French Money printing and deficit spending 1790 comes to mind
A couple other takes:
...As a historian of the French Revolution, I cannot help but think of the impending state bankruptcy that pushed France into crisis in the late 1780s. In terms of “economic fundamentals,” prerevolutionary France was in good shape: It had Europe’s biggest population, thriving agricultural and manufacturing sectors, and an effective tax rate well below that of Great Britain. Nonetheless, decades of conflict over the size and purpose of its central government meant that disputes over budget deficits and national debt dominated French public debate. For years, the monarchy had endeavored to tax the super-wealthy; in response, many aristocrats, traditionally exempt from paying the head tax levied on commoners, decried those efforts as tyranny. Claiming to speak for France as a whole, members of a tiny and extremely privileged elite stymied all plans to tax their wealth—and did so in a way that rallied public opinion to their cause. Who else would defend the rights of the French nation against the encroachments and greed of expanding Big Government?
Norman noblemen and Paris magistrates were, we could say, the Koch Brothers of their day: bent on conserving their own position by fueling grassroots populism. Their successful depiction of the monarchy’s budget crisis as a result of its own opulence—even today, don’t we imagine that France’s money was spent on Marie Antoinette’s dresses and cakes?—made state finances into a moral, rather than political, issue. Like so many in the United States today, these critics of the centralizing monarchy couched political arguments in what looked like financial or budgetary terms. None of these self-interested aristocrats intended to start a revolution. .....
theatlantic.com
...While idealism was a factor, the main problem was a more pragmatic one. A financial system, so convoluted, so poorly managed, and so skewed in favor of the rich it could make Wall Street shudder — though Wall Street was only founded three years after the revolution began.
Poor FoundationsThe French Revolution officially started in 1789, but the economic crisis had been brewing long before that. France had been lagging...
medium.com@amberbrambell/the-real-french-revolution-financial-shams-politcking-e2c297f2bce6 |
