Tennis Court Oath

The Tennis Court Oath (other source: here) was an oath proposed by Jean-Joseph Mounier of the national assembly (members of the third estate) that stated the members shall be bound together until a new constitution was formed. All members of the national assembly pledged the oath except for one, Martin Dauch. The oath is called the Tennis Court Oath because, after being locked out of their regular meeting place, the members of the national assembly decided to meet in a nearby indoor tennis court.

The grievances of the Third Estate was mostly social and physical, because the main thing the Third Estate was rebelling against was equality between estates. This started with the fact that each estate had an equal amount of votes, but the first two estates agreed with each other, which left the third estate out-numbered two to one, even though the third estate was 97% of the population. This is a social grievance because it had to do with who had power. The nobility had the power to make the decisions of how to divide up the votes, and the third estate had absolutely no say in this. This is also physical, because it has to do with the physical structure of how the votes were divided up, and this ended up not being fair.

The other part of equality that the third estate was rebelling against was the level of taxes they had to pay versus the taxes the first and second estates had to pay. This was a financial grievance, and also a social grievance, because even though the peasants made much less money than the merchants, they still had to pay the same amount of money.

The new constitution (that was decided to be developed by the Tennis Court Oath) pledged to fix all of these grievances which mainly revolved around equality within estates.