Unrest among the peasantry of France in the late 1700s, which culminated in the French Revolution that began in 1789, was due to a lot more than the trickle-down effects of the country's financial difficulties. There were economic, social, political, and cultural factors at work, too. There are great books which discuss all of them, like Citizens by Simon Schama. Here are three examples.

One of the most important causes was that bread became a lot more expensive. French peasants ate mostly bread, supplemented by legumes and the occasional egg, piece of meat, wedge of cheese, pitcher of milk, flagon of wine, or the odd fruit or vegetable. Beginning in the 1760s, and accelerating in the early 1780s, the government of Louis XVI eased price controls to placate merchants and large landowners. A big effect of this was that grain became a lot more expensive, and this increase was passed down to the average bread-buyer as a steady increase in the price of their staple food. As early as 1775, riots protesting the effects of this increase got so bad they got a name, "The Flour War" or "The Bread War," depicting the struggles of rioters against government troops trying to keep order. All this led to the famous quote attributed to Marie Antoinette, Louis's queen, who said, "Let them eat brioche" when told the peasants couldn't afford bread. Brioche isn't cake, but it is bread with a lot less flour and a lot more sugar, and Marie thought this made it more affordable when grain was very expensive.

Another cause of peasant unrest leading to the French Revolution was the gradual decline in respect for the authority of the Catholic Church. The entire eighteenth century and part of the seventeenth was a time of intellectual ferment in Europe, and especially in France. The Enlightenment, as we know it today, popularized the notion that you could make sense of the world and figure out how to solve its problems using reason instead of referring to the Bible or the teachings of the church. Even for peasants, who mostly couldn't read and who mostly were very devoted Catholics, this was strong stuff—even more so for the educated middle-class people who became the leaders of the revolution. They understood the power of the Enlightenment, and they used it to stir up trouble among the peasantry, asking, for example, why they had to pay so much for bread while the royalty and nobility lived in spectacular palaces. This disaffection grew and grew until it exploded in the summer of 1789.

A third cause was the rapid growth of that middle class, which threw up revolutionary leaders, during the eighteenth century. Its effect on the peasantry was to put social inequality into very sharp relief. Here was a new sort of person, the merchant, the town-dwelling businessman, called a "bourgeois," whose power was increasing at a time when peasants were struggling. When they superimposed this phenomenon on the image of royal splendor, and with the encouragement of certain radical bourgeois, peasants gradually accepted the view that they were being left behind socially and economically. Events of the late 1780s gave them an outlet for their frustrations.