While the American Revolution is considered pretty non-hostile, the French Revolution is often seen as a bloody, anarchic mess. It was indeed pretty terrible. Also, like a lot of revolutions, in the end it exchanged an authoritarian regime for an authoritarian regime. But even if the revolution was a mess, its ideas changed human history far more than the American Revolution.
So France in the 18th century was a rich and populous country, but it had a systemic problem collecting taxes because of the way its society was structured. They had a system with kings and nobles we now call the Ancien Regime. For most people it was disadvantageous because the people with the money-the nobles and the clergy never paid taxes. So by 1789, France was deeply in debt thanks to their funding the American Revolution and king Louis XVI was spending half of his national budget to service the federal debt. Louis tried to reform this system under various finance ministers. He even called for democracy on a local level but all attempts failed and soon France basically declared bankruptcy. This nicely coincided with the hailstorms that ruined a year’s harvest, thereby raising food prices and causing widespread hunger, which made the people of France angry, because they love to eat.
Meanwhile, the king certainly did not look broke, as evidenced by his well-fed physique and fancy footwear. He and his wife Marie Antoinette also got to live in the very nice Palace at Versailles thanks to God’s mandate, but Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were challenging the whole idea of religion, writing things like: “The main point of enlightenment is of man’s release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion.” So basically the peasants were hungry, the intellectuals were beginning to wonder whether God could or should save the king, and the nobility were dithering about, eating foie gras and songbirds, failing to make meaningful financial reform. In response to the crisis, Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General, the closest thing France had to a national parliament which had not met since 1614. The Estates General was like a super parliament made up of representatives from the First Estate, the nobles, the Second Estate, the clergy and the Third Estate, everyone else. The Third Estate showed up with about 600 representatives, the First and Second Estates both had about 300, and after several votes, everything was deadlocked and then the Third Estate wanted to leave and become their own National Assembly.
This did not please King Louis XVI so when the new National Assembly left the room for a break, he locked the door and said they could not go in the room to assemble and so they could not make an assembly. Shockingly, the Third Estate representatives were able to find a different room in France, this time in an indoor tennis court where they swore the famous Tennis Court Oath. And they agreed not to give up until a French constitution was established. So then Louis XVI responded by sending troops to Paris primarily to quell uprisings over food shortages but the revolutionaries saw this as a provocation, so they responded by seizing the Bastille Prison on July 14th, which is also Bastille Day.
Transcripted By Benazir Elahee Munni