Did the French Revolution improve the lives of non-aristocratic French people?

by Maplike

The causes of the French Revolution - high bread prices, starvation, the habitual indecency of the aristocrats towards the peasants and townspeople - are talked about a lot. To what extent did the Revolution actually help end those horrors? Did it relieve the "hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break"?

(I'm asking primarily about the time before the Napoleonic wars.)

amp1212

The problem is that it's impossible to disentangle the Revolution from the wars that follow. France is essentially at war, with very few brief intervals of peace, from 1792 to 1815. That's two decades plus of conscription and war. After 1798, there's little conflict on French soil until 1814, but still conscription and casualties were felt everywhere.

So what you've got is a revolutionary period, where foreign armies are in France; hard to say that people's lives got better. Then there's the Napoleonic period, marked by foreign wars, the probable cost in lives to France-- roughly one million men

Economically, taxes went up -- the portion of French commodities taken as tax increased by %30 during the war years-- and trade went down. Fields that would have been tended by men conscripted away to serve in the armies lay fallow. France, which began the 18th century as Europe's richest nation, ended the century falling behind Britain.

It's possible that a peaceful revolution might have modernized an old regime society and produced greater wealth for the people; that was the aim of the consitutionels, the "men of 1789" who like Mirabeau, Du Pont de Nemours and Talleyrand sought a British style constitutional monarchy for France. You can see elements of this kind of political and institutional modernization and rationalization, particularly in the educational system, the adoption of the metric system, the Code Napoleon, but you can't extract the benefits from the costs of the wars that surround them.

See:

The Costs of the French Revolution