Identify the political, social, and economic causes of the French Revolution and trace events from the Estates-General through the fall of the monarchy, 1789-1792.
Eighteenth-century France was still legally divided into three estates: the First Estate (clergy) and Second Estate (nobility) held most wealth and privilege and paid almost no tax, while the Third Estate -- everyone else, roughly 97 percent of the population -- paid nearly all of it. By the 1780s the French crown was effectively bankrupt, drained by decades of war and by King Louis XVI's own government having helped fund the American Revolution against Britain. A run of bad harvests in 1788 sent bread prices soaring just as Enlightenment ideas about natural rights and consent-based government were circulating more widely than ever, and America's recent example proved a revolution against a king could actually succeed.
Desperate for new tax revenue, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General in May 1789 for the first time since 1614. When the three estates deadlocked over voting rules that let the privileged two estates outvote the Third every time, Third Estate delegates broke away, declared themselves the National Assembly, and swore the Tennis Court Oath on June 20, 1789, vowing not to disband until France had a constitution. On July 14, 1789, Parisians stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress-prison, in search of weapons -- an event now celebrated as Bastille Day and remembered as the Revolution's symbolic birth. In August 1789 the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and in June 1791 Louis XVI was caught trying to flee France in disguise (the Flight to Varennes), a humiliation that shattered what little trust remained between king and nation even after France adopted a constitutional monarchy that same year.
Mastery looks like: They can explain at least two distinct causes of the French Revolution (social/tax inequality and fiscal crisis) and place the Estates-General, the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Flight to Varennes in correct order.
Common stumbles: Reducing the French Revolution's causes to "the people were angry," instead of naming the specific structural inequality and fiscal crisis that made 1789 different from any other hard year.