Paris in 1789 smelled like bread that didn't exist. The markets were empty, the winter had been brutal, and ordinary people — bakers, cobblers, seamstresses — were making a terrible calculation: if the king won't feed us, perhaps we should replace the king. Marie-Antoinette, sealed inside the gilded bubble of Versailles, had no idea that the world outside was boiling. She wasn't evil — she was simply invisible to suffering. That invisibility was the revolution's first spark. What followed was not just a political upheaval; it was a complete shattering of who gets to matter. Within five years, a king would be beheaded, a queen would follow, and France would cycle through terror, then exhaustion, then a general named Napoleon who promised order and delivered an empire. The single most important thing to carry into your exam: the French Revolution proved that no government survives when it stops acknowledging the hunger — literal or metaphorical — of the people it governs.