The Estates General of 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). Summoned by King Louis XVI, it opened on 5 May 1789 at Versailles, marking the first such meeting since 1614. The assembly was a desperate attempt to resolve a catastrophic fiscal crisis. Previous attempts at structural reform, including a universal land tax, had been blocked by the Assembly of Notables and the Parlements. These bodies claimed that only the Estates General possessed the authority to approve new taxes. The Estates General ultimately failed due to a fundamental deadlock over voting procedures. The First and Second Estates sought to vote by estate to preserve their tax exemptions and political dominance. Conversely, the Third Estate demanded voting by head to reflect their numerical majority. This procedural dispute paralyzed the body for six weeks, preventing any progress on the financial crisis. The failure became definitive when the Third Estate broke away to declare itself the National Assembly on 17 June 1789.
Background Assembly of Notables As a result of the financial support given to the Americans during the war against Great Britain, the amount totaled 1.25 billion livres, and France was heavily in debt. For a total income of 475 million livres, the annual deficit was some 150 million. In 1786, Calonne informed the king that increasing taxes would be impossible, that continued borrowing would be disastrous, and that merely cutting expenses would be inadequate. He added that the only way to bring real order to the finances would be to revitalise the entire state by reforming everything that was defective in its constitution. Calonne did not want the Parlements involved due to their opposing stance. He preferred an assembly of notables, as they were only the most important and enlightened magnates of the realm to whom the king could communicate his views and from whom he sought their opinions. Calonne received little cooperation from the assembly as his reforms included a land tax, which was rejected by the nobility within the assembly. Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, president of the Assembly of Notables, succeeded Calonne as the Controller-General of Finances. Frustrated by his inability to obtain money, he required 240 million livres in short-term advances budgeted for 1788, the king ordered Brienne on 25 May to dissolve the Assembly. Their proposals reverted to the Parlement.
Rebellion of the parlements Turning again to the parlements, the king found that they were inclined to continue the issues that had been raised in the Assembly of Notables. The proper legal function of the parlements, besides giving advice to the king, was only to register or record the king's edicts as law unless the registered edicts were not lawful. On 6 July 1787, Brienne forwarded the Subvention Territoriale (land tax) and the edit du timbre, (stamp act), for registration. On 6 August, the king ordered the Parlement to assemble at Versailles, where Louis held a Lit de justice to register the taxes. On 7 August, back in Paris, the Parlement declared the registration illegal and the lit de justice null and void, calling for the Estates General to assemble.
Following the arrest of some leading magistrates on 15 August, the king exiled the Parlement from Paris to Troyes. When negotiations with the Parlement were at a deadlock, Louis XVI was forced to give in. On 19 September, Louis XVI agreed to withdraw the Edict of the land tax and promised to convene the Estates-General in 1792, and the Parlement returned to Paris. No longer able to rely on revenue from the land tax, Brienne was forced to propose a loan of 420 million livres before Parlement on 19 November. The rejection of the registration led to the exile of the Duke of Orléans and the arrest of two magistrates. In May 1788, Louis XVI and his ministers Brienne and Lamoignon attempted to limit the Parlements to judicial duties by creating a royal plenary court for political acts. On 3 May, the Parlement responded with a declaration of fundamental laws that rejected arbitrary arrests and stated that only the Estates-General could authorize new taxes.
Two days later, the King annulled this declaration and ordered the arrest of Duval d'Éprémesnil and Goislard de Monsabert, who were eventually taken after a thirty-hour resistance within the Parlement walls. During a lit de justice on 8 May, the King enacted reforms that transferred parlementary powers to forty-seven new courts of appeal and the Plenary court. He argued that a single king required a single law and a single register, subsequently suspending all Parlements. This move led to widespread provincial opposition, including the Day of the Tiles in Grenoble and an unauthorized assembly in Vizille that called for an institutional change where the Third Estate would have doubled representation.
The King found it impossible to establish the Plenary court as several peers refused to participate and civil unrest increased. By 8 August 1788, the King and Brienne cancelled the Plenary court and scheduled the Estates-General for the following May. Following Brienne's resignation on 24 August, the King reappointed Necker as Director-General of Finance, who restored the Parlements to their previous status. However, the Parlement of Paris lost its public standing in September by demanding that the Estates-General follow the 1614 format, which restricted the influence of commoners. Although the Assembly of Notables supported this traditional format in November, the King chose to support the Third Estate's demand for doubled representation. By 5 December 1788, the King informed the parlementarians that he would no longer consult them, preferring to seek measures for the state through the National Assembly.
Convening Edict of 24 January 1789
The Estates-General were summoned by a royal edict dated 24 January 1789.
