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HISTORY

The Claim

In the late 1780s, the Kingdom of France was nearly bankrupt due to the costs of expensive wars and high government spending.

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The Short Version

The claim is well supported by mainstream historical scholarship. By the late 1780s, the French monarchy faced acute fiscal distress driven in large part by debts from major wars and the burden of state spending, especially interest and military costs. France’s problem was not just the size of debt, but its weak ability to raise revenue and maintain credit.

Caveats

  • “Nearly bankrupt” is a shorthand description of severe fiscal distress and near-insolvency, not a precise legal bankruptcy in the modern corporate sense.
  • The crisis was not caused by spending alone; France’s inefficient tax system and political resistance to new taxes were also crucial.
  • Comparisons with Britain’s higher debt ratio can mislead, because France’s immediate problem was debt service, revenue weakness, and loss of credit access.

The Receipts

  1. The crisis of 1787–1789 (Chapter 7) - The State in Early Modern France

    Cambridge University Press

  2. The French Revolution and the Politics of Government Finance, 1770–1815

    JSTOR

  3. The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746–1793

    Piketty/ENS archive hosting academic paper

  4. The French public debt in the nineteenth century

    Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

  5. Debate on the Role of Orders in France, 1787–1789

    Oxford Academic

  6. France – Foreign policy and financial crisis

    Encyclopaedia Britannica

  7. French Revolution

    Encyclopaedia Britannica

  8. France: The ancien régime

    Encyclopaedia Britannica

  9. The long and short reasons for why Revolution broke out in France in 1789

    Swansea University

  10. French Revolution

    Encyclopedia.com

+ 8 more sources — see the full list on Lenz

Filed Under

Kingdom Of France

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