the assaults of the populace, assumed the dress of one of his own
domestics, fled to the cellar of the church, shut himself in, and
ensconced himself in a cask, the bung-hole of which was stopped up by a
faithful servitor.  The crowd wandered about everywhere in search of him
on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance.  A bandit named Teutgaud,
notorious in those times for his robberies, assaults, and murders of
travellers, had thrown himself headlong into the cause of the commune.
The bishop, who knew him, had by way of pleasantry and on account of his
evil mien given him the nickname of _Isengrin_.  This was the name which
was given in the fables of the day to the wolf, and which corresponded to
that of Master Reynard.  Teutgaud and his men penetrated into the cellar
of the church; they went along tapping upon all the casks; and on what
suspicion there is no knowing, but Teutgaud halted in front of that in
which the bishop was huddled up, and had it opened, crying, "Is there any
one here?"  "Only a poor prisoner," answered the bishop, trembling.  "Ha!
ha!" said the playful bandit, who recognized the voice, "so it is you,
Master Isengrin, who are hiding here!  "And he took him by the hair, and
dragged him out of his cask.  The bishop implored the conspirators to
spare his life, offering to swear on the Gospels to abdicate the
bishopric, promising them all the money he possessed, and saying that if
they pleased he would leave the country.  The reply was insults and
blows.  He was immediately despatched; and Teutgaud, seeing the episcopal
ring glittering on his finger, cut off the finger to get possession of
the ring.  The body, stripped of all covering, was thrust into a corner,
where passers-by threw stones or mud at it, accompanying their insults
with ribaldry and curses.

[Bishop Gaudri dragged from the Cask----224]

Murder and arson are contagious.  All the day of the insurrection and all
the following night armed bands wandered about the streets of Laon
searching everywhere for relatives, friends, or servitors of the bishop,
for all whom the angry populace knew or supposed to be such, and wreaking
on their persons or their houses a ghastly or a brutal vengeance.  In a
fit of terror many poor innocents fled before the blind wrath of the
populace; some were caught and cut down pell-mell amongst the guilty;
others escaped through the vineyards planted between two hills in the
outskirts of the town.  "The progress of the fire, kindled on two sides
at once, was so rapid," says Guibert of Nogent, "and the winds drove the
flames so furiously in the direction of the convent of St. Vincent, that
the monks were afraid of seeing all they possessed become the fire's
prey, and all the persons who had taken refuge in this monastery trembled
as if they had seen swords hanging over their heads."  Some insurgents
stopped a young man who had been body-servant to the bishop, and asked
him whether the bishop had been killed or not; they knew nothing about
it, nor did he know any more; he helped them to look for the corpse, and
when they came upon it, it had been so mutilated that not a feature was
recognizable.  "I remember," said the young man, "that when the prelate
was alive he liked to talk of deeds of war, for which to his hurt he
always showed too much bent; and he often used to say that one day in a
sham-fight, just as he was, all in the way of sport, attacking a certain
knight, the latter hit him with his lance, and wounded him under the
neck, near the tracheal artery."  The body of Gaudri was eventually
recognized by this mark, and "Archdeacon Anselm went the next day," says
Guibert of Nogent, "to beg of the insurgents permission at least to bury
it, if only because it had once borne the title and worn the insignia of
bishop.  They consented, but reluctantly.  It were impossible to tell how
many threats and insults were launched against those who undertook the
obsequies, and what outrageous language was vented against the dead
himself.  His corpse was thrown into a half-dug hole, and at church there
was none of the prayers or ceremonies prescribed for the burial of, I
will not say a bishop, but the worst of Christians."  A few days
afterwards, Raoul, Archbishop of Rheims, came to Laon to purify the
church.  "The wise and venerable archbishop," says Guibert, "after
having, on his arrival, seen to more decently disposing the remains of
some of the dead and celebrated divine service in memory of all, amidst
the tears and utter grief of their relatives and connections, suspended
the holy sacrifice of the mass, in order to deliver a discourse, touching
those execrable institutions of communes, whereby we see serfs, contrary
to all right and justice, withdrawing themselves by force from the lawful
authority of their masters."

