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The French Revolution (Causes (http://www.historydiscussion.net/world…

- - - - The Three Estates
        
        First Estate = Clergy
        
        They occupied the top position in society.
        
        They managed the churches, monasteries, and educational institutions of France.
        
        Subdivided into the Upper Clergy and the Lower Clergy
        
        They did not pay any tax.
        
        The higher clergy lived in the midst of scandalous luxury and extravagance, so people hated them.
        
        The lower clergy served the people in true sense of the term and they lived a very miserable life
        
        Second Estate = Nobility
        
        They did not pay any tax.
        
        The Nobility was subdivided into the Court nobles and the provincial nobles
        
        The court nobles lived in pomp and luxury and did not pay any heed towards the problems of the common people of their areas.
        
        The provincial nobles paid attention to the problems of the people, but they did not enjoy the same privileges as the Court nobles enjoyed.
        
        Third Estate = heterogenous class
        
        Consisted of farmers, cobblers, sweepers and other lower classes.
        
        The condition of the farmers was very miserable.
        
        They paid the taxes like Taille, Tithe and Gable
        
        The Bourgeoisie formed the top of the third estate, and consisted of doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, writers and philosophers.
        
        They had wealth and social status, but the monarchy, influenced by the Nobility and Clergy, ranked them third estate.
        
        They heavily influenced the revolution, introducing people to their rights.
    - - During the reign period of Louis XVI, the royal treasury became empty due to the extravagant expenses of his queen Marie Antoinette
      - The economic instability formed one of the most important causes of the French Revolution.
      - Louis XVI appointed Turgot as his Finance Minister in 1774, who tried to minimise the expenditure of the royal court. He also advised the king to impose taxes on every classes of the society, but due to the interference of Queen Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI dismissed Turgot.
    - - Autocratic Monarchy
      - Under Louis XV, France became bankrupt due to over expenditure in wars (eg. the 7 years war) and luxuries
      - By the Letter de Catchet, the French Monarchy arrested any person at any time and imprisoned them
      - French monarchs had unlimited power over the people of France, and declared themselves "Representatives of God"
      - The French Monarchs engaged themselves in luxurious and extravagance at the royal court of Versailles
      - The French Monarchy paid no attention to their subjects
      - Louis XV's defective foreign policy weakened the economic condition of France.
  - - - The Enlightenment philosophy desacralized the authority of the monarchy and the Catholic Church, and promoted a new society based on reason instead of traditions.
      - Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2015).
        
        A growing number of the French citizenry had absorbed the ideas of "equality" and "freedom of the individual" as presented by Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and other philosophers and social theorists of the Age of Enlightenment.
      - R.R. Palmer, The age of the Democratic Revolution: a political history of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (2nd ed. 2014) pp. 177–213
        
        Contact between American revolutionaries and the French troops who served in North America helped spread revolutionary ideas to the French people.
        
        The American Revolution demonstrated that it was plausible for Enlightenment ideas about how a government should be organized to actually be put into practice.
    - - The population of France in the 1780s was about 26 million, of which 21 million lived in agriculture
      - Hunger was a daily problem which became critical in years of poor harvest and the condition of most French peasants was poor.
      - The fundamental issue of poverty was aggravated by social inequality as all peasants were liable to pay taxes, from which the nobility could claim immunity, and feudal dues were payable to a local seigneur or lord.
      - Similarly, the destination of tithes which the peasants were obliged to pay to their local churches was a cause of grievance as it was known that the majority of parish priests were poor and the contribution was being paid to an aristocratic, and usually absentee, abbot
      - The clergy numbered about 100,000 and yet they owned 10% of the land
      - Dislike of the nobility was especially intense - successive French kings and their ministers had tried with limited success to suppress the power of the nobles but, in the last quarter of the 18th century, "the aristocracy were beginning once again to tighten their hold on the machinery of government"
    - - "It is a truism that the French Revolution was touched off by the near bankruptcy of the state." - John Shovlin (2007). The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution
      - Kenneth N. Jassie, "We Don't Have a King: Popular Protest and the Image of the Illegitimate King in the Reign of Louis XV". Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850: Proceedings 1994 23: 211–19
        
        In order to finance the budget deficit, which amounted to 100 million livres in 1745, Machault d'Arnouville created a tax of 5% on all revenues (the vingtième), a measure that affected the privileged classes as well as the rest of the population. Still, expenditures outpaced revenues.
      - Stacy Schiff (2006). A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
        
        Before the revolution, the French debt had risen from 8 billion to 12 billion livres Tournois (currency)
        
        Heavy expenditures to conduct losing the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), and France's backing of the Americans in their War of Independence, ran the tab up an even further 1.3 billion livres.
      - On finance see William Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989)
        
        The war cost 1.066 million French livres, a huge sum, that was financed by new loans at high interest rates, but no new taxes were imposed.
        
        Necker concealed the crisis from the public by explaining only that ordinary revenues exceeded ordinary expenses, and by not mentioning the loans at all.
      - Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution
        
        France raised most of its tax revenue internally, with a notable deficit regarding external customs tariffs
      - In good times, the taxes were burdensome; in harsh times, they were devastating. After a less-than-fulsome harvest, people would starve to death during the winter
- - - - http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-Blackwell-Companion-to-Social-Movements-Edited-by-David-A.-Snow-Sarah-A.-Soule-and-Hanspeter-Kriesi.pdf#page=585