Estates General (France)

In France under the Ancien Régime, the Estates General (French: États généraux [eta ʒeneʁo]) or States-General was a legislative and consultative assembly of the different classes (or estates) of French subjects. It had a separate assembly for each of the three estates (clergy, nobility and commoners), which were called and dismissed by the king. It had no true power in its own right as, unlike the English Parliament, it was not required to approve royal taxation or legislation.^[1] It served as an advisory body to the king, primarily by presenting petitions from the various estates and consulting on fiscal policy.^[2]

The Estates General first met in 1302 and 1303 in relation to King Philip IV's conflict with the papacy.^[3] They met intermittently until 1614 and only once afterward, in 1789, but were not definitively dissolved until after the French Revolution.^[2] The Estates General were distinct from the parlements (the most powerful of which was the Parlement of Paris), which started as appellate courts but later used their powers to decide whether to publish laws to claim a legislative role.

The Estates General had similarities with institutions in other European polities, generally known as the Estates, such as the States General of the Netherlands, the Parliament of England, the Estates of Parliament of Scotland, the Sejm of Poland-Lithuania, the Cortes of Portugal, the Cortes of Spain, the Imperial Diet (Reichstag) of the Holy Roman Empire, the Diets (German: Landtage) of the "Lands", the Parliamentum Publicum of Hungary, and the Swedish Riksdag of the Estates. Unlike some of these institutions, however, France's Estates General were only summoned at irregular intervals by the king, and never grew into a permanent legislative body.