Here is a striking instance of the changeableness of men's feelings and
judgments; and it causes a shock even when it is natural and almost
allowable.  Guibert of Nogent, the contemporary historian, who was but
lately loud in his blame of the bishop of Laon's character and conduct,
now takes sides with the reaction aroused by popular excesses and
vindictiveness, and is indignant with "those execrable institutions of
communes," the source of so many disturbances and crimes.  The burghers
of Laon themselves, "having reflected upon the number and enormity of the
crimes they had committed, shrank up with fear," says Guibert, "and
dreaded the judgment of the king."  To protect themselves against the
consequences of his resentment, they added a fresh wound to the old by
summoning to their aid Thomas de Marle, son of Lord Enguerrand de Coucy.
"This Thomas, from his earliest youth, enriched himself by plundering the
poor and the pilgrim, contracted several incestuous marriages, and
exhibited a ferocity so unheard of in our age, that certain people, even
amongst those who have a reputation for cruelty, appear less lavish of
the blood of common sheep than Thomas was of human blood.  Such was the
man whom the burghers of Laon implored to come and put himself at their
head, and whom they welcomed with joy when he entered their town.  As for
him, when he had heard their request, he consulted his own people to know
what he ought to do; and they all replied that his forces were not
sufficiently numerous to defend such a city against the king.  Thomas
then induced the burghers to go out and hold a meeting in a field where
he would make known to them his plan.  When they were about a mile from
the town, he said to them, 'Laon is the head of the kingdom; it is
impossible for me to keep the king from making himself master of it.  If
you dread his arms, follow me to my own land, and you will find in me a
protector and a friend.'  These words threw them into an excess of
consternation; soon, however, the popular party, troubled at the
recollection of the crime they had committed, and fancying they already
saw the king threatening their lives, fled away to the number of a great
many in the wake of Thomas.  Teutgaud himself, that murderer of Bishop
Gaudri, hastened to put himself under the wing of the Lord of Marie.
Before long the rumor spread abroad amongst the population of the
country-places near Laon that that town was quite empty of inhabitants;
and all the peasants rushed thither and took possession of the houses
they found without defenders.  Who could tell, or be believed if he were
to attempt to tell, how much money, raiment, and provision of all kinds
was discovered in this city?  Before long there arose between the first
and last comers disputes about the partition of their plunder; all that
the small folks had taken soon passed into the hands of the powerful; if
two men met a third quite alone they stripped him; the state of the town
was truly pitiable.  The burghers who had quitted it with Thomas de Marle
had beforehand destroyed and burned the houses of the clergy and grandees
whom they hated; and now the grandees, escaped from the massacre, carried
off in their turn from the houses of the fugitives all means of
subsistence and all movables to the very hinges and bolts."

The rumor of so many disasters, crimes, and reactions succeeding one
another spread rapidly throughout all districts.  Thomas de Marle was put
under the ban of the kingdom, and visited with excommunication "by a
general assembly of the Church of the Gauls," says Guibert of Nogent,
"assembled at Beauvais; "and this sentence was read every Sunday after
mass in all the metropolitan and parochial churches.  Public feeling
against Thomas de Marle became so strong that Enguerrand de Bowes, Lord
of Coucy, who passed, says Suger, for his father, joined those who
declared war against him in the name of Church and King.  Louis the Fat
took the field in person against him.  "Men-at-arms, and in very small
numbers, too," says Guibert of Nogent, "were with difficulty induced to
second the king, and did not do so heartily; but the light-armed infantry
made up a considerable force, and the Archbishop of Rheims and the
bishops had summoned all the people to this expedition, whilst offering
to all absolution from their sins.  Thomas de Marle, though at that time
helpless and stretched upon his bed, was not sparing of scoffs and
insults towards his assailants; and at first he absolutely refused to
listen to the king's summons."  But Louis persisted without wavering in
his enterprise, exposing himself freely, and in person leading his
infantry to the attack when the men-at-arms did not come on or bore
themselves slackly.  He carried successively the castles of Crecy and
Nogent, domains belonging to Thomas de Marle, and at last reduced him to
the necessity of buying himself off at a heavy ransom, indemnifying the
churches he had spoiled, giving guarantees for future behavior, and
earnestly praying for re-admission to the communion of the faithful.  As
for those folks of Laon, perpetrators of or accomplices in the murder of
Bishop Gaudri, who had sought refuge with Thomas de Marle, the king
showed them no mercy.  "He ordered them," says Suger, "to be strung up to
the gibbet, and left for food to the voracity of kites, and crows, and
vultures."

There are certain discrepancies between the two accounts, both
contemporaneous, which we possess of this incident in the earliest years
of the twelfth century, one in the Life of Louis the Fat, by Suger, and
the other in the Life of Guibert of Nogent, by himself.  They will be
easily recognized on comparing what was said, after Suger, in Chapter
XVIII. of this history, with what has just been said here after Guibert.
But these discrepancies are of no historical importance, for they make no
difference in respect of the essential facts characteristic of social
condition at the period, and of the behavior and position of the actors.

