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

The French Revolution

The French Revolution began in 1789 and reshaped France within a few years: the abolition of feudal privileges, a declaration of rights, the end of the monarchy, and then the Terror. It had several causes, long-term and short-term, and historians still disagree about how to weigh them. Privilege, unfair taxation and a loss of trust in the people running the country were part of it, and those are the parts this page is about. They are also the parts that travel best to other times and places.

Unearthing the roots of greed and corruption

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 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, though 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.

Money was the trigger. France had borrowed heavily to fight Britain in the war of 1778 to 1783, kept borrowing afterwards, and by 1788 half of state revenue went on servicing its debt. The debt itself was not high compared with Britain’s; the problem was a tax system that could not be reformed, because the regional courts called parlements could block new tax laws. Bad harvests in 1787 and 1788 pushed up food prices and unemployment.

Scandal did the rest. In the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which broke in August 1785, Queen Marie Antoinette was accused of taking part in a fraud against the Paris jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge. The accusation was false, but it still damaged her reputation, and scandals like it fuelled widespread anger at the court, the nobility and church officials.

Why historians disagree. Historians still argue about the causes. 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, and 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. Greed and corruption are one thread, not the whole cloth.

The dangers of unchecked greed and corruption

What the old regime shows is how a system loses the benefit of the doubt. When taxes fall hardest on those least able to pay, when the rules are too complex to check, and when the people at the top are the subject of scandal, a false story can be believed as easily as a true one. The Diamond Necklace affair is the clearest case: the accusation against the queen was false, and it hurt her anyway.

The Revolution did not end corruption either. The government that followed the Terror, the Directory (1795 to 1799), had its own: corruption was a serious problem, particularly among the businessmen who supplied the army and the government, and charges of corruption surrounded the director Paul Barras and his allies.

The imperative of accountability and transparency

The revolutionaries wrote accountability into their founding document. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, approved by the National Assembly and published on 26 August 1789, says in Article 14 that “All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.” 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, and other decrees brought in equality before the law and opened public office to all.

Comparisons in today’s world

This section is our reading, not a finding. The pattern in the sources above is not specific to eighteenth-century France: rules too complicated for the people paying to check, privileges that some enjoy and others fund, and a public that has stopped extending the benefit of the doubt. Where those three meet, trust wears thin, and a rumour can do as much damage as a fact. The eighteenth-century tools for this were pamphlets and newspapers; ours are faster.

Who was who, and what the Terror was

The other half of the story is what happens when a revolution starts turning on its own.

The people at the centre of it

• Maximilien Robespierre: 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: “Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.” He was executed on 28 July 1794. Historians still argue about him. One view, found in the work of Marisa Linton and Pierre Serna, is that the other members of the Committee, with those of the Committee of General Security, were as much responsible for running the Terror as he was, and may have exaggerated his role to play down their own, using 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.
• 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, then on 11 July 1789 presented a declaration of rights to the National Assembly and was made commander of the new National Guard of Paris. In August 1792 the Assembly declared him a traitor; he fled to neutral territory, was taken prisoner, and was 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, whose 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, rose rapidly after the siege of Toulon in 1793, and overthrew the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire on 9 November 1799.

The Reign of Terror (1793 to 1794). Encyclopaedia Britannica sums it up: “During the Reign of Terror, at least 300,000 suspects were arrested; 17,000 were officially executed, and perhaps 10,000 died 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, and estimates 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.

The Terror also consumed its own makers. 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 on a charge of malversation and forgery connected with the affairs of the French East India Company, and guillotined on 5 April, the same day as Danton. Robespierre followed in July. Historians differ on why: François Furet argued that the revolutionaries’ ideological commitment required the extermination of any opposition, while a middle position holds that the violence was not inevitable but the product of a series of complex internal events, made worse by war.

Pamphlets 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.

