The old France is subject to an economic system with agricultural preponderance. The vast majority of the 25 million inhabitants of the kingdom of Louis XVI live off the land. However, this peasant France has a subsistence economy with low productivity, linked to the vagaries of time and family demography. These elements are not the only ones to make the means of existence of the French precarious. Survival of the feudal era when the lord protected the men of his movement in the event of serious danger - in return for which the castle was owed seigniorial rights levied on the product of the land - the 18th century no longer knew protection, but retained the seigniorial rights.
The tithe due to the clergy and the exemption from size enjoyed by the nobles accentuate the economic distortion between the third estate (about 98% of the kingdom), and the two other orders. Certainly, half of the lands of the kingdom are held by a multitude of commoners; nevertheless, in order to be a landowner, the small peasant still owes an infinite number of taxes to his lord, who is the master of the domain. The current notion of holding-management is a concern of liberal economics which will only appear later.
The vast majority of French people believe that this order of things is indisputable since it is subject to the overall organization of a society resulting from divine right. Thus, any rational reasoning on economic egalitarianism will long pass for a sinful subversion, therefore not admissible. The people, over the centuries, will rise up not against the foundations of the system but against the abuses in their mode of application.
Furthermore, the social pyramid converges, through complex administrative labyrinths, towards its top, the monarch who holds from God his throne, and his court. The king both reigns over the country, as uncontested master, and finds himself, as "lord of lords", struggling with a turbulent nobility more or less domesticated since Louis XIV.
Where and how do we see the breaking points of the old monarchical edifice appear at the end of the 18th century? As paradoxical as it may seem at first glance, 1789 closed a relatively rich century. The last years of the Ancien Régime saw satisfactory harvests with the exception of that of 1788, better demography, the war carried beyond the borders. In a word, a certain prosperity is born. However, favoring trade and land rent, it penalises, because of the inflation it induces, the essentially rural working classes. The wealth of the cities due to the development of commercial exchanges, carries with it a bourgeoisie which, considering being able to deal as equals with the landed nobility, does not admit, for example, to being excluded from the high ranks of the army. .
Thus occurs the process of aristocratic reaction. The nobility, politically muzzled under Louis XIV, wants to take revenge which pushes it to a social immobility more and more badly supported. And the philosophical movement, advocating the consecration of natural law, comes to spread on a people, more and more open to the Enlightenment, the reflexes of social equality.
A series of unsuccessful attempts to restructure institutional bodies; an endemic financial crisis; a growing discredit of court society; a brave man of a king quickly overtaken by events; a fixed and divided nobility; a high sectarian clergy and a discontented bourgeois class, allow the meeting of a society - at the same time deliquescent and imbued with the spirit of the century - and the people, a numerically crushing class, overwhelmed with taxes and worried about its future.
Faced with these multiple elements, Louis XVI, lost between the tensions and the contradictory aspirations of the various elements of the social body, opts, for lack of knowing how to impose his law, for the headlong rush that constitutes the meeting of the Estates General.