1. The Third Estate Is a Complete Nation

What does a nation need in order to survive and prosper? Private work and public functions.

All private work can be gathered into four classes. 1. Since land and water furnish the raw material for the needs of man, the first class, in the order of ideas, will be that of all the families attached to work on the land. 2. Between the first sale of materials and their consumption or use, further labour, more or less multiplied, adds to these materials a second value, more or less compound. Human industry thus succeeds in perfecting the gifts of nature, and the raw product doubles, increases tenfold, a hundredfold in value. Such is the work of the second class. 3. Between production and consumption, as also between the different stages of production, there arises a host of intermediate agents, useful to producers and consumers alike: these are the dealers and the merchants; the merchants who, constantly comparing the needs of different places and times, speculate on the profit to be had from storage and carriage; the dealers who, at the last stage, take charge of selling, whether wholesale or retail. This kind of usefulness characterises the third class. 4. Besides these three classes of hard-working and useful citizens, who are occupied with the object fit for consumption and use, a society also needs a multitude of private occupations and services directly useful or agreeable to the person. This fourth class takes in everything from the most distinguished scientific and liberal professions down to the least esteemed domestic services.

Such is the work that sustains society. Who carries it out? The Third Estate.

Public functions, likewise, can all be ranged at present under four familiar headings: the Sword, the Robe, the Church and the Administration. It would be superfluous to go through them in detail to show that the Third Estate everywhere makes up nineteen-twentieths of them, with this difference: that it is burdened with everything that is really hard, with all the duties the privileged order refuses to perform. Only the lucrative and honorific posts are filled by members of the privileged order. Shall we count that to its credit? For that, either the Third Estate would have to refuse to fill these posts, or it would have to be less able to perform their functions. We know how matters stand. Yet the order of the Third Estate has been placed under a ban. It has been told: “Whatever your services, whatever your talents, you shall go so far and no further. It is not fitting that you should be honoured.” Rare exceptions, felt for what they are, are only a mockery, and the language people allow themselves on such occasions is one insult more.

If this exclusion is a social crime against the Third Estate, if it is a real act of hostility, could it at least be said to be useful to the commonwealth? Ah! are the effects of monopoly not known? If it discourages those it shuts out, is it not known that it makes those it favours less able? Is it not known that any work from which free competition is kept away will be done at greater cost and worse?

In devoting any function whatever to serve as the appanage of a distinct order among the citizens, has it been noticed that it is then no longer only the man who works who must be paid, but also all those of the same caste who are not employed, and also the entire families both of those who are employed and of those who are not? Has it been observed that as soon as the government becomes the patrimony of a particular class, it soon swells beyond all measure, and posts are created in it not for the needs of the governed but for those of the governors, etc., etc.? Has it been noticed that this order of things, so basely and, I dare to say, so stupidly respected among us, is the very one we find contemptible, monstrous, destructive of all industry, hostile to social progress, above all degrading to the human race in general and intolerable for Europeans in particular, etc., etc., when we read the history of ancient Egypt and the accounts of travels in the East Indies? But we must leave aside considerations which, while widening the question and perhaps throwing new light upon it, would nevertheless slow our progress.

It is enough here to have made it felt that the alleged usefulness of a privileged order for the public service is only a chimera; that without it everything that is hard in that service is done by the Third Estate; that without it the higher posts would be infinitely better filled; that they ought naturally to be the lot and the reward of recognised talents and services; and that, if the privileged have succeeded in usurping all the lucrative and honorific posts, this is at once an odious iniquity towards the generality of citizens and a betrayal of the commonwealth.

Who, then, would dare to say that the Third Estate does not have in itself everything needed to form a complete nation? It is the strong and robust man who still has one arm in chains. If the privileged order were removed, the nation would not be something less, but something more. So what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything fettered and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything; but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can go on without it; everything would go infinitely better without the others.

It is not enough to have shown that the privileged, far from being useful to the nation, can only weaken and harm it; it must also be proved that the noble order does not enter into the social organisation at all; that it may well be a burden on the nation, but cannot be a part of it.

First, among all the elementary parts of a nation, it is not possible to find where to place the caste of nobles. I know that there are individuals, too many of them, whom infirmity, incapacity, incurable idleness or the torrent of bad morals make strangers to the work of society. Exception and abuse are everywhere found beside the rule, and above all in a vast empire. But it will be agreed that the fewer such abuses there are, the better ordered a state is thought to be. The worst ordered of all would be one in which not just isolated individuals but a whole class of citizens placed its glory in remaining motionless amid the general movement, and contrived to consume the best part of the product without having contributed anything to bringing it into being. Such a class is surely foreign to the nation by its idleness.

The noble order is no less foreign among us by its civil and political prerogatives.

What is a nation? A body of associates living under a common law and represented by the same legislature, etc.

Is it not only too certain that the noble order has privileges and exemptions, which it dares to call its rights, separate from the rights of the great body of citizens? By these it stands outside the common order, outside the common law. Thus its civil rights already make it a people apart within the great nation. It is truly imperium in imperio.

As for its political rights, it exercises these apart as well. It has its own representatives, who are in no way charged with the mandate of the people. The body of its deputies sits apart; and even if it assembled in the same hall as the deputies of the ordinary citizens, it would be no less true that its representation is essentially distinct and separate: it is foreign to the nation, first by its principle, since its mandate does not come from the people; and then by its object, since this consists in defending not the general interest but a particular one.

The Third Estate therefore embraces everything that belongs to the nation; and whatever is not the Third Estate cannot regard itself as being of the nation. What is the Third Estate? Everything.