Estates General (France)
It had no true power in its own right as, unlike the English Parliament, it was not required to approve royal taxation or legislation.
[1] It served as an advisory body to the king, primarily by presenting petitions from the various estates and consulting on fiscal policy.
Unlike some of these institutions, however, France's Estates General were only summoned at irregular intervals by the king, and never grew into a permanent legislative body.
The first national assembly of the Estates General was in 1302, summoned by King Philip IV, to address a conflict with Pope Boniface VIII.
[4] The letters summoning the assembly of 1302 are published by Georges Picot in his collection of Documents inédits pour servir à l'histoire de France.
During Philip's reign, the Estates General were subsequently assembled several times to give him aid by granting subsidies.
This amounted to needing authorization from the Estates General, which granted these subsidies only temporarily and for fairly short periods.
[5] In the second half of the 14th century, however, certain royal taxes, levied throughout the Crown's domain, tended to become permanent and independent of the vote of the estates.
For instance, the Crown thus raised the necessary taxes for twenty years to pay the ransom of King John II of France without a vote of the Estates General, although the assembly met several times during this period.
During the second half of the 15th century, the chief taxes, the taille, aids and gabelle became definitely permanent for the benefit of the Crown.
[5] The critical periods of the Hundred Years' War favoured the Estates General, though at the price of great sacrifices.
Under the reign of King John II, from 1355 to 1358, the Estates General had controlled not only the voting but, through their commissaries, the administration of and jurisdiction over the taxes.
[6] At the estates of 1484, however, after the death of Louis XI, the Duke of Orleans sought to obtain the regency during the minority of Charles VIII.
They voted the taille for two years only, at the same time reducing it to the amount it had reached at the end of the reign of Charles VII.
Those of 1588 ended with a coup d'état by Henri III, and the States summoned by the League, which sat in Paris in 1593 and whose chief object was to elect a Catholic king, were not a success.
The Estates General again met in Paris in 1614 [fr], on the occasion of the disturbances that followed the death of Henry IV; however, though their minutes bear witness to their sentiments of exalted patriotism, dissensions between the three orders rendered them weak.
But after 1560, the rule was that each order deliberate separately; the royal declaration of 23 June 1789 (at the outbreak of the French Revolution) even stated that they formed three distinct chambers.
At the first, the king or his chancellor announced the object of the convocation, and set forth the demands or questions put to them by the Crown; at the other royal sessions each order made known its answers or observations by the mouth of an orateur elected for the purpose.
Certain questions, however, were discussed and decided in full assembly; sometimes, too, the estates nominated commissaries in equal numbers for each order.
It was only in 1787 that the parlement of Paris declared that it could not register the new taxes, the land-tax and stamp duty (subvention territoriale and impôt du timbre), as they did not know whether they would be submitted to by the country, and that the consent of the representatives of the tax-payers must be asked.
Those who sat in them had at all times the right of presenting complaints (doléances), requests and petitions to the king; in this, indeed, consisted their sole initiative.
The deputies of each order in every bailliage also brought with them a cahier des doléances, arrived at, for the third estate, by a combination of statements drawn up by the primary or secondary electors.
The last of the type was the grande ordonnance of 1629 (Code Michau), drawn up in accordance with the cahiers of 1614 and with the observations of various assemblies of notables that followed them.
It was universally recognized that in the event of the line of Hugh Capet becoming extinct, it would be the function of the States-General to elect a new king.
A new convocation had indeed been announced to take place on the majority of Louis XIII, and letters were even issued in view of the elections, but this ended in nothing.
But though St Simon stood high in the favor of the regent Orléans, the death of Louis XIV did not see a summoning of the Estates.
By the time of the revolution, they had almost a monopoly over distinguished government service, higher offices in the church, army, and parliaments, and most other public and semi-public honors.
As François Fénelon had promoted in the 17th century, an Assembly of Notables in 1787 (which already displayed great independence) preceded the Estates General session.
