Each of you is assigned issue that is in someway related to the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. I would like you to do a little research on your own and present a case for why your item/issue/person was responsible for causing the French Revolution. You will 1) present your finding briefly (5 minutes) in class, and 2) write out your thesis. Please post your thesis (a few sentences should be sufficient) in a comment below, explaining, of course how _____ helped cause the French Revolution. You should have your comment posted by Tuesday 1 March. (Please include your initials on the posting.)
- The Gabelle/taille
- Jean-Jacque Rousseau
- Palais Royal
- The weather
- Jacque Neckar/Charles de Calonne
- Louis XVI
- Louis XV
- Bread
- Marie-Antoinette
- Voltaire
- Treaty of Paris, 1763
- Pornography
- French Nobility
- Peasants
- The Industrial Revolution
- America
- The Austrian Netherlands and United Provinces
- The Federalist Papers
- La Corvée
Something to think about while working on your graphic design:
European History 
a name would help me
name please
Louis XV helped cause the French Revolution by ceding power to the provinces, parlements, and nobility and by significantly increasing the debt of the French state. Louis’ failure to impose the vingtième on the first and second estates, his delegation of power to ministers, and provincial governments’ successful attempts in gaining religious and political autonomy weakened the French monarchy. Louis XV’s various wars, including The War of Polish Succession, The War of Austrian Succession and, especially, The Seven Years’ War, incurred a large debt on the French state. Often publicized as pertaining to the monarch’s womanizing and therefore corrupt habits, this debt was borne by the third estate due to a lack of economic reform on account of the decreased authority of the French crown which added to a growing resentment of the privileged classes.
– Harrison Aaron
Born into a position of absolute power he was largely uninterested in wielding, Louis XVI through ignorance, indolence, and indecisiveness was responsible for the French Revolution. His first fault was the he was largely ignorant he was the head of, so evidenced by his diary entry on the day the Bastille was stormed: “July 14th, Nothing.” He was uninterested in government and instead spent time relaxing in his lavish court. Paying for this luxury was only a small part of the tax burden (6%), but the courts lavishness gave something for the regular people to focus their anger on. A greater tax burden was the American Revolution which Louis brought France into against the advice of his ministers Turgot and Necker. Louis’s weakness that most contributed to the war was his indecisiveness. By appointing ministers such as Turgot, Calonne and Necker, and then refusing to back their agenda’s he missed opportunities to steer the country away from economic disaster and contributed to his own perceived weakness, forfeiting what little power he had left.
– Will Phelps
The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War, humiliated the French, leading to the French Revolution. After losing New France to the British (per the terms of the treaty), Louis XV became determined to build a navy to rival the British. To finance this construction, Louis raised taxes for everyone: nobles took insult at the disregard for their privilege of tax exemption; peasants, at the further imposition on what little wealth they had. Also, the humiliation detracted from the French absolutist monarchy—Louis had gone against stated public policy with the Secret du Roi, weakened the treasury with increased spending and taking loans, and, to make these acts unforgivable, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, he had lost French territory and the war.
―Rory Frydman
The weather extremes caused by the 1783-4 Laki Volcanic eruption’s interference with long-term weather patterns, including the Asian Monsoon cycle and El Niño, disrupted the agricultural output of much of Europe in the 1780s. These fluctuations came to a head with a particularly extreme summer and winter in 1788-89 in France, which smothered production, slowed commerce, and caused the price of bread to skyrocket. Subsistence farmers, already impoverished from previous crop failures and an economic system structured against them, found themselves destitute. Peasants with nothing to lose rioted against an archaic feudal land and tax structure that they saw as culpable for their poverty in famine, pitting the peasantry against the aristocracy as a unified block. As the aristocracy failed to provide, tensions rose even higher until a culmination in revolution.
– Wesley Price
WILL ATKINS:
The results of the unstable weather conditions caused by The Little Ice Age, the eight month Laki Volcano eruption, and the El Nino Effect all contributed to a lower crop yield and poor economies throughout Western Europe and much of France. These fluctuations in weather caused lower crop yields, massive blockages of ice on commercial waterways, higher bread prices, and otherwise general economic hardships. This disparity coupled with an oppressive system of taxes and the notion that there was nothing more to lose, all led the peasants to rise against the nobility and revolt.
The deliberate subordination of peasants, in a decade of climactic disruption, provoked violent uprisings against the ‘ancien regime’ of France. In a system that deregulated the grain market; privatized tax collection, while exempting higher-ups from fees; and forced both peasants and nobles to pay for judiciary trials, the peasants had no choice but to revolt.
