What was the Estates-General in France?

The Estates-General was a body with representatives of each of the three "estates," or socio-legal orders, in France under the Bourbon monarchs. It was convened most famously by Louis XVI in 1789 in a last-ditch attempt at achieving some type of reform to address the growing fiscal crisis that confronted the kingdom. It had not been previously convened in more than two hundred years, a fact which shows how urgent this crisis really was. The...

The Estates-General was a body with representatives of each of the three "estates," or socio-legal orders, in France under the Bourbon monarchs. It was convened most famously by Louis XVI in 1789 in a last-ditch attempt at achieving some type of reform to address the growing fiscal crisis that confronted the kingdom. It had not been previously convened in more than two hundred years, a fact which shows how urgent this crisis really was. The delegates to the Estates-General were chosen by local elections, and instructed by what were known as cahiers, similar to petitions, which expressed grievances of ordinary people. A fatal problem to the 1789 Estates-General was the seating of delegates by order, which ensured that the reforms that Louis XVI sought would be impossible to achieve--the First and Second Estates (the Catholic clergy and the nobility) would generally vote together against the Third Estate (everyone else in French society). Eventually the Third Estate left the Estates-General, forming what became known as the National Assembly. This act is often seen by historians as the beginning of the French Revolution.