Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/344

LV The French Revolution and the Restoration of Monarchy IN France BRITAIN had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies in America before a profound social and political convulsion at the very- heart of Grand Monarchy was to remind Europe still more vividly of the essentially temporary nature of the political arrange- ments of the world. We have said that the French Monarchy was the most suc- cessful of the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy and model of a multitude of competing and minor courts. But it flourished on a basis of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse. It was brilliant and aggressive, but it was wasteful of the life and substance of its common people. The clergy and nobility were protected from taxation by a system of exemption that threw the whole burden of the state upon the middle and lower classes. The peasants were ground down by taxation ; the middle classes were dominated and humiliated by the nobility. In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and obliged to call representatives of the different classes of the realm into consultation upon the perplexities of defective income and excessive expenditure. In 1789 the States General, a gathering of the nobles, clergy and commons, roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the British parliament, was called together at Versailles. It bad not assembled since 1610. For all that time France had been an absolute monarchy. Now the people found a means of expressing their long fermenting discontent. Dis- putes immediately broke out between the three estates, due to the resolve of the Third Estate, the Commons, to control the assembly. The commons got the better of these disputes and the States General became a National Assembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown in order, as the British Parliament kept the British 324