Question

why was the tennis court oath taken

Answer 1

The Tennis Court Oath  "serment du jeu de paume" was a important historical event during the first days of the French Revolution. The Oath was a pledge signed by 576 of the 577 members from the Third Estate, the only member of the Third Estate commitee who didn't sign the oath was Joseph Martin-Dauch. Because the Third Estate was locked out of a meeting of the Estates-General on June 20, 1789 they made a secret conference room inside a tennis court located in the Saint-Louis district of Versailles, near the Palace of Versailles.

    On 17 June 1789 this group, led by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, began to refer to themselves as the National Assembly.On the morning of 20 June, the Third Estate was shocked to discover that the chamber door was locked and guarded by soldiers. Suddenly fearing the worst, and anxious that a royal attack by King Louis XVI was imminent, the deputies congregated in a nearby indoor tennis court where they took a necessary pledge or oath "not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established". It later happened that the most probable reason why the meeting chamber was closed was that the royal household was still in mourning over the death of the king's oldest son who died two weeks earlier; ordinarily, political matters could not be held in place until the King had emerged from mourning. The oath is an important pivotal point in French political history. Other historians have negotiated that given political tensions in France at that time period, and the Third Estates' most horid fears, even if wrong, were reasonable that they where risking thier lives for liberty and that the importance of the oath goes above and beyond its context.

    The Third Estate vow to continue to gather until a solid constitution had been written, disregarding the royal prohibition. The oath was both as much a revolutionary act as it was an assertion toward the political authority that striped the people and their representatives bare of their possesions. Their militant mindstate and reighn of public massacre and horid terror forced Louis XVI to order the clergy and the noble class to join with the Third Estate in the National Assembly.

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