Why did the French Monarchy collapse in 1792?
In order to begin to answer this question it is necessary to first return to the Estates General of 1789. Although the body had not been convened since 1641, over 150 years prior, Louis XVI was not prepared to allow for any significant change in procedure; in November of 1788, the king had granted double representation for the Third Estate but also upheld voting by orders. Under such a system, the first and second estates had the happy fortune to be always in the majority, as most of the upper echelons of the Catholic Church were made up of nobles. As such, despite their overwhelming majority, both in the meeting halls of the Estates General and throughout the country, the commons had little power.
Historians Mora Ozouf and Keith Baker have both discussed the significance of the emergence of the public sphere during this period which gave rise to hundreds of political satires, pamphlets and cartoons which were used to devastating effect to decry the lack of influence the Third Estate was able to exert. Through these mediums, the commons began to question the legitimacy of a strictly hierarchical society and, even more troublingly as far the upper estates were concerned, started to suggest that the Third Estate, by virtue of their labours, were the only true citizens of the French Nation, as articulated in Father Sieyes pamphlet ‘What is the Third Estate.’ It seems that instead of engaging with these issues, the king ‘surrendered to reactionary elements at court’, most noticeably the Princes of the Blood who, in December of 1788 had issued a memorandum denouncing the various reform proposals put forward by the Third Estate in anticipation of the Estates General.
On June 17 the r...
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Norman Hampson. A Social History of the French Revolution (London, 1963) p.
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Bibliography D. M. G. Sutherland, France 1789-1815 Revolution and Counterrevolution (London 1985). Tom Holmberg, “Napoleon and the French Revolution”, 1998, www.napoleonbonaparte.nl/html/body_nap_and_revolution.html. www.chesco.com/artman/napoleonbonaparte.html (Quotes by Napoleon Bonaparte). George Orwell, Animal Farm, Middlesex, England 1945. Colin Jones, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution, (New York, 1988).
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In 1788 Louis XVI had had to call the Estates General to ward off the
Some people like Emmanuel Sieyès, middle-class writer who was taken by the Enlightenment ideas, believed that all of French Society lay on the backs of the third estate. On the contrary, Robespierre, the monarch at the time, believed that the third estate did not have the power to do anything important to society. The third estate had to pay taxes like the Gabelle and Taille while the first and seconds estates did not have to pay any taxes to the king. Also, the third estates had less of a representation in voting. The first and second estate could outvote the third estate every time and this was a huge inequality. The condition of the third estate was horrible but a good portion of this third estate was the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie had some wealth and social class, so they influenced the rest of the third estate about their rights, while also inspiring some lower clergies and provincial nobles and thus led to a group of rebellious people to fight the monarchy. This fight for political representation and political rights was only one cause of the French Revolution. Another causes lies in the French Monarchs: Louis XlV, Louis XV, and Louis XVl. When Louis XlV was ruling, the monarchy had unlimited power and was known as a
Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1976. Print.
The France practically changed from being an absolute monarchy to a republic overnight. Everything that the people of France had ever known was changed in a heart-beat. Their once beloved king had just been guillotined and it was now time to set up a new political system. The leaders of the revolution, the Jacobins, imagined a representative government that ruled on the principals of “liberte,” “egalite,” and “fraternity,” liberty, equality and broth...
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Sutherland, Donald M.G. The French Revolution and Empire: the quest for a civic order. Oxford, UK. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2003. 40-43. Print.
In the 1780s, the rise of the French middle classes provided a major counterpoint to the total dominance of the King, which was powered by enlightenment principles, as well as the success of the American Revolution. Representational government was a huge factor in the rise of revolutionary spirit, since many members of the middle classes were not allowed to vote or speak out their views on political, economic, and legal matters. Political activism on part of the middle classes (and some members of the upper classes) led diplomatic and political methods to coerce the King to allow them greater participation in government. Abbes Sieyes was a member of the Third Estate, a political group that sought representational government for the people, instead of merely serving the First Estate (The Clergy” and the Second Estate (The
New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969. Print. The. Kreis, Steven. A. A. "Lecture 12: The French Revolution - Moderate Stage, 1789-1792.
[7] Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: U of California, 1984. Print.
Each social class in France has its own reasons for wanting a change in government. The aristocracy was upset by the king’s power, while the Bourgeoisie was upset by the privileges of the aristocracy. The peasants and urban workers were upset by their burdensome existence. The rigid, unjust social structure meant that citizens were looking for change because “all social classes.had become uncomfortable and unhappy with the status quo.” (Nardo, 13)
At the start of the revolution, in 1789, France’s class system changed dramatically (Giddens, 2014). Aristocrats lost wealth and status, while those who were at the bottom of the social ladder, rose in positions. The rise of sociology involved the unorthodox views regarding society and man which were once relevant during the Enlightenment (Nisbet, 2014). Medievalism in France during the eighteenth century was still prevalent in its “legal structures, powerful guilds, in its communes, in the Church, in universities, and in the patriarchal family” (Nisbet, 2014). Philosophers of that time’s had an objective to attempt to eliminate the natural law theory of society (Nisbet, 2014). The preferred outcome was a coherent order in which the mobility of individuals would be unrestricted by the autonomous state (French Revolution). According to Karl Marx, economic status is extremely important for social change. The peasants felt the excess decadence of the ancient regime was at the expense of their basic standards of living, thus fuelling Marx’s idea of class based revolutions and the transition of society (Katz, 2014). This can be observed, for example, in novels such as Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a novel that had a role for mobilizing the attitudes of the