The French Revolution: From an Absolute Monarchy to an Empire
by People have always striven to become more powerful and more acknowledged. It is in their nature after all to want to be seen and heard. In the late 18th century, the Third Estate of France, the middle-class and peasants, felt as if they were being cheated out of their money by their king, Louis XIV.
They took a stand and within a few years set up the National Assembly to guide the king and then after another few years made the Legislative Assembly to share half of France’s power with the king. Then France declared the king a traitor after he had tried to escape Paris. The Legislative Assembly gave up their power to the National Convention, a republic, that was supposed to give all the government’s power to the people, but instead began to kill its own people. Finally, Napoleon came in and took all the power for himself, ruining the desires of the people to have control over their own country. The French Revolution failed in its attempt to make a government based on Enlightenment ideals because of the lack of power the people ended up having after the Revolution. France went from being an Absolute Monarchy, to a Limited Monarchy, and finally back to an Empire, with little power for the people.
Before the French Revolution, France’s Third Estate found its government extremely unfair and wished to gain more power in order to balance out some of the issues in the country. First, Louis XIV was only taxing the poor third estate, leaving the wealthy nobles and clergy to spend all of their money for their own pleasures. The Third Estate found this unfair and wanted to have their say in a fair taxation for all of France, but really couldn’t do anything about it. This shows how unsubstantial the third estate was because they were helpless against the taxes of their king and it also shows how they sought for power to fight the taxation. Also, when the king called upon the Estates General for a meeting, the Third Estate did not have enough influence to make any changes in France. In France, the votes that counted towards reforms were counted by estate and not by head. Such is the case, the Third Estate had no chance of changing any of the ways of France because the First and Second would team together to stop any changes. This led to the Third Estate’s creation of the National Assembly in which they demanded power that they actually had no right to. Once again, the Third Estate lack of power made them desire power, but up to this point they were fairly successful in slowly gaining power up to this point, but after the victory of the National Assembly and later the Legislative Assembly, the Third Estate’s power quickly declined.
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