Nation Making, French Revolutionary Style: What is the Third Estate?

These extracts, from one of the key early pamphlets of the French Revolution, represent one of the first attempts to define the nation in a modern sense. Note too the hard hitting edge to the concluding sections - an echo of the far more radical and populist wave to the Revolution which would shortly follow, bringing Terror in its wake...

Extracts from: the Modern History Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/sieyes.asp