(^122) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
oversaw both education and poverty relief. The Church owned approximately 10 percent of
all the land in France but paid no taxes to the government; instead, it made an annual gift
to the Crown in an amount of its own choosing. The clergy who populated the hierarchi-
cal structure of the Catholic Church in France ranged from poor, simple parish priests to
the powerful cardinals, who were connected to the pope in Rome, and who often served as
chief advisors in the government of the French king.
The nobility were the traditional landowning elite of France, though by this period
they often supplemented their fortunes through banking and commerce. They owned
somewhere between 25 and 33 percent of the land in France but were exempt from most
taxes, despite the fact that they still collected various types of manorial dues from peasant
farmers. Members of the nobility held most of the high offices in the French government,
army, and Church.
The citizenry can roughly be divided into three social groups:
• The bourgeoisie, including merchants, manufacturers, bankers, lawyers, and master
craftsmen
• The peasantry, including all agricultural laborers, ranging from very prosperous land
owners to poor sharecroppers and migrant workers
• Urban laborers, including journeymen craftsmen, mill and other small-scale manufactur-
ing workers, and all wage laborers who populated the cities and towns of France
By 1787, the government of King Louis XVI was in financial crisis. When he took the
throne in 1774, Louis XVI had inherited a huge and ever-increasing national debt, most
of it incurred by expansion of the bureaucracy, and by borrowing money to finance wars
and maintain an army. With interest on the debt mounting and bankers refusing to lend
the government more money, Louis and his ministers attempted to reform the tax system
of France and to pry some of the vast wealth out of the hands of the nobility. When the
nobility resisted, he was forced to do something that had not been done since 1614; he
called into session the Estates General. The Estates General was the closest thing to a leg-
islative assembly that existed in eighteenth-century France. Members representing each of
the three Estates met to hear the problems of the realm and to hear pleas for new taxes.
In return, they were allowed to present a list of their own concerns and proposals, called
cahiers, to the Crown. When the representatives arrived at Versailles, the palace of Louis
XVI, in April 1789, the representatives of the Third Estate presented a series of proposals
that were revolutionary in nature.
The Moderate Phase of the French Revolution (1789–1791)
The representatives of the Third Estate, in reality all members of the bourgeoisie, demanded
that the number of representatives for the Third Estate be doubled in order to equal the
number of representatives in the other two Estates combined and that representatives of
all three Estates meet together and vote by head rather than by Estate. These demands
were designed to give the Third Estate a chance to pass resolutions by persuading a single
member of the nobility or clergy to side with them. The demands of the Third Estate posed
a dilemma for Louis XVI: granting their demands would give the Third Estate unprec-
edented power, and that power would come at the expense of the nobility and the clergy,
but could perhaps be used to achieve the tax reforms that Louis and his ministers needed
to address France’s financial crisis.16_Bartolini_Ch16_119-132.indd 122 27/04/18 1:55 PM