ABSTRACT
For the French historian Jacques Revel, the essential characteristic of ancien regime society was the corporate order rather than the feudal tie.! He was describing less the material importance of corporations than the power of corporate communities, as representations of economic and social relations, to shape the ways in which people perceived the social order in which they lived. The avocat general Seguier, in his famous speech attacking Turgot's controversial plans to abolish trade guilds in 1776, made the point powerfully when he told the King:
All your subjects, Sire, are divided amongst as many different bodies as there are states in the kingdom. The clergy, the nobility, the sovereign courts, the law courts, the officials of these courts, the universities, the academies, the finance companies, the trading companies, represent throughout the State existing bodies which one might see as links in a great chain, the first of which is in the hands of Your Majesty, as chief and sovereign administrator of all that constitutes the body of the nation.2
