France

IN THE YEARS before the French Revolution, the right in France, the monarchy and its allied nobles, was [Page 652]in trouble. When Louis XV died and was interred in the cathedral of St. Denis, burial place of French kings, no public mourning accompanied his passing. There were too many French households with empty seats from his reckless pursuit of military glory. While Louis XV had been at least a capable king and a wily diplomat, any productive genes in his son and heir, Louis XVI, remained distinctly, as Abbot Gregor Mendel would have said, recessive. The depletion of the treasury continued, with an archaic system of finances that never repaired the deficit. In January 1772, only 20 years before the fall of the monarchy, the comptroller-general, Abbe Terry, would plead with Necker, “we beg you to help us before the day is over.”

The internal taxation of France hinged on the activities of the fermier-generaux, “the tax farmers,” who paid more attention to fattening their fortunes than to raising funds for the country. The entire burden of the taxes rested on the third estate, ultimately on the backs of the French peasants—those who could afford taxes the least. The first estate, the nobility, was exempt, while the priesthood of the second estate escaped with paying the don gratuit, a voluntary contribution that could be avoided if so wished.

In March 1778, Louis XVI performed perhaps the most altruistic act of his reign, yet one that would have disastrous consequences. He entered into a formal alliance with the infant United States against France's traditional enemy, England. While the war ended in victory and vengeance for France, triumph was bought at a high price. France groaned under a debt of some two million livres. Efforts to solve the problem finally led the king to summon the Etats-Generaux, the Estates-General, to a convention in Paris for May 1789.

Although the third estate had come to prominence economically during the long wars that France had fought since Louis XIV had invaded the Netherlands in 1672, the nobility had, unlike in England, conspired to keep them frozen out of the higher ranks of French government and society. As Crane Brinton noted in The Anatomy of Revolution, “the French nobility of the 18th century [made] access to the top difficult for ambitious non-nobles.”

The third estate had always been outnumbered by the other two at such meetings, as the first and second estates would vote against it for the interests they held in common. This is what had led to the dissolution of the last convocation of the Estates-General in 1614. The third estate insisted on a more democratic, proportional representation, in which their topics of concern would be given a fair hearing. Finally, when their efforts met with no response, one of their leaders, the Abbe Sieyes, demanded in June that the third estate should reconstitute itself as a National Assembly. On June 20, as George Havens wrote in The Age of Ideas, the third estate met on an unused tennis court and, in what became known as the Oath of the Tennis Court, vowed “a solemn oath never to separate until the Constitution of the Kingdom shall be laid and established on secure foundations.” The left in France was established and soon moved forward toward revolution, leaving the rightists, the monarchists, shocked and dismayed.

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