There is significant disagreement among historians of the French Revolution as to its causes. Usually, they acknowledge the presence of several interlinked factors, but vary in the weight they attribute to each one. These factors include cultural changes, normally associated with the Enlightenment; social change and financial and economic difficulties; and the political actions of the involved parties. For centuries, French society was divided into three estates or orders. The first estate, the highest class, consisted of the clergy. The second estate consisted of the nobility. The third estate consisted of the commoners. It included businessmen, merchants, court officials, lawyers, peasants, landless labourers and servants. The first two estates together consisted of 2% of the population, whereas the third estate was the remaining 98%. All of the many types of taxes were paid by the third estate. The society was based on the old French maxim "The nobles fight; the clergy pray, and the people pay".
Beyond these relatively established facts about the social conditions surrounding the French Revolution, there is significant dissent among historians. Marxist historians, such as Lefebvre and Soboul, see the social tensions described here as the main cause of the revolution, as the Estates-General allowed them to manifest into tangible political action; the bourgeoisie and the lower classes were grouped into the third estate, allowing them to jointly oppose the establishment. Others see these social issues as important, but less so than the Enlightenment or the financial crisis; François Furet is a prominent proponent of the former, Simon Schama of the latter.
Political background
Prior to the revolution, France was a de jure absolute monarchy, a system that became known as the Ancien Régime. In practice, the power of the monarchy was typically checked by the nobility, the Roman Catholic Church, institutions such as the judicial parlements, national and local customs and, above all, the threat of insurrection. Prior to 1789, the last severe threat to the monarchy was the Fronde civil wars from 1648 to 1653 during the minority of Louis XIV. Although the earlier reign of Louis XIII had already seen a move towards centralization of the country,Collins, p. 1—although Collin does note that this can be exaggerated. the adulthood of Louis XIV marked the peak of the French monarchy's power. His tactics for bringing the nobility under control included inviting them to stay at his extravagant Palace of Versailles and participate in elaborate court rituals with a detailed code of etiquette.Sources of Making of the West, People and Cultures, Vol. 2, Since 1340Bluche, 1986, 1991; Bendix, 1978; Solnon, 1987.
Some scholars have argued that Louis XIV contributed to the monarchy's downfall by failing to reform the government's institutions while the monarchy was still secure. Others, including François Bluche, argue that Louis XIV cannot be held responsible for problems that would emerge over 70 years after his death.
His successor Louis XV was less interested in governingRobert D. Harris, "Review", American Historical Review, (1987) 92#2, p. 426, and his reign saw a decline in the power of the monarchy.Ford, Franklin L. Robe & Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Historians generally describe his reign as a period of stagnation, foreign policy setbacks, and growing popular discontent against the monarchy.Kenneth N. Jassie and Jeffrey Merrick, "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: 211–219. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Ancien Régime: A History of France, 1610–1774 (1998), pp. 320–23.Jones, Colin. The Great Nation: France from Louis XIV to Napoleon (1715–1799) (2002) pp. 124, 132–33, 147. His affairs with a succession of mistresses also damaged its reputation.Jeffrey Merrick, "Politics in the Pulpit: Ecclesiastical Discourse on the Death of Louis XV", History of European Ideas 1986, 7(2): 149–160.
During the reign of Louis XVI, the power and prestige of the monarchy had declined to the point where the king struggled to overcome aristocratic resistance to fiscal reform, with the parlements often being focal points for this resistance. The parlements were regional courts of appeal that had the de facto power to block the implementation of legislation in their respective provinces. They were each dominated by the regional nobility. The power of the parlements had been curtailed by Louis XIV, but mostly reinstated during the minority of Louis XV. In 1770, Louis XV and René de Maupeou again curtailed the power of the parlements, except for the Parlement of Paris,Antoine (1989) pages 931–934 the one that was the most powerful. Louis XVI reinstated them early in his reign.Hardman, John. Louis XVI, The Silent King. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. pp. 37–39. Alfred Cobban describes the Parlement of Paris as "though no more in fact than a small, selfish, proud and venal oligarchy, [it] regarded itself, and was regarded by public opinion, as the guardian of the constitutional liberties of France." see also Cobban, "The parlements of France in the eighteenth century." History (1950) 35#123 pp 64–80.
