Causes of the French Revolution

Directions: Question 1 is based on the accompanying documents.  The documents have been edited for the purpose of this exercise.  

In your response you should do the following: 
-Respond to the prompt with a historically defensive thesis or claim that establishes a line of reasoning.
-Describe a broader historical context relevant to the prompt.
-Support an argument in response to the prompt using at least four documents.
-Use additional, specific historical evidence (beyond that found in the documents) relevant to an -argument in the prompt.
-For at least two documents, explain how or why the document’s point of view, purpose, historical s-ituation, and/or audience is relevant to an argument.
-Demonstrate a complex understanding of a historical development related to the prompt through -sophisticated argumentation and/or effective use of evidence.

1. Analyze the major factors that caused France to experience a Revolution in 1789. 

Document 1
Source: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762.

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? 
...the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions…
The Sovereign, being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power need give no guarantee to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to hurt all its members.
… In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. 

Document 2
Source: Nobleman Chodeerlos de Laclos, in a letter to noblewoman Marchioness de Merteuil. 1780

I called the Tax-Collector; and, yielding to my generous compassion, I nobly paid forty-six livres, for which five persons were to be reduced to straw and despair.  After such a simple action you cannot imagine what a chorus of benedictions echoed around me from the spectators!...I was watching this spectacle when a younger peasant , leading a woman and two children, rushed towards me, saying to them: ‘Let us all fall at the feet of this Image of God.’

Document 3
SOURCE: Francois de Lamignon, minister of Louis XVI, to the Parlement of Paris, 1787

These principles, universally recognized by the Nation to be true, attest that to the King alone belongs the sovereign power in his kingdom; that he is accountable only to God for the exercise of the supreme power; that the bond uniting the King and the Nation is by its nature indissoluble; that interests and duties that are reciprocal between the King and his subjects do nothing else than to assure the perpetuity of this union; that the Nation’s interests require that the rights of its chief suffer no alteration; that the King is sovereign Chief of the Nation and one with the Nation; and finally, that the legislative power resides in the person of the Sovereign, independently and without partition....

It follows from these long-standing national maxims, attested to by every page of our history, that the right to summon the Estates-General belongs to the King alone; that he alone must judge whether such convocation is useful or necessary; that to administer his kingdom he has need of no extraordinary powers; that a King of France could find in the representatives of the three orders of the state only a more extensive council composed of members chosen from a family of which he is the chief and concerning whose remonstrances and grievances he will always be the supreme arbiter.

Document 4
Source: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.

History will record, that, on the morning of the sixth of October, 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite, and troubled, melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was first startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, who cried out to her to save herself by flight,—that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give,—that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband not secure of his own life for a moment.

Document 5
Source: Marquis de Condorcet, written in prison during the French Revolution,  Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795

In this state of things it could not be long before the transatlantic revolution must find its imitators in the European quarter of the world. And if there existed a country in which, from attachment to their cause, the writings and principles of the Americans were more widely disseminated than in any other part of Europe; a country at once the most enlightened, and the least free; in which philosophers had soared to the sublimest pitch of intellectual attainment, and the government was sunk in the deepest and most intolerable ignorance;  where the spirit of the laws was so far below the general spirit and illumination, that national pride and inveterate prejudice were alike ashamed of vindicating the old institutions: if, I say, there existed such a country, were not the people of that country destined by the very nature of things, to give the first impulse to this revolution, expected by the friends of humanity with such eager impatience, such ardent hope? Accordingly it was to commence with France.