French Society during the Late Eighteenth Century: A Growing Middle Class Envisages an End to Privileges

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In the past, peasants and workers had participated in revolts against increasing taxes and food scarcity. But they lacked the means and programmes to carry out full-scale measures that would bring about a change in the social and economic order. This was left to those groups within the third estate who had become prosperous and had access to education and new ideas. The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of social groups, termed the middle class, who earned their wealth through an expanding overseas trade and from the manufacture of goods such as woolen and silk textiles that were either exported or bought by the richer members of society. In addition to merchants and manufacturers, the third estate included professions such as lawyers or administrative officials. All of these were educated and believed that no group in society should be privileged by birth. Rather, a person’s social position must depend on his merit. These ideas envisaging a society based on freedom and equal laws and opportunities for all, were put forward by philosophers such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. 

In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke sought to refute the doctrine of the divine and absolute right. of the monarch. Rousseau carried the idea forward, proposing a form of government based on a social contract between people and their representatives. In The Spirit of the Laws (http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/837), Montesquieu proposed a division of power within the government between the legislative, the executive and the judiciary. This model of government was put into force in the USA, after the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Britain. The American constitution and its guarantee of individual rights was an important example for political thinkers in France.

Accounts of lived experiences in the Old Regime:

1. Georges Danton (Left), who later became active in revolutionary politics, wrote to a friend in 1793, looking back upon the time when he had just completed his studies:

‘I was educated in the residential college of Plessis. There I was in the company of important men… Once my studies ended, I was left with nothing. I started looking for a post. It was impossible to find one at the law courts in Paris. The choice of a career in the army was not open to me as I was not a noble by birth, nor did I have a patron. The church too could not offer me a refuge. I could not buy an office as I did not possess a sou. My old friends turned their backs to me …. the system had provided us with an education without however offering a field where our talents could be utilised..’

2. An Englishman, Arthur Young, travelled through France during the years from 1787 to 1789 and wrote detailed descriptions of his journeys. He often commented on what he saw.

‘He who decides to be served and waited upon by slaves, ill-treated slaves at that, must be fully aware that by doing so he is placing his property and his life in a situation which is very different from that he would be in, had he chosen the services of free and welltreated men. And he who chooses to dine to the accompaniment of his victims. groans, should not complain if during a riot his daughter gets kidnapped or his son.s throat is slit.’

(Young's first visit to France was in 1787. Travelling all over that country around the start of the French Revolution, he described the condition of the people and the conduct of public affairs at that critical juncture. The Travels in France appeared in one large quarto volume in 1792, reprinted in two octavo volumes (Dublin, 1793); enlarged second edition in two quarto volumes (London, 1794). On his return home he was appointed secretary of the Board of Agriculture 1793 just formed under the presidency of Sir John Sinclair. In this capacity he gave most valuable assistance in the collection and preparation of agricultural surveys of the English counties. His sight, however, failed, and in 1811 he had an operation for cataract, which proved unsuccessful.)
TAKEN FROM 
NCERT BOOK ( India and the Contemporary World -II FOR CLASS X )
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/837
Wikipedia