Numbers

The Three Estates

• First Estate:  Lords Spiritual, i.e. the clergy
• Second Estate:  Lords Temporal, i.e. the nobility
• Third Estate: Commons

Most people learn about the Three Estates as part of learning about the French Revolution: along with "Let Them Eat Cake," the Storming of the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, and the guillotine, we learn about the Estates-General and how French society prior to the Revolution was divided into three groups.

However, this tripartite organization of society—a political class, a religious class, and a business class—is common to many other countries and cultures. Even off-hand descriptions of society such as in David Macaulay’s City:  A Story of Roman Planning and Construction reflect this basic nature. “The Romans knew that well-planned cities did more to maintain peace and security than twice the number of military camps.  They also knew that a city was more than just a business, government, or religious center.  It was all three, but most important, it had to be a place where people wanted to live,” p. 5.

There are other tripartite systems, such as Britain's class system: “Then there is the view of class that sees the nation divided into three great groups: the upper class, the (always rising) middle class and finally the working class.  Victorian reformers assumed that such a nation should have a tripartite system of schooling too: the old Eton-style academies for the lords; a literate curriculum for the respectable clerks in the middle; and a ‘sound and cheap’ education for the future miners and factory hands.”—David Brooks, “The Ranking that Rankles,” The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 1998, p. A11 in a review of David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain.

“A three-part division [of society into classes] is popular too, probably because the number three is portentous, folkloristic, and even magical, being the number of bears, wishes, and Wise Men. In Britain three has been popularly accepted as the number of classes at least since the last century, when Matthew Arnold divided his neighbors and friends into upper, middle and lower classes, or as he memorably termed them, Barbarians (at the top, notice), Philistines (in the middle), and Populace. This three-tiered conception is the usual way to think of the class system for people in the middle, for it offers them moral and social safety, positioning them equally distant from the vices of pride and snobbery and waste and carelessness, which they associate with those above them, and dirtiness, constraint, and shame, the attendants of those below. Upper, middle, and lower are the customary terms for these three groups, although the British euphemism working class for lower class is now making some headway here.”—Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 26.

How It's Used

The Estates General of France "had then [1614] been composed of representatives of the three 'estates' of the realm—that is, the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. The representatives of each estate had met and voted separately. Obviously such an arrangement gave the clergy and nobility a decisive preponderance, and when in August, 1788, the king [of France] decided to summon the Estates General, the question of how that body would be organized became a burning one. Members of the commons (or Third Estate) were not satisfied with the old medieval distribution of power, and found effective spokesmen for their wishes in the Abbé Sieyès and others. After some indecision, the royal government agreed that the representatives of the Third Estate should equal in number the representatives of the other two orders combined."

"Revolution followed frustrated reform. King Louis XVI, desperate for money, had assembled the Estates-General to raise taxes, thereby acknowledging the voice of the three estates—clergy, nobles and commoners. And when all three claimed the prerogative of taxation, as well as that of legislation, for the assembly, the King conceded.

"But when commoners went beyond this to insist on a voice equal to the other two estates, the nobles balked and the King backed them. The third estate, commons, then reconstituted itself as the National Assembly, representing the nation as a whole, and drafted a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The King, with the support of the nobles, moved with force to halt further progress and the incendiary implication seemed clear. When commoners fought for constitutional monarchy, the privileged class sided with them. When they fought for their right to be citizens, they fought alone."

"In Labour's case, its present system, concocted 25 years ago under the Bennite hard-left ascendancy, is known as the electoral college, although the late Geoff Thomas, a most engaging Welsh Labour MP, said at the time: 'Electoral college? It sounds to me more like an electoral comprehensive.' An expensive one, too: Jack Dromey, the party treasurer, has said mournfully that electing a new leader is going to cost the party several hundred thousand pounds it can ill afford.

"This college apportions the vote between unions, with 40 per cent, and constituency parties and MPs with 30 per cent each. So far, Labour's luck has held: when Neil Kinnock was elected as leader in 1983, John Smith in 1992 and Tony Blair in 1994, all of them won a majority in each of the three 'estates', including the MPs."

"The press likes to think of itself as the fourth estate, a term said to have been coined by 18th-century British orator Edmund Burke in reference to the reporters gallery in the House of Commons. 'Yonder sits the fourth estate,' he intoned, 'more important than them all'—an allusion to Britain's three Estates of the Realm, the Crown, House of Lords and Commons."

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