Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Module 1- French Society during the late 18th Century :red_flag:, image,…
Module 1- French Society during the late 18th Century :red_flag:
The King and the Queen
In 1774, Louis XVI ascended the throne of France. He was 20 years old and married to the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette.
Empty Treasury
Long years of war had drained the financial resources of
France and the cost of maintaining an extravagant court
at the immense palace of Versailles.
Under Louis XVI, France helped the thirteen American colonies to gain their independence so The war added more than a billion livres to a debt that had already risen to more than 2 billion livres.
Solution
To meet its regular expenses, such as the cost of maintaining an army, the court, running government offices or universities, the state was forced to increase taxes.
The Society
French society in the 18th C were divided into 3 Estates.
Only members of the third estate paid taxes.
Structure
Peasents made upto 90% of the Population but only little of them owned land.
About 60 % of the land was owned by nobles, the Church and other richer members of the third estate.
The members of the first 2 Estates, that is clergy and the Nobility, enjoyed certain priveleges by birth and the most important of them was exemption of Taxes
Peasants were obliged to render services to the lord to work in his house and fields to serve in the army or to participate in building roads
Taxes
There was a direct tax called Taille and a number of indirect taxes on Salt and Tobbaco
Revolt
In the past, peasants and workers had participated in revolts against increasing taxes
and food scarcityBut they lacked the means and programmes to carry out full-scale measures that would bring about a change in the social and economic order.
End to Priveleges?
All of these were educated and believed that no group in society should be privileged by
birth.Rather, a person’s social position must depend on his merit.
These ideas envisaging a society based on freedom and equal laws and opportunities for allwere put forward by philosophers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu
