Re. the Versailles strategy, did it contribute to the French Revolution, by distancing the nobility from the rest of French society?

Yes and no. 

The complicating factor is that significant portions of the nobility were quite involved in the early stages of the French Revolution – the Parlement of Paris’ refusal to register royal decrees on taxation leading to the calling of the Estates General, the renunciations of feudal privileges, the Orleanist faction of the Second Estate joining the National Assembly, etc. – and were quite fluent in the language of the Enlightenment, and could become quite popular political figures. (Think nobles like the Comte de Mirabeau, or Phillipe Égalité the Duc d’Orleans, or the Marquis de Lafayette.) The real turn against the nobility comes a bit later, with the Great Fear, the beginning of the war, etc.  

I would argue that the main contribution was that it exacerbated inequalities in taxation, and here is where the political and economic impulses of Louis XIV’s government come to the fore. Politically, Louis needed to give out tax exemptions as a way to get the nobility to come to Versailles and keep them there. Economically, Louis’ ministers wanted to tax the Second Estate to pay for Versailles, to pay for Louis’ wars, to pay for the growing centralized bureaucracy that was replacing the nobility out in the provinces, to pay for the infrastructure and investments in new industries that were needed to develop the French economy. 

Because the former impulse usually won out during the reigns of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI (to be fair, a lot of royal finance ministers tried to tax the First and Second Estates even when it usually ended their political careers), the tax burden on the Third Estate was significantly higher than it would have been had the Second Estate been paying taxes. 

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