ABSTRACT
The dominant mode of social organization in most European countries was the society of orders. The classical form of the hierarchy, still the official rule in France, distinguished a first order or estate, the clergy; a second, the nobility; and a third, the common people. Actual patterns of power and influence in old regime European society did correspond to this model of the three orders, although with a wide variety of modifications, emendations and qualifications. The economic system prevalent in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century was characterized by low productivity. The economy's problems began with agriculture, the sector in which a substantial majority of the population was employed. Thinking about culture in the broad terms of anthropologists, as a system of symbolic expression and interaction people use to make sense of the world in which they live, religious confession was the dominant element in European cultural life during the decade of the 1780s.
