The French Revolution

Crushing government debt, bread shortages, and a swollen class of educated men with no path to power detonated a revolution that toppled the French monarchy and, with it, the ancient idea of the divine right of kings. It swung from soaring declarations of universal rights to the mass executions of the Terror to, finally, a strongman. Nearly every political pattern fires here at once — debt, hardship, elite overproduction, a collapsing story of legitimacy — which is why it still reads as the birth of modern politics.