Louis the Fat, after his victory over Thomas de Marle and the fugitives
from Laon, went to Laon with the Archbishop of Rheims; and the presence
of the king, whilst restoring power to the foes of the commune, inspired
them, no doubt, with a little of the spirit of moderation, for there was
an interval of peace, during which no attention was paid to anything but
expiatory ceremonies and the restoration of the churches which had been a
prey to the flames.  The archbishop celebrated a solemn mass for the
repose of the souls of those who had perished during the disturbances,
and he preached a sermon exhorting serfs to submit themselves to their
masters, and warning them on pain of anathema from resisting by force.
The burghers of Laon, however, did not consider every sort of resistance
forbidden, and the lords had, no doubt, been taught not to provoke it,
for in 1128, sixteen years after the murder of Bishop Gaudri, fear of a
fresh insurrection determined his successor to consent to the institution
of a new commune, the charter of which was ratified by Louis the Fat in
an assembly held at Compiegne.  Only the name of commune did not recur in
this charter; it was replaced by that of Peace-establishment; the
territorial boundaries of the commune were called peace-boundaries, and
to designate its members recourse was had to the formula, _All those who
have signed this peace_.  The preamble of the charter runs, "In the name
of the holy and indivisible Trinity, we Louis, by the grace of God king
of the French, do make known to all our lieges present and to come that,
with the consent of the barons of our kingdom and the inhabitants of the
city of Laon, we have set up in the said city a peace-establishment."
And after having enumerated the limits, forms, and rules of it, the
charter concludes with this declaration of amnesty: "All former
trespasses and offences committed before the ratification of the present
treaty are wholly pardoned.  If any one, banished for having trespassed
in past time, desire to return to the town, he shall be admitted and
shall recover possession of his property.  Excepted from pardon, however,
are the thirteen whose names do follow; "and then come the names of the
thirteen excepted from the amnesty and still under banishment.
"Perhaps," says M. Augustin Thierry, "these thirteen under banishment,
shut out forever from their native town at the very moment it became
free, had been distinguished amongst all the burghers of Laon by their
opposition to the power of the lords; perhaps they had sullied by deeds
of violence this patriotic opposition; perhaps they had been taken at
haphazard to suffer alone for the crimes of their fellow-citizens."  The
second hypothesis appears the most probable; for that deeds of violence
and cruelty had been committed alternately by the burghers and their foes
is an ascertained fact, and that the charter of 1128 was really a work of
liberal pacification is proved by its contents and wording.  After such
struggles and at the moment of their subsidence some of the most violent
actors always bear the burden of the past, and amongst the most violent
some are often the most sincere.

For forty-seven years after the charter of Louis the Fat the town of Laon
enjoyed the internal peace and the communal liberties it had thus
achieved; but in 1175 a new bishop, Roger de Rosoy, a man of high birth,
and related to several of the great lords his neighbors, took upon
himself to disregard the regimen of freedom established at Laon.  The
burghers of Laon, taught by experience, applied to the king, Louis the
Young, and offered him a sum of money to grant them a charter of commune.
Bishop Roger, "by himself and through his friends," says a chronicler, a
canon of Laon, "implored the king to have pity on his Church, and abolish
the serfs' commune; but the king, clinging to the promise he had received
of money, would not listen to the bishop or his friends," and in 1177
gave the burghers of Laon a charter which confirmed their peace-
establishment of 1128.  Bishop Roger, however, did not hold himself
beaten.  He claimed the help of the lords his neighbors, and renewed the
war against the burghers of Laon, who, on their side, asked and obtained
the aid of several communes in the vicinity.  In an access of democratic
rashness, instead of awaiting within their walls the attack of their
enemies, they marched out without cavalry to the encounter, ravaging as
they went the lands of the lords whom they suspected of being
ill-disposed towards them; but on arriving in front of the bishop's
allies, "all this rustic multitude," says the canon-chronicler, "terror-
stricken at the bare names of the knights they found assembled, took
suddenly to flight, and a great number of the burghers were massacred
before reaching their city."  Louis the Young then took the field to help
them; but Baldwin, Count of Hainault, went to the aid of the Bishop of
Laon with seven hundred knights and several thousand infantry.  King
Louis, after having occupied and for some time held in sequestration the
lands of the bishop, thought it advisable to make peace rather than
continue so troublesome a war, and at the intercession of the pope and
the Count of Hainault he restored to Roger de Rosoy his lands and his
bishopric on condition of living in peace with the commune.  And so long
as Louis VII. lived, the bishop did refrain from attacking the liberties
of the burghers of Laon; but at the king's death, in 1180, he applied to
his successor, Philip Augustus, and offered to cede to him the lordship
of Fere-sur-Oise, of which he was the possessor, provided that Philip by
charter abolished the commune of Laon.  Philip yielded to the temptation,
and in 1190 published an ordinance to the following purport: "Desiring to
avoid for our soul every sort of danger, we do entirely quash the commune
established in the town of Laon as being contrary to the rights and
liberties of the metropolitan church of St. Mary, in regard for justice
and for the sake of a happy issue to the pilgrimage which we be bound to
make to Jerusalem."  But next year, upon entreaty and offers from the
burghers of Laon, Philip changed his mind, and without giving back the
lordship of Fere-sur-Oise to the bishop, guaranteed and confirmed in
perpetuity the peace-establishment granted in 1128 to the town of Laon,
"on the condition that every year at the feast of All Saints they shall
pay to us and our successors two hundred livres of Paris."  For a century
all strife of any consequence ceased between the burghers of Laon and
their bishop; there was no real accord or good under-standing between
them, but the public peace was not troubled, and neither the Kings of
France nor the great lords of the neighborhood interfered in its affairs.
In 1294 some knights and clergy of the metropolitan chapter of Laon took
to quarrelling with some burghers; and on both sides they came to deeds
of violence, which caused sanguinary struggles in the streets of the town
and even in the precincts of the episcopal palace.  The bishop and his
chapter applied to the pope, Boniface VIII., who applied to the king,
Philip the Handsome, to put an end to these scandalous disturbances.
Philip the Handsome, in his turn, applied to the Parliament of Paris,
which, after inquiry, "deprived the town of Laon of every right of
commune and college, under whatsoever name."  The king did not like to
execute this decree in all its rigor.  He granted the burghers of Laon a
charter which maintained them provisionally in the enjoyment of their
political rights, but with this destructive clause: "Said commune and
said shrievalty shall be in force only so far as it shall be our
pleasure."  For nearly thirty years, from Philip the Handsome to Philip
of Valois, the bishops and burghers of Laon were in litigation before the
crown of France, the former for the maintenance of the commune of Laon in
its precarious condition and at the king's good pleasure, the latter for
the recovery of its independent and durable character.  At last, in 1331,
Philip of Valois, "considering that the olden commune of Laon, by reason
of certain misdeeds and excesses, notorious, enormous, and detestable,
had been removed and put down forever by decree of the court of our most
clear lord and uncle, King Philip the Handsome, confirmed and approved by
our most dear lords, Kings Philip and Charles, whose souls are with God,
we, on great deliberation of our council, have ordained that no commune,
corporation, college, shrievalty, mayor, jurymen, or any other estate or
symbol belonging thereto, be at any time set up or established at Laon."
By the same ordinance the municipal administration of Laon was put under
the sole authority of the king and his delegates; and to blot out all
remembrance of the olden independence of the commune, a later ordinance
forbade that the tower from which the two huge communal bells had been
removed should thenceforth be called belfry-tower.

