"Third estate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... meeting, to the immortal night of the Fourth of August, when the nation entered upon an era that was to atone for so many disasters, one event succeeded another with bewildering rapidity. The victorious resistance of the Third Estate to the pretensions of the nobility and clergy; the proclamation of the king; the movement of the French Guards; their imprisonment; their deliverance by the people; the intrigues of the Orleans party; the taking of the Bastile; the death of Foulon ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... scheme destroyed itself. Instead of making the crown absolute, as was intended, it threw the balance into the hands of the Barons, who became so many petty Sovereigns, and a scourge to the King in after ages, 'till Henry the Seventh sapped their power, and raised the third estate, the Commons, which quickly ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... of the State, headed by Mirabeau, steered with considerable success among waters as yet but partly roiled. At Versailles an outward and visible Liberalism triumphed. The Third Estate or Commons, consolidating its authority as a permanent assembly, took measures to end the national bankruptcy and tried to cope with the awful menace of starvation. It was a bourgeois body, thinly sprinkled with members of the nobility and clergy; its aim, to abolish the worst seigniorial ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... coffee-house or drawing-room into which he had just looked, did Barere enter into public life. The States-General had been summoned. Barere went down to his own province, was there elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were divided into three orders, differing in legal rights. These were the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Commons, or Third Estate. The first two, which are commonly spoken of as the privileged orders, contained but a small fraction of the population numerically, but their wealth and position gave them a ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell |
