Revolutionary Voices from the French Revolution

1. Revolutionary Voices from the French Revolution

2. May 5th, 1789: As I walk home through the streets of France, everything that just happened plays over and over through my head. Everything that happened at the estates general meeting. The king rejecting our ideas. The changes now made. How we will never get a fair say in society. I guess it’s my fault that I’m so disappointed. I got my hopes high just for them to be torn down to the ground in a million pieces. The third estate voted for us to vote by heads as we all want a say but no, King Louis XVI rejected the idea and left us all infuriated. I thought that since we were such a big group that maybe we would have a say or opinion that count a little bit. But everything we said to him just went in one ear and out the other. Sometimes I really don’t like King Louis XVI. He isn’t a good king, he’s not very thoughtful of the rest of us. He never takes the third estates opinions into consideration. It’s like we are just there for his amusement and not for anything else. We make up a huge part of France and we payed nearly all the taxes that supplied weapons for the Americans. To him we are just tax payers. We have helped him with nearly all of his financial problems. The gap between us, the third estate, and the nobles or the second estate is huge. We pay 94% of the taxes while the second estate only pays 5%. And of course the first estate pays the remaining 1%. It’s terrible because it all depends on the family you were born into. Also the taxes you pay all depend on how represented you are. As for the third estate, we are barely represented. But now we are all in debt and bankrupt.

3. 14 July 1789 I’ve just heard about the news of what happened at the Bastille. People from the third estate went to the Bastille looking for gun powder to protect themselves along with guns. The guards misunderstood them and started firing at them. The people of the third estate decided to storm the Bastille and attack the guards and Marquise de Launay, the governor of the Bastille. They put peoples heads on pikes and killed a lot of people. One of the reasons it happened as that Louis XVI recently dismissed the finance minister Jaques Necker. Jaques Necker was actually nice to the third estate. Those of us who supported the establishment of an assembly in Paris thought that the King would stop the establishment and therefore some of us attacked Bastille. There was blood and guns. 98 people of the third estate were shot and killed, yet only about 10 guards were killed. Things are starting to get out of hand here in France. First we have the meeting that went horribly wrong for the the third estate. And now we have this, the storming of the Bastille. This feels like the start of a revolution.

4. August 10 1792 It’s been four years since the revolution began. So many things have happened since the Bastille but things are really getting good now. We finally have control over the government. We had taken an oath to not disband until a new constitution takes place and now they have finally completed the task of writing one. This new constitution declares France to be a constitutional monarchy. The Legislative Assembly alone has the power to declare war and raise taxes. The Legislative Assembly is an indirectly elected body. It’s made up of representatives selected by Electors, who themselves were elected by qualified male citizens who worked their quotas. The monarch of the L.A. has limited powers. He can temporarily stop legislation with a suspensive veto, but he cannot veto anything permanently. He has no control of the army, or any authority over local government. He has no voice in the Assembly. However, even though the constitution was created, the revolution is turning in a more radical direction. Under the constitution, France is being reorganized into 83 départements.  This is for the purposes of efficiency and to mark a break with the past. The constitution also abolished the old judging system, which was mostly nobility, and that gave the government control over the Roman Catholic Church by requiring both judges and priests to be elected to office. The National Assembly also took ownership of much of the Catholic Church's vast lands and property, which were sold off in order to pay off the nation's debts. This revolution is the best thing that has happen to France in a long time.

5. 22 January 1793 The kings and emperors of many foreign countries are now worried by the French Revolution. They don’t want revolution in their own countries. On 27 August 1791, Leopold IIof the Holy Roman Empire/Austria, Frederick William II of Prussia and Louis XVI’s brother Charles-Philippe wrote the Declaration of Pillnitz The Declaration asked for Louis XVI to be set free and the National Assembly to be ended. They promised that they would invade France if their requests were ignored. The Declaration was taken very seriously in among the revolutionaries. With the Legislative Assembly in place, the problems did not go away. The Girodins wanted war because they wanted to take the revolution to other countries. The King and many of his supporters, the Fuelliants, wanted war because they thought it would make the King more popular. Many French were worried that the émigrés would cause trouble in foreign countries against France. On 20 April 1792, the Assembly voted to declare war on Austria. They planned to invade the Austrian Netherlands, but the revolution had made the army weak. Many soldiers deserted. Soon, Prussia joined on the Austrian side. They both planned to invade. Together, on 25 July, they wrote the Brunswick Manifesto promising that if the royal family was not hurt, no civilians would be hurt in the invasion. The French believed that this meant the king Louis XVI was working with the foreign kings. Prussia invaded France on 1 August, 1792.

6. 28 July 1794 Robspierrehas taken place as the head. At the beginning he was a strong voice for the National Assembly. He was the one who proved King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinnette guilty. He got them to court and got them executed by the guillotine. After they were dead there was a power vacuum and he obtained power. He is executing anybody who is still loyal to the king. The guillotine was made to end the spectacle of public torture and to eliminate the severity of pain involved with capital punishment.  It was made to punish those who crossed the law and rules the king had set. It was for the public to view and to send them a message that if they were to question the kings decrees (they could be easily taken care of). Robespierre uses the guillotine as a tool to stay in power. He claims that we are surrounded by traitors, and this is giving him an excuse to execute anyone who opposes him as well as regular criminals. Everyone lives in fear that something will happen that causes them to be killed. The guillotine has become the symbol of a string of executions: Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins Philippe Égalité and Madame Roland, as well as many others, such as "the father of modern chemistry" Antoine Lavoisier, lost their lives under its blade. France is now being threatened by internal enemies, conspirators, and foreign monarchies. The Roman Catholic Church is against the Revolution, which is turning the clergy into employees of the state and requires they take an oath of loyalty to the nation. In addition, the French Republic was engaged in a series of wars with neighboring powers. European monarchies want to stifle the democratic and republican ideals that might threaten their own stability. Things will hopefully start to get better when he falls.