third estate

And now the fencing has come to the Supreme Court, to the third estate.

The term had a special resonance with his Francophone audience because it recalled the third estate, “tiers-état,” of the French Revolution.

Has the King ordered us, too, to sit with the third estate?

The Revolution was the victory of the third estate, i.e., of the great masses of the nation, working in production and in trade, over the privileged idle classes, the nobles and the priests.

Voltaire soon afterwards purchased a third estate at Ferney, just a little over the French border, and here, eventually, he lived en grande seigneur, and was known as the “patriarch of Ferney.”