Lawyers, merchants, financiers, doctors, clerks, a range of professions made up the upper crust of the third estate. These individuals lived much better lives than the peasants or the artisans.
As a result of their lifestyle, their grievances with the old regime were not primarily economic in nature. Instead, the grievances of many of the bourgeoisie at the time of the Revolution were social. In the last few decades, the ability of the third's upper crust to climb the social ladder had been inhibited.
Once upon a time, the rich members of the third had been able to buy government offices. These venal offices provided the Crown with some much-needed revenue and the bourgeoisie with some much-desired benefits. These offices might have exempted the purchaser from taxation or more importantly granted them ennoblement and thus membership into the coveted second estate.
However, in the decades prior to the Revolution, these routes to ennoblement had been suppressed by members of the nobility who were seeking to quarantine and protect the exclusivity of their privilege. In short, the road to social advancement had been blocked and it was this inability to ascend the social hierarchy that would fuel the grievances of the bourgeoisie. Unlike the peasants and the artisans who could not ever hope to enjoy the fruits of privilege, the bourgeoisie did actually have a chance to join the party if they were allowed to buy a ticket.
So, when the rule gentry and the newly ennobled nobility had blocked the way for more to ascend to the second estate fearing their slice of the privilege pie was under threat, anger amongst the bourgeoisie was the prime result. Historian Christopher Hibbett hits the nail on his head in his book The French Revolution when he says the following: “Yet most of the bourgeoisie, whether in business or in the professions, manufacturers or merchants, doctors or lawyers, were for the most part anxious to break down the barriers that excluded them from aristocratic preserves rather than to destroy the aristocracy that had brought those preserves into existence.”
He goes on to say, “The limitations upon the talents of the bourgeoisie, particularly upon those of ambitious lawyers, were to make them the aristocracy's most formidable opponents.”
In short, according to historian Christopher Hibbett, unlike the peasants and the artisans who hated the entire system of feudalism which institutionalised their misery, the upper crust of the Third Estate only rallied against this unnatural societal structure only once they could no longer partake in its benefits. With their ability to climb the social hierarchy, curtailed by the chief benefactors of the old regime, the well-to-do's of the Third Estate would seek to retaliate by instead curtailing the regime itself.
Introduction & The Three Estates
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