[Illustration: The Cathedral of Laon----233]

The history of the commune of Laon is that of the majority of the towns
which, in Northern and Central France, struggled from the eleventh to the
fourteenth century to release themselves from feudal oppression and
violence.  Cambrai, Beauvais, Amiens, Soissons, Rheims, Vezelay, and
several other towns displayed at this period a great deal of energy and
perseverance in bringing their lords to recognize the most natural and
the most necessary rights of every human creature and community.  But
within their walls dissensions were carried to extremity, and existence
was ceaselessly tempestuous and troublous; the burghers were hasty,
brutal, and barbaric,--as barbaric as the lords against whom they were
defending their liberties.  Amongst those mayors, sheriffs, jurats, and
magistrates of different degrees and with different titles, set up in the
communes, many came before very long to exercise dominion arbitrarily,
violently, and in their own personal interests.  The lower orders were in
an habitual state of jealousy and sedition of a ruffianly kind towards
the rich, the heads of the labor market, the controllers of capital and
of work.  This reciprocal violence, this anarchy, these internal evils
and dangers, with their incessant renewals, called incessantly for
intervention from without; and when, after releasing themselves from
oppression and iniquity coming from above, the burghers fell a prey to
pillage and massacre coming from below, they sought for a fresh protector
to save them from this fresh evil.  Hence that frequent recourse to the
king, the great suzerain whose authority could keep down the bad
magistrates of the commune or reduce the mob to order; and hence also,
before long, the progressive downfall, or, at any rate, the utter
enfeeblement of those communal liberties so painfully won.  France was at
that stage of existence and of civilization at which security can hardly
be purchased save at the price of liberty.  We have a phenomenon peculiar
to modern times in the provident and persistent effort to reconcile
security with liberty, and the bold development of individual powers with
the regular maintenance of public order.  This admirable solution of the
social problem, still so imperfect and unstable in our time, was unknown
in the middle ages; liberty was then so stormy and so fearful, that
people conceived before long, if not a disgust for it, at any rate a
horror of it, and sought at any price a political regimen which would
give them some security, the essential aim of the social estate.  When we
arrive at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth
century, we see a host of communes falling into decay or entirely
disappearing; they cease really to belong to and govern themselves; some,
like Laon, Cambrai, Beauvais, and Rheims, fought a long while against
decline, and tried more than once to re-establish themselves in all their
independence; but they could not do without the king's support in their
resistance to their lords, laic or ecclesiastical; and they were not in a
condition to resist the kingship, which had grown whilst they were
perishing.  Others, Meulan and Soissons, for example (in 1320 and 1335),
perceived their weakness early, and themselves requested the kingship to
deliver them from their communal organization, and itself assume their
administration.  And so it is about this period, under St. Louis and
Philip the Handsome, that there appear in the collections of acts of the
French kingship, those great ordinances which regulate the administration
of all communes within the kingly domains.  Hitherto the kings had
ordinarily dealt with each town severally; and as the majority were
almost independent, or invested with privileges of different kiwis and
carefully respected, neither the king nor any great suzerain dreamed of
prescribing general rules for communal regimen, nor of administering
after a uniform fashion all the communes in their domains.  It was under
St. Louis and Philip the Handsome that general regulations on this
subject began.  The French communes were associations too small and too
weak to suffice for self-maintenance and self-government amidst the
disturbances of the great Christian community; and they were too numerous
and too little enlightened to organize themselves into one vast
confederation, capable of giving them a central government.  The communal
liberties were not in a condition to found in France a great republican
community; to the kingship appertained the power and fell the honor of
presiding over the formation and the fortunes of the French nation.

But the kingship did not alone accomplish this great work.  At the very
time that the communes were perishing and the kingship was growing, a new
power, a new social element, the Third Estate, was springing up in
France; and it was called to take a far more important place in the
history of France, and to exercise far more influence upon the fate of
the French father-land, than it had been granted to the communes to
acquire during their short and incoherent existence.

