, 1789. "A great revolution of which the idea
should have appeared chimerical a few months since has been effected
amongst us."]

CHAPTER III. THE MIDDLE CLASS.

I. The Past.

The former spirit of the Third-Estate.--Public matters
concern the king only.--Limits of the Jansenist and
parliamentarian opposition.

The new philosophy, confined to a select circle, had long served as a
mere luxury for refined society. Merchants, manufacturers, shopkeepers,
lawyers, attorneys, physicians, actors, professors, curates, every
description of functionary, employee and clerk, the entire middle class,
had been absorbed with its own cares. The horizon of each was limited,
being that of the profession or occupation which each exercised, that
of the corporation in which each one was comprised, of the town in which
each one was born, and, at the utmost, that of the province which each
one inhabited[4301]. A dearth of ideas coupled with conscious diffidence
restrained the bourgeois within his hereditary barriers. His eyes seldom
chanced to wander outside of them into the forbidden and dangerous
territory of state affairs; hardly was a furtive and rare glance
bestowed on any of the public acts, on the matters which "belonged to
the king." There was no critical irritability then, except with the
bar, the compulsory satellite of the Parliament, and borne along in its
orbit. In 1718, after a session of the royal court (lit de justice), the
lawyers of Paris being on a strike the Regent exclaims angrily and
with astonishment, "What! those fellows meddling too!"[4302] It must
be stated furthermore that many kept themselves in the background. "My
father and myself," afterwards writes the advocate Barbier, "took no
part in the uproars, among those caustic and turbulent spirits." and
he adds this significant article of faith: "I believe that one has to
fulfill his duties honorably, without concerning oneself with state
affairs, in which one has no mission and exercises no power." During
the first half of the eighteenth century I am able to discover but one
center of opposition in the Third-Estate, the Parliament; and around it,
feeding the flame, the ancient Gallican or Jansenist spirit. "The
good city of Paris," writes Barbier in 1733, "is Jansenist from top to
bottom," and not alone the magistrates, the lawyers, the professors, the
best among the bourgeoisie, "but again the mass of the Parisians, men,
women and ch