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The events of May to October 1789 transformed France with breathtaking speed. In barely five months the country moved from a traditional, ceremonial meeting of the Estates-General — an institution that had not assembled for 175 years — to the storming of a royal fortress, the abolition of the feudal order, and the collapse of the Crown's authority over its capital. This compressed period contains, in miniature, the central interpretive problems of the whole Revolution: the relationship between elite political manoeuvre and popular action, the role of contingency and rumour, and the speed with which a movement for reform escalated into a transfer of sovereignty.
The narrative is deceptively familiar — Tennis Court Oath, Bastille, August Decrees, Declaration of Rights — but the analytical task is harder. Each of these events can be read as a stage in a single revolutionary surge, or as a series of distinct crises with different actors and logics. The deputies who declared the National Assembly were not the artisans who stormed the Bastille; the peasants of the Great Fear were not the women who marched to Versailles. Explaining how these separate movements converged — and how an essentially moderate, monarchist reforming assembly came to preside over the destruction of the old order — is the heart of this topic and the substance of the collapse of absolutism.
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This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 2, Option 2C.1 (Route C depth study): "France in revolution, 1774–99." It covers the breakdown of the Estates-General, the assertion of national sovereignty, and the popular interventions of July–October 1789 that secured the early Revolution. Within our own teaching sequence it is the pivot between the causes of Lesson 1 and the constitutional experiment of Lesson 3: it explains how the old order fell and what the revolutionaries first tried to build in its place.
Because Paper 2 is a depth paper, the reward is for fine command of a short, fast-moving period and for source judgements set firmly in context. (For the precise weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General for 5 May 1789 at Versailles. The elections, conducted through an elaborate hierarchy of local and bailliage assemblies, generated an explosion of political activity and the compilation of tens of thousands of cahiers de doleances across the kingdom.
The very act of convening the Estates-General was itself revolutionary in its effects, whatever the Crown's intentions. The elections politicised the entire nation: in drawing up cahiers, ordinary communities were invited, for the first time in living memory, to articulate grievances and imagine reforms, and the relaxation of censorship that accompanied the elections unleashed a flood of pamphlets debating the constitution of the kingdom. Sieyes's Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? was only the most famous of thousands. By the time the deputies assembled at Versailles, France had already been transformed into a kind of vast political seminar, and expectations of fundamental change had been raised that no merely fiscal settlement could satisfy. This is a crucial point of causation: the Crown summoned the Estates-General to solve a budgetary problem, but the process of summoning it created a political movement that rapidly outran the Crown's control.
In December 1788, on Necker's advice, the Crown granted the Third Estate double representation — roughly 600 deputies against some 300 each for clergy and nobility. But the truly decisive question, the mode of voting, was deliberately left open. Would the assembly vote by order (par ordre), giving the two privileged estates a permanent 2-to-1 majority, or by head (par tete), allowing the doubled Third Estate, with sympathetic clergy and liberal nobles, to command a majority? Doubling the numbers meant nothing unless voting was by head. The failure to settle this procedure before the Estates-General convened was a catastrophic miscalculation: it guaranteed that the opening weeks were consumed not by reform but by a constitutional stand-off, and it was on this rock that the old institution broke.
When the Third Estate's deputies arrived, they found the king's opening address evasive on voting by head and the privileged orders unwilling to merge. After six weeks of deadlock, the Third Estate seized the initiative.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 5 May 1789 | Estates-General opens; Louis XVI's speech disappoints reformers |
| 17 June 1789 | The Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly — a revolutionary act claiming to embody the sovereignty of the nation |
| 20 June 1789 | Locked out of their hall, the deputies gather at a nearby indoor tennis court (jeu de paume) and swear not to disperse until they have given France a constitution |
| 23 June 1789 | At a royal session Louis orders the estates to deliberate separately; the Third Estate refuses to leave |
| 27 June 1789 | Louis capitulates and orders the clergy and nobility to join the National Assembly |
The Abbe Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes had published Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? ('What is the Third Estate?') in January 1789, arguing that the Third Estate was the nation while the privileged orders were a parasitic excrescence. The pamphlet supplied the theoretical justification — sovereignty resides in the nation, and the nation is the Third Estate — for the revolutionary claim of 17 June.
The Tennis Court Oath was, constitutionally, the most radical act of 1789: a self-constituted body of deputies asserting that sovereignty had passed from the Crown to the representatives of the nation. The king's surrender on 27 June conceded the principle without yet conceding the reality. There is a strong case — associated with Furet and with constitutional historians — that 17–27 June was the true revolution, more decisive even than 14 July. In declaring itself the National Assembly and refusing to disperse, the Third Estate did not merely defy the Crown on a point of procedure; it transferred sovereignty from king to nation, the foundational act on which everything else rested. On this reading the Bastille was the defence of a revolution already accomplished in principle in June, rather than the revolution itself. A strong answer holds this constitutional interpretation in tension with the 'popular force' reading: June supplied the claim to sovereignty, July the power to make it stick. Neither alone would have sufficed — a claim without force would have been crushed by the troops, and force without the prior claim would have been mere riot.
Louis appeared to accept the National Assembly, but simultaneously concentrated some 20,000 troops — many of them foreign mercenary regiments — around Paris and Versailles. On 11 July he dismissed Necker, the minister most trusted by the Third Estate. To Parisians this signalled an impending military coup against the Assembly.
