The causes of the French Revolution

What this chapter is for

In February 1787 a hundred and forty-four of the greatest men in France gathered at Versailles because the king had run out of money. Only eight or nine of them were commoners.¹ The king’s minister asked them to agree that nobles and churchmen should pay a tax on their land like everyone else. They refused. Two years later, in May 1789, the king opened an assembly of the whole nation that had not met for a hundred and seventy-five years, and on 17 June the deputies of the commoners declared themselves the National Assembly, a body that claimed to be sovereign.⁷²⁰ This chapter explains how a quarrel about a tax became a revolution.

Chapter 0101 described the old regime, and chapter 0102 the ideas of the philosophers. This chapter puts them together with the events of 1786 to 1789 and asks which causes mattered most. It tells the story of the crisis year by year, sorts its causes into the deep, the immediate and the last, weighs them against each other, and sets out how historians from Burke to the present have explained the Revolution, and how an Ottoman statesman explained it in 1798.

The chapter is long, so here is the way through it. Sections 1 and 2 explain what a cause is and what France brought to the crisis. Sections 3 to 6 tell the story, from the empty treasury through the revolt of the nobles and judges to the hunger and fear of 1789. Sections 7 to 10 weigh the causes and the historians’ explanations. The last part prepares you for the examination.

The examiners have set this subject four times since 2016. In 2016 the examiners asked about the philosophers’ part in it, in 2018 and 2026 how “Rational ideas” and “fear” shaped its course, and in 2025 they asked you to “Deliberate in detail the causes and consequences of the French Revolution.”²⁸ Section 15 plans the question of 2018 and 2026.

Before you start

The words

Estates-General. The old assembly of France’s three estates, the clergy, the nobles and everyone else. It met only when the king called it, and it had last met in 1614.

Assembly of Notables. A meeting of leading nobles, bishops and officials, chosen by the king to advise him. It had no power to make law. Louis XVI called one in 1787 and again in 1788.

Parlement. One of France’s high courts of law. The Parlement of Paris was the most important. Before a royal law could take effect it had to be registered by a parlement, and the parlements used that step to protest.

Lit de justice. A special session in which the king came to a parlement in person and ordered it to register a law. It means “bed of justice”, from the cushioned seat the king sat on.

Cahier. A list of grievances and wishes. In the spring of 1789 every village, town and order in France drew one up for its deputies to take to the Estates-General.

Deficit. The gap when a government spends more than it takes in. The deficit is paid for by borrowing, and every loan adds interest to next year’s spending.

Bankruptcy. A state is bankrupt when it cannot pay what it owes. A partial bankruptcy means paying only part of what is due, or paying in paper instead of money.

Voting by order and voting by head. Two ways the Estates-General could vote. By order, each estate met apart and cast one vote. By head, all the deputies met in one hall and each one counted.

Privileged. The clergy and nobles, who had rights in law that commoners did not, above all freedom from most taxes.

The places

Versailles, eighteen kilometres west of Paris, was the king’s palace and the seat of government, where the Notables and the Estates-General met. Paris was the capital and the largest city, with about 600,000 people by 1789.¹³ Troyes, in Champagne, was where the king exiled the Parlement of Paris in 1787. Grenoble was the capital of Dauphiné, a province in the south-east, and Vizille a château near it where the province’s three orders met in defiance of the king in July 1788. Rennes, the capital of Brittany in the west, was one of the cities that rioted for its parlement. In the Muslim world the story touches Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, where a statesman wrote in 1798 the explanation of the Revolution you will meet in section 9.

The story in plain words

1. France fought a costly war to help the Americans win their independence, and paid for it by borrowing.
2. By August 1786 the treasury was empty and no one would lend the king any more money.
3. His ministers proposed that nobles and churchmen, who paid little tax, should pay a new tax on land.
4. The nobles, the bishops and the high courts refused, and demanded that the Estates-General be called, because only it could agree new taxes.
5. The king tried to break the courts, the provinces rose in their defence, and in August 1788 he gave way and called the Estates-General for May 1789.
6. Then a new quarrel began, over whether the commoners would have a real voice in the Estates-General or be outvoted by the clergy and nobles.
7. At the same time a bad harvest made bread dear, and hungry, frightened people rioted.
8. When the Estates-General met on 5 May 1789, the nation was full of hope, full of grievances and deeply divided over how the assembly should vote.

1. Three kinds of cause

Start with a single event to see what a cause is. On 8 August 1788 Louis XVI announced that the Estates-General would meet the following May.¹ Ask why he did it and you get several answers at once. He did it because the treasury could no longer pay its bills. He did it because the nobles and the courts had refused every other way of raising money. He did it because a province had defied him and he did not dare use his army against it. Behind those answers lie older ones. The treasury was empty because of decades of war and borrowing, and the nobles could refuse because the law had always exempted them. Every event in history has causes of different depths, and the skill this chapter teaches is to tell them apart.

