VI. The bourgeoisie

The Third Estate was as profundly divided as the first two. It has become fashionable nowadays to call Third Estate the class of the capitalists, the proletariat thus becoming the fourth estate 9 . Aside from the fact that the modern proletariat is a *class* and not an estate, a social layer distinguished by its economic situation, and not separate judicial institutions, one cannot talk of a fourth estate for the simple reason that the proletariat already existed within the Third Estate. For it encompassed the whole of the population that did not belong to the first two, thus not only the capitalists, but the artisans, the peasants and the proletariat as well. It is easy to conceive of the huge heterogeneity this might have represented. Herein we see the most violent antagonisms, the most diverse methods of struggle and goals at play. It is impossible to speak of an homogeneous class struggle.

What is generally meant today by Third Estate, the capitalist class, was itself not an orderly phalanx.

At the top of this class was high finance. Being the foremost creditor of the state, it did have excellent reasons to push for reforms that would save it from bankruptcy, increase its revenues and lower its spending. But according to it, these reforms should conform to the tenet "Wash my hair without wetting my head". And indeed, the gentlemen financiers had all the reasons in the world to be opposed to real radical finance reforms, without even speaking of social ones.

Most of them were large feudal domains owners, held nobility titles and were not ready to renounce the privileges and revenues attached to them. Besides they held for the continuation of nobility privileges the interested sympathy the creditor naturally holds towards its debtor. They were not only the king's creditor, but the indebted nobility's. Economists could well demonstrate that the return of land property would increase if capitalist norms were applied to it and not semi-feudal principles. In order to move to a purely capitalist agriculture, one had to own a certain *capital* to set up various installations, acquire livestock, tools, etc. Most of the nobility had none. The abilition of feudal fees was a direct threat of bankruptcy. The creditors held no reason whatsoever to run such a risk.

When it came to sociability as well, as we've seen before, the links between nobility and finance had become closer and closer. Any finance reform would have inevitably lead to the replacing of tax farmers-general by a state administration. A number of the most important sources of revenue, the gabelle, the aides, the octroi, the tobacco monopoly, existed under "affermage". TN1 The farmers gave the state 166 millions of pounds annually (during the last few years before the Revolution), but extorted up to double from the people. The affermage of taxes was one of the most lucrative method to exploit the people, how could those gentlemen of the high finance voluntarily renounce it! One assuredly ought not to expect them to take a stand against it.

Neither did they have any interest in ending state deficit, and thus its indebting. They only  withheld for themselves part of the debt's bonds and were keen on investing the greater part of it, for highly interesting returns, in the "public", small and medium capitalists, and notably rentiers. High finance was thus highly skilled in the art of putting on other shoulders the *risk* a new loan yielded. But the *profit* they extracted from it, either directly, or indirectly, exploiting the state as well as the public, was gigantic. Any new loan equated to a great harvest for the people of finance. Nothing would been more disagreeable to them than the institution of a budget without deficit that would have rendered new loans superfluous.

That the sympathies of high finance as a *class* had gone to the Ancien Régime, the state of privileges, is therefore no surprise. It called for reforms, that much is true, but who didn't before the Revolution! Even the most stubborn of aristocrats had come to the conviction that the current state of affairs was intolerable and reforms were going to necessary, insatisfaction was global. But each class wanted "reforms" that would give it advantages, not impose sacrifices.

However, high finance's political unrest had, against its will, a powerful effect on minds and was transforming the most peaceful citizens into political activists and partisans of freedom. It was the canal through which an ever-growing mass of Treasure bonds passed before irrigating the people. As loans were multiplying faster and faster, it was through it that small and average capital transited before ending up in the court and disappearing in the vast pockets of courtisans, yet without ever filling them, given they were riddled with holes. More and more small and medium capitalists were becoming creditors of the state. This type of bourgeois is usually no danger to a government. For a philistine, politics was a fruitless occupation, at most costing time and money. He sticks to the principle that one should stay contented with tending to one's garden and leave public affairs to the king. In an absolute state making use of police espionnage on a mass scale, which was what France used to be, where citizens' participation in politics was furthermore considered a crime of some sort, the philistine only loathed bothering with whatever was going on beyond his four walls all the more.

