this is Crash Course World History

and today we’re going to talk about The French Revolution.

Admittedly, this wasn’t the French flag until 1794,

but we just felt like he looked good in stripes. [vertical = slimming]

As does this guy. Huh?

So, while the American Revolution is considered a pretty good thing,

the French Revolution is often seen as a bloody, anarchic mess—which—

Mr. Green, Mr. Green!

I bet, like always,

it’s way more complicated than that.

Actually no.

It was pretty terrible.

Also, like a lot of revolutions,

in the end it exchanged an authoritarian regime for an authoritarian regime.

But even if the revolution was a mess,

its ideas changed human history— far more, I will argue,

than the American Revolution.

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Right,

so France in the 18th century was a rich and populous country,

but it had a systemic problem collecting taxes because of

the way its society was structured.

They had a system with kings and nobles

we now call the ancien regime.

Thank you,

three years of high school French. [and Meredith the Interness]

And for most French people,

it sucked, [historical term]

because the people with the money—

the nobles and the clergy—

never paid taxes.

So by 1789,

France was deeply in debt thanks to their funding the American Revolution—

thank you, France, [also for Goddard and The Coneheads]

we will get you back in World Wars I and II.

And King Louis XVI was spending half of his national budget to service the federal debt.

Louis tried to reform this system under various finance ministers.

He even called for democracy on a local level, but all attempts to fix it failed and soon

France basically declared bankruptcy.

This nicely coincided with hailstorms that ruined a year’s harvest,

[ah, hail]

thereby raising food prices and causing widespread hunger,

which really made the people of France angry,

because they love to eat.

Meanwhile, the King certainly did not look broke,

as evidenced by his well-fed physique and fancy footwear.

He and his wife Marie Antoinette

also got to live in the very nice Palace at Versailles

thanks to God’s mandate,

but Enlightenment thinkers like Kant

were challenging the whole idea of religion,

writing things like:

“The main point of enlightenment is of man’s release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily

in matters of religion.”

[while smacking folks in face w/ glove]

So basically the peasants were hungry,

the intellectuals were beginning to wonder

whether God could or should save the King,

and the nobility were dithering about,

eating fois gras and songbirds,

[I'd rather eat cake, personally]

failing to make meaningful financial reform.

In response to the crisis,

Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General,

the closest thing that France had to a national parliament,

which hadn’t met since 1614.

The Estates General was like a super parliament made up of representatives from the First

Estate, the nobles, the Second Estate, the clergy,

and the Third Estate, everyone else.

The Third Estate showed up with about 600 representatives,

the First and Second Estates both had about 300,

and after several votes,

everything was deadlocked,

and then the Third Estate was like,

“You know what? Forget you guys. [expletive deleted]

We’re gonna leave and we’re gonna become our own National Assembly.”

This did not please King Louis XVI.

[everything can't be an eclair, Lou]

So when the new National Assembly left the room for a break,

he locked the doors, and he was like,

"Sorry, guys, you can't go in there. And if you can't assemble, how you gonna be a national

assembly?"

[…and with that, mischief managed!]

Shockingly,

the Third Estate representatives were able to find

a different room in France, [D'oh!]

this time an indoor tennis court where

they swore the famous Tennis Court Oath. [Like McEnroe? You can't be serious..]

And they agreed not to give up until a French constitution was established.

So then Louis XVI responded by sending troops to Paris

primarily to quell uprisings over food shortages,

but the revolutionaries saw this as a provocation,

so they responded by seizing the Bastille Prison on July 14th,

which, coincidentally,

is also Bastille Day.

The Bastille was stormed ostensibly to free prisoners—

although there were only seven in jail at the time—

but mostly to get guns.

But the really radical move in the National Assembly came on August 4,

when they abolished most of the ancien regime.

-- feudal rights, tithes, privileges for nobles, unequal taxation,

they were all abolished --

in the name of writing a new constitution.

And then, on August 26th, the National Assembly proclaimed the Declaration of Rights of Man

and Citizen,

which laid out a system of rights that applied to every person,

and made those rights integral to the new constitution.

That’s quite different from the American bill of rights,

which was, like,

begrudgingly tacked on at the end and only applied to non-slaves.

The DoRoMaC, as I called it in high school,

declared that everyone had the right to liberty, property, and security—

rights that the French Revolution

would do an exceptionally poor job of protecting,

but as noted last week,

the same can be argued for many other supposedly more successful revolutions.

Okay, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

Meanwhile, back at Versailles,

Louis XVI was still King of France, and it was looking like France might be a

constitutional monarchy. Which might've meant that the royal family could hang on to their

awesome house,

but then, in October of 1789, a rumor started that Marie Antoinette was hoarding grain somewhere

inside the palace.

And in what became known as the Women's March,

a bunch of armed peasant women stormed the palace and demanded that Louis and Marie Antoinette

move from Versailles to Paris.

Which they did,

because everyone is afraid of armed peasant women.

["hell hath no rath" and all]

And this is a nice reminder that to many people at the time,

the French Revolution was not primarily about fancy Enlightenment ideas;

it was mostly about lack of food and a political system that made economic contractions hardest

on the poor.

Now, a good argument can be made that this first phase of the revolution wasn’t all

that revolutionary.

The National Assembly wanted to create a constitutional monarchy;

they believed that the king was necessary for a functioning state and they were mainly

concerned that the voters and office holders be men of property.

Only the most radical wing,

the Jacobins,

called for the creation of a republic.

But things were about to get much more revolutionary—

and also worse for France.

First, the Jacobins had a huge petition drive that got a bit unruly, which led troops controlled

not by the King but by the national assembly to fire on the crowd,

killing 50 people.

And that meant that the National Assembly, which had been the revolutionary voice of

the people, had killed people in an attempt to reign in revolutionary fervor.

You see this a lot throughout history during revolutions. What looked like radical hope

and change suddenly becomes

"The Man"

as increasingly radical ideas are embraced.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

Meanwhile, France’s monarchical neighbors were getting a little nervous about all this

republic business,

especially Leopold II,

who in addition to being the not holy not roman and not imperial holy roman emperor,

was Marie Antoinette’s brother.

I should note, by the way, that at this point,

the Holy Roman Empire was basically just Austria.

Also, like a lot of monarchs,

Leopold II liked the idea of monarchies,

and he wanted to keep his job as a person who gets to stand around wearing a dress,

pointing at nothing,

owning winged lion-monkeys made out of gold.