The Problems of Europe's Greatest Monarchy

In the year 1786, Louis XVI, King of France, ruled over the most powerful monarchy in Europe, yet he faced several serious problems.

First, he was bankrupt. In the 17th century, King Louis XIV of France had developed an absolute monarchy, meaning that he could rule without seeking the consent of clergy, nobles or commoners. However, after Louis died in 1715, nobles gradually regained their traditional power of approving, through law courts known as Parlements, any new taxes the King sought to levy.

From 1715 through the 1780s, these Parlements resisted almost all new taxes, even as royal expenditures increased due to fighting wars such as the Seven Years War. So the king had to borrow money, and by the year 1786, France was effectively bankrupt. In response, he proposed not only new taxes but reforms to the tax-collecting system that would have eliminated many of royal offices that were held by nobles and wealthy commoners.

Next, his place as God's sacred representative in France was under question. Under the "Divine Right" theory of monarchy, the King was believed to have been given special powers by God, including the power to cure a certain, rare and painful skin disease, called scrofula. Each year, at Easter, poor people who suffered from scrofula would gather at the King's palace at Versailles to receive the "royal touch" and be cured by the King. However, over the course of the eighteenth century, due largely to new Enlightenment ideas about medicine, the King of France had stopped giving the "royal touch". The result was that people, over the course of several generations, ceased to think of him as God's sacred representative in France.

There was also the problem of his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette. She was from the Austrian royal family, the Habsburgs, who were the traditional enemies of France, so she was widely distrusted in France. Moreover, her reputation suffered from the publication of pornographic pamphlets attacking the Queen as a sexual monster who had debauched the King and prevented him from paying enough attention to ruling his people.