In his Persian Letters, published anonymously and abroad in 1721, Charles–Louis de Sécondat, Baron de Montesquieu, president of the Parlement of Bordeaux and a noble himself, made a scathing critique of nobility that set the tone for the philosophes’…
Like his predecessors of earlier generations, playwright Pierre–Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais—who became an important figure of the late Enlightenment because of the controversy surrounding his work The Marriage of Figaro [1784]—believed that a…
This newspaper article considers the question of equality from the opposite point of view—arguing that without social distinctions making clear who should lead and who should follow, society cannot hold together. In particular, the article emphasizes…
By the fall of 1788, parlementary opposition to royal reforms had brought about a stalemate, with the Parlements refusing all reforms to the tax system. To gain the Parlement of Paris’s acceptance of new loans to keep the monarchy from going…
Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès was born at Fréjus on 3 May 1748. He was educated at a Jesuit school, became a licentiate of canon law, and was appointed vicar–general by the bishop of Chartres. He first came into prominence with the publication of his…
In late July 1789, as reports of several thousand separate yet related peasant mobilizations poured into Paris from the countryside, a majority of them against seigneurial property, the deputies of the National Assembly debated reforming not just the…
The major principle underlying the 4 August decree found legislative expression in the decree of 19 June 1790, which legally abolished the nobility, all its privileges, and, as the excerpt demonstrates, those aspects that seemed particularly contrary…
The cahiers de doléances ["lists of grievances"] drawn up by each assembly in choosing deputies to the Estates–General are the best available source of the thoughts of the French population on the eve of the Revolution. This excerpt from a parish…
The cahiers de doléances ("list of grievances") drawn up by each assembly in choosing deputies to the Estates–General are the best available source of the thoughts of the French population on the eve of the French Revolution. The following excerpts…
In the spring of 1791, as the National Assembly worked on political and social reforms, workers in Paris took economic matters into their own hands by staging a series of strikes and demonstrations against their employers. To many deputies, most…
