French Revolution

• The Revolution


  1789
• Estates General


  French government had been in debt for a hundred years
• Calonne


  Responsible to the King for raising money
• Calonne's idea


  1. People should pay tax depending on how much land they owned

  2. People who owned more land would pay more tax

  3. 1st and 2nd Estate weren't happy
• Assembly of Notables


  1st and 2nd Estate
• The Estates said that such a tax could only be agreed by people from all the Estates
• 1614: Last time the King called Estates General
• King's response


  1. Told the Assembly of Notables to stop meeting

  2. Replaced Calonne with Brienne

  3. The Parlement of Paris refused to agree to the new tax

  4. The King dismissed the members
• 1788: Harvest, the price of a loaf of bread went up by 50% between April 1788 and March 1789
• Riots and protests
• The King called a meeting of the Estates General
• Estates General


  • Middle-class people demanded a share of power
  • Magisters, lawyers, teachers and bankers wanted a say in how France was governed
  • They demanded a Constitution - set of rules which said how the country should be run
• Many of these ideas were opposed by the King and by the richest members of the First and Second Estates
• National Assembly - The Tennis Court Oath


  1. Members of the 3rd Estate met in a nearby tennis court

  2. They pledged not to go home until France had a Constitution

  3. They called themselves: National Assembly
• 20th June 1789: The Tennis Court Oath
• The middle-class members of the National Assembly didn't at first plan to make a democracy
• They wanted some of the power for themselves
• 27th June ordered members of the First and Second Estates to join the National Assembly
• The Year of the Revolution

  1789
• The fall of the Bastille

  1. Sparked off violence all across France

  2. Uprisings by peasants

  3. Summer of 1789: Grand Peur (Great Fear)

  4. Peasants attacked the houses of rich landowners, broke down fences and killed their animals

  5. They burnt the records which said how much rent and tax the peasants had to pay
• Jacobins


  • A group of people who encouraged the violent acts
  • They said that peasants should no longer do what the landowners told them to do
• The attempt by the better-off members of the Third Estate to share power with the nobles had started off a series of events which they had never planned
• It had encouraged the poorer people to rise up in revolt
• A revolution (a new class gets into power) was beginning to take place
• The National Assembly was no longer in control
• The middle-class members became very worried about what was happening
• First and Second Estate: Realized that power was beginning to slip from their hands too
• They realized that their control over the peasants was being lost
• King Louis XVI was very angry: He even thought about sending soldiers to recapture the Bastille
• His advisors told him this was a bad idea: he could no longer rely on his soldiers to do as he ordered
• Louis allowed the people of Paris to do as they wanted
• A new government of the city: The Paris Commune was set up by some members of the Third Estate
• 4th August 1789


  1. The National Assembly tried to do away with the things that were making the peasants so angry

  2. A new law ended many of the powers of the nobles and the Church

  3. Peasants couldn't be punished in their own courts

  4. Church could no longer take taxes and tithes from them

  5. All adult male citizens were given the right to vote
• On 26 August they produced a Declaration of the Rights of Man
• This promised freedom to the people of France
• This still did not stop the violence: In October a crowd marched from Paris to the Palace of Versailles and forced the King and his family to return to Paris