France in 1789 was not a poor country, but it was a broke and badly governed one, run by a king who could not pay his debts and a tax system that exempted the people best able to pay them. When bread prices spiked and the king dismissed a popular reformist minister, the pressure that had been building for years erupted — first in the meeting halls of Versailles, then, on July 14, 1789, in the streets of Paris.

A Kingdom Drowning in Debt

By the 1780s, the French crown was effectively bankrupt, having spent enormous sums propping up the American Revolution against Britain on top of decades of lavish royal spending under King Louis XVI and his predecessors. Successive finance ministers proposed reforms, including a universal land tax that would have applied even to the nobility and clergy, who had long been exempt from most taxation. The aristocracy blocked those reforms, leaving the ordinary tax base — already strained — to keep absorbing the cost. Poor harvests in the mid-1780s then sent bread prices soaring; by 1789, the poorest French families were spending as much as 80 percent of their income on bread alone.

A Society Divided Into Three Estates

French society was legally divided into three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate, which encompassed everyone else — roughly 98 percent of the population, from wealthy merchants to peasant farmers. Despite representing nearly the entire country, the Third Estate held no more voting power in national assemblies than either of the other two estates combined, since votes were traditionally counted by estate rather than by individual. That imbalance, paired with growing exposure to Enlightenment ideas about individual rights and representative government, left the Third Estate increasingly unwilling to accept a system that taxed it hardest while granting it the least say.

The Estates-General Breaks Down

Desperate for new revenue, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General — a national assembly of all three estates — on May 5, 1789, the first time it had convened since 1614. Disputes immediately erupted over voting procedure. When the king refused to allow voting by individual head rather than by estate, delegates of the Third Estate broke away entirely: on June 17, 1789, they declared themselves the National Assembly, asserting they alone represented the will of the French people. Three days later, on June 20, locked out of their usual meeting hall, they gathered on a nearby tennis court and swore the Tennis Court Oath, pledging not to disband until France had a written constitution.

July 14, 1789: The Bastille Falls

Alarmed by the king’s response — he had massed roughly 30,000 troops around Paris and, on July 11, dismissed the popular reformist finance minister Jacques Necker — Parisians feared a royal crackdown was coming. Riots broke out, and crowds began seizing weapons, first raiding the Hôtel des Invalides for muskets and then, on July 14, marching on the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison, in search of gunpowder. After tense negotiations broke down and shots were fired, the crowd, joined by mutinous soldiers from the French Guard, forced the fortress’s surrender. The Bastille itself held only seven prisoners, but its fall showed that royal authority could be broken by force, and it forced the king to recall Necker and withdraw his troops.

The Revolution Accelerates

Momentum built quickly after the Bastille’s fall. On August 4, 1789, the National Assembly voted to abolish the feudal privileges of the nobility and clergy, dismantling centuries of legal inequality in a single session. Later that month, the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, enshrining principles of liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty that would echo far beyond France. The monarchy itself would survive only a few more years: Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, as the Revolution moved into its more radical and violent phase.