Was the French Revolution Successful

King Louis XVI once said “The interests of the state must come first.” But it’s funny because that’s actually the complete opposite of how he did things while he was king. I think the French Revolution was very successful because multiple things got accomplished from it. For example, the social classes went away and everybody was equal, the taxes went down, and France got a new and better ruler that benefited the people a lot more. But how did they accomplish these things you might ask? Well let me enlighten you.

Before the Revolution began, there were 3 different social classes. The first estate was the clergy, the second was the nobility, and the third estate was everybody else. “Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed.” The third estate always got the short end of the stick. They were the only ones paying taxes and they were the only ones working so all they did their whole lives was work and give the money they earned from working to the king. But the social classes eventually went away when france adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. Once this was established, there were no more social classes, everybody paid taxes, and everybody was able to own land instead of just the farmers.

Before they adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, taxes were insanely high on food. They were so high that families were starving to death because they couldn’t pay for food for their families to eat. “The prices reported are five sous a pound for white bread, and three-and-a-half to four sous for the common sort of bread eaten by the poor. These rates are beyond their faculties [ability to pay] and occasion great misery.” So as you can already tell, the prices on everything were very high. At one point the prices got to be so high that people of france were rioting and just trying to get the prices of food to go down just by a little bit. At one point the rioting got so bad that a whole group of men and women stormed into a bakery and stole loaves of bread because they couldn’t even afford a loaf of bread because the taxes became too high.

King Louis XIV and Queen Marie Antoinette were terrible rulers. They raised the taxes from the people so that they could throw parties every weekend. So while the king and queen were living in luxury and carelessly spending money, their people were starving and and most nights didn’t even have any food to eat. “Personal expenses of the king and queen: 11,423,750 livres.” That’s a lot of money that the king and queen could have spent on the families that were starving instead of on parties and whatnot. Later, the king was convicted of conspiracy with foreign powers, and then eventually executed by a guillotine. And at about this time when King Louis got executed, Napoleon Bonaparte became the Emperor. And he was much more thoughtful about the people and their tax situations than king Louis and Marie Antoinette were.

In conclusion, the French Revolution was very successful because multiple things were accomplished such as the tax prices going down, the social classes going away, and getting a new ruler, (Napoleon Bonaparte), who benefited France so much more than King Louis and Marie Antoinette.

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