The King of France was absolute
And the people all were destitute
And the year was seventeen and eighty-nine.

The Churches paid no income tax,
And neither did aristocrats,
And wars were costing money all the time.

But enlightenment, ideas
Had entered people’s ears
Like liberty, equality and brotherhood.

People starved and broke
Under feudalism’s yoke
No church or king was going to do them any good

There was such financial crisis,
The king had to take advice,
To try an old thing called the States-General government

The ‘éstates-general’ had three votes
The nobles, church and common folk
Two-to-one, the commons lose, it always went

The commons, in frustration said,
“We represent the nation,
and the nobles and the church must lose their privileges!”

The rich were scared for real,
When they stormed the Bastille,
And rebellions also broke out in the villages

At the palace in Versailles,
The king and queen were heard to sigh,
When the national assembly made a bill of rights,

Then the womens’ march embarrassed them,
And chased them in to Paris, and
The church and nobles lost their power overnight.

Arguments got hot,
Whether to keep the king or not,
Different groups saw different way to run the country best.

When the royal family tried
To flee the country in disguide,
They were busted and then put under house arrest.

All of Europe’s kings
Were terrified to hear these things,
So france was threatened on all sides by enemies,

When the other kings declared,
The King of France should be spared,
It made the King of France look worse to the revolutionaries.

They built a new machine,
The quick and painless guillotine,
They said it’s fairer than the King’s medieval torture rack.

They put it to a vote,
And then they dropped it on his throat,
And then every king across the world just had a heart attack!

They attacked from north and south,
They attacked from east and west,
Revolutionary France was in a despot state

And when the radical Marat,
Was killed politically, now that,
Was what it took for France’s outlook to degenerate

The new leader Robespierre
Said “enemies are everywhere”
And for a year, the guillotine was working endlessly.

And though he freed the slaves, it’s true,
Robespierre’s head came off too.
And France was run by more moderate Directory.

But the Directory was lame,
And France’s only good news came,
From their army down in Europe winning more and more.

And the man who made them win
Was General Napoleon
But when he came back home, he made himself the emperor.

Though it was a painful climb
To get from kings to modern times.
But the French revolution always paved the way.

Because the ideas that sparked the first,
Have never ever ever been reversed.
It was the biggest change that shaped our Western World today.

La Fin