Historians sort the causes of a revolution into three kinds. The first are the conditions, the things that had been true for decades and made a revolution possible. Privilege, a growing middle class with no share in power, a peasantry burdened with dues, and a monarchy losing respect were all conditions. They explain why France could have a revolution, but not why it came in 1789 rather than in 1750 or 1820. The second kind is the crisis, the events of a few years that turned a possibility into a likelihood. For France that was the bankruptcy of the state and the refusal of the privileged to pay. The third kind is the spark, the last events that turned a crisis into a revolution. In 1788 and 1789 these were the quarrel over voting in the Estates-General, the dear bread of a bad harvest, and the fear that ran through every class.

The difference matters in an answer. A candidate who lists ten causes in a row, giving the ideas of Rousseau the same weight as the hailstorm of 1788, has described without explaining. A candidate who says which causes made the Revolution possible, which made it likely and which set it off, and then argues which mattered most, has explained. Section 7 does that weighing, and Figure 4 draws it.

One more distinction helps. Some causes were necessary, meaning that without them there would have been no revolution in 1789. Others only shaped what kind of revolution it became. The bankruptcy was necessary, because without it the king would never have called the Estates-General. The philosophers’ ideas were not necessary for the crisis to begin, but they decided what the men of 1789 tried to build once it had. Keep asking of each cause, “Without this, would it still have happened, and would it have happened in the same way?”

2. What France carried into the crisis

The conditions were described in chapters 0101 and 0102, so they are only gathered here, with the point each one makes about the causes.

The first was privilege. The clergy and nobles, a small minority of the nation, were free of the main direct tax and paid little of the rest, while the peasants paid the taille, the salt tax, the tithe to the Church and dues to their lords. Chapter 0101 showed that the privileged could block any tax that touched them. That fact is the hinge of this chapter, because the crisis of 1787 began when the state could no longer manage without taxing them.

The second was a society that had outgrown its rules. The middle class of lawyers, merchants, officials and doctors had grown in numbers, wealth and education during the century, yet the law still ranked them below any noble. They supplied the ideas and the leaders of the Third Estate in 1789. The third was the burden on the peasants, most of whom lived close to the edge in a bad year. Ninety per cent of them, historians estimate, lived at or below the level of bare survival in lean years.¹³ When the harvest failed, they had nothing to fall back on.

The economy added to the strain. From about 1730 prices rose across the Western world, a sign of good times, and France’s population grew faster than it had for centuries. From about 1770, Encyclopaedia Britannica’s history of the Revolution says, the good times slackened, and “economic crises, provoking alarm and even revolt, became frequent.”²⁶ A growing population meant more mouths to feed from the same land, so a bad harvest now hurt more people than before. The crisis of 1788 and 1789, when bread became too dear for the poor, came at the end of almost twenty years of harder times.

The fourth was a monarchy that was losing the respect it needed. Absolute monarchy rested on the belief that the king ruled by God’s will and stood above every quarrel. In the eighteenth century that belief wore thin. Louis XV fought the parlements for decades, and in 1770 and 1771 he dissolved all thirteen of them and exiled their judges, which made him look like a despot. Clandestine pamphlets, printed abroad and sold in Paris, mocked his mistress and later the queen, Marie Antoinette, and the Diamond Necklace Affair of 1785 and 1786, a scandal that made the queen look greedy for luxury, deepened the scorn.¹⁴ A king who is laughed at cannot easily demand sacrifices.

The fifth condition was the ideas of the philosophers, the subject of chapter 0102. They taught educated people to judge every institution by reason, to believe that sovereignty belonged to the nation, and to see privilege as having no basis in nature. These ideas did not cause the crisis, but when it came they told people what to demand. Keep the five conditions in mind as the story unfolds, because each of them shows itself at a particular moment of the crisis.

3. How the treasury ran dry

The crisis began with money. Hazen, the American historian whose survey of 1917 is still a clear guide, sums up the state of the royal finances on the eve of the Revolution. “Almost half of the national income was devoted to the payment of interest on the national debt.” Spending was always larger than income, and the gap was covered by new loans, which added to the debt and to next year’s interest. “It appeared to be the principle of state finance,” he writes, “not that expenditures should be determined by income, but that income should be determined by expenditures.”⁶ A government in that position can survive only as long as people will go on lending to it.

The war of American independence made it worse. France joined the Americans against Britain in 1778, won, and paid for its part almost entirely with loans, as chapter 0101 showed. Necker, the Genevan banker, ran the finances until 1781. Calonne, controller-general from 1783, borrowed more freely than any minister before him. He believed confidence was everything. “A man who wishes to borrow must appear to be rich,” he said, “and to appear rich he must dazzle by spending freely.” The court loved him. Then, in August 1786, Calonne found that the treasury was empty and, in Hazen’s words, “that there were no more fools willing to loan to the state.”⁷

The best way to see the size of the hole is to read the government’s own figures. In March 1788 Calonne’s successor, Loménie de Brienne, published an account of the year’s finances for the king. It said that the ordinary revenue reaching the royal treasury in 1788 would be 231,994,829 livres and the ordinary spending 286,834,369 livres, a gap of almost 55 million. On top of that the treasury had to repay loans that fell due and meet extraordinary costs, together 105,897,952 livres. Brienne gave the total deficit for the year as 160,737,492 livres.⁸ Figure 1 sets these sums side by side.

