individual advantage (provided that it does not offend the law), has a right
to protection. But since the social union could have been formed only by
the links between those points that its members had in common, it is this
common quality alone that serves to give legislation its lawful character.
It follows from this that any particular corporate body’s interest, far from
having an influence in the legislature, can only arouse its suspicion. It will
always be as opposed to the object of a body of representatives as it will be
alien to its purpose.
These principles become even more rigorous when it is a matter of
dealing with privileged orders. I take “privileged” to mean anyone who falls
outside the provisions of the common legal system either because he
claims not to be subject to common legality at all or because he claims to
have exclusive rights. We have provided sufficient proof of the fact that
any privilege is by nature unjust, odious, and contrary to the social pact.
A privileged class is to the Nation what individual advantages are to the
citizen. Like them, it is not something that can be represented. But even this
is not quite enough. A privileged class is to the Nation what harmful individual
advantages are to the citizen. The legislator does his duty in suppressing
them. The parallel also serves to reveal a final difference, which
is that an individual advantage that is harmful to others is at least useful to
its owner, while a privileged class is a pestilence upon the nation that is
forced to suffer its existence. To make the comparison more exact, one
would have to compare a privileged class in a nation to a frightful disease
devouring the living flesh of the body of its unhappy victim. With this in
mind, it is easy to see why a privileged class might feel a need to cloak itself
in all the honorable distinctions it can find.
A privileged class is therefore harmful not only because of its corporate
spirit but simply because it exists. The more it has been able to obtain
of those favors that are necessarily opposed to common liberty, the
more it is essential to exclude it from the National Assembly. Anyone
privileged is entitled to be represented only on the basis of his quality as a
citizen. But for him that quality has been destroyed. He is outside the
civil order and an enemy of common legality.38 To confer a right to be
represented upon him would be a manifest legal contradiction. The Nation
could have agreed to do so only as an act of servility, which is something
that cannot be supposed.
Although it has been shown why anyone mandated to enforce the executive’s
active power should be neither an elector nor eligible for election
to the legislative representation, this should not be taken to mean
What is the Third Estate? 157
that he should cease to be considered to be a true citizen. In terms of his
personal rights he is as much of a citizen as anyone else, and, far from destroying
his civic quality or affronting others’ civic sense, those necessary
and honorable functions that set him apart were established to serve those
very qualities. If nonetheless it is necessary to suspend the exercise of his
political rights, how much more so must it be for those who, scorning
the provisions of common legality, consist of those for who the Nation is
a foreign country, of those whose mere existence is tantamount to a continuous
state of hostility towards the great body of the people? It is indisputable
that these latter, having renounced the very character of
citizenship, ought, more certainly than a foreigner, to be denied the right
to elect or to be eligible. At least a foreigner’s overt interest may well not
be opposed to your own.
To sum up, it is a matter of principle that everything that falls outside
the common attributes of citizenship cannot give rise to an entitlement
to exercise political rights. A people’s legislature can be charged only with
providing for the general interest. But if privileged individuals enjoy an
estate that makes them the enemy of the common order, not the beneficiaries
of simple distinctions that are almost indifferent to the law, then
they should be positively excluded. They can be neither electors nor eligible
for election for as long as their odious privileges exist.
I know that such principles will seem extravagant to most readers.
Truth must seem as strange to prejudice as prejudice must seem to truth.
It all depends. If my principles are sure and my consequences correctly
deduced, I am content.
But it might still be said that all these things are absolutely impracticable
at the moment. In which case, I undertake not to practice them. My
own role is that of every patriotic writer, namely, to publish the truth.
Others, according to opportunity and their ability, will find ways to approach
it or, by acting in bad faith, to stray from it, and then we will have
to suffer what we cannot prevent. If everyone were to think correctly, even
the greatest changes would no