Critically examine the statement that the French Revolution was not caused by the French philosophers but by the conditions of national life.

Answer:

The relative weight of ideas and of material conditions in causing the French Revolution has long been debated. The conditions of French national life, fiscal crisis, social inequality and subsistence failure, provided the causes, while the philosophers supplied the language in which grievance became revolution.

The conditions of national life

• The society of orders exempted clergy and nobility from most taxation.
• The Third Estate bore the taille, gabelle and feudal dues while lacking political voice.
• State bankruptcy followed the American war and decades of deficit finance.
• Harvest failure in 1788 sent bread prices to unprecedented heights.
• The bourgeoisie had grown wealthy but remained excluded from power and honour.
• The aristocratic revolt against fiscal reform forced the calling of the Estates-General.

The role of the philosophers

• Montesquieu attacked absolutism and proposed the separation of powers.
• Rousseau's Social Contract asserted popular sovereignty and the general will.
• Voltaire's ridicule undermined the authority of the Church.
• The Encyclopedie diffused critical and secular habits of mind.
• Their writings circulated among the educated bourgeoisie and liberal nobility.

Assessing the relative weight

• The philosophers were mostly dead by 1789 and none advocated revolution.
• Their ideas had circulated for decades without producing an upheaval.
• It was the fiscal and subsistence crisis of 1787-89 that precipitated events.
• Yet the Declaration of Rights and the language of the Revolution are unmistakably theirs.
• Ideas gave form and legitimacy to discontent that conditions had created.

Historiographical views

• Georges Lefebvre stressed the convergence of aristocratic, bourgeois, urban and peasant revolts.
• Alfred Cobban questioned the simple bourgeois-revolution model.
• Revisionists such as Francois Furet restored weight to political culture and ideas.
• Most historians now treat conditions and ideas as complementary rather than rival explanations.

The immediate trigger

• The Estates-General met in May 1789 for the first time since 1614.
• Voting by order rather than by head precipitated the Third Estate's revolt.
• The Tennis Court Oath and the fall of the Bastille followed within weeks.
• The Great Fear in the countryside carried revolution beyond Paris.

The statement is therefore substantially correct but incomplete. As Lefebvre and later historians agree, the causes lay in the fiscal, social and subsistence crisis of the old regime, yet without the vocabulary of rights, sovereignty and citizenship supplied by the philosophers the crisis might have produced a revolt rather than a revolution.