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Unlock This CourseFrance was one of the richest kingdoms in Europe, yet by the 1780s its government was close to ruin. Money was counted in livres, and every year the king spent many millions more than he collected. There were three main reasons.
Key terms:
France fought three long wars between 1740 and 1783. It lost the Seven Years' War (1756-63) and was left with heavy debts. Then came the American War of Independence (1778-83). France was on the winning side, but the war cost over 1,000 million livres. Almost all of it was borrowed.
The people best able to pay, the clergy and nobles, paid little or nothing, so the load fell on those with least. Taxes also changed from one province to the next. Worst of all was tax farming. The tax farmers, called the Farmers-General, grew rich, and much of what people paid never reached the king.
The court at Versailles, with its thousands of servants, feasts and generous pensions for favourite nobles, cost many millions of livres a year. It was only around 6 per cent of royal spending, far less than the debt. But it was the spending everyone could see, so it caused the most anger.
Each loan had to be repaid with interest. To pay the interest, the government borrowed again, and the debt grew like a snowball rolling downhill.
The only real cure was to tax the wealth of the privileged Estates. That meant an attack on privilege itself, which nobles and the parlements were sure to resist. So the money problem could not be solved without changing how France was run. This is why finance matters so much as a cause of the Revolution.
Jacques Necker was a rich Swiss banker from Geneva. Louis XVI put him in charge of France's finances in 1777. As a foreigner and a Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, he was not given the full title of minister or a seat on the royal council.
Necker paid for the American war almost entirely with loans, and brought in no new taxes. He also cut some costly posts in the royal household and tried to limit tax farming.
This made him very popular. France seemed to be fighting a war for free. But the loans carried high interest, so he was piling up debt for the ministers who came after him.
In February 1781 Necker published the Compte rendu au roi (Report to the King). For the first time, the royal accounts were open for the public to read. It sold in huge numbers.
It claimed the king had 10 million livres to spare each year. This was misleading, because it left out the cost of the war. It also showed how much the king spent on pensions for courtiers, which shocked readers and made Necker enemies at court.
In May 1781 Necker asked for a seat on the royal council. Louis refused, and Necker resigned.
Why it mattered:
Most French people lived on bread. A town worker normally spent about half of his wages on it. France's farming was old-fashioned and produced little spare grain, so one wet summer or hard winter was enough to cause a shortage.
Harvests failed several times in the 1770s and 1780s. Each time, the same chain of events followed:
Why it mattered: hunger turned millions of ordinary people, who had never read a book by a philosophe, against the system. They blamed the king's government for failing to keep bread cheap, and nobles and merchants for hoarding grain.
You have now met all the long-term causes. Notice how they link together:
'The main long-term cause of the French Revolution was France's financial problems.'
How far do you agree? Explain your answer.
You may use the following in your answer:
You must also use information of your own. [16 marks]
I agree to a large extent. Financial problems were the cause that forced change, although they only became so dangerous because of other long-term causes.
Financial problems were a very important cause. Wars had left huge debts, and the American War of Independence alone cost over 1,000 million livres, almost all borrowed. Necker paid for it with loans instead of taxes, and his Compte rendu of 1781 hid the damage by claiming a surplus. By 1786 the deficit was over 100 million livres a year. The only cure was to tax the privileged, so the king had to try to reform the whole system. This shows that the debt made a crisis certain.
However, the Enlightenment was also important. Montesquieu argued that power should be divided, and Rousseau said government should rest on the will of the people. Educated nobles and the bourgeoisie read these ideas and stopped accepting absolute monarchy. This meant that when a crisis came, people did not just want lower taxes. They wanted a say in how France was governed. But ideas alone did not force the king to act. These books had been read for decades without a revolution.
A third cause was the unfair system of the Three Estates. The clergy and nobles were largely free from taxes such as the taille, while peasants paid taxes, tithes and feudal dues. This created deep resentment in the Third Estate. It also explains why the debt could not be paid, because the richest people were the least taxed. Poor harvests added to the anger. When bread prices rose, as in the Flour War of 1775, hungry people blamed the government.
Overall, financial problems were the main long-term cause, because they were the one problem the king could not ignore or delay. Resentment and new ideas had existed for many years, but it was the empty treasury that forced the monarchy to attempt reform and so opened the way to revolution. However, the debt came from an unfair tax system, so finance and privilege cannot be fully separated.
What lifts it to the top level: it covers three causes, including one that is not in the bullets, keeps linking each one back to the question, and reaches a judgement using a clear test: which cause forced change to happen.
An answer that uses only the two bullets cannot reach the top level. Always add a third cause of your own, such as the Three Estates or poor harvests here. In your conclusion, do not just repeat your points. Say which cause mattered most and give your test for choosing it.