2. What Has the Third Estate Been Until Now? Nothing

We shall not examine the state of servitude in which the people groaned for so long, nor that of constraint and humiliation in which it is still held. Its civil condition has changed; it must change still further: it is quite impossible for the nation as a body, or even for any order in particular, to become free if the Third Estate is not. One is not free by privileges, but by the rights of a citizen: rights that belong to all.

If the aristocrats set out, even at the price of that liberty of which they would show themselves unworthy, to keep the people in oppression, the people will dare to ask by what title. If the answer is “by right of conquest”, it must be admitted that this is wanting to go back rather a long way. But the Third Estate need not fear going back into past times. It will carry itself back to the year that preceded the conquest; and since it is strong enough today not to let itself be conquered, its resistance will no doubt be more effective. Why should it not send back to the forests of Franconia all those families that cling to the mad pretension of being descended from the race of the conquerors and of having succeeded to the rights of conquest?

The nation, thus purged, will be able to console itself, I think, for being reduced to believing itself composed only of the descendants of the Gauls and the Romans. Truly, if people insist on distinguishing birth from birth, could we not reveal to our poor fellow citizens that descent from the Gauls and the Romans is worth at least as much as descent from the Sicambri, the Welches and other savages who came out of the woods and marshes of ancient Germany? Yes, it will be said; but the conquest upset all relations, and nobility of birth passed over to the side of the conquerors. Very well! It must be made to pass back to the other side; the Third Estate will become noble again by becoming a conqueror in its turn.

But if everything is mixed in the races; if the blood of the Franks, which would be none the better for being kept apart, flows mingled with that of the Gauls; if the ancestors of the Third Estate are the fathers of the whole nation, may we not hope to see an end one day to that long parricide which one class prides itself on committing daily against all the others? Why should reason and justice, grown one day as strong as vanity, not press the privileged to solicit for themselves, out of a new interest, but one truer and more social, their rehabilitation in the order of the Third Estate?

Let us pursue our subject. By the Third Estate must be understood the whole body of citizens who belong to the common order. Whatever is privileged by law, in whatever manner, stands outside the common order, is an exception to the common law and consequently does not belong to the Third Estate. We have said it: a common law and a common representation, that is what makes a nation. It is only too true, no doubt, that one is nothing in France when one has only the protection of the common law on one’s side: unless one holds to some privilege, one must resign oneself to enduring contempt, insult and vexations of every kind. To keep himself from being utterly crushed, what is left to the unhappy non-privileged man? The resource of attaching himself to some great man by every kind of baseness; he buys, at the price of his morals and of his dignity as a man, the ability to call on somebody’s protection when occasion arises.

But it is less in its civil state than in its relation to the constitution that we have to consider the order of the Third Estate here. Let us see what it is in the Estates-General.

Who have been its so-called representatives? Ennobled men, or men privileged for a term. These false deputies have not even always been the free work of the people’s election. Sometimes in the Estates-General, and almost everywhere in the provincial estates, the representation of the people is regarded as a right attached to certain posts or offices.

The old nobility cannot bear the new nobles; it allows them to sit with it only when they can prove, as the saying goes, four generations and a hundred years. Thus it pushes them back into the order of the Third Estate, to which they evidently no longer belong.

Yet in the eyes of the law all nobles are equal, the noble of yesterday as well as the one who succeeds well or badly in hiding his origin or his usurpation. All have the same privileges. Opinion alone distinguishes them. But if the Third Estate is forced to bear a prejudice consecrated by the law, there is no reason why it should submit to a prejudice contrary to the text of the law.

Let them make of the new nobles whatever they please; it is certain that from the moment a citizen acquires privileges contrary to the common right, he no longer belongs to the common order. His new interest is opposed to the general interest; he is unfit to vote for the people.

This incontestable principle likewise removes from the representation of the order of the Third Estate those who are simply privileged for a term. Their interest, too, is more or less hostile to the common interest; and although opinion ranks them in the Third Estate and the law is silent about them, the nature of things, stronger than opinion and the law, places them irresistibly outside the common order.

Will it be said that to wish to remove from the Third Estate not only the hereditary privileged but also those who enjoy only privileges for a term is wantonly to weaken this order, by depriving it of its most enlightened, most courageous and most esteemed members?

Far be it from me to wish to diminish the strength or the dignity of the Third Estate, since in my mind it is always one and the same with the idea of a nation. But whatever the motive that directs us, can we make the truth not be the truth? Because an army has had the misfortune to see its best troops desert, must it also entrust its camp to them to defend? Every privilege, it cannot be repeated too often, is opposed to the common right; therefore all the privileged, without distinction, form a class different from and opposed to the Third Estate. At the same time, I observe that this truth should hold nothing alarming for the friends of the people. On the contrary, it leads back to the great national interest, by making forcibly felt the need to abolish at once all the privileges for a term that divide the Third Estate and would seem to condemn this order to place its destiny in the hands of its enemies. Moreover, this observation must not be separated from the one that follows: the abolition of privileges within the Third Estate does not mean the loss of the exemptions some of its members enjoy. These exemptions are nothing but the common right. It was supremely unjust to deprive the generality of the people of them. Thus I am claiming not the loss of a right, but its restitution; and if it is objected that by making some of these privileges common — for example, that of not having to draw lots for the militia — we should deprive ourselves of the means of meeting a social need, I reply that every public need must be a charge on everyone and not on a particular class of citizens, and that one would have to be as much a stranger to all reflection as to all equity not to find a more national means of completing and maintaining whatever military establishment one wishes to have.

Thus, whether for want of any election at all, or because they had not been elected by the generality of the members of the Third Estate of the towns and the countryside who had the right to be represented, or because, being privileged, they were not even eligible, the so-called deputies of the Third Estate who have appeared until now in the Estates-General did not hold the true mandate of the people.

People sometimes seem astonished to hear complaints of a threefold aristocracy of Church, Sword and Robe. They would have it that this is only a manner of speaking; but the expression must be taken literally. If the Estates-General are the interpreter of the general will, and on that account possess the legislative power, is it not certain that there is a real aristocracy wherever the Estates-General are nothing but a clerico-nobili-judicial assembly?

Add to this frightening truth that, in one way or another, all the branches of the executive power have also fallen to the caste that supplies the Church, the Robe and the Sword. A sort of spirit of brotherhood or cronyism makes the nobles prefer one another, in everything, to the rest of the nation. The usurpation is complete; they truly reign.

Let history be read with the aim of examining whether the facts agree with this assertion or contradict it, and one will be convinced — I have tried the experiment — that it is a great error to believe that France is subject to a monarchical regime. Take out of our annals a few years of Louis XI, of Richelieu, and some moments of Louis XIV, in which nothing is to be seen but pure despotism, and you will think you are reading the history of a court aristocracy. It is the court that has reigned, and not the monarch. It is the court that makes and unmakes, that appoints and dismisses ministers, that creates and distributes posts, etc. And what is the court, if not the head of that immense aristocracy which covers every part of France, which through its members reaches everything and exercises everywhere whatever is essential in every part of public affairs? And so the people has grown used to separating, in its murmurings, the monarch from the movers of power. It has always regarded the king as a man so surely deceived, and so defenceless amid an active and all-powerful court, that it has never thought of imputing to him all the evil that has been done in his name. Finally, is it not enough to open one’s eyes to what is happening around us at this moment? What do we see? The aristocracy alone, fighting at once reason, justice, the people, the minister and the king. The outcome of this terrible struggle is still uncertain; let anyone say now whether aristocracy is a chimera!

To sum up: the Third Estate has not had real representatives in the Estates-General until now. Thus its political rights are nil.