This actually coincided with hailstorms that ruined a year's harvest, thereby raising food prices and causing widespread hunger, which really made the people of France angry because they loved to eat. Meanwhile, the king certainly did not look broke, as evidenced by his well-fed physique and fancy footwear. He and his wife Marie Antoinette also got to live in the very nice palace at Versailles thanks to God's mandate, but Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were challenging the whole idea of religion, writing things like, The main point of Enlightenment is of man's release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion. So basically, the peasants were hungry, the intellectuals were beginning to wonder whether God could or should save the king, and the nobility were dithering about eating foie gras and songbirds, failing to make meaningful financial reform. In response to the crisis, Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General, the closest thing that France had to a national parliament, which hadn't met since 1614. The Estates General was like a super-parliament, made up of representatives from the First Estate, the nobles, the Second Estate, the clergy, and the Third Estate, everyone else. The Third Estate showed up with about 600 representatives, the First and Second Estates both had about 300, and after several votes everything was deadlocked, and then the Third Estate was like, you know what, forget you guys, we're gonna leave and we're gonna become our own National Assembly.