The most powerful groups in society, in any case, had elaborated persuasive rationales for exemption. The clergy, a vast corporation drawing revenues from a sixth of the kingdom’s land, and creaming off, in the form of tithes, a notional tenth of the yield of the rest, paid no direct taxes on the grounds that it performed its service to society by praying and interceding with God. The nobility, the social elite which owned over a quarter of the land, levied feudal dues over much of the rest, and steadily sucked most of the newly rich into its ranks via ennobling offices, resisted the payment of direct taxes as well. Nobles, the argument went, served the kingdom with their blood, by fighting to defend it.

The crisis was triggered by King Louis XVI’s attempts to avoid bankruptcy.

Yet it was hard to see how a French king could keep up his international pretensions without some modification in his subjects’ time-honoured privileges and inequalities. Nowhere was the kingdom’s lack of uniformity more glaring than in the structure of privilege and exemption which gave each and every institution, group, or area a status not quite like any other.

As in every aspect of the ancien régime, the judicial and institutional map of France had no uniformity.