By the middle of the eighteenth century, France was one of the most powerful countries in the world. The Kingdom possessed a huge population, a powerful army and navy, a vast colonial empire and one of Europe’s most influential cultures. Paris was a centre of intellectual and artistic life, while the royal court at Versailles represented the extraordinary wealth and power of the French monarchy. But beneath this grandeur was a society divided by enormous inequalities. French society was organised according to a system known as the Ancien Régime. The population was formally divided into three estates. The First Estate consisted of the Catholic clergy, the Second Estate consisted of the nobility, and virtually everyone else belonged to the Third Estate.
The divisions were not merely social. The first two estates possessed significant privileges that were denied to the overwhelming majority of the population. Members of the clergy and nobility were often exempt from some of the taxes imposed upon ordinary people, while many nobles enjoyed feudal rights over the peasants who worked their land. The Third Estate, meanwhile, contained everyone from wealthy merchants and lawyers to urban workers and impoverished peasants. Although these groups had vastly different lives, they shared one important characteristic: they lacked the legal privileges enjoyed by the first two estates. This created an increasingly uncomfortable contradiction. France was becoming wealthier and more commercially sophisticated, yet political power remained concentrated among a relatively small section of society.
France’s problems were made considerably worse by its rivalry with Britain. Both countries were competing for territory, trade and influence across Europe, North America, the Caribbean and India. Tensions eventually erupted into the Seven Years’ War in 1756, one of the first conflicts to become genuinely global in scale. France initially appeared capable of challenging Britain, but the war ended disastrously for the French. Britain captured important French possessions in North America and India, while the Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced France to surrender much of its colonial territory.
The defeat was more than a military humiliation. France had spent enormous sums fighting the war and was left with a massive national debt. The monarchy now faced a problem that would haunt it for decades: it needed more money, but the people with the greatest wealth and political influence were often the very people most resistant to taxation.
At the same time, an intellectual revolution was taking place across Europe. The Enlightenment was a broad movement of philosophers, writers and political thinkers who questioned traditional assumptions about government, religion and society. Thinkers such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu argued, in different ways, that political authority should be subjected to reason and that individuals possessed rights that governments were expected to respect.
Montesquieu promoted the idea of separating political power between different branches of government. Rousseau argued that legitimate political authority ultimately came from the people, rather than simply from hereditary rulers. Voltaire attacked religious intolerance and abuses of authority. These ideas did not automatically call for the destruction of monarchy. Many Enlightenment thinkers initially supported the idea of reforming existing governments rather than overthrowing them.
Nevertheless, their arguments provided Europeans with a new way of thinking about political authority. If government existed to serve society, why should a king possess almost unlimited political authority simply because he had been born into the royal family? And if all people possessed natural rights, why should some be granted legal privileges simply because of their birth? These questions would become increasingly dangerous for the French monarchy.
In 1774, Louis XVI became King of France following the death of his grandfather, Louis XV. Louis inherited a country with enormous potential but equally enormous problems. He was not the caricature of an entirely incompetent ruler sometimes portrayed by later revolutionary propaganda. He could be conscientious and genuinely wanted to improve France. However, he was indecisive, politically inexperienced and frequently struggled to make difficult decisions. More importantly, he inherited a financial system that was deeply resistant to reform. France’s debt had continued to grow since the Seven Years’ War. The monarchy had also spent enormous sums supporting the American colonists during the American Revolutionary War, hoping to weaken Britain and recover some of the prestige France had lost during the Seven Years’ War.
The strategy worked militarily. France helped the Americans defeat Britain and played a crucial role in the victory at Yorktown in 1781. Financially, however, it was disastrous. The French government had effectively spent enormous amounts of money helping another country win independence while already struggling to pay its own debts. Successive ministers attempted to solve the problem by reforming taxation and reducing government expenditure. However, these reforms repeatedly encountered resistance from powerful groups who feared losing their privileges. Finance ministers such as Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Jacques Necker and Charles Alexandre de Calonne proposed different solutions, but none could permanently resolve the crisis. The problem was not simply that France lacked money. It was that the monarchy struggled to reform the system through which money was collected.
