On the eve of the July Days of 1789, Georges Lefebvre contended, the French court “certainly intended to dissolve” the Estates General. The court, in this view, could rely henceforward upon the support of the parlements and “resign itself to bankruptcy.” Yet such conjecture seems wildly unrealistic when we regard the onset of the Revolution from a global-historical perspective. Any French monarch in late 1788 and 1789, not only Louis XVI, would have been impaled on the horns of a dilemma fairly reminiscent of that which had faced Charles I of England and strikingly anticipatory of that which would confront Nicholas II of Russia. In each of these situations the sovereign was challenged by history, by the conventions of his own upbringing, and by contemporary events to maintain the international credibility of his state; and yet to do so, in each situation, required his endorsement of domestic reforms inimical to the public philosophy by which he and his ancestors had always lived! Cruel predicaments, for sure – and, in the French case, this was the ultimate challenge looming behind the developments that took the Bourbon polity from the threshold of revolution in August 1788 into the initial stages of revolution proper by the summer and autumn of 1789.

We can best analyze those developments under four headings: (1) the critical geopolitical context of the events of 1788–89, (2) the failure of the king to compromise with the patriotic and progressive notables, (3) the polarization within the “respectable” ranks of society, and (4) the upheaval of the urban and rural masses.