Social structure of france during the french revolution
Answers
hope it would help my dear friend to clear your doubt thank you
Like many European societies, the theory people thought from was the concept of the three Estates :
The nobles, who are the fighters that defend the others. This is not completely rhetorical : the nobles always weighted more than their proportion in the military, and in fact the highest officers had to be noble. They were expected to live from the rents obtained by possessing lands (fiefdoms) and their frowned upon doing commoner activities like trade and crafting. Louis XIV tried to involve them in these activities and they never wanted. The honorable thing to do was to be in the military. Nobles had some legal privileges like paying LESS taxes (not none, contrary to a popular belief). Nobility is a ststus drawn from lineage and nothing else. Having a paticule name is not an indication of nobility.
The priests, ecclesiastics, those who pray. Don’t assume they are naive believers that don’t involve in politics. They were often career choices, a way to be an intellectual in an agricultural society, not all of them were believers actually and some ecclesiastics had a very important role in society like the cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu who actually governed France. University students were given the privilege to be considered ecclesiastics and therefore benefit from their separate legal regime that was nicer.
The commoners. In French the opposite of a noble is a roturier. We can call this class la roture. The Third Estate is another way to frame it, when discussing the Estates general. It would be wrong to assume they are all poors. A bourgeois was a city dweller that lived in a bourg (that term usually implies the city has walls), and many were rich merchants. Craftmanship could be quite a lucrative activity if you were a master (who could exploit his apprentices). Roturiers could even be lords (seigneurs) just like nobles (in the Modern Era of course, not before) but it was more common in the colonies than in France. The term pauvre in French did not mean the same thing as what we would assume now. For them, what we understand as poors were called indigents. They were sometimes stacked in “hospitals”, that were not actual health institutions like the hôtels-dieux but rather a form of social service.
The society in France was classified into three different categories that were known as the Estates. Accordingly, there was the first, second and the third estate. Where the first estate incorporated the clergy, the second was comprised of the nobles and the third one incorporated all other commoners. In this social structure, the people of the First Estate were released from meeting any sort of tax or tribute, the Second Estate also paid a very few taxes. But the third estate was overtaxed by the monarchy.