The eighteenth century was a time of grave change for the men and women of Western Europe. Their ancestors had descended upon the fertile soil of Gaul, Britannia, Germania, Hispania, and Italia as barbarian hordes overrunning the fraying borders of the Roman Empire in search of a better life: a life free from the relentless predation of the Eurasian Steppes, a life of stability, security, and civility. But for centuries uncounted, they had toiled in the fields as illiterate, penniless, and powerless peasants, having traded the perils of freedom for the rigours of slavery. Placed under the oppressive bondages of hierarchical and ecclesiastical institutions, who dangled in front of them the tantalising prospect of salvation in Heaven whilst offering no earthly reprieve, the population of France languished in unrealised misery. Western Europe was weak, disunited, and impoverished. This incapacity in turn gave rise to anarchy and multipolarity, and the creed that “might is right” dominated the western consciousness. Warlords ruled the landscape, pulling power away from the central government and guarding it with castles and fortresses and armoured knights. The church abused Divine Providence, hoarding wealth and land and indulging in the vices of luxury. To the east, the nations of China and Islam held sway, ruling over vast empires of incomparable wealth and might, casting a long shadow over the faltering enterprises of Christendom. The rest of the world basked in golden hue as the Europeans floundered in impoverished servitude.

But nothing can be sustained forever, and the primacy of the Orient slowly gave way to the rise of the West. As the climate shifted and the temperature dropped, ferocious nomads poured into the dominions of Islam and the Son of Heaven, leaving a fiery trail of devastation in their wake. With them they carried the Black Death, a plague that shattered the balance of power and set into motion a great transformation. The Western Europeans, buoyed by the advent of agriculture and stimulated by pestilence, finally accumulated enough resources to look beyond the fringes of their barren homeland, to the cerulean tides of the sea. And thus, colonial empires were built as European vessels braved the waves in search of fabled bounties, wresting supremacy from the hands of the Chinese and the Muslims and delivering it to the once-impoverished kingdoms of Western Europe in this Age of Sails. When the cannons of Mehmed the Conqueror sundered the walls of Constantinople, the forgotten knowledge of the Graeco-Roman civilisations were released back into the world, carried in the satchels of Byzantine scholars fleeing the wrath of the Ottoman Empire. Geographical phenomena and geopolitical circumstance had conspired to grant the Western Europeans unparalleled ascendency as masters of the entire globe, and yet they were still governed by institutions designed for the impoverished and fractured feudal societies of the Mediaeval Age.

Herein lies the principal cause of the French Revolution: a fundamental disjuncture between ideology and reality at the heart of Western Europe. Their states operated on the basis of God, church, aristocracy, and the King—a system of administration founded to sustain an agricultural economy—whereas the population of France engaged instead a world of commerce, imperialism, colonialism, and enlightened ideas. Changes in the human condition had delivered unto the men and women of Europe the tools, both physical and metaphysical, to begin interpreting the world around them not through the medium of authorities, but directly, by their own volition. The creeds of morality and law lain down by the saints of yore thus faded into obsolescence, and individuals were set free to construct worldviews for themselves. France, the most powerful nation of Western Europe, was at the epicentre of this great transformation. As their empire overseas expanded beyond the scope of human imagination, and as the seditious Graeco-Roman ideologies became revived by the pens of their philosophes, the monarchy which held sovereignty over the nation began to crumble. Vested interests at the heart of the swirling vortex formed a bulwark against reforms, and France became a nation of volatile polarities. With the Crown compromised by an immense national debt and the people suffering incessant poor harvests, underlying tension imploded into anarchy and terror in the twilight of the eighteen century.