If the future Louis XVI absorbed in childhood his country's patriotic pride and prejudices, he absorbed as well its ethos of absolutism and social inequality. The due de Berri's preceptor, La Vauguyon, taught him to “know the whole extent both of your authority and of the obedience due to you from your subjects. … Uphold all the orders of the State and each of them in particular in its rights, properties, honors, distinctions, and privileges. … alter nothing … except after the most profound reflection and most scrupulous examination.” At thirteen or fourteen, the sovereign-to-be wrote that “there was no person more proper than himself … to manage his State, God having destined him, and no other, to that function.” Here, capsulated, was the philosophy of the world in which this prince, like his predecessors, was formed – a world that, tragically for him, was being steadily undermined by the converging geopolitical and sociopolitical requirements of the modern France.

In his imposing overview of the institutions of old regime France, Pierre Goubert has asserted: “The financial problem of the Ancien Regime is not really distinct from the problem of the State, which itself is hardly more distinct from that of society. These are three practically synonymous expressions of the same reality.” For analytical purposes, however, we will treat these three “problems” separately, acknowledging even as we do so that they are, indeed, very closely interrelated.