But things changed when he became a creditor of the state and the possibility of a bankruptcy was uttered. Politics cessed to be an improductive passtime, it became a serious business. The interest of the small or medium bourgeois was suddenly piqued by all matters of management of the state, and as it was not hard to see how the privileges of the first two estates were primarily responsible for the misery of public finances, given they were taking the lion's share and contributed next to nothing to public revenue, he from then on became an energetic opponent, furiously hostile to privileges and enamoured of freedom and equality.

However it wasn't only the creditor of the state, but the merchant or the industrial he also was that was brought to battle against the privileges' state.

The army and marine's higher ranks were reserved for a nobility in complete moral and physical decadence, the french arms were less and less successful. The 18th century practically only saw wars that ended in disadvantageous commercial clauses and the loss of precious colonies for France - one only has to look at the Peace of Utrecht (1718), the treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), of Paris (1763), of Versailles (1783). And, for international trade to prosper, one first and foremost needed a foreign policy generating good results.

Within the borders, commerce was hindered by old feudal barriers. A number of provinces were states in their own right, with particular powers in a number of domains, their own administration, and were closed off from other parts of the kingdom by customary barriers. On top of that were excise taxes and feudal lords' rights on markets, tolls, etc. which were all but paralyzing exchanges. The price of merchandises coming from Japan or China after having crossed stormy oceans were pirates roamed was only multiplied by three or four. Meanwhile, the price of wine going from Orléanais to Normandy was multiplied by at least twenty due to the numerous taxes striking the merchandise all across its path 10 . Wine commerce specifically, one of the most important branch of commerce in France, was particularly difficult owning to the fees and dues it was burdened with. Thus for example, Bordeaux district's vineyard owners could ban from sale all wine that didn't come from this city. The wine regions of Languedoc, Périgord, Agénois and Quercy, whose waterways met behind the walls of Bordeaux, had their products barred from entering to the benefit of Bordeaux' winegrowers.

And at the same time, communications were in a dismal state. There was no money to uphold roads, and the works for which the peasants' corvée labor wasn't enough were not carried out.

For commerce to flourish, nobility's pribileges had to be abolished, the army and marine had to be reformed, the provinces' particularism had to broken, and the crown's and feudal lords' custom fees eliminated. In a word, the interests of commerce required "freedom and equality".

Merchants however did not unanimously unite under this banner.

One of the favorite methods or prerevolutionary royalty to procure money was to monopolize a branch of industry or commerce and sell the monopole to a small number of favorites or share with them the revenue of this monopilistic exploitation of the public.

The most lucrative monopoles were the great companies dealing with oversea countries. There existed other commercial monopoles granted in certain cities to guilds, for some to organized corporations. One example of such, which survived Turgot's reforms, was Paris' guild of wine merchants.

That the privileged in this category remained in favor of the privileges regime while belonging to the Third Estate is thus nothing surprising.

The provinces' closedness to one another was not a target of hostility from all capitalists either. The obstacles to commerce of grain between different provinces, notably the impossibility to export it from one to another without a specific, and hard to obtain authorization, prevented lands that had a good harvest from feeding those which had a poor one, and thus constituted powerful leverage for *speculation on grain*, speculation which often took immense dimensions and was one of the most efficient ways to exploit the people. Just as today protectionnist custom tariffs enable the formation of cartels, hinderances to interior trade enabled the formation of corporations based on speculative buybacks and conjurations which were called "famine pacts". At the head of these conspirator could sometimes sit the monarch 11 and usury on wheat was one of its best sources of revenues. It goes without saying that a "très-chrétien" king of this calibur was also as little prone to hear speak of liberalization of the commerce of grain as his partners in speculation, circumcized or not.

