Did poverty in France cause the French Revolution?

Did poverty in France cause the French Revolution?

No because the poor rural classes supported the Monarchy and the Clergy. The French Revolution is a bourgeoisie revolution. It started with the question of taxation, where the third estate, represented by urban middle to upper classes, where they decided to form the National Assembly

Bullshit
The first spark of the revolution were caused by the poorest people in paris because they were starving.

>Did poverty in France cause the French Revolution?

If this were true then the more disastrous famines of the preceding century would have caused a French Revolution.
There are plenty of disputed reasons for the revolution, the initial spark was the impending default of the French government on its debt. The way taxation functioned in the old regime was very messy, and previous attempts to reform tax had been strongly opposed. France was a very wealthy nation, but it had very inefficient methods of converting this prosperity into wealth for the state.

A more important question, and I think it is one that a lot of people who do not know much about the period tend to miss, is what gave the French Revolution its unique character. A short and probably too simplistic answer would be enlightenment ideals and the desacralisation of the monarchy, which is what led to infamous pamphlets like 'What is the Third Estate?'

Another point is that the character of the French Revolution changed over time, only a very tiny minority of influential individuals wanted to remove the monarchy in 1789, the situation developed partially out of crisis and also because of Louis XVI's stupid flight to Varenne.

It's a myth that 'bad times' creates revolutions. America was extremely prosperous when it started its revolution, the Soviet Union was at its highest peak when the system collapsed, North Korea is an utter shithole but they don't revolt, etc.

Standard of living is a variable, but not the only variable.

So what did cause it? The failure of the monarchy to reform the tax code?

Good question, isn't it?

>the Soviet Union was at its highest peak when the system collapsed
in what sense, its empire was coming apart

No it was Adam Weisaupt.

>France was a very wealthy nation, but it had very inefficient methods of converting this prosperity into wealth for the state.

Do you have any sources or data on this?

Yes.

More or less

Same story throughout history really,

By in large people don't give a fuck who is ruling them.

Until they can't put bread (literally) on the table,

>the Soviet Union was at its highest peak when the system collapsed

Breadlines and empty shelves brought down the Soviet Union

I have no idea where one even gets the idea the Soviet economy was 'peaking'

The Soviet Union literally suffered through famines and property confiscation under Stalin and yet Stalin had a high approval rating as any. But I concede, maybe the 70s were the high point of the USSR when Oil prices were high. I was wrong.

No. France had countless and far worse famines before. The French revolution was a bourgeois uprising not a peasant uprising. What changed was the means to overthrow the government not the motivation.

It was also similar to the English Civil War, where the bourgeois backed the parliament against the nobility. Only the English nobility managed to survive the wrath of the upper middle class unlike their French counterparts.

The biggest cause of the French Revolution was *literally* that the National Assembly decided to tax the peasantry instead of the middle and upper classes to pay the debt France incurred by helping America in their Revolution.

Obviously it's not the only cause, but it's a pretty significant one.

It was a confluence of several different causes and pressures. From above, below, and everywhere in between.

brainlet here. Can someone explain to me how and why exactly ideas like Nationalism and socialism and proto-communism all came out of the french revolution, as well as the modern political usage of right and left wing?

I believe the right and left wing concept simply came from the fact that the 2 opposing ideologies sat on their respective sides of whichever building they assembled. Nationalism in short because it was the first time a state-polity was formed on the basis of a nation rather than the power of a monarchy in Europe.

Got Bonaparte and the States out of it so meh.

The upper classes, as is the case in all 19th century revolutions, merely hopped on the revolution bandwagon after the fact and used the chaos to better their own prospects by removing the established authority and replacing it with themselves.

Right and left-wing came from the National Assembly where the republicans sat on the left side and the monarchists sat on the right.

Also, the concept of nationalism wasn't really from after the French Revolution. It really started some 140 years before, with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia.

You don't make a revolution with poor people, with poor people you make riots and protesting in the streets, to evolve that form of useless anarchism into a concrete revolution you need an influential group of wealthy people to push the lever for it to kickstart and guide the movement towards the goal. That's what IQ lacking lefists of every countries in the world never understood and are still doing irrelevant protests on the streets to this day but nothing ever change consequently. Things will trully move when they'll be backed up by either an internal group of neo-bourgeois or by an external group of influential people that happens to want a change of regime, or simply make his way into the elite of the nation.

No a bankrupt state due to the nobility refusing to pay taxes and then trying to dump the responsibility on the middle class, at the time when the middle class had become super educated and were writing and reading works about liberal ideals and social contract caused the French Revolution.

Not really. The Revolution didn't start with the Bastille, hell the "Tennis Court Oath" occurred nearly a month before the Bastille, and those poor people who did it, were inspired, energized by the on-going reports of events in Versailles. Furthermore, the Revolution really started in 1787 when the assembly of Notables said, "nah to paying new taxes", this forced the King to call for the Estates General launching every thinking man into a frenzy on how Government should be change