Pre-revolutionary society was split up into three estates, the clergy in the First Estate, the nobility in the Second Estate, and everybody else in the Third Estate (@). All three estates had the same amount of power in the government despite the fact that the Third Estate contained eighty percent of the population of France (@). Recent poor harvests had decreased the income of the peasants and led to increased disdain for the government (@). Along with a disgruntled population, France had deep economic woes and when King Louis XVI proposed new taxes to be imposed on the nobility the path to a bloody revolution was underway (@). The Third Estate had declared itself the National Assembly corresponding to the central ideas of the time: that the government was granted its power by the people (@). Peasants ransacked manor houses and destroyed documents of their debt obligations (#). These revolts ended with the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which, among other things, guaranteed free expression of ideas, equality before the law, and a representative government (*). Fearing for their lives in the midst of an increasingly radical National Assembly, King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, attempted to flee the country but were quickly captured and executed (@). By the end of this bloody revolution in July 1794, forty-thousand people were executed or died in prison (@). Although this revolution did not end with a democratic government as many had originally hoped, the outcome of this revolution was the advent of a modern form of government: popular authoritarianism under the young French general, Napoleon Bonaparte
Pre-revolutionary society was split up into three estates, the clergy in the First Estate, the nobility in the Second Estate, and everybody else in the Third Estate (@). All three estates had the same amount of power in the government despite the fact that the Third Estate contained eighty percent of the population of France (@). Recent poor harvests had decreased the income of the peasants and led to increased disdain for the government (@). Along with a disgruntled population, France had deep economic woes and when King Louis XVI proposed new taxes to be imposed on the nobility the path to a bloody revolution was underway (@). The Third Estate had declared itself the National Assembly corresponding to the central ideas of the time: that the government was granted its power by the people (@). Peasants ransacked manor houses and destroyed documents of their debt obligations (#). These revolts ended with the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which, among other things, guaranteed free expression of ideas, equality before the law, and a representative government (*). Fearing for their lives in the midst of an increasingly radical National Assembly, King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, attempted to flee the country but were quickly captured and executed (@). By the end of this bloody revolution in July 1794, forty-thousand people were executed or died in prison (@). Although this revolution did not end with a democratic government as many had originally hoped, the outcome of this revolution was the advent of a modern form of government: popular authoritarianism under the young French general, Napoleon Bonaparte