So it was that when the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote about Egalité, Fraternité, and Liberté, with the idea that all men were created equal (and therefore ought to be equal always), that all men ought to live in brotherly love, and that all men should be free, these ideas won an immediate influence over the minds of Frenchmen that they would not have exercised over the minds of Britons or Germans. No doubt they are pleasant ideas, and would be very welcome, if they could be practically realised, to all reasonable men of any country; but on the French their effect was such that the nation at once had an eager desire to act on them. Frenchmen deemed that they might bring about the millennium, or a heaven on earth, by striving for their realisation.
Rousseau, then, and other writers inspired with his sentiments, prepared the minds of men in France for revolution. Many, with an ardour for freedom from the hard conditions which bound them, went as volunteers to help the Americans fighting against England. Those who returned came back with their ardour further kindled.
Now most of the historians write as if the immediate occasion of the Revolution was the misery, the oppression, the poverty, and the hunger of the lowest classes in the towns and in the country. Yet other historians, perhaps more judicious, tell us that, evil as their condition was, it was certainly no worse than that of the lowest classes elsewhere on the Continent. Let us admit, at any rate, that it was a cruelly evil condition and left much to be desired. What was different in France was the very rigid division between the classes of society and the fact, noticed before, that the king had all the real power in his own hands. The nobles and large landowners had none, except over their own dependants.
Thus there was no link, no connexion, between the Government and the great mass of the governed: the governed were dumb; they could not make their voices heard.
The "States General"
The reckless extravagance of three successive French kings had exhausted the treasury. Money was needed for the bare necessities of Government, for the pay of soldiers and officials. His ministers having failed to devise a means of raising the sums required, the king, Louis XVI., called together the "States General," a measure to which the Government had not resorted since the early years of the seventeenth century.
This States General was an assembly of the whole nation of France represented by deputies elected by the three great classes, the nobles, the Church, and the commoners. Each class elected its own deputies and sent them up to Paris to take counsel together and assist the Government in its distress.
The deputies of the three estates came to Paris in 1789, and though they did not succeed in finding money for the Government, they did succeed in finding a voice for the people. And it was by this voice that the Revolution was declared.
Trouble began over the manner in which votes were to be recorded. The clergy and the nobles demanded that each estate should give a single vote on any measure under discussion, and since clergy and nobles were likely to cast similar votes, the result would then be that the commoners would be outvoted. The commoners demanded that the votes of all three estates should be given in mass, a vote by each deputy. And since the deputies of the commoners outnumbered the other two combined, this would give them a majority. The clergy and nobles thereupon began their deliberations and excluded the deputies of the third estates from the assembly hall.
The deputies of the people, thus isolated, went in a body to the neighbouring tennis court, and there began their deliberations apart from the deputies of the other classes. They assumed the name of the National Assembly and took an oath not to dissolve until they had given France a constitution under which men might live in the desired condition of equality, brotherhood, and liberty. They commenced their sitting on June 20th, 1789.