Here's how to group the answers:
ECONOMIC CAUSES
- The government faced high levels of debt and went bankrupt.
- Peasants and farmers (and city workers) couldn't afford to buy food, and were starving.
POLITICAL CAUSES
- The people were at the mercy of King Louis XVI, who had unlimited authority.
- Members of the Third Estate broke away from the Estates-General.
Some notes on the social/political and economic factors in France leading up to the French Revolution:
The 3rd Estate (98% of the population) were all those who were considered "commoners." (The clergy and nobility were the 1st and 2nd Estates.) So, the 3rd Estate included everyone from a wealthy, bourgeois wine merchant to a day laborer in the city to a peasant farmer. The poorest folks (city laborers and peasants) were burdened the most, but the bourgeoisie also resented heavy taxation and lack of political rights. If we look at the peasant farmers (the ones noted in the question choices), they were on the bottom rung of society. The country depended on agriculture to survive, yet the producers (the peasant farmers) got no real respect. Economically they could barely manage a living, and heavy taxes and fees ate into any profit they might have made. Politically, they pretty much just had to pay taxes and do the bidding of the nobility and monarchy. They could be called out to build a road if the king said so. The lands they farmed could be trampled by a noble's hunting party if the noble in that region wanted to go hunting. The political, economic and social situations of city workers were similar to that of peasants.
As to the government's major debt problem: The royals and aristocracy lived large – too large. The government had accumulated 4 billion livres worth of debt by 1789. 1 livre in their monetary terms then = approx. $4 in our monetary terms in the US today, so that’s a $16 billion national debt. 40% of the government’s budget was going to pay interest on debts. And the debt kept getting bigger. [One big jump in the debt was when Louis XVI's government provided 1 billion livres to help finance the American colonists' revolution against Britain.) The costs of debt for France's government began to outpace their income. In 1786, for example, government income was 357 million livres and expenses were 555 million. So that's about 200 million added to the national debt in just one year. When bankers and lenders would no longer give further loans to the French government, the series of events that led to the French Revolution fell into place.
