ABSTRACT
One may hypothesise that if the Bourbon monarchy had successfully modernised its society and government then it might have sustained the cost of being a world power in the late eighteenth century: after all, the Third French Republic was to create an overseas empire second only to that of Britain a century later. But it did not, and this failure in foreign and domestic policy, allied to the accident of poor harvests, helps to explain the timing of the French Revolution in 1789.
