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1-005 The Tennis Court Oath
Vol. 1- No. 5
1995
Lead: Many Frenchmen count the fall of the Bastille as the beginning of their Revolution. Perhaps it was not. Intro: A Moment In Time with Dan Roberts. Content: In the spring of 1789, France was facing bankruptcy. Due in part to fiscal incompetence and to France's aid to the infant United States in its own revolution earlier in the decade, the royal government of Louis XVI was floundering. To solve his financial problems the king called the Assembly of Notables to secure support for drastic changes in the French Tax Code. The aristocrat assemblies refused to take on the added tax burden and the king was forced to call the national parliament, the Estates-General, to meet in late May. Each of the three sections, called estates, represented part of France's political spectrum: the first estate was the Catholic clergy; the second, the nobility; and the third, the commoners representing 98 percent of the French people. Usually the king played the groups against each other to get what he wanted. This time he failed. The third estate demanded that its numbers be doubled and that voting be combined so that it could dominate the other estates. At first, Louis went along, but soon he was forced to back off. The harvest of 1788 was the worst in ninety years and the price of bread on the streets of Paris exploded. Peasants and urban crowds began to riot. At that moment of high drama, the third estate moved to assert its rights. Under the leadership of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, the third estate voted to constitute itself as the "National Assembly." When Louis ordered their meeting place closed, it met anyway with allies from the other two estates in a nearby indoor tennis court. On June 20, 1789, the members of the National Assembly, in direct defiance of the king, swore the "tennis court oath": not to disperse before they had given France a constitution. The French Revolution had begun. The Producer of A Moment in Time is Steve Clark. At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts. Resources: Bosher, J. F. The French Revolution New York W.W. Norton, c. 1988 Doyle William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1989 Copyright 1995 by Educational Broadcast, Inc.
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