InNo+seank2013+08.26.10

=**__Revolution in France__**= toc //Chapter 1: France Before the Revolution// pages 4-14 (2-12 on scanned)

A great introduction to the French Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EvakM9Waus //(no embedded code)//

To get a better view of the comic on the right go to: @http://static.funnyjunk.com/pictures/4ac40264_5e34_f48b.jpg //(try pressing command when you click on the link above so it won't lead you to their weird homepage)//

Note: Each photo of information comes from the Book: Revolution in France

I. The Summer of 1789

 * 1) In cities, towns and villages everywhere in France, people used violence to change the way they lived
 * 2) At the end of 1789, they destroyed centuries old of law and government
 * 3) The decade that followed they would transform their society, their religion and their economy

II. The people of France

 * 1) About 20 million French people were peasants - those who made their living by farming
 * 2) About 2 million people worked in towns - shopkeepers, traders, craftsmen, builders and laborers
 * 3) Some 2 million people belonged to the //bourgeoisie// - 'middle class' between the nobility and the workers and peasants
 * 4) Between 12 hundred thousand and 35 hundred thousand were nobles - they were the land-owning, ruling class

III. The three states

 * 1) There are four social classes: the **peasantry**, the town **working class**, the middle class or **bourgeoisie**, and the **nobility**.
 * 2) According to French law, the people belonged to three estates instead of social classes
 * 3) The **Clergy** - people who made a living by working in the Church
 * 4) The **Nobility**
 * 5) Everyone else
 * 6) These first two classes had more privileges or rights, which gave them a number of advantages.
 * 7) The three estates had once been important in the French Society. This was until 1769, after the wars had ended and the nobles no longer had the responsibility for wa
 * 8) These privileges for the nobles were then thought of as outdated and unfair
 * 9) Several million people relied on charity in order to survive
 * 10) An average family had to pay 10 - 15 percent of what they earned every year


 * 'An entire family lives in a single room, in which the four walls are bare, the beds have no covers, and the kitch things are piled up with the chamber pots. All the furniture together is not worth twenty crowns. Every three months the inhabitants are thrown out for owing back rent and must find another hole to live in. Thus, they wander, taking their miserable possessions from refuge to refuge'**

Louis Sebastien Mercier, //Tableau de Paris// [Picture of Paris], 1780s

IV. Critics of French Society

 * 1) Most people thought this the government and laws were unfair but they knew there was no other way of life.
 * 2) A handful of educated people did question it. These people were **philosophes**, a group of writers, journalists and scientists who shared a way of thinking they called **Reason**.
 * 3) These people refused to accept anything as true without questioning it.
 * 4) One of these philosophes was Lavoisier who discovered the gas which he called oxygen. In addition to his scientific work, he involved himself with social and political issues such as
 * 5) Building a experimental farm in which he tried to show farmers how to improve their crops
 * 6) Proposing a number of reforms to help the poor and these included
 * 7) abolishing the taille
 * 8) introducing old age pensions
 * 9) building new hospitals

V. The Calas Affair

 * 1) Another famous philosophe was the writer Voltaire
 * 2) he questioned the power and belief of the church
 * 3) he showed his views most clearly when he became involved in a sad case of injustice - the **Calas Affair**.
 * 4) Jean Calas was a Protestant cloth merchant who lived among Catholics in the city of Toulouse.
 * 5) When his son hanged himself in 1761, the Catholics accused him of the murder of his son.
 * 6) It seemed to the Catholics that Jean didn't want his son to turn Catholic so he killed him
 * 7) The magistrates accepted this rumor and had him brutally killed
 * 8) In public, he was tied to a cartwheel getting his limbs broken by steal bars.
 * 9) Once they were all broken, he was strangled and then his body was burned.
 * 10) Voltaire believed Jean was innocent and spent the next three years trying to clear his name
 * 11) In the end, an appeal court decided that Calas was innocent.
 * 12) Voltaire took up the Calas case because he thought it showed up some major wrongs in the French Society
 * 13) Religious intolerance - the refusal to allow non-catholics to follow their religion
 * 14) The law that let Calas be tortured to death

**Summary**
The beginning of the French Revolution started during the summer of 1789 when people started acting against the unfair way of life they were living. More than 3/4 of the population was poor and getting poorer because of the taxes that had no effect on the upper classes. The three estates had great impact of who payed the taxes. The nobles were exempt from paying certain taxes even though they were among the richest of the French people. The introduction to the //Revolution in France// explained how unfair the government and law was to the working and peasant class. Near the end of these few pages the book describes some major philosophes that impacted the French Society eventually leading the 'everyone else' estate to have revolution.

Question(s)
How long did the peasants live in misery before philosophes came into the situation and came up with the idea of Revolution?