Shawn O'Donnell

Mr. Cain

French 1

December 12, 2017

The French Revolution was in effect started way before the people tried to get a voice. It

first started when Austria and France tried to make an alliance by having a marriage of the two

monarchies. Marie Antoinette from Austria married Louis the XVI when she was 15 years old.

Their marriage was a symbol of the corruptness that was in the monarchy at the time. After a

while the last queen of France before the Revolution became the talk of a lot of the gossip that

went around in Versailles. They gossiped about her because she couldn’t produce a child with

Louis XVI for a long time, she gambled a lot of money, and spent even more on close and

extravagant hair-dos. She put the country in to more and more debt because of personal use. This

started to put the country into further debt. The King and Queen were starting to lose control of

their people.

The population of France grew considerably, and the farms were not able to produce the

correct amount of grain to keep up with the need of bread from the people. And the ones who

lived in Versailles were eating tons and tons of food every day. Also, the king and queen just

stayed in Versailles instead of staying in Paris, so they could be with their people and see what

they need to change for their country to strive. Then the bread became even more heavily taxed

and the poor people began to attack people who had bread and the bakeries. On June 12, 1789

the National Assembly meet at Versailles to work on a new constitution.

 Then on July 14, rioters took to the streets and stormed the Bastille. Bastille use to be

used as a prison and there were unspeakable forms of torture that was taking place. It was also a

symbol of the tyranny of the king and the queen. So, on that day the governor of the Bastille saw

a large crowd of angry mob of protesters surround the prison. They were demanding that the

governor was to surrender. Delegates from the mob were invited into the prison to negotiate, but

as the group of men talked the mob thought they were imprisoned, so they started to storm the

prison. The governor instructed his men to shoot into the crowd killing 100 people. Then the

revolutionist was able to get some canons from mutinous French Guards from Paris, and was

able to make the people in the Bastille surrender. After taking the governor as a prisoner, the

people cut off his head and held it up on a pike. When news of this event spread across France

there was a period of time known as the Great Fear. During this time the peasants attacked and

burned tax collector’s houses.

After this the National Assembly abolished feudalism on August 4, 1789. This was

considered the “death certificate of the old order”. The Assembly adopted the Declaration of

rights of Man and of the Citizen. This was a statement of principles like equal opportunity,

freedom of speech, and representative government. Drafting the new constitution was much of a

challenge for the assembly. Especially trying to figure out how much power the king and queen

would hold after their failed escape attempt. Then the newly formed government declared war on

Austria and Prussia.

Then on August 10, 1792 a group of extremists attacked the building where the king was

staying and arrested him. In the months to follow there were many executions given to people

who were accused of treason and counterrevolutionaries. These executions were accomplished

with help of the new invention the guillotine. For the new government to become successful for
the people the old one would have to come to an end. And that happened on January 21, 1793

when the guillotine executed Louis XVI.

After the death of the monarchy there was the awful Reign of Terror. This is when

Robespierre carried out the execution of “traitors’ by the thousands. By the end of the terror they

could have been around 40,000 people killed. Most of these people’s deaths were from unfair or

in some cases without a trail. So, these people were unjustly done in their deaths. All these

executions took place to show that the new government was in control and out of fear that the

people would revolt again. During this period in time there was always a fear of a civil war and

that is what the cause of most of the deaths came from.

The French Revolution not only changed France. It also affected the rest of the world.

For example, it had a major part in forming America.

1. http://www.history.com/topics/french-revolution

2. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Reign_of_Terror