It suffices to have made the point that the so called usefulness of a privileged order to the public service is a fallacy-, that, without help from this order, all the arduous tasks in the service are performed by the Third Estate; that without this order the higher posts could be infinitely better filled; that they ought to be the natural prize and reward of recognized ability and service; and that if the privileged have succeeded in usurping all well-paid and honorific posts, this is both hateful iniquity towards the generality of citizens and an act of treason to the commonwealth. Who is bold enough to maintain that the Third Estate does not contain within itself everything needful to constitute a complete nation?57
The problem with excluding the First and Second Estates was that they held a majority of the wealth. Regardless of how hard the Third Estate worked, the wealth was needed to run the country. However, as the Third Estate made up a majority of the population of the nation, it did, in a sense, make up the nation itself. The Third Estate, especially in the areas surrounding Paris, made up some of the loudest proponents of nationalism. They made the strongest call for change within the state, and put the nation before all else.
Along with the cahiers, these revolutionary pamphlets constitute the best sources of information on the thinking of literate Frenchmen at the beginning of the Revolution. They reflected the nationalist ideology that would become important during the Revolution. “Written, for the most part, by the men who were to dominate in France during the revolutionary years to come, they at once simplified and popularized the philosophical ideas current in the eighteenth century and laid the ideological and practical basis for many of the debates and laws of the Constituent and, to a lesser extent, the later assemblies”58 By examining publications dating from the Eve of the French Revolution, historians can compare the nationalist sentiment that was expressed there with the opinions that were expressed previously under the Ancien Régime…