Read the figure carefully. For every hundred livres the treasury had to pay out in 1788, only about fifty-nine came in. The sums are those that passed through the treasury itself, and much of the interest on the debt had already been paid out of the taxes before the money reached it, so the burden of the debt was even heavier than the bars suggest. No government could close a gap like this by saving on the king’s table or dismissing a few courtiers. It needed either a large new tax or a refusal to pay its lenders, and both were dangerous.

A king facing a deficit had three old answers. He could borrow, but by 1786 the lenders had stopped lending. He could raise the existing taxes, but these fell on the peasants and the towns, who were already paying all they could, as chapter 0101 showed. He could refuse to pay his debts, as French kings had done in the past, but that would ruin the bankers, merchants and officials who had lent him money, many of them members of the middle class he could least afford to anger.

That left one new answer, and Calonne saw it. The richest people in France, the clergy and the nobles, paid the least. A tax on all land, paid by everyone whatever their rank, would raise large sums without crushing the poor. It was the kind of reform Turgot had proposed, and the kind the privileged had always blocked.¹ The money crisis had now forced the question of privilege into the open, and the next two years are the story of how the privileged answered it.

4. The revolt of the privileged, 1787 to 1788

The story of these two years is told in Figure 2. It is worth learning in order, because each step led to the next, and an answer that gets the order wrong usually gets the causes wrong too.

The Notables and the Parlement refuse, 1787

Calonne knew the Parlement of Paris would never register a tax on the privileged, so he tried to go round it. He persuaded the king to call an Assembly of Notables, hand-picked men whose approval, he hoped, would carry the reform. It met on 22 February 1787. It had 144 members, divided into eight committees, each presided over by a prince of the royal family, and only eight or nine of its members did not belong to the clergy or the nobility.¹ Calonne put before them a whole programme of reform, with elected assemblies in the provinces, the end of customs barriers inside France and, above all, a general tax on land.

The Notables would not be managed. They demanded to see Calonne’s accounts, and in one committee the young Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American war, asked that the Estates-General be called. Paris applauded the Notables, believing Calonne insincere, and when the king dismissed him in April 1787 the news was greeted with joy across the country.¹²⁷ His successor was Brienne, the Archbishop of Toulouse. The books do not agree on the exact days of these appointments, so learn the months. The Notables accepted most of Calonne’s reforms from him but would not agree to the land tax, and they were sent home on 25 May.¹

Brienne now had to take his edicts to the Parlement of Paris. It registered the less dangerous ones in June 1787, freeing the trade in grain inside France, setting up provincial assemblies and allowing the corvée to be paid in money. Then came the land tax. On 30 July, after a long debate, the Parlement refused to register it, together with a new stamp tax, and demanded the Estates-General.¹ It declared, in Hazen’s words, “the far-reaching principle that taxes can only be imposed by those who are to pay them.”⁷

Notice what the judges were doing. They were nobles themselves, and the land tax would have fallen on their own estates. Morse Stephens, a British historian who wrote a detailed history of the Revolution in 1886, thought the judges did not believe the king would ever call the Estates-General, and used the demand because it made them popular and was “a good excuse for refusing the hated land tax, which would affect their own incomes.”¹ Self-interest and principle pointed the same way, and the public saw only the principle. The people of Paris, Stephens writes, “now began to talk of nothing but the States-General.”¹

The king answered with force. On 6 August 1787 he held a lit de justice and had the taxes registered, and then he exiled the whole Parlement to Troyes. The other courts and the provincial parlements protested. The judges soon tired of the provinces, and in September a compromise brought them back to Paris in return for registering an older tax on all property. It was not nearly enough money. In November Brienne came to the Parlement with the king to register large new loans, the king again forced the registration, and he promised to call the Estates-General by 1792.¹

The king strikes at the courts, and gives way, 1788

Brienne now planned to break the parlements for good. His edicts, registered at a lit de justice on 8 May 1788, took away the parlements’ power to register laws and gave it to a new court of great nobles and officials named for life. Two judges of the Parlement of Paris who had exposed the plan were arrested.¹ The parlements of Rennes, Rouen, Grenoble and Bordeaux protested, their judges were sent to their country estates, and the people of the provinces showed their support for their courts with riots and even open revolt.¹

An English farmer who toured France in these years saw it at first hand. Arthur Young reached Rennes, the capital of Brittany, on 2 September 1788, and found a camp of four regiments of infantry and two of dragoons outside the gates. “The discontents of the people have been double,” he wrote, “first on account of the high price of bread, and secondly for the banishment of the parliament.”⁹ Young could not understand why the people loved a court made up entirely of nobles. The answer is that in 1788 the parlements stood for resistance to a despotic king, and the people did not yet see that the judges were defending their own privileges.

