This image uses the classical figures of an angel and a cherub to celebrate the achievements of Louis XVI on the base of a statue. The words state that he has destroyed the "aristocracy" and established the liberty of the French people. The monarch’s…
This reproduction of a painting by George Morland (1789) has lurid colors and shows the sale of a slave. The artist suggests that friends or relatives are being separated, as one of the slaves is being forcibly restrained as the other slave is being…
The petitions from rural communities decried the abuse of seigneurial dues that peasants owed to lords in exchange for which they were supposed to receive protection and supervision. But by 1789, as these excerpts demonstrate, peasants had come to…
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…
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…
Baptiste–Henri Grégoire was a parish priest who was elected to the National Assembly by the clergy of Lorraine. He championed the rights of minorities both before the Revolution and in the legislature. The most noted beneficiaries of his attention…
Jacques Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of Blacks in 1788 to agitate against the slave trade and slavery itself. Brissot modeled the Society on the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade established in 1787. He hoped that…
A common theme in libels was to compare the royal family to animals. This pamphlet parodies the Queen and her entourage as animals in a zoo, emphasizing how the courtly way of life at Versailles seemed bizarre to the rest of the French people. (The…
In 1789, with the collapse of old regime censorship as well as a sense of liberation from traditional moral constraints, printed libels against the Queen became both more common and more intense. An example of this greater intensity is this light…
