3 - Of the order of the clergy

Summary

1. The three estates of France are very different from those of the Romans. In the first place we have no senatorial order. Budé's comment is very true, that our parlements scarcely resemble the Roman senate. The senate was not a body of officers, but an order from which public functionaries of war, justice or finance were ordinarily taken. In France, however, military officers ought to be taken from the order of the nobility; judicial officers are taken indiscriminately from the three estates, apart from the fact that ecclesiastics cannot hold offices of criminal justice; and financial officers are taken from the third estate, because the clergy and the nobility for the most part disdain them.

2. But in this most Christian kingdom we have reserved the first rank of honour for the ministers of God, making the clergy, or the ecclesiastical order, the first of the three estates of France, with good reason.

3. On the other hand, the Romans, being more interested in the state than in religion, did not make of their priests a separate order, but commingled them with the three estates, just as justice is with us. This is how matters are arranged in almost all the states of Christendom. Scarcely anywhere else are the clergy a separate order as is the case in France which has always been more Christian and has honoured the church more highly than has any other nation in the world.