Taxes in France in the Eighteenth Century

King louis the sixteenth needed to find a way of generating extra money. He didn't have the power to snap his fingers and put through a tax rise. To do that, he would need to call something called the states general. This was a body which represented the three classes of french society as it had been divided. The first state or class, was the clergy, the members of the church. The ond class was the richest and most powerful non religious members of society. And the third class was everyone else, the commoners. But the problem was that the voting system in this states general was one vote for one class.

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