The most serious defiance came from Dauphiné. When the king exiled its parlement, the leading men of the province called its old provincial assembly together without his permission. On 21 July 1788 an assembly of the three orders, 397 deputies by Stephens’s count (49 of the clergy, 160 of the nobility and 188 of the Third Estate), met in the château of Vizille, the home of a rich Grenoble merchant, elected a young judge named Mounier as its secretary, and demanded that the Estates-General be called at once.¹ Stephens calls it “simply an act of rebellion”. Notice that the three orders met as one assembly. When Necker later gave the Third Estate as many deputies as the other two orders together, he named the new assembly of Dauphiné as one of his examples.¹

The king would not send soldiers against Dauphiné, fearing it would drive the province and its neighbour Provence to arms. He had already, on 5 July, asked every public body to search its archives for how earlier Estates-General had been formed, which is why some books say he called it in July. On 8 August 1788 he suspended Brienne’s new court and fixed the meeting of the Estates-General at Versailles for 1 May 1789.¹ Eight days later, on 16 August, Brienne admitted partial bankruptcy. The state’s debts, pensions and salaries would be paid three-fifths in money and two-fifths in paper notes.⁵ Brienne resigned, and in the last week of August the king recalled Necker. Stephens gives 27 August and other accounts the 24th, 25th or 26th, so here too the month is what to learn.¹²⁷

Look back at who did all this. It was not the peasants or the Paris crowd or the readers of Rousseau. It was the Notables, the Parlement of Paris, the provincial courts and the nobles of the provinces, defending their exemptions in the language of liberty. They had forced the king to call the Estates-General, and they expected it to protect them. For a few months in 1788 the privileged and the Third Estate stood on the same side against the king. Section 5 shows how quickly that alliance broke.

5. From taxes to power, the quarrel over the Estates-General

Once the Estates-General had been called, everyone asked how it would be made up. At its last meeting, in 1614, each estate had sent an equal number of deputies and each had met separately. If that form were kept, the clergy and nobles would always outvote the Third Estate by two votes to one, and no reform touching privilege could pass. The Parlement of Paris was asked its opinion and said the old form should be kept. In Hazen’s words, “itself a privileged body, it stood for privilege,” and it “immediately became as unpopular as it had previously been popular, when opposing the monarch.”⁷

This was the turning point of the crisis. Until the autumn of 1788 the quarrel had been between the king and the privileged, with the Third Estate cheering the privileged. From now on it was between the privileged and the Third Estate, with the king in the middle. The question was no longer who should pay taxes but who should hold power.

The king called the Notables again in November 1788 to advise him on the form of the Estates-General, and most of them, Stephens writes, saw the coming assembly as a chance to strengthen the privileges of the clergy and nobility.¹ Late in 1788 the princes of the royal family sent the king a memorandum that shows how frightened the high nobility had become. “Sire, the state is in peril,” it began. “A revolution is brewing in the elements of government and is being brought about by rousing the people.” Pamphlets were questioning everything. “Every author sets himself up as legislator.” Soon, they warned, “Property rights soon will be attacked,” and already some proposed that feudal dues be abolished. They begged the king to keep “the distinction between the orders, the right to deliberate in separate chambers, and equality of votes.”¹⁰

The princes ended with an offer. If the Third Estate would stop attacking the rights of the first two orders, those orders would “agree to bear their full share of public taxation.”¹⁰ Two years earlier that offer would have saved the monarchy’s finances. By the end of 1788 it was too late, because the question had changed from money to power, and the Third Estate wanted more than tax equality.

On 27 December 1788 the king’s council published its decision, drafted by Necker. The Estates-General would have about a thousand deputies, elected in proportion to population, in 250 groups of four, one for the clergy, one for the nobles and two for the Third Estate. The Third Estate would thus have as many deputies as the other two orders combined. On the question that mattered most, whether the estates would vote by order or by head, the decision said nothing.¹ Figure 3 shows why that silence made the doubling almost worthless.

If the vote was by order, the 500 deputies of the Third Estate cast one vote and the clergy and nobles two, whatever their numbers. If the vote was by head, the Third Estate had half the seats, and a handful of parish priests or liberal nobles joining it would give it a majority. Hazen judged that Necker “half settled the question and left it half unsettled,” and that in dodging it he “was laying up abundant trouble for the immediate future.”⁷ The fight over voting by head, which chapter 0104 tells, broke out the moment the deputies met.

The calling of the Estates-General opened a flood of pamphlets. The most famous, by the Abbé Sieyès, asked “What is the Third Estate?” and answered “Everything”, as chapter 0101 showed. Sieyès argued that the Third Estate did all the useful work of the nation and filled almost all its public posts, “nineteen-twentieths of them”, and was “laden with all that which is really painful, with all the burdens which the privileged classes refuse to carry.”¹¹ His argument was the general will of chapter 0102 turned into a weapon. If the Third Estate was the nation, the privileged were not part of it at all.

In the spring of 1789 almost every adult man in France voted in the elections, and every assembly that chose deputies wrote a cahier of grievances. Fifty or sixty thousand of them survive, Hazen says.⁷ A village in Provence, Lauris, wrote that “the Third Estate pays everything and does not enjoy anything”, and asked the king to see “how much sweat, how many tears soak the money going into your treasury.”¹² Writing down their grievances taught millions of people to think about the whole system that caused them. Section 8 sets out what the cahiers asked for.

6. Hunger and fear, 1788 to 1789

While the politicians argued, nature struck. In July 1788 a great hailstorm struck, and Stephens writes that it did “such immense damage that in very many districts there had been no harvest whatsoever.”³ The harvest of 1788 was poor, the winter that followed was one of the hardest in memory, and by the spring of 1789 bread, the main food of the poor, was dear. Chapter 0101 gave Hazen’s picture of hundreds of thousands of hungry men turned into beggars.

