The immediate cause of the Revolution of 1789 was a campaign by the clergy and nobility to protect their status - especially their exemption from taxation - from erosion by the royal government. The revolutionary movement, however, was quickly taken over by the middle classes, essentially the provincial bourgeoisie, relatively well off but politically underprivileged. They comprised the majority of the representatives of the Third Estate , the "order" that encompassed the whole of French society after the clergy, who formed the First Estate, and the nobility who formed the Second. It was the middle classes who took the initiative in setting up the National Assembly on June 17, 1789. The majority would probably have been content with constitutional reforms that checked monarchical power, as on the English model. But their power depended largely on their ability to wield the threat of a Parisian popular uprising.

 

Although the effects of the Revolution were felt all over France, it was in Paris that the most profound changes took place. Being as it were on the spot, the people of Paris couldn't avoid being caught up in the Revolution. They formed the revolutionary shock troops, the driving force at the crucial stages of the Revolution. Parisians marched on Versailles and forced the king to return to Paris with them. They stormed and destroyed the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789. They occupied the Hôtel de Ville, set up an insurrectionary Commune and captured the Tuileries palace on August 10, 1792. They invaded the Convention in May 1793 and secured the arrest of the more conservative Girondin faction of deputies.

Where the bourgeois deputies of the Convention were concerned principally with political reform, the poorest people, the sans-culottes - literally, the people without breeches - expressed their demands in economic terms: price controls, regulation of the city's food supplies, and so on. In so doing they foreshadowed the rise of the working-class and socialist movements of the nineteenth century.