History question

Question

The French estates-general,a representative assembly,was the equivalent there of the English _

Answer 1

Roughly speaking, the Estates General would have been the governmental equivalent of the British Parliament, since both institutions with the national lawmaking (legislative) bodies in France and Great Britain in early modern times, respectively.

However, the two institutions differed in structure. Parliament was (and remains) a bicameral legislature divided into the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The Estates General was a three-house legislature based on the three-part (tripartite) divisions of French society before the French Revolution (the Ancien Regime period). It consisted of the First Estate (clergy-bishops and priests), the Second Estate (landed aristocracy), and the Third Estate (a mix of middle-class merchants, yeomen, peasants, the working class, and the poor.) The vast inequality inherent in this system was a major cause of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.