Former good article nomineeFrench Revolution was a good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
On this day... Article milestones
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October 17, 2008WikiProject peer reviewCollaborated
October 22, 2008WikiProject peer reviewCollaborated
June 14, 2013Peer reviewReviewed
October 25, 2013Good article nomineeNot listed
On this day... A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on June 20, 2007.
Current status: Former good article nominee

Estates General of 1789[edit]

Hello all

Once again, I checked all the sources for this and found that most of the content was unsourced or had nothing to do with the cited sources or were old and didn't reflect recent scholarship. I have replaced most of the content with more accurate content based on recent scholarship. I have moved some content to the section on Financial and political crisis in order to make the sequence of events and reasons for the growing crisis clearer. I have made some cuts to detail and repetitive information so that the changes don't increase the word length of the article. I have mainly relied on The Oxford Handook of the French Revolution (2018), A Companion to the French Revolution (2013) and the Oxford History of the French Revolution (2018). I have also used Schama (1989) and Cobban (1965) to a limited extent. As always, I would be happy to discuss any objections you might have to the changed content, and suggestions for changes in wording. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 04:22, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Same objections as above, plus I think you miss the point. This section is not concerned so much with the process of elections, but the make up. If there are parts that need improving, let's discuss but a blanket rewrite is not collaboration. Robinvp11 (talk) 12:29, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The Estates-General contained three separate bodies, the First Estate representing 100,000 clergy, the Second the nobility, and the Third the "commons".[1] Since each met separately, and any proposals had to be approved by at least two, the First and Second Estates could outvote the Third despite representing less than 5% of the population.[2] [I didn't delete this, I moved it to a more logical place in the Financial and Political crisis section.]
Although the Catholic Church in France owned nearly 10% of all land, as well as receiving annual tithes paid by peasants,[3] more than two-thirds of the clergy lived on incomes putting them close to the poverty line [Source Schama. Doesn't say this. My summary is an accurate reflection of what he, and other sources cited actually say. And there was no such thing as a poverty line in 18th century France.] Many of the 303 deputies returned in 1789 were thus closer in sympathy to the poor than those elected for the Third Estate, where voting was restricted to male French taxpayers, aged 25 or over.[4] The vast majority of the 610 Third Estate deputies were lawyers, government officials, businessmen, or wealthy land owners.[5] [Source Doyle, doesn't say this. In fact he says pretty much the opposite. My summary is accurate.]
The Second Estate elected 291 deputies, representing about 400,000 men and women, who owned about 25% of the land and collected seigneurial dues and rents from their tenants. Like the clergy, this was not a uniform body, and was divided into the noblesse d'épée, or traditional aristocracy, and the noblesse de robe. The latter derived rank from judicial or administrative posts and tended to be hard-working professionals, who dominated the regional parlements and were often intensely socially conservative.[6] [source Schama doesn't say this. "Hard working professionals" indeed!]
To assist delegates, each region completed a list of grievances, known as Cahiers de doléances.[7] Although they contained ideas that would have seemed radical only months before, most supported the monarchy, and assumed the Estates-General would agree to financial reforms, rather than fundamental constitutional change.[8] [Citation is Doyle's Very short history p. 38. It's actually p. 39 and says this: "An amazing range of grievances and aspirations were articulated in what amounted to the first public opinion poll of modern times. Suddenly changes seemed possible that only a few months earlier had been the stuff of dreams; and the tone of the cahiers made clear that many electors actually expected them to happen through the agency of the Estates-General." Nothing about radicalism, support of the monarchy, or fundamental constitutional change, My summary of the Cahiers is more accurate..]
The lifting of press censorship allowed widespread distribution of political writings, mostly written by liberal members of the aristocracy and upper middle-class.[9] Abbé Sieyès, a political theorist and priest elected to the Third Estate, argued it should take precedence over the other two as it represented 95% of the population.[10] [This is all in the wrong place. I moved it to the section on Financial and political crisis because that's where it logically belongs. The political writings were part of the political ferment leading up to the Estates General. And if this is relevant to this section, why not the information about how these delegates were elected?]
On 5 May 1789, the Estates-General convened at Versailles, a location seen as an attempt to control their debates. [Says who?] As was customary, each Estate assembled in separate rooms, whose furnishings and opening ceremonies deliberately emphasised the superiority of the First and Second Estates. The Second Estate ruled only landowners could sit as deputies, excluding the immensely popular Comte de Mirabeau.[11] [Source is Schama. He doesn't say this. It was the local Estate of Provence that had this rule. Mirabeau was elected as a rep of the Third Estate for Aix.]
To prevent the Third Estate being outvoted, Sieyès proposed deputies be approved by the Estates-General as a whole, instead of each Estate verifying its own. [It wasn't Sieyes who proposed this, it was the reps from Brittany and the Dauphiné. See Doyle p. 102] Since their legitimacy would derive from the Estates-General, they would be forced to continue as one body.[12] Sitting as the Estates-General, on 10 June members of the Third Estate began verifying their own deputies, a process completed on 17 June. [No they didn't. They sat as the Third Estate and began verifying the members of the Third Estate on 12 June. On 17 June they declared themselves a National Assembly. per Doyle. 103-105] Two days later, they were joined by over 100 members of the clergy, [This is true, it was the 19th. Scharma p. 355] and declared themselves the National Assembly. The remaining deputies from the other two Estates were invited to join, but the Assembly made it clear they intended to legislate with or without their support.[13] [The invitation to join was much earlier, as I wrote.]
In an attempt to prevent the Assembly from convening, Louis XVI closed the Salle des États, claiming he needed it for a royal speech. [Unsourced and untrue. My version is an accurate reflection of the sources.] On 20 June, the Assembly met in a tennis court outside Versailles, and swore not to disperse until a new constitution had been agreed. [This is true. Schama p. 359.] Messages of support poured in from Paris and other cities; by 27 June, they had been joined by the majority of the First Estate, plus forty-seven members of the Second, and Louis backed down.[14] [No he didnt. He offered some concessions but ordered the Estates General to meet in their separate orders the next day. Schama p. 362] Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 14:00, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have reinstated most of my earlier changed as the previous version was inaccurate in many respects and was not supported by the cited sources. Happy to discuss further. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 04:15, 14 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Hunt 1984, pp. 6–10.
  2. ^ Schama 1989, p. 115.
  3. ^ Doyle 1990, p. 59.
  4. ^ Schama 1989, p. 335.
  5. ^ Doyle 1990, pp. 99–101.
  6. ^ Schama 1989, pp. 116–117.
  7. ^ Frey & Frey 2004, pp. 4–5.
  8. ^ Doyle 2001, p. 38.
  9. ^ Neely 2008, p. 56.
  10. ^ Furet 1995, p. 45.
  11. ^ Schama 1989, p. 343.
  12. ^ Hibbert 1982, p. 54.
  13. ^ Schama 1989, pp. 354–355.
  14. ^ Schama 1989, p. 356.