It may astonish many who study the records of French history from the
eleventh to the fourteenth century, not to find anywhere the words third
estate; and a desire may arise to know whether those inquirers of our day
who have devoted themselves professedly to this particular study, have
been more successful in discovering that grand term at the time when it
seems that we ought to expect to meet with it.  The question was,
therefore, submitted to a learned member of the _Academie des
Inscriptions et Belles-lettres,_ M. Littre, in fact, whose _Dictionnaire
etymologique de la Langur Francaise_ is consulted with respect by the
whole literary world, and to a young magistrate, M. Picot, to whom the
_Acacdemie des Sciences morales et politiques_ but lately assigned the
first prize for his great work on the question it had propounded, as to
the history and influence of states-general in France; and here are
inserted, textually, the answers given by two gentlemen of so much
enlightenment and authority upon such a subject.

M. Littre, writing on the 3d of October, 1871, says, "I do not find, in
my account of the word, third estate before the sixteenth century.  I
quote these two instances of it: 'As to the third order called third
estate .  .  .' (_La Noue, Discours,_ p. 541); and 'clerks and deputies
for the third estate, same for the estate of labor (laborers).'
(_Coustumier general,_ t. i.  p. 335.) In the fifteenth century, or at
the end of the fourteenth, in the poems of Eustace Deschamps, I have--

'_Prince, dost thou yearn for good old times again?
In good old ways the Three Estates restrain._'

"At date of fourteenth century, in Du Cange, we read under the word
status, '_Per tres status concilii generalis Praelatorum, Baronum,
nobilium et universitatum comitatum._' According to these documents, I
think it is in the fourteenth century that they began to call the three
orders _tres status_, and that it was only in the sixteenth century that
they began to speak in French of the _tiers estat_ (third estate).  But I
cannot give this conclusion as final, seeing that it is supported only by
the documents I consulted for my dictionary."

M. Picot replied on the 3d of October, 1871, "It is certain that acts
contemporary with King John frequently speak of the 'three estates,' but
do not utter the word _tiers-etat_ (third estate).  The great chronicles
and Froissart say nearly always, 'the church-men, the nobles, and the
good towns.'  The royal ordinances employ the same terms; but sometimes,
in order not to limit their enumeration to the deputies of closed cities,
they add, _the good towns, and the open country_ (Ord.  t. iii  p. 221,
note).  When they apply to the provincial estates of the _Oil_ tongue it
is the custom to say, the burghers and inhabitants; when it is a question
of the Estates of Languedoc, the commonalties of the seneschalty.  Such
were, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the only expressions for
designating the third order.

"Under Louis XI., Juvenal des Ursins, in his harangue, addresses the
deputies of the third by the title of _burghers and inhabitants of the
good towns_.  At the States of Tours, the spokesman of the estates, John
de Rely, says, _the people of the common estate, the estate of the
people_.  The special memorial presented to Charles VIII. by the three
orders of Languedoc likewise uses the word _people_.

"It is in Masselin's report and the memorial of grievances presented in
1485 that I meet for the first time with the expression third estate
(_tiers-etat_).  Masselin says, 'It was decided that each section should
furnish six commissioners, two ecclesiastics, two nobles, and two of the
third estate (_duos ecclesiasticos, duos nobiles, et duos tertii
status._)' (_Documents inedits sur l'Histoire de France; proces-verbal de
Masselin,_ p. 76.) The commencement of the chapter headed _Of the Commons
(du commun)_ is, 'For the third and common estate the said folks do
represent .  .  .' and a few lines lower, comparing the kingdom with the
human body, the compilers of the memorial say, 'The members are the
clergy, the nobles, and the folks of the third estate.  (_Ibid.  after
the report of Masselin, memorial of grievances,_ p. 669.)

"Thus, at the end of the fifteenth century, the expression third estate
was constantly employed; but is it not of older date?  There are words
which spring so from the nature of things that they ought to be
contemporaneous with the ideas they express; their appearance in language
is inevitable, and is scarcely noticed there.  On the day when the
deputies of the communes entered an assembly, and seated themselves
beside the first two orders, the new comer, by virtue of the situation
and rank occupied, took the name of third order; and as our fathers used
to speak of the third denier (_tiers denier_), and the third day (_tierce
journee_), so they must have spoken of the (_tiers-etat_) third estate.
It was only at the end of the fifteenth century that the expression
became common; but I am inclined to believe that it existed in the
beginning of the fourteenth.

"For an instant I had imagined, in the course of my researches, that,
under King John, the ordinances had designated the good towns by the name
of third estate.  I very soon saw my mistake; but you will see how near I
found myself to the expression of which we are seeking the origin.  Four
times, in the great ordinance of December, 1335, the deputies wrest from
the king a promise that in the next assemblies the resolutions shall be
taken according to the unanimity of the orders 'without two estates, if
they be of one accord, being able to bind the _third._' At first sight it
might be supposed that the deputies of the towns had an understanding to
secure themselves from the dangers of common action on the part of the
clergy and noblesse, but a more attentive examination made me fly back to
a more correct opinion: it is certain that the three orders had combined
for mutual protection against an alliance of any two of them.  Besides,
the States of 1576 saw how the clergy readopted to their profit, against
the two laic orders, the proposition voted in 1355.  It is beyond a doubt
that this doctrine served to keep the majority from oppressing the
minority whatever may have been its name.  Only, in point of fact, it was
most frequently the third estate that must have profited by the
regulation.

