Commoners In The French Revolution

The French Revolution was a movement led by the commoners, or Third Estate, that heavily impacted all France. Given a chance to see the current conditions of France, members of the Third Estate would not be satisfied with the overburdening taxes and unemployment or the lack of upward social mobility for peasants. Demands by members of the Third Estate, or common class, or France fueled the French Revolution. The Third Estate was composed of 23.5 million people, or 98% of the population, all in poverty, consisting of mainly peasants and workers (“French Revolution”). Being in poverty, they already faced a daily struggle to afford the high cost of survival. But despite that “starving commoners could not afford to buy bread” and “50% of people
Prior to the French Revolution, an ancien régime existed in which aristocrats held all the power while the Third Estate supplied all the “toil and taxes” that enabled the system (“French Revolution”). To maintain this inequality, the government passed laws to “prevent people […] living beyond their rank” and to ensure that everyone kept to their “exact place in a changeless scheme of things” (Stromberg, 93). Evidently, under this system, poor commoners’ families were confined to the class that they had been born with while aristocrats would always remain in power. And having become “aware of the injustice of the feudal system,” it became clear to the revolutionaries that the only way to ameliorate their living conditions was to revolt (“French Revolution”). Because the revolutionaries became aware that the lack of social mobility would result in a never-ending cycle of poverty, they revolted in the hopes of achieving a more equal social
In 2015, France had an average national personal income tax rate of 53.24% in addition to a climbing 10.18% national unemployment rate despite government efforts (Youngblood-Coleman, 2016). Given how directly income taxes and economic conditions are related, it is clear that France’s “weak” economic performance is “explained” by the “high tax burden [that weighs] heavily on the economy” (Égert). Given that “a rising tax rate leads to higher long-term unemployment rate [causing] higher tax rate,” it is reasonable to say that the high tax rate in France has led to the high unemployment rate and that there is a dire outlook for France (Heitger). France’s current economic conditions reflect of those that caused the French Revolution, where there is a compounding negative effect of high tax rates and unemployment that increases poverty for French citizens. Rather than having ameliorated this problem, one that originally caused revolt, the unsatisfactory same conditions from the past are still found in modern day France: high taxes tied to a high unemployment