This fact is unique in the history of the world. We recognize in the career of the chief nations of Asia and ancient Europe nearly all the great facts which have agitated France; we meet in them mixture of different races, conquest of people by people, immense inequality between classes, frequent changes in the forms of government and extent of public power; but nowhere is there any appearance of a class which, starting from the very lowest, from being feeble, despised, and almost imperceptible at its origin, rises by perpetual motion and by labor without respite, strengthens itself from period to period, acquires in succession whatever it lacked, wealth, enlightenment, influence, changes the face of society and the nature of government, and arrives at last at such a pitch of predominance that it may be said to be absolutely the country. More than once in the world’s history the external semblances of such and such a society have been the same as those which have just been reviewed here, but it is mere semblance. In India, for example, foreign invasions and the influx and establishment of different races upon the same soil have occurred over and over again; but with what result? The permanence of caste has not been touched; and society has kept its divisions into distinct and almost changeless classes. After India take China. There too history exhibits conquests similar to the conquest of Europe by the Germans; and there too, more than once, the barbaric conquerors settled amidst a population of the conquered. What was the result? The conquered all but absorbed the conquerors, and changelessness was still the predominant characteristic of the social condition. In Western Asia, after the invasions of the Turks, the separation between victors and vanquished remained insurmountable; no ferment in the heart of society, no historical event, could efface this first effect of conquest. In Persia, similar events succeeded one another; different races fought and intermingled; and the end was irremediable social anarchy, which has endured for ages without any change in the social condition of the country, without a shadow of any development of civilization.
So much for Asia. Let us pass to the Europe of the Greeks and Romans. At the first blush we seem to recognize some analogy between the progress of these brilliant societies and that of French society; but the analogy is only apparent; there is, once more, nothing resembling the fact and the history of the French third estate. One thing only has struck sound judgments as being somewhat like the struggle of burgherdom in the middle ages against the feudal aristocracy, and that is the struggle between the plebeians and patricians at Rome. They have often been compared; but it is a baseless comparison. The struggle between the plebeians and patricians commenced from the very cradle of the Roman republic; it was not, as happened in the France of the middle ages, the result of a slow, difficult, incomplete development on the part of a class which, through a long course of great inferiority in strength, wealth, and credit, little by little extended itself and raised itself, and ended by engaging in a real contest with the superior class. It is now acknowledged that the struggle at Rome between the plebeians and patricians was a sequel and a prolongation of the war of conquest, was an effort on the part of the aristocracy of the cities conquered by Rome to share the rights of the conquering aristocracy. The families of plebeians were the chief families of the vanquished peoples; and though placed by defeat in a position of inferiority, they were not any the less aristocratic families, powerful but lately in their own cities, encompassed by clients, and calculated from the very first to dispute with their conquerors the possession of power. There is nothing in all this like that slow, obscure, heart-breaking travail of modern burgherdom escaping, full hardly, from the midst of slavery or a condition approximating to slavery, and spending centuries, not in disputing political power, but in winning its own civil existence. The more closely the French third estate is examined, the more it is recognized as a new fact in the world’s history, appertaining exclusively to the civilization of modern, Christian Europe.