On this day (20 June) in 1789, deputies of the “Third Estate” of the Estates-General (see here and here) met at the Royal Tennis Court in the Palace of Versailles, where they made “a solemn oath never to separate … until [a new] constitution of the realm is established and fixed upon solid foundations”, i.e. until they had drafted a written constitution limiting the absolute powers of the king. (For more details about this historic moment, see here and here.) This pivotal episode in the French Revolution was later immortalized by the great Jacques-Louis David in his unfinished fresco The Tennis Court Oath (pictured below), an epic symbolic work that merits its own separate blog post. In the meantime, see here.