The 1583 Assembly of Notables (French: Assemblée des notables de 1583) was a gathering of much of the political elite of the kingdom of France in addition to financial and technical experts in administration. The meeting hoped to reform France's shaky financial situation. Efforts towards the financial reform of the kingdom had been a feature of the reign of king Henri III since the Estates General of 1576. The crown was in a great amount of debt, and the royal taxes were increasingly insufferable to the French people. In the Grand Ordonnance de Blois issued in 1579, which summarised many of the requests of the Estates General, a large number of financial reforms were put forward. However, Henri was forced to turn to various expedients due to the financial demands of first the civil wars, then his brother the duc d'Alençon's military exploits in Nederland and then the needs to pay off the foreign mercenaries to whom the crown was indebted. By 1582 Henri, faced with increasing resistance to the crowns financial policy from the provinces, was resolved to break the pattern of expedients.
In August 1582 he established commissioners who were to go out into the provinces and find out the grieviances of the royal officers and the representative assemblies of the kingdom. Where they identified officials to be guilty of abuses they were also to apply sanctions. Having toured the kingdom, the various groups of commissioners were summoned to arrive back in Paris for September 1583. The conclusions of their tour were to be summarised for council and then form the basis for an Assembly of Notables. The Assembly of Notables opened in November 1583 and contained 66 participants, largely embodying administrative experts and functionaries, but also many of the great nobles of the kingdom such as the cardinal de Bourbon. Opening the Assembly on 18 November, Henri presented to the notables a radical tax plan, first presented to the Estates General of 1576 by which several existing taxes would be abolished and replaced with a single income/wealth tax structured over 30 bands. This was unpalatable to the assembled notables who proposed instead that Henri work towards the redemption of the royal domain (much of which had been alienated into private hands to raise short term funds) rather than raising new taxes. The cardinal de Bourbon implored Henri to re-establish unity of religion in the kingdom, but Henri dismissed his pleas. After two months of deliberation, the Assembly presented to Henri in February a host of proposals, among which were a reduction in the size of the army, a reviewal of the contracts made with the tax farmers and those to whom he had alienated elements of the royal domain a revitalisation of French manufacturing and a suppression of abuses in tax collection. Over the following year, Henri's edicts would embody many financial policies championed by the Assembly, including a reform of the military, the reissuing and consolidation of several tax farms at a more favourable rate, the establishment of a court to punish financial abuses and the suppression of the unpopular taille (land tax) in areas it had been recently introduced into. In 1585 Henri enjoyed the fruits of these efforts in a radically reduced royal deficit. However the reforms were not able to entrench further as France fell into a politico-religious crisis as represented by the uprising of the Catholic ligue (league).