Summarize this for a student in tight bullet points, then add 3 quick self-test questions: The French Revolution: Causes, Course, and Consequences The Old Regime By the late 1780s, France was governed under the Ancien Régime, a rigid social order divided into three estates. The First Estate was the clergy, the Second the nobility, and the Third Estate — some 97% of the population — comprised everyone from wealthy merchants to landless peasants. The first two estates enjoyed sweeping tax exemptions while the Third Estate bore the fiscal weight of the state. This structural inequality, inherited from feudalism, is the essential backdrop to everything that followed. The monarchy under Louis XVI was effectively bankrupt. Decades of costly wars — above all French support for the American Revolution — had drained the treasury, and the tax system was too regressive and too riddled with exemptions to close the gap. The Financial Crisis Successive finance ministers — Turgot, Necker, Calonne — proposed reforms that would tax the privileged estates, and each in turn was blocked by the nobility and the parlements. When Calonne convened an Assembly of Notables in 1787 to approve a universal land tax, they refused, insisting only the Estates-General could consent to new taxation. The king was cornered into summoning the Estates-General for the first time since 1614. From Estates-General to National Assembly When the Estates-General met at Versailles in May 1789, it deadlocked immediately over voting procedure: voting by estate would let the privileged two outvote the Third, while voting by head favored the numerous Third Estate. In June the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and, locked out of its hall, swore the Tennis Court Oath — vowing not to disband until France had a constitution. This was the decisive revolutionary act: sovereignty had shifted from the crown to the nation. 1789: The Popular Revolution Popular unrest gave the political revolution its force. On 14 July 1789 a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress and symbol of arbitrary power. In the countryside, the "Great Fear" saw peasants rise against feudal dues. In August the Assembly abolished feudalism and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming liberty, equality before the law, and popular sovereignty. The Constitutional Monarchy and Its Collapse Between 1789 and 1791 the Assembly rebuilt France: it reorganized the church (the Civil Constitution of the Clergy), redrew administrative boundaries into departments, and produced the Constitution of 1791 establishing a constitutional monarchy. But the king's attempted flight to Varennes in 1791 shattered trust in the monarchy, and war with Austria and Prussia from 1792 radicalized politics further. The Republic and the Terror In September 1792 the monarchy was abolished and the First Republic proclaimed. Louis XVI was tried and executed in January 1793. Facing foreign invasion and internal revolt, the Jacobin-led Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Robespierre, instituted the Terror (1793–94): tens of thousands were executed by guillotine as "enemies of the revolution." The Terror ended with Robespierre's own fall in July 1794 (Thermidor). Consequences The Revolution ended feudalism in France, established the principle of equality before the law, and spread the ideals of liberty and nationalism across Europe. It also unleashed a decade of instability that culminated in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power in 1799. Its long-term legacy — constitutional government, secular citizenship, and the very language of human rights — reshaped the modern world far beyond France.