Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
The Revolution and the Meter
Cassini IV became Director of the Paris Observatory in 1784 (Howard-Duff 1984).
Louis XVI was then the king of France, Marie-Antoinette of Austria his consort.
Marie-Antoinette was a beautiful, but capricious, queen and greatly disliked by the
French people. By contrast, Louis XVI was at first a popular, but weak, king ruling
France from his palace at Versailles at a time of ineffectively resolved political
struggle. The struggle began as an argument about how to incorporate the bourgeoisie
of rich merchants, traders and peasants (the “Third Estate”) into the national decision-
making process, joining the clergy (the “First Estate”) and the nobility (the “Second
Estate”). These latter two groups, the
ancien régime
(or
the old order
), were unwilling
to share or restrict their feudal privileges, including rights to vote on the amount
and kind of taxes and who should pay them, privileges that reflected social class,
rather than empowerment from the franchise. Louis was faced with an increasingly
severe national financial crisis which had its origins in the Seven Years War and in
his own indiscreet extravagance. Wanting to reform and extend the taxation system,
he called together representatives of the three Estates into a consultation called the
Estates General, a body in which the three Estates had equal voting rights therefore
ensuring that the Third Estate could always be outvoted by the other two, protecting
their position.
The political struggle came to a head in the summer of 1789 when the Third
Estate walked out of the Estates General and, in what became known as the Tennis
Court Oath (its customary meeting place had been locked), established itself as the
National Assembly, the national decision-making body, It declared that sovereignty
lay not in the king but in the people; class distinctions were to be suppressed and it
would implement a system of voting by head (effectively, representation by those
who were being taxed). The king attempted to annul the declaration and ordered the
military to enforce his decision against the National Assembly but the army refused.
France increasingly became the scene of popular unrest, and a political conflict
between the government and the privileged classes developed into a revolutionary
conflict between the privileged classes and the people, with the king caught in the
middle as arbiter and becoming increasingly out of touch with both sides.
The king ordered foreign regiments to the alert in Paris. This proved to be a
mistake, and hearing of the potential interference by foreign armies in their home
affairs, the Parisian mob marched on 14 July, 1789 to the Bastille, a fortress used
