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Meanwhile, France went the other way, toward Absolutism. Since the Visigoths and Franks conquered Gaul, the nobility had no tax obligation, only a military one. The middle and lower classes paid for wars. Eventually, they made the shift to a professional army. This meant that the aristocrats had no obligation to the government at all, while the tax burden rose dramatically for the average Frenchman.

Other stuff went on to make this trend more extreme:

A. The French crown (or the nobles controlling it) consistently pushed for centralization of power, in part as a result of early losses in the Hundred Years War. This trend continued until the point where Louis XIV, the Sun King, was able to break the nobles' power by making them dependant for just about everything from the crown. He ran up a huge debt doing this, but nobody in power cared, since it was the middle class that was being financially ruined. By the time of the French Revolution the nobles really were a useless parasitical class with absolute power over the peasants. No law prevented the rape, murder, etc. of non-nobles by nobles. There was no recourse for the ordinary person; no sense that the government was even pretending to be fair. Ironically, it was an attempt by the nobles to get back some of the political power they'd lost, that ignited the revolution.

B. In the Early Modern Period, the French murdered or exiled most of their middle class because they happened to be protestant (Huguenot). Basically they slaughtered the most useful and productive portion of the populace and squandered their goods and money. The people on the bottom couldn't move up to fill the slots because of the even bigger tax burden. (Someone had to pay the taxes the Huguenots used to pay and fund the armies used to kill them, and it sure wouldn't be the aristocrats.)