Arthur Young, in Paris on 10 June 1789, recorded the price. White bread cost five sous a pound, and the coarse bread the poor ate three and a half to four sous. “These rates are beyond their faculties,” he wrote, meaning beyond what the poor could pay, “and occasion great misery.” Accounts arrived “every moment from the provinces of riots and disturbances,” with soldiers called in to keep order in the markets.⁹ For families who lived on bread, prices like these meant hunger.

Hunger made the poor angry, and the political crisis gave their anger somewhere to go. On 28 April 1789, a week before the Estates-General met, a rumour spread in the working-class Faubourg Saint-Antoine that Réveillon, a rich wallpaper manufacturer, had said a workman could live on three sous a day. A crowd sacked his factory. The French Guards, the soldiers who policed Paris, were called out, but their officers dared not attack the rioters because they could not trust their own men.² Stephens drew the lesson. The riot “proved to the popular leaders how much could be done at a crisis by a riot.”² When the crowd moved again in July, the soldiers again would not stop it.

Hunger came with fear, and fear ran through every class. The privileged feared for their rights, as the princes’ memorandum shows. The historians of the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity project at George Mason University even ask whether “the nobility’s fear of losing its privileges, rather than the assertiveness of the middle classes, might have been the most important factor in the events that followed.”¹³ The middle class feared that the privileged and the court would cheat them of their victory. The poor feared famine and believed that someone was hoarding grain to starve them.

In the summer of 1789 these fears exploded. When troops were gathered round Paris in early July and news came on 12 July that the king had dismissed Necker, the Parisians feared a plot to crush the Estates-General by force, and two days later they stormed the Bastille.⁴¹⁵ In the countryside, in July and August, panic spread from village to village, a panic historians call the Great Fear. “Men were afraid, both in town and country, of they knew not what,” Stephens writes, and the fear “was generally expressed in the words, ‘The brigands are coming.’”³ Chapter 0104 tells those events. Here the point is that fear was not only a result of the Revolution but one of its causes, and it worked on the privileged and the commoners alike.

7. The causes weighed

You now have the whole story, and the task is to weigh it. Figure 4 sorts the causes into the three layers of section 1, with each layer resting on the one before.

Read the figure from the top. The conditions made a revolution possible but did not set a date for it. The crisis of 1786 to 1788 made a meeting of the Estates-General unavoidable. The last layer turned that meeting into a revolution. Each layer needed the one above it. A bad harvest without a political crisis would have produced bread riots, as France had seen many times, and nothing more. A political crisis without the deep conditions might have ended in a compromise between king and nobles. It was the meeting of all three in 1788 and 1789 that made the Revolution.

If one cause must be named as decisive, it is the bankruptcy of the state. Without the empty treasury there would have been no Assembly of Notables, no revolt of the parlements and no Estates-General in 1789. Every step in Figure 2 follows from the king’s need for money. That is why historians say the money crisis decided the timing of the Revolution. It does not mean the debt “caused” the Revolution by itself. Britain too had borrowed heavily for its wars and had no revolution, because its Parliament could tax everyone and lenders trusted it. The French debt became fatal because of the second cause.

The second cause was privilege. The French crisis could not be solved inside the old regime, because the only workable answer, taxing the rich, was the one the rich could block. The Notables, the parlements and the nobles of the provinces blocked it for two years, and they did so in the name of liberty, demanding the Estates-General as the only body that could agree new taxes. In this sense the Revolution began from the top. The privileged opened the crisis, and they opened the door through which the Third Estate walked.

What turned a quarrel among the rich into a revolution was the entry of the Third Estate and the poor. The Third Estate came in through the quarrel over voting, which showed it that the privileged meant to keep their power. The poor came in through hunger, and the riots of 1789 gave the Third Estate’s leaders a force the king could not resist, because his own soldiers would not fire. Ideas told both what to want. Sieyès’s pamphlet and the cahiers spoke the language of the philosophers, of the nation, of rights and of a constitution.

Behind every step stood Louis XVI, and his weakness is a cause in its own right. He backed Turgot, Calonne and Brienne and then dropped each of them when the court or the privileged pressed him. He forced the Parlement to register his taxes and then recalled it. He called the Estates-General and then left its most important question unanswered. Hazen calls “his feebleness of will, his vacillation” “a fatal factor in the history of the times.”⁷ Some recent historians, as section 10 shows, give his failures of judgement more weight than any long-term cause.

Two causes are often overstated. The American war mattered mainly through its cost, and secondly through its example, since French officers and soldiers, Lafayette among them, came home having fought for a people’s right to rule itself. The ideas of the philosophers mattered in the way chapter 0102 explained. They did not create the crisis, but they gave the Third Estate its programme and its confidence. Without them there would still have been a crisis in 1789, but it might have ended in a reformed monarchy ruled by nobles rather than in the sovereignty of the nation.

Two questions follow from all this. Why did the revolution come in France, the richest and most advanced of the great monarchies, and not in Prussia or Austria, where serfdom still held? Tocqueville’s paradox, in chapter 0101, gives part of the answer. The French peasant was freer and often owned land, so the dues that remained felt heavier, and the reforms of Turgot had raised hopes they did not satisfy. The rest of the answer is in this chapter. France had a large, educated middle class, a public that read and argued, a king who could not tax his nobles and a nobility strong enough to defy him. Why 1789? Because that was when the bankruptcy, the revolt of the privileged and the worst harvest for decades came together.

