Louis XVI: Is it a revolt?La Rochefoucauld–Liancourt: No, Sire, it is a revolution.

The remark is traditionally attributed to François Alexandre Frédéric, duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, in the early days of the French Revolution. On the night of 14–15 July 1789, after news reached Versailles that the Bastille had fallen in Paris, Louis XVI is said to have asked whether the disturbance was merely a “revolt.” La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt allegedly replied that it was not a revolt but a “revolution,” signaling that the events were not a temporary riot but a fundamental political rupture. The exchange has become a set-piece anecdote used to dramatize the monarchy’s belated recognition of the scale of the crisis.

The force of the line lies in its distinction between a limited outbreak of disorder and a systemic transformation. A “revolt” suggests a containable challenge to authority; a “revolution” implies a change in the foundations of legitimacy and power. In the anecdote, Louis XVI’s question conveys the court’s initial tendency to interpret Parisian unrest as episodic, while La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt’s answer frames it as irreversible and structural. The quotation endures because it compresses a historical turning point into a single exchange: the moment when the old regime’s assumptions no longer fit events, and language itself must shift to name a new political reality.

1) « C’est une révolte ? — Non, Sire, c’est une révolution. »
2) “Is it a revolt?” — “No, Sire, it is a revolution.”
3) “Is this a revolt?” — “No, Sire; it is a revolution.”