The families of plebeians were the chief families of the vanquished peoples; and though placed by defeat in a position of inferiority, they were not any the less aristocratic families, powerful but lately in their own cities, encompassed by clients, and calculated from the very first to dispute with their conquerors the possession of power.

There is nothing in all this like that slow, obscure, heart-breaking travail of modern burgherdom escaping, full hardly, from the midst of slavery or a condition approximating to slavery, and spending centuries, not in disputing political power, but in winning its own civil existence.

The more closely the French third estate is examined, the more it is recognized as a new fact in the world's history, appertaining exclusively to the civilization of modern, Christian Europe.
Not only is the fact new, but it has for France an entirely special interest, since--to employ an expression much abused in the present day-- it is a fact eminently French, essentially national.

Nowhere has burgherdom had so wide and so productive a career as that which fell to its lot in France.

There have been communes in the whole of Europe, in Italy, Spain, Germany, and England, as well as in France.