Category: France

The fall of the monarchy did not bring peace to revolutionary France. Instead, it created a political vacuum at precisely the moment when the country was facing its greatest crisis yet. France was at war with the European monarchies, the government was increasingly divided between competing revolutionary factions, and Paris was filled with rumours of treason and counter-revolution. The danger appeared to be coming from outside as well as within. On July 25th 1792, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Prussian forces invading France, issued a declaration on behalf of the allied Austrian and Prussian armies. The Brunswick Manifesto warned that if the royal family were harmed, Paris would face severe reprisals. The city would, it threatened, be subjected to military punishment.

Rather than frightening the revolutionaries into submission, the manifesto had almost the opposite effect. To many Parisians, it appeared to confirm their suspicion that Louis XVI was conspiring with France’s enemies. If foreign monarchies were threatening to destroy Paris in order to protect the King, then the King himself increasingly appeared to be an enemy of the Revolution. The result was the insurrection of August 10th 1792. Thousands of revolutionaries, including the radical Paris Commune and fédérés who had arrived from the provinces, marched on the Tuileries Palace. The Swiss Guards defending the palace opened fire, and a bloody battle followed. Hundreds of insurgents were killed, while the Swiss Guards were eventually overwhelmed. Louis XVI, recognising that the palace could not be held, fled with his family to the Legislative Assembly.

The Assembly suspended the King’s constitutional powers. Louis was no longer effectively the ruler of France. He and Marie Antoinette were placed under guard and eventually imprisoned in the Temple. The monarchy was finished. But the Republic that replaced it was born into an atmosphere of fear. The Legislative Assembly was replaced by a newly elected National Convention, which met for the first time on 20 September. On 21 September, it formally abolished the monarchy. The following day, September 22nd 1792, the Convention declared the French Republic. For revolutionaries, this represented the fulfilment of a remarkable transformation. France was no longer to be a kingdom ruled by a hereditary monarch. The old political order had been overturned in the name of popular sovereignty, citizenship and equality.

Yet outside Paris, the armies of Austria and Prussia were advancing. The revolutionary government feared that France might collapse from within before it could defeat its enemies from without. The fortress of Longwy had fallen on August 23rd, and Verdun was under threat. On September 2nd, news reached Paris that Verdun had fallen. The road to the capital appeared open. This was the environment in which paranoia became explosive. Thousands of men were being called upon to leave Paris and fight at the front. If the city’s defenders departed, what would prevent royalists and counter-revolutionaries from rising behind them? Rumours spread that aristocrats and refractory priests imprisoned in Paris were preparing to escape, seize weapons and massacre the families of revolutionaries while the city’s men were away fighting. There was little evidence for such a conspiracy. But revolutionary politics had increasingly developed a language in which political opponents could be portrayed not merely as people with different opinions, but as enemies of the nation. Jean-Paul Marat was particularly influential in this atmosphere. Through his newspaper, L’Ami du peuple, Marat repeatedly warned that enemies of the Revolution were hiding within France and called for decisive action against them. The question was no longer simply whether the Revolution could defeat its enemies. It was whether the enemies of the Revolution were already inside Paris.

On September 2nd, as volunteers prepared to leave Paris for the front, crowds gathered outside the city’s prisons. The first killings began at the Abbaye prison. Prisoners were dragged out and subjected to improvised tribunals. Those judged to be dangerous counter-revolutionaries were killed. But the violence quickly spread. Over the following several days, groups of armed Parisians moved between the city’s prisons. Clergy, aristocrats, suspected royalists and ordinary criminals were brought before makeshift courts. Some were released. Others were condemned and killed. The distinction between political vengeance and indiscriminate violence rapidly began to disappear. Among the victims was Princess Marie-Louise de Lamballe, a close friend of Marie Antoinette. She was murdered after being brought before the killers, and her death became one of the most notorious episodes of the massacres. Her body was mutilated and her head was reportedly displayed before the Temple prison where the royal family was being held.

The violence was not limited to aristocrats. Priests who had refused to accept the revolutionary state’s religious reforms were among the principal targets, while ordinary prisoners were also killed. Men, women and some children were caught up in the violence. By the time the massacres subsided around 6 September, approximately 1,100 to 1,400 prisoners had been killed. The September Massacres were not formally ordered by the National Convention. They were carried out largely by crowds and militants in Paris. Yet the revolutionary authorities did remarkably little to stop them. Figures such as Georges Danton have consequently been the subject of considerable historical debate over their responsibility, with historians disagreeing about how much the revolutionary leadership encouraged, tolerated or simply failed to prevent the killings.

