support themselves on the sap of the plants to which they are a burden, and which wither beneath the load.” —­ They suck all, everything being for them.  “Every branch of the executive power has fallen into the hands of this caste, which staffed (already) the church, the robe and the sword.  A sort of confraternity or joint paternity leads the nobles each to prefer the other and all to the rest of the nation. . . .  The Court reigns, and not the monarch.  The Court creates and distributes offices.  And what is the Court but the head of this vast aristocracy that covers all parts of France, and which, through its members, attains to and exercises everywhere whatever is requisite in all branches of the public administration?” —­ Let us put an end to “this social crime, this long parricide which one class does itself the honor to commit daily against the others. . . .  Ask no longer what place the privileged shall occupy in the social order; it is simply asking what place in a sick man’s body must be assigned to a malignant ulcer that is undermining and tormenting it . . . to the loathsome disease that is consuming the living flesh.” —­ The solution is self-evident:  let us eradicate the ulcer, or at least sweep away the vermin.  The Third-Estate, in itself and by itself, is “a complete nation,” requiring no organ, needing no aid to subsist or to govern itself, and which will recover its health on ridding itself of the parasites infesting its skin.

“What is the Third-Estate?” says Sieyès, “everything.  What, thus far, is it in the political body?[46] Nothing.  What does it demand?  To become something.”

Not something but actually everything.  Its political ambition is as great as its social ambition, and it aspires to authority as well as to equality.  If privileges are an evil that of the king is the worst for it is the greatest, and human dignity, wounded by the prerogative of the noble, perishes under the absolutism of the king.  Of little consequence is it that he scarcely uses it, and that his government, deferential to public opinion, is that of a hesitating and indulgent parent.  Emancipated from real despotism, the Third-Estate becomes excited against possible despotism, imagining itself in slavery in consenting to remain subject.  A proud spirit has recovered itself, become erect, and, the better to secure its rights, is going to claim all rights.  To the people who since antiquity has been subject to masters, it is so sweet, so intoxicating to put themselves in their places, to put the former masters in their place, to say to himself, they are my representatives, to regard himself a member of the sovereign power, king of France in his individual sphere, the sole legitimate author of all rights and of all functions! —­ In conformity with the doctrines of Rousseau the registers of the Third-Estate unanimously insist on a constitution for France; none exists, or at least the one she possesses is of no value.