France possessed a complicated collection of taxes, exemptions and privileges that made taxation deeply unequal. Attempts to make the wealthy contribute more were often blocked by institutions dominated by privileged elites. The monarchy therefore found itself trapped. It needed to reform the system to survive, but reform required the cooperation of people who benefited from the existing system. By the late 1780s, the situation had become critical. Poor harvests caused the price of bread to rise dramatically, placing enormous pressure on ordinary families. For peasants and urban workers, bread was not merely another expense: it was a necessity of life. A sudden increase in its price could mean hunger.
At the same time, unemployment and poverty were increasing in many parts of the country. Meanwhile, France’s political elite continued to debate how the kingdom should be governed. The contrast was becoming impossible to ignore. At Versailles, the monarchy remained surrounded by the ceremony and splendour of the royal court. Outside the palace, ordinary French people increasingly questioned why they were expected to bear the financial burden of a system that appeared to benefit the privileged. The monarchy’s financial crisis was therefore becoming a political crisis.
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By 1788, the French government was effectively approaching bankruptcy. Louis XVI’s ministers could no longer solve the problem through ordinary financial measures. France had helped create a new republic partly to weaken Britain, but the financial consequences of that decision would help undermine the French monarchy itself. As the financial crisis worsened, resentment towards the royal family intensified. Much of this anger became concentrated on Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette, the daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. She had arrived in France as a teenager after marrying the future king in 1770, symbolising the diplomatic alliance between France and Austria.
Marie Antoinette became an extraordinarily unpopular figure. Her expensive clothing, jewellery, entertainments and lavish lifestyle made her an easy target at a time when ordinary French people were struggling to afford basic necessities. She became associated with the extravagance of Versailles, even though many of the most extreme stories about her spending were exaggerated or completely fabricated. Her reputation was so poor that political pamphlets began referring to her as “Madame Déficit.” The nickname was unfair in the sense that Marie Antoinette was not responsible for France’s enormous national debt. The financial crisis had existed long before her influence became significant. Nevertheless, her lifestyle provided revolutionaries with a convenient symbol of everything they believed was wrong with the Ancien Régime. She was no longer simply the King’s wife. To many of his opponents, she represented the entire privileged elite.
The royal family’s reputation was made even worse by a series of scandals and rumours. Louis XVI’s marriage to Marie Antoinette had initially attracted enormous public attention. The couple’s failure to consummate their marriage for several years became the subject of widespread gossip. Louis eventually underwent a medical procedure that appears to have resolved the problem, and the couple eventually had four children.
However, by then the damage had been done. Pamphlets and political cartoons portrayed the King as weak and sexually incompetent while depicting Marie Antoinette as promiscuous and morally corrupt. Much of this material was deliberately designed to humiliate the royal couple rather than accurately describe their private lives.
The most notorious scandal was the Diamond Necklace Affair of 1785. Marie Antoinette had nothing to do with the scheme, but con artists managed to convince a cardinal that he was secretly purchasing an extraordinarily expensive diamond necklace on the Queen’s behalf. When the fraud was exposed, the Queen’s reputation suffered even further. The episode demonstrated how effectively political propaganda could be used against the monarchy. By the late 1780s, rumours about the royal family were no longer merely gossip. They had become political weapons.
While the monarchy struggled to pay its debts, the burden of taxation fell disproportionately upon the Third Estate. France’s taxation system was extremely complicated. Some taxes were imposed directly by the monarchy, while others were collected locally or through privileged arrangements. One of the most hated was the gabelle, a tax on salt that had existed for centuries and varied dramatically between different regions. Tax collection could also be deeply unpopular because some taxes were collected through private contractors known as fermiers généraux. These financiers effectively purchased the right to collect certain taxes on behalf of the Crown and could employ armed guards to enforce payment. For peasants and urban workers, taxation was therefore not simply an abstract financial issue. It could mean losing money they desperately needed to buy food.
The resentment was made worse by the perception that the wealthy were protected from the worst consequences. The clergy and nobility possessed important tax privileges, while the Third Estate carried much of the financial burden. This created an increasingly explosive political question: why should the people who had the least wealth be expected to carry so much of the country’s financial burden?
