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France's inhabitants were divided into three estates - the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else. The clergy numbered about 100,000 and had important privileges. It owned about 10 percent of the land and paid only a "voluntary gift," rather than regular taxes, to the government every five years. Moreover, the church levied a less than 10 percent tax (the tithe) on landowners. Much of the church's income was actually drained away from the local parishes by political appointees and worldly aristocrats at the top of the church hierarchy-to the intense dissatisfaction of the poor parish priests. .
The second estate - noblemen and noblewomen were the descendants of "those who fought" in the Middle Ages. They owned 25 percent of the land in France and they, too, were taxed very lightly. They continued to enjoy certain manorial rights, that dated back to medieval times and allowed them to tax the peasantry for their own profit. They had exclusive rights to hunt and fish, village monopolies on baking bread and pressing grapes for wine, fees for justice, and a host of other "useful privileges. In addition, nobles had "honorific privileges," such as the right to precedence on public occasions and the right to wear a sword. These rights conspicuously proclaimed nobility's legal superiority and exalted social position.
Everyone else was a commoner, legally a member of the third estate. A few commoners, prosperous merchants or lawyers and officials, were well educated and rich, and might even buy up manorial rights as profitable investments. Many more commoners were urban artisans and unskilled day laborers. The vast majority of the third estate consisted of the peasants and agricultural workers in countryside. Thus the third estate was a conglomerate of vastly different social groups united only by their shared legal status as distinct from the nobility and clergy. One of the long-term origins of the French Revolution was the growing tension between the nobility and the comfortable members of the third estate, usually known as the bourgeoisie, or middle class.