Estates General

The social composition of the three orders

The three estates were the legal ordering of ancien-régime French society itself, and the king belonged to none of them. The First Estate was the clergy, the Second the nobility, the Third the commoners. In 1789 the First Estate numbered 115,000–150,000 Catholic clergy, under 1 per cent of the population, owning 5–10 per cent of the land and exempt from taxation; the Second Estate was roughly 1.5 per cent of the population (about 400,000 including women and children, with other counts of 120,000–400,000), owned about 25–30 per cent of the land, and was exempt from the taille and most taxes; the Third Estate comprised about 25–28 million people, some 98 per cent of the population, including wage-labourers, free peasants and villeins, and alone bore the main burden of taxation.

Origins and dormancy

The Estates General originated in 1302, when Philip IV summoned representatives of each order to Notre-Dame in Paris to secure the nation's support in his quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII; a second session followed in 1303. Granting subsidies became the most frequent motive for convocation. In the 14th century its powers were considerable and consent to general taxation was needed, but permanent royal taxation developed in the second half of that century and the chief taxes (taille, aides, gabelle) became permanent for the Crown in the second half of the 15th, reducing its effective role. In the primitive form only Third Estate representatives were chosen by election, and only the privileged bonnes villes were called upon; country districts were not represented.

From 1614 to 1789

The Estates were revived in the second half of the 16th century amid the Wars of Religion and scarcity of money (Orléans 1560, Pontoise 1561, Blois 1576 and 1588); those of 1588 ended with a coup d'état by Henri III. The 1614 assembly in Paris was weakened by dissensions among the three orders, dissolved before completing its work, and was not summoned again until 1789, 175 years later.

One chamber or three?

Whether the Estates General formed one body or three chambers was never constitutionally decided. At the 1484 estates elections were made in common and resolutions arrived at in common; after 1560 the rule was that each order deliberated separately, and the royal declaration of 23 June 1789 went so far as to state that they formed three distinct chambers. The unit of voting was never personal: for each order it was the bailliage or sénéchaussée, each with one vote, and in the 16th-century estates it was the gouvernement. Almost all useful work was done in sections or bureaux, and drawing up the cahier général was regarded as the session's main business.

The convocation of 1789

The 1789 assembly was a desperate attempt to resolve a catastrophic fiscal crisis. Structural reform attempts, including a universal land tax, were blocked by the Assembly of Notables in 1787 and by the parlements, which claimed that only an Estates General had authority to approve new taxes. When Brienne forwarded the land tax and the stamp duty for registration, the king held a lit de justice on 6 August 1787 to force registration through; on 7 August the Parlement of Paris declared that registration illegal and the lit de justice null and void, and called for the Estates General. After the Parlement's declaration of 3 May 1788, Louis XVI conceded: on 8 August 1788 the Plenary court was cancelled and the Estates General scheduled for the following May, and Necker, reappointed after Brienne's resignation on 24 August, restored the parlements. The summons came by royal edict dated 24 January 1789; after a grand procession on 4 May, Louis XVI opened the session on 5 May at the Menus Plaisirs in Versailles, followed by Necker's long financial speech.

The basic constituencies were the ancient bailliage and sénéchaussée judicial districts, each with a separate electoral assembly for each order. Every male taxpayer over 25 could attend a primary assembly, with two delegates chosen per hundred households for the final Third Estate elections, and every voting assembly drew up a cahier de doléances. Over six million people took part in the electoral process and over 25,000 cahiers were drawn up.

The voting dispute and the collapse

Under the 1614 format each estate had an equal number of representatives and one vote each, so the two upper estates could always outvote the Third. This produced the demands for "doubling the Third", a twofold increase in Third Estate representation, and "voting by head", decisions made by individual deputies' ballots. The Third Estate obtained double representation and was allotted 578 deputies against 303 for the clergy and 282 for the nobility (the November 1788 second Assembly of Notables voted against doubling but was overruled by Necker), yet because votes were cast by order, the collective vote of 578 deputies weighed the same as that of each of the two smaller estates. According to whether allotment or attendance is counted, Third Estate figures run from 578 to 609–611, and totals from 1,219 deputies to 1,208 actually seated.

The deadlock came at once. On 6 May 1789 the Second Estate voted 188 to 46 to refuse joint verification of credentials with the Third. The Third refused to organize as a separate order, began calling itself the Commons (les communes), and after Sieyès's motion on 17 June voted 491 to 89 to adopt the title National Assembly, claiming the power to consent to taxation and inviting the other orders to join. When the hall was closed on 20 June the deputies swore the Tennis Court Oath not to disband until France had a constitution, and by 9 July the Assembly reconstituted itself as the National Constituent Assembly. The procedural dispute paralyzed the body for six weeks, and that deadlock turned the fiscal crisis into a crisis of sovereignty.

Distinction from same-name assemblies

The French Estates General resembled estates institutions elsewhere: the States General of the Netherlands, the Parliament of England, the Estates of Parliament of Scotland, the Sejm of Poland-Lithuania, the Cortes of Portugal and Spain, the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, the Parliamentum Publicum of Hungary, and the Swedish Riksdag of the Estates. Unlike some of these, France's Estates General were summoned only at irregular intervals by the king and never grew into a permanent legislative body. It is also distinct from the parlements, the most powerful being the Parlement of Paris, which began as appellate courts and later claimed a legislative role. In England a two-estate system evolved, combining nobility and clergy into one lordly estate with the commons as the second, producing the two houses of parliament; in Scotland the Three Estates were the clergy, nobility and shire commissioners or burghers. France's assembly remained a royal summons rather than a standing parliament.

Interests within the assembly

Members used the assembly to defend their own interests: nobles and clergy sought to strengthen their lordship over the peasants who were their source of income in exchange for consenting to the king's demands, while town representatives sought economic privileges as the price of the taxes they paid. New kings regarded receiving an accession gift through the Estates as a right (the 1484 estates gave 300,000 livres on Charles VIII's accession), but members increasingly regarded the king's obtaining their consent as important in itself.

The end point

Sources assign no single dissolution year. The Estates met intermittently until 1614 and only once afterwards, in 1789, and were not definitively dissolved until after the French Revolution. The last assembly was effectively broken up in 1789 amid the Third Estate's demand over voting, and the French Revolution began from it.