The French nobility caused the French revolution of 1789 because it opposed and prevented new tax reforms aimed at increasing the nobility’s share of France’s heavy debt, which had previously fallen entirely on peasants. By rejecting the various tax plans, which had been proposed by Robert Jacques Turgot, Jacques Necker, and at the 1787 Assembly of Notables, nobles secured the status quo of a flamboyant, tax-exempt nobility and an economically ruined Third Estate of commoners. However, by holding onto their privileges and leaving the commoners to starve, literally and financially, the French nobles increased the commoners’ hatred for the ruling class, highlighted social inequality in France, and left many of France’s devastated peasants hoping for revolution.
NBS
Several forces, many of which are listed in the assignment’s list, culminated in the arcades of the Palais Royal, an open air marketplace that became key in the French Revolutionary narrative due to the social dynamic, distance from Versailles and the King’s influence, and symbolism. Louis Philippe II, a member of the Orleans family and the Jacobin club, turned the Palais into a commercial center, allowing for many shops, prostitutes, entertainment centers for the lower class, and coffeehouses which would attract social climbers, elites, and intellectuals such as Rousseau. The Palais would also adopt a reputation for anti-royalist sentiment as the police normally prohibited from the Palais, allowing Louis Philippe to turn his “palace” into an asylum for his fellow Jacobins. The Palais Royal, by July 12, 1789, would become heavily associated with liberty and the intellectual debates in the coffeehouses, prompting the youth to view the new green sprigs in the garden as a symbol for a new France.
–Sebastian Hernandez
Bread was the most foundational part of the lives of 18th-century French peasants. At stable economic times, an average peasant would spent half their daily wages on bread. Poor crop yields in 1788 and 1789 led to the shortage of grain and the skyrocketing of bread prices. The peasants responded with bread riots, demanding lower prices and reflecting growing resentment of the French Monarchy and its extravagance. These bread riots mobilized the French peasantry into a state of revolt and revolution in reaction to their disparity. The importance of bread and its soaring prices in 1789 were the final pushes that spurred the French people to revolt against the Monarchy, leading to the French Revolution.
Judd Linscott
Louis XV’s costly wars, failed tax reform, and womanizing personality led to a tide of unpopularity for the Bourbon Crown and angered all French Estates, putting the country on an unavoidable path towards revolution. Described by historians as “a perpetual adolescent called to do a man’s job,” Louis was ill suited to carry the Ancien Regime forward and neglected his religious duties and the tight control on his ministers valued by his predecessor. By losing territory at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle and obtaining massive debts as a result of the Seven Year’s war, Louis further angered the economically depressed populace. His bold initiation of a direct income tax (5%) on all Frenchmen to curb privilege enraged the nobles and clergy led to widespread protests until its partial removal. These factors, as well as his infatuation with mistresses despised by his court, caused the spread of anti-absolutist political forces and general disdain for the monarchy which would culminate in revolt against his successor in the spring of 1789.
-Ethan Ehrenhaft
French pornography in the years leading up to the French Revolution was mass-produced through printed pamphlets and used the shock of alleged sexual activities to attack the reputation of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI. These pamphlets, produced by revolutionaries such as Marquis de Sade, portrayed Marie Antoinette copulating with soldiers, women, nobles, government officials, and even her own son. They poked fun at Louis XVI’s political ineptitude through drawings of his imagined sexual impotence. The pamphlets enabled French citizens to judge the royals and feel as if they were above the aristocracy, detracting from the idea that the royals were more worthy to lead than the common man. Eventually, the deterioration of the royal reputation helped encourage the French citizens to rebel against the Ancien Regime.
-Christian Hanway
The Industrial Revolution in England contributed to the start of the French Revolution by augmenting France’s pre-existing economic issues, such as the controversial tax system and war debts, and creating unrest among manufacturers and merchants. As England and France both followed the principles of mercantilist economics and were long-standing rivals, the two countries had significant barriers limiting trade between them, including high tariffs. Under the influence of Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith, England began seeking ways to open up their trade, and France’s financial crisis and debt meant that they sought new markets through which to expand trade. In 1786, the two countries signed the Eden Agreement, which reduced duties on the other country’s products among other favorable economic policies. However, because England had begun the process of industrialization, their craft goods were produced less expensively with efficient machinery and began to flood French markets, while France enjoyed very few of the same economic benefits of the Agreement. Due to the economic advantages the Industrial Revolution provided England with, the Eden Agreement both heightened France’s existing economic issues and added manufacturers and merchants to the many groups of people experiencing turmoil, two factors that contributed significantly to the outbreak of the French Revolution.
-Charlotte Scott
Industrialized French cities, In the years before the Revolution of 1789, were both home to an increasingly educated general populace–whose discourse was full of the enlightenment ideals that sparked the revolution–and were where the economic pressures of taxation and industrial labor placed on the third estate were most evident.
