The Constituents of the French Revolution National Assembly

I led a digital history research project at Stanford University with Professor Dan Edelstein, the goal of which was to digitally map the constituents of the French National Assembly during the French Revolution.

Procedure

I began by collecting biographical and voting information on each deputy of the National Assembly from the Dictionnaire des Constituants, 1789-1791 (Lemay, ref. 1). After taking a class on the mapping software ArcGIS and writing my own java program to retrieve the latitude and longitude of each city from which the deputies came, I used ArcGIS and shapefiles from Euratlas to visually represent voting patterns, the distribution of the members of each estate (i.e., nobility, clergy and Third Estate), and other interesting information. Each map shows an individual variable according to the distribution among each department (i.e., a particular level of government), with the divisions in the maps representing the individual departments. For example, the "Significant Vote" grouping of maps depicts the number of people in each department that voted for or against a particular issue. The greater the number of constituents voting a certain way on the specific issue in a particular department, the darker that department appears in the applicable map.

Significant Votes

The vote for the reattachment of Avignon took place on May 4, 1791. Avignon was a papal state in the South of France that, after rising up, requested integration into France. The integration of Avignon into France was ratified on September 14, 1791.

The assignats were the paper currency used during the French Revolution. In a vote on September 29, 1790, the assignats were made legal tender.

In September 1791, the Assembly voted to approve the constitution, France’s first (in writing). Only votes against the constitution were recorded. A few months earlier, the deputies voted whether to grant political rights to the "gens de couleur libres" (free men of color) living in the colony of Saint-Dominque (future Haiti). Opponents to this measure dubbed it the “sacrifice of the colonies,” and made a list of deputies who presumably voted in favor of it. The data represented here comes from that list (see Lemay, ref. 2).

Political Spectrum

Lists were also made of deputies thought to vote “on the left,” and “on the right.”

Political Clubs

There were many political clubs of the French Revolution. The Jacobin Club became one of the more politically radical clubs, under the leadership of Robespierre. The Feuillants Club formed as a result of the moderate Jacobins splitting from the more radical Jacobins members. The Feuillants Club was more conservative and supported a constitutional monarchy.

Other Associations

A constituent who is listed as active was considered to have been a particularly active participant in the National Assembly.

Estates

The National Assembly was preceded by the Estates General, a gathering of the traditional “three estates” in French society. The clergy was at the top as the First Estate, followed by the nobility, and then the Third Estate. The Third Estate represented the vast majority of the population and made up a little over half of the National Assembly, starting with 654 constituents in 1789. The number of constituents from the nobility and clergy was fairly equal: 311 and 331 members of the Assembly, respectively (see Lemay, ref. 2).