Louis wanted to be a good, popular king. One of his early decisions was to give powers back to the "parlements" that had been taken away in the later reign of Louis XV. The parlements were not parliaments in the modern meaning; they were not elected assemblies of politicians. The parlements were actually important regional courts and their judges supported the local nobles. They often stopped the kings from changing the country and stopped laws from having an effect in their provinces. When he brought back the parlements, Louis said "It seems to me to be the general wish and I want to be loved." He chose the Comte de Maurepas to be his main advisor, and Maurepas served in this role until his death in 1781. He also chose Anne Robert Jacques Turgot to be his minister of finance.
Turgot suggested they should relax the laws that limited when grain could be sold and how much it could be sold for. However, these changes caused high grain prices in years when the harvest was bad. This caused the Flour War protests in 1775. Some of Turgot's other reforms were blocked by the nobles and "parlements". In 1776, Louis changed his mind and sacked Turgot. He replaced him with Jacques Necker. Necker tried to publish a complete list of everything the government was spending money on, but this ended up hiding much of the spending. In 1783, Louis then chose Charles Alexandre de Calonne as his main minister of finance.
Louis and his government supported the Americans in the American Revolutionary War, because they wanted to weaken Great Britain. They wanted revenge because they had lost Quebec to the British in the Seven Years' War. The Americans won and the British agreed to let them be independent in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. However, their other attempts to weaken the British Empire were mostly stopped because their navy lost the Battle of the Saintes, and France did not gain many new lands. Moreover, the debts from the war worsened the government's money problems. By 1787, the money problems were out of control.
Louis called an Assembly of Notables, a meeting of the most senior French nobles, to discuss how to solve the money problems. He wanted to stop the nobles and parlements from blocking his attempts to solve them. But the nobles were shocked when they learned how bad the problems were and refused to help. Louis also tried to stop the Parlement of Paris from getting in the way, even arresting two of members, but it did not work because too many people supported the parlement. He also brought back Jacques Necker. Louis decided he had no choice but to call the Estates-General, the French parliament, which had not met since 1614.
The Estates-General of 1789 began sitting in May. Like previous Estates-General, it was designed to represent the "three estates" that made up French society. A quarter of its members were elected by the First Estate (Catholic Church priests), another quarter were elected by the Second Estate (the nobles) and the other half were elected by wealthy people from the Third Estate (everyone else). The politicians of the Third Estate wanted to talk about changing French society and reducing the powers of the king, but the king only wanted them to talk about taxes. He very quickly managed to annoy these politicians. For example, they were told that all members would have an equal vote, but then the king decided instead that the Third Estate members would only have half a vote. The Third Estate members thought it was unfair that they represented 95% of the population, but had only a third of the power in the Estates-General.
In June 1789, the Third Estate members announced that they were the National Assembly. Louis tried to stop them from meeting. On 20 June, all but one of those members signed the Tennis Court Oath. They promised that they would stay together until the king agreed to reduce his powers. Although Louis did offer some more rights to the Third Estate, they decided that this was not enough. On 11 July, Louis sacked many advisors who supported the National Assembly. This included Jacques Necker, who was quite popular. Ordinary people in Paris strongly supported Necker and the National Assembly. They began to fear that the king was going to stop the National Assembly. A riot broke out, leading to the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July.
Louis backed down and agreed to let the National Assembly run the country. The National Assembly started to carry out some dramatic changes to France. They passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and ended the laws that allowed the nobles to be treated better than ordinary people.
On 5 October 1789, a crowd of protestors (mostly women) gathered in Paris to protest the high price of bread. They decided to have a march to the Palace of Versailles. where the king lived. They broke into the palace. Some guards were killed, and the rest did not stop them. The protestors demanded that the royal family come with them to Paris. Louis did not want to come, but he gave in to their demands. He signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and went with them to Paris. He moved into the older Tuileries Palace.
Either the Storming of the Bastille or the Women's March on Versailles could be seen as the moment the king lost control of his country.
Louis would not be content as puppet king for very long. He was unhappy with the way he, his family and the church were being treated. The moderate politicians were losing support to more radical ones. But even though he was really a prisoner in the Tuileries Palace, Louis had allies in the army and other countries who would have supported the king over the politicians. Louis and Marie Antoinette planned to escape from the Tuileries on the night of June 21, 1791, disguised as servants. The royal family travelled towards the Fortress of Montmédy, which was a base for soldiers who supported the king and was on the border with the Austrian Netherlands. On their way to Montmédy, they were caught in the village of Varennes and forced to return to Paris. This incident became known as the flight to Varennes.
When Louis and his family were brought back to the Tuileries, guards now watched over them far more. Whether rightly or wrongly, many people in France believed that the king and queen were plotting with foreign governments to restore the absolute monarchy. The next year, these tensions led to France starting a war with Austria and Prussia. In July 1792, Prussia's Duke of Brunswick wrote "We will destroy Paris into the ground if anything happens to our royal majesty, the king and queen." He was trying to help the king and queen, but instead it did the opposite.
In August 1792, a riot broke out in Paris. A crowd of protestors, encouraged by radical politicians, invaded the Tuileries. Louis was arrested on 13 August and sent to the Temple, an ancient Paris fortress used as a prison. On September 21, the National Convention (the new National Assembly) declared France to be a republic and abolished the monarchy. They took away Louis's titles and gave him an ordinary name: "Louis Capet". They believed that Capet should be his surname because he was related to the House of Capet.
Louis was charged with several crimes, with the National Convention (the new National Assembly) acting as the judge. The main crime they accused him of was plotting with Austria to restore the absolute monarchy. They quickly voted that he was guilty. Nobody at the Convention liked Louis, but the Girondins at least wanted to spare his life. Maximilien Robespierre and the Montagnards said that he should be killed, and more than half of the members voted to have him executing. Many of them believed that they were not just punishing Louis for a crime, but also destroying the idea of monarchy.