France. — The total of regular clergy thus amounts to 60,000 persons. — The secular clergy may be estimated at 70,000:  curates and vicars 60,000 ("Histoire de l’Eglise de France,” XII. 142, by the Abbé Guettée); prelates, vicars-general, canons of chapters, 2,800; collegiate canons, 5,600; ecclésiastics without livings, 3,000 (Sieyès).  Moheau, a clear-headed and cautious statistician, writes in 1778 ("Recheches,” p. 100):  “Perhaps, to day, there are 130,000 ecclesiastics in the kingdom.”  The enumeration of 1866 ("Statistique de la France,” population), gives 51,100 members of the secular clergy, 18,500 monks, 86,300 nuns; total, 155,900 in a population of 38,000,000 inhabitants. _________________________________
________________________________________ Notes:  [1] In 1998, 550 000 square kilometers. (Sr.)

[2] Archives nationales, G. 319 ("Etat actuel de la Direction de Bourges au point de vue des aides,” 1774).

[3] Blet, at the present day, contains 1,629 inhabitants. (This was around 1884, in 1996 it remains a small commune and a village of 800 people on the route nationale N76 between Bourges and Sancoins.  Sr.)

[4] The farms of Blet and Brosses really produce nothing for the proprietor, inasmuch as the tithes and the champart (field-rents), (articles 22 and 23), are comprehended in the rate of the leases. --------------------
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End note 2: 

On feudal rights and on the state of feudal dominion in 1733.

The following information, for which I am indebted to M. de Boislisle, is derived from an act of partition drawn up September 6, 1783.

It relates to the estates of Blet and Brosses.  The barony and estate of Blet lies in Bourbonnais, two leagues from Dun-le-Roi.  Blet, says a memorandum of an administrator of the Excise, is a “good parish; the soil is excellent, mostly in wood and pasture, the surplus being in tillable land for wheat, rye and oats. . . .  The roads are bad, especially in winter.  The trade consists principally of horned cattle and embraces grain; the woods rot away on account of their remoteness from the towns and the difficulty of turning them to account."[1]

“This estate,” says the act of valuation, “is in royal tenure on account of the king’s chateau and fortress of Ainay, under the designation of the town of Blet.”  The town was formerly fortified and its castle still remains.  Its population was once large, “but the civil wars of the sixteenth century, and especially the emigration of the Protestants caused it to be deserted to such an extent that out of its former population of 3,000 scarcely 300 remain,[2] which is the fate of nearly all the towns in this country.”  The estate of Blet, for many centuries in the possession of the Sully family, passed, on the marriage of the heiress