What is clear is that the massacres demonstrated how far revolutionary politics had changed. Only three years earlier, the Revolution had proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, declaring that men were born free and equal in rights. Now prisoners were being condemned and executed by crowds without anything resembling a normal judicial process. The contradiction was noticed almost immediately outside France. The British press followed events in Paris with horror. The Times of London reported the killings on 10 September 1792, describing the streets as being filled with the bodies of victims and asking:

Are these “the Rights of Man”? Is this the liberty of Human Nature?

The London Times, Sept 10, 1792

The quotation captured one of the great questions raised by the Revolution. Could a movement founded upon liberty and human rights justify violence against those it considered enemies of liberty? The September Massacres were not yet the Reign of Terror. That came later, particularly after the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Committee of Public Safety and the Law of Suspects in 1793. Nor did the massacres represent the inevitable consequence of republicanism or democracy. They emerged from a very specific combination of circumstances: foreign invasion, the collapse of the monarchy, political instability, fear of counter-revolution, rumours of conspiracy and the radicalisation of popular politics. Nevertheless, they marked a profound psychological turning point.

The Revolution had begun by attacking the privileges of the old order. It was now beginning to define itself through the identification and destruction of its enemies. That distinction would become increasingly important. A political opponent could be described as a royalist. A royalist could be described as a counter-revolutionary. A counter-revolutionary could be described as a traitor. And a traitor, in the logic of revolutionary emergency, could be treated as someone who had forfeited the protections normally afforded to a citizen. The language of universal rights therefore existed alongside a new language of revolutionary necessity.

The Republic itself would soon become radically more secular. The dechristianisation campaigns of 1793–94 would see churches closed or transformed, religious symbols destroyed and the revolutionary Cult of Reason promoted by some of the most radical revolutionaries. Notre-Dame de Paris was converted into a Temple of Reason in November 1793. The revolutionary government would also introduce the Republican Calendar, beginning retrospectively on September 22nd 1792, the first day of the Republic. These developments belonged to a later phase of the Revolution, but they reflected the same desire to break decisively with the institutions, symbols and traditions of the ancien régime.

The September Massacres therefore occupy an important place in the story of the Revolution. They were not simply a particularly bloody riot. They demonstrated the extent to which fear could transform a political movement. France had overthrown its king. It had proclaimed a republic. It had declared the equality of its citizens. But now, faced with war and internal conspiracy, the Revolution had begun to ask a darker question: Who deserved to be a citizen at all?

The Revolution had transformed France politically, but for ordinary people, one problem remained largely unchanged: food. Bread was the foundation of the French diet, and its price had risen dramatically following years of poor harvests and economic disruption. Paris was particularly vulnerable. Thousands of workers and labourers depended upon cheap bread to survive, and rumours that the aristocracy was hoarding grain or deliberately allowing prices to rise were widespread.

Many Parisians therefore began to see the political crisis and the food crisis as inseparable. The National Assembly might have been debating constitutional reform, but ordinary people wanted something much more immediate: bread. Increasingly, they also believed that King Louis XVI did not fully understand their suffering. He lived at the Palace of Versailles, surrounded by courtiers and aristocrats, almost twenty kilometres from the centre of Paris. To many Parisians, Versailles represented everything that was wrong with the old regime: enormous wealth, political privilege and royal isolation from the people.

Tensions became even worse in early October 1789. On October 1st, royal soldiers held a banquet at Versailles to welcome a newly arrived regiment. According to reports circulating in Paris, the soldiers had trampled on the revolutionary tricolour cockade, a symbol of the Revolution, while royal white cockades were supposedly worn in its place. Whether the event was quite as provocative as later revolutionary propaganda suggested remains debated, but the story spread rapidly through Paris. To an already angry population, it appeared that the King and his soldiers were openly mocking the Revolution while ordinary people struggled to feed themselves.

