I believe the collapse of royal government was a simple phenomenon. Most despotic governments fall (and most governments have been, historically, despotic) when the king cannot pay the bills and his erstwhile subordinates cannot be convinced to bail him out. A division in the ruling class allows those usually excluded from power a chance to assert themselves. This, I think, is what happened in France in the 1780s.
If we accept this theory, it follows that several other things did not cause the revolution.
First, the revolution was not caused by an inevitable bourgeois rising against feudalism, against a parasitic landowning nobility that was hopelessly out of date. There was, before the revolution, no simple division between bourgeois and nobility in economic terms.
Neither do we find any clear dividing line if we turn from wealth to economic function . The word "bourgeois" summons up a vision of an entrepreneurial, productive class, proto-industrialists and daring merchant-adventurers. Very few 18th century bourgeois fit this description. The most respectable bourgeois, and generally the more prosperous ones were members of the professions, especially lawyers, and minor office-holders These men were not the wave of the economic future. People like this had existed for centuries. some of the most progressive economic projects of the time, the big capitalist and industrial experiments, were financed and planned by old, rich noble families.
There was no strong bourgeois consciousness before the revolution The desire of the ambitious bourgeois was not to overthrow or displace the nobility, but to join it. If the bourgeois had a complaint against the nobles, it was that it was becoming too difficult to get into the club. Both the population of France and the numbers of the bourgeois had increased dramatically in the eighteenth century [Doyle (p. 129) estimate of number of bourgeois: 1700 -- 700-800,000; 1789 -- 2,300,000.] The number of offices, especially those that gave a reasonable expectation of social advancement, had not increased.
A second thing that did not cause the French Revolution was sheer misery. Short-term misery did indeed have an important effect on the course of the revolution, as we shall see later. But it did not begin the revolution, nor was misery typical of the eighteenth century as a whole. Even if everyone had been miserable, misery often exists in history, and it usually needs something else to turn it into revolutionary action.
Nor do risings by the most miserable, by themselves, do much to alter governments and regimes, especially to liberalize them.
A third thing that did not cause the French Revolution was the sheer immorality of the rulers. Caligula's orgies did not cause the fall of the Roman Empire.
The collapse of the Old Regime was a much more mundane affair. Government must be paid for. Those who do the government's work, dirty or otherwise, must have their rewards. When the profit goes out of government, change must come.
In the 1780s, the debts of Louis XVI's government were immense. Interest payments sucked the government dry.
At the same time, the king's ministers found it impossible to raise new taxes, and old taxes did not yield efficiently. One reason for inefficiency was the number of people who had fiscal (tax) privileges. Also, those who collected taxes in Old Regime France were not salaried employees, but tax-farmers who took their profit first before handing over the revenue to the treasury. Even the government's own receivers were allowed to use the funds in their care for their own purposes -- which usually meant lending the government its own money at interest.
When Louis XVI's finance minister Calonne came to him in 1786 to tell him the till was empty, the government, with its debts and many commitments, had little room to manoeuver. Yet drastic action was absolutely necessary, because the government had neither money nor credit.
An absolute king in theory should have the power to bring in new taxes, especially in an emergency of this sort. But in actual fact, some kind of agreement with the privileged classes was necessary if their tax burden was to be increased.
Calonne proposed the calling of a pseudo-representative body named the Assembly of Notables . These Notables were to be royal nominees, men of weight and substance whose acquiescence in his financial plans could be presented as the assent of the nation.
This body, made up of 144 nobles, bishops, royal officials, mayors, and provincial leaders, met in February of 1787. They refused to consider reform unless they were shown the government accounts to see that there really was a crisis. Once they had seen them the Notables suggested retrenchment before any new taxes were tried, and then denied they had the power to approve new taxes or a more uniform system of tax liability on behalf of the kingdom.
Self-interest, yes, but at the same time they were acting out of an honest distrust of arbitrary government, which was shared by almost everyone.
By the summer of 1787, it was evident that the Assembly of Notables would pass no significant measures, and the government began changing the tax system by edict. But such edicts had to be registered by the various "regional supreme courts," the parlements, before they had the force of law, and the parlements refused to do this.
The resistance of the parlements, which was the resistance of some of the most privileged groups in the kingdom, enjoyed a great deal of popular support. The parlements claimed to be the kingdom's best defense against arbitrary royal authority, and they were accepted as such.
When the government exiled the members of the parlements, and issued edicts to strip them of their powers, there were riots and the troops had to be called out.
Parlements seen as champions of the "constitution" or "fundamental law" of the country.
These courts stated that sweeping changes in the "constitution" could only be made by the Estates-General which had not met since 1614.
It was taken for granted, by both conservatives and liberals, that representative government was the only cure for the current corrupt regime.
The royal government might have toughed it out, except that there was no money. Also arbitrary measures taken by the royal court had destroyed investor confidence, and no one would trust a despot with good money.
At the beginning of August of 1788, the controller-general told the chief minister, Brienne, that the treasury was empty. On the 8th of August, Brienne agreed to call the Estates-General on May 1st of the next year. Even this did not restore credit. A forced loan and a change of ministry was necessary to keep the government going.
Necker, a Swiss banker who had been an important minister years earlier, and who enjoyed the confidence of other bankers, was brought in to run the government. He made it clear that he would run a caretaker government until the Estates met. The Old Regime was both financially and morally bankrupt. The nation, or at least part of it, now had the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to put something else in its place
If the Old Regime was now gone, what would replace it? Perhaps nothing very shocking or different. Some privileges would have to be trimmed, some degree of representation would have to be introduced into the government. A slightly modernized and more efficient monarchy might have emerged from the crisis. But the issue of who deserved to be represented quickly emerged to fan revolutionary sentiment.
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