The French Revolution

France in the 1780s was the richest country in Europe and functionally bankrupt. The contradiction was not accidental. Decades of imperial war, a tax system that exempted the nobility and clergy, and a court at Versailles that spent money like oxygen had driven the state to the edge of insolvency. Louis XVI's government consumed roughly half its revenue just servicing debt. The American Revolution, which France had bankrolled to humiliate Britain, cost approximately 1.3 billion livres. The irony was exquisite: France helped birth a republic abroad while its own monarchy drowned in the bill.

The fiscal crisis alone would not have caused a revolution. Plenty of states have survived worse. What made France combustible was the collision of financial desperation with a rigid social structure that refused to bend. The Ancien Regime divided French society into three estates: the First Estate (clergy), the Second Estate (nobility), and the Third Estate (everyone else, roughly 97 percent of the population). The first two estates owned vast land, held enormous privileges, and paid almost no taxes. The Third Estate paid nearly all of them.

Bread prices in Paris had doubled by the spring of 1789. A hailstorm the previous July had devastated crops across northern France. Peasants and urban workers spent 80 to 90 percent of their income on food. Hungry people are patient up to a point. That point was approaching.