On the morning of October 5th, thousands of Parisian women gathered at the Hôtel de Ville. Women played a particularly prominent role in the protest because they were often responsible for purchasing food for their families and therefore experienced the effects of rising bread prices directly. What began as a protest over food quickly developed into something much larger. The women demanded bread and political action. They also demanded that the King approve the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and accept the decrees passed by the National Assembly. The crowd began marching towards Versailles. As the procession travelled westwards, its numbers grew. Thousands of men eventually joined the march as well, many carrying weapons taken from Parisian arsenals. By the time the protesters reached Versailles, the crowd numbered in the tens of thousands. The National Assembly was already meeting at Versailles, meaning that the demonstrators had effectively brought the Revolution directly to the King and his government.

Louis XVI initially attempted to calm the situation. He agreed to approve several of the National Assembly’s decrees, including the abolition of feudal privileges. But this did not satisfy the crowd. The fundamental problem remained: the King was still at Versailles, while the people of Paris were still hungry. The situation became increasingly dangerous during the night. In the early hours of October 6th, protesters broke into the Palace of Versailles. They fought their way through the palace’s security and attempted to reach the royal family’s apartments. Several members of the Swiss Guards and royal bodyguards were killed. Some of the guards were decapitated and their heads displayed on pikes, a grim practice that had already become associated with revolutionary violence.

Marie Antoinette was one of the principal targets of the mob. The Queen was sleeping when the attackers entered the palace and was forced to flee through a private passageway connecting her apartments to those of the King. She narrowly escaped the crowd and was reunited with Louis. The situation had become so dangerous that the royal family could no longer remain at Versailles. Louis eventually appeared before the crowd on the palace balcony. He agreed to move to Paris and accept the protection of the people. The crowd responded enthusiastically, reportedly calling for the King and Queen to return with them. The royal family therefore left Versailles later that day.

The procession back to Paris was enormous. Thousands of people accompanied the King, Queen and their children, while the National Guard under Marquis de Lafayette escorted them. The atmosphere was simultaneously celebratory and threatening. One contemporary description famously characterised the procession as the people bringing the King back to Paris with the cry that they had finally found “the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy” – a reference to the belief that the monarchy could now be forced to provide bread. For Louis XVI, however, the consequences were enormous. The King was no longer living at the centre of the old royal court. He was now effectively under the supervision of revolutionary Paris. Versailles had represented royal independence from the political population of the capital. Paris represented the opposite. From this point onwards, Louis was increasingly constrained by the National Assembly, the Paris Commune and the National Guard. The March on Versailles therefore represented a fundamental shift in the balance of power. The King had not formally lost his throne, but he had lost much of his freedom.

For the next two years, Louis attempted to operate within the new constitutional system. The Constitution of 1791 transformed France from an absolute monarchy into a constitutional one. Louis retained the title of King and certain important powers, but sovereignty was increasingly understood to belong to the nation rather than the monarch. For revolutionary moderates, this represented the ideal outcome: France would retain a monarchy while becoming a constitutional state. For Louis himself, however, the situation was increasingly unbearable. He had accepted the Revolution publicly, but privately he remained deeply opposed to many of its fundamental changes. His religious beliefs also put him at odds with the revolutionary government, particularly after the Civil Constitution of the Clergy attempted to bring the Catholic Church under state control. The royal family eventually decided that remaining in Paris was too dangerous.

In June 1791, Louis, Marie Antoinette and their immediate family attempted to escape France. Their destination was the eastern frontier, where they hoped to reach territory controlled by royalist forces and potentially obtain protection from Austria and other European monarchies. The escape was carefully planned, and the family travelled under assumed identities. The plan might have succeeded had Louis not been recognised at Varennes. According to the traditional account, the local postmaster Jean-Baptiste Drouet recognised the King from his resemblance to the image on an assignat, the revolutionary paper currency that carried Louis’s portrait. He alerted the authorities, and the royal family’s carriage was stopped. Louis was forced to return to Paris.

The political consequences were devastating. Until Varennes, many revolutionaries could still argue that the King was genuinely willing to accept the constitutional settlement. His attempted escape appeared to prove the opposite. To his critics, Louis had not merely attempted to flee Paris – he had attempted to abandon the country and seek assistance from France’s enemies. The King now faced a profound crisis of legitimacy. Moderate revolutionaries attempted to preserve the monarchy, arguing that Louis had effectively been kidnapped or coerced into leaving. Radicals rejected this explanation entirely. To them, the Flight to Varennes demonstrated that the monarchy could never coexist peacefully with the Revolution.