Life hacks and lessons for today’s world

Some ways to use this, as a reader rather than a revolutionary:

• Ask the Article 15 question. Of any organisation that takes your money or makes rules for you, ask whether it gives an account of what it did with them. You can ask it of a club, a company or a council.
• Treat complexity as something to look into. In old-regime France, a tax system too tangled to check was part of what people resented.
• Notice when trust has gone. Once people stop believing an institution, a false story can land as hard as a true one, as the Diamond Necklace affair shows.
• Be wary of single-cause stories. Historians still argue over what caused the Revolution. A neat explanation, including “greed”, is a starting point.
• Watch what happens to the machinery of punishment. In 1794 the Terror reached Hébert, Danton and finally Robespierre in a little over four months.

Sources

• Wikipedia, “French Revolution” (taxation, the Church, feudal dues, debt, the August decrees, the Declaration, the historians’ debate, the Terror, the press), and the works it cites for them: Thomas J. Sargent and François R. Velde, “Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution”, Journal of Political Economy (1995); Gerri Chanel, “Taxation as a Cause of the French Revolution: Setting the Record Straight” (2015); David Weir, “Tontines, Public Finance, and Revolution in France and England, 1688–1789”, Journal of Economic History (1989); Jean-Pierre Jessene, “The Social and Economic Crisis in France at the End of the Ancien Régime” (2013); Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (2001); Robert Forster, “The Survival of the Nobility during the French Revolution”, Past & Present (1967); Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution (1962); Keith Michael Baker, “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights” (1994); Niek Pas, De geschiedenis van Frankrijk in een notendop (2008); Jay M. Smith, “Nobility” (2015); William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1990); Simon Schama, Citizens (1989); George Rudé, The French Revolution: Its Causes, Its History and Its Legacy After 200 Years (1988); Pascal Dupuy, “The Revolution in History, Commemoration, and Memory” (2013); Rebecca Spang, “Paradigms and Paranoia”, American Historical Review (2003); David A. Bell, “Class, Consciousness, and the Fall of the Bourgeois Revolution”, Critical Review (2004); François Furet, “A Deep-rooted Ideology as Well as Circumstance” (1989); Paul Hanson, Contesting the French Revolution (2009); Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. I (1963); Harvey Chisick, “The Pamphlet Literature of the French Revolution”, History of European Ideas (1993); Jane Chapman, “Republican Citizenship, Ethics and the French Revolutionary Press” (2005).
• Wikipedia, “Reign of Terror” (the counts), citing Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution (1935), and Jean-Clément Martin, La Terreur: vérités et légendes (2017).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Reign of Terror”.
• Claire Rioult and Romain Fathi, “The French Revolution executed royals and nobles, yes – but most people killed were commoners”, The Conversation (12 July 2023), for Donald Greer’s figures.
• “Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789”, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School (Articles 14 and 15).
• Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy” (5 February 1794), Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University.
• Wikipedia, “Maximilien Robespierre”, citing Raphaël Matta Duvignau, “Le Comité de salut public”, La Révolution française (2012); Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror (2013); Pierre Serna, La République des girouettes (2005); Albert Mathiez, “Robespierre: l’histoire et la légende”; and Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas (2014).
• Wikipedia, “Affair of the Diamond Necklace”, citing Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001).
• Wikipedia, “French Directory”, citing Georges Lefebvre, La France sous le Directoire (1795–1799) (1977).
• Wikipedia, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau”, citing the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.
• Wikipedia, “Napoleon”, citing Adam Zamoyski, Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth (2018), and Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power (2008); and “French Directory”, citing Jean Tulard, Jean-François Fayard and Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de la Révolution française (1998), for the date of the coup.
• Wikipedia, “History of French journalism”, citing Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind (2013), and Hugh Gough, The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (1988).
• Wikipedia, “L’Ami du peuple”, citing Louis R. Gottschalk, Jean-Paul Marat: A Study in Radicalism (1927, reissued 1966).
• Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), on Wikisource: “Robespierre”, “La Fayette”, “Roland, Jean Marie” (for Madame Roland), “Barras”, “Fabre d’Églantine” and “Diamond Necklace, The Affair of the”.

Checked September 2026. Wikipedia is used here only where it gives a citation for the sentence, and the work it cites is named above. Lafayette, Madame Roland, Barras, Fabre d’Églantine and the dates of Robespierre’s last months are checked against the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, the Terror’s counts against Britannica and Greer, and the Declaration and Robespierre’s speech against their own texts. Where counts differ (deaths in the Terror, newspapers founded), the page gives each.