Third Estate
제3신분
The legal order comprising everyone in ancien-régime France who belonged to neither the First Estate (clergy) nor the Second Estate (titled nobility): the great majority of the population, urban and rural alike, and internally divided among bourgeoisie, officeholders, professionals, artisans, wage workers and peasants.
In depth
Legal order and internal class
The Third Estate was the third order of the French ancien-régime hierarchy: it comprised everyone who belonged to neither the First Estate (clergy) nor the Second Estate (titled nobles), while the king stood outside any estate. This division was not merely descriptive. Legal and political status depended on one's estate, and each estate held distinct privileges: the First and Second were largely tax-exempt while the Third bore the main tax burden. Composed of the bourgeoisie, artisans, workers and above all peasants, the Third Estate formed roughly 97 per cent of the population, with peasants making up nearly 80 per cent of the estate itself.
After the eleventh century the general category of those who laboured diversified into peasants, skilled artisans, merchants, financiers, lay professionals and entrepreneurs. The estate can be divided into urban groups, including wage-labourers, and rural groups, including free peasants and villeins or serfs working nobles' land. Free peasants paid disproportionately high taxes compared to the other estates.
Representation against class reality
Political representation diverged sharply from the estate's social reality. In 1614, of 187 Third Estate deputies, two were merchants and one a ploughman, while thirty were lawyers, fifty-eight lieutenants-general and fifty-six bailiwick officers; 177 had at some time practised as lawyers. Among the roughly 610 (or 578, and sometimes counted as 600) Third Estate deputies of 1789, about two-thirds held legal qualifications and almost half were venal office holders, while fewer than 100 were in trade or industry. Whether any peasants sat among the elected deputies is disputed in the sources: English Wikipedia states that none were peasants or artisans, whereas French Wikipedia records that only a single peasant figured among the elected deputies.
1789 and after
The Third Estate pressed for voting by head rather than by estate, since voting by estate allowed clergy and nobility, less than 5 per cent of the population, to outvote it. On 17 June 1789 its deputies declared themselves the National Assembly of France and existing taxes illegal. Sieyès's pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? (January 1789) argued that the estate was a complete nation in itself and that the other two orders were unnecessary; it became one of the most influential pamphlets of the early Revolution, printed in some 300,000 copies. Following the abolition of privileges on 4 August, the National Assembly decreed the complete destruction of the feudal regime on 11 August 1789, ending the estate's legal existence.
After the Revolution, 'tiers état' was often confused with a vague synonym for 'people'; in the nineteenth century Proudhon revived the register with 'What is the third estate? Nothing. What should it be? Everything.' The term must also be distinguished from same-name uses elsewhere: in Scotland the 'Third Estate' was the shire commissioners and burghers, in Sweden and Russia burghers and rural commoners formed separate estates in a four-estate system, and today the 'fourth estate' usually means the press or mass media.