The division became increasingly visible in Paris. On July 17th 1791, thousands gathered on the Champ de Mars to demand the King’s removal. The demonstration was organised by radical political groups, including members of the Cordeliers Club, and became an important moment in the development of revolutionary republicanism. The authorities declared the demonstration illegal. Lafayette and the National Guard arrived to disperse the crowd. When stones were thrown at the soldiers, the National Guard opened fire. The resulting Champ de Mars Massacre killed and wounded numerous protesters.

The massacre exposed a growing fracture within the Revolution. The people who had initially united against the old absolute monarchy were now divided over what should replace it. On one side were constitutional monarchists, who wanted France to remain a monarchy with the King reduced to a largely constitutional role. On the other were increasingly radical republicans, including the Jacobins and Cordeliers, who believed that the Revolution could not succeed while Louis remained on the throne. The March on Versailles had therefore achieved something far more significant than simply bringing the royal family to Paris. It demonstrated that popular pressure could force the monarchy to surrender to the Revolution. The Flight to Varennes then destroyed much of the remaining trust between King and people. Within a year, the constitutional monarchy would collapse entirely. Louis XVI would be arrested, the monarchy abolished and France declared a republic. And the Revolution would enter its most violent phase.

By July 1789, France was already in the middle of a political revolution. The Estates-General had transformed into the National Assembly, the Tennis Court Oath had challenged the authority of the King, and Louis XVI’s government was struggling to maintain control over Paris. What had begun as a dispute over taxation and political representation was rapidly becoming a confrontation between the monarchy and a population increasingly willing to use force to defend the Revolution.

The situation became even more dangerous when Louis XVI began concentrating troops around Paris and Versailles. Several thousand soldiers, including foreign regiments in French service, were brought into the region. To many Parisians, this appeared to be preparation for a military coup against the National Assembly. Their fears intensified when Louis dismissed Jacques Necker, his popular finance minister, on July 11th. Necker had become a symbol of financial reform and was regarded by many ordinary people as one of the few members of the government sympathetic to their suffering. His dismissal therefore convinced many Parisians that the King intended to crush the revolutionary movement. The news spread rapidly. Paris erupted.

The revolutionary response was not initially a plan to storm a fortress. Parisians began arming themselves. Crowds gathered throughout the city, searching for weapons with which they could defend themselves against the troops surrounding Paris. On July 13th, a citizens’ militia was organised, eventually becoming known as the National Guard. The Marquis de Lafayette, an aristocrat and veteran of the American Revolution who had joined the revolutionary cause, was appointed its commander. Even some regular French soldiers began refusing to fire upon the population or defecting to the revolutionary side. The monarchy’s ability to control Paris was rapidly disappearing. On the morning of July 14th, thousands of Parisians attacked the Hôtel des Invalides, a large military complex and veterans’ hospital. They seized thousands of muskets and several cannons. There was, however, one major problem. They had very little gunpowder. The revolutionaries knew where they could find more. The Bastille.

The Bastille was a medieval fortress in eastern Paris that had been used as a royal prison. By 1789, it was no longer the enormous prison of popular imagination. Only seven prisoners were being held there when the Revolution began. Its military importance was nevertheless considerable. The fortress contained a substantial supply of gunpowder, and its enormous walls and cannons made it a powerful defensive position. More importantly, however, the Bastille had become a symbol of royal absolutism. For centuries, the French monarchy had possessed the power to imprison people through lettres de cachet, allowing individuals to be detained without a conventional trial. Although the Bastille was not filled with political prisoners in 1789, its reputation had become associated with arbitrary royal power. To the revolutionaries, therefore, the fortress represented much more than a collection of stone walls. It represented the authority they were trying to overthrow.

The Bastille was commanded by Bernard-René de Launay, a relatively inexperienced military governor. His garrison consisted primarily of about 80 elderly soldiers known as Invalides, supported by several dozen Swiss soldiers. Thousands of Parisians surrounded the fortress. They demanded that de Launay surrender the Bastille and hand over its gunpowder. De Launay refused. The situation became increasingly tense as representatives of the Parisian population attempted to negotiate with him. The defenders lowered a drawbridge at one point, allowing some of the crowd into the outer courtyard. Confusion followed, and fighting eventually broke out. The revolutionaries attacked.

The Bastille’s defenders opened fire, killing and wounding numerous people. The attackers, however, vastly outnumbered the garrison. The fighting continued for several hours. Eventually, de Launay realised that the fortress could not be held indefinitely. With the possibility of a much larger massacre looming, he agreed to surrender. The drawbridge was lowered. The Bastille had fallen. The surrender did not save de Launay.

