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Opening of the Estates General on 5 May 1789 in the Grands Salles des Menus-Plaisirs in Versailles. In France under the Ancien Régime, the Estates General (French: États généraux [eta ʒeneʁo]) or States-General was a legislative and consultative assembly of the different classes (or estates) of French subjects.
The Estates General of 1789 (French: États Généraux de 1789) was a general assembly representing the French estates of the realm: the clergy (First Estate), the nobility (Second Estate), and the commoners (Third Estate). It was the last of the Estates General of the Kingdom of France. [2]
This list aims to display alphabetically the 1,145 titular deputies (291 deputies of the clergy, 270 of the nobility and 584 of the Third Estate-commoners) elected to the Estates-General of 1789, which became the National Assembly on 17 June 1789 and the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July 1789; as well as the alternate delegates who sat.
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 Estates-General contained three separate bodies, the First Estate representing 100,000 clergy, the Second the nobility, and the Third the "commons". [33] Since each met separately, and any proposals had to be approved by at least two, the First and Second Estates could outvote the Third despite representing less than 5% of the population. [28]
The Estates General of France were convoked only twice between 1614 and 1789, both times during the Fronde (1648–53), and in neither case did they actually meet. At the final meeting of the Estates in 1789 , they voted to join in a single National Assembly , generally seen as marking the start of the French Revolution. [ 1 ]
Their compilation was ordered by Louis XVI, who had convened the Estates General of 1789 to manage the revolutionary situation, to give each of the Estates – the First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the nobility) and the Third Estate, which consisted of everyone else, including the urban working class, the rural peasantry, and middle ...
The number of the Estates-General increased significantly during the election period, but many deputies took their time arriving, some of them reaching Paris as late as 1791. According to Timothy Tackett, there were a total of 1,177 deputies in the Assembly by mid-July 1789. Among them, 278 belonged to the nobility, 295 to the clergy, and 604 ...