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The best-known system is a three-estate system of the French Ancien Régime used until the French Revolution (1789–1799). This system was made up of clergy (the First Estate), nobility (the Second Estate), and commoners (the Third Estate). A direct land tax on the French peasantry and non-nobles in Ancien Régime France.
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The Ancien Régime (Old Regime or Former Regime) was the social and political system established in the Kingdom of France from approximately the 15th century until the latter part of the 18th century under the late Valois and Bourbon dynasties.
The term is occasionally used to refer to the similar feudal social and political order of the time elsewhere in Europe.
The administrative and social structures of the Ancien Régime were the result of years of state-building, legislative acts, internal conflicts, and civil wars, but they remained a patchwork of local privilege and historic differences until the French Revolution ended the system.
Despite the notion of absolute monarchy and the efforts by the kings to create a centralized state, Ancien Régime France remained a country of systemic irregularities.
Administrative (including taxation), legal, judicial, and ecclesiastic divisions and prerogatives frequently overlapped (for example, French bishoprics and dioceses rarely coincided with administrative divisions).