Having already obstructed tax reform proposals during the reign of Louis XV, the parlements would play a major role in obstructing Louis XVI's attempts to resolve the debt crisis. Traditionally, a king could quell a recalcitrant parlement by conducting a lit de justice ceremony, in which he would appear there in person to demand that they register an edict. However, by 1787, Louis XVI could not get this tactic to work. The parlements enjoyed wider support from the commoners, who appreciated their role as a check on royal power. This placed Louis XVI at a disadvantage when he attempted to coerce and then suppress them in 1787–88.
By 1789, Louis XVI struggled to maintain power, and early French revolutionaries from the Third Estate began to rebel. The milices bourgeois was a military force formed in France by the middle class, made to maintain order and define the lower classes from the privileged nobility. In the years leading up to the French Revolution, this militia had been reduced by government and nobility to auxiliary status. This reduction led to an increase in military members that the Third Estate appointed, and a decrease in middle and lower class representation. When these political changes were being made by the Second Estate, which consisted of French nobility, they began to acknowledge much of Louis XVI's faults.
Encyclopædia Britannica cites Prussia as an example of a European state where a strong monarchy succeeded in preventing revolution and preserving its power through reforms from above. Conversely, the lack of a constitutional monarchy meant that the French monarch was a target for any popular discontent against the government. Traditionally, this was tempered because there was an aversion to direct criticism and disrespect towards the king (lèse-majesté), but by the start of Louis XVI's reign, respect for the monarchy had declined. In his study of the libelle pamphlets and books, Robert Darnton noted that libelles during the reign of Louis XIV tended to direct their criticism towards individual figures like Cardinal Mazarin and even those that criticized the king's actions directly still had a respectful tone. During the reign of Louis XV, libelles became willing to bluntly criticize both the king and the entire system of the Ancien Régime.Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, 1995, p.213.
Social background
Throughout the early modern period a class of wealthy middlemen who connected producers emerged: the bourgeoisie. These bourgeoisie played a fundamental role in the French economy, accounting for 39.1% of national income despite only accounting for 7.7% of the population. Under the Ancien Régime they were part of the Third Estate, as they were neither clergymen (the First Estate) nor nobles (the Second Estate). Given their powerful economic position and their aspirations on a class-wide level, the bourgeois wanted to ascend through the social hierarchy, formalised in the Estate system. This is reflected by cahiers submitted by members of the Third Estate in March to April 1789: those of Carcassonne demanded that Louis "assure to the third estate the influence to which it is entitled in view of...its contribution to the public treasury". This desire for higher social position resulted in high levels of bourgeois entry into the Second Estate throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was enabled by several factors. The poverty of many noble families meant that they married bourgeois families; the nobles gained bourgeois wealth, while the bourgeoisie gained noble status. Moreover, corruption was rife, with many bourgeoisie simply attaching the noble particle 'de' to their name or assuming nonexistent titles. Investigations into this behaviour were stopped in 1727. Furthermore, many governmental offices and positions were sold to raise cash. The bourgeoisie bought these positions and hence were ennobled; by 1765, six thousand families had gained nobility through this method. Such entryism resulted in significant social tension as the nobles were angered that these bourgeoisie were entering their ranks (despite often having been bourgeois themselves one or two generations previously) while the bourgeoisie were angered that the nobles were trying to prevent them ascending and being disdainful when they did ascend. As such, there was significant social tension between the dominant classes at the time of the French Revolution.
Cultural change
There are two main points of view with regard to cultural change as a cause of the French Revolution: the direct influence of Enlightenment ideas on French citizens, meaning that they valued the ideas of liberty and equality discussed by Rousseau and Voltaire et al, or the indirect influence of the Enlightenment insofar as it created a "philosophical society". The Enlightenment ideas were particularly popularised by the influence of the American War of Independence on the soldiers who returned, and of Benjamin Franklin himself, who was a highly dynamic and engaging figure in the French court when he visited.R.R. Palmer, The Revolution: a political history of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (2nd ed. 2014) pp. 177–213 The French publication of Locke's Treatises in 1724 also played an important role in influencing both pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary ideology. He has been considered an ideological "father" of the revolution.