The French Revolution: How a financial crisis sparked a decade of upheaval

The French Revolution is one of the most significant events in modern history. As such, many historians date the start of the modern history period from the start of this event in 1789.

Many of the ideas and systems created during the revolution had long-term impacts on the creation of the contemporary world.

Simply put, the French Revolution changed France from a medieval kingdom ruled by a king into a modern democratic state with elected rulers in the space of just a few years. 

Ancient traditions, laws and cultural habits were rewritten many times.

In the decades before the revolution began, a number of factors had created unhappiness in the vast majority of the French population.

Most of this discontentment was due to unequal social structures that had remained unchanged from the Middle Ages.

The medieval feudal system, which had existed for almost a thousand years in Europe, divided society into broad groups.

The people with the most political and military power were actually the smallest group: the nobility.

This group included the king and royal family. The largest group, the commoners, had very little power.

However, between these two social groups was a third one: the wealthy commoners (often called the bourgeoisie), which included merchants, craftspeople, and lawyers.

As the importance of this group grew, the more they realised how little power they had, and they wanted to force the nobility to share it with them.

However, the royalty and nobility of France had been used to dominating power for a thousand years, and they refused to change a system that they were benefitting from, no matter how angry the commoners or bourgeoisie became.

The rest of French society realised that nothing would change unless the nobility were forced to do so.

What was needed was a crisis that meant that the powerful minority had to listen to the needs of the rest of the people. By chance, that crisis eventuated.

In the years before the revolution began, the kingdom of France was falling deeper into a financial crisis.

The French kings had spent an enormous amount of money supporting the American colonies to fight for separation from Britain during the American War of Independence.

Britain was the traditional enemy of France, and the French nobility were happy to spend their money to help the Americans hurt the British Empire.

Unfortunately, France did not have endless resources to both spend at home and abroad.

Soon, the spiralling costs of doing these two things at once emptied France's cash reserves. 

The current king, Louis XVI, had tried many potential solutions to save money.

Louis' director of finances, a man called Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, encouraged the king to summon an Assembly of Notables (which were members of the nobility and the church) in February 1787.

At this meeting, de Calonne proposed that one of the potential solutions to the financial crisis was to tax the nobility.

For the entirety of French history, one of the benefits of being a noble was that they were not required to pay taxes. This was not the case in other European countries.

In response to this idea, the nobility reacted angrily, and refused to accept it as an option. Instead, the taxes on the commoners were increased.

The commoners had been paying a lot taxes already, and a further increase angered them as well.

Unfortunately, since they had no political powers to stop this from happening, they had to pay the increased costs.

For many commoners, they now had barely enough money to survive.

Then, in 1788, environmental conditions caused many food crops across the country to fail.

For the grain that was harvested, farmers had to charge much higher prices to cover their own costs.

This meant that the cost of bread and food also increased. Ultimately, expensive food was now unaffordable for most peasants who had no money left over after the latest tax increases.

By the start of 1789, many French people were beginning to starve and talk of armed rebellion against the king was commonplace.

In desperation, Louis XVI called together a group of people in 1789 called the 'Estates General'.

The Estates General were made up of representatives of the three great social groups in French society: the church, the noble families, and the commoners.

By having these three groups together, Louis XVI hoped to quickly raise new taxes to fix his financial problems.

To oversee this assembly, King Louis appointed a new man, called Jacques Necker, as the new finance minister.

Necker announced that the Estates-General would meet on the 5th of May, 1789. Between January and April, a series of elections were held across France to decide who would represent the different 'estates' at the assembly.

In the end, 600 deputies represented the commoners (the Third Estate), 300 for the nobility, and 300 for the Church.

However, there was an inherent power imbalance in the Estates General. The commoners, known as the 'Third Estate, represented the vast majority of French society, but they were only allowed one-third of the vote.

The other two 'estates' (the church and the nobility) only represented a small, but wealthy, segment of French society, yet had two-thirds of the vote.

The Estates General finally met at the king's palace at Versailles on May 5, 1789.

The king opened the discussions and called for a quick decision to save France from financial collapse.

Almost instantly, fierce debates broke out about how unfair French society was. The Third Estate would not accept new taxes without first restructuring French society.

The other two estates would not hear of this, and discussions entered a deadlock.

Following this, on the 17th of June, representatives of the Third Estate created an entirely new political group, called the 'National Assembly', and refused to pay any further taxes.

The National Assembly made a promise to itself not to quit until the king gave in to their demands.

Since this promise was made on a tennis court, it is known as the 'Tennis Court Oath'.

King Louis realised that he had to accept this new group and once he did, the Assembly began writing up a new social system that got rid of the old system. 

They wrote a document with rules which the country of France had to follow, called a 'constitution' and created a second new political group called the 'Legislative Assembly'.

In 1792, a second stage of the revolution occurred. Two radical political groups, called the Jacobins and sansculottes, manipulated the Assembly into disbanding itself and creating a replacement group called the 'National Convention'.

It was at this stage that the French monarchy ceased to exist, and France was declared a republic. In the following year, in 1793, the French revolutionaries publicly executed the king.

The killing of a king outraged the rest of Europe, since every other country was a monarchy, and feared that similar revolutions might occur in their lands.

The European kings declared war on the French republic and subsequent battles were particularly fierce.

As it appeared that France was losing more battles than it was winning, many parts of France began revolting against the republican government.

To respond to growing unrest, the National Convention created something called the Committee of Public Safety, in 1793.

The Committee was given the task of protecting the revolution from internal and external threats so that the republic continued to survive.

Any French leaders or people who were deemed to be disloyal to the revolution were publicly executed by guillotine.

Unfortunately, the Committee became paranoid and saw many people as disloyal. A period known as 'The Terror' unfolded, where over 16,000 people were killed for not being sufficiently 'revolutionary'.

By 1794, it was clear that the killing was not having a positive effect and different political factions gained control in the government. The Terror was ended and its most notorious leader, Robespierre, was killed.

A new constitution was created in 1795, and a new form of government was created, with a group called the Directory, made up of five men, oversaw its operations.

However, these men manipulated each election, so they never lost their position of power.

That was until the rise of a popular French military general, called Napoleon Bonaparte, seized power under another new constitution in 1799.

Napoleon's new government gave power to three men, called 'consuls'. Napoleon gave himself the most important of these roles as the 'first consul'.

In 1804, Napoleon abandoned this system as well by crowning himself Emperor of France.

By doing so, he had essentially returned France back to the rule by a monarch. As a result, historians often consider this event to be the end of the French Revolution.