The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny
by Ian Davidson (Profile, £25)
In January 1789, King Louis XVI of France, on advice from his ministers but with no support from his courtiers and outright opposition from his Austrian wife, launched what we would now call an exercise in market research. In August the previous year, he had called a meeting at Versailles of that obsolete institution the États Généraux (Estates General) in the faint hope that they could agree a solution to France’s immediate problem: the crisis in the public finances. The crisis had been the result of France’s inefficient and unfair tax system, several years of failed harvests and the costs of her participation in the Seven Years’ War with Britain (1756-63), and the American Revolutionary War (1778-83). In addition, France had a weak monarch and a corrupt privy council with no stomach for the corrective measures proposed by successive finance ministers.