Then France suffered a disaster that transformed political resentment into popular unrest. The harvests of the late 1780s were poor, particularly the harvest of 1788. Severe weather, including hailstorms and an exceptionally harsh winter, damaged agricultural production. Grain became more expensive and bread prices increased dramatically. For ordinary French families, this was catastrophic. Bread was the foundation of the French diet. A substantial increase in its price could consume a huge proportion of a worker’s income, leaving little money for anything else.
Unemployment also increased as economic difficulties affected industries that depended upon agricultural demand. The wealthy could often survive food shortages more easily because they possessed money, land or stored supplies. The poor could not. Rioting and attacks on food supplies became increasingly common. Bakeries were sometimes looted and accusations that merchants or bakers were deliberately hoarding grain could lead to violence. The crisis transformed dissatisfaction with the monarchy into something far more dangerous. People were no longer merely angry about political privilege. They were hungry.
One of the most famous stories associated with Marie Antoinette emerged from this atmosphere. According to a popular legend, when the Queen was told that the French poor had no bread, she supposedly replied:
Let them eat cake.
An alleged quote from Marie Antoinette
The story is almost certainly false. The phrase appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, written before Marie Antoinette had even arrived in France, although Rousseau attributed it only to an unnamed “great princess.” There is no reliable evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said it. Nevertheless, the story became extremely useful to revolutionaries. Whether or not the Queen had actually said it was almost irrelevant. The phrase captured the image of Marie Antoinette that revolutionary propaganda wanted the public to believe: an immensely wealthy aristocrat who could not understand the suffering of ordinary people.
By 1788, the financial crisis had become impossible for the monarchy to ignore. Louis XVI’s ministers had repeatedly attempted to introduce financial reforms, but privileged groups had resisted measures that would make them pay more taxes. Eventually, the monarchy reached the point where it could no longer borrow enough money to keep the government functioning. Louis therefore agreed to summon the Estates-General, a representative assembly that had not met since 1614. The Third Estate represented the overwhelming majority of the French population, but the traditional voting system meant that each estate effectively received one collective vote. This created an obvious problem. If the First and Second Estates voted together, they could defeat the Third Estate regardless of how many people the Third Estate represented. The Third Estate therefore demanded that voting take place by head, allowing individual representatives to vote rather than giving each estate a single collective vote. The dispute quickly became about something much larger than taxation. It was becoming a struggle over who possessed political authority in France.
The representatives of the Third Estate eventually decided that they could no longer accept the existing system. On June 17th, 1789, they declared themselves the National Assembly, claiming that they represented the French nation rather than merely one section of French society. Members of the clergy and nobility gradually began joining them. Louis XVI attempted to prevent the assembly from meeting by having its usual meeting place closed. When the deputies arrived and discovered that they had been locked out, they moved to a nearby indoor tennis court. There, on June 20th, they made a dramatic pledge. Known as the Tennis Court Oath, the deputies promised not to separate until they had established a constitution for France. The political revolution had begun. The Third Estate was no longer simply asking the King to reform the tax system. It was claiming the right to determine how France itself would be governed.
The National Assembly quickly attracted some of the most influential political thinkers and activists in France. Among them was Maximilien Robespierre, a young lawyer who had become increasingly influenced by Enlightenment ideas and the writings of Rousseau. Another prominent figure was Georges Danton, a powerful speaker who would later become one of the Revolution’s most important leaders. There were also revolutionaries who came from the aristocracy itself. One of the most prominent was the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought alongside the Americans during their Revolution and had returned to France convinced that constitutional government could be established without destroying the monarchy.
These revolutionaries did not initially agree on what France should become. Some wanted a constitutional monarchy similar to Britain’s. Others wanted a much more democratic republic. Some primarily wanted economic reform and an end to aristocratic privilege. Others increasingly believed that the monarchy itself had to disappear. One of the most important political organisations to emerge from this atmosphere was the Jacobin Club. Originally a debating and political society dominated by reformers, it gradually became associated with increasingly radical revolutionary politics. Robespierre would eventually become its most famous leader. The Revolution was therefore beginning to develop factions within factions.
France had not yet abolished its monarchy. But the authority of the King was already being challenged by a new principle: that political power belonged to the nation rather than simply to the monarch. The financial crisis had created the conditions for revolution. The Enlightenment had provided many of its ideas. And the National Assembly had now given those ideas a political institution through which they could be turned into action. All that remained was for the crisis to become violent.