I know that the ideas of montesquieu and such prepared the people to accept the idea of a republic even before they realised they wanted it.. but could someone go into more depth about that?
also, how did the unequal representation of the third estate in the Estates General affect the revolution besides the fact that it caused the third estate to break away and take the "tennis court oath"?
thanks in advance!
To your first question, I think the philosophers like Montesquieu and Rousseau gave revolutionaries a kind of blueprint for how to build their government. Most people realized there had to be some sort of reform, but the shape that took was based on how people interpreted various philosophers’ positions. More to your point, I think the ideas raised by philosophers about government made people realize that there could be something else other than absolute monarchy; that there was an alternative. What that alternative was exactly was a thing that was ruthlessly debated throughout the Revolution.
To your second question, I’m not entirely sure of the answer, though I might tie the Third Estate’s unequal representation in with the general frustration of the masses towards the aristocracy. It was a view of city-dwellers in Paris that at any moment the king’s forces may be unleashed to crush the Revolution, and this led to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Also, in the countryside, the peasants were afraid of hired goons sent on them by their landlords, which led to peasants destroying their land owners’ tax papers, etc. All of these things came from a belief that the aristocracy was trying to stop reform in its tracks. The paralysis in the Estates-General might have been an early example of this to many city-dwellers or peasants, who wanted to see reform happen, but only saw aristocrats delaying and undermining any attempts at reform. (I’m not sure if that’s the answer you were looking for, but that’s what I came up with, hope it helps!)
