French Revolution Background
Marie Antoinette:
Born on November 2, 1755, in Vienna, Austria, Marie Antoinette helped provoke the popular
unrest that led to the French Revolution and to the overthrow of the monarchy in August
1792, in part with her famous quote addressing the starving French populace: 'Let them eat
cake.' As a 20-year consort to Louis XVI, she was beheaded nine months after he was by
order of the Revolutionary tribunal.
Queen of France. Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, was born as Maria Antonia
Josepha Joanna on November 2, 1755 in Vienna, Austria. She was the fifteenth and second
to last child of Maria Theresa, the Empress of Austria, and Francis I, the Holy Roman
Emperor. Marie Antoinette lived a relatively carefree childhood. She received an education
typical of an eighteenth-century aristocratic girl, focusing primarily on religious and moral
principles while her brothers studied more academic subject matter.
With the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the preservation of a fragile alliance
between Austria and France became a priority for Empress Maria Theresa; cementing
alliances through matrimonial connections was a common practice among European royal
families at the time. In 1765, the son of French Emperor Louis XV, Louis Ferdinand, died,
leaving his 11-year-old grandson Louis Auguste heir to the French throne. Within months,
Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste were pledged to marry each other.
In 1768, Louis XV dispatched a tutor to Austria to instruct his grandson's future wife. The
tutor found Marie Antoinette "more intelligent than has been generally supposed," but
added that since "she is rather lazy and extremely frivolous, she is hard to teach." A child
of only 14 years, delicately beautiful with gray-blue eyes and ash-blonde hair, in May 1770,
Marie Antoinette set out for France to be married, escorted by 57 carriages, 117 footmen
and 376 horses. On May 16, 1770, Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste were married. The
young woman did not adjust well, however, to a married life for which she was obviously not
ready, and her frequent letters home revealed intense homesickness. "Madame, my very
dear mother," she wrote in one letter, "I have not received one of your dear letters without
having the tears come to my eyes." She also bristled at some of the rituals she was
expected to perform as a lady of the French royal family. "I put on my rouge and wash my
hands in front of the whole world," she complained of a ritual in which she was required to
put on her makeup in front of dozens of courtiers.
Louis XV passed away in 1774, and Louis Auguste succeeded him to the French throne as
Louis XVI, making Marie Antoinette, at 19 years old, Queen of France. However, as
personalities went Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette could not have been more different. He
was introverted, shy and indecisive, a lover of solitary pleasures such as reading and
metalwork. She was vivacious , outgoing and bold, a social butterfly who loved gambling,
partying and extravagant fashions. When the King went to bed before midnight, Marie
Antoinette's nights of partying and carousing had yet to begin. When she woke up just
before noon, he had been at work for hours. In 1777, word reached Empress Maria Theresa
that her daughter and her husband had not yet consummated their marriage, and she
immediately dispatched Joseph II, Marie Antoinette's older brother, CONTENTS
to France to act as a sort of marriage counselor. Whatever his counsels, they apparently
worked; a year later, Marie Antoinette gave birth to a daughter, Marie Therese Charlotte.
Beginning in 1780, Marie Antoinette began spending more and more time at Petit Trianon,
her private castle on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, almost always without the king.
Around this time the first rumors surfaced about her relationship with Swedish diplomat
Count Axel von Fersen. During the 1780s, with the French government sliding into financial
turmoil and poor harvests driving up grain prices across the country, Marie Antoinette's
fabulously extravagant lifestyle increasingly became the subject of popular ire. Countless
pamphlets accused the queen of ignorance, extravagance and adultery, some featuring
salacious cartoons and others dubbing her "Madame Deficit." In 1785, the infamous diamond
necklace scandal permanently tarnished the queen's reputation. A thief posing as Marie
Antoinette obtained a 647-diamond necklace and smuggled it to London to be sold off in
pieces. Although Marie Antoinette was innocent of any involvement, she was nevertheless
guilty in the eyes of the people. Refusing to let public criticism alter her behavior, in 1786
she began building the Hameau de la Reine, an extravagant retreat near the Petit Trianon in
Versailles.
