To understand what was the French National Assembly, which began in 1789 and was dissolved in 1791, it is necessary to recover a little of the events that led France to the revolution.
With the economic and political crisis that settled in France during the reign of Louis XVI, the upper bourgeoisie and the other members of the so-called “Third State” began to exert great pressure against the administration of the absolutist monarch. This pressure was aimed at obtaining political legitimacy for the bourgeois and the consequent end of the privileges held by the First and SecondStates, that is, the nobility and the clergy, respectively.
The high point of this crisis was triggered by the call of the States General, in May 1789, by the king to vote on measures that met the wishes of all. Voting was done by a representative of each State, so the Third State would always lose 2 votes to 1. Representatives of the Third Estate rebelled against such a measure and began to take to the streets of the French capital, Paris. On July 14 of the same year, there was the Bastille takeover, a fortress where political prisoners of the absolutist regime were kept.
Amid the population's insurgency, the bourgeois leaders declared themselves in National Constituent Assembly, that is, they came together to radically redefine the political bases of France, drawing up a new Constitution. The Constituent Assembly had as its main target what solidified the absolutist regime: the submission of subjects to the figure of the king. In the absolutist system, the king is the source of powers, as it is from the king that the legal system and the sovereign decision-making power come from.
The Constituent Assembly made it clear that the source of the legal system in France would be the people, the population itself. Therefore, the Constitution to be drafted would be a citizen constitution – a model that would be adopted by the nations that formed in the 19th century. One of the main measures of the Assembly was taken on the night of August 4, 1789: the deputies voted for the abolition of feudal rights that were still in force in France.
Another extremely important measure was the publication of the Declaration of Human and Citizen's Rights. This declaration resolved issues such as the essential rights, which would be: freedom, property, security and resistance to oppression. It also assured the people the source of sovereignty, religious freedom, free expression of opinion, equitable taxation, among many other decisive issues that have influenced modern law, both civil and criminal, as well as the constitutions of democracies. contemporary.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
