Third Estate

Those who work

Churchmen of the early Middle Ages pictured society as three orders: those who pray, those who fight and those who work. By the eighteenth century the first two, the clergy and the nobility, were a small privileged minority. Everyone else, some 98 people in every hundred, made up the Third Estate.

It was not a class. It held the banker and the shipowner, the lawyer, the doctor and the shopkeeper, the craftsman and the day labourer and, above all, the peasants, who were the great majority of the French. What they shared was what they lacked: privilege. Nobles and clergy were exempt from the taille, the main direct tax. Commoners paid it, and on top of it they worked unpaid on the royal roads (the corvée, turned into a money tax in 1787), gave a tithe to the Church and paid dues to their lords. A rich commoner could buy an office that made him noble, and so leave the Third Estate behind.

By order or by head

The question that decided who would count

When Louis XVI agreed in August 1788 to summon the Estates-General, the assembly had not met since 1614. Then each order had sat apart, with one vote each, so the clergy and the nobility voting together could always outvote the commoners. On 25 September 1788 the Parlement of Paris ruled that the new Estates should meet as they had in 1614. Overnight the magistrates, cheered a few months earlier for defying the crown, looked like defenders of privilege.

A flood of pamphlets demanded two things: as many deputies for the Third as for the other two orders together, and a vote by head, counting each deputy. On 27 December 1788 the king's council, urged on by the finance minister Necker, granted the first and said nothing about the second.

“What is the Third Estate?”

The most famous of those pamphlets appeared in January 1789. Its author, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, was a priest, vicar-general to the bishop of Chartres, yet he wrote for the commoners, and a few months later the Third Estate of Paris elected him as its deputy.

Sieyès argued that the Third Estate did all the work that kept France alive, in the fields, in trade, in the professions and in the public service, and so was a complete nation on its own. The privileged orders, living on exemptions, were a burden on the nation rather than a part of it. The pamphlet turned a quarrel about procedure into a question of who the nation was.

From an order to the nation

The Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789. The Third's deputies, most of them lawyers and office-holders, with hardly a peasant among them, refused to check their credentials as a separate order, and for five weeks nothing moved. On 10 June, on a motion by Sieyès, they called on the other orders to join them; a few parish priests came over. On 17 June they declared themselves the National Assembly, speaking for the whole nation.

Three days later, locked out of their hall, they swore the Tennis Court Oath not to separate until France had a constitution. On 27 June the king gave way and ordered the clergy and the nobility to sit with them. The orders themselves did not outlive the summer: on the Night of 4 August the Assembly began to abolish privilege, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 26 August declared all men free and equal in rights. The Third Estate won by ceasing to exist: it had become the nation.

How a quarrel over voting grew into a revolution is told in Why did the Revolution happen?