the french revolution: artistic interpretation. may 4, 1789 estates-general meet
TRANSCRIPT
The French Revolution:Artistic Interpretation
May 4, 1789 Estates-General Meet
June 17, 1789National Assembly Formed
June 20, 1789Tennis Court Oath
Jacques–Louis David
• This amazingly rich sketch by Jacques–Louis David is one of the most famous works from the French revolutionary era. The thrust of the bodies together and toward the center stand for unity. The spectators, including children at the top right, all join the spectators. Even the clergy, so vilified later, join in the scene. Only one person, possibly Marat, in the upper left–hand corner, turns his back on the celebration. And, in fact, David is commemorating a great moment of the Revolution on 20 June 1789, in which the deputies, mainly those of the Third Estate, now proclaiming that they represent the nation, stand together against a threatened dispersal
• David creates an air of drama in this work. The very power of the people appears to be “blowing” through the scene with the stormy weather, in a sense alluding to the storm that would be the revolution.
• Symbolism in this work of art closely represents the revolutionary events taking place at the time. The figure in the middle is raising his right arm making the oath that they will never disband until they have reached their goal of creating a “constitution of the realm fixed upon solid foundations.” The importance of this symbol is highlighted by the fact that the crowd’s arms are angled to his hand forming a triangular shape. Additionally, the open space in the top half contrasted to the commotion in the lower half serves to emphasize the magnitude of the Tennis Court Oath.
The Great Fear
July 14, 1789 Storming of the Bastille
August 4, 1789August Decrees
Article One The Assembly declared the feudal system abolished thereafter. Within the “existing rights and dues, both feudal and censuel, all those originating in or representing real or personal serfdom shall be abolished without indemnification.”[
Article Nine Fiscal privileges in the payment of taxes were abolished forever. Taxes were to be collected from all the citizens, in exactly the same manner, and plans were to be considered to set up a new method of tax collection.
Article Ten All particular privileges given to certain provinces, district, cities, cantons and communes, financial or otherwise, were abolished because under the new rules, every part of France was equal.
Article Eleven All citizens, no matter what class or birth he might be, were eligible for any office in civil and military service.
August 26, 1789Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen
Articles:1. Men are born free and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions
can be based only on public utility.
2. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The sources of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation; no body, no individual can exercise authority that does not proceed from it in plain terms.
4. Liberty consists in the power to do anything that does not injure others; accordingly, the exercise of the rights of each man has no limits except those that secure the enjoyment of these same rights to the other members of society. These limits can be determined only by law.
5. The law has only the rights to forbid such actions as are injurious to society. Nothing can be forbidden that is not interdicted by the law, and no one can be constrained to do that which it does not order.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part personally, or by their representatives, and its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, art equally eligible to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacities, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.
7. No man can be accused, arrested, or detained, except in the cases determined by the law and according to the forms it has prescribed. Those who procure, expedite, execute, or cause arbitrary orders to be executed, ought to be punished: but every citizen summoned were seized in virtue of the law ought to render instant obedience; he makes himself guilty by resistance.
8. The law ought only to establish penalties that are strict and obviously necessary, and no one can be punished except in virtue of a law established and promulgated prior to the offense and legally applied.
9. Every man being presumed innocent until he has been pronounced guilty, if it is thought indispensable to arrest him, all severity that may not be necessary to secure his person ought to be strictly suppressed by law.
10. No one should be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious, provided their manifestation does not upset the public order established by law.
11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man; every citizen can then freely speak, write, and print, subject to responsibility for the abuse of this freedom in the cases is determined by law.
12. The guarantee of the rights of man and citizen requires a public force; this force then is instituted for the advantage of all and not for the personal benefit of those to whom it is entrusted.
13. A general tax is indispensable for the maintenance of the public force and for the expenses of administration; it ought to be equally apportioned among all citizens according to their means.
14. All the citizens have a right to ascertain, by themselves or by their representatives, the necessity of the public tax, to consent to it freely, to follow the employment of it, and to determine the quota, the assessment, the collection, and the duration of it.
15. Society has the right to call for an account of his administration by every public agent.
16. Any society in which the guarantee of the rights is not secured, or the separation of powers not determined, has no constitution at all.
17. Property being a sacred to and inviolable right, no one can be deprived of it, unless illegally established public necessity evidently demands it, under the condition of a just and prior indemnity.
October, 1789 Women March on Versailles
July 12, 1790Civil Constitution of the Clergy
Title II, Article XXI:Before the ceremony of consecration begins, the bishop elect shall take a solemn oath, in the presence of the municipal officers, of the people, and of the clergy, to guard with care the faithful of his diocese who are confided to him, to be loyal to the nation, the law, and the king, and to support with all his power the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by the king.
Constitution of 1791 Adopted
June 20, 1791Louis XVI Flees to Varennes, Austria
Louis XVI Return to Paris
August 27, 1791Declaration of Pillnitz
October 1, 1791Legislative Assembly meets
• Girondins- political radicals seeking change through democratic action. Comprised of educated men and merchants. They wanted to keep the Revolution alive by extending the ideas of the Enlightenment beyond the borders of France. They declared war against the émigrés in Austria thus beginning the Revolutionary Wars.
