It has subsisted, it has gone on growing throughout the whole course of French history; and at the end of five centuries, in 1789, when the Communes had for a long while sunk into languishment and political insignificance, at the moment at which France was electing her Constituent Assembly, the Abbe Sicyes, a man of powerful rather than scrupulous mind, could say, "What is the Third Estate?
Everything.

What has it hitherto been in the body politic?
Nothing.
What does it demand?
To be something." These words contain three grave errors.

In the course of government anterior to 1789, so far was the third estate from being nothing, that it had been every day becoming greater and stronger.

What was demanded for it in 1789 by M.Sicyes and his friends was not that it might become something, but that it should be everything.

That was a desire beyond its right and its strength; and the very Revolution, which was its own victory, proved this.