A Program for Revolutionary Change in France

The French Revolution began because of a problem that has plagued rulers since the beginning of organized government—King Louis XVI and his ministers could not balance their budget. Having exhausted every other solution, in 1788 the king agreed to convene a meeting of the Estates General, France’s representative assembly, which had last met in 1614. He hoped it would solve the government’s fiscal plight by approving new taxes. The nobility, having fended off every effort to curtail its tax exemptions and privileges, saw the convening of the Estates General as an opportunity to increase its power at the expense of the monarchy. For both king and nobility the calling of the Estates General had unexpected results: The nobility lost its privileges, and the king lost most of his power and, in 1793, having been judged a traitor to the Revolution, his head.

Neither Louis nor the nobles had comprehended the French people’s disgust with royal absolutism and aristocratic privilege. Nor had they sensed the degree to which the Enlightenment and the English and American revolutions had committed the people to fundamental change. Having convened in May 1789, within months the Estates General transformed itself into a National Assembly, dismantled the laws and institutions of the Old Regime, and set about creating a new political order based on constitutionalism, equality, and natural rights.

Even before the Estates General met, the French populace was in a high pitch of political excitement as a result of the procedures adopted for choosing delegates. The delegates representing the three orders of French society—the First Estate, or clergy; the Second Estate, or nobility; and the Third Estate, everyone else from peasants to wealthy city dwellers—were chosen in a complicated process that began with village and neighborhood and ended at the level of baillages, larger districts based on divisions in the French judicial system. At each electoral meeting those attending were encouraged to draw up a cahier de doléances, a memorandum of grievances, in which all kinds of ideas on local and national affairs could be expressed. These were then passed on to editorial committees at the baillage level, whose members sifted through them and integrated them into final cahiers that were sent on to Versailles, where the Estates General would meet.

I would like you to read some excerpts from the cahier of the Third Estate of the city of Paris (you can read it by clicking here). A document largely created by lawyers and businessmen, it presents a fair sampling of the grievances and expectations of urban, upper-middle-class Frenchmen on the eve of the French Revolution.

Once you have read the document, I would like you to think about and discuss the following: What view of monarchy is expressed in the cahier? How does it compare with the view of monarchy expressed in the English Bill of Rights? What views are expressed in the cahier about the position of the nobility and clergy in the French society? It has been said that the French Revolution was about legal privilege, not monarchy. Do the thoughts expressed in this cahier bear this out? What solutions does the cahier offer for the government’s fiscal crisis? In what ways does this document represent the interests of the urban middle class? To what extent does it show concern for other groups in society? What kind of government does the cahier envision for France? Your thoughts…