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;