What Is the Third Estate? What Is the Third Estate? What Is the Third Estate? () is a political pamphlet written in January 1789, shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, by the French thinker and clergyman Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836). The pamphlet was Sieyès' response to finance minister Jacques Necker's invitation for writers to state how they thought the Estates-General should be organized. In the pamphlet, Sieyès argues that the third estate – the common people of France – constituted a complete nation within itself and had no need of the "dead weight" of the two other orders, the first and second
What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" is the title now given to a speech by Frederick Douglass delivered on July 5, 1852, in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, addressing the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. The speech is perhaps the most widely known of all of Frederick Douglass' writings save his autobiographies. Many copies of one section of it, beginning in para. 32, have been circulated online. Due to this and the variant titles given to it in various places, and the fact that it is called a July