What Was The Cause Of The French Revolution Essay
One of the causes of the French Revolution was enormous public debt. MIRABEAU presented a now famous oration in defense of Jacques Necker’s patriotic tax.
MIRABEAU: Two centuries of depredations and brigandage have made the chasm in which the kingdom is ready to engulf itself. We must close this fearful abyss. Well, here is a list of French proprietors! Choose among the richest, thus sacrificing the least number of citizens! But choose! For must not a small number perish to save the mass of the people? Well, these two thousand notables possess enough to make up the deficit. This will restore order in the finances and bring peace and prosperity to the kingdom!
Strike, immolate without pity these wretched victims, cast them into the abyss until it is closed. You recoil in horror, inconsistent and pusillanimous men! Do you not see that in decreeing bankruptcy, or what is still more odious, in rendering it inevitable, without decreeing it, you do a deed a thousand times more criminal, and – folly inconceivable – gratuitously criminal? For at least this horrible sacrifice would cause the disappearance of the deficit. But do you imagine that in refusing to pay, you will cease to owe? Do you believe that the thousands, the millions of men who will lose in an instant, by the terrible explosion or its repercussion, all that made the consolation of their lives, and constituted, perhaps, the sole means of their support, would leave you peaceably to enjoy …show more content…
And yet you deliberate!’
And certainly there has been about us no Catiline, no peril, no faction, no Rome. But today bankruptcy – hideous bankruptcy is here – it threatens to consume you, your properties, your honour! And yet you
MIRABEAU: Two centuries of depredations and brigandage have made the chasm in which the kingdom is ready to engulf itself. We must close this fearful abyss. Well, here is a list of French proprietors! Choose among the richest, thus sacrificing the least number of citizens! But choose! For must not a small number perish to save the mass of the people? Well, these two thousand notables possess enough to make up the deficit. This will restore order in the finances and bring peace and prosperity to the kingdom!
Strike, immolate without pity these wretched victims, cast them into the abyss until it is closed. You recoil in horror, inconsistent and pusillanimous men! Do you not see that in decreeing bankruptcy, or what is still more odious, in rendering it inevitable, without decreeing it, you do a deed a thousand times more criminal, and – folly inconceivable – gratuitously criminal? For at least this horrible sacrifice would cause the disappearance of the deficit. But do you imagine that in refusing to pay, you will cease to owe? Do you believe that the thousands, the millions of men who will lose in an instant, by the terrible explosion or its repercussion, all that made the consolation of their lives, and constituted, perhaps, the sole means of their support, would leave you peaceably to enjoy …show more content…
And yet you deliberate!’
And certainly there has been about us no Catiline, no peril, no faction, no Rome. But today bankruptcy – hideous bankruptcy is here – it threatens to consume you, your properties, your honour! And yet you