Pre-revolutionary government and society provided the appropriate factors to bring the nations of France and Russia to revolution. To say that they provided the necessary ferment we must analyse society and government in their own right to reveal the pressures that were placed upon the people of both nations through society's structure and autocratic nature of their rulers. The parallels we can draw between the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolt beginning in 1881 are paramount in giving us a sense of the necessary ferment/breakdown.
             The structure of pre-revolutionary French society and Russian society are remarkably similar, they can be broken down in to three separate groups. In Russia they were known only as classes and they could be split in to three; 'the ruling class' included the Tsar and his various forms of court and government (although the Tsar's power was absolute), 'the upper class' which contained the nobility, higher clergy and military officers and 'the working class' which made up roughly eighty seven and half percent of the population and included peasants, merchants, factory owners, land dwellers and agricultural workers. The French system of social class was almost identical except they called it the 'ancien regime' and split the population base in to three estates the first containing the clergy, the second the bloodlines of nobility (although in recent years tainted with corruption) and the third made up roughly ninety five percent of the population and included the same social and professional groupings. The working class or the third estate was heavily taxed in both Russia and France and provided the luxurious lifestyle that the people 'classed' above them entertained. In France the method of taxation was appaling there was no sense of being taxed on what you made, only on what you used or bought and the first an second estates were exempt from many different taxes. Leaving they poor minority t...