awkward policies of louis XVI
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Louis XVI’s policy of not raising taxes and taking out international loans, including to fund the American Revolution, increased France’s debt, setting in motion the French Revolution. By the mid-1780s the country was near bankruptcy, which forced the king to support radical fiscal reforms not favorable with the nobles or the people.
When the pressure mounted, Louis XVI reverted to his earlier teaching of being austere and uncommunicative, posing no solution to the problem and not responding to others who offered help. By 1789 the situation was deteriorating rapidly.
In May of 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates General to address the fiscal crisis, an advisory assembly of different estates or socio-economic classes (the clergy, the nobility and the commoners). The meeting did not go well. By June, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly, aligned with the bourgeoisie, and set out to develop a constitution.
Initially, Louis XVI resisted, declared the Assembly null and void and called out the army to restore order. Public dissension grew, and a National Guard formed to resist the King's actions. By July 1789, he was forced to acknowledge the National Assembly's authority.
On July 14, riots broke out in Paris and crowds stormed the Bastille prison in a show of defiance toward the King.
For a time, it seemed that Louis XVI could mollify the masses by saying that he would acquiesce to their demands. However he accepted bad advice from the nobility's hard-line conservatives and his wife, Marie Antoinette. He talked of reform but resisted demands for it.
The royal family was forcibly transferred from Versailles to Paris on October 6, 1789. Louis ignored advice from advisors and refused to abdicate his responsibilities as king of France, agreeing to a disastrous attempt to escape to the eastern frontier in June 1791. He and his family were brought back to Paris, and he lost all credibility as a monarch.