The National Assembly is composed of the representatives of the three estates who've been called together by Louis XVI to form the estates general in May, 1789 that had become transformed by the victory of the revolution into the National Assembly. Now, in July, after this forming of the Bastille, one of Louis XVI's brothers decide to immigrate. He's so disgusted by the intervention of the populace into a phase of the realm. There are a few noble and clerical deputies who'd been at Versailles who similarly are outraged by the popular affront to the authority of the king and to the traditions of France. They too have gone home. But the great majority of the clerical and noble deputies join with the third state deputies and become part of the National Assembly governing France in conjunction with the king in 1789. You can still see in this representation the third of state deputies in their modest dark garb in the background. These are the men who stopped receiving news from all over the country, that peasants have taken matters into their own hands, have attacked chateau, have ceased feudal registers, have refused to pay tax, etc., etc.. How should they respond? On the 4th of August, at the peak of the rebellion in the countryside, several members of the former privileged daughters rise in their faith and say, the only way that we can respond effectively to what is happening in the countryside is to recognize that many of our feudal rights, many of our privileged practices in the countryside have to come to an end. And they start almost in an atmosphere of elation and panic. They start making what seem to be wholesale sacrifices of their particular rights and exemptions. They decree to begin with that the National Assembly abolishes the feudal regime completely. But in the days after the 4th of August, after their initial panic and elation, they start to pull back. And when that article is finally registered as part of the August decrees on feudalism, it is qualified in a very significant way. The National Assembly destroys the feudal regime completely, but it then says the decrees that feudal, and not the Jews, that are from real or personal servitude, that they are abolished without compensation. That's to say that any rights that feudal lords had exercised over the people in the countryside over the persons and their freedoms that they are abolished immediately and without compensation. But all others are declared redeemable and the price and the manner of the redemption will be set by the National Assembly. That's to say the great mass of harvest use are regarded as a legal form of rent and that before peasants can stop paying those harvest Jews, some way will have to be found a way by they can compensate the lords for their losses. Those of the said rights that are not abolished by the decree will continue nonetheless to be collected until redemption has been made. In other words, the system must continue as it is until we find a way whereby the great noble landlords, the senior, can be compensated for what they've lost. The only things that are be to be abolished completely and immediately are things that matter as a personal servitude that are imposed on rural people. This hesitation about whether the seigneurial regime has or has not been abolished completely is to be at the heart of the rural face of the French Revolution for the next few years. But the August decrees are quite clear about a number of other matters. They make it plain that privilege in taxation is to be abolished henceforth and forever, that no longer the privileged daughters to have some forms of taxation exemptions. They will be one common taxation system for all French people. All special privileges of provinces, towns, and other communities even happens to be abolished without compensation as well. You might remember the ways in which regional France in the 18th century been characterized by different rights of taxation, different exemptions that pertain to particular provinces, gone. From now on, all French people, wherever they live, will have the same administrative taxation and legal arrangements. There will be a united nation. They also proclaim significantly that Louis XVI is the restorer of French liberty, that even though we know that Louis XVI vacillated again and again, he is seen to be the monarch who after all had called the estates general together. After the storming of the Bastille three days later, he had decided to take action on the advice of Lafayette to ride into Paris from Versailles as a way of trying to calm things down, to say that he is on side with his people, and is at that moment that he wades the white color of the bourbon royal family to the red and blue of Paris, the colors of the city of Paris to create the red, white, and blue symbol of the French nation, indeed of the French Revolution. He stocks extremely high at that time. Just a few weeks later, the Assembly decides to issue a declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The view of members of the National Assembly or of a clear majority of them is that a new regime must be founded on a very clear statement of the rights that people are to enjoy in future and the limits to those rights. This is one of the great cornerstones of liberal political philosophy in practice. Like their friends across the Atlantic in North America, they begin by insisting that in a generic sense, people are born and remain free and equal in rights. People are born with rights. Human beings by their very nature, possess a range of rights which cannot be taken away from them. They are not gifts of the monarch, they are rights that belong to people as human beings. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. They thereby legitimize the insurrections of 1789, the right to resist oppression. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body or individual may exercise authority that does not expressly emanate from it. Again, like their colleagues across the Atlantic, the insistence that legitimate sovereignty, legitimate political power must come from below. It's the most radical change of all. Remember that Louis XVI had been king of France by the grace of God. He was responsible to God alone for the well-being of his people. What the National Assembly is effectively saying is that they're reversing the whole foundation of political legitimacy by saying that political power can only be legitimate if its authority emanates from the sovereign people. The fourth article of the Declaration of The Rights of Man and of the Citizen makes the crucial statement about the nature of Liberty, the great keyword of 1789 that it is the right to do anything that is not harmful to others. The only limits to individual rights and freedoms are the rights of other people, but it will be the law as articulated by the National Assembly which will decide on just what those limitations are. The declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is the blueprint for a new society, a new polity. Every one of its 17 articles is a direct repudiation of one of the characteristics of monarchial and feudal society. What the men of the National Assembly assume is that their task is now to put these principles into practice. And they are sweeping principles. This is a revolutionary blueprint that they've grown up. The key elements of society and politics as had existed before 1789 are directly challenged. From now on, instead of an absolute monarchy, they will be a constitutional monarchy that the divine right of kings will give way to popular sovereignty as the basis of legitimacy, that a society founded on the privilege of the nobility and the upper clergy will give way to a society in which there is civil equality in terms of taxation, the law, and religious beliefs, that people of all faiths will have the right to worship in public. If we are to have a hierarchy of any type in society, it will no longer be one which is based on birth. It will be one which is based on merit and talent, on recognition by one's fellow citizens, and at the same time, feudalism is to be abolished at least in part. This is a sweeping project that the men of the National Assembly have set themselves. They believed when they drawn those documents up that their task that remained to them was simply to put those into effect. Was the French Revolution over? Let's explore that in my next lecture.
