ABSTRACT
The last crisis experienced by the ancien régime was essentially man-made, then. Indeed, it was triggered in large measure by the needsand actions of the monarchy. If the Bourbons had avoided foreign policy entanglements which required heavy war expenditures, it is possible that the budgetary problem could have been managed within existing structures. But it was not to be, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s dictum which holds that the most dangerous moment for an authoritarian government occurs when it embarks on reform was framed precisely to accommodate the situation in which France now found herself (1969, Headlam edn: 182). Yet no one knew that the country’s governing system was in its death throes at the start of 1787. A few commentators reached for the word ‘revolution’ in order to describe what was happening as early as the autumn of that year, but they used the term imprecisely and with little sense of what it might mean. In his travel journal, Arthur Young recorded much dinner-table wisdom, including the opinion expressed on 17 October that France stood on the threshold ‘of some great revolution in the government’ (Young, Betham-Edwards edn, 1900: 97). But ‘revolution’ – in this context – can be taken as the superlative of ‘reform’. Even as late as the spring of 1789, the majority of thinking men and women had little inkling of what lay in store. This chapter lays out the sequence of events that led from reform to revolution. It explains why reform from above failed to win sufficient support in the country at large, and how this failure helped to unleash forces that would cause the ancien régime to fall to pieces within a short span of time.
