Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Estates General of 1576 was a national meeting of the three orders of France; the clergy (First Estate), nobility (Second Estate) and common people (Third Estate). It was called as one of the many concessions made by the crown to the Protestant/moderate Catholic rebels to bring the Fifth War of Religion to a close.
Commoners were universally considered the lowest order. The higher estates' necessary dependency on the commoners' production, however, often further divided the otherwise equal common people into burghers (also known as bourgeoisie) of the realm's cities and towns, and the peasants and serfs of the realm's
Most of the royal clergy—especially those who rose to its upper echelons, such as canon and provost—were recruited from the lower nobility and sometimes even from the higher nobility. In the years following the Reformation, this royal clergy gradually disappeared, as the entire church hierarchy came directly under the King's control.
At the time of the revolution, the First Estate comprised 100,000 Catholic clergy and owned 5–10% of the lands in France—the highest per capita of any estate. All property of the First Estate was tax exempt. The Second Estate comprised the nobility, which consisted of 400,000 people, including women and children.
The Estates-General had been called on 5 May 1789 to manage France's financial crisis, but promptly fell to squabbling over its own structure. Its members had been elected to represent the estates of the realm: the 1st Estate (the clergy), the 2nd Estate (the nobility) and the 3rd Estate (which, in theory, represented all of the commoners and, in practice, represented the bourgeoisie).
The adjective feudal was in use by at least 1405, and the noun feudalism was in use by the end of the 18th century, [4] paralleling the French féodalité.. According to a classic definition by François Louis Ganshof (1944), [1] feudalism describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations of the warrior nobility that revolved around the key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs, [1 ...
The Third Estate balked at this traditional arrangement, because the clergy and nobility were more conservative than the commoners and could overrule the Third Estate on any matter 2–1. The Third Estate had initially demanded to be granted double weight, allowing them to match the power of the First and Second Estates, but those estates had ...
First Estate (Premièr État, le clergé) – The clergy, both high (generally siding with the nobility, and it often was recruited amongst its younger sons) and low. Second Estate (Second État, la noblesse ) – The nobility. Technically, but not usually of much relevance, the Second Estate also included the Royal Family.