Contemporary references can be found in the eighteenth century for the view that seigniorial rights and dues were largely obsolete in practice. In 1735 d'Argenson wrote, ‘There only remains the shadow of the seigneurie’, and rather later Letrône, ‘There is nothing real in feudalism except the expenses, that is to say there is no profit except for the agents and the compilers of terriers’. But they cancel this out themselves when Letrone goes on to call it ‘a social evil’, and d'Argenson adds, ‘all the same it is annoying and harmful’. Seigniorial rights certainly survived, even if not as universally as has sometimes been supposed, and they were an object of widespread attack; but is this attack correctly described as the struggle of the bourgeois against feudalism? I have already suggested that the equation of the system of seigniorial rights with feudalism is historically unjustifiable, but this can be disregarded for the moment, as a matter of terminology, though it is rather more than that: M. Methivier, following other French historians, has rightly protested against the confusion of feudal and seigniorial. There is a problem involved, however, which is a matter of historical fact. Is the identification of the bourgeois as the social force responsible for the attack on seigniorial rights a valid one?

This is not a new doubt. Georges Lefebvre pointed out that, up to 14 July 1789, the bourgeois had neither the desire nor the intention to attack the seigniorial rights, and that they had no idea of calling on the peasants to revolt, or of abolishing seigniorial rights without compensation.