Wikipedia posted:

Radical financial reforms by Turgot and Malesherbes angered the nobles and were blocked by the parlements who insisted that the King did not have the legal right to levy new taxes. So, in 1776, Turgot was dismissed and Malesherbes resigned, to be replaced by Jacques Necker. Necker supported the American Revolution, and he carried out a policy of taking out large international loans instead of raising taxes. He attempted to gain public favor in 1781 when he had published the first ever statement of the French Crown's expenses and accounts, the Compte rendu au Roi. This allowed the people of France to view the king's accounts in modest surplus.[22] When this policy failed miserably, Louis dismissed him, and then replaced him in 1783 with Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who increased public spending to "buy" the country's way out of debt. Again this failed, so Louis convoked the Assembly of Notables in 1787 to discuss a revolutionary new fiscal reform proposed by Calonne. When the nobles were informed of the extent of the debt, they were shocked into rejecting the plan. After this, Louis XVI tried, along with his new Controller-General des finances, Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, to force the Parlement de Paris to register the new laws and fiscal reforms. Upon the denial of the members of the Parlement, Louis XVI tried to use his absolute power to subjugate them by every means: enforcing in many occasions the registration of his reforms (6 August 1787, 19 November 1787, and 8 May 1788), exiling all Parlement magistrates to Troyes as a punishment on 15 August 1787, prohibiting six members from attending parliamentary sessions on 19 November, arresting two very important members of the Parlement, who opposed his reforms, on 6 May 1788, and even dissolving and depriving of all power the "Parlement," replacing it with a Plenary Court, on 8 May 1788. All of these measures and shows of royal power failed mainly for three reasons. First: the majority of the population stood in favor of the Parlement against the king, and thus continuously rebelled against him. Second: the royal treasury was literally running out of money, in which case it would be incapable of sustaining its own imposed reforms. And third: although the king had as much absolute power as his predecessors, he lacked one crucial trait for absolutism to function properly: authority. Having become unpopular to both the commoners and the aristocracy, Louis XVI was, therefore, able to impose his decisions and reforms only for very short periods of time, ranging from 2 to 4 months, before revoking them.