Canada’s Louis the XVI moment:
"All bad ideas are French. It is an absolute principle of human existence." ~ David Starkey on The Brendan O'Neill Show:
What happens when the elite ignores the 3rd Estate is a lesson which every Frenchman, Englishman, and American ought to know! Louis the XVI was in favour of reform but his hatred of the British led him to borrow money to fund the American Revolution which required him to tax the nobility, something they refused to tolerate since they weren't about to forgo their privilege. This resulted in dumping the debt via taxation onto the 3rd Estate, namely the common person who was already suffering due to recession and inflation. When the elite dismissed them ‘en masse’ they formed a national assembly and demanded a constitution which would force the elite to answer to the people, making the French Revolution an inevitability.
For over a century the palace of Versailles was home to the most powerful family in Europe. Versailles was known for lavish entertainment, passionate love affairs, and outrageous scandals. While a lucky few danced, feasted, and flirted their days away, the state was on the brink of collapse. Outside those gilded gates millions of ordinary people were taxed to the hilt while rich nobles paid virtually nothing. A new king Louis XVI and his beautiful young Queen Marie Antoinette faced the biggest challenge in the history of their illustrious families to bring fairness to the system and hope to their subjects or face losing their palace, their crowns, and their heads.
In 1775 Versailles celebrated the coronation of a new king and queen. Louis XVI had lived most of his 20 years here surrounded by courtiers and power brokers but like his young Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, he didn't feel ready to rule. Despite their King's private feelings, the public had high hopes as he was young, and he had a beautiful wife. So, there was everything to expect from the new and hopefully glorious reign of Louis XVI. Louis XVI wanted to rule in the grand manner, he wanted to be an absolute monarch, he wanted to live up to the style of Louis the Great, Louis XIV but interestingly also wanted to rule in a manner which would be popular. To be truly popular Louis knew that he had to govern in the interest of all his people and not just the ones he had grown up with. So, in keeping with the Age of Enlightenment he intended to be a slightly more modern king. He has ambitions to be a just and a philanthropic monarch and he called himself Louis the Bianfa, or Louis the Beneficent. In fact, one of his first decisions was so modern that it quite terrified his courtiers, he had his whole family inoculated against smallpox using a procedure that was experimental and very dangerous. This was something which had raised hairs at the time and people thought, “what will happen if he dies”? In that way the king took the lead, he showed that he could lead with the times and move with the times and that was a promising start to the reign. A promising start yes, but the end wasn’t so promising unless losing one’s head was the promise one hoped to fulfil.
https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/third-estate/
“Before the revolution, French society was divided into three orders or Estates of the Realm – the First Estate (clergy), Second Estate (nobility) and Third Estate (commoners). With around 27 million people, or 98 per cent of France’s population, the Third Estate was by far the largest of the three. Despite this it was politically invisible, unrepresented in and wielding no influence on the government.
Diversity
As might be expected in such a sizeable group, the Third Estate boasted considerable diversity. There were many different classes and levels of wealth; different professions and ideas; rural, provincial and urban residents alike.
Members of the Third Estate ranged from lowly beggars and struggling peasants to urban artisans and labourers; from the shopkeepers and commercial middle classes to the nation’s wealthiest merchants and capitalists.
Despite the Third Estate’s enormous size and economic importance, it played almost no role in the government or decision-making of the Ancien Regime. The frustrations, grievances and sufferings of the Third Estate became pivotal causes of the French Revolution.
The peasantry
Peasants inhabited the bottom tier of the Third Estate’s social hierarchy. Comprising between 82 and 88 per cent of the population, peasant-farmers were the nation’s poorest social class.
While levels of wealth and income varied, it is reasonable to suggest that most French peasants were poor. A very small percentage of peasants owned land in their own right and were able to live independently as yeoman farmers. The vast majority, however, were either feudal tenants, métayers (tenant sharecroppers who worked someone else’s land) or journaliers (day labourers who sought work where they could find it).
Whatever their personal situation, all peasants were heavily taxed by the state. If they were feudal tenants, peasants were also required to pay dues to their local seigneur or lord. If they belonged to a parish, as most did, they were expected to pay an annual tithe to the church.
These obligations were seldom relaxed, even during difficult periods such as poor harvests, when many peasants were pushed to the brink of starvation.
