The Crisis of the 1780s, The Aristocratic Revolt and the Origins of the Revolution
The 1780s saw a deepening of the fiscal crisis of the French monarchy. French involvement in the American war of independence may have assuaged the humiliations France had felt as a result of defeats in the previous decades. But the war had cost over one billion livres, more than twice the usual annual revenues of the state. As the royal state lurched into financial crisis after 1783, the changing economic and cultural structures of French society conditioned responses to Louis XVI’s pleas for assistance, Increasing costs of war, maintaining an expanding court and bureaucracy, and servicing a massive debt impelled the monarchy to seek ways of eroding noble taxation immunity and the capacity of parlements to resist royal decrees. The entrenched hostility of most nobles to fiscal and social reform were generated by two factors: the long-term pressures of absolutism which had reduced the autonomy of the nobility, and by challenges from a wealthier, larger and more critical bourgeoisie than had existed in the past and a more openly disaffected peasantry towards aristocratic conceptions of property, hierarchy and social order.
In the late 1770s Necker had ambitious plans to bypass the traditional channels of resistance to innovation by setting up provincial assemblies. These would have given the state direct access to non-venal representative bodies of the landowning classes which might be manipulated into fundamental tax reforms. But when Necker tried to pursue this agenda by publishing his compte rendu au roi, which claimed that finances were sound, he was dismissed for making public what was still treated as the king’s domain. Thereafter, serious attempts at reform were scarce. Nonetheless, facing imminent bankruptcy in 1786, that Calonne, the Comptroller General, was compelled to propose radical reforms. He proposed reforms in three parts: abolition of the existing vingtiemes...