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A Very Brief Look At The Estates Of France

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In the last few years of the French monarchy, many radical voices of the time attempted to bring equality and equal privileges to all corners of society. However, France and its legislative body, The Estates General, was divided into three Estates which were the clergy, the nobility, and the common people. The Estates General heavily favored the nobility and clergy as their two votes would overrule the one vote of the common people, even though they held a larger part of the population. A voice to challenge this system was, Abbe Sieyes, who was a middle class clergyman that demanded more rights for the Third Estate. In his pamphlet, he described that the nation is made up of average hard working people who are forced to do the hard work of …show more content…

This cartoon which can be understood by the common people depicts King Louis XVI using a whip while riding on a working class man. With him, there is a bishop who carries inquisitional documents and the church tax that are meant to suppress the Third Estate. Then the last person is a judge who represents the nobility’s influence over the regional courts, known as the parlements. These three figure are shown to treat this average man as something like an animal in that they can control and force to do whatever they want with. This cartoon tells of what Sieyes has described in his pamphlet, in which the nobles and clergy can bypass the legal code and laws that are put forth because they have the special privileges and titles that allow them to do so. This cartoon also echoes of the description and duty of the Third Estate, by saying that the common man is strong, robust, and the source of the wealth of the nation since they does all the work. Furthermore, once the working man is unshackled then the wealth of the nation can go towards the betterment and improvement of the society and not just make one group superior over another. Thus in doing so the nation can advance and not be hindered by a monopoly of the higher classes that only reap the rewards of the working class. This cartoon nevertheless critiques the old system as flawed and insufficient in the long run as the privileged

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Something.” In response to his own title “What Is the Third Estate”, Sieyès answered, “The Nation.” The pamphlet expressed the widespread feeling in France that although a small faction may be in control, the country rightly belonged to the working crowd. Sieyès’s pamphlet bound the Third Estate to action, provoking the crowds to take matters into their own hands if the aristocracy failed to give them complete respect.

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In order to repair this problem, Sieyes demands that the third estate have true representatives in the Estates-General selected by the people and an equal amount of representatives to the other two orders together. Both of these demands seem very reasonable, especially considering that the third estate made up about 95 % of the population of France. Additionally, as Sieyes also mentions in his pamphlet, why is it fair that the nobles and the clergy are simply born into a higher class and have more rights and advantages than the people who are born into the third estate? Everybody is born and created equally and should have an equal amount of rights. Descent is not a fair determining factor of class and representation.

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