| [Edit]
The Day of the Tiles () is an event that took place in the French town of Grenoble on June 7, 1788. It was among the first of the revolts which preceded the French Revolution, and is credited by some historians as being the start of it.
top
Background
Prior to the day, Grenoble was the scene of popular unrest. The approaching harvest promised to be poor due to excessive rain, and previous poor harvests had increased the price of bread. This added to the poverty resulting from the economic and financial crises due to poor economic management and overspending on recent wars. These causes of the French Revolution affected all of France, but matters came to a head first in Grenoble.
Unrest in the town was sparked by the attempts of Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the Archbishop of Toulouse and Controller-General of Louis XVI to abolish the Parlements in order to enact a new tax to deal with France's unmanageable public debt. Tensions in urban populations had been rising already due to poor harvests and high cost of bread in France. These tensions were exacerbated by the refusal of the privileged classes such as the aristocracy to relinquish any of their fiscal privileges. They insisted on retaining the right to collect feudal and siegnorial royalties from their peasants and landholders. This acted to block reforms attempted by King Louis XVI. Added to this, Brienne, the King's Controller-General of Finance appointed on 8 April 1787 was widely regarded as being a manager without experience or imagination.
top
Events on the day
Soldiers sent to quell the disturbances forced the townspeople off the streets. Some sources say that the soldiers were sent to disperse parliamentarians that were attempting to assemble a parlement.[ However, the townspeople climbed onto the roofs of buildings to hurl down roof-tiles on the soldiers in the streets below, hence the name. This drove royal troops out of the city in the first outbreak of political violence that became the revolution.][From Failed Reforms to Revolutionary Crisis,A Short History of the French Revolution, Jeremy D. Popkin, Prentice-Hall, 14 July 2005, Retrieved on 3 November 2006]
The event was captured in a painting in 1889 by Alexandre Debelle titled The Day of the Tiles, 13 July 1788[The Day of the Tiles, 13 July 1788, Painting, Art.com, Retrieved on 3 November 2006]. He painted it a century after the event and got the date wrong, but it is undoubtedly of the events described by the title.
top
Significance
Some historians, such as Jonathan Sperber, have used it to demonstrate the worsening situation in France in the build up to the French Revolution of 1789. Others have even credited it with being the beginning of the revolution itself.
top
Footnotes
|
|
