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Unlock This CourseLouis XVI became king in 1774, aged 19. He ruled from the huge palace of Versailles, about 20 kilometres outside Paris, surrounded by thousands of nobles and servants. Most ordinary French people never saw him.
France was an absolute monarchy. There was no parliament to share power with the king. Louis chose and dismissed his own ministers, made the laws, set the taxes and decided on war and peace. He could even send a person to prison without a trial, simply by signing a sealed letter.
Key terms:
Louis believed he ruled by divine right. In theory nobody could tell him what to do.
In practice there were limits. France had thirteen high law courts called parlements, run by nobles. New laws had to be registered by them, and they could protest against laws they disliked.
Louis was well-meaning and wanted to be loved by his people. But he was shy, slow to decide and easily persuaded by those around him.
He preferred hunting and his hobby of making locks to the hard work of government. In 1776 he sacked his reforming finance minister, Turgot, when nobles and courtiers complained.
Why it mattered: an absolute monarchy only works if the king is strong. All power led to Louis, so when he hesitated or gave way, nothing got fixed. France badly needed reform, and it had a king who started reforms and then dropped them. People also learned that the king would back down under pressure.
Marie Antoinette was the daughter of the Empress of Austria. She married Louis in 1770, when she was only 14, to seal an alliance between France and Austria. She never won the trust of the French people.
Austria had been France's enemy for centuries, and many French people disliked the alliance. The queen was nicknamed 'the Austrian woman'. People suspected she cared more about Austria than France and had too much influence over her weak husband.
She spent heavily on dresses, jewels, gambling and gifts for her favourites. At Versailles she had her own private palace, the Petit Trianon, and built a pretend country village in its grounds. As France's debts grew, she was nicknamed 'Madame Deficit'.
Cheap pamphlets sold in Paris printed cruel, made-up stories about her private life. In 1785 came the Diamond Necklace Affair. Tricksters used the queen's name to get hold of a hugely expensive necklace. She was innocent, but many people believed she was guilty.
Why it mattered: the queen's real spending was only a small part of France's costs, but that was not how it looked. To people struggling to buy bread, she stood for a court that was wasteful, selfish and out of touch. Every story about her made people respect the monarchy a little less, and that damaged Louis too.
For centuries most people had accepted that kings ruled by God's will and that the Church was always right. The philosophes asked a new question: is this reasonable? They wanted to test everything by reason and evidence.
Attacked the power, wealth and intolerance of the Catholic Church. He argued for freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
In The Spirit of the Laws (1748) he argued that power should not sit with one person. It should be divided between a ruler, a law-making body and independent judges.
In The Social Contract (1762) he wrote, 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' He argued that a government should be based on the will of the people.
These ideas were collected in the Encyclopédie, a huge set of books edited by Diderot. The government and the Church tried to ban such writing, but it spread anyway. It was read and argued over in coffee houses and at salons, which were discussion evenings held in wealthy homes.
Why it mattered: the Enlightenment struck at the two pillars of the old order. If power should be shared and should come from the people, then divine right was false. If the Church was not always right, why should it keep its wealth and privileges? Most philosophes wanted reform, not revolution, and most peasants could not read their books. But the educated bourgeoisie and some nobles could. They later became the leaders of the Revolution, and they had learned to question everything.
In 1776 Britain's thirteen American colonies declared independence. Their Declaration said that 'all men are created equal' and that governments get their power from the consent of the people they govern. In 1778 France joined the war on the American side, mainly to weaken its old rival Britain. French soldiers and ships helped win the key victory at Yorktown in 1781, and Britain accepted American independence in 1783.
The impact on France was huge:
The war also cost France a fortune. You will study that in A Kingdom Going Bankrupt: Debt, Necker and Failed Harvests.
Explain two effects of the Enlightenment on France in the years before 1789. [8 marks]
One effect of the Enlightenment was that it weakened belief in absolute monarchy. Louis XVI claimed to rule by divine right and shared power with no parliament. Montesquieu argued in The Spirit of the Laws that power should be divided, and Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract that government should rest on the will of the people. Because educated nobles and the bourgeoisie read and discussed these ideas, they stopped accepting that the king should hold all power and began to want a say in how France was run.
A second effect was that it damaged respect for the Catholic Church. Voltaire attacked the Church's wealth, power and intolerance and called for freedom of religion. The Church tried to ban such writing, but it still spread through works like the Encyclopédie and through talk in salons and coffee houses. This led many educated people to question why the Church should keep its privileges, so one of the main supports of the old order lost much of its authority.
What lifts it to the top level: there are two separate effects, each backed with precise knowledge (names, books, ideas), and each paragraph shows how the Enlightenment led to the effect using words like 'because' and 'this led'.
Write two paragraphs and start them 'One effect was...' and 'A second effect was...'. One effect alone cannot score more than half marks, however well you explain it. Do not just describe what Voltaire or Rousseau said: finish each paragraph by showing what changed in France as a result.