The Complete Idiot's Guide to European History by Nathan Barber

Author:Nathan Barber
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

WOULD YOU BELIEVE?

The most influential painter of this time, Jacques Louis David, painted a stirring scene of the Tennis Court Oath. In the painting, a brewing storm can be seen outside through an open window. Indeed, a storm was brewing in France.

Bastille and the Great Fear

Louis XVI couldn’t have picked a worse time to try to flex his muscles. Economic conditions were terrible in France, especially around Paris. Awful harvests resulted in exorbitant bread prices, prices the poor could not afford. As prices spiraled, workers lost their jobs at astounding rates. The king, and those before him, had made decisions that adversely affected the economy, but the poor people believed that the king and the nobles were directly responsible for the shortages, high prices, unemployment, and general state of despair.

In mid-July 1789, the poor of Paris, who began to gather in crowds demanding food, caught wind of troop movement; they feared the king had dispatched the troops to disband the crowds and attack the city. In a panic caused by misunderstanding, the mobs descended on a prison called the Bastille, believing it housed massive supplies of weapons and gunpowder they could use to defend the city against the attacking royal troops.

The mob demanded entry but the prison’s governor refused. When the mob tried to force its way in, the guards opened fire and killed almost 100 Parisians. The mobs continued until the prison surrendered. They killed some of the guards and the governor, and put the governor’s head on a pike; the mayor of Paris met the same fate. The crowds then appointed the Marquis de Lafayette commander of the “army” in Paris. The poor of Paris had begun the armed revolution and effectively taken control of the city.

The chaos didn’t remain confined to Paris for long. In the days and weeks that followed the storming of Bastille, peasants throughout France, also suffering from hunger and high prices, rebelled against their feudal lords. Throughout the French countryside, peasants attacked their masters, pillaged their estates, and burned the paperwork that bound them to their lords. They destroyed the fences that enclosed fields and had their way with the forests and the farmland. The Great Fear, as it was known, terrified the nobles. In reaction, an assembly gathered at Versailles and abolished serfdom and many of the unpleasant fees and fines that went with serfdom. The peasants had brought about change and established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in the revolution.

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