On July 14, 1789, 900 French workers and peasants stormed the Bastille Prison to take
arms and ammunition, marking the beginning of the French Revolution. On October 6, a
crowd of 10,000 gathered outside the Palace at Versailles and demanded that the King and
Queen be brought to Paris. At the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the always indecisive Louis XVI
acted almost paralyzed, and Marie Antoinette immediately stepped into his place, meeting
with advisors and ambassadors and dispatching urgent letters to other European rulers
begging them to help save France's monarchy. In a plot hatched primarily by Marie
Antoinette and her lover Count Axel von Fersen, the royal family attempted to escape
France in June 1791, but they were captured and returned to Paris; in September, King Louis
XVI agreed to uphold a new constitution drafted by the Constituent National Assembly in
return for keeping at least his symbolic power. However, in the summer of 1792, with
France at war with Austria and Prussia, the increasingly powerful radical Jacobin leader
Maximilien de Robespierre called for the removal of the king. In September, after a month
of terrible massacres in Paris, the National Convention abolished the monarchy, declared
the establishment of a French Republic, and arrested the king and queen.
In January of 1793, the radical new republic placed King Louis XVI on trial, convicted him of
treason and condemned him to death. On January 21, 1793, he was dragged to the guillotine
and executed. In October, a month into the infamous and bloody Reign of Terror that
claimed tens of thousands of French lives, Marie Antoinette was put on trial for treason,
theft,
CONTENTS
and a false and disturbing charge of sexually abusing her son. After the two-day trial, an
all-male jury found her guilty on all charges. Like her husband several months before, Marie
Antoinette was beheaded at the guillotine on October 16, 1793. The night previous, she had
written her last letter to her sister-in-law Elisabeth. "I am calm," the queen wrote, "as
people are whose conscience is clear." Then in the moments before her execution, when the
priest present told her to have courage, Marie Antoinette responded, "Courage? The
moment when my ills are going to end is not the moment when courage is going to fail me."
Loius XVI:
1 photo
QUICK FACTS





NAME: Louis-Auguste de France
OCCUPATION: King
BIRTH DATE: August 23, 1754
DEATH DATE: January 21, 1793
PLACE OF BIRTH: Versailles, France






PLACE OF DEATH: Paris, France
AKA: Louis XVI
Nickname: "Citizen Capet"
AKA: Louis Auguste de France
AKA: Louis XVI of France
Nickname: "Citoyen Louis Capet"
BEST KNOWN FOR
Louis XVI was the last king of France (1774–92) in the line of Bourbon monarchs preceding
the French Revolution of 1789. He was executed for treason by guillotine in 1793.
SYNOPSIS
Louis XVI became the heir to the throne and the last Bourbon king of France upon his
father's death in 1765. In 1770, he married Austrian archduchess Marie-Antoinette, the
daughter of Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. After a slew of governing
missteps, Louis XVI brought the French Revolution crashing down upon himself, and in 1793
he was executed. His wife, Marie-Antoinette, was executed nine months later.
EARLY LIFE
Louis XVI was born on August 23, 1754, in the Palace of Versailles. Named Louis Auguste de
France, he was given the title Du de Berry signifying his junior status in the French Court.
He was the third son of Louis, Dauphin of France and grandson of Louis XV of France. His
mother, Marie-Josephe of Saxony, was the daughter of Frederick Augustus II of Saxony,
also the King of Poland.
Louis Auguste grew up strong and healthy, though very shy. He was tutored by French
noblemen and studied religion, morality, and humanities. He excelled in Latin, history,
geography, and astronomy and achieved fluency in Italian and English. With his good health,
he enjoyed physical activities such as hunting and wrestling and from an early age he
enjoyed locksmithing, which became a life-long hobby.
