On 5 May 1789 the Estates-General opened at Versailles, with about 1,200 deputies in procession through the town. In December the government had agreed to double the Third Estate's representation, giving it roughly as many deputies as the clergy and nobles combined. It left open the question that mattered most. If deputies voted by order, each estate would cast one collective vote, and the two privileged orders could always outvote the commoners. If they voted by head, the doubled Third, joined by liberal nobles and poor parish priests, would hold a majority.
What is the Third Estate?
Months earlier a priest, the Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, had written the pamphlet of the year. It opened with three questions: "What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something." Sieyès argued that the Third Estate was the nation itself, and that the privileged orders were a burden carried on its back.
At the same time, communities across France drew up cahiers de doléances, lists of grievances for their deputies to carry. Most were loyal to the king and asked for practical reforms: fairer taxes, regular meetings of the Estates-General, limits on lords' dues and hunting rights. They show a country that wanted change but did not yet dream of a republic.
From estates to assembly
For six weeks the Third Estate refused to meet as a separate order. On 17 June it declared itself the National Assembly, claiming to speak for the whole nation. Three days later, finding their hall locked, the deputies crowded into an indoor tennis court and swore the Tennis Court Oath: never to separate until they had given France a constitution. Many parish priests and some nobles crossed over to join them. On 27 June the king gave way and ordered the remaining deputies to sit with the Assembly.
The Bastille
Louis was also moving troops toward Paris and Versailles, and on 11 July he dismissed Necker, the popular minister. Parisians read this as the start of a crackdown. Crowds hunted for weapons; on 14 July they seized muskets from the Invalides and marched on the Bastille, an old fortress prison that held gunpowder. After a fight in which about a hundred attackers died, the garrison surrendered. Its governor, the Marquis de Launay, was killed and his head carried through the streets on a pike. The Bastille held only 7 prisoners that day, but its fall proved that the people of Paris could defeat royal force, and the king pulled back his troops. The Marquis de Lafayette took command of a new citizen militia, the National Guard.
The Great Fear and the night of 4 August
In the countryside, rumors spread that nobles had hired brigands to destroy the ripening harvest. In this panic, known as the Great Fear, peasants armed against brigands they believed nobles had hired, and in many places attacked manor houses and burned the records of their feudal dues. The Assembly answered on the night of 4 August, when deputy after deputy, many of them nobles, rose to give up privileges. By morning the Assembly had voted to abolish the feudal regime, along with tithes, the sale of offices and tax exemptions. Some dues were later declared payable until bought out, which angered peasants until they were scrapped without compensation in 1793.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
On 26 August 1789 the Assembly adopted a declaration of seventeen articles. Lafayette, who consulted his friend Thomas Jefferson, drafted an early version. Article 1 reads: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good." Article 3 placed sovereignty in the nation rather than the king. Article 6 called law "the expression of the general will," echoing Rousseau, and Article 11 called the free communication of thoughts and opinions "one of the most precious of the rights of man." Where the American Declaration of Independence justified a break with Britain, this was a statement of principles meant for everyone, which is why it is often treated as an ancestor of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Its silences mattered too. It said nothing explicit about women, about the enslaved people of France's colonies, or about whether the poor would vote. Those gaps would drive a decade of argument. In early October, with bread still scarce, thousands of Paris women marched about 20 kilometers to Versailles, and the next day the royal family was brought back to live in Paris, under the eye of the capital.
Worked example: what did the Bastille mean?
Ask three people in July 1789 what had just happened. A Paris cabinetmaker might say the people had saved the Assembly from the king's soldiers. A courtier might say a mob had murdered a royal officer and gone unpunished. A deputy at Versailles might feel relief and alarm at once: the crowd had protected the Assembly, but it had also shown that violence could settle political questions.
All three were partly right. That is why 14 July became France's national holiday, and also why the revolution's relationship with crowd violence was uneasy from its first summer. When you study any uprising, it helps to ask the same double question: what did the violence achieve, and what did it teach people about how power is won?