It is not my intention here to examine in detail how things were done in each of the pays d'états that still existed at the time of the Revolution.

I merely wish to note their number and to identify those that retained an active local existence, as well as to describe their relations with the royal administration, in what respects they departed from the common rules I set forth earlier and in what respects they did not, and, finally, by taking one of them as an example, to show what they all might easily have become.

Estates had at one time existed in most of the provinces of France. In other words, each province had been administered, under the auspices of the royal government, by the “people of the three estates,” as people used to say. This expression should be understood to mean an assembly composed of representatives of the clergy, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie. This provincial constitution, like other medieval political institutions, could be found with identical features in almost all civilized parts of Europe, or at any rate in all those influenced by Germanic mores and ideas. In many German provinces, estates persisted right up to the French Revolution. Where they had vanished, they had done so only in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Everywhere, for two centuries, princes had waged war on them, at times covertly, at times openly, but without interruption.