Main Currents of European History, 1815-1915 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE I Democracy And The French Revolution 7. Arrival Of The Third Estate Until the outbreak of the present war the French Revolution was generally recognised as the most important event in modern European history. It marked the definite entry of a new and dominant force into Continental politics?the force of the third estate, the vanguard of the democracy. Ever since the close of the Middle Ages this third estate had been making its way towards the front: now it broke down the last of the mediaeval barriers which hitherto had prevented it from occupying the place to which its members and its capacities gave it a valid claim. Mediaeval society had consisted of three grades, viz. the prayers, the fighters, and the workers. They had formed ideally a trinity in unity, for each grade was supposed to perform its function not only on its own behalf but also on behalf of the whole Respublica Christiana. The circumstanceshowever, of the long and distressful period of the Middle Ages militated against the real equality of the three orders, and gave uncontested preeminence to the first and second over the third. The clergy, by reason of the magnitude of their uncontested supernatural claims, exercised indisputable sway over the mind and conscience of a believing Christendom, and by reason of their monopoly of clerkship necessarily possessed an almost equal ascendancy in the world of politics. The feudal nobility, because of the lawlessness and insecurity of the time, and because the art of war as then known gave military supremacy to horse - riders armour- wearers and castle - dwellers, had a monopoly of material power. In other words, the first estate controlled the moral and intellectual forces, the second estate the physical and economic forces of those dark centuries. ...