"The "revolutionary bourgeoisie" as a class concept, Cobban found, dissolves under close analysis. What remains is a loose congeries of socially and economically disparate "middle classes." "Feudalism," whatever it had been, did not exist in eighteenth-century France. What was "overthrown" in 1789 was a vestige of feudalism—admittedly a hated and often onerous one—seigniorial rights. And it was the peasantry, not the "revolutionary bourgeoisie," which acted first and unanswerably against what they labeled "feudalism." In so acting, that is, without regard to and even in opposition to the desires of the Third Estate majority in the National Assembly, the peasantry cannot be subsumed "within the cadre of a bourgeois revolution.""