8. What the causes had produced by May 1789

When the Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789, the causes had produced something more than a quarrel over taxes. Hazen gives about 1,200 deputies, over 600 of them for the Third Estate, and notes that of the 300 elected by the clergy over 200 were parish priests or monks, commoners by birth and often in sympathy with the Third Estate.⁷ The deputies came with the cahiers, and the cahiers show what the nation wanted.

On some points, Hazen found, clergy, nobles and commoners agreed. All blamed the country’s ills on “arbitrary, uncontrolled government”. All wanted a constitution that would define the rights of the king and of the people and bind everyone. All wanted the Estates-General to meet regularly, to share the power of making laws and alone to vote taxes, and they wanted taxes paid by all. The clergy and nobles, in Hazen’s words, “almost unanimously agreed in their cahiers to relinquish their exemptions, for which they had fought so resolutely only two years before.” The Third Estate demanded the end of feudal dues. There was in the cahiers “no hint of a desire for a violent revolution”. They expressed “a deep affection for the King” and faith “that the worst was over.”⁷

So the causes had produced three things by May 1789. They had produced a programme, a constitution with an elected assembly, equal taxes and individual liberty, which almost everyone accepted. They had produced a Third Estate that was organised, led by lawyers and officials, and convinced that it was the nation. They had produced hungry, frightened crowds in Paris and the countryside who would act if the assembly failed them. What they had not produced was any agreement on the one question that decided who would rule, whether the estates would vote by order or by head. Hazen notes that in his opening speech on 5 May the king “said not a word about the thought that was in every one’s mind.”⁷ Chapter 0104 tells what followed.

9. How the Muslim world explained the Revolution

The French Revolution was watched from Istanbul. At first the Ottoman government saw it as a quarrel inside Christian Europe, and even a useful one, since it kept the Empire’s enemies busy. In January 1792 the privy secretary of Sultan Selim III wrote in his journal a hope that the upheaval in France would spread to the Empire’s enemies and keep them fighting each other.¹⁶ That changed when France took the Ionian islands and the coasts of Greece and Albania in 1797, becoming the Empire’s neighbour, and reports came of a French fleet preparing to attack. In the spring of 1798 the Ottoman foreign minister, the Reis-ul-Küttab Ahmed Atıf Efendi, was told to prepare a memorandum for the imperial council on whether to join the coalition against France.¹⁶

Atıf began with the causes of the Revolution, and his explanation is worth reading closely. The “conflagration of sedition and wickedness” in France, he wrote, “had been conceived many years previously in the minds of certain accursed heretics”. In particular, “the known and famous atheists Voltaire and Rousseau, and other materialists like them, had printed and published various works”, attacking religion and kings and praising “the sweetness of equality and republicanism, all expressed in easily intelligible words and phrases, in the form of mockery, in the language of the common people.”¹⁶ For Atıf the Revolution was caused by the writers, and its danger lay in the claim that a state could hold together without religion. He warned that the French had translated their declaration of “The Rights of Man” into all languages to stir up the subjects of every ruler.¹⁶

Atıf’s explanation is very close to the one the Irish-born British statesman Edmund Burke had given in 1790, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. “The literary cabal,” Burke wrote, “had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion,” and he joined the men of letters with “the new moneyed interest” as the makers of the Revolution.¹⁷ The Christian conservative in London and the Muslim statesman in Istanbul agreed that the Revolution was the work of irreligious writers, and both feared it for the same reason, that it attacked the religious foundation of the social order.

How should you use Atıf in an answer? Treat his memorandum as evidence of how the Revolution looked to a statesman of a great Muslim empire, and as a sign of how quickly its ideas were felt as a danger far beyond France. Bernard Lewis, the historian of modern Turkey whose book preserves the memorandum in English, notes that the French landing at Alexandria on 1 July 1798 confirmed Atıf’s reasoning.¹⁶ As an explanation of the causes, though, it is one-sided, for the reasons this chapter has given. It leaves out the bankruptcy, privilege and hunger, and it gets the writers wrong. Voltaire believed in God, as chapter 0102 showed, and Rousseau so distrusted atheists that he would have banished them from his ideal state.¹⁸ Set Atıf beside Iqbal, whose view of European thought chapter 0102 gave, and you have two Muslim responses to the Enlightenment, one rejecting it as heresy, the other treating its best ideas as a development of Islam’s own.

10. How historians have explained the Revolution

Historians have argued about the causes of the Revolution for more than two hundred years, and the examiners reward a candidate who knows the main schools and can say what each gets right. There are five to know.

Explanations from the Revolution’s own time and the century after

The first explanation came from the Revolution’s enemies while it was still going on. Burke in 1790 and Atıf Efendi in 1798 both blamed the writers. On this view the philosophers had undermined religion and respect for kings, and the Revolution was the result. Its strength is that it takes ideas seriously, since the men of 1789 did speak the philosophers’ language. Its weakness is that it cannot explain why the Revolution came in 1789 and not in 1760, when the same books were being read. Hazen called this “putting the cart before the horse”, as chapter 0102 showed.

