hastened the growing exodus of nobles from the country and inspired the National Constituent Assembly to abolish feudalism on August 4, 1789, signing what the historian Georges Lefebvre later called the “death certificate of the old order.”
Drafting a Constitution
On August 4, the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (“Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen”), a statement of democratic principles grounded in the philosophical and political ideas of Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). The document proclaimed the Assembly’s commitment to replace the ancien régime with a system based on equal opportunity, freedom of speech, popular sovereignty and representative government.
Drafting a formal constitution proved much more of a challenge for the National Constituent Assembly, which had the added burden of functioning as a legislature during harsh economic times. For months, its members wrestled with fundamental questions about the shape and expanse of France’s new political landscape. For instance, who would be responsible for electing delegates? Would the clergy owe allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church or the French government? Perhaps most importantly, how much authority would the king, his public image further weakened after a failed attempt to flee in June 1791, retain? Adopted on September 3, 1791, France’s first written constitution echoed the more moderate voices in the Assembly, establishing a constitutional monarchy in which the king enjoyed royal veto power and the ability to appoint ministers. This compromise did not sit well with influential radicals like Maximilien de Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, and Georges Danton , who began drumming up popular support for a more republican form of government and the trial of Louis XVI.
The Revoltuion Turns Radical: Terror and Revolt
In April 1792, the newly elected Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria and Prussia, where it believed that French émigrés were building counterrevolutionary alliances; it also hoped to spread its revolutionary ideals across Europe through warfare. 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 (1755-1793) suffered the same fate nine months later.
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. They also unleashed the bloody Reign of Terror (“la Terreur”), a 10-month period in which suspected enemies of the revolution were guillotined by the thousands. 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.
End of the Revolution and Impact
On August 22, 1795, the National Convention, composed largely of Girondins 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 (1769-1821).
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.
Trivia
- Overall, the Revolution did see the abolishment of the Ancien Régime and the French monarchy, but it also and established principles of inalienable rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
- After the abolishment of the Kingdom of France, the French Republic was founded. However, this gave way to many upheavals and executions. Furthermore, the major powers of Europe felt threatened by the new republic's revolutionary ideals, and waged war on France, taking advantage of its destabilized government. In the wake of the ensuing chaos, the French Empire was founded by Napoleon Bonaparte,[3] who used an Apple of Eden to expand the holdings of his new empire.[4]
References
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||