August the 4th – a good day in the French Revolution

A few days past but who is counting? In all the talk of the anniversaries noted by the media on August the 4th (90th anniversary of the British declaration of war on Germany and the 300 hundredth anniversary of the capture of Gibraltar) I hoped (although I did not expect) that there would be a brief mention of August the 4th 1789.

The French Revolution was mostly just a story of murder and plundering (at least ten times more government officials, paper money, vast numbers of killings all over France, endless new regulations…) but there were a few good things (things that people like me often overlook) and most of them happened on August the 4th 1789.

It was on this date that the National Assembly abolished many of the old taxes and regulations of the Ancient Regime.

Taxes to the Church – abolished. Feudal dues – abolished. Many of the Royal taxes (including, I believe, the salt tax) – abolished.

True the good things were being overwhelmed by bad things even by August the 4th 1789 – but, to be fair, we should still remember the good things.

It was also the date when (again if my memory serves me correctly) serfdom was abolished. True French courts had hardly been in the habit of enforcing serfdom – but the fact remains that about half a million people were formally serfs in the France of 1789.

Sadly my memory fails me when I try to remember when the guilds were abolished – was it also August the 4th? True the guilds should not have been abolished, it was their legal monopoly on the production of various products (granted by Henry IV – before his time towns in France had varied in terms of guild rights) that should have been abolished – but the revolutionaries were sort of right in this area. They (or at least some of them) sort of understood that the effects of the guild monopoly (in-so-far as the courts enforced it) were bad.