Live Free or Die

The years preceding Camille Desmoulins were filled with increasing levels of public angst.  France had just gone through a financial crisis and their congress was convened to try and procure emergency funds.  The people were represented with the great exception of the third estate which represented the most populous lower class.  Their representatives were actually locked out of the meeting.  This was gasoline on the already smoldering rage against the centuries old class system.  Later pamphlets came out trying to unify the third estate and they began to identify themselves as the ‘real France.’  It was in this setting that Desmoulins wrote his treatise “live free or die.”