Night of the 4th of August

The Night of the 4th of August of 1789 was a tumultuous night in the Constituent Assembly where it seemed the delegates were determined to tear down a thousand years of privilege in one evening.  

The Duc d’Aiguillon proposed the ending of feudal rights and the end of personal servitude despite being one of the richest men in France due to feudal dues.  It also deprived the church of its traditional income by abolishing the tithing system as put forward by Duc du Châtelet.  Plurality was also embraced when the Assembly decided to allow freedom of religion.  As the evening progressed it appeared delegates were seeking to outdo each other in terms of their revolutionary credentials.  Over the course of the evening hunting rights would be abolished, the ability to buy magisterial positions removed and privileges of various towns, cities and regions ended.

Although the nobles within the hall seemed to have succumbed to revolutionary fervour this was not the case for those across France.  Many were horrified at the ending of seigneurial duties although peasants were meant to pay for their land this never happened.  Soon many nobles would be leaving France as emigres.

Barère on reaction after the the night of August 4th 1789.  Taken from Memoirs of Bertrand Barère Volume 1, H. S. Nichols, London (1896) p231

The session of the night of the 4th of August was crowded : everyone wanted to know what had happened in the provinces, the natural result of the great excitement in the capital. The details of these almost general insurrections were heard in most profound silence ; and after the report had been read, a generous feeling was universal. Some proposed to free the country from all traces of feudalism, others wished to declare the church rates abolished.

These decrees of abolition caused the issue of two remarkable works, remarkable from the names of their authors as by their disinterested character. One, written by the Abbe Maury, was entitled, "Return me my Eight Hundred Francs " ; the other, by the Abbe Sieyes, was against the suppression of the smaller taxes, which formed the revenue of his abbey. The latter chose as the motto of his pamphlet, "They want to be Free, but do not know how to be Just." These two protests showed the amount of patriotism of those abbes who preached either revolution or the cause of the monarchy, but who at the same time would much rather have retained their wealth and their livings. This night is to be remembered for the transfer of property and for the generous abandonment of so many privileges which formed the patrimony of whole families.

Tom Paine discusses the removal of the feudal titles on August 4th 1789. Taken from The Rights of Man, Penguin, London (1983) p102

The French constitution says, there shall be no titles; and of consequences, all that class of equivocal generation, which in some countries is called aristocracy and in others nobility, is done away and the peer is exalted into MAN.

Titles are but nicknames and every nickname is a title.  The thing is perfectly harmless in itself; but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it.  It reduces man into the diminutive of man into things which are great, and the counterfeit of woman in things which are little.  It talks about its fine blue ribbon like girl, and shows its new garter like a child.  A certain writer of some antiquity says “When I was a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things. “

It is, properly, from the elevated mind of France, that the folly of titles has fallen.  It has outgrown its baby clothes of Count and Duke and breached itself in manhood.  France has not levelled; it has exalted.