The second explanation, held by the liberal historians of the nineteenth century, is the one Hazen gives in 1917 and chapter 0101 described. The old regime was unjust and unbearable. Privilege, the burden on the peasants and arbitrary government drove the nation to demand a constitution, and a feeble king could neither reform the system nor defend it. Tocqueville added his paradox, that the Revolution broke out where the old burdens were lightest and when the government had begun to reform. This view explains why the nation wanted change. It is less good at explaining why the crisis began among the nobles and not among the oppressed.

The twentieth-century debate, and after

The third explanation dominated the twentieth century. Georges Lefebvre, the leading French historian of the Revolution, set it out in Quatre-vingt-neuf (“Eighty-nine”) in 1939, and Albert Soboul carried it on. It holds that the Revolution came out of a long conflict between social classes. The bourgeoisie, grown rich through trade and industry, overthrew the nobles and the feudal system that held it back. Soboul opened his history of 1965 with the sentence “La Révolution marque l’avènement de la société bourgeoise et capitaliste dans l’histoire de la France”, meaning that the Revolution marks the arrival of bourgeois and capitalist society in French history.¹⁹ The view drew on Marx’s idea that history moves through the struggle of classes, and it is often called the Marxist interpretation. Lefebvre also studied the peasants deeply, and his book La Grande Peur de 1789 of 1932 showed how much the peasants’ own rising mattered.¹⁹

The fourth explanation began as an attack on the third. In 1954 Alfred Cobban, professor of French history in London, gave a lecture called “The Myth of the French Revolution”, and in 1964 he published The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution.¹⁹ Cobban looked at who the deputies of the Third Estate really were. Using Lefebvre’s own figures and the research of the American historian George V. Taylor, he showed that they were mostly officials, state servants and professionals, above all lawyers and landowners, “not capitalists”.¹⁹ He pointed out that the abolition of feudal dues in August 1789 was forced on the Assembly by the peasants’ rising, not chosen by bourgeois deputies, many of whom owned such dues themselves. Lefebvre had written that “the bourgeoisie had neither the time nor the desire to attack the tithe or the feudal rights”.¹⁹ François Furet, in France, went further. In Penser la Révolution française (1978), published in English as Interpreting the French Revolution, he argued that 1789 was not mainly about class at all but about who had the right to rule, which Pamela Pilbeam, a British historian of France, sums up as “challenges to political legitimacy”.¹⁹ Historians who followed Cobban came to be called revisionists, because they revised the social interpretation.

The fifth explanation is today’s, and it is less a school than a change of emphasis. Since the 1960s historians have been less sure that economic forces decide events. “The outbreak of revolution tends now to be explained more by chance and personal decisions – or lack of them,” Pilbeam writes. “Leading exponents are William Doyle and Timothy Tackett, who blame the king for his ineptitude, indecision, and stubbornness in failing to reform absolutism.”¹⁹ Others, such as Peter McPhee, study how ordinary people in the towns and villages took up, adapted and resisted what Paris did.¹⁹ On this view the deep conditions made a crisis likely, but how it ended depended on decisions that could have gone another way.

The table sets the five side by side.

Where should you stand? A strong answer does not simply choose a school. It says that the social interpretation was right that long social changes made France ready for revolution, that the revisionists were right that the crisis began among the privileged and was led by lawyers rather than capitalists, and that the recent historians are right that the king’s choices decided how it ended. The bankruptcy decided when it came.

11. What students mix up

The causes and the course. The causes are what led to the meeting of the Estates-General on 5 May 1789 and to the first revolutionary acts. The storming of the Bastille, the Great Fear and the Terror are the course of the Revolution, not its causes. A question on causes that spends a page on the Terror has drifted.

The Estates-General and the National Assembly. The Estates-General was the old assembly of three orders that the king called. The National Assembly was what the deputies of the Third Estate declared themselves on 17 June 1789, claiming to speak for the nation. Chapter 0104 tells how one became the other.

The parlements and Parliament. A French parlement was a court of law staffed by nobles, not an elected assembly like the British Parliament. When the parlements resisted the king in 1787 and 1788, they were defending their own privileges as much as the people’s liberties.

Who began the crisis. It was not the Third Estate. The Notables, the parlements and the provincial nobles opened the crisis of 1787 and 1788 by refusing to pay. The Third Estate entered only when the quarrel over voting began.

Doubling the Third Estate and voting by head. Doubling gave the Third Estate as many deputies as the other two orders together. It meant nothing unless the vote was by head. The decision of 27 December 1788 granted the first and was silent on the second.

The debt and the deficit. The debt is everything the state owes. The deficit is the gap between one year’s spending and income. A large debt was not fatal in itself, since Britain had one. The French deficit became fatal when no one would lend to cover it.

12. What the examiners have asked

The causes of the Revolution come up often. In 2025 the examiners asked, “French Revolution was extraordinary event of 18th century. Deliberate in detail the causes and consequences of the French Revolution.”²⁸ This chapter gives you the causes. Chapter 0106 gives the consequences.

