2 Julia Crewitt Stoddard 



rection, it will be seen that the fear of famine was a most impor- 

 tant factor in that event. 



The political situation will be studied ; the interests and pur- 

 poses of parties, and their effect on each other and on the course 

 of events, will be pointed out. The evidence cited will, I think, 

 create the conviction that there is no necessity for theories of 

 deep-laid plots to account for this uprising. 



Military complications will also be investigated and their in- 

 fluence on the course of events estimated. What was the attitude 

 of the French guards and of the king's body-guard and what the 

 effect of calling the regiment of Flanders? 



The role played by individuals is not at all a simple question. 

 But it is possible to show that this great movement was not the 

 result of the political machinations of any one man or of any 

 group of men, but that its causes were various and very compli- 

 cated. Many things of different degrees of importance working 

 together produced it. It will be my task to note these causes in 

 their relations to each other and to what had gone before, to 

 attempt to unravel the tangled web of circumstance, and to show 

 the October days as a necessary link in the chain of historical 

 development. 



I 



ECONOMIC CAUSES 



Undoubtedly one of the causes of the revolt was scarcity of 

 bread and fear of famine. How fundamental a cause this was 

 it would be hard to understand without some examination of the 

 economic conditions of France. 



Taine has drawn so vivid a picture of the pitiful condition of 

 the French peasant before the revolution that a study of the 

 economic causes of any event in the course of that social up- 

 heaval seems incomplete without a rapid glance at his work. 



It is well to remember that scarcity of food was no new thing 

 in France : that for more than a hundred years poverty and 

 wretchedness had burdened the whole rural population. 1 An 



1 Taine, L'ancien regime, 430, in a note: " L'oppression et la misere com- 

 mencement vers 1672." 



268 



