ted for centuries. some of the most progressive economic projects of the time, the big capitalist and industrial experiments, were financed and planned by old, rich noble families. There was no strong bourgeois consciousness before the revolution The desire of the ambitious bourgeois was not to overthrow or displace the nobility, but to join it. If the bourgeois had a complaint against the nobles, it was that it was becoming too difficult to get into the club. Both the population of France and the numbers of the bourgeois had increased dramatically in the eighteenth century [Doyle (p. 129) estimate of number of bourgeois: 1700 -- 700-800,000; 1789 -- 2,300,000.] The number of offices, especially those that gave a reasonable expectation of social advancement, had not increased. A second thing that did not cause the French Revolution was sheer misery. Short-term misery did indeed have an important effect on the course of the revolution, as we shall see later. But it did not begin the revolution, nor was misery typical of the eighteenth century as a whole. Even if everyone had been miserable, misery often exists in history, and it usually needs something else to turn it into revolutionary action. Nor do risings by the most miserable, by themselves, do much to alter governments and regimes, especially to liberalize them. A third thing that did not cause the French Revolution was the sheer immorality of the rulers. Caligula's orgies did not cause the fall of the Roman Empire. The collapse of the Old Regime was a much more mundane affair. Government must be paid for. Those who do the government's work, dirty or otherwise, must have their rewards. When the profit goes out of government, change must come. In the 1780s, the debts of Louis XVI's government were immense. Interest payments sucked the government dry. At the same time, the king's ministers found it impossible to raise new taxes, and old taxes did not yield efficiently. One reason for...
