The work analyzes the pre-revolutionary social and political order using archival records, local assemblies' proceedings, and administrative documents, arguing that many attitudes, institutions, and the centralization of authority persisted beneath surface change and shaped subsequent upheaval. It reconstructs class relations, legal burdens, and everyday administrative practices to show how longstanding structures influenced popular expectations and political action, and it traces a twofold process in which an initial phase of abolition was later followed by a reconstruction that incorporated numerous elements of the old order into the emerging system.