Long-term impact[edit]

Hello all

I have summarised some excessive detail in this section. I have cut information already in this article (for example most of the information on the impact of the Revolution on the Church) or the article Influence of the French Revolution. I have removed unsourced content. As most of the content was about the short-term impact of the Revolution on other countries, I have changed the heading to Impact. I think there is a good argument for removing most of the remaining detail and retaining just a few general observations made by historians. One concern is that there is no way of separating the impact of the revolution of 1789-99 from the long-term impact of the Napoleonic era (which was arguably greater). As it is, the section is an invitation for people to write potted histories of every country in the world since 1789.

Happy to discuss. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 12:08, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One of the long term impacts is that Liberté, égalité, fraternité has the origin in the French Revolution. I suggest that this should be linked here. Zukunft (talk) 09:50, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK, you're welcome to to link it. WP:BB —GoldRingChip 12:29, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Eurocentrism in the historiography of the French Revolution[edit]

This is written now on the Wikipedia page:

"Some studies assert that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a "western cultural bias", "pro-western bias", or "Eurocentric bias", reiterating, says Anna Samoilenko, "similar biases that are found in the 'ivory tower' of academic historiography". Due to this persistent Eurocentrism, scholars like Carwil Bjork-James or the authors of 'The colonization of Wikipedia: evidence from characteristic editing behaviors of warring camps' call for a “decolonization” of Wikipedia."

