Why Did The French Revolution Happen In 1789? PDF

Why did the French Revolution happen in France in 1789? - sources for analysis Morrill 2023, NSHS DOC 1: Louis XVI rules as an absolute monarch secondary source: textbookI: “... The King, Louis XVI,...

Why did the French Revolution happen in France in 1789? - sources for analysis Morrill 2023, NSHS DOC 1: Louis XVI rules as an absolute monarch secondary source: textbookI: “... The King, Louis XVI, was absolute. He ruled by the divine right theory which held that he had received his power to govern from God and was therefore responsible to God alone. THE KING… - appointed all civil (government) officials and military officers. - made and enforced the laws. - could declare war and make peace. - levied (charged) taxes and spent the people’s money as he saw fit. - controlled the expression of thought by a strict censorship of speech and press. - arbitrarily imprisoned anyone without trial for an indefinite period. secondary source: textbook - lived in his magnificent palace at Versailles, Louis XVI had little particular taste or talent for rule, completely oblivious to the rising tide of popular and his unpopular Austrian wife, Queen Marie discontent....” Antoinette, increasingly drew fire for her supposed extravagance and indifference to those below her.” Friedman & Foner, A Genetic Approach to Modern European - Excerpt from Sherman Dennis. West in the World: From the History, College Entrance Book Co., 1938 Renaissance. S.I.: Mcgraw-Hill, 2004. 557.. DOC 2: 18th c. French society divides people into “estates” 1st Estate: 2nd Estate: nobility clergy (2-4% of pop; owned (1% of pop. 25% of land; paid no owned 20% taxes) of land; paid no taxes)  Doc 3: 18th c. French society divides people into “estates” 1st Estate 2nd Estate 3RD Estate: 97% of population CLERGY NOBILITY BOURGEOISIE URBAN WORKING PEASANTS CLASS ~1% of population; ~ 2% of population; merchants, manufacturers, craftsmen, wage earners, rural farmers ~130,000 ~ 350,000 bankers, master craftsmen, day laborers, gardeners, doctors, lawyers, intellectuals, handymen 75-80% of the Owned ~10% of land Owned 25-30% of lower government officials population; owned land ~ 8-9% of population 35-40% of the land DID NOT PAY TAXES ~ 8% of population did not own land yearly gift to the king DID NOT PAY TAXES owned 20-25% of the land PAID STATE TAXES PAID STATE TAXES: and FEUDAL DUES Bishops were nobles Had access to the PAID SOME TAXES; - Spent a lot of their Priests were from the highest positions of - They could not get jobs income on food. 3rd estate. power in the Catholic reserved for nobles. Church, army and the - Educated and aware of government. Enlightenment ideas. Doc 3: Different estates pay different taxes DOC 4: Political cartoons critique the social structure, 1780 Cartoon, anonymous, 1780s, showing relationship between tradition French estates. The rock is labeled “Taille,” a traditional land tax, and “Corvee,” the official name for feudal dues and relationships owed to the higher estates. DOC 5: Political cartoons critique the social structure, 1787 Challenging the French Political Order This late eighteenth-century cartoon satirizes the French social and political structure as the events and tensions leading up to the outbreak of the French Revolution unfolded. This image embodies the highly radical critique of the French political structure that erupted from about l787 when the nobility and church refused to aid the financial crisis of the monarchy. CORBIS/Bettmann DOC 6: The American Revolution (1776-1781) sets the stage for France secondary source: textbook Thousands of French soldiers had provided assistance to the American colonists and now returned home full of republican enthusiasm. Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. ambassador in Paris, reported that France "has been awakened by our revolution." More immediately, the French government, which had generously aided the Americans in an effort to undermine its British rivals, was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and had long sought reforms that would modernize the tax system and make it more equitable. Excerpted from Strayer, Robert W. Ways of the World a Brief Global History, Value Edition. BEDFORD BKS ST MARTIN'S, 2021, 471. DOC 7: There is a series of bad harvests BAD WEATHER: - severe hailstorms on July 13th 1788 - Winter 1788/89: Coldest it had been in decades DOC 8: Population and the price of bread are rising POPULATION + POOR FARMING TECHNIQUES= FOOD PRICES Population went from 20 million (1700)→ 28 million people (1780) Agricultural methods had changed little since the Middle Ages so the same amount of food was produced to feed many more people  DOC 9: An English observer describes the lives of the poor primary source: book written in the 1780s “September 5, 1788: The poor people seem very poor indeed. The children are terribly ragged (worn down, neglected). June 10, 1789: The lack of bread is terrible. Stories arrive every moment from the provinces of riots and disturbances, and calling in the military, to preserve the peace of the markets….The price of bread has risen above people’s ability to pay. This causes great misery. July 12, 1789: Walking up a long hill, to ease my mare, I was joined by a poor woman, who complained of the times, and that it was a sad country; demanding her reasons, she said her husband had but a small plot of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet they had to pay a tax of 42 pounds of wheat, and three chickens, to one noble and 168 pounds of oats, one chicken and 1 sou [small unit of money] to another...the taxes and laws are crushing us. This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent, and her face so wrinkled and hardened by labor, — but she said she was only twenty-eight.” Excerpt from: Miss Betham-Edwards, ed., Arthur Young’s Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 DOC 10: Louis summons the Estates General to reform the taxation system secondary source: textbook Louis XVI summoned the Estates General in July 1788…During the early months of 1789, elections of representatives to the Estates General were held. All men who had reached the age of 25 and who paid taxes could vote. Each of the three estates elected its own representatives. In thousands of meetings to draw up lists of grievances to present to the king, people found their political voices and connected their dissatisfactions with inflating expectations of reform. Hundreds of pamphlets appeared and public debate spread widely. Of the 600 representatives of the third estate, not one came from the peasantry.. these delegates…were all members of the bourgeoisie. They fully expected to solve the financial crisis quickly and then move on to addressing the long lists of complaints that they had been accumulating for years. Most bourgeois representatives, like many liberal nobles, wanted to create a constitutional government with a national assembly that would meet regularly to pass taxes and laws. Excerpt from Sherman Dennis. West in the World: From the Renaissance. S.I.: Mcgraw-Hill, 2004. Print, 557. DOC 11: Political pamphlets spread new ideas primary source: Abbé Sieyès, was a Who then shall dare to say that the Third French Roman Estate has not within itself all that is Catholic abbé and clergyman, one of the necessary for the formation of a complete chief theorists of the French Revolution. His nation? ….Therefore, what is the Third Estate? liberal 1789 pamphlet Everything; but an everything shackled and What is the Third Estate? became the oppressed. What would it be without the manifesto of the Revolution that helped privileged order? Everything, but an transform the Estates-General into everything free and flourishing. Nothing can the National Assembly succeed without it, everything would be in June of 1789. infinitely better without the others. (“What is the Third Estate”, Jan 1789) DOC 12: Political pamphlets spread new ideas primary source: Comte “The Third Estate is the People and the D’Antraigues as People is the foundation of the State; it is in quoted in an excerpt from fact the State itself; Nobles and clergy are Citizens: A merely political categories while according Chronicle of the French to the unchangeable laws of nature the Revolution. People is everything. Everything should be subordinated (inferior) to it… It is in the People that all national power resides and for the People that all states exist.”