Napoleon

oleon

Title: Napoleon Bonaparte

Name: Matthew W. Nowak

Institutional Affiliation: American Military University

Course: DEFM500

Date: 17June12

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Rise to Power

The third estate was the lowest class in the French society during the era of the revolution; the eighteenth century. The third estate ranked last after the nobles and the clergy as the first and the second class of citizens (McDouglas, n.d., p 29). The third estate was made up of two categories of people; the bourgeois that comprised of prosperous traders and merchants proficient in their trades and occupations and the peasants; the laborers, farmers and other subsistence producers (McDouglas, n.d., p. 29). In general, the third estate is referred to as the rest because it comprises of ninety two percent of the population (McDouglas, n.d., p. 29).

Forty percent of the land was owned by the third estate. The nobles as a social class took claim of twenty percent while the clergy owned ten percent of the land (McDouglas, n.d., p. 29). The remaining thirty percent of the land ownership could be attributed to the crown and accounts for the wasteland and common land available in France preceding the revolution (McDouglas, n.d., p. 29).

There was socio-economic inequality in France in the eighteenth century. One of the bases of unfairness was the remuneration system that was set up by the first class of the society against the third estate which was the backbone of the economy by being the source of labor. For fifty eight years beginning 1730, the prices of commodities for production and consumption increased by sixty five percent (65%) while the real wage rate of the working class only increased by twenty two percent (22%). This was one of the reasons that the third estate was inspired into a revolutionary mind state (Palmer, n.d, p. 1)

The revolution began when the third estate woke up from their subconsciously accepted state of being...