The French Revolution: Crash Course World History #29

Hi, my name is John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today we’re going to

talk about The French Revolution. Admittedly, this wasn’t the French flag until 1794,

but we just felt like he looked good in stripes. As does this guy. Huh?

So, while the American Revolution is considered a pretty good thing, the French Revolution

is often seen as a bloody, anarchic mess, which...

Mr. Green, Mr. Green! I bet, like always, it’s way more complicated than that.

Actually no. It was pretty terrible. Also, like a lot of revolutions, in the end it exchanged

an authoritarian regime for an authoritarian regime. But even if the revolution was a mess,

its ideas changed human history - far more, I will argue, than the American Revolution.

[theme music]

Right, so France in the 18th century was a rich and populous country, but it had a systemic

problem collecting taxes because of the way its society was structured. They had a system

with kings and nobles we now call the Ancien Régime. Thank you, three years of high school French.

And for most French people, it sucked, because the people with the money - the nobles and

the clergy - never paid taxes. So by 1789, France was deeply in debt thanks to their

funding the American Revolution - thank you, France; we will get you back in World Wars

I and II. And King Louis XVI was spending half of his national budget to service the federal debt.

Louis tried to reform this system under various finance ministers. He even called for democracy

on a local level, but all attempts to fix it failed and soon France basically declared

bankruptcy. This nicely coincided with hailstorms that ruined a year’s harvest, thereby raising food prices

and causing widespread hunger, which really made the people of France angry, because they love to eat.

Meanwhile, the King certainly did not look broke, as evidenced by his well-fed physique

and fancy footwear. He and his wife Marie Antoinette also got to live in the very nice

Palace at Versailles thanks to God’s mandate, but Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were

challenging the whole idea of religion, writing things like: “The main point of enlightenment

is of man’s release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion.”

So basically the peasants were hungry, the intellectuals were beginning to wonder whether

God could or should save the King, and the nobility were dithering about, eating foie

gras and songbirds, failing to make meaningful financial reform.

In response to the crisis, Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General, the closest

thing that France had to a national parliament, which hadn’t met since 1614. The Estates

General was like a super parliament made up of representatives from the First Estate,

the nobles, the Second Estate, the clergy, and the Third Estate, everyone else.

The Third Estate showed up with about 600 representatives, the First and Second Estates

both had about 300, and after several votes, everything was deadlocked, and then the Third