ally played into the hands of more radical elements that began to use it to shift political power in their direction in a more organized fashion.
The ancien régime which was toppled from power by the French Revolution had ruled France for many centuries despite many destabilizing factors and events. The Revolution was caused by many forces, but the most immediate set of circumstances which precipitated it was, according to Roberts, "a prolonged crisis . . . at the heart [of which] lay the state's penury . . . expressed in deficits and a huge debt accumulated . . . in pursuit of an expensive foreign policy" (3). The weakness of the regime was open for all to see when King Louis XVI convened for the first time in 175 years the Estates General which met in Versailles in May 1789 to help resolve that crisis. By that time, the April Rebellion riots by crowds in Paris had already occurred, but Lucas says they were similar to traditional expressions of unrest in times of crisis (436). At this point, the King hesitated to use troops to control crowds in Paris, according to Blanning, because "the conviction had taken hold in the royal council that they would mutiny if ordered to take action" (29). In any event, the multitude succeeded in disarming the guards at the Invalides and storming the Bastille in July. Lucas characterized the crowd action in July as "engendered by panic fear and its motive was fundamentally self defense" (437). According to Blanning, "now that his weapon of last resort the army had failed him, he [the King] had no option but to
Similarly, the takeover of power by revolutionaries in 26 of France's 30 largest cities and peasant uprisings and random acts of violence (the Great Fear) during the summer of 1789 were also mostly unorganized. They were undoubtedly encouraged by the actions taken by the Constituent Assembly to abolish by its decree of August 4th. Many of the traditional ranks and privileges of the ol...