The Thing That Lived in France

 

Look, I’m going to tell you about something that happened a long time ago—1789, to be exact—but don’t let the date fool you. This isn’t some dusty textbook story about powdered wigs and tea parties. This is a story about monsters. Real ones. The kind that wore silk and lace and called themselves nobility while they sucked the life out of an entire country.

The Old Ones (Or: How the World Worked Before It All Went to Hell)

Let me start with what the smart folks—guys like Jean Jaurès and Albert Mathiez, academics who spent their lives picking through the bones of history—called the “orthodox theory.” They figured that France in the 1700s was split right down the middle, like a rotten log that’s been sitting in the woods too long. You could see the decay if you looked close enough, and brother, if you were one of the 26.5 million people living in the wrong part of that log, you felt it every single day.

The bourgeoisie—that’s French for the middle class with ambition—they wanted industry, commerce, profit. They wanted to move. But they were stuck, see? Stuck under a system that had been in place since the Middle Ages, a system that moved about as fast as a corpse doing the backstroke.

The old guard—the nobles, the financiers, the ones who’d been running the show since God was a boy—they had their claws deep in everything. Commerce? Theirs. Industry? Theirs. The peasants who actually worked the land? Well, hell, they owned those too, in everything but name.

Thomas E. Kaiser—and you can look this up if you don’t believe me, it’s in his 1979 piece on feudalism—he said it plain: the French Revolution was like a pressure cooker that finally blew its lid. All that middle-class rage, all that hatred for a system that kept them down economically and socially, it just exploded when the money ran out.

The Castle Built on Bones

Picture this: France before 1789 was like one of those old Victorian houses you see in Maine, the kind that looks solid from the street but inside, the floorboards are rotting and the walls are full of rats. The whole structure was feudal—and I mean feudal in the old, nasty sense. Not some romantic medieval fantasy, but a grinding, soul-crushing machine that turned human beings into property.

They had what they called the Three Estates. Sounds fancy, right? Like something from a wine list. But here’s what it really meant:

First Estate: The clergy. God’s representatives on Earth, or so they claimed. Fewer than 100,000 of them in a country of 27 million.

Second Estate: The nobles. About 400,000 entitled bastards who’d inherited their power and thought it was their divine right to keep it.

Third Estate: Everyone else. Twenty-six and a half million people. The ones who did the actual work, paid the actual taxes, and got exactly none of the respect.

Georges Lefebvre laid it all out in his book on the Revolution’s origins. The math alone should’ve told you something was wrong. When 99.6% of your population is getting screwed by the other 0.4%, you don’t have a society. You have a time bomb.

The King Who Thought He Was God (And the Church That Agreed)

The king—and we’re talking about Louis XVI here, though the rot went back generations—he believed he ruled by divine right. God Himself had supposedly tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’re the man.” And the Church? The Church backed him up, because the Church had its own racket going.

Here’s how twisted it got: In 1685, they revoked something called the Edict of Nantes. Overnight, everyone in France was Catholic. Had to be. No choice. And the Church controlled everything—births, marriages, deaths, education, hospitals, even what you were allowed to read. As Lefebvre put it, without Catholic sacraments, you didn’t legally exist. Your kids were bastards. You couldn’t inherit property. You were a ghost.

That’s not religion, friend. That’s a protection racket. That’s the mob in fancy robes.

The Daily Grind of Evil

William Doyle, in his Oxford history of the Revolution, wrote something that still gives me chills: “The distance separating the rich from the other citizens increased daily… Hatred grew more bitter, and the nation split into two classes: the greedy and unfeeling, and the discontented who murmured.”

Murmured. That’s a hell of a word for people who were slowly starving to death.

Because this wasn’t abstract oppression. This was concrete. This was everyday. You harvest your crops? The landlord takes his cut. You need to grind your grain? You pay to use the mill. You want to collect firewood to keep your kids from freezing? That’s illegal—the landlord owns the forest.

John Markoff spent years studying this in his 1996 book, and what he found was that the breaking point wasn’t just economic. It was moral. People weren’t just hungry. They were outraged. The seigneurial dues, the forced labor (they called it corvée), the way the nobles could use communal ovens and mills and then charge the peasants to use them too—it was like being robbed by the same guy every day and having to thank him for the privilege.

The peasants actually wrote it down. There’s a document called Elves-le Moutier where they demanded that nobles and clergy pay the same taxes as everyone else. “They share in the profits,” the peasants wrote. Simple logic. Fair logic. The kind of logic that gets you killed in a feudal system.

The Night Everything Changed

And then came August 4, 1789.

John Hall Stewart called it “the decisive moment,” and he wasn’t wrong. The National Assembly—which had started as just the Third Estate but had grown teeth—they met that night and they burned it all down. Nineteen articles. The August Decrees. They abolished feudalism. Just like that. Poof.

The seigneurial rights? Gone. The tithe the Church collected? Gone. The whole rotten structure that had held France together for five hundred years? Gone.

The Church Eats Itself

But here’s where it gets really interesting, in that sick way that human nature always gets interesting when power’s involved.

The revolutionaries passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790. Made the Church subordinate to the state. Changed how priests were paid and appointed. And the Church split right down the middle.

Some priests—they called them the “constitutional priests”—they took the oath. Swore loyalty to the new system. Figured they could still serve God under a new boss.

But others—the “refractory priests”—they refused. Saw it as betrayal. Heresy. And suddenly the Church that had spent centuries presenting a unified front was at war with itself.

The Wake-Up Call

Alexis de Tocqueville—and this guy was writing decades later, had some perspective on the whole thing—he nailed something important. Before the Revolution, he said, the French were obedient. They loved their lords “with a father’s affection.” They respected them “with the reverence due to God.”

But that obedience? It wasn’t conviction. It was habit. It was the way an abused dog still comes when called.

And here’s the thing about habits: they can break. One day you wake up and realize that the thing you’ve been afraid of your whole life? It’s not God. It’s not divine right. It’s just another asshole in a fancy coat.

The kingdom had always crushed dissent with violence. They executed people for writing against the Church or the Crown. Booksellers. Street vendors. Anyone who passed along dangerous ideas. They killed them.

But you can’t kill an idea once it’s loose. You can’t execute twenty-six and a half million people who’ve finally figured out that the emperor has no clothes.

The Monster Dies

So that’s how it happened. Not all at once. Not cleanly. There was blood—rivers of it before and after. The Revolution ate its own children, as they say. But the thing that lived in France, that feudal monster that had been feeding on the poor for centuries?

It died.

Whether what replaced it was better—well, that’s another story. A longer one. And probably just as dark.

But on that night in August 1789, when they passed those decrees and abolished the old system, something fundamental changed. The people who’d been ghosts became citizens. The people who’d murmured started to shout.

And the castle built on bones?

It fell.

That’s all. That’s the story. Sleep well.