By Philip Dwyer
The upheavals, terror, and drama of the French progressive and Napoleonic interval restructured politics and society on a grand scale, making this the defining second for contemporary ecu heritage. This quantity collects jointly a big variety of fundamental texts to give an explanation for the method at the back of the big alterations passed through by way of France and Europe among 1787 and 1815, from the phobia to the Counter-Revolution and from Marie-Antoinette to Robespierre and Bonaparte. whereas bringing the effect of old occasions to lifestyles, Philip Dwyer and Peter McPhee offer a transparent define of the interval via key files and lucid introductory passages and remark. They illustrate the which means of the Revolution for peasants, sans-culottes, ladies, and slaves, in addition to putting occasions inside a much broader eu context.. scholars will locate this a useful resource of data at the Revolution as an entire in addition to the foreign value of the occasions.
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The Third Estate deputies refused to vote separately, but the nobility were clearly in favour of this, as, very narrowly, were the clergy. The resolve of the bourgeois deputies was strengthened by defections from the privileged orders, particularly by parish priests. On 17 May the deputies of the Third Estate declared that ‘the interpretation and presentation of the general will belong to it…. The name National Assembly is the only one which is suitable’. Three days later, finding themselves locked out of their meeting hall (apparently by accident), the deputies moved to a nearby indoor royal tennis court and, under the presidency of the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, insisted by oath on their ‘unshakeable resolution’ to continue to act as the national representation.
The paupers of this parish are dying of hunger: I will help them a little in this dreadful destitution and, to try to stop it, distribute 50 crowns or so…. Source: Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 1955, pp. 161–2. 23 3 CREATING A REGENERATED FRANCE The August 1789 decrees on feudalism The response of the National Assembly to the news of the ‘Great Fear’ was initially one of panic. On 4 August a series of prominent nobles made sweeping gestures to renounce their privileges. Over the succeeding days, however, the Assembly made a crucial distinction between instances of ‘personal servitude’, which were abolished out-right, and ‘property rights’ (seigneurial dues payable on harvests) for which peasants had to pay compensation before ceasing payment.
In a parallel manner, parish delegates were sent to district capitals where they elected the Third Estate deputies for Versailles. This meant that district cahiers tended to reflect urban middle-class grievances and aspirations, just as the deputies were almost exclusively urban men from the professions, public service or commerce. Nevertheless, the sharp contrast in the outlook of prominent members of the Third Estate of Bourges and that of the nobility (see the extract above) is readily apparent, as are some startlingly radical attitudes to individual freedoms.