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The history of the commune of Laon is that of the majority of the towns which, in Northern and Central France, struggled from the eleventh to the fourteenth century to release themselves from feudal oppression and violence. Cambrai, Beauvais, Amiens, Soissons, Rheims, Vezelay, and several other towns displayed at this period a great deal of energy and perseverance in bringing their lords to recognize the most natural and the most necessary rights of every human creature and community. But within their walls dissensions were carried to extremity, and existence was ceaselessly tempestuous and troublous; the burghers were hasty, brutal, and barbaric—as barbaric as the lords against whom they were defending their liberties. Amongst those mayors, sheriffs, jurats, and magistrates of different degrees and with different titles, set up in the communes, many came before very long to exercise dominion arbitrarily, violently, and in their own personal interests. The lower orders were in an habitual state of jealousy and sedition of a ruffianly kind towards the rich, the heads of the labor market, the controllers of capital and of work. This reciprocal violence, this anarchy, these internal evils and dangers, with their incessant renewals, called incessantly for intervention from without; and when, after releasing themselves from oppression and iniquity coming from above, the burghers fell a prey to pillage and massacre coming from below, they sought for a fresh protector to save them from this fresh evil. Hence that frequent recourse to the king, the great suzerain whose authority could keep down the bad magistrates of the commune or reduce the mob to order; and hence also, before long, the progressive downfall, or, at any rate, the utter enfeeblement of those communal liberties so painfully won. France was at that stage of existence and of civilization at which security can hardly be purchased save at the price of liberty. We have a phenomenon peculiar to modern times in the provident and persistent effort to reconcile security with liberty, and the bold development of individual powers with the regular maintenance of public order. This admirable solution of the social problem, still so imperfect and unstable in our time, was unknown in the middle ages; liberty was then so stormy and so fearful, that people conceived before long, if not a disgust for it, at any rate a horror of it, and sought at any price a political regimen which would give them some security, the essential aim of the social estate. When we arrive at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, we see a host of communes falling into decay or entirely disappearing; they cease really to belong to and govern themselves; some, like Laon, Cambrai, Beauvais, and Rheims, fought a long while against decline, and tried more than once to re-establish themselves in all their independence; but they could not do without the king’s support in their resistance to their lords, laic or ecclesiastical; and they were not in a condition to resist the kingship, which had grown whilst they were perishing. Others, Meulan and Soissons, for example (in 1320 and 1335), perceived their weakness early, and themselves requested the kingship to deliver them from their communal organization, and itself assume their administration. And so it is about this period, under St. Louis and Philip the Handsome, that there appear in the collections of acts of the French kingship, those great ordinances which regulate the administration of all communes within the kingly domains. Hitherto the kings had ordinarily dealt with each town severally; and as the majority were almost independent, or invested with privileges of different kiwis and carefully respected, neither the king nor any great suzerain dreamed of prescribing general rules for communal regimen, nor of administering after a uniform fashion all the communes in their domains. It was under St. Louis and Philip the Handsome that general regulations on this subject began. The French communes were associations too small and too weak to suffice for self-maintenance and self-government amidst the disturbances of the great Christian community; and they were too numerous and too little enlightened to organize themselves into one vast confederation, capable of giving them a central government. The communal liberties were not in a condition to found in France a great republican community; to the kingship appertained the power and fell the honor of presiding over the formation and the fortunes of the French nation.
But the kingship did not alone accomplish this great work. At the very time that the communes were perishing and the kingship was growing, a new power, a new social element, the Third Estate, was springing up in France; and it was called to take a far more important place in the history of France, and to exercise far more influence upon the fate of the French father-land, than it had been granted to the communes to acquire during their short and incoherent existence.
It may astonish many who study the records of French history from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, not to find anywhere the words third estate; and a desire may arise to know whether those inquirers of our day who have devoted themselves professedly to this particular study, have been more successful in discovering that grand term at the time when it seems that we ought to expect to meet with it. The question was, therefore, submitted to a learned member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, M. Littre, in fact, whose Dictionnaire etymologique de la Langur Francaise is consulted with respect by the whole literary world, and to a young magistrate, M. Picot, to whom the Acacdemie des Sciences morales et politiques but lately assigned the first prize for his great work on the question it had propounded, as to the history and influence of states-general in France; and here are inserted, textually, the answers given by two gentlemen of so much enlightenment and authority upon such a subject.
M. Littre, writing on the 3d of October, 1871, says, “I do not find, in my account of the word, third estate before the sixteenth century. I quote these two instances of it: ‘As to the third order called third estate …’ (La Noue, Discours, p. 541); and ‘clerks and deputies for the third estate, same for the estate of labor (laborers).’ (Coustumier general, t. i. p. 335.) In the fifteenth century, or at the end of the fourteenth, in the poems of Eustace Deschamps, I have—
| ‘Prince, dost thou yearn for good old times again? In good old ways the Three Estates restrain.’ |
“At date of fourteenth century, in Du Cange, we read under the word status, ‘Per tres status concilii generalis Praelatorum, Baronum, nobilium et universitatum comitatum.’ According to these documents, I think it is in the fourteenth century that they began to call the three orders tres status, and that it was only in the sixteenth century that they began to speak in French of the tiers estat (third estate). But I cannot give this conclusion as final, seeing that it is supported only by the documents I consulted for my dictionary.”
M. Picot replied on the 3d of October, 1871, “It is certain that acts contemporary with King John frequently speak of the ‘three estates,’ but do not utter the word tiers-etat (third estate). The great chronicles and Froissart say nearly always, ‘the church-men, the nobles, and the good towns.’ The royal ordinances employ the same terms; but sometimes, in order not to limit their enumeration to the deputies of closed cities, they add, the good towns, and the open country (Ord. t. iii p. 221, note). When they apply to the provincial estates of the Oil tongue it is the custom to say, the burghers and inhabitants; when it is a question of the Estates of Languedoc, the commonalties of the seneschalty. Such were, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the only expressions for designating the third order.
“Under Louis XI., Juvenal des Ursins, in his harangue, addresses the deputies of the third by the title of burghers and inhabitants of the good towns. At the States of Tours, the spokesman of the estates, John de Rely, says, the people of the common estate, the estate of the people. The special memorial presented to Charles VIII. by the three orders of Languedoc likewise uses the word people.
“It is in Masselin’s report and the memorial of grievances presented in 1485 that I meet for the first time with the expression third estate (tiers-etat). Masselin says, ‘It was decided that each section should furnish six commissioners, two ecclesiastics, two nobles, and two of the third estate (duos ecclesiasticos, duos nobiles, et duos tertii status.)’ (Documents inedits sur l’Histoire de France; proces-verbal de Masselin, p. 76.) The commencement of the chapter headed Of the Commons (du commun) is, ‘For the third and common estate the said folks do represent …’ and a few lines lower, comparing the kingdom with the human body, the compilers of the memorial say, ‘The members are the clergy, the nobles, and the folks of the third estate. (Ibid. after the report of Masselin, memorial of grievances,