"In brief, we may, before the fifteenth century, make suppositions, but
they are no more than mere conjectures.  It was at the great States of
Tours, in 1468, that, for the first time, the third order bore the name
which has been given to it by history."

The fact was far before its name.  Had the third estate been centred
entirely in the communes at strife with their lords, had the fate of
burgherdom in France depended on the communal liberties won in that
strife, we should see, at the end of the thirteenth century, that element
of French society in a state of feebleness and decay.  But it was far
otherwise.  The third estate drew its origin and nourishment from all
sorts of sources; and whilst one was within an ace of drying up, the
others remained abundant and fruitful.  Independently of the commune
properly so called and invested with the right of self-government, many
towns had privileges, serviceable though limited franchises, and under
the administration of the king's officers they grew in population and
wealth.  These towns did not share, towards the end of the thirteenth
century, in the decay of the once warlike and victorious communes.  Local
political liberty was to seek in them; the spirit of independence and
resistance did not prevail in them; but we see growing up in them another
spirit which has played a grand part in French history, a spirit of
little or no ambition, of little or no enterprise, timid even and
scarcely dreaming of actual resistance, but honorable, inclined to order,
persevering, attached to its traditional franchises, and quite able to
make them respected, sooner or later.  It was especially in the towns
administered in the king's name and by his provosts that there was a
development of this spirit, which has long been the predominant
characteristic of French burgherdom.  It must not be supposed that, in
the absence of real communal independence, these towns lacked all
internal security.  The kingship was ever fearful lest its local officers
should render themselves independent, and remembered what had become in
the ninth century of the crown's offices, the duchies and the countships,
and of the difficulty it had at that time to recover the scattered
remnants of the old imperial authority.  And so the Capetian kings with
any intelligence, such as Louis VI., Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and
Philip the Handsome, were careful to keep a hand over their provosts,
sergeants, and officers of all kinds, in order that their power should
not grow so great as to become formidable.  At this time, besides,
Parliament and the whole judicial system was beginning to take form; and
many questions relating to the administration of the towns, many disputes
between the provosts and burghers, were carried before the Parliament of
Paris, and there decided with more independence and equity than they
would have been by any other power.  A certain measure of impartiality is
inherent in judicial power; the habit of delivering judgment according to
written texts, of applying laws to facts, produces a natural and almost
instinctive respect for old-acquired rights.  In Parliament the towns
often obtained justice and the maintenance of their franchises against
the officers of the king.  The collection of kingly ordinances at this
time abounds with instances of the kind.  These judges, besides, these
bailiffs, these provosts, these seneschals, and all these officers of the
king or of the great suzerains, formed before long a numerous and
powerful class.  Now the majority amongst them were burghers, and their
number and their power were turned to the advantage of burgherdom, and
led day by day to its further extension and importance.  Of all the
original sources of the third estate, this it is, perhaps, which has
contributed most to bring about the social preponderance of that order.
Just when burgherdom, but lately formed, was losing in many of the
communes a portion of its local liberties, at that same moment it was
seizing by the hand of Parliaments, provosts, judges, and administrators
of all kinds, a large share of central power.  It was through burghers
admitted into the king's service and acting as administrators or judges
in his name that communal independence and charters were often attacked
and abolished; but at the same time they fortified and elevated
burgherdom, they caused it to acquire from day to day more wealth, more
credit, more importance and power in the internal and external affairs of
the state.

Philip the Handsome, that ambitious and despotic prince, was under no
delusion when in 1302, 1308, and 1314, on convoking the first states-
general of France, he summoned thither "the deputies of the good towns."
He did not yet give them the name of third estate; but he was perfectly
aware that he was thus summoning to his aid against Boniface VIII. and
the Templars and the Flemings a class already invested throughout the
country with great influence and ready to lend him efficient support.
His son, Philip the Long, was under no delusion when in 1317 and 1321 he
summoned to the states-general "the commonalties and good towns of the
kingdom "to decide upon the interpretation of the Salle law as to the
succession to the throne, "or to advise as to the means of establishing a
uniformity of coins, weights, and measures;" he was perfectly aware that
the authority of burgherdom would be of great assistance to him in the
accomplishment of acts so grave.  And the three estates played the
prelude to the formation, painful and slow as it was, of constitutional
monarchy, when, in 1338, under Philip of Valois, they declared, "in
presence of the said king, Philip of Valois, who assented thereto, that
there should be no power to impose or levy talliage in France if urgent
necessity or evident utility did not require it, and then only by grant
of the people of the estates."

In order to properly understand the French third estate and its
importance, more is required than to look on at its birth; a glance must
be taken at its grand destiny and the results at which it at last
arrived.  Let us, therefore, anticipate centuries and get a glimpse, now
at once, of that upon which the course of events from the fourteenth to
the nineteenth century will shed full light.

