Talk:Estates General of 1789

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Jamisenrose.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:52, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Freemasonry
The remark about Mirabeau being "a member of the freemasonry lodge of the Nine Sisters" was made by User:Melkart without citation. At about the same time, at Storming of the Bastille a similar remark was made, anonymously, about Camille Desmoulins. I am not sure of the accuracy or relevance of either statement; barring citation, I am inclined to revert, but will leave a chance for comment first. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:11, August 27, 2005 (UTC)

First & Second Estates
The clergy formed the first estate while the nobility formed the second estate. I fixed the language in the Background section but am unsure as to how to procede with the text later on. I cannot access the source text at quid.fr, as it is a paid service, in order to examine the original french material to attempt at least a rough translation to see why the 'translation' that appears here contradicts everything else.

The original poster needs to fix the obvious errors. This article contradicts Wikipedia's own Estates_of_the_realm as well as other postings on the internet (http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1111044 http://www.france.com/culture/display_item.cfm?id=154 http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/REV/FIRST.HTM http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture11a.html http://www.lepg.org/classes.htm) THIS HELPS WITH HISTORY HWWWW

Copyright infringement?
Large swaths of this article are identical to "The French Revolution" By David E. A. Coles, a copyrighted work published in 2014:

https://books.google.com/books?id=KkBNBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=On+17+June,+with+the+failure+of+efforts+to+reconcile+the+three+estates&source=bl&ots=LiP9_9AXgP&sig=WtA9qGrKBww_A8VvlMJT1foY_Fo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiV1arA_bnMAhWKtYMKHQs0AJ8Q6AEILDAC#v=onepage&q=On%2017%20June%2C%20with%20the%20failure%20of%20efforts%20to%20reconcile%20the%20three%20estates&f=false

Either Mr. Coles lifted this article for his book or vise-versa. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Criticality (talk • contribs) 23:08, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

Readability, narrative, etc
Wikipedia's French Revolution articles are stylistically pretty distinct from the average wikipedia article, which can be a good and a bad thing. The prose is good, but in many cases requires you read the entire thing linearly from start to finish to understand, as sections will reference the sections before. It's important that if someone just wants to know, for example, who disbanded the Estates General and when, that they can scroll down to find it. As well, the prose often has sections that play the pronoun game, making it incredibly difficult to understand whether the author is referring to the subject or one of the many objects. I've fixed several examples that I was able to decode, but here's one that I am still befuddled by:

""On 6 July 1787, Loménie forwarded the Subvention Territoriale and another tax, the Edit du Timbre, or "Stamp Act," based on the American model, for registration. Parlement refused an illegal act, demanding accounting statements, or "States," as a prior condition. It was the King's turn to refuse...""

Parlement refused *an illegal act*? Was the 'act' in question the action of forwarding the Subvention Territoriale or the Edit du Timbre (as the syntax would most naturally imply), or does it refer to the "Stamp Act" that was just mentioned(as the wording would most naturally imply)? If the latter, then what happened to the Subvention Territoriale? If the former, then this sentence needs to be flipped around.

""demanding accounting statements, or "States," as a prior condition""

A PRIOR CONDITION FOR WHAT?????

""It was the King's turn to refuse""

This is a small issue, but the idiom "It was ______'s turn" only works if the person in question was an active participant beforehand.

Anyway, sorry that I'm spending more time whinging than actually making edits, I just wanted to make sure I justify what I'm up to so that people don't think I'm vandalizing the article when they see that I keep taking the word count down. This is just because clear sentences tend to be shorter, have little pomp, and flow into each-other naturally. The prose in these articles is, generally, quite good and makes the article quite fun to read.

Best, Will

Conkaeso (talk) 19:10, 24 September 2019 (UTC)