Descendant of 16th century French Court dogs. (Photo by Yale Joel//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images). Copyright: Time & Life Pictures

The French nobility (French : la noblesse ) was the privileged order of France in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern periods.
In the political system of the Estates General , the nobility made up the Second Estate . This three-way division of the Estates should not be construed however as implying a division of Early Modern French society into three rigid orders (clergy, nobles, bourgeois and peasants) without the possibility of crossover.
Even if figures differ on the actual number of nobles in France, it has always been seen as proportionally one of smallest noble classes in Europe. For the year 1789, the French historian François Bluche gives a figure of 140,000 nobles (9,000 noble families) and claims that around 5% of nobles claimed descent from feudal nobility before the 15th century. With a total population of 28 million, this would represent merely 0.5%. The historian Gordon Wright gives a figure of 300,000 nobles (of which 80,000 were from the traditional noblesse d'épée ), which agrees with the estimation of the historian Jean de Viguerie, or a little over 1%.

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