The 1789 French Revolution
Senior 3 · History and Citizenship
The 1789 French Revolution
Lesson 2 of 4
25 min
On 5 May 1789 about 1,200 deputies of the three estates met at Versailles, the king's palace near Paris. Louis XVI wanted only one thing from them: new taxes. Within six months the Third Estate had taken the name of the nation, a Paris crowd had seized a royal fortress, feudal privileges had been abolished, and the king had been brought to live in Paris under the eyes of the people. Figure 1 shows how fast it happened.
Figure 1. The year 1789. Events in the Assembly (blue) and in the streets (orange) pushed each other forward.
The first quarrel was about voting. If each estate voted as one block, the clergy and nobles would always win two votes to one. The Third Estate, which had been given as many deputies as the other two together, demanded a vote "by head", one vote per deputy. When the king would not agree, the Third Estate declared on 17 June that it alone was the National Assembly, representing the nation. Three days later, locked out of its usual hall, it met in an indoor tennis court and swore not to separate until France had a constitution: the Tennis Court Oath of 20 June 1789.
Definition
National Assembly: the body formed on 17 June 1789 by the deputies of the Third Estate, later joined by many clergy and nobles, which claimed to represent the whole nation and set out to write a constitution.
Constitutional monarchy: a system in which a king remains head of state but must rule according to a written constitution and share power with an elected assembly.
Sans-culottes: the working people of Paris, named for wearing long trousers instead of the knee-breeches (culottes) of the rich.
In early July the king gathered troops around Paris and, on 11 July, dismissed Jacques Necker, a finance minister who was popular with the people. Parisians feared the Assembly would be crushed. On 14 July a crowd seized weapons and attacked the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison that stood for arbitrary power, looking for gunpowder. It held only seven prisoners that day; its importance was as a symbol. After several hours of fighting, its governor surrendered. The king withdrew his troops and recalled Necker. 14 July is still France's national day.
In the countryside, rumours spread that nobles were sending bandits to destroy the harvest. In this Great Fear of late July, peasants attacked manor houses and burned the records of their feudal dues. To calm them, the Assembly voted on the night of 4 August 1789 to abolish feudal privileges, the tithe and the special tax exemptions of the clergy and nobles.
In October, with bread still scarce, several thousand Paris women marched to Versailles on 5 October. The next day the royal family was forced to move to the Tuileries palace in Paris. From then on the king lived under the watch of the capital.
On 26 August 1789 the Assembly adopted a declaration of rights to stand at the head of the future constitution. Here are four of its seventeen articles, in a public-domain English translation.
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be based only upon public utility.
2. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part personally, or by their representatives, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. […]
11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man; every citizen then can freely speak, write, and print, subject to responsibility for the abuse of this freedom in the cases determined by law.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (26 August 1789), translated by Frank Maloy Anderson in The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789–1907 (1908).
Worked example: reading the Declaration
Question: Using Article 1 and your own knowledge, explain how the Declaration attacked the Ancien Régime. (4 marks)
Step 1. Quote. Article 1 says "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."
Step 2. Explain. Under the Ancien Régime rights depended on birth: clergy and nobles were born into privileges, such as freedom from the taille, that the Third Estate did not have. If all are born equal in rights, such privileges cannot be justified.
Step 3. Add knowledge. The second sentence allows only distinctions based on "public utility", in other words usefulness to society, such as a job earned by talent, not by birth. This matched the demand of the bourgeoisie for careers open to talent.
Step 4. Conclude. Article 1 destroyed the legal basis of the three estates.
Tip
Link the Declaration to the thinkers. "Law is the expression of the general will" (Article 6) is Rousseau's phrase. The protection of liberty and property echoes John Locke, whom you met with the American Revolution. Examiners reward this link between ideas and events.
Warning
"Men" meant men. The Declaration spoke of "the rights of man". In 1789 it did not give women political rights, and it did not end slavery in France's colonies. Don't write that it gave equal rights to everyone; say whom it included and whom it left out.
Crash Course World History #29, "The French Revolution" (CrashCourse channel, 12 minutes). John Green races from the bankruptcy of 1788 to Napoleon. Watch for how he compares the French and American revolutions, and note the events of 1789 you have just studied.
Article 16 (1) of the Constitution of the Republic of Rwanda says: "All Rwandans are born and remain equal in rights and freedoms." Article 29 gives everyone the right "to be presumed innocent until proved guilty by a competent Court", and Article 38 says that "Freedom of press, of expression and of access to information are recognised and guaranteed by the State." Which articles of the 1789 Declaration do these echo? What has the Rwandan text added that the 1789 text left out?
Practice
Sources and credits
