Transcript of Political Causes of the the French Revolution. They had an absolute monarchy, and most people were denied basic rights. Their King and Queen cared only for themselves.
In general terms, there were several factors that influenced the Revolution:
a monarchical regime that would succumb to its own rigidity in the context of a changing world, and that, after several attempts to adopt measures to tackle the political and economic crisis, capitulated before the violent reaction of the nobility and some provincial parliaments as the of Grenoble (Jornada de las Tejas);
an aristocracy (the nobility and the high clergy) clinging to their feudal privileges, which blocked all the structural reforms (of Machault, Maupeou, Turgot) that were tried to be implanted from the Court;
the rise of a bourgeois class born centuries ago, that had reached a great power in the economic field and that now began to advocate the politician. Its wealth and its culture had raised it to the first position in the society, position that was in contradiction with the existence of the privileged estates, nobility and clergy;
the exasperation of the urban popular classes and the peasantry, impoverished by the rise in prices-in particular, of cereals and bread, the basis of food-and by the continuous increase in taxes and seigneurial and royal rights. The tithe charged by the clergy hardly served to maintain the cult and help the poor. The peasantry also answered the origin of the property rights and feudal servitudes (collected in the so-called "books terriers"), which seemed abusive and unjust;
the expansion of new enlightened ideas;
the economic regression and the cyclical agricultural crises (the one that broke out in 1788 was the most violent of all the XVIII century), aggravated by the bad harvests in the years that preceded the Revolution;
the financial bankruptcy caused by the vices of the fiscal system, the bad perception and the inequality of the taxes, the expenses of the Court, the costs of the wars, and by the serious financier problems caused by the military support to the war of Independence of the United States. This military intervention would become a double-edged sword, because, despite winning the war against Britain France and thus recover from the previous defeat in the Seven Years' War, the farm was bankrupt and with a significant external debt. The fiscal problems of the monarchy, together with the example of democracy of the new emancipated State precipitated the events.
