The War of Wars Read Free

smouldered to be blown by Atlantic winds across to Britain’s north American colonies. There, as in Britain before the Civil War, rapid economic and demographic change in the mid-eighteenth century suddenly collided with the attempt of a centralizing state to extend its authority in 1776. The result was inevitable: the latter was swept away in a torrent: only in calmer waters further downstream, could it re-emerge in very different guise.
    If the American Revolution can be described as a distant descendant of the English Revolution, the French Revolution was undoubtedly a firstborn child of the American one. It was no coincidence at all that it began when Benjamin Franklin – lecherous, egotistical, homespun, brilliant Franklin – was America’s longstanding envoy to France (wherehe subverted the French court by wearing shabby republican clothes amid the finery, becoming a cult figure for intellectuals), nor that Thomas Paine was to be swept up in the tumult of the French Revolution, nor that one of the first revolutionaries was the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the heroes of the American War of Independence.
    Franklin, a representative of men who had rejected the authority of a monarch altogether and preached a republic was a lethal cancer in the body politic of the French monarchy, and it was almost suicidally obtuse of Louis XVI and his courtiers not to realize it, obsessed as they were with the old power struggle with Britain.
    France had sought to turn the American Revolution into a dagger aimed at Britain’s breast, but succeeded in striking only a glancing blow before falling on the weapon itself. For in an age of press, printing and pamphleteering the ideals of the American Revolution soon found a following among intelligent and dissatisfied men in France. The immediate catalyst for the French Revolution, however, was the French court’s need to raise money – an exact echo of the cause of the English Revolution, when Charles I had had to summon parliament to raise revenue. The cost of French participation in the American war had been prohibitive, and had been met by loans. The French government afterwards ran out of ready access to lenders and in 1786 the minister of finance was forced to inform the French King that the situation could only be corrected by imposing taxes. In 1788, the
ancien régime
for the first (and last) time drew up a budget, which showed there to be a shortfall of some 20 per cent between expenses and revenues. Of the total budget, some 6 per cent was being spent on the court itself, some 20 per cent on administration, and 26 per cent on defence and foreign affairs. Nearly half was being swallowed up on debt service of some 318 million livres.
    It was thought necessary to reduce the debt through taxation – not through a general increase of the taxes that already fell almost entirely on the poor classes, whose wages had risen only by 22 per cent, compared to average price increases of 65 per cent over the previous half century – but by extending taxation to the wealthy bourgeoisie and to the nobility. The cause of the French Revolution was thus not the state’s attack on the poor, but on the rich!
    The minister of finance, Calonne, proposed an eminently progressive taxation regime: a uniform tax on salt and tobacco across the nation, a land tax and an end to internal tariffs and freedom for the grain trade (which affected the all-important price of bread) as well as the selling off of manorial properties possessed by the church so that they would be able to pay tax. Finally tax was to be administered by provincial assemblies in which the traditional ‘three estates’ of France – the clergy, the nobility, and all property owners – should be represented equally.
    Exactly as occurred under Charles I’s exactions, and George Grenville’s attempts to raise taxes in America through the Stamp Act the King’s plan provoked a furious outcry from the men of property – in particular, in