Paris erupted. A population already inflamed by record bread prices and fear of repression armed itself; on the morning of 14 July crowds seized muskets from the Invalides and then converged on the Bastille, a medieval fortress and state prison in the east of the city.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Why the Bastille? | It held the gunpowder the new citizens' militia needed; it symbolised arbitrary royal imprisonment by lettre de cachet |
| The garrison | Around 80 invalides and some 30 Swiss guards under Governor de Launay |
| The assault | Negotiations collapsed; after hours of confused fighting the fortress fell; roughly a hundred of the attackers were killed |
| Aftermath | De Launay was killed by the crowd; the fortress was soon demolished; 14 July became the founding symbol of the Revolution |
The fall of the Bastille was the moment at which popular force entered the Revolution as an autonomous and decisive actor. It halted the threatened royal counter-stroke, saved the National Assembly, and demonstrated that the Parisian crowd could determine national political outcomes. Within days Louis recalled Necker, withdrew the troops, and on 17 July came to Paris to accept the new tricolour cockade — a public submission to the Revolution.
Beyond the fortress itself, 14 July triggered a wider municipal revolution. Across France, in the days following the news from Paris, existing royal authorities were swept aside and replaced by new revolutionary committees and citizen National Guards. This collapse of the old administrative order in the provinces was arguably as significant as events in the capital: it meant that by late July the Crown had lost effective control not merely of Paris but of much of urban France. The concept of the journee deserves emphasis: a single day of decisive crowd action that altered the balance of national politics. From the Bastille onward, the journee became a recurring instrument, and the willingness or refusal of political leaders to invoke or restrain it would shape every subsequent crisis of the Revolution — a thread to carry forward into the fall of the monarchy in Lesson 4.
The significance of 14 July is best assessed on three levels. Practically, it saved the National Assembly by forcing Louis to withdraw his troops and recall Necker. Symbolically, it demolished a monument of arbitrary power and gave the Revolution its founding myth — celebrated thereafter as the nation's birthday. Structurally, by demonstrating that the crowd could overturn royal authority, it permanently altered the terms of politics, making popular force a standing factor that no government could ignore. A nuanced answer distinguishes these registers rather than treating 'significance' as a single quantity.
In the weeks after the Bastille, a wave of rural panic — the Grande Peur — swept much of France. Peasants, gripped by rumours of aristocratic conspiracy and of 'brigands' coming to destroy the harvest, armed themselves, attacked chateaux, and above all burned the terriers (registers of feudal dues). The Great Fear showed that the Revolution was not a Parisian event alone; rural France had its own grievances and its own initiative. Crucially, it pressed the frightened National Assembly to act on feudalism.
Lefebvre's classic study of the Great Fear (1932) reconstructed it as a rational panic with traceable routes of transmission, not a mindless contagion: the rumours spread along roads and waterways, were believed because they fitted genuine fears of aristocratic revenge after the Bastille, and were acted upon by communities with concrete grievances against their seigneurs. The peasants' specific target — the terriers recording feudal obligations — reveals the precise object of rural anger: not the king, not even the nobility as such, but the legal documentation of seigneurial dues. By destroying the records, peasants sought to destroy the obligations. This is why the Great Fear functioned as direct pressure on the Assembly: rural France was abolishing feudalism in practice, and the deputies had either to ratify that abolition or to send troops against the peasantry. On the night of 4 August they chose, in effect, to ratify it.
In an extraordinary night session beginning 4 August 1789, liberal nobles and clergy rose in turn to renounce their privileges in a wave of patriotic emotion, and over the following week the Assembly enacted a series of decrees abolishing:
The August Decrees dismantled the legal framework of the Ancien Régime in a matter of days. But the abolition was carefully hedged: 'personal' feudal obligations were ended outright, while 'real' (property-based) dues were declared redeemable — peasants had to buy them out by compensation. This compromise satisfied no one and left rural grievance smouldering; outright abolition without compensation came only in 1793. This unfinished business is worth remembering, because unresolved peasant grievance will resurface as a factor in the radicalisation of the Republic.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was the Revolution's foundational statement of principle, fusing Enlightenment philosophy with the political needs of 1789. Its key articles included:
| Article | Principle (in summary) |
|---|---|
| Article 1 | Men are born and remain free and equal in rights |
| Article 2 | The natural rights of man: liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression |
| Article 3 | The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation |
| Article 6 | Law is the expression of the general will; citizens may share in its making |
| Article 10 | No one may be disturbed for their opinions, including religious ones |
| Article 11 | Free communication of ideas is among the most precious rights of man |
| Article 17 | Property is an inviolable and sacred right |
Marxist historians (Soboul, Lefebvre) read the Declaration as a fundamentally bourgeois document, its sanctification of property (Article 17) protecting the propertied classes. Revisionists (Furet; Keith Baker) stressed instead its universalist language and Enlightenment lineage. Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights (2007), argued that it inaugurated a genuinely new conception of universal human rights with lasting global reach. The tension between universal aspiration and propertied, gendered limitation is the document's defining ambiguity — and, as we shall see, a central problem for evaluating it as a source.
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