It was through burghers admitted into the king's service and acting as administrators or judges in his name that communal independence and charters were often attacked and abolished; but at the same time they fortified and elevated burgherdom, they caused it to acquire from day to day more wealth, more credit, more importance and power in the internal and external affairs of the state.
Philip the Handsome, that ambitious and despotic prince, was under no delusion when in 1302, 1308, and 1314, on convoking the first states- general of France, he summoned thither "the deputies of the good towns." He did not yet give them the name of third estate; but he was perfectly aware that he was thus summoning to his aid against Boniface VIII.

and the Templars and the Flemings a class already invested throughout the country with great influence and ready to lend him efficient support.
His son, Philip the Long, was under no delusion when in 1317 and 1321 he summoned to the states-general "the commonalties and good towns of the kingdom "to decide upon the interpretation of the Salle law as to the succession to the throne, "or to advise as to the means of establishing a uniformity of coins, weights, and measures;" he was perfectly aware that the authority of burgherdom would be of great assistance to him in the accomplishment of acts so grave.

And the three estates played the prelude to the formation, painful and slow as it was, of constitutional monarchy, when, in 1338, under Philip of Valois, they declared, "in presence of the said king, Philip of Valois, who assented thereto, that there should be no power to impose or levy talliage in France if urgent necessity or evident utility did not require it, and then only by grant of the people of the estates." In order to properly understand the French third estate and its importance, more is required than to look on at its birth; a glance must be taken at its grand destiny and the results at which it at last arrived.

Let us, therefore, anticipate centuries and get a glimpse, now at once, of that upon which the course of events from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century will shed full light.
Taking the history of France in its entirety and under all its phases, the third estate has been the most active and determining element in the process of Freneh civilization.

If we follow it in its relation with the general government of the country, we see it at first allied for six centuries to the kingship, struggling without cessation against the feudal aristocracy and giving predominance in place thereof to a single central power, pure monarchy, closely bordering, though with some frequently repeated but rather useless reservations, on absolute monarchy.