How Every Major Royal Dynasty Collapsed

How Every Major Royal Dynasty Collapsed For over two centuries, the House of Bourbon ruled France with the kind of absolute, untouchable authority that made kings feel genuinely ordained by God. Versailles was their monument to that belief, a palace so outrageously gilded, so deliberately overwhelming in its scale and opulence, that visiting diplomats were meant to feel small by design. It worked, until it didn't. By the late eighteenth century, France was drowning in debt, a significant portion of which had been accumulated by funding the American Revolution, a choice that would prove darkly ironic, given that France was essentially bankrolling a republican uprising abroad while sitting on a powder keg at home.