Was Louis Xvi Responsible For The French Revolution

It was 1789, King Louis XIV was on the throne and the ‘Revolution was born in blood’; the French Revolution had begun. The French Revolution began in 1789 on July 14th (Bastille Day) where the commoners of Paris stormed the prison, murdered the Governor and the Mayor of Paris. They were not standing for the mismanagement and tyranny of the French monarchy any longer. The Revolution that followed was a bloody massacre of torture and new ideas. Although the French Revolution only caused the people to go from King to Emperor, with it a new ideology was born. Louis XVI was partially but not wholly responsible for the French Revolution (and specially the Peasant’s Revolt) in 1789: there were other factors in play, such as the dismal state the country
He was always a shy boy and very easily manipulated (Shephard, et al.100). He was horrible at making decisions and tended to want others to make them for him, leading him to taking all the advice he could get and implementing it: even bad advice (The French Revolution). In addition to this, the monarchs of France lived in a palace in Versailles, removed from their people (The French Revolution). This caused the monarchs and the palace nobility in general to be incredibly ignorant of the circumstances of their people and they were not fully aware of the hunger and desperation which the third estate was enduring. Louis XVI could not help the short-comings of his personality, nor could he help the long tradition of ignorance if he himself was ignorant and so this cannot be held against the man, especially as he was very young when he ascended to the throne: only twenty. Therefore, although this did contribute to a lack of foresight when it came to financial and social issues, as can be seen, it is not Louis’ fault and can therefore not be attributed to him as one of the ways in which he was responsible for the Peasant’s Revolt on July 14th, 1789 or the revolution that