The storming of the Bastille this week (July 14) in 1788 heralded the French Revolution, but why did the French people rebel against King Louis XVI, an inoffensive, even well-meaning member of the Bourbon dynasty that had ruled France for more than two centuries?
Several reasons, but, ironically, the main reason was France’s decision to aid the United States in its rebellion against Great Britain in 1776. A long-standing enemy of Britain, France finally decided to support the Americans with military aid after they defeated the British at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.
Alas, French support of the American Revolution proved to be very expensive, costing more than 1 billion livres, most of which France borrowed because the French government feared increasing the tax burden of the French people, which, thanks to the numerous tax breaks and exemptions enjoyed by the French clergy and nobility, fell mostly on the common people. The resulting huge budget deficit, which contributed to an economic downturn that lasted into the late 1780s, angered millions of those common people.
And then came the spark that lit the revolution’s fire, a series of bad harvests in 1787 and 1788 that resulted in food shortages and massive inflation. Food riots led to the storming of the Bastille.
The Enlightenment, then in its heyday, also profoundly affected the French Revolution, because the French people became obsessed with its principles of individual liberty, equal rights for all, and government based on reason and practical experience rather than on religious rituals and ancient monarchical traditions. As a result, French citizens began studying America’s successful revolution and its subsequent experiments in republican self government and citizen empowerment. Unsurprisingly, those same French citizens couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between the constitutional republic the Americans were fashioning, which guaranteed liberty to all, and the despotism, class distinctions and favoritism of the traditional monarchy that ruled them.
That stark contrast, coupled with the dire economy, soon led to the abolishment of the French monarchy, the death by guillotine of Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, and the end of the 237-year-old Bourbon dynasty.
Of course, the French Revolution degenerated into a chaotic bloodbath, but talk about irony. Thinking that it would weaken its great enemy, Britain, while solidifying its own position in the balance-of-power struggles that then dominated Europe, the longest-lasting, most conservative, most anti-republican monarchy in Europe bankrupted itself financially in order to ally with, and help make possible, the most liberal republican government in the world. More than anything, it was those liberal republican principles, pioneered in America but becoming increasingly popular in a destitute France, that spelled doom for that conservative, anti-republican monarchy.
