what happened in the French society to end the privileges for the the first and second estates
Answers
In the eighteenth century, many persons who belonged to third estate and earned their wealth through overseas trade and manufacturing goods, were termed as middle class. It was a new social group, which also comprised of court officials, lawyers and administrative officials.
Peasants, labours, had been participating in revolts against increase in taxes and food scarcity for long time, but because of lack of means and concrete programmes they did not bring any change to the society. Thus bringing the change about the social and economic order in the society was left to the middle class. People of the middle class were also oppressed at that time, as they had to pay taxes and meet the demands of clergy and nobility.
People of Middle class were educated and believed that no privilege should be given by birth, rather position of a person in society should be merit based. Philosophers, such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau were envisaging a society based on freedom, equal laws and opportunity for all. The freedom of thirteen colonies in USA from Britain based on such ideas; strengthened the thoughts of then philosophers who mainly belonged to middle class. The ideas of guarantee of individual rights became one of the important examples among the political thinkers and then philosophers of France.
Refuting the doctrine of divine and absolute right of the monarch was the main idea of Locke which was made public in his Two Treaties of Government. Rousseau proposed the idea to form a government based on a social contract between people and their representatives. Montesquieu gave the idea of division of power within the government among the legislative, the executive and the judiciary in his The Spirit of the Laws.