Throughout the 18th century, France ... French Revolution. Violence spread to the countryside, where peasants demanded the feudal system be dismantled. Fearing powerlessness, the nobility and ...

Louis, like the monarchs before him ... hadn’t noticed the revolution brewing on his doorstep. France was almost bankrupt but the people who mostly had the money - the nobility and the church ...

which turned the tide of the Revolutionary War. All the while, Beaumarchais had continued to lobby for France to enter the war as a member of the French nobility, which finally came to pass in 1778.