1. The Class System in Pre-Revolutionary France
• Although the French Revolution marks the beginning of the modern era, France just before the Revolution wasn’t very modern.
• It was deeply divided by its class system and people at all levels were un happy
• There were also divisions within each class, such the different types of nobles (traditional: less powerful resided on estates, court: more powerful, served the king and lived at Versailles and judicial: powerful but resisted the draw of the court, controlled the law courts, most powerful) and the clash between ‘old’ and ‘new’ (former bourgeois, bought their way into the nobility) nobles.
• ‘New’ nobles Louis the 16th raised 2500 people to nobility in his 15 year reign, banking, trade
• The middle class wanted noble status because it was the only way they could participate in the political process
• The nobles and the middle class saw themselves as very different but had a lot in common compared to the lower classes
• Along with having wealth and opportunities, they both owned a lot more land than the peasants for their percentages of the population
• Estimated of land ownership in pre-revolution France
Nobility 20
Urban bourgeois 20-25
The Church 10
Peasantry 35-40
• By the late 18th c., it was getting harder for peasants to buy land
• More middle-class people wanted land, thus driving the price up
• Also, nobles didn’t want to sell land to peasants and, in fact, sometimes conspired to them of their land leases
2. The Growing Criticism of absolutism
• By the later 18th c., many people in France didn’t think absolutism was working
• Louis XV (1715-1774), spent most of his reign fighting with the parliaments for power until, in 1771, he abolished them
• Louis XVI brought back the parliaments in 1774 as a goodwill gesture but soon regretted it when they wanted him to give up more power to them
• Louis XVI made a Philosophe, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, his finance minister in 1774
• Turgot, as