IV. the collapse of the ancien regime

A Sketch of the Capitalist Revolution in Europe (IV)

The French Revolution broke the equilibrium decisively. Had the revolution not occurred, many of the same changes would still have happened in 19th c Europe, but it is difficult to imagine them being implanted as quickly or as decisively in the German and Italian principalities as they in fact were on the point of the Revolutionary and Imperial sword.

Yet, only in a very limited way can it be called a "bourgeois revolution." The tensions that led to the breakdown of the royal state were not directly related to any conflict between capitalist economic relations and absolutist political institutions. Instead, the stage was set for the revolution when a fiscal crisis became a political crisis setting the monarchy against the office-holding nobility, which sought to defend and expand its capacity to shape royal policy. This was continuation of the recurrent political struggle of royal absolutism, but when the king called the Estates General, it metastasized into a far deeper crisis of the connection between noble status and access to the political power (and economic resources) of the state. The revolutionary protagonists were not capitalists but instead legal functionaries of the ancien regime who more often than not reacted to rather than led the actions of the smallholding peasantry and the urban "little people."

Nonetheless, the pressure of popular demands, combined with the exigencies of re-establishing the institutions of rule in the absence of the absolute monarchical authority that had been the central pivot of relative political power of elites, as well as the problems of financing a Continental war, compelled the various Revolutionary regimes to do away with almost all of the forms of privately appropriated political power that had been the sine qua non of the position of pre-Revolutionary elites.