Why couldn’t France’s “absolute” king fix France before it exploded?

Why couldn’t France’s “absolute” king fix France before it exploded?

The YouTube video “Revolutions Podcast by Mike Duncan - S3: French Revolution - Episode 1” contains Mike Duncan’s Revolutions episode 3.1, “The Three Estates,” after a brief podcast update. The episode introduces the French Revolution by rejecting simple one-class-versus-another explanations, then maps pre-revolutionary France through peasants, urban workers, bourgeois office-buyers, nobles, clergy, and the Bourbon monarchy to show why reform was so difficult before the financial crisis.