Toward the French Revolution
Following the American victory in the Revolutionary War French national prestige was restored, and it was again viewed as one of the great powers of Europe. The performance of the French Navy during the war against the British was a point of particular pride, but France was heavily burdened by debts incurred during the war. The period of peace immediately following the war saw little increase in trade with the Americans, and a large increase in American trade with the British. In 1785 John Adams was received in England as the first American ambassador to the Court of St. James. Adams was pro-British and contemptuous of French morals and practices.
In France a series of bad harvests led to famine, and government efforts to relieve them were to naught, as the treasury had been bankrupted by the series of wars fought in the eighteenth century. Unable to sell their cargoes to bereft French merchants, American traders sent their ships to other European ports. British merchants did likewise and the loss of revenues from the former North American colonies was made up by Canadian shipments and the growing trade with India. England lost the war with the French and Americans, but emerged as the financial victor as the Americans suffered from a weak central government and the French from a crippled economy.
French King Louis XVI was an absolute monarch, though his circle of advisers were often able to sway his decisions towards their mutually held opinions. The King had been popular with his subjects up to the mid-1780s, especially so after the victory over England in the American Revolutionary War, but the popularity soon waned as the wealthy French nobility continued to flaunt their superior social positions while the people starved, burdened by crushing taxes supporting the estates of the nobles. The common people of France also bore the burden of supporting the clergy, which was in many instances hopelessly corrupt.
The Estates General were called in France in 1789, the first such event since the early seventeenth century. There were three estates, the first estate being the clergy, the second the nobility and the third the commoners, including lawyers, merchants, artisans and farmers. By June, the middle classes were fanning the fires of radicalism and the following month the Bastille was stormed by the Paris mob in response to the King dismissing his minister of finance, Jacques Necker, who had been manipulating public opinion through the publication of false information regarding the finances of the kingdom.
As France suffered through the convulsions of its revolution and the excesses into which it descended, the British Empire and the by then strongly governed United States continued to expand their trade markets. Large sections of France became areas of anarchy. French ships rotted at their wharves, as reactionaries refused to allow them to sail, fearing that they would bring back mercenaries opposing the revolution. Fleeing French royalists raised armies to return to France and overthrow the revolution, supported by the other crowned heads of Europe. By 1793 France was engaged in the most expensive and fateful of its conflicts with Great Britain.