How was the society divided before French revolution? (3) answer the question for 3 marks
Answers
Answer:
France under the Ancien Régime (before the French Revolution) divided society into three estates: the First Estate (clergy); the Second Estate (nobility); and the Third Estate (commoners). The king was considered part of no estate.
Explanation:
First Estate
The First Estate comprised the entire clergy, traditionally divided into "higher" and "lower" clergy. Although there was no formal demarcation between the two categories, the upper clergy were, effectively, clerical nobility, from the families of the Second Estate. In the time of Louis XVI, every bishop in France was a nobleman, a situation that had not existed before the 18th century.[5]
At the other extreme, the "lower clergy" (about equally divided between parish priests, monks, and nuns) constituted about 90 percent of the First Estate, which in 1789 numbered around 130,000 (about 0.5% of the population).[citation needed]
Second Estate
The Second Estate (Fr. deuxieme état) was the French nobility and (technically, though not in common use) royalty, other than the monarch himself, who stood outside of the system of estates.
The Second Estate is traditionally divided into noblesse d'épée ("nobility of the sword"), and noblesse de robe ("nobility of the robe"), the magisterial class that administered royal justice and civil government.
The Second Estate constituted approximately 1.5% of France's population.[citation needed] Under the ancien régime ("old rule/old government"), the Second Estate were exempt from the corvée royale (forced labour on the roads) and from most other forms of taxation such as the gabelle (salt tax) and most important, the taille (the oldest form of direct taxation). This exemption from paying taxes led to their reluctance to reform.
Third Estate
Coat of arms of pre-revolutionary Kingdom of France
The Third Estate comprised all of those who were not members of either of the above and can be divided into two groups, urban and rural, together making up over 90% of France's population.[6] The urban included wage-labourers. The rural included free peasants (who owned their own land) who could be prosperous and villeins (serfs, or peasants working on a noble's land). The free peasants paid disproportionately high taxes compared to the other Estates and were unhappy because they wanted more rights. In addition, the First and Second Estates relied on the labour of the Third, which made the latter's inferior status all the more glaring.
There were an estimated 27 million people in the Third Estate when the French Revolution started.
They had the hard life of physical labour and food shortages.[7] Most were born within this group and died as a part of it, too. It was extremely rare for people of this ascribed status to make it into another estate. Those who did so managed as a result of either being recognized for their extraordinary bravery in a battle or entering religious life.[8] A few commoners were able to marry into the Second Estate, but this was a rare occurrence.[8]
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