1. The French Revolution

2. The Regime Ancien
Before 1789, French society was made up of three classes or estates.
The First Estate was the Roman Catholic Church.
The Second Estate was the nobility.
The Third Estate was everyone else.
The Estates General—France’s version of Parliament was also divided into three parts, one representing each estate.
Each estate had only one vote.

3. Financial Crisis In 1789, France was deeply in debt.
Louis XIV had spent heavily on wars in Europe and the Americas and on his new palace at Versailles.
Louis XVI continued to spend extravagantly on himself and his wife.
He also lent money to the Americans to help finance the revolution and spent even more helping to fight it.

4. The Estates General
Louis XVI needed to raise taxes, but the Third Estate was too heavily taxed to add any more.
Louis needed to tax the Second Estate (they actually had the money).
Before they would agree to the new taxes, Louis’s nobles insisted he call a meeting of the Estates General—the first such meeting in nearly 200 years.

5. The Estates General
The First and Second Estates always voted together. Leading churchmen were often the younger sons of the nobility.
The Third Estate might have representation, but it did them no good—2% of the population outvoted the other 98%

6. The Estates General
But the Third Estate was changing, many of its representatives were of the Bourgeois—a wealthy, educated middle-class.
They proposed new rules that would make the Third Estate’s votes equal to the First and Second combined.

7. The National Assembly
Naturally, the other Estates refused and the King needing their support agreed.
Abbe Sieyes, a monk elected to the Third Estate convinced his fellow delegates to declare themselves the National Assembly of France and replace the Estates General.
The even invited the delegates of the First and Second Estates to join them.
“What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been up to now in the political order? Nothing. What does it demand? To become something herein.”

8. The Great Fear
Protests continued to grow, poor weather had led to bad harvests and food shortages.
The King appeared to give in to the National Assembly, but also began stationing foreign mercenaries in Paris.
Peasants and the urban poor began to worry he would hire more foreigners to punish them.
They formed mobs arming themselves and sometimes burning the homes of nobles.

9. Revolution
Louis XVI agrees to come to Paris with his family to try to restore order.
He is soon arrested and put on trial for treason.
Louis and Marie Antoinette are executed and their young son dies in prison.

10. The Reign of Terror
As the National Assembly struggled to govern France, it set up the Committee for Public Safety to catch enemies of the Revolution.
The Chairman of the Committee, Maximilien Robespierre, sought to scare the French people into obedience.
He encouraged them to report on their neighbors.
Anyone found guilty of being an enemy of the revolution was beheaded.

11. The Reign of Terror Ends
Robespierre becomes a virtual dictator, able to manipulate members of the National Assembly with the threat of the guillotine.
In 1794, members of the National Assembly have Robespierre arrested and executed as an enemy of the Revolution.
A new constitution is created putting five Directors in charge of governing France.