On 5 July 1788, the French government by decree invited “all Frenchmen, through provincial Estates or assemblies,” to signify their opinions “on the appropriate rules to be followed” in the convocation of the Estates General. In August, the crown effectively acknowledged its own “temporary” insolvency but assured its creditors that the impending session of the Estates, now formally set for 1 May 1789 at Versailles, would permanently secure their investments. Yet, by October 1789, both king and Estates General (the latter now renamed the National “Constituent” Assembly) would be taking up new, Parisian quarters in the midst of a full-fledged revolution. Over the intervening period, dramatic events had transpired; most symbolically potent of them, for sure, was the Parisians' seizure of the Bastille on 14 July 1789.

This much is uncontested; but why events unfolded the way they did remains as controversial as ever. Georges Lefebvre, in what was for a long time the standard account of the coming of the Revolution, suggested that Louis XVI's government was determined on the eve of the July Days of 1789 to dissolve the increasingly rebellious Estates General, rely henceforth upon the support of the parlements, and “resign itself to bankruptcy.” Yet such a hypothesis, viewed from our global-historical perspective, seems wildly unrealistic. In late 1788 and 1789, any French king would very likely have been impaled on the horns of a dilemma recalling to us that which had faced Charles I of England and anticipating that which would confront Nicholas II of Russia.