June 20, 1789: the Tennis Court Oath
In 1789, King Louis XVI was having some financial problems. Political ones, too: the Parlement de Paris wasn’t giving its usual rubber stamp on his edicts, which made it harder for him to push off the cashflow issue. He resorted instead to convening an archaic body called the Estates-General, which had not ben called since 1614, to bless his mandates.
Item One on the agenda was determining how votes would be counted. Would each Estate get a vote, in which case the First (clergy) and the Second (nobility) would benefit? Or, would votes be counted per delegate, in which the Third Estate (commoners) would have the upper hand?
The king wanted the former option, and he got it – and the Third Estate left, eventually adopting the name L’assemblée nationale and attracting members of the other two Estates.
On this day in 1789, the National Assembly found their meeting room at Versailles locked. They repaired to the royal tennis court, where all but one of them pledged loyalty to the ideals of a constitutional republic – an act now known as the Tennis Court Oath, or le Serment du Jeu de paume.
The leaders of the Assembly were scared of a royal attack, and wanted to ensure its members would see their work through to completion, no matter what events might transpire.
A translation of the Oath read as follows:
We swear never to separate ourselves from the National Assembly, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the realm is drawn up and fixed upon solid foundations.
The king appeared to embrace the Assembly after the Oath, but his dismissal of finance minister Jacques Necker on July 11 resulted in the storming of the Bastille three days later. Although he was a terrible politician, Necker had openly supported the Third Estate during negotiations over vote-counts.
But was the locked door intentional? Some say it was an accident – June 20, 1789 was a Saturday.
Image: Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment du Jeu de paume (1791), Musée national du château de Versailles