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The Estates General, a legislative assembly of France's "estates" or branches of feudal society, was called for the first time in 1614 after the king's will had been successfully challenged. A series of poorly coordinated and conflicting protests against the king's efforts to reform taxation led to the emergence of the Revolution.

The process of a chain reaction began when the Estates General met in 1789. Expectations were awakened by the king's indecisiveness and incompetence. A potent mix of angry urban mobs, panic in the countryside, and intellectuals intoxicated by Enlightened ideals - soon intensified by the fear of invasion by foreign powers - produced a series of changes that are astonishing in their scope and ambition.

A number of observers, including Karl Marx, argued that the Revolution was the expression of conflict between social classes, with an emerging class of bourgeois capitalists defeating the feudal nobility in the process establishing a new legal order. The Marxist concept of social class tends to fall apart under rigorous analysis, which is why recent historians have substantially qualified or flatly rejected the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution. Providing a more satisfactory general theory to explain how and why it all happened has proven to be a continuing challenge. By 1789, practices and beliefs that had been acceptable in 1614 were considered unjust and irrational. One idea that had spread into large parts of the population was the idea of sovereignty, or the right to rule, which was derived from the consent of the people rather than from God's will. The Old Regime's intricate network of special rights and corporate privileges was losing much of its popularity.

The American Revolution had evoked a lot of discussion in France and Europe because of its focus and model of rationality. The British colonies in North America fought against British tyranny. The ideals of the Enlightenment were expressed in the Declaration of Independence. The Americans adopted a constitution that put those ideals into action. The revolutionaries in America seemed to have shown that a constitutional republic based on popular sovereignty and the protection of individual rights was feasible, in stark opposition to the prevailing belief in Europe that the republican form of government was possible only in a citystate or very small country. The legitimacy of the violent opposition to tyranny gained increasing support, though that notion had roots in Christian political philosophy, itself looking back to the thought of the Greeks and Romans.

The extent to which the American precedent was relevant for France remained open to question. The British colonies in North America had a small population of about 2 million by the last years of the 18th century and were culturally and linguistically diverse. Civil equality, or the equality of the individual citizen under a single legal system, was the meaning that seemed most widely agreed upon in 1789, but Feudalism violated not only individual liberty but also the second element of the revolutionary trinity: equality. That notion was fundamentally different from the Old Regime's recognition, and sanctification, of legal or civil inequality, according to membership in a hierarchy of corporate entities, involving often great differences in material wealth, social prestige, and political power.

The Old Regime, which was supported by Christian universalism, did recognize equality in one major regard - that is, equality before God, or the equal worth of the human soul in God's eyes - even if such equality found only the faintest expression in the legal rights of the lowest. The universalism of the Enlightenment was most famously expressed in Thomas Jefferson's "all men are created equal" but it was not meant to imply a belief in the desirability of creation. "equality" did not mean physical or intellectual equality for Jefferson since he harbored doubts about the equality of those members of the human family coming from Africa.

Civil equality introduced by the French Revolution had definite and revealing limits. The qualification of "active" and "passive" citizenship was introduced by the constitution of 1791, with wealth determining who was eligible for active citizenship. Only a small percentage of males voted.

Only a small percentage of people enjoy the right to hold public office. The electoral procedures of the Old Regime engaged a wider part of the population than the first revolutionary constitution did.

When the Revolution moved in a more egalitarian direction, few revolutionaries contemplated measures designed to encourage economic or social equality. When Francois Babeuf plotted to seize power and introduce a regime that would actively pursue economic equality by distributing private wealth, price controls were introduced as a way to protect the poor. During the years of the Revolution, there were very few defenders of the idea of giving equal rights to women.