Welcome to DJ (Daisy and Jasmine) Blogs! We made a common craft video about a brief introduction to the French Revolution (We each wrote half of the speech). I (Daisy) drew the contours of the images and colored a half of them and did the editing, Jasmine colored the rest of the images and provided the music and sound effects for our video.

 

The French Revolution is gory, dramatic, and entertaining to delve into, with the Sans Culotte peasants organizing an overthrow against the corrupted royalists, over 17,000 brutal executions on the guillotine, and France turning from a monarchial country into a republic. The Tennis Court Oath, taken on June 20, 1789, was the key event that set off the revolution. Pre-revolution France had an absolutist king (Louis XVI) and was constituted of three Estates, the First and Second Estates (very rich) took up only 0.1%  of the French population and had privileges like not needing to pay taxes, but the Third Estates had to pay lots of taxes and had many less rights than them. When the First and Second Estates outvoted the Third Estate in the Meeting of the Estates General, the Third Estate people went to a tennis court, held their meetings there, and created the National Assembly. The second key event is the creation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (introduced by the national assembly), which was originated from the Enlightenment and promised more equality in the society and more fair rights between all French people. The third key event happened in 1791, Louis XVI and his family were put in jail and he was convicted of treason. A newly established Convention chose to make France a republic, so Louis was executed on the scaffold in January 1793 (and later Marie Antoinette). The fourth key event resulted in 17,000 heads chopped off––––The Reign of Terror. A committee led by the Jacobins (Committee of Public Safety) passed two unfair and unethical laws that allowed convicting, imprisoning, and beheading anyone that was suspicious of being a counterrevolutionist or was alleged by someone. So many people, including the innocent people and poor peasants, died on the guillotine. Later, people got tired of this committee, so they beheaded the leader of the committee.

 

What big ideas did I learn about this revolution? First, it is a radical and violent grass-root movement that overthrew the monarchial governing system violently to embrace a better system: Republicanism. The Russian Revolution is similar to it, because it is also a grass-root movement and Russia also had a bad absolutist leader (Tsar Nicholas II), bad economy (widespread inflation), unfairness in social classes (the nobles and the rich had much better lives than the peasants), and food shortages (bad harvests) before having the revolution. Second, a revolution cannot change everything in the society. Because, even though there was more equality, education, nationalism, secularism, democracy, and freedom among the French people after the French Revolution, there were still wars (the French Revolutionary wars), government corruption (the Directory), and Roman Catholicism (many French people were still very religious). Enjoy watching the video, have a nice day!