One of the major reasons why the Revolution came to pass is due to the Old French Social Order, also known as the Old Regime. In the years directly preceding the Revolution, French society was sharply divided into social classes, some highly privileged, others much less so; and all classes increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with traditional sociopolitical order, making the demand for and implementation of systemwide change inevitable. The social order of Continental Europe was anchored firmly on the assumption of human inequality. The privileged were divided into churchmen, or the First Estate, and the aristocracy, the Second Estate. More than twenty-four million Frenchmen, artisans, town laborers and countryfolk, were grouped in the unprivileged