Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The later 1780s had been, for a complexity of reasons, a period of great difficulties for virtually all branches of the French economy. . . . The country poor were therefore desperate and restless with riot and banditry; the urban poor were doubly desperate as work ceased at the very moment that the cost of living soared. . . . They introduced the tremendous and earth-shaking idea of liberation from gentry and oppression. A riotous people stood behind the deputies of the Third Estate. . . . The fall of the Bastille spread the revolution to the provincial towns and the countryside. . . . . After 1794 it would be clear to moderates that the Jacobin regime had driven the Revolution too far for bourgeois comfort and prospects . . . Between 1789 and 1791 the victorious moderate bourgeoisie, acting through what had now become the Constituent Assembly, set about the gigantic rationalization and reform of France which was it object. Most of the lasting institutional achievements of the Revolution date from this period, as do it most striking international results, the metric system and the pioneer emancipation of the Jews."