All states evolve social myths in order to explain how they came into being and managed to survive in an often hostile environment. As denizens of a dynastic state, French men and women would have been familiar with the image of the ‘body politic’ with a monarch forming the ‘head’, clergy and nobility figured as the ‘arms’ and the toiling masses performing the role of ‘legs’. The early seventeenth-century jurist Loyseau expressed this concept in terms of three ‘orders’ or ‘estates’, each buttressed by law and united in a common bond of loyalty to the sovereign. These orders have been described aptly as ‘transparent envelopes’ for, on closer inspection, they dissolve into a multitude of pullulating corporate interests. ‘All of your subjects’, the Parlement of Paris informed Louis XVI,

At least, that was the theory. Even as the Parlement extolled the virtues of a society rooted in a natural equilibrium of orders and estates, other observers were drawing attention to the less than harmonious reality.