French Revolution (1789) - Essay Example

lic and in 1793 executed the king. The formation of the National assembly, a body of people who were picked out of the middle classes, was an important development during the year of 1792. This led to an understanding on part of both the king and the bourgeoisie of the power of a collective, which strengthened the foundations of the goal to come out of political and social upheaval. According to a scholar, David Sibalis, the formation of the National Assembly represented an attempt on the part of the Parisian middle classes to “provide themselves with some minimal economic security through their own efforts.

”3 Many of these efforts were frustrated by later events of the Revolution but the events of 1789 displayed a passion and fervor on the part of the Parisian middle classes to rise above their petty divisions and fight for the causes of equality that the French Revolution stands for, even today. The fight was also against what Barry M. Shapiro, a researcher, refers to as an “irrational and inhumane judicial system”4 that refused to fix every subject of the state equally. According to a historian Eric Hobsbawn, the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 reflected the third estate’s passion and enthusiasm.

5 Disgruntled soldiers joined the movement rioters who sought to storm the Bastille. Although the Bastille was a prison, it was also an armory, which the revolutionaries needed to continue their movement. It was also intended as a warning to the higher powers of Paris. The demand of the public for a constitutional monarchy that would lead to the formation of a republic had gained momentum in Paris and the middle classes saw in this idea the promise of a better future. The storming of the Bastille assumes greater implications once one takes these factors of the storming into regard.

The storming of the battle, the, becomes a symbolic attack on the tyranny that the nobles and the king practiced upon the citizens of France. According to a historian, Richard Burton, the Bastille formed a “nexus of fears and phobias whose hold over the eighteenth century Parisian mind is not to be doubted.”6 It is this tenacious hold that the act of the storming of the Bastille sought to loosen, consciously or unconsciously. Paris being the capital of the country, not only was aware of the nature of the exploitation that was happening, but Parisians were also the first to be affected by the mismanagement of the economy.

They possessed the ability, due to their proximity to the centers of power, to analyses and understand the causes of the miserable conditions of their existence, as they existed in 1789. These conditions reached a peak when the Bastille was stormed. This action in itself, shorn of it symbolic significance, appears a trivial one since there weren’t any important people in the Bastille who could have been harmed. As a prison of the French government, however, the Bastille had turned into a symbol of the tyranny that caused great misery to the lives of the French people. The