This Eurocentric bias is also the one that postcolonial studies finds in Western history (Art. ‘Eurocentrism’ in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts), a bias that J. M. Blaut labeled in a title of a book as the “colonizer’s model of the world” (The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History).

In particular, Eurocentrism has been noted in the historiography of the French Revolution. Robert R. Palmer's conception of Western history, for example, with the American and French Revolutions presented as the two most important events leading to modernity, has been considered by David Armitage to be “guilty of almost every current scholarly sin—Eurocentrism, essentialism, teleology, diffusionism...” (Foreword to The Age of the Democratic Revolution)

Armitage noted the “omission of the Haitian revolution” in this book, an omission that was general until recently in the historiography of the French Revolution, wrote Marlene Daut, in Tropics of Haiti: “It is by now rather commonplace in academic circles to refer to the idea that the Haitian Revolution has been ‘silenced’ for the past two centuries in both scholarship and popular history.”

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot described this omission as “a chapter within a narrative of global domination”, thus as Eurocentrism:

“The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated forms, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.”

According to Trouillot, the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is consistent with the desire to obscure three themes related to it: racism, slavery and colonialism:

“Finally, the silencing of the Haitian Revolution also fit the relegation to an historical backburner of the three themes to which it was linked: racism, slavery, and colonialism. In spite of their importance in the formation of what we now call the West, in spite of sudden outbursts of interest as in the United States in the early 1970s, none of these themes has ever become a central concern of the historiographic tradition in a Western country. In fact, each of them, in turn, experienced repeated periods of silence of unequal duration and intensity in Spain, France, Britain, Portugal, The Netherlands, and the United States. The less colonialism and racism seem important in world history, the less important also the Haitian Revolution.” Wordyhs (talk) 14:41, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The French Revolution is first of all a French phenomenon, because it occurred in France primarily and not somewhere else (though it had after-effects in multiple places in the world). And second of all, it is primarlily an European phenomenon, because France is in Europe, and not somewhere else. Therefore, a French and and an European view of the phenomenon being the first views presented in the Wikipedia page is completely logical and rational, and there is nothing to be changed in that respect. Only my own two cents' worth. Thank you, warshy (¥¥) 17:22, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This seems to be largely about the French historiography, where the tradition was, probably still is, essentially that the FR was a good thing, despite..... The dominant Anglophone tradition, by contrast, has always been that the FR was at bottom a bad thing, or at least a thing that got well out of hand. In this tradition, the Haitian Revolution was usually played up with some satisfaction (if not always in colossal detail), as demonstrating French hypocisy. Johnbod (talk) 17:34, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Trade Guilds were not "worker representation".[edit]

The compulsory guilds, made compulsory by King Henry IV, were producer cartels - to refer to them as "worker representation" is utterly absurd. There had been an effort to end these compulsory cartels in 1776, by Turgot, but that effort had failed because of the fatal weakness of King Louis XVI. The French Revolutionaries, in the Estates General, proclaimed the end of the compulsory guilds on August the 4th 1789 - but such words were not given legal effect till 1791. 2A02:C7C:E183:AC00:5405:9838:B7F6:9189 (talk) 13:31, 22 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The article doesn't say that guilds were worker representation. It says, " Le Chapelier Law suppressing trade guilds and any form of worker organisation." This is correct. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 22:09, 22 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Very unbalance article[edit]

The majority of scholars today argue that the French Revolution did NOT contribute to the development of democracy in Europe, while this article argues the opposite, citing a single contribution, Livesey 2001, which is more than 20 years old and does not represent the standard of current scholarship. Deeply unbalanced and in need of revision. 86.6.148.125 (talk) 15:48, 1 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

By my count, the article cites four different sources which state that the French revolution influenced liberal democratic ideas in Europe and the world. However, if you can cite specific sources which state otherwise they can be incorporated into the article. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 06:44, 2 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 11 March 2024[edit]

There are multiple cases in the article where the revolutionary political figure Antoine Barnave's name is mispelled as "Bernave" and action should be taken to rectify these mistakes. By using the text-search tool and entering in "Bernave" you will find these 2 errors. Sarffgadau (talk) 19:49, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

 Done Jamedeus (talk) 19:56, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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