A rich country, a broke crown
France in the 1780s was the most populous country in western Europe and one of the richest. Its government was nearly bankrupt. Two expensive wars — the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence — had been paid for largely with loans, and by 1788 servicing those loans swallowed about half of everything the crown spent.
The money was there; the crown could not reach it. The nobility were exempt from the taille, the main direct tax, and paid the newer ones lightly; the Church gave the king a “free gift” whose size it voted itself. Every minister who tried to reform the system — Turgot, Necker, Calonne, Brienne — was blocked by the privileged orders and the law courts. In August 1788 the king agreed to summon the Estates-General for the following May, and days later the treasury suspended its payments. The Estates-General had not met since 1614.
- Debt service 50%
- Military 26%
- Civil 18%
- Court 6%
Approximate shares. The court, blamed by pamphleteers, was the smallest slice.
Bread
On 13 July 1788 a hailstorm flattened the crops across much of northern France. The winter that followed was one of the coldest anyone remembered; the Seine froze in Paris. By February 1789 the four-pound loaf that fed a Parisian family had gone from 9 sous to 14½, and it was still there in July. A labourer earned perhaps 20 to 30 sous a day; bread alone could take most of it.
Hungry people are not revolutionaries by nature, but they are angry, and they gather. Bread riots broke out across the country in the spring of 1789, and the crowds that stormed the Bastille in July came from the working districts of Paris, where bread now took most of what people earned.
- Aug 1788 9
- Feb 1789 14.5
- July 1789 14.5
A labourer earned roughly 20–30 sous a day.
New ideas
For half a century writers had been asking what made a government legitimate. Montesquieu argued for separating the powers of the state; Rousseau, that sovereignty belonged to the people as a whole. The American colonies — helped by French money and French soldiers — had just shown that a people could write its own constitution.
In January 1789 a priest, the abbé SieyèsFigure: Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. The abbé whose pamphlet opened the Revolution and whose coup closed it, turned these ideas into a pamphlet that was read everywhere. The commoners of the Third EstateIdea: Third Estate. Everyone who was neither priest nor noble, and who in 1789 claimed to be the nation, he wrote, were not one order among three: they were the nation.
“What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.”
A king who couldn’t decide
A stronger king might have steered the crisis; a more ruthless one might have crushed it. Louis XVIFigure: Louis XVI. The king who called a meeting and lost a monarchy did neither. He backed reforming ministers and then dropped them, conceded to the Assembly and then massed troops around Paris. Each half-measure convinced one side that he was weak and the other that he was not to be trusted.
On 11 July 1789 he dismissed Necker, the one minister the public still believed in. Paris read it as the first move of a coup, and three days later took the BastilleEvent: Storming of the Bastille. The afternoon Paris took up arms — and the Revolution became real.
Why 1789
Debt, hunger and new ideas had all existed before. What made 1789 different was that they met. The treasury’s collapse forced the king to call the Estates-General; the argument over how it should vote turned the Third Estate into a National Assembly; and the hungry crowds of Paris gave that Assembly the force the king could not answer.
From bankruptcy to the Bastille took eleven months. The treasury suspended its payments on 16 August 1788; Sieyès’s pamphlet appeared in January; the Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789; on 17 June the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly; and on 14 July Paris stormed the Bastille.
