Dual revolution Louis Blanc, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx who attempted to come up with ideas for “utopias”, conservative and socialist societies. The French Revolution began in 1789 with the Tennis Court Oath, by which the members of the third estate, who had been locked out of the meeting the estates general, gathered together and swore not to disband until they had written a new constitution. Inspired by the ideas of Enlightenment Philosophers, most prominently Rousseau and his social contract, the National assembly, those who had sworn the tennis court oath, published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
Tennis Court Oath This oath would prove vital to the Third Estate as a step of protest that would eventually lead to more power in the Estates General, and every governing body thereafter. The Oath signified for the first time that French citizens formally stood in opposition to Louis XVI, and the National Assembly's refusal to back down forced the king to make concessions. It was foreshadowed by, and drew considerably from, the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, especially the preamble. The Oath also inspired a wide variety of revolutionary activity in the months afterwards, ranging from rioting across the French countryside