o cost money. So, by the 1780s, the Crown desperately needed money just to pay off its debts. To do this, taxes would have to be raised, which would naturally be unpopular with the third estate who would bear the burden as usual, so the King and his finance minister decided to call the States-General for the first time in 175 years in an effort to solve the problem. Another problem lay with the character of the King, Louis XVI, himself. He was not a strong man, and was more interested in hunting than politics. He was largely under the influence of his wife, Marie Antoinette, who, although strong-minded, failed to grasp the political situation of the time. She was also Austrian, and so, given the nationalistic mood of the day, this probably did not make her very popular. Louis XVI's handling of the States-General when it met in May 1789 contributed towards the start of the Revolution. The King wanted to make reform difficult by making the three estates meet separately, in the hope that the first and second estates would vote the third down. However, he had not judged the mood of the representatives, and this backfired: opposition to the King grew, the third estate refused to act separately, and the clergy changed sides, changing the balance of power. In an act that would have angered the second and third estates' representatives, Louis then closed the meeting halls. He later had to agree to a constitution when the third estate representatives occupied the royal tennis courts. The King had lost considerably more political ground than if he had just listened to the grievances of the middle classes and the third estate right from the start, and opinion had turned against him. Also in the medium term was the rise in prices that had occurred before the Revolution, with no corresponding rise in wages, which meant an obvious increase in the cost of living. This caused widespread poverty at the bottom of society, ie. the third estate, and to som...