Cities, especially those involved in textile production and other major industries, experienced a growth both in population–which rose to approximately 28 million, 16% of which lived in cities–and in industry. Cities became centers of textile production, metallurgy, and other crafts. Growing industry contributed to poor living conditions and, though not to the degree of the English system, allowed the masters to utterly control the lives of their workers. Cities were centers of thought and discourse, and that the increasingly-educated third estate should undergo such intense taxation and labor sparked a discourse laden with Enlightenment ideals. These ideals, focused on the dignity of the individual man and strongly opposed to the ineffective economic policies of Louis XV and XVI which placed an immense burden on the lower reaches of the population, were fuel for revolutionary fire.
-Flood
Voltaire was a “philosophe” of 18th century France whose name is historically synonymous with French literature. A satirical critic of the French political and religious structure, Voltaire believed the aristocracy to be corrupt and ineffective, and he condemned the church as abusive of its influence. Voltaire was a staunch advocate for the philosopher king, or at least for a monarch surrounded by enlightened philosophers, and he once said, “I would rather obey one lion than two hundred rats of my species.” Despite Voltaire’s self-stated position against mob rule, revolutionaries used his uniquely French voice, coupled with his antiestablishment writings, to fuel the fire of the French Revolution.
America helped cause the French Revolution by driving France into deep debt. During the American Revolution, France provided expensive aid in military assistance and materiel. The need to pay for these led to financial crisis in France, driving taxes and prices higher, even as the victorious American colonies provided an example of successful revolt against kingship.
–Jack Shapiro
Marie Antoinette, in her visible extravagance and foreign occupations, became a symbol for many grievances held by French revolutionaries, an image both unconsciously produced by the visibility of her court life and consciously cultivated by her opposition throughout the revolution. Famously known as ‘Madame Deficit,’ Marie Antoine spent almost 6 percent of France’s revenue in 1788 on her court. Known to be ‘aggressively socially,’ she spent the majority of this on her palace, art, fashion, and elaborate court events and dinners. Her lifestyle became representative of the unchecked privilege and vices of the nobility to French revolutionaries, who were increasingly desperate for economic stability and political reform in a time of economic decline and corruption. This reputation was augmented by her non-French leanings. Marie Antoinette was unpopular from the start of her marriage to Louis XVI by simply being an Austrian Hapsburg. Her unpopularity continued as she outwardly rejected Louis sexually, entertaining numerous high profile lovers and failing to produce an heir for some time. Once exiled, Marie Antonine even contacted her brother Joseph II, and other foreign powers to intervene in the revolution, a fact spread wildly by dissenting presses, who had long spread propaganda about her troubling sexual endeavors and sought to perpetuate her image as an embodiment of all noble vice. Marie Antoinette and all that she represented was one of the initial sparks of the revolution and the flame that continued to feed revolutionaries in the years after 1789.
-Alexandra Karppi
Bread prices, rising steadily beginning in the 1740s and reaching incredible heights in 1789, set the stage for the French Revolution by producing famine and joblessness that engendered peasant mistrust and anger with the crown and flooded the countryside with brigands and hungry wanderers and cities with rural refugees that were quick to foment bread riots that set a precedent for revolt. Bread prices were also an immediate cause of the revolution in 1789; they inspired revolutionary ferment in critical moments, inhibited the restoration of order in France, and propelled France towards radicalization. As the price of bread rose, the trust that the king was a père nourricier, (“the king as a fatherly provider”) was replaced with the growing Pacte de Famine conspiracy theory that grains were being deliberately hoarded by the monarchy to sell when prices were high. With these ideas firmly established, bread price spikes inflamed desperately hungry peasants, a growing number of them them homeless, jobless, and masterless, to revolt, as thousands did in the Flour War of 1775, setting a precedent for popular rebellion that would encourage French rebels 14 years later. By 1788 and through 1789, high bread prices would inspire the crowd actions–the Day of Tiles, the Storming of the Bastille, the Women’s march on Versailles–that often propelled the revolutionary cause forward. These and other frequent and often murderous riots would inhibit the restoration of order across France, and as the association between blood and bread grew stronger, high bread prices drove the French Revolution into Radicalization.
TB
Jacque Necker helped induce the French Revolution through the publication of “Compte Rendu Au Roi,” an untruthful report of royal expenses, which exalted his reputation as a financier, sparked common interest in state expenditures, and hid France’s rapidly growing debt. Also, because he was born a peasant and abolished mortmain, commoners were angered further by his dismissal by Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Charles de Calonne also helped spark the revolution because nobles rejected his five-point financial reform, which might have remedied France’s debt, digging France deeper into financial discourse. Both Necker’s and Calonne’s inability to remedy France’s financial problems led to the Estates-General meeting, which led to direct conflict between classes, and then to Revolution.
TG