Jacobins
• Split from the Girondins over the issue of war against European nations.
• Wanted to refocus the Revolution to eliminate the constitutional Monarchy and turn France into a Republic.
• Social reform over economic reform.
• Become more radical over time
• Key leader- Maximilien Robespierre
Robespierre
April, 1792France Declares War On Austria
La Marsaillaise-Battle Song of the Revolutionary Army
The words1Arise you children of our motherland,
Oh now is here our glorious day ! Over us the bloodstained banner Of tyranny holds sway ! Of tyranny holds sway ! Oh, do you hear there in our fields The roar of those fierce fighting men ? Who came right here into our midst To slaughter sons, wives and kin. To arms, oh citizens ! Form up in serried ranks ! March on, march on ! And drench our fields With their tainted blood !
2Supreme devotion to our Motherland, Guides and sustains avenging hands. Liberty, oh dearest Liberty, Come fight with your shielding bands, Come fight with your shielding bands ! Beneath our banner come, oh Victory, Run at your soul-stirring cry. Oh come, come see your foes now die, Witness your pride and our glory. To arms, etc..
3Into the fight we too shall enter, When our fathers are dead and gone, We shall find their bones laid down to rest, With the fame of their glories won, With the fame of their glories won ! Oh, to survive them care we not, Glad are we to share their grave, Great honor is to be our lot To follow or to venge our brave. To arms, etc..La Marseillaise Sound Clip
Brunswick Manifesto
• Declaration by émigrés and King’s army that promised to restore the King’s authority and that any rebel opposition was to be ordered to death.
• This only serves to strengthen the resolve of the revolutionary army.
August 10, 1792Louis XVI Arrested
• Enraged Parisian men and women attacked the king’s palace and killed several hundred Swiss Guards. The result of this journee was the radicalization of the Revolution. Louis and Marie Antoinette were forced to flee the Tuileries and took refuge in the Legislative Assembly itself. The royal family was placed under house arrest, and lived rather comfortably, but the king could not perform any of his political functions. Although the revolutionaries had drafted a constitution, now they had no monarch.
September, 1792National Convention Meets
• The Convention’s first act was to establish the French First Republic and officially strip the king of all political powers. The King, by then a private citizen bearing his family name of Capet, was subsequently put on trial for crimes of high treason.
• Paris voted overwhelmingly for death, 21 to 3. Robespierre voted first, and said "The sentiment that led me to call for the abolition of the death penalty is the same that today forces me to demand that it be applied to the tyrant of my country."
“With regret I pronounce this fatal truth: Louis must die so that the nation may live.” Robespierre
January 21, 1793Louis XVI Guillotined
After the execution of Louis, the National Assembly, now known as the National Convention, faced enormous problems. The value of paper currency (assignats) used to finance the Revolution had fallen by 50%. There was price inflation, continued food shortages, and various peasant rebellions against the Revolution occurred across the countryside. France was close to civil war.
April 6, 1793Committee of Public Safety
Formed
Justification of the use of terror
• Terror was formally instituted as a legal policy by the Convention on 5 September 1793, in a proclamation which read, "It is time that equality bore its scythe above all heads. It is time to horrify all the conspirators. So legislators, place Terror on the order of the day! Let us be in revolution, because everywhere counter-revolution is being woven by our enemies. The blade of the law should hover over all the guilty."[
Strange Fruit
Robespierre
• In Robespierre's utopian vision, the individual has the duty "to detest bad faith and despotism, to punish tyrants and traitors, to assist the unfortunate and respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, to do all the good one can to one's neighbor, and to behave with justice towards all men." Robespierre was a disciple of Rousseau-both considered the general will an absolute necessity. For Robespierre, the realization of the general will would make the Republic of Virtue a reality. Its denial would mean a return to despotism.
• “Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible.”
Cartoon showing
Robespierre guillotining the
executioner after having guillotined
everyone else in France.
"To punish the oppressors of
humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity."— Maximilien Robespierre,
1794
"It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror".
Lenin, 1918
“Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.” Adolf Hitler
The Death of Marat- Jacques Louis David
Influential writer that inspired the revolution to rise up against the King. He was assassinated by a Girondin member and thus was viewed as a martyr for the Revolution.
Jacobin Control-The Republic of Virtue
• Introduced the ‘levee en masse’- a policy of general conscription. Led to massive state army- established the new standard for the rest of Europe.
• Abolished slavery in the colonies
• State sponsored education system
July 28, 1794Robespierre Guillotined
August, 1795Directory Established
• Under the French Constitution of 1795, qualified property holders elected 750 legislators, who divided themselves into the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. This bicameral legislature had a term of three years, with one-third of the members renewed every year. The Ancients held a suspensory veto, but possessed no initiative in legislation.