Well, I would argue that it is because France wasn't able to truly become an absolute monarchy, though Louis XIV gave it his darnedest.

Now I'll start off by saying I'm not a Louis XIV expert, so my discussion won't focus so much on how Louis XIV tried to make France an absolute monarchy (though we'll go over it at a high level), but instead I'll focus more on why France wasn't an absolute monarchy under Louis XV and Louis XVI, leading into the Revolution.

You're certainly right in that France, while having a central monarchy that ebbed and flowed in power until Louis XIV, a great deal of power was retained in the provinces. A large reason for this was that France did not spring out fully formed as Athena from Zeus's head. Far from this analogy, France was more like a patch-work quilt, with new patches being sewn in as new territory was acquired, lost, and disputed over. When these new territories were incorporated into "France", there was very little that tied them to "France" other than their allegiance to the same monarch. As I've mentioned in previous answers on the French Revolution, one thing to keep in mind was a large effort undertaken by the Revolutionaries was forging a cohesive, civic body of "the French" out of the disparate peoples that populated France. In 1789, on the eve of the Revolution, many of the "French" did not even speak French, but retained their quasi-independent languages (such as Provençal) or spoke entirely different languages altogether, such as Catalan in the South or German in the North. Outside of the easily illustrative difference of language, there was the more important difference as far as the Revolution was concerned, which was the difference in rights & privileges enjoyed by groups of people, certain provinces, or even specific cities within the provinces.

One of the hurdles for Louis XIV was bringing the geographically sprawling "French" under his personal thumb. To this end he famously built the massive palace of Versailles, and brought the nobles (soon to be the "Courtiers") to him, rather than letting them retain personal influence and power over their ancestral lands. Of course not all of the nobility was rich enough to afford to live at Versailles or nearby Paris, but accumulating the richest of the rich at Versailles and having them wait hand and foot upon the King in various splendid royal ceremonies did the trick in concentrating most of the power in one central location.

The other large initiative of the Bourbon's started under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, and that was the creation (or enlargement) of the royal bureaucracy, who would report up the chain directly to the ministry and therefore ostensibly be controlled more directly by the king. This was unpopular amongst those who had enjoyed power under local rule, and was a major cause of the Frond, the wide insurrection launched when Louis XIV was still a child under regency. After squashing the Frond, Louis XIV reinstated and enlarged the power of the royal bureaucracy, hopefully as a check against such provincial revolt in the future. This time it stuck, and though the Intendants (somewhat analogous to a 'governor' of a province appointed by the king) would be among the most hated men in the country and a prime target for violence once the Revolution broke out, they enjoyed a large amount of power until then.

So we have a nobility accumulated at Versailles, centralizing power around the King, who (usually) has a strong prime minister or at least a strong ministry. We have a royal bureaucracy that is well staffed and responds up the chain of command to the king. At this point let's address the two other political bodies who could ostensibly compete with the monarchy for power: the Estates General, and the parlement.

The Estates General was a 'representative' body that was assembled as a sort of advisory and consulting legislative body that the King would call in times of need. They were (supposedly) the only body that could officially approve new taxes (note: permanent taxes, not temporary levies or one-time contributions). The Estates General famously had not been called since 1614, as the 'absolutist' Bourbon kings had no need of them and wish to retain full sovereignty. There was no set schedule upon which the Estates had to be called: if the King never called for them, they could never be constituted.

The other body is perhaps the most important for our discussion of absolutism, and those are the parlement. These were thirteen courts of law that were staffed by the so-called "robe nobility", which often consisted of men who had purchased their office from the King, and which often conferred nobility upon them; in this way buying such an office was seen as an investment, as the nobility enjoyed all kinds of tax privileges and exemptions. The parlement were the perennial enemies of the monarchy, as they had grown to view themselves as the only 'check' against despotism. There is a fascinating fiction around the parlement that explains why each side-- the king and the parlement-- were hesitant to upset the status quo.

(continued in comment below)