The 1789 French Revolution
Senior 3 · History and Citizenship
The 1789 French Revolution
Lesson 1 of 4
25 min
Before you read what historians say, look at what people saw at the time. The first source is a cartoon sold in Paris in 1789. The second is from the diary of Arthur Young, an English farmer and writer who travelled across France on horseback in 1787, 1788 and 1789 to study its farming.
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 morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet they had a franchar (42 lb.) of wheat, and three chickens, to pay as a quit-rent to one Seigneur; and four franchar of oats, one chicken and [a small sum of money] to pay to another, besides very heavy tailles and other taxes. She had seven children, and the cow's milk helped to make the soup. […] This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent, and her face so furrowed and hardened by labour, — but she said she was only twenty-eight.
Source B. Arthur Young, diary entry for 12 July 1789, on the road to Mars-la-Tour in eastern France, from Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, 1789 (first published 1792).
Analysing the sources. Both sources show the same thing from two angles: the people at the bottom of French society carried the weight of those at the top. In Source B one poor family owes grain and chickens to two lords (a seigneur is a lord), plus the taille and other taxes to the king. Source A turns that burden into a picture. Notice also who made each source: A is propaganda, made to anger its buyers; B is an eyewitness diary by a foreigner with no side to take in French politics, though it describes only one woman on one day.
Definition
Ancien Régime (French for "old order"): the political and social system of France before 1789, with an absolute king and a society divided into three estates.
Estate: one of the three legal orders of French society. The First Estate was the clergy, the Second Estate the nobles, and the Third Estate everyone else.
Absolute monarchy: a system in which the king holds all power, with no elected parliament to limit him.
Taille: the main direct tax, paid by the Third Estate. Tithe: a tenth of the harvest, paid to the Church. Feudal dues: payments in money, crops or labour owed by peasants to their lord.
Figure 1. The clergy and nobles were about 2 in every 100 French people but owned much of the land and paid little tax.
| Estate and its members | Privileges and burdens |
|---|---|
| First Estate: the clergy (bishops, abbots and parish priests) | Collected the tithe; owned much land; paid no taille, only a "free gift" to the king that it chose itself. |
| Second Estate: the nobles | Held the top posts in the army, the Church and government; collected feudal dues; paid no taille; had hunting rights over peasants' fields. |
| Third Estate: the bourgeoisie (merchants, bankers, lawyers, doctors), town workers and peasants | Paid the taille, the tithe and feudal dues; peasants also owed the corvée, unpaid work on the roads; had almost no share in power. |
Definition
Bourgeoisie: the educated and often wealthy middle class of the towns, such as merchants, bankers, lawyers and doctors. In 1789 it belonged to the Third Estate.
The Enlightenment: an eighteenth-century movement of thinkers who argued that reason, not tradition or royal authority, should guide government and society.
Bankruptcy. Wars had drained the treasury. The Seven Years' War cost about 1.8 billion livres, and French help to the Americans about 1.3 billion livres, more than twice the Crown's yearly income. Because the privileged paid little tax, the king could not raise enough money, and lenders charged France about twice the interest rate Britain paid. In August 1788 the government had to suspend some payments.
Hunger. The harvest of 1788 was very poor. In 1789 the price of bread rose by 88% while real wages fell by 25%, so bread swallowed a larger and larger share of a worker's wage.
The Estates-General. The nobles refused new taxes unless the king called the Estates-General, an assembly of the three estates that had not met since 1614. Louis XVI called it for May 1789. That meeting turned a money crisis into a revolution, as the next lesson shows.
Figure 2. Long-term causes (blue) made France ready to explode; short-term causes (orange) lit the fuse.
Worked example: judging a source
Question: How useful is Source B to a historian studying the causes of the French Revolution? (6 marks)
Content. It shows that a peasant family paid dues to two lords as well as the taille and other taxes, and that this made the family poor. That supports social inequality and economic hardship as causes.
Origin. It was written by Arthur Young on the day, 12 July 1789, as an eyewitness. As an Englishman he had no reason to favour either the king or the revolutionaries, and as a farming expert he knew what a family could pay.
Limits. It records the words of one woman, in one place, on one day. Young did not check her figures, and he published the diary in 1792, after the Revolution had begun, when he could have edited it.
Judgement. It is useful as vivid evidence of the burden on peasants, but it must be supported by wider evidence, such as figures on taxes and bread prices, before a historian can generalise.
Tip
Judge a source with "CO-PL": Content (what it says), Origin (who made it, when, why), Purpose (to inform, persuade, amuse?), Limits (what it cannot show). Then give a verdict.
Warning
Don't say "poverty caused the Revolution". Many countries were poor without a revolution. France exploded because several causes came together at once: unfair privileges, new ideas, a bankrupt king and hungry towns. Show how the causes connect.
French peasants owed the corvée, unpaid work on the roads. In Senior 1 you studied uburetwa, unpaid labour that grew heavier under Belgian rule in Rwanda. In what ways are the two alike, and in what ways are they different? Why do systems of forced, unpaid labour so often cause anger?
Practice
Sources and credits
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
