It all began with the indecisive, pompous King Louis XVI and his Austrian wife Marie Antoinette. Succeeding his grandfather’s rule, which had run up extreme debt in France, the newlywed couple seemed apathetic to the cry for help. People snickered in the streets about Louis fiddling around with locks, instead of properly ruling a nation, making him intensely unpopular. Other rumors plagued the couple about producing an heir one that said “the locksmith was having trouble finding the keyhole.” A black cloud hung over France, and the peoples view soured over the monarchs as horrid weather and failure of crops afflicted the nation. To thwart the developing crisis, King Louis called “les états généraux” (Estates General) meeting, the first in 175 years including the three estates –the clergy, the nobility, and the 98% of the population, the …show more content…
Louis became threatened by the Assemblies’ proposals he stationed an immense army of Swiss soldiers in Paris –but the Parisians quickly formed a plan. A mob of the Third Estate charged into the Bastille, stabbed the governor Delaunay and other royalist traitors in order to steal gunpowder for protection. The fall of the Paris prison became the first physical act of revolution. They began to dismantle the past itself, as Parisians break apart the Bastille’s bricks and sell them off the streets. It was the start of change, a start of bloodshed, but as Honore Mirabeau stated “When one meddles with the direction of a revolution, the problem is not how to make it go but how to keep it under