As the revolutionary crowd entered the fortress, the governor was seized. He was beaten and eventually killed. His head was cut off and placed on a pike, before being carried through the streets of Paris. The violence shocked even some revolutionaries. The Bastille’s defenders also suffered casualties, although the majority of those killed during the battle were among the attackers. Around a hundred revolutionaries were killed or wounded during the fighting, while only a small number of the defenders were killed. The revolutionaries had nevertheless achieved something enormously significant. They had captured a royal fortress. More importantly, they had demonstrated that the government could no longer simply order the people of Paris to obey.

The fall of the Bastille sent shockwaves throughout France. Louis XVI was reportedly informed of the events by the Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. According to the famous story, the King asked whether the events constituted a revolt. Liancourt allegedly replied:

No, Sire, it is a revolution.

Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt to Louis XVI

Whether the exchange occurred exactly as later accounts claimed is uncertain, but the sentiment captured the reality of what was happening. Louis was losing control. The King eventually recalled Necker and ordered the withdrawal of many of the troops surrounding Paris. He also travelled to the city himself, where he appeared before the revolutionary authorities and publicly accepted the newly established National Guard. The Bastille had therefore achieved something that the National Assembly had struggled to accomplish through political debate. It had forced the monarchy to retreat.

The consequences were not limited to Paris. News of the Bastille spread throughout the countryside, where rumours circulated that aristocrats were preparing to use armed forces to crush the Revolution. Peasants began attacking aristocratic estates and destroying documents recording feudal obligations. This wave of panic became known as the Great Fear. Across France, peasants demanded an end to feudal privileges. Some attacked manor houses and burned records relating to rents and obligations. The National Assembly now faced a problem. The Revolution was no longer merely a political movement taking place in Paris. It had become a mass uprising across the country.

On the night of August 4th, 1789, members of the National Assembly responded by abolishing many of France’s remaining feudal privileges. In a matter of hours, centuries of aristocratic and feudal rights were swept away. The old social order was beginning to collapse. The Revolution was not simply about destroying the existing system. It was also about deciding what would replace it. Inspired by Enlightenment philosophy and influenced by the American Revolution, the National Assembly began developing a new political philosophy based upon individual liberty, equality before the law and popular sovereignty. One of the figures involved was the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought alongside the Americans and had become familiar with the political ideas that had inspired their revolution. Lafayette also corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, who was serving as the American ambassador to France. Jefferson offered suggestions and discussed the principles of the emerging document, although he was not its author. On August 26th, the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It proclaimed that men were born free and equal in rights and that sovereignty ultimately belonged to the nation. It was one of the most important political documents of the Revolution.

However, its vision of equality had significant limitations. Women were not granted equal political rights, slavery continued in French colonies, and the declaration’s language about universal liberty would coexist uneasily with the realities of colonialism and economic inequality. Nevertheless, its principles represented a fundamental challenge to the old order. Political authority was no longer supposed to exist simply because a king or aristocrat possessed it by birth. It had to be justified by the rights of the nation. The Storming of the Bastille therefore represented a turning point. The Revolution had begun as a constitutional and financial dispute between Louis XVI and the representatives of the French people. By July 14th, it had become a popular uprising capable of overthrowing royal authority by force. The Bastille itself was not particularly important as a prison by 1789. Its real importance was symbolic. The people of Paris had destroyed one of the most recognisable symbols of arbitrary royal power and demonstrated that the monarchy could be challenged directly. But the violence of July also foreshadowed the increasingly radical character of the Revolution.

One of the most prominent voices calling for further violence was Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist whose newspaper, L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), attacked aristocrats, royal officials and political opponents. Marat increasingly argued that the enemies of the Revolution could not be defeated through moderation alone and that force would be necessary to destroy them. His rhetoric became increasingly extreme as the Revolution progressed. Marat was not responsible for the Storming of the Bastille, nor did the National Assembly simply order or endorse the killing of de Launay. However, the events demonstrated how quickly political conflict could turn into popular violence once the authority of the state began to collapse.

The Revolution had crossed a threshold. The King could no longer rule France in the way his predecessors had. The aristocracy was beginning to lose its privileges. The National Assembly claimed to represent the French nation. And the people of Paris had discovered that they possessed something that the monarchy could not easily take away: the power of the crowd. The Bastille had fallen. The French Revolution was only beginning.

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.

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.