What Caused The French Revolution Essay

There were many different causes that led to the French Revolution. There was an excessive monarchy, overspending of money being, a ton of debt, and rising taxes. The debt was caused from The Seven Years war where the French came out defeated, also from the generous spending during the American Revolution. France had an average amount of debt compared to other countries but “the problem lay with the inability of the royal government to tap the nation’s wealth through taxes to service and repay the debts” (pg. 551). Taxes began to get higher and the peasants had the highest load of taxes, making it almost impossible to pay them. They needed to be able to tax nobility higher rather than the peasants that way they could obtain money and pay off debt but, “as one royal minister after another attempted to devise new tax schemes that would tap into the wealth of the nobility, only to be confronted by opposition from both the Parlement of Paris and provincial Parlements” (pg. 551). These problems all were leading causes going up to the French Revolution. A major event during this time was the meeting of the Estates General. The Estates General consisted of three estates: “The First Estate was the clergy, the Second Estate was the nobility, and the Third Estate was all the other adult men in the kingdom” (pg. 553). Each Estate had one …show more content…
This dismissal led to the Third Estate believing that it was “an opening of a royal offensive against the National Constituent Assembly and the city” (pg. 556). This led to the start of the revolution where extremely large crowds stormed the Bastille. “Most of them small shoe keepers, tradespeople, artisans, and wage earners, marched to the Bastille to get weapons for the militia” (pg. 556). This act was the first of many to come in this revolution and it resulted in citizens declaring themselves as their own political