Reasond of french revolution og class 9th ncert
Answers
Financial Causes
1. Long years of war had drained the financial resources of France.
2. Added it this was the cost of maintaining an extravagant court at the immense palace of Versailles.
3. Under Louis XVI, France helped the thirteen American colonies gain their independence from the common enemy, Britain.
4. The war added more than a billion livres to a debt that had already risen to more than 2 billion livres.
5. Lenders who gave the state credit, now began to charge 10 per cent on loans. So, he French government was obliged to spend an increasing percentage of its budget on interest payments alone.
Social causes
1. The members of the first two estates, i.e., the clergy and the nobility, enjoyed certain privileges by birth.
2. The most important of these was exemption from paying taxes to the state.
3. The nobles further enjoyed feudal privileges. These included feudal dues, which they extracted from the peasants.
4. The Church too extracted its share of taxes called tithes from the peasants.
5. Peasants had to pay a direct tax, called taille, and a number of indirect taxes which were levied on articles of everyday consumption like salt or tobacco.
6. The burden of financing activities of the state through taxes was borne by the third estate alone.
Economic causes
1. The population of France rose from about 25 million in 1715 to 28 million in 1789.
2. This led to a rapid increase in the demand for food grains.
3. Production of grains could not keep pace with the demand. So the price of bread which was the staple diet of the majority rose rapidly.
4. But wages did not keep pace with the rise in prices. So the gap between the poor and the rich widened.
5. Things become worse whenever drought or hail reduced the harvest. This led to a subsistence crisis.
— Hope this helps! Please leave a “thanks” and mark this as the “brainliest answer” if it did. Cheers! :)