In addition to this, the monarch exercised complete power in France; France was an autocracy. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the will of the sovereign was law (``The thing is legal because I wish it'' - Louis XVI). Critics of the government could be arrested via a royal writ (a lettre de cachet) without trial. Earlier on, the French provinces (états) were each represented by their own parliament, but these had declined by the 18th century. The States-General (which bore a closer resemblance to England's parliament) had not been called since 1614. Lastly, the parliament of Paris, which registered the King's edicts, was the only body left that could have opposed the King, but by the 19th century had no real power to reject the edicts.
Another long-term cause was the growth in nationalism that had occurred as a result of the Enlightenment (nationalism being, in this case, a belief that the nation should be the focus of the state, rather than any mutated 20th century meanings of the word). Central to the Enlightenment was reason: it encouraged criticism, and freedom of thought, speech and religion, and was seen as the end of man's self-imposed irrationality at the hands of the Church in particular. However, once religion was discredited, and the notion of the ``divinely-appointed'' monarch discredited with it, people became increasingly dissatisfied with the government, which before was held in place by its association with God. Nationalism had existed previously to the Enlightenment, but before it had been tied in with religion and the monarch; now people wanted to cut it free from those discredited notions, and this resulted in a much more powerful fanaticism, one that was revolutionary rather than conservative. Nationalism's revolutionary and anti-monarchic natures in this state are what contributed to the French Revolution. Conor Cruise O'Brien sums it up: ``The philosophers hoped to rid the world of fanaticism, but what they actually seem to have done is to have provided fanaticism with a new deity...There was a yawning emotional void, left by the discredited notions of God and king. And the idea of the nation, la patrie, was beginning to fill this void.
In the medium term, the bankruptcy of the French Crown contributed a lot to the causes of the French Revolution. By the late 18th century, half of the royal income was being spent on the interest alone for the huge debts it had built up; the French court spent one twelfth of government revenue; tax collection was very expensive due to the bonuses paid to tax collectors; most of the French Empire was lost in the Seven Years War (the war cost money, and France lost out on taxes); and Louis XVI joined in the American War of Independence, which also cost money. So, by the 1780s, the Crown desperately needed money just to pay off its debts. To do this, taxes would have to be raised, which would naturally be unpopular with the third estate who would bear the burden as usual, so the King and his finance minister decided to call the States-General for the first time in 175 years in an effort to solve the problem.
Another problem lay with the person, the King, Louis XVI, himself. He was not a strong man, and was more interested in hunting than politics. He was largely under the influence of his wife, Marie Antoinette, who, although strong-minded, failed to grasp the political situation of the time. She was also Austrian, and so, given the nationalistic mood of the day, this probably did not make her very popular.
Louis XVI's handling of the States-General when it met in May 1789 contributed towards the start of the Revolution. The King wanted to make reform difficult by making the three estates meet separately, in the hope that the first and second estates would vote the third down. However, he had not judged the mood of the representatives, and this backfired: opposition to the King grew, the third estate refused to act separately, and the clergy changed sides, changing the balance of power. In an act that would have angered the second and third estates' representatives, Louis then closed the meeting halls. He later had to agree to a constitution when the third estate representatives occupied the royal tennis courts. The King had lost considerably more political ground than if he had just listened to the grievances of the middle classes and the third estate right from the start, and opinion had turned against him.
Also in the medium term was the rise in prices that had occurred before the Revolution, with no corresponding rise in wages, which meant an obvious increase in the cost of living. This caused widespread poverty at the bottom of society, ie. The third estate, and to some extend in the second estate, who were not necessarily rich.
This was compounded by bad weather in 1788, which ruined harvests and resulted in famine. In 1789 this was repeated, with a severe winter making things worse. The frozen rivers affected trade, causing unemployment, which led to mobs of the unemployed forming in the cities during winter. A crucial event came on 14th July 1789, when there was an uprising of the Paris mobs, who stormed the Bastille, a royal prison and symbol of royal despotism. This event was a result of the economic conditions (caused by both weather and taxes) and the anti-monarchic mood at the time, and was one of the first revolts in the French Revolution as a whole.
The French Revolution was by no means inevitable. If Louis XVI had listened to the States-General and the mood of the middle classes and peasants, and made some concessions, he would probably have remained as a constitutional monarch without the loss of too much power. However, this is not what he did. The main underlying cause of the French Revolution was the combination of the autocratic Ancien Régime with the influence of the philosophers and the Enlightenment. The two could not co-exist, and the new nationalism would not go away; therefore the only option was for the people to be granted some sovereignty. The economic conditions of the day and the American example merely accelerated the start of the Revolution; no government can govern perfectly forever, so at some point there would probably have been objections to the autocracy, and an uprising. So instead, the French Revolution was made inevitable through the continued denial of sovereignty from the people by the French monarchy, and in the short term, by King Louis XVI.