In 2018 they asked, “Rational ideas and ‘fear’ determined the course of French Revolution in the eighteenth century. Discuss”, and in 2026 almost the same, “How did Eighteenth century’s Rational ideas and the situation of Fear outlined the course of French Revolution in Europe? Discuss and analyze.”²⁸ Section 15 plans it. Notice that it asks about the course, not only the causes, so a good answer follows reason and fear from 1789 into the 1790s.

In 2016 they asked whether “The connection between the ideas of French Philosophers and the revolution was indirect and remote”, which chapter 0102 plans.²⁸ The examiner’s report for that year complained that “a significant number discussed causes of the revolution rarely touching the real point.”²⁹ That warning applies to every question in this area. Answer the question set, not the causes in general.

For practice, try these, which this chapter has written for you in the examiners’ style. “The French Revolution began as a revolt of the nobles. Discuss.” “How far was the bankruptcy of the French monarchy the main cause of the Revolution of 1789?” “Assess the importance of social and political causes of the French Revolution.” “Why did the Revolution break out in France and not elsewhere in Europe?”

Expect objective questions too. When did the Assembly of Notables meet? When was the Estates-General called, and when did it open? When had it last met? Who wrote What is the Third Estate? Where did the three orders of Dauphiné meet in July 1788? Who was the controller-general in 1786?

13. Facts to take into the examination hall

14. What loses marks on this subject

A list with no weighing. Ten causes in ten paragraphs, each given the same weight, is a description. The examiner wants to know which causes mattered most and why. Sort them into conditions, crisis and spark, and argue for one as decisive.

Starting with the peasants. Many answers open with the misery of the peasants as if it alone caused the Revolution. The peasants had been poor for centuries. Misery gave the Revolution its force in 1789, but the crisis began among the privileged.

Leaving out the privileged revolt. An answer that jumps from the American war to the Estates-General misses the two years in which the Notables and the parlements forced the king’s hand. That is the heart of the causes.

Bullets instead of argument. The examiners of 2018 warned that “Many candidates have written in headings or bullets, hence, they could not come up with any cogent argument.”³⁰ Use headings to organise an answer, but write each part as connected prose.

Getting dates wrong. The Estates-General was called in August 1788 and opened on 5 May 1789. The Bastille fell on 14 July 1789. The Notables met in 1787. Muddled dates suggest muddled causes.

One historian’s view as fact. “The Revolution was a bourgeois revolution” is Lefebvre’s view, not a fact, and Cobban attacked it. Name the historian and give the other side.

Writing about Islam carelessly. If you quote Atıf Efendi, present him as a statesman of his time explaining a danger to his empire, and say where his account falls short. The examiner rewards balance.

15. A worked answer plan

Take the question the examiners set in 2018 and again, in slightly different words, in 2026. “Rational ideas and ‘fear’ determined the course of French Revolution in the eighteenth century. Discuss.”²⁸ It is worth twenty marks, and you have about thirty-seven minutes. Discuss asks you to weigh the statement and reach your own judgement. The statement says two forces, reason and fear, determined the course of the Revolution. You must show how each shaped it, how they worked together, and whether “determined” is too strong.

Before you open the plan, decide your verdict. Did reason and fear determine the course of the Revolution, or only shape it? What else would you add?

Notice three things about the plan. Each part opens with the claim it proves and then gives its evidence, with dates, names and quotations. The parts follow the chronology, so the examiner sees the course of the Revolution unfold. The conclusion answers the word “determined” directly, which is what discuss demands.

What to remember from this chapter

• The causes of the Revolution come in three layers, the conditions that made it possible, the crisis of 1786 to 1788 that made the Estates-General unavoidable, and the quarrel over voting, hunger and fear that turned the crisis into a revolution.
• The bankruptcy decided the timing. The treasury was empty by August 1786, and Brienne’s own account gave a deficit of 161 million livres for 1788.
• The crisis began at the top. The Notables (February 1787), the Parlement of Paris (July 1787) and the provincial courts and nobles (1788) refused a tax on the privileged and demanded the Estates-General.
• The king gave way on 8 August 1788 and called the Estates-General for May 1789, then admitted partial bankruptcy on 16 August and recalled Necker.
• The quarrel turned from taxes to power when the Parlement wanted the forms of 1614. The Third Estate was doubled on 27 December 1788, but the vote was left undecided.
• The harvest of 1788, dear bread and the riots of 1789 brought the poor into the crisis. Fear ran through every class.
• Atıf Efendi in 1798, like Burke in 1790, blamed irreligious writers. Historians since have offered the liberal, social (Lefebvre), revisionist (Cobban, Furet) and recent (Doyle, Tackett) explanations.

Check yourself

Answer each question in your own words before you open the answer. The last two go back to chapters 0101 and 0102.

1. Why was the bankruptcy of the state the cause that decided when the Revolution came?

2. In what sense did the Revolution begin as a revolt of the privileged?

3. Why did doubling the Third Estate’s deputies settle nothing?

4. What did Cobban argue against the social interpretation of the Revolution?

5. How did Atıf Efendi explain the causes of the Revolution in 1798, and what does his explanation leave out?

6. From chapter 0101. What was Tocqueville’s paradox, and how does it help explain why the Revolution came in France?

7. From chapter 0102. Why did Hazen say that blaming the philosophers for the Revolution was “putting the cart before the horse”?