Louis's parents paid little attention to him, instead focusing on his older brother, the heir
apparent, Louis duc de Bourgogne, who died at age 9 in 1761. Then, on December 20, 1765,
his father died of tuberculosis, and Louis Auguste became Dauphin at age 11. His mother
never recovered from the family tragedies and also succumbed to tuberculosis on March 13,
1767. Louis Auguste was ill prepared for the throne he was soon to inherit. Following the
death of his parents, Louis's tutors provided him with poor interpersonal skills. They
exacerbated is shyness by teaching him that austerity was a sign of a strong character in
monarchs. As a result, he presented himself as being very indecisive.
At age 15 (in May 1770), Louis married the 14 year-old Habsburg Archduchess Maria
Antonia (Marie Antoinette), his second cousin once removed, in an arranged marriage. She
was the youngest daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Teresa.
The marriage was met with some skepticism by members of the French court, as they
remembered a previous alliance with the Habsburgs pulled France into the Seven Years
War. Though initially charmed by her personality, the French people eventually came to
loathe her, accusing her of being promiscuous and sympathetic to French enemies.
The first few years of marriage for Louis and Marie were amicable but distant. His shyness
kept him distant from her in private and his fear of her manipulation made him cold to her
in public. It is believed the couple did not consummate their marriage for some time, having
their first child eight years after their wedding. Historians debate the cause, but most
likely, Louis suffered from a physiological dysfunction that took time to rectify. Eventually,
the couple had four children, all of whom but one died in childhood.
DOWNFALL
By 1789, the situation was deteriorating rapidly. In May of that year, to address the fiscal
crisis, Louis XVI convened the Estates General, an advisory assembly of different estates
or socio-economic classes (the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners). The meeting did not
go well. By June, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly, aligned with the
bourgeoisie, and set out to develop a constitution. Initially, Louis XVI resisted, declared the
Assembly null and void, and called out the army to restore order. Public dissention grew and
a National Guard formed to resist the King’s actions. By July 1789, he was forced to
acknowledge the National Assembly’s authority. On July 14, riots broke out in Paris and
crowds stormed the Bastille prison in a show of defiance toward the King.
For a time, it seemed that Louis XVI could mollify the masses saying he would acquiesce to
their demands. However, he accepted bad advice from the nobility’s hard line conservatives
and his wife, Marie Antoinette. He talked of reform but resisted demands for it. The royal
family was forcibly transferred from Versailles to Paris on October 6, 1789. Louis ignored
advice from advisors and refused to abdicate his responsibilities, and then agreed to a
disastrous attempt to escape to the eastern frontier in June 1791. He and his family were
brought back to Paris, and he lost all credibility as a monarch.
On September 21, 1792, the Legislative Assembly proclaimed the First French Republic.
That November, proof of Louis XVI’s secret dealings and counter-revolutionary intrigues
was discovered, and he and his family were charged with treason. Louis was soon found
guilty by the National Assembly and condemned to death. On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI
was guillotined in the Palace de la Revolution. His wife, Marie Antoinette, met the same fate
nine months later, on October 16, 1793.
Background:
France in 1789 was one of the richest and most powerful nations in Europe. Only in Great
Britain and the Netherlands did the common people have more freedom and less chance of
arbitrary punishment.
Nonetheless, a popular rebellion would first to bring the regime of King Louis XVI of France
under control of a constitution, then to depose, imprison, try, and execute the king and,
later, his wife Marie Antoinette.
Many factors led to the revolution; to some extent the old order succumbed to its own
rigidity in the face of a changing world; to some extent, it fell to the ambitions of a rising
bourgeoisie, allied with aggrieved peasants and wage-earners and with individuals of all
classes who were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment.
As the revolution proceeded and as power devolved from the monarchy to legislative bodies,
the conflicting interests of these initially allied groups would become the source of conflict
and bloodshed.
Certainly, all of the following must be counted among the causes of the revolution:

Resentment of royal absolutism.

Resentment of the seigneurial system by peasants, wage-earners, and a rising
bourgeoisie.

The rise of enlightenment ideals.

An unmanageable national debt, both caused by and exacerbating the burden of a
grossly inequitable system of taxation.

