Night of 4 August

The countryside in flames

In the second half of July 1789, news of the Bastille and rumours of “brigands” in the pay of aristocrats spread from village to village. Historians call the panic that followed the Great Fear. Across much of France peasants armed themselves against enemies who never came, and in several regions they turned on the châteaux instead: they forced lords to give up their claims and burned the terriers, the registers in which their dues were written down.

At Versailles the National Assembly was debating a declaration of rights. The news from the provinces left it two choices: send troops against the peasants, and depend on the royal army it had just defied, or give the countryside something of what it wanted. On the evening of 3 August the Breton Club, a group of patriot deputies that had formed around the delegation from Brittany, chose the second. The Duc d’Aiguillon was to open the next evening’s debate with an offer from the nobility itself.

A night of renunciations

Aiguillon was forestalled. As soon as a report on the disorders had been read, the Vicomte de Noailles — a younger son with little land of his own, and Lafayette’s brother-in-law — asked to speak. The peasants, he said, wanted to be relieved of their burdens. The Assembly should decree that taxes be paid by everyone in proportion to their income, that feudal dues could be bought out by the communities at a fair price, and that seigneurial labour services, mortmain and other personal servitudes be abolished without compensation.

Aiguillon, one of the greatest landowners in the kingdom, followed and backed him. After that the sitting took on a life of its own. The Bishop of Chartres proposed ending the lords’ exclusive right to hunt; lords gave up their seigneurial courts and their dovecotes; clergymen offered up the fees parish priests charged for baptisms, weddings and burials, and agreed that the tithe could be bought out; holders of venal offices renounced them. Then came the provinces and the towns, whose deputies offered up their separate privileges in turn, some only on condition that their constituents agreed.

Toward 2 am, on the proposal of the Marquis de Lally-Tollendal, the Assembly hailed Louis XVI as “Restorer of French Liberty”; at the Archbishop of Paris’s suggestion it also voted a Te Deum.

What the decrees said

The night produced a list of promises, not a law. Turning it into one took a week of debate, from 5 to 11 August, and some of the generosity cooled along the way. The final decree, of 19 articles, opened with a sweeping sentence:

The rest of the article drew a line. Rights tied to personal servitude — mortmain, serfdom and the dues that stood in for them — were abolished without compensation. All other feudal dues, the quitrents and harvest shares that weighed most on the peasants, were declared redeemable: they remained payable until each holder bought them out, at a price the Assembly would set later. Seigneurial courts, exclusive hunting rights and dovecotes went outright. The tithe, which the clergy had offered to make redeemable, was abolished without compensation, though it was still to be collected until the state found another way to pay for public worship. Venal offices were suppressed, their holders to be reimbursed. Tax privileges, the special rights of provinces and towns, and the fees paid to Rome went too, and every citizen became eligible for every office.

Why it matters

In one night the Assembly dismantled the legal frame of a society divided into orders: privilege by birth, by province and by town gave way to one law for all citizens. That cleared the ground for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, voted on 26 August, whose first article says that men are born and remain free and equal in rights.

For the peasants the victory was only partial. Buying out their dues was beyond most of them, and many simply stopped paying. Unrest in the countryside went on for years, until the National Convention abolished the remaining feudal dues without compensation on 17 July 1793. By then the Night of 4 August had already become one of the founding legends of the Revolution: the moment the old order was given up rather than taken.