A revolution is easiest to follow if you stop asking who is in charge and start asking on whose authority anyone acts. Drag the scrubber through twenty moments and watch sovereignty leave the crown, settle on “the nation,” and then narrow violently to twelve men in a committee. Below, run the Estates-General vote yourself — the procedural quarrel that was really the sovereignty quarrel.
August 1788Step 1 of 20
The vote that decided everything
The Estates-General met in May 1789 for the first time since 1614 with roughly 300 clergy, 291 nobles and 578 deputies of the Third Estate — the Third doubled in number, but not yet in power. Choose the counting rule, then decide how many privileged deputies cross the floor.
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reforming blocprivileged orders
Who holds sovereignty at this moment?
Sovereignty rests with
Breadth of the sovereign body4%
Roughly what share of adult French people the ruling body could claim to answer to. Watch it swell in 1789 and collapse in 1793 — the Revolution narrows its own base each time it is frightened.
Bread as a share of a labourer's day-wage50%
Hunger did not make the Revolution. It filled the streets at the decisive moments — and the July 1789 peak of 80–88 percent is the highest reading on this whole timeline.
The whole arc, 1788 → 1799
The shape to remember. Sovereignty widens fast from 1789 to 1792, then collapses to a committee, then to one man — ending almost exactly where it began. That curve, not any single event, is the argument of this section.