Abolishment Of The Third Estate Analysis

Prior to the French Revolution, the Age of Absolutism brought about several absolutist leaders in eastern Europe such as Leopold I of Austria and Ivan the Great of Russia. Although an age of constitutionalism had been occurring at the same time in western European nations, including France, some aspects of absolutism were apparent in the reign of Louis XV as he spent much of the taxpayer money on France on wars, which he would be unable to pay off. Not only that, he increased the power of the nobility by imposing them with fewer taxes than they deserved, angering the Third Estate and effectively setting up the French Revolution. The grievances of the Third Estate involved their constant state of being shackled by the French society, which caused …show more content…
de la Bourdonnaye’s comments about taxation, Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s description of the lifestyle of impoverished French families, and Thomas Paine’s questioning of the despotic nature of the French government’s taxation. Before Napoleon Bonaparte performed his coup d’etat upon the French government with the aid of Abbe Sieyes, Sieyes played an important role in proposing the abolishment of the French nobility, as he demonstrated with his comments in What is the Third Estate? When discussing the injustices performed against the Third Estate, Sieyes explained that the Third Estate had been “shackled and oppressed” limiting their ability to be “free and flourishing.” With the political climate of the time, Sieyes demonstrated why members of the sans-culottes believed in protesting to protest violently for the liberties they were not provided. After the Estates-General was summoned by Louis XVI, the Third Estate wrote out their own grievances and presented them to the king in the form of the Cahiers. As stated in the Cahiers, the grievances …show more content…
In the book, Young explained that “the discontents of the people have been double, first on account of the high price of bread.” Due to the purpose of Young’s book to portray the situation of the Third Estate, Young illustrated why the French incited revolts such as the March of the Women to Versailles. As well as the inflation of food by the French government, taxes had been greatly inflated and imposed the most upon the members of the Third Estate, as explained by M. de la Bourdonnaye. The high amounts of taxes that the French peasantry was forced to pay was described by Bourdonnaye when he remarked that peasants “do not have seed to plant in their fields” and have to overcome “collectors of the tailles continu[ing] to be strict.” Due to the historical situation of the time with the Third Estate living extremely poor lives, Bourdonnaye demonstrating how the constraints of the government with strict tax collectors would force the Third Estate to revolt against the French government. On top of the high food prices and the inflated taxes, the cost of living in a home in France had skyrocketed as well. In fact, Louis-Sebastien Mercier epitomized this situation in his Tableau de Paris. When Mercier described a homeless family in this