The French Revolution's Lessons in Greed and Corruption: A Reflection on Today's World

Start hereBy 1788, half of French state revenue went on servicing debt. Yet the debt itself was not high compared with Britain's. So why did a money problem become a crisis?

The French Revolution began in 1789 and reshaped France within a few years. It abolished feudal privileges and issued a declaration of rights. In September 1792 the monarchy was replaced by a republic.

It had several causes, long-term and short-term, and historians still disagree about how to weigh them. This page follows three threads: privilege, unfair taxes and lost trust.

01Privilege and an unfair tax system

Old-regime France was divided into three estates: the clergy, the nobility and the commoners, known as the Third Estate. The first two enjoyed a variety of tax exemptions, so the tax burden fell mainly on the lower classes. The nobility were not wholly exempt, though how much they evaded or passed on to their tenants is disputed.

The system was also opaque: tax rates varied widely from region to region, were often different from the official amounts, and were collected inconsistently. That complexity, and the lack of accountability, caused resentment among all taxpayers.

The Church was wealthy. It owned nearly 10% of the land in France and collected tithes, in effect a 10% tax on income paid by peasant farmers in crops. Yet many of the parish priests elected to the Estates General earned less than unskilled labourers.

Over 25% of French farmland was subject to feudal dues, which provided the nobility with most of their income.

02Debt, bad harvests and a scandal

France had borrowed heavily to fight Britain in the war of 1778 to 1783, and kept borrowing afterwards. By 1788, half of state revenue went on servicing its debt.

The debt itself was not high compared with Britain’s. But reform was difficult, because new tax laws had to be registered with regional courts called parlements, which could block them. Bad harvests in 1787 and 1788 pushed up food prices and unemployment.

The Affair of the Diamond Necklace broke in August 1785. Queen Marie Antoinette was accused of taking part in a fraud against the Paris jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge. She is generally believed to have been innocent, but the affair still made her more unpopular.

Scandals like it fuelled widespread anger at the court, the nobility and church officials.

03Why historians still disagree

From the 1930s, social and economic explanations led French studies of the Revolution: Georges Lefebvre developed a Marxist analysis, and Albert Soboul wrote in the same tradition.

Alfred Cobban challenged that reading, arguing that the Revolution was primarily a political conflict. François Furet and Denis Richet also argued for the primacy of political decisions.

Since the 1990s Western scholars have largely set aside the Marxist class-struggle reading, but no new explanation has gained widespread support. Our reading: greed and corruption are one thread, not the whole cloth.

04What the Declaration of 1789 said about accountability

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was approved by the National Assembly and published on 26 August 1789. The revolutionaries wrote accountability into it.

Its Article 14 gives all citizens the right to decide, themselves or through representatives, whether a public contribution is needed. They also have the right to grant it freely and “to know to what uses it is put”. They may fix its proportion, how it is assessed and collected, and how long the tax lasts.

Article 15 is shorter: “Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.”

In the same summer the Assembly passed the August decrees, which abolished feudalism. Feudal dues and church tithes were cancelled. Former tenants were supposed to pay compensation, but it could not be collected, and the obligation was annulled in 1793. Other decrees brought in equality before the law and opened public office to all.

05The Terror, and how it turned on its makers

Historians disagree on exactly when the Terror began: some say 1793, others the September Massacres of 1792 or even July 1789.

Encyclopaedia Britannica counts at least 300,000 suspects arrested. It puts official executions at 17,000, with perhaps 10,000 more dying in prison or without trial. Elsewhere on the same page it puts the deaths without trial or in prison at as many as 23,000.

Another count gives 16,594 official death sentences from June 1793 to the fall of Robespierre, 2,639 of them in Paris. It adds ten to twenty thousand more people executed without trial or dead in prison awaiting it. Totals cited to Greer and to the historian Jean-Clément Martin put the deaths at 35,000 to 45,000 at least.

Most of the dead were not aristocrats. The historian Donald Greer estimated that 8.5% of the Terror’s victims were nobles, 6.5% clergy and 85% from the Third Estate, the commoners.

In 1794 the Terror reached Hébert, Danton and finally Robespierre in a little over four months. The radical Hébert was executed on 24 March 1794 with 19 of his colleagues, and Danton on 5 April.