Taking the history of France in its entirety and under all its phases,
the third estate has been the most active and determining element in the
process of Freneh civilization.  If we follow it in its relation with the
general government of the country, we see it at first allied for six
centuries to the kingship, struggling without cessation against the
feudal aristocracy and giving predominance in place thereof to a single
central power, pure monarchy, closely bordering, though with some
frequently repeated but rather useless reservations, on absolute
monarchy.  But, so soon as it had gained this victory and brought about
this revolution, the third estate went in pursuit of a new one, attacking
that single power to the foundation of which it had contributed so much
and entering upon the task of changing pure monarchy into constitutional
monarchy.  Under whatever aspect we regard it during these two great
enterprises, so different one from the other, whether we study the
progressive formation of French society or that of its government, the
third estate is the most powerful and the most persistent of the forces
which have influenced French civilization.

This fact is unique in the history of the world.  We recognize in the
career of the chief nations of Asia and ancient Europe nearly all the
great facts which have agitated France; we meet in them mixture of
different races, conquest of people by people, immense inequality between
classes, frequent changes in the forms of government and extent of public
power; but nowhere is there any appearance of a class which, starting
from the very lowest, from being feeble, despised, and almost
imperceptible at its origin, rises by perpetual motion and by labor
without respite, strengthens itself from period to period, acquires in
succession whatever it lacked, wealth, enlightenment, influence, changes
the face of society and the nature of government, and arrives at last at
such a pitch of predominance that it may be said to be absolutely the
country.  More than once in the world's history the external semblances
of such and such a society have been the same as those which have just
been reviewed here, but it is mere semblance.  In India, for example,
foreign invasions and the influx and establishment of different races
upon the same soil have occurred over and over again; but with what
result?  The permanence of caste has not been touched; and society has
kept its divisions into distinct and almost changeless classes.  After
India take China.  There too history exhibits conquests similar to the
conquest of Europe by the Germans; and there too, more than once, the
barbaric conquerors settled amidst a population of the conquered.  What
was the result?  The conquered all but absorbed the conquerors, and
changelessness was still the predominant characteristic of the social
condition.  In Western Asia, after the invasions of the Turks, the
separation between victors and vanquished remained insurmountable; no
ferment in the heart of society, no historical event, could efface this
first effect of conquest.  In Persia, similar events succeeded one
another; different races fought and intermingled; and the end was
irremediable social anarchy, which has endured for ages without any
change in the social condition of the country, without a shadow of any
development of civilization.

So much for Asia.  Let us pass to the Europe of the Greeks and Romans.
At the first blush we seem to recognize some analogy between the progress
of these brilliant societies and that of French society; but the analogy
is only apparent; there is, once more, nothing resembling the fact and
the history of the French third estate.  One thing only has struck sound
judgments as being somewhat like the struggle of burgherdom in the middle
ages against the feudal aristocracy, and that is the struggle between the
plebeians and patricians at Rome.  They have often been compared; but it
is a baseless comparison.  The struggle between the plebeians and
patricians commenced from the very cradle of the Roman republic; it was
not, as happened in the France of the middle ages, the result of a slow,
difficult, incomplete development on the part of a class which, through a
long course of great inferiority in strength, wealth, and credit, little
by little extended itself and raised itself, and ended by engaging in a
real contest with the superior class.  It is now acknowledged that the
struggle at Rome between the plebeians and patricians was a sequel and a
prolongation of the war of conquest, was an effort on the part of the
aristocracy of the cities conquered by Rome to share the rights of the
conquering aristocracy.  The families of plebeians were the chief
families of the vanquished peoples; and though placed by defeat in a
position of inferiority, they were not any the less aristocratic
families, powerful but lately in their own cities, encompassed by
clients, and calculated from the very first to dispute with their
conquerors the possession of power.  There is nothing in all this like
that slow, obscure, heart-breaking travail of modern burgherdom escaping,
full hardly, from the midst of slavery or a condition approximating to
slavery, and spending centuries, not in disputing political power, but in
winning its own civil existence.  The more closely the French third
estate is examined, the more it is recognized as a new fact in the
world's history, appertaining exclusively to the civilization of modern,
Christian Europe.

Not only is the fact new, but it has for France an entirely special
interest, since--to employ an expression much abused in the present day--
it is a fact eminently French, essentially national.  Nowhere has
burgherdom had so wide and so productive a career as that which fell to
its lot in France.  There have been communes in the whole of Europe, in
Italy, Spain, Germany, and England, as well as in France.  Not only have
there been communes everywhere, but the communes of France are not those
which, as communes, under that name and in the middle ages, have played
the chiefest part and taken the highest place in history.  The Italian
communes were the parents of glorious republics.  The German communes
became free and sovereign towns, which had their own special history, and
exercised a great deal of influence upon the general history of Germany.
The communes of England made alliance with a portion of the English
feudal aristocracy, formed with it the preponderating house in the
British government, and thus played, full early, a mighty part in the
history of their country.  Far were the French communes, under that name
and in their day of special activity, from rising to such political
importance and to such historical rank.  And yet it is in France that the
people of the communes, the burgherdom, reached the most complete and
most powerful development, and ended by acquiring the most decided
preponderance in the general social structure.  There have been communes,
we say, throughout Europe; but there has not really been a victorious
third estate anywhere, save in France.  The revolution of 1789, the
greatest ever seen, was the culminating point arrived at by the third
estate; and France is the only country in which a man of large mind
could, in a burst of burgher's pride, exclaim, "What is the third estate?
Everything."

