ABSTRACT
The pre-1789 political culture of France was that of an absolute monarchy in which the person of the King was sacred and the royal will understood to be identical with the will of God. The monarch represented both the state and the nation, embodying national unity in his own person. The social order was explicitly hierarchical, divided into three estates (the clergy, the nobility and the commons, or Third Estate), and particularistic, numbering a host of corporate bodies which were entitled to send delegates to an Estates-General, a consultative assembly summoned by the King to proffer advice and to represent particular interests of the three estates. In practice, however, by the 1780s the Crown increasingly struggled to obtain the political decisions it wanted, confronted not only with the truculence of the Parlement of Paris (not a proto-parliament but a court of law which was supposed to dispense royal justice) but, more importantly, with the alienation of public opinion, moulded by a popular press and the outpourings of hack pamphleteers who diffused the thought of the philosophes to a wide audience. Hard-pressed financially by the late 1780s, the King and his ministers were forced to conclude that reform was imperative.
