ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, France was a largely agrarian society ruled by an absolute monarchy. In terms of its class structure, it was divided into three “orders” or “estates,” groups that had a legally defined status. The two privileged estates were the nobility and the clergy. At the time of the revolution they owned perhaps as much as a third of all the land in France, from which they collected feudal dues from the peasants who worked the land. The other privileged class was the clergy, which enjoyed a special status because its members were considered mediators between God and people. Just how numerous the bourgeois were at the time of the revolution is not precisely known, but William Doyle estimates that they constituted about 6 percent of the population. The king of France at the time of the revolution was Louis XVI.
