Day of the Tiles

The Day of the Tiles (French: Journée des Tuiles) is an event that took place in the French town of Grenoble on the 7th of June in 1788. It was one of the first disturbances which preceded the French Revolution, and is credited by a few historians as the start of it.

Grenoble was the scene of popular unrest due to financial hardship from the economic crises. The causes of the French Revolution affected all of France, but matters came to a head first in Grenoble.

Unrest in the town was sparked by the attempts of Cardinal Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the Archbishop of Toulouse and Controller-General of Louis XVI, to abolish the Parlements in order to enact a new tax to deal with France's unmanageable public debt. Tensions in urban populations had been rising already due to poor harvests and the high cost of bread in France. These tensions were exacerbated by the refusal of the privileged classes, the Church and the aristocracy, to relinquish any of their fiscal privileges. They insisted on retaining the right to collect feudal and seignorial royalties from their peasants and landholders. This acted to block reforms attempted by the king's minister Charles Alexandre de Calonne and the Assembly of Notables that he convoked in January 1787. Added to this, Brienne, appointed the king's Controller-General of Finance on 8 April 1787, was widely regarded as being a manager without experience or imagination.

Shortly prior to the 7th of June in 1788, in a large meeting at Grenoble those who attended the meeting decided to call together the old Estates of the province of Dauphiné. The government responded by sending troops to the area to put down the movement.

At roughly 10 in the morning of Saturday, June 7, merchants closed down their shops as groups of 300 to 400 men and women formed, armed with stones, sticks, axes, bars. They rushed to the city gates to prevent the departure of judges who took part in the Grenoble meeting. Some rioters attempted to cross the Isère but faced a picket of 50 soldiers at the St. Lawrence bridge, while others headed to the Rue Neuve.

...
Wikipedia