Louis XVI vs. Maximilien Robespierre

[Insula Dei]

Uhm, what attempts to change things did Louis make? He was a weak king that managed to so completely screw up budgetary matters that he saw himself forced to call together the General-Estates and then was completely ineffectual in managing the deluge that inevitably ensued. If he had been actually reformist or competent, the sheer magnitude of his moral authority as king might conceivably have been suffficient to perhaps channel the energy released during the revolution in a direction that was less destructive to his own person.

If he has managed to get remembered in a fonder light by history, it's because the right people chopped his head off. (i.e. some of the first actual 'modern' men, naturally hated by the whole of reactionary Europe).

Robespierre on the other hand was a principled, if somewhat flawed, man leading a nation at the height of an existential crisis and a revolution at the height of its destructive fervour. Even so he and his peers did more for the French (rather than for France) than the Bourbons had done in the 2 centuries before.

Pretty obvious who gets my vote.

[Insula Dei]

Uhm, what attempts to change things did Louis make?

He and the people he appointed attempted finance reforms that were blocked by the nobles. He was by no means great at his job but what went wrong leading up the the Revolution is much more the fault of the nobles than anyone else. 

What went 'wrong' in the run-up to the revolution, is something the reactionary right at the time instinctively grasped: Voltaire happened. The same people who had been played around with for hundreds of years now were modern subjects rather than the medieval serfs of before. The 'distant authoritarianism' shua bemoans above, was an absolutist regime the likes of which have vanished from the Western World since 1917-18. The situation was always going to explode, the only thing that can be considered surprising is how completely inane the French monarchy reacted to the eventual implosion*: the complete failure of attempting to shut down the constitutional assembly, the scheming in the Tuileries, the idiocy of the attempted run for Austria (, which directly alligned the French monarchy with the enemies of France).

The 'reforms' which Calonne and Lomenie-Brienne attempted were mainly the consequence of their prior effing up the government's budget and the fact that the nobility wasn't feeling like taking the bullet for his majesty. That's also the reason for the monarchy's half-assed attempt at an alliance with the Third Estate in the early stages of the Estates-General.

*: This is a bit unfair. Louis obviously didn't have the comfort of hindsight to steer his course of actions.

[Insula Dei]

People did not get angry and rise up becuase they read a few books by Voltaire, they did so becuase they were starving. The rain had more to do with it than Voltaire. Along with the food shortage from a less than fantastic harvest there was of course the financial situation for France which only piled on top of it. And that is largely the fault of the nobles, not Louis.

People had been raising up since the dawn of time, Jbrase. What's new here is that they rise up, not against a certain policy or even against a certain ruler, but ultimately against the entire paradigm of government that was the ancien régime. The French Revolution wasn't a revolution of the people by anyone's standards, it was a bourgeois revolution led by a class which was deeply steeped in Enlightenment thought.

The nobles by the way weren't responsible for the financial situation, they only refused to mend it. That isn't very relevant, though.