First Estate

The First Estate were the clergy of France.  The higher clergy consisted of the Bishops who had a great deal of political power and often lived in Paris or Versailles.  The lower clergy were the monks, nuns and priests of France.  It is estimated in total the clergy made up at most 1% of the population of France in 1789.

The church did not pay taxation and owned around 10% of the land in France.  They also received tithings from those who lived on their land.

Comte de Segur on the clergy before the revolution.  Memoirs of Louis Philippe Comte de Segur, The Folio Society, London (1960) p15

The clergy, proud of their influence and wealth, were far from apprehending any danger to their existence, but they were exasperated at the boldness of the philosophers.  Although, by mixing too much in the world, some members of the clergy participated to some extent in the new fashions, they were not content with just directing their attacks against license, but vainly attempted to resist the introduction of truths which the removal of darkness had rendered evident to all, and they persisted in upholding certain antiquated and childish superstitions which the grapeshot of ridicule and the torch of reason had dispersed forever.

Edmund Burke on the French Revolution and the church and nobility.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p222

Perhaps persons, unacquainted with the state of France, on hearing the clergy and the noblese were privileged in point of taxation, may be led to imagine, that previous to the revolution these bodies had contributed nothing to the state.  This is a great mistake. They certainly did not contribute equally with each other, nor either of them equally with the commons.  They both however contributed largely.  Neither nobility nor clergy enjoyed any exemption from the duties of custom, or from any other of the other numerous indirect impositions, which in France as well as here, make so very large a proportion of all payments to the public.  The noblesse paid the capitation.  They also paid a land tax, called the twentieth penny, to the height sometimes of three, sometimes of four shillings in the pound; both of them direct impositions of no light nature and no trivial produce.

Edmund Burke on the church.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p252-253

When my occasions took me into France, towards the close of the late reign, the clergy, under all their forms, engaged a considerable part of my curiosity.  So far from finding…. The complaints and discontents against that body, which some publications have given me reason to expect, I perceived little or no public or private uneasiness on their account.  On further examination, I found the clergy in general, persons of moderate minds and decorous manners; I include the seculars, and the regulars of both sexes.