How Did Jean Jacques Rousseau Influence The French Revolution

This lecture was on the Fall of the Bastille, which was presented by Lynne Taylor. On July 14, 1789, a Parisian mob broke down the gates of the ancient fortress known as the Bastille, marking a flashpoint at the beginning of the French Revolution. For years, the anger between the three major social classes, called Estates, had grown to a fever pitch. The First Estate was the clergy. The Second Estate was the nobility. The Third Estate was everyone else-the poor, the shopkeepers, and the middle classes. It was by far the largest group of people, and several them were well-educated clerks, lawyers, and teachers. The philosophical ideas of Cicero and Rousseau fueled the Revolutionary fire. In old Rome, Cicero had promoted the restoration of original Republican values to a state whose nobility seemed cheerfully mired in decadence and corruption. Lynne Taylor talked about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who died a short time before the French Revolution, argued for a civil society that would be voluntarily formed by its citizens and wholly governed by reference to their general will. Citizens governed in this way, he believed, would unanimously accept their governing authority. Rousseau proposed that man in his natural state, without the interference of defective laws,

I was really interested and thinking a lot about how she talked about the three different estates. The three different estates, first, second, and third, really have big margin gaps for the people in these estates. I believe if these margin gaps were closer and even not having these different “classes” of people, the revolution, I believe, would probably not happen. I like how Jean-Jacques Rousseau really tried to make a society that all 3 estates would learn to love and would have a civil society with everyone acting as equal to someone