Just like commerce, the Ancien Régime corseted industry. Not out of desire to restrain it! On the contrary, it benefited from its extreme benevolence. A flourishing capitalist industry was considered one of the most abundant source of wealth for the state, that thus had to be supported by all means. Since the guilds of artisans were attempting to obstruct capitalist industry as much as possible, threatened by its competition, and trying to quibble with it any way they could, the kings granted it a very particular personal protection. Nevertheless they never thought of radically eliminating the obstacle by abolishing guilds, as in doing so they would have lost an abundant source of revenue, as we will see later. But they granted manufactures privileges that exempted them from feudal and guild-related hurdles and fees. A manufacture that benefited from these held the title of "royal manufacture". And royalty went further yet. In order to have them deliver products as perfect as possible, entrepreneurs were taught about the best techniques, and specific regulations demanded that they follow them.

These measures could remain profitable to manufactures still in the infancy stage. But things took a different turn when, in the second half of the 18th century, capitalist industry started to develop faster and reached a higher level. The royal privilege which protected them from the artisans guilds' quibbles and trials became a servitude that many times blocked new investments. Regulations were becoming unbearable. They helped to spread the best working techniques, but now, were artificially imposing to retain the worst. The 1860s saw the beginnings of the technical revolution which replaced the manufacture with the factory and would give birth to modern big industry. In the older days, in manufactures, methods and tools evolved but very slowly. But now, innovations were propping up at a high rate and were quickly adopted in England. If the French wanted to compete, they had to undergo the same improvements themselves. Getting rid of the guilds' barriers and of  bureaucratic regulations was not solely a profit motive anymore, but a question of survival for the capitalist industry. But Turgot's 1776 attempts towards this goal failed to gain fruition. The privileged knew reform could not stop there. They overturned him and erased what he had done. Only the revolution managed to tear down the barriers holding large industry back.

A far from negligible fraction of industrial capitalists had however an interest in maitaining the privileges regime. Like commerce, capitalist industry priamarily fulfilled luxury needs. In part because there was no interior market and the peasantry manufactured itself the industrial products it needed, in part also because it was a court industry nurtured by royalty. In France, the most important manufactures were used to produce silk fabric, velvet, lace, tapestries, porcelain, cosmetic powders, paper (it still used to be a luxury item a hundred years ago), etc. These corporations' best customers were belonged to court nobility, amongst the privileged. To trim their revenues would endanger the existence of an entire array of industrial capitalists. As a result they did not welcome the revolution with the utmost sympathy.

It is significant that when the counter-revolution took arms in 1793, at its head - next to Vendée, one of the most backwards regions of France with a flourishing and vigorous remaining feudal regime - was the city of Lyon, the most industrial city of the country, famous for its silk industry and its gold embroideries. Already in 1790, a tentative uprising was led by priests and nobles, and Lyon remaining a bastion of legitimism and catholicism for a long time. And when in 1795 the hegemony of Jacobins was smashed, Paris' bourgeoisie did not hide its antirepublican royalist sympathies. If things had went according to its wishes, the restauration of legitimate monarchy and the return of emigrated aristocrast would not have waited any longer.


Notes :

9 - The idea of a fourth estate appears early in the revolution, but this term then only stands for the worker class. Engels communicated to me interesting data on this topic from a book by Karejev, written in Russian - tongue I do not practice : "Peasants and the peasantry question in France in the last quarter of the 18th century", Moscow 1879, p.327 : As early as the 25th of April 1789, Dufourny de Villers' "Notebook of the fourth estate, of the poor day laborers, the disabled, the indigents, etc., the order of the unfortunate" was published. As a general rule, the fourth estate is the peasants. For example Noilliac, "The strongest of pamphlets. The order of Peasants at the Estates General, 26 February 1789". One can read p.9 : "Let us borrow from the Swedish constitution its four orders.". Vartout, "Letter from a peasant to his priest on a new manner in which to hold the Estates General, Cartrouville, 1789", p.7 : "I had heard say that in a country to the north... the order of peasants was admitted to the Estates General." One can also find other conceptions of the fourth estate. By fourth estate one brochure means the merchants, another public employees, etc.

TN1 - See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferme_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale

10 - Louis Blanc, "History of the Revolution, IIIrd tome" (p.156 in Brussels edition, 1847)

11 - Louis the XVth was the main shareholder of the Malisset corporation, a speculative buybacks corporation. Within its inventories of his court spendings can be found a treasurer specifically assigned to "His Majesty's speculation on grains".