Elections The electoral system used in 1789 was complex. Basic constituencies were to be the ancient bailliage and sénéchaussée judicial districts. To ensure rough parity of size and population, however, smaller bailliages and sénéchaussées were amalgamated while Bordeaux, Marseille, Nantes, Amiens, Lille, Lyon, Rouen and Paris were granted separate representation. With these exceptions, there was to be an electoral assembly for each order in each of the 234 constituencies. Nobles with full transmissible titles were eligible to participate in the noble assemblies, whilst beneficed clergymen were entitled to participate in their own assemblies. Due to the sheer size of the Third Estate, indirect representation was required. Thus, every male taxpayer over the age of 25 had the right to attend a primary assembly. Two delegates were chosen from every hundred households to sit in the assembly that elected the final third-estate deputies.
The number of deputies was 1,219 in total: 302 for the First Estate, 289 for the Second Estate and 611 for the Third Estate. The actual number of deputies who in fact sat was 1,208: 299 for the First Estate, 278 for the Second Estate and 609 for the Third Estate. The First Estate represented 115,000 to 150,000 Catholic clergy, less than 1 per cent of the population. Three-fourths of the delegates from the First Estate were ordinary parish priests. The remaining First Estate deputies held a variety of clerical positions. Of these, 46 were prelates, including 34 bishops, 10 archbishops and two episcopal coadjutors. The 27 other members of the upper clergy were closely associated with the episcopal contingent and included vicars-general, a retired bishop, an agent-general of the Clergy of France, three conseillers clercs attached to the sovereign courts, and an abbé commendataire linked to the royal ministry (the Oratorian academician Maury). The group of 26 canons, ecclesiastical teachers, and non-parish regulars completed the clerical estate.
The Second Estate represented the nobility, about 120,000 to 400,000 men and women who owned about 25 to 30 percent of the land. Primarily drawn from the elite of the traditional aristocracy, the deputies of the Second Estate included four princes of the blood, sixteen dukes (nine of whom were peers of the realm), eighty-three marquesses, one hundred and four counts or viscounts, and twenty-eight barons. Nearly three-quarters of nobles overall belonged to this category, compared to just two to six per cent of titled nobles on the provincial tax rolls of the kingdom. Moreover, a large proportion of these aristocrats lived in towns, particularly in Paris. Only a minority of these Parisian noble deputies were 'courtiers', with ties and responsibilities at the royal court in Versailles.
Just nine were listed in the official almanac, not including the King's cousin, the Duke of Orléans, and six other dukes and peers who had immediate access to the king's inner circle. However, many others undoubtedly attended court functions and socialised with one another in Paris. A quarter of the Second Estate deputies came from the medium to large provincial towns of the kingdom, joining the large contingent of Parisian aristocrats. Some of these were undoubtedly military officers stationed with their regiments or serving as local commanders or governors. Others were retired officers living among the prosperous regional nobility, dividing their time between rural estates and townhouses in provincial capitals. Overall, only a fifth to a quarter of the deputies were nobles from the provinces.
The Third Estate representation was doubled, representing about 98 percent of the population of roughly 28 million. Half were well-educated lawyers or local officials. Nearly a third were in trades or industry; 51 were wealthy landowners. None of them were craftsmen or shopkeepers, and only two of them identified themselves as peasants through their clothing: the Bretons Michel Gérard and Corentin Le Floc'h. A minimum of fifty-eight of the Third Estate delegates held some form of hereditary or personal nobility. While this was well below the 25–45 per cent of nobles in the Third Estate in 1614, it still represented almost one in twelve of the Commons' members. Some of these deputies came from prominent and ancient aristocratic families: Mirabeau, the Comte de Chambord and the Marquis de Rostaing, who presided over the Nobility order in Montbrison before being elected by the Third Estate of the same bailliage. The majority of Third Estate nobles, however, had been ennobled recently, were in the process of being ennobled, or held various forms of 'temporary' nobility.Some clergy were also elected as Third Estate delegates, most notably the abbé Sieyès.
The Règlement that went out by post in January thus specified separate voting for delegates of each estate. Each tax district (cities, boroughs, and parishes) would elect their own delegates to the Third Estate. The Bailliages, or judicial districts, would elect delegates to the First and Second Estates in separate ballots. The election rules differed somewhat depending on the type of voting unit, whether city, parish, or some other. Generally, the distribution of delegates was by population: the most populous locations had the greatest number of delegates. Paris was thus dominant. The electorate consisted of males 25 years and older, property owners, and registered taxpayers. They could be native or naturalized citizens.