Aristocratic Revolt in France led to aristocratic beheadings

The French Revolution

On July 15th 1789 a mob stormed the Bastille in Paris, and the French Revolution was born. The early days were triumphant: the ideals of the Enlightenment were dominant, a Declaration of the Rights of Man was proclaimed on the American model, and the King remained nominally in power. But gradually the revolution began to go wrong. In 1792 the king was dethroned and in the following January he was actually beheaded, soon to be followed by his wife, Marie Antoinette. By 1793 the reign of terror was in full swing; guillotines were set up throughout France and thousands were beheaded. These were not just the aristocrats, but ordinary people – the Third Estate – were hunted down; indeed it is said that more bakers were beheaded than aristocrats. In 1794 Robespierre, the architect of the terror was himself beheaded which seemed to mark the beginning of the end of the worst excess. Gradually the terror abated, and in 1796 a young general called Napoleon began winning victories in the south, and 3 years later he came to power as First Consul. Any semblance of democracy was snuffed out and the ideals of the Revolution were forgotten, but a sort of normality returned. There followed a decade of triumph when Napoleon extended French domination over much of Europe.
But what had gone wrong? Why did revolution lead to terror in this way? This question reverberated through much of the 19th century, when the revolutions were seen as the inevitable harbinger of terror and revolutionaries in their turn thought they ought to bring terror in their wake. But the answer to the problem of the French Revolution is very simple and can be boiled down to a single word: inflation. Inflation is the hidden ingredient in the French revolution, yet it is one that is tossed aside or ignored by virtually all historians of the period. Yet the French revolution is one of the classic cases where a monetary analysis is the vital hidden ingredient and makes sense of the whole phenomenon.
The French revolution began from an economic crisis. Louis XVI mismanaged the economy, and his extravagances drove him to near bankruptcy. At the beginning of 1789, he was forced to call together the Estates General to vote him more money. The Estates General proved obstinate, an impasse developed, and the Parisian mob supported the Estates General. On July 14, they stormed the Bastille.
From the first, financial matters predominated: there was not enough money to go round, and what should be done about it? There was one obvious solution – create more money. There was however one serious objection - the memory of John Law, whose inflationary schemes had ruined many Frenchmen a generation before. John Law (1671-1729) was a Scottish gambler and financier, half genius, half crook who fled from Scotland having killed a man in a duel over a girl. Having arrived in France, he set up a scheme to finance the French colony in Louisiana. His financial schemes were ingenious and at first they succeeded brilliantly, establishing a Banque Royale which issued its own bank notes. The scheme ballooned into Companie Perpetuelle des Indes encompassing both the West and East Indies. More and more paper money was issued, till in 1720 it all collapsed. Law fled from France and many of the French middle classes, and indeed of the aristocracy, were ruined.

http://www.civilisation.org.uk/Later/french_revolution.htm