Chapter 3: The French Revolution and Napoleon 1789-1815
Section 1: On the Eve of Revolution
Part 1
A DIVIDED FRENCH SOCIETY
First Estate
Who:
Clergy – high Church leaders such as bishops and abbots
Living Conditions:
The Church owned about 10 percent of the land, collected tithes, and paid no direct taxes to the state.
Second Estate
Who:
Nobility of French society
Living Conditions:
Some held top jobs in government, the army, the courts, and the Church.
Courtiers (the attendants of a luxurious autocrat) enjoyed endless entertainment.
Many nobles owned land, but received little financial income. As a result, they felt the pressure of trying to maintain their status in a period of rising prices.
Third Estate
Who:
Bourgeoisie (boor zhwah zee), or middle class.
Prosperous bankers, merchants, and manufacturers, as well as lawyers, doctors, journalists, and professors.
Rural Peasants
Some were prosperous landowners who hired laborers to work for them. Others were tenant farmers or day laborers.
Poorest members
Urban workers. They included apprentices, journeymen, and others who worked in industries such as printing or cloth making.
Many women and men earned a meager living as servants, stable hands, construction workers, or street sellers of everything from food to pots and pans.
A large number of the urban poor were unemployed. To survive, some turned to begging or crime.
Living Conditions:
Wealthy bourgeois families in the Third Estate could buy political office and even titles, but the best jobs were still reserved for nobles.
Urban workers earned miserable wages. Even the smallest rise in the price of bread, their main food, brought the threat of greater hunger or even starvation.
Critical Thinking
1. What privilege did the First and Second Estates have that were not enjoyed by the Third Estate?
The First and Second Estates paid almost no taxes. Peasants were burdened by taxes on everything from land to soap to salt.
2. What caused the French national debt to soar?
The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution.
Costs generally had risen in the 1700s, and the lavish court wasted millions
The government borrowed more and more money. By 1789, half of the government’s income from taxes went to paying the interest on this enormous debt.
In the late 1780s, bad harvests sent food prices soaring and brought hunger to poorer peasants and city dwellers.
The nobles and clergy fiercely resisted any attempt to end their exemption from taxes.
3. What did Jacques Necker suggest to ease the national debt problem?
Urged the king to reduce extravagant court spending, reform government.
Abolish burdensome tariffs on internal trade.
When Necker proposed taxing the First and Second Estates, however, the nobles and high clergy forced the king to dismiss him.
4. Why did wealthy and powerful demand that the king to summon the Estates-General?
The purpose was to reform the government. They hoped that they could bring the absolute monarch under the control of the nobles and guarantee their own privileges.
Part 2
1788
France was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Louis XVI finally summoned the Estates-General to meet at Versailles the following year.
In preparation, Louis had all three estates prepare cahiers (kah yayz), or notebooks, listing their grievances.
called for reforms such as fairer taxes
freedom of the press
Servant girls demanded the right to leave service when they wanted.
Some complained that “20 million must live on half the wealth of France while the clergy . . . devour the other half.”
Critical Thinking:
1. Why was the Estate General deadlocked over the issue of voting?
Traditionally, each estate had met and voted separately. Each group had one vote. Under this system, the First and Second Estates always outvoted the Third Estate two to one. This time, the Third Estate wanted all three estates to meet in a single body, with votes counted “by head.”
2. What action did the Third Estate take to resolve the deadlock on the voting issue?
In June 1789, they declared themselves to be the National Assembly. A few days later, the National Assembly found its meeting hall locked and guarded. Fearing that the king planned to dismiss them, the delegates moved to a nearby indoor tennis court where the delegates took their famous Tennis Court Oath. They swore “never to separate and to meet wherever the circumstances might require until we have established a sound and just constitution.”
3. How did the First / Second Estate and Louis XVI respond to the “Tennis Court Oath”?
Reform-minded clergy and nobles joined the Assembly, but Louis XVI grudgingly accepted it. As royal troops gathered around Paris, rumors spread that the king planned to dissolve the Assembly.
4. How did Parisians respond to with rumors that royal troops were going to occupy the capital?
More than 800 Parisians assembled outside the Bastille, a grim medieval fortress used as a prison for political and other prisoners. The crowd demanded weapons and gunpowder believed to be stored there.
The commander of the Bastille refused to open the gates and opened fire on the crowd. In the battle that followed, many people were killed. Finally, the enraged mob broke through the defenses. They killed the commander and five guards and released the handful of prisoners who were being held there, but found no weapons.
5. What is the significance of the fall of the Bastille on 7/14/1789?
The Bastille was a symbol to the people of France representing years of abuse by the monarchy. The storming of and subsequent fall of the Bastille was a wake-up call to Louis XVI. Unlike any other riot or short-lived protest, this event posed a challenge to the sheer existence of the regime. Since 1880, the French have celebrated Bastille Day annually as their national independence day.
6. In your own words, what are the three factors that led to the start of the French Revolution?
Social inequalities
Economic troubles
Inspiration from Enlightenment ideas
