The French Revolution

In 1789, France was the most powerful nation in Europe. It had 28 million people—more than any other European country. It had a rich culture, a powerful army, and centuries of tradition. The Palace of Versailles, just outside Paris, was the envy of the world—a monument to French greatness where King Louis XVI ruled as an absolute monarch.

But beneath the gilded surface, France was bankrupt and furious.

French society was divided into three "Estates." The First Estate was the clergy—bishops, priests, monks. The Second Estate was the nobility—dukes, counts, aristocrats who owned most of the land. The Third Estate was everyone else: 97% of the population, from wealthy merchants to illiterate peasants.

Here's the problem: the First and Second Estates were largely exempt from taxation. The Third Estate paid nearly everything, while having almost no political power. A peasant farmer might pay a dozen different taxes—to the king, to the local lord, to the church, to the tax collector—while the nobleman who owned the land paid nothing.

It was fundamentally unfair, and everyone knew it. But it had been this way for centuries. It was called the Ancien Régime—the Old Regime—and it seemed eternal.

Louis XVI was not a tyrant. He was mild-mannered, somewhat awkward, genuinely concerned about his subjects. His wife, Marie Antoinette, was more confident and less popular—an Austrian princess whom many French people distrusted as a foreigner. Later propaganda would paint her as a monster of excess, but the truth was more complicated.

The famous quote "Let them eat cake" when told peasants had no bread? She never said it. It was propaganda, invented years earlier and falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette during the Revolution to justify her execution.

But facts mattered less than perception. France was broke. Bread prices were soaring. The government couldn't pay its debts. And the king, living in a palace with 700 rooms, seemed oblivious to his people's suffering.

This is the story of how the most powerful monarchy in Europe collapsed in ten years. It's a story of idealism and terror, of visionaries and opportunists, of how a quest for justice became a bloodbath. It begins with a financial crisis and ends with a dictator. And every word of it is true.

France was bankrupt. Decades of expensive wars, particularly supporting the American Revolution against Britain, had drained the treasury. By 1787, half of France's annual budget went to paying interest on debt. The government couldn't borrow more—creditors didn't trust it. And it couldn't raise taxes—the tax system was already crushing the poor while exempting the rich.

Louis XVI's finance ministers tried reform. Jacques Necker proposed taxing the nobility. The nobility refused. Charles Alexandre de Calonne proposed the same. The nobility refused again. The king couldn't force them—French law required the nobility's consent to new taxes.

So in August 1788, Louis XVI made a desperate decision: he would convene the Estates-General, a national assembly that hadn't met since 1614. Representatives from all three Estates would gather to solve the crisis.

It seemed like a reasonable compromise. It would prove to be a fatal mistake.

Meanwhile, France was starving—literally. The harvest of 1788 had been terrible. Bread prices doubled. In Paris, workers spent 80% of their income on bread. People were hungry, angry, and looking for someone to blame.

Urban workers rioted. Rural peasants attacked grain convoys. Rumors spread that aristocrats were hoarding food to starve the people. In April 1789, a wallpaper factory owner named Réveillon suggested lowering wages to match falling bread prices. Workers burned his house. French troops killed dozens of rioters. The Réveillon riots were a warning: France was a powder keg.

Into this crisis stepped a generation of intellectuals who had radical ideas. They had read Enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. They believed in natural rights, popular sovereignty, and constitutional government. They had watched America rebel against British tyranny and win. They thought France could do the same.

One of these men was Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a priest who wrote a pamphlet called What is the Third Estate? His answer: "Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want? To be something."

Sieyès' pamphlet was electrifying. It said what millions of French people were thinking: we are the nation, we do all the work, we pay all the taxes, and we deserve political power. The nobility and clergy are parasites. They should be abolished.

When elections for the Estates-General were held in spring 1789, Third Estate representatives arrived in Versailles filled with this radical energy. They weren't there to tinker with taxes. They were there to remake France.

The French Revolution didn't create a stable democracy. It created Napoleon, who crowned himself Emperor in 1804 and conquered most of Europe before his final defeat in 1815. France would cycle through revolutions in 1830, 1848, and 1871 before finally stabilizing as a republic.

But the Revolution changed everything anyway.

It proved that ordinary people could overthrow a thousand-year-old monarchy. It showed that rights didn't come from God or kings but from the people themselves. It invented the idea of citizenship—that everyone in a nation deserves equal legal status and political representation. These ideas would inspire revolutions across Europe and Latin America throughout the 19th century.

But the Revolution also demonstrated the dangers of radical political change. The descent from idealism to Terror—from liberty to guillotines—haunted political thought for generations. Edmund Burke, writing in 1790, predicted the Revolution would end in military dictatorship. He was right.

Conservatives pointed to France as proof that revolution leads to chaos and tyranny. Radicals pointed to France as proof that oppressive regimes will fight back with violence, justifying revolutionary terror. Both had a point.

Was the Revolution worth it? That's been debated for 230 years. France paid a terrible price: tens of thousands executed, hundreds of thousands dead in civil war, two decades of warfare under Napoleon. The monarchy was eventually restored (briefly). Many revolutionaries died betrayed by their own comrades.

But feudalism was gone forever. Legal equality became the norm. Religious minorities gained rights. The metric system standardized measurements. The Napoleonic Code reformed law across Europe. And most importantly, the Revolution established that government legitimacy comes from the people, not from God or tradition.

The French Revolution is both an inspiration and a warning. It shows that oppressed people can rise up and claim their rights. It also shows that revolutions consume their own children, that idealism can curdle into fanaticism, and that destroying an old order doesn't guarantee a better new one.

Every revolution since has had to grapple with this legacy: How do you change society without descending into Terror? How do you establish justice without creating new injustices? How do you balance liberty and order, freedom and security?

France in 1789 didn't have answers. We're still looking for them.