HIST 1003 Lecture : La Marseillaise Notes 2 19 13
Document Summary
Top down rationalization and modernization: example joseph ii of austria, building a centralized bureaucracy, many nobles oppose this. Catalogs of complaints": composed by estate, addressed to the king, contribute to sense that france is in desperate need of reform, that circumstances are unfair. The hard winter of 1788-89: cold winter, very little food, enormous hardship, prices of bread are going way up, grain supply begins to dwindle, picture of louis giving alms to a village in france (father figure) Leads to abolition of all privileges on august 10-11 (august decrees) including exemptions from taxation: response to the great fear, but property not shared out to the peasants, destroyed church"s secular powers. In favor of economic equality: sans culottes even more radical than some jacobins, the maximum control of the market not just the state; ceiling set on bread prices, set sept. 1793, enrages the provincial peasantry.