Since the explosion, and after all the changes, liberal and illiberal,
due to the revolution of 1789, there has been a common-place, ceaselessly
repeated, to the effect that there are no more classes in French society
--there is only a nation of thirty-seven millions of persons.  If it be
meant that there are now no more privileges in France, no special laws
and private rights for such and such families, proprietorships, and
occupations, and that legislation is the same, and there is perfect
freedom of movement for all, at all steps of the social ladder, it is
true; oneness of laws and similarity of rights, is now the essential and
characteristic fact of civil society in France, an immense, an excellent,
and a novel fact in the history of human associations.  But beneath the
dominance of this fact, in the midst of this national unity and this
civil equality, there evidently and necessarily exist numerous and
important diversities and inequalities, which oneness of laws and
similarity of rights neither prevent nor destroy.  In point of property,
real or personal, land or capital, there are rich and poor; there are the
large, the middling, and the small property.  Though the great
proprietors may be less numerous and less rich, and the middling and the
small proprietors more numerous and more powerful than they were of yore,
this does not prevent the difference from being real and great enough to
create, in the civil body, social positions widely different and unequal.
In the professions which are called liberal, and which live by brains and
knowledge, amongst barristers, doctors, scholars, and literates of all
kinds, some rise to the first rank, attract to themselves practice and
success, and win fame, wealth, and influence; others make enough, by hard
work, for the necessities of their families and the calls of their
position; others vegetate obscurely in a sort of lazy discomfort.  In the
other vocations, those in which the labor is principally physical and
manual, there also it is according to nature that there should be
different and unequal positions; some, by brains and good conduct, make
capital, and get a footing upon the ways of competence and progress;
others, being dull, or idle, or disorderly, remain in the straitened and
precarious condition of existence depending solely on wages.  Throughout
the whole extent of the social structure, in the ranks of labor as well
as of property, differences and inequalities of position are produced or
kept up and co-exist with oneness of laws and similarity of rights.
Examine any human associations, in any place and at any time, and
whatever diversity there may be in point of their origin, organization,
government, extent, and duration, there will be found in all three types
of social position always fundamentally the same, though they may appear
under different and differently distributed forms; 1st, men living on
income from their properties, real or personal, land or capital, without
seeking to increase them by their own personal and assiduous labor; 2d,
men devoted to working up and increasing, by their own personal and
assiduous labor, the real or personal properties, land or capital they
possess; 3d, men living by their daily labor, without land or capital to
give them an income.  And these differences, these inequalities in the
social position of men, are not matters of accident or violence, or
peculiar to such and such a time, or such and such a country; they are
matters of universal application, produced spontaneously in every human
society by virtue of the primitive and general laws of human nature, in
the midst of events and under the influence of social systems utterly
different.

These matters exist now and in France as they did of old and elsewhere.
Whether you do or do not use the name of classes, the new French social
fabric contains, and will not cease to contain, social positions widely
different and unequal.  What constitutes its blessing and its glory is,
that privilege and fixity no longer cling to this difference of
positions; that there are no more special rights and advantages legally
assigned to some and inacessible to others; that all roads are free and
open to all to rise to everything; that personal merit and toil have an
infinitely greater share than was ever formerly allowed to them in the
fortunes of men.  The third estate of the old regimen exists no more; it
disappeared in its victory over privilege and absolute power; it has for
heirs the middle classes, as they are now called; but these classes,
whilst inheriting the conquests of the old third estate, hold them on new
conditions also, as legitimate as binding.  To secure their own
interests, as well as to discharge their public duty, they are bound to
be at once conservative and liberal; they must, on the one hand, enlist
and rally beneath their flag the old, once privileged superioritics,
which have survived the fall of the old regimen, and, on the other hand,
fully recognize the continual upward movement which is fermenting in the
whole body of the nation.  That, in its relations with the aristocratic
classes, the third estate of the old regimen should have been and for a
long time remained uneasy, disposed to take umbrage, jealous and even
envious, is no more than natural; it had its rights to urge and its
conquests to gain; nowadays its conquests have been won, the rights are
recognized, proclaimed, and exercised; the middle classes have no longer
any legitimate ground for uneasiness or envy; they can rest with full
confidence in their own dignity and their own strength; they have
undergone all the necessary trials, and passed all the necessary tests.
In respect of the lower orders, and the democracy properly so called, the
position of the middle classes is no less favorable; they have no fixed
line of separation; for who can say where the middle classes begin and
where they end?  In the name of the principles of common rights and
general liberty they were formed; and by the working of the same
principles they are being constantly recruited, and are incessantly
drawing new vigor from the sources whence they sprang.  To maintain
common rights and free movement upwards against the retrograde tendencies
of privilege and absolute power, on the one hand, and on the other
against the insensate and destructive pretensions of levellers and
anarchists, is now the double business of the middle classes; and it is
at the same time, for themselves, the sure way of preserving
preponderance in the state, in the name of general interests, of which
those classes are the most real and most efficient representatives.