The Third Estate might reply: “It is high time that you shouldered the
burden of taxes that are much more useful to you than to us. You have
well been able to see that this monstrous inequity cannot last much
longer. If we are to be free in what we offer as taxes, it is clear that we
cannot, nor should not, nor will not, give anything more bountiful than
you. This simple resolution on our part serves to make us more than a little
indifferent to those acts of renunciation that you continue to vaunt as
a rare kind of gesture, one befitting what honor and generosity would
What is the Third Estate? 121
20I confess that I find it impossible to approve of the great store set upon getting the
privileged orders to renounce their pecuniary privileges. The Third Estate seems to be unaware
that since consent to taxation is as much a matter of the constitution whether it applies
to itself or to the other orders, all it will need to do is to declare that it does not intend
to bear any tax which is not born by all three orders at once. I am no more satisfied with the
way in which this far-too-highly solicited renunciation has been carried out in the majority
of the bailliages, despite the show of gratitude that has filled the pages of the newspapers and
magazines. It can be read there that the nobility will retain the sacred rights of property . . . the
prerogatives belonging to it . . . and the distinctions essential to a monarchy. It is astonishing that the
Third Estate has not replied, first, to the reservation of the sacred rights of property by saying: that
the whole Nation has an interest in doing so but that it could not see who this reservation
is directed against; and that if the three orders wished to consider themselves separately, history
would doubtless instruct them which of the three had the most reason to be suspicious
of the others; that, in a word, the claim can be regarded only as a gratuitous insult, tantamount
to saying we will gladly pay taxes on condition that you do not steal from us. In addition,
what are prerogatives belonging to part of the Nation when the Nation never seems to have
granted them? Prerogatives which would soon no longer be esteemed if granted no other
origin than the right of the sword! Finally it is even more difficult to understand what these essential
distinctions in a monarchy might be, without which, presumably, a monarchy would
not be able to exist. As far as we can see, none of them, not even the distinction of mounting
the royal carriage, seems to be important enough to make it true that a monarchy would
not be able to survive without them.
command to French chivalry.
20 Truly, you will have to pay, not from generosity,
but from justice; not because you choose to, but because you
ought to. All that we expect from you is a sign of obedience to the common
law and not an insulting sign of pity towards an order that you have
treated without pity for so long. But the whole matter is one for the Estates-General
to deal with. What is at issue now is how it will be constituted.
If the Third Estate is not represented, the Nation will be dumb.
Nothing it undertakes can be valid. Even if you were to find a way to establish
a rightful order everywhere without our assistance, we cannot
allow you to dispose of us in our absence. Long and bitter experience has
made it impossible for us to believe that any good law can be sound if it
is merely a gift of the strongest.”