In addition to economic differences, early modern French society was legally stratified by birth. Its three traditional divisions, or "orders," were the clergy, the nobility, and the common people. Nobles ruled over commoners, but even among commoners, specific individuals (such as officeholders) or groups (such as a particular guild or an entire town) enjoyed privileges unavailable to outsiders

When the King called for an Estates-General in 1789, the social tensions plaguing the old regime emerged as a central issue of the Revolution