Prologue

PROLOGUE

FRANCE DIDN’T FALL. It faceplanted.

This wasn’t some slow, graceful decline of an old kingdom. This was a full-body collapse. The kind where the wheels fly off, the crowd’s screaming, and the guy in charge is still pretending everything’s fine.

For most of the 1700s, France looked solid. Huge empire. Flashy king. Art, fashion, and influence. It was the center of the world, or at least it acted like it. But underneath all the lace and powdered wigs, the system was duct-taped together. The people at the top were rich, tax-free, and clueless. The people at the bottom were broke, hungry, and pissed. You don’t need a political science degree to guess where that leads.

The numbers were brutal. A tiny elite owned most of the land and paid almost nothing. The working majority got hit with every tax, every famine, and every screw-up. The king spent like there was no ceiling. His advisors begged him to stop. His court laughed. His people starved.

Then came the Enlightenment. Writers started asking dangerous questions. Stuff like: “What if kings aren’t chosen by God?” and “What if we didn’t have to live like this forever?” That was enough to get you exiled, or worse, but the ideas spread anyway. By the time anyone tried to shut it down, the crowd was already forming.

In 1789, it all cracked open. The king called a meeting to fix the crisis. The people showed up with receipts. The monarchy didn’t just lose power. It got dragged into the street, put on trial, and publicly decapitated. After that, things didn’t calm down. They got worse.

For the next ten years, France would turn itself inside out. Factions would rise and eat each other alive. The guillotine would become a regular part of city life. And in the end, a young general would walk through the chaos and turn the republic into an empire.

This wasn’t just a political shake-up. This was the death of an entire worldview. The old order collapsed and something new crawled out of the rubble. Loud, angry, bloody, and untested.

That’s the revolution.
It wasn’t clean.
But it was coming.