Food scarcity in the years immediately before the revolution.
ABSOLUTISM AND PRIVILEGE
France in 1789 was, at least in theory, an absolute monarchy, an increasingly unpopular form
of government at the time. In practice, the king's ability to act on his theoretically absolute
power was hemmed in by the (equally resented) power and prerogatives of the nobility and
the clergy, the remnants of feudalism. Similarly, the peasants covetously eyed the relatively
greater prerogatives of the townspeople.
The large and growing middle class -- and some of the nobility and of the working class -had absorbed the ideology of equality and freedom of the individual, brought about by such
philosophers as Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Turgot, and other theorists of the Enlightenment.
Furthermore, they had the example of the American Revolution showing that that it was
plausible that Enlightenment ideals about governmental organization might be put into
practice. They attacked the undemocratic nature of the government, pushed for freedom of
speech, and challenged the Catholic Church and the prerogatives of the nobles.
Economics
TAXATION
Unlike the trading nations, France could not rely almost solely on tariffs to generate income.
While average tax rates were higher in Britain, the burden on the common people was
greater in France. Taxation relied on a system of internal tariffs separating the regions of
France, which prevented a unified market from developing in the country.
Taxes such as the extremely unpopular gabelle were contracted out to private collectors
("tax farmers") who were permitted to raise far more than the government requested.
These systems led to an arbitrary and unequal collection of many of France's consumption
taxes. Further royal and seigneurial taxes were collected in the form of compulsory labor
(the corvée).
The system also excluded the nobles and the clergy from having to pay taxes (with the
exception of a modest quit rent). The tax burden was thus paid by the peasants, wage
earners, and the professional and business classes. These groups were also cut off from
most positions of power in the regime, causing unrest.
DEBT
Since 1614, the French monarchy had operated without resort to a legislature. Kings had
managed their fiscal affairs by increasing the burden of the ancient and unequal system of
taxes, by borrowing money, and sometimes by selling noble titles and other privileges;
however, because noble titles exempted the holder from future taxes, the purchasers of
titles were effectively buying an annuity.
This led to the long-running fiscal crisis of the French government. On the eve of the
revolution, France was deeply indebted, so deeply as to be effectively bankrupt.
Extravagant expenditures by Louis XIV on luxuries such as Versailles were compounded by
heavy expenditures on the Seven Years War and the American War of Independence.
Britain too had a great of debt from these conflicts, but Britain had a far more advanced
fiscal structure to deal with it. There was no counterpart to the Bank of England in France
in 1789 and there was also far less ready capital in France, as it was not nearly as much a
trading nation as was Britain.
Edmund Burke, no friend of the revolution, was to write in 1790, "...the public, whether
represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it
can have no public estate except in what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition
upon the citizens at large." Because of the successful defence by the nobles of their
privileges, the king of France lacked the means to impose a "just and proportioned" tax. The
desire to do so led directly to the decision in 1788 to call the Estates-General into session.
Other Causes
AMERICAN INFLUENCE
France had played a deciding role in the American Revolutionary War, (1775-1783) sending
its navy and troops to aid the rebelling colonists. During this time there was much contact
between the Americans and the French, and revolutionary ideals spread between the groups.
FOOD SCARCITY
These problems were all compounded by a great scarcity of food in the 1780s. Different
crop failures in the 1780s caused these shortages, which of course led to high prices for
bread. Perhaps no cause more motivated the Paris mob that was the engine of the revolution
more than the shortage of bread.
The poor conditions in the countryside had forced rural residents to move into Paris, and
the city was overcrowded and filled with the hungry and disaffected. The peasants
suffered doubly from the economic and agricultural problems.
Foundation of the Republic
Born of this second revolution and briefly favored by military victory, the National
Convention horrified Europe by establishing a republic (Sept. 22, 1792), inaugurating a policy
of revolutionary war, and sending the king to the guillotine on Jan. 21, 1793. It also appalled
France by its own furious disputes. A militant minority, the Montagnards, who spoke for
Paris and the left-wing club called the Jacobins, demanded vigorous revolutionary measures.
