The Revolution began as an argument about money, not liberty

Schama insists the immediate trigger for 1789 was mundane and fiscal: the French monarchy was effectively bankrupt after decades of war spending, and its attempts to reform taxation ran into an entrenched, privileged class unwilling to give up exemptions. The convening of the Estates-General was meant to solve an accounting problem, not launch a philosophical revolution.

Only once that assembly convened did grander Enlightenment language about rights, representation, and sovereignty attach itself to what had started as a narrow negotiation over who would pay the crown's debts. The ideals didn't cause the crisis; they were recruited to interpret and justify it once it was already underway, giving participants a moral vocabulary for what began as an argument over budgets and privilege.

This matters because it undercuts a tidy story of revolution springing fully formed from philosophy. Takeaway: revolutions often begin in bureaucratic crisis and only later acquire their grand ideological narrative.