"Third estate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the People.—If the nobility despised the lower classes and ignored their rights, they in turn were hated intensely by those whom they sought to degrade. The third estate in France was divided into the bourgeoisie and the peasantry and small artisans. The former gradually deteriorated in character and tended toward the condition of the lowest classes. By the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a large number of the bourgeoisie, or middle class, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... of 1788 the King of France found himself forced to summon the States-General. It was their first assembly since 1614. On the memorable Fourth of May, 1789, Robespierre appeared at Versailles as one of the representatives of the third estate of his native province of Artois. The excitement and enthusiasm of the elections to this renowned assembly, the immense demands and boundless expectations that they disclosed, would have warned ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... 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
... hamstrung,—nor to clothe themselves like the nobles,—nor to clothe their wives like the wives of nobles,—nor to wear velvet or satin under a penalty of five thousand livres. And, preposterous as such claims may seem to us, they carried them into practice. A deputy of the Third Estate having been severely beaten by a noble, his demands for redress were treated as absurd. One of the orators of the lower order having spoken of the French as forming one great family in which the nobles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... extirpation Of linsey-woolsey in the nation; And some against all idolizing The Cross in shops-books, or Baptizing Others to make all things recant 315 The Christian or Surname of Saint; And force all churches, streets, and towns, The holy title to renounce. Some 'gainst a Third Estate of Souls, And bringing down the price of coals: 320 Some for abolishing black-pudding, And eating nothing with the blood in; To abrogate them roots and branches; While others were for eating haunches Of warriors, and now and then, 325 The flesh of Kings ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler |
