The 1789 Revolution
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The immediate cause of the Revolution of 1789 was a campaign by the privileged classes of the clergy and nobility to protect their status, especially exemption from taxation, against erosion by the royal government. The revolutionary movement, however, was quickly taken over by the middle classes, relatively well off but politically underprivileged. In the initial phases this meant essentially the provincial bourgeoisie. It was they who 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 they who took the initiative in setting up the National Assembly on June 17, 1789. The majority of them would probably have been content with constitutional reforms that checked monarchical power on the English model. But their power depended largely on their ability to wield the threat of a Parisian popular explosion.

Although the effects of the Revolution were felt all over France and indeed Europe, it was in Paris that the most profound changes took place. Being as it were on the spot, the people of Paris discovered themselves in the Revolution. They formed the revolutionary shock troops, the driving force at the crucial stages of the Revolution. They marched on Versailles and forced the king to return to Paris with them. They stormed and destroyed the Bastille 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 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. By their practice of taking to the streets and occupying the Hôtel de Ville, they also established a tradition of revolutionary action that continued through to the 1871 Commune.