Their opponents, the Girondist leaders of the amorphous majority, looked to the provinces
and hoped to consolidate the Revolution. In the spring of 1793, as the military and economic
situation deteriorated and a savage royalist rising began in the Vendee region of western
France, the Montagnards gained ground. Emergency bodies such as the Committee of Public
Safety and the Revolutionary Tribunal were then established, but unified leadership was
lacking until the Parisian insurrection of June 2 compelled the Convention to expel the
Girondists and accept Montagnard control.
The Reign of Terror, 1793-94
The Montagnard Convention then had to contend with invasion, royalist civil war, and
widespread provincial revolts against "the dictatorship of Paris." Initially, Georges Danton
tried to placate the provinces, and the democratic Constitution of 1793 was approved by
plebiscite and celebrated at a Festival of Unity (August 10). After July, however,
Maximilien Robespierre's influence prevailed, and armies were sent to subdue rebellious
cities. When the city of Toulon voluntarily surrendered to the British, a demonstration in
Paris compelled the National Convention to establish (September 5) the repressive regime
known as the Terror. A fearful time ensued: the Committee of Public Safety strove to
organize the economy and the war effort; the Revolutionary Tribunal sent state prisoners,
including the Girondists, to the guillotine; and agents of the Convention known as
Representatives of the People enforced bloody repression throughout France. A campaign of
dechristianization, marked by a new Revolutionary Calendar computed from Sept. 22, 1792
(1 Vendemiaire, Year I), led to the closing of all churches on 3 Frimaire, Year II (Nov. 23,
1793).
From December 1793, when republican armies began to prevail, both at home and abroad,
the Terror became identified with ruthless but centralized revolutionary government.
Because dissidence was now classified as counterrevolutionary, moderate Montagnards such
as Danton and extremists such as Jacques Rene Hebert, a leader of dechristianization, were
guillotined early in 1794. The centralization of repression also brought innumerable victims
before the Revolutionary Tribunal, whose work was expedited by the draconian Law of 22
Prairial (June 10). As a result of Robespierre's insistence on associating Terror with Virtue,
his efforts to make the republic a morally united patriotic community became equated with
the endless bloodshed. Finally, after a decisive military victory over the Austrians at
Fleurus (June 26), Robespierre was overthrown by a conspiracy of certain members of the
National Convention on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794). After trying in vain to raise Paris, the
Robespierrist deputies and most members of the Commune were guillotined the next day,
July 28.
Secular Effects of the French Revolution
Civil disorder became a common scene after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. After a
few years the French intellectuals who rode the banner of liberalism as the forerunners of
the revolution issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Through this document they
aimed at shifting the authority of issuing basic human rights from the Church, or God so to
say, to the state government. The King’s crown that was a symbol of Catholic Christianity
was replaced with a red liberty cap that represented the state as authority.
Government Effects of the French Revolution
In the same year the National assembly of the new parliament seized all the Church lands to
further suppress religion and enrich itself. Further more, an end was put to all kinds of
religious orders and monastic vows. Through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy the
government took direct control over all religious proceedings and took the authority of
selecting Pastors and Bishops who were to take oath under the new government. All those
priests who refused to take oath under the new government were arrested and banned from
operating underground chapels.
Effects after the French Revolution
The effects of the revolution took full swing when the revolutionaries managed to
overthrow the monarchy in total as an addition to the suppression of the church. In the
years to come the world and particularly France was to realize the far reaching
consequences that this bloody revolution had. The middle men known as the bourgeois and
the land owning class were now in the most dominant social class in France. With the death
of feudalism and the implementation of ‘Code Napoleon’ the country had consolidated its
contracts and managed to attain some social order. Although under an ungodly regime
France now stood as a unified nation which gave it more power and authority to influence
world affairs. In the years of the Napoleonic wars the idea of nationalism was further
progressed as France began total warfare. Although the historians have major differences
in the benefits that the French revolution has flowered no one can argue the effects that it
had on shaping the future course of the world.