Fabre d’Églantine, a member of the Jacobin club and Danton’s private secretary, was arrested on 12 January 1794. The charge was malversation and forgery connected with the affairs of the French East India Company. He was guillotined on 5 April, the same day as Danton.

Robespierre himself was executed on 28 July 1794.

Historians read the Terror and its violence in different ways. François Furet argued that the revolutionaries’ ideological commitment required the extermination of any opposition. A middle position holds that the violence was not inevitable, but the product of a series of complex internal events, made worse by war.

06Who was who

Maximilien Robespierre was a lawyer and radical Jacobin, a member of the Committee of Public Safety from July 1793.

In a speech on 5 February 1794 he said that “Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue”. He went on to call it a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the country’s most urgent needs.

Historians still argue about him. One view, in the work of Marisa Linton and Pierre Serna, holds that the other Committee members were as much responsible for running the Terror as he was. So were the members of the Committee of General Security.

They may have exaggerated his role to play down their own, and used him as a scapegoat after his death.

The opposite view, long the common one and still held by some historians, sees him as demagogic, dictatorial and fanatical. The historian Albert Mathiez argued against it in the 1920s.

The others on this page:

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the philosopher whose political thought influenced aspects of the Revolution. He died on 2 July 1778, eleven years before it began.

• Lafayette: a French officer who served as an unpaid volunteer in the American army during the War of Independence. On 11 July 1789 he presented a declaration of rights to the National Assembly, and he was made commander of the new National Guard of Paris.

  In August 1792 the Assembly declared him a traitor. He fled to neutral territory and was taken prisoner, then held for five years in Prussian and then Austrian prisons until his release in 1797.

• Madame Roland: a political hostess close to the Girondins, a faction less extreme than the Mountain. Her salon became a meeting place for leaders of the popular movement, among them Brissot and Robespierre. She was guillotined on 8 November 1793.

• Paul Barras: sided with the men who overthrew Robespierre’s faction in 1794, then became one of the five directors who ran the Directory.

• Napoleon Bonaparte: trained at the École Militaire as an artillery officer, and rose rapidly after the siege of Toulon in 1793. He overthrew the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire, on 9 November 1799.

07Corruption did not end with the Revolution

The government that followed the Terror, the Directory (1795 to 1799), had its own corruption. It was a serious problem, particularly among the businessmen who supplied the army and the government. Charges of corruption also surrounded the director Paul Barras and his allies.

08Pamphlets and newspapers

Before 1789 France had a small number of heavily censored newspapers that needed a royal licence.

From 25 September 1788, the public debate produced an average of 25 new political pamphlets a week. One of the most influential, the abbé Sieyès’s What Is the Third Estate?, denounced the privileges of the clergy and nobility.

Then came the newspapers, among them Marat’s L’Ami du peuple, first published as Le Publiciste parisien on 12 September 1789. Estimates of how many were founded over the next decade differ: more than 2,000 in one, over 1,300 in another. Newspapers were read aloud in taverns and clubs and passed from hand to hand.

09What it suggests about trust today

This section is our reading, not a finding. Three things meet in the sources above:

• rules too complicated for the people paying to check;
• privileges that some enjoy and others fund;
• a public that has stopped extending the benefit of the doubt.

Where they meet, trust wears thin, and a rumour can do as much damage as a fact. The Diamond Necklace affair is the clearest case on this page.

The eighteenth-century tools for spreading a story were pamphlets and newspapers. Ours are faster. And a neat single cause, “greed” included, is a starting point rather than an answer.

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How we checked this · Last checked October 2026

• The causes, the historians' debate, the counts for the Terror and the press rest on Wikipedia's articles, used only where they cite a work for the sentence; that work is named in the Sources list.
• Lafayette, Madame Roland, Barras, Fabre d'Églantine, the Diamond Necklace affair and the date of Robespierre's death were checked against the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica on Wikisource.
• Articles 14 and 15 of the Declaration and Robespierre's speech of 5 February 1794 were read in their own texts (the Avalon Project at Yale and Fordham's Internet Modern History Sourcebook).
• Where counts differ, for deaths in the Terror and newspapers founded, the page gives each one.
• The section on trust today is our reading, not a finding.

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13Sources