Urban commoners
Other members of the Third Estate lived and worked in France’s towns and cities. While the 18th century was a period of industrial and urban growth in France, most cities remained comparatively small. There were only nine French cities with a population exceeding 50,000 people. Paris, with around 650,000, was by far the largest.
Most commoners in the towns and cities made a living as merchants, skilled artisans or unskilled workers. Artisans worked in industries like textiles and clothing manufacture, upholstery and furniture, clock making, locksmithing, leather goods, carriage making and repair, carpentry and masonry.
A few artisans operated their own business but most worked for large firms or employers. Before doing business or gaining employment, an artisan had to belong to the guild that managed and regulated his particular industry.
Unskilled labourers worked as servants, cleaners, hauliers, water carriers, washerwomen, hawkers – in short, anything that did not require training or membership of a guild. Many Parisians, perhaps as many as 80,000 people, had no job at all: they survived by begging, scavenging, petty crime or prostitution.
The difficult 1780s
The lives of urban workers became increasingly difficult in the 1780s. Parisian workers toiled for meagre wages: between 30 and 60 sous a day for skilled labourers and 15-20 sous a day for the unskilled. Wages rose by around 20 per cent in the 25 years before 1789, however prices and rents increased by 60 per cent in the same period.
The poor harvests of 1788-89 pushed Parisian workers to the brink by driving up bread prices. In early 1789, the price of a four-pound loaf of bread in Paris increased from nine sous to 14.5 sous, almost a full day’s pay for most unskilled labourers.
Low pay and high food prices were compounded by the miserable living conditions in Paris. Accommodation in the capital was so scarce that workers and their families crammed into shared attics and dirty tenements, most rented from unscrupulous landlords.
With rents running at several sous a day, most workers economised by sharing accommodation. Many rooms housed between six and ten people, though 12 to 15 per room was not unknown. Conditions in these tenements were cramped, unhygienic and uncomfortable. There was no heating, plumbing or common ablutions. The toilet facilities were usually an outside cesspit or open sewer while water was fetched by hand from communal wells.
Not all members of the Third Estate were impoverished. At the apex of the Third Estate’s social hierarchy was the bourgeoisie or capitalist middle classes.
The bourgeoisie were business owners and professionals with enough wealth to live comfortably. As with the peasantry, there was also diversity within their ranks.
The so-called petit bourgeoisie (‘petty’ or ‘small bourgeoisie‘) were small-scale traders, landlords, shopkeepers and managers. The haute bourgeoisie (‘high bourgeoisie‘) were wealthy merchants and traders, colonial landholders, industrialists, bankers and financiers, tax farmers and trained professionals, such as doctors and lawyers.
The bourgeoisie flourished during the 1700s, due in part to France’s economic growth, modernisation, increased production, imperial expansion and foreign trade. The haute bourgeoisie rose from the middle classes to become independently wealthy, well-educated and ambitious.
Political aspirations
As their wealth increased so did their desire for social status and political representation. Many bourgeoisies craved entry into the Second Estate. They had money to acquire the costumes and grand residences of the noble classes but lacked their titles, privileges, and prestige.
A system of venality evolved that allowed the wealthiest of the bourgeoisie to buy their way into the nobility, though by the 1780s this was becoming more difficult and frightfully expensive.
The thwarted social and political ambitions of the bourgeoisie led to considerable frustration. The haute bourgeoisie had become the economic masters of the nation, yet government and policy remained the domain of the royalty and their noble favourites.
The revolutionary bourgeoisie
Many educated bourgeoisie found solace in Enlightenment tracts, which challenged the foundation of monarchical power and argued that government should be representative, accountable and based on popular sovereignty.
When Emmanuel Sieyes published What is the Third Estate? in January 1789, it struck a chord with the self-important bourgeoisie, many of whom believed themselves entitled to a hand in government.
What is the Third Estate? was not the only expression of this idea; there was a flood of similar pamphlets and essays around the nation in early 1789. When these documents spoke of the Third Estate, however, they referred chiefly to the bourgeoisie – not to France’s 22 million rural peasants, landless labourers or urban workers.
When the bourgeoisie dreamed of representative government, it was a government that represented the propertied classes only. The peasants and urban workers were politically invisible to the bourgeoisie – just as the bourgeoisie was itself politically invisible to the Ancien Régime.”
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