Fifth State

Of Roberto Pecchioli

Source: Heretically
I met the Fifth Estate. It happened this morning, soon, in my neighborhood. In less than half an hour and within a radius of a few tens of metres, I verified the existence of the Fifth Estate. It's here, I met him and even touched him. We know the ancient division of society into three orders, dating back to the Middle Ages. The first order, or State, it was made up of the clergy; the second by the nobles. The third, theoretically, from everyone else. His representation, in the French States General, was entrusted to members of the nascent bourgeoisie, who made the Revolution and buried the past forever. His vate was Abbot Sieyès, author of a very successful pamphlet that set France on fire at the beginning of the fateful period 1789. With the lexicon of Gyorgy Lukàcs, we could say that it was the ecclesiastic of Fréjus who gave the Third Estate class consciousness, starting from the famous phrase "what is the Third Estate? All. What has happened so far in the political system? Nothing. What do you want?? Becoming something". The bourgeoisie cut off the King's head and inaugurated modernity.
During the nineteenth century, the socialist controversy began to talk about the Fourth Estate, that is, of the peasant and worker proletariat whose ranks swelled in the shadow of the industrial revolution, of forced urbanization, of the birth of large factories. Its artistic representation is the great painting of 1901 by the Piedmontese Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo: a compact and orderly crowd moving towards the future, confident in history, led by a young mother with her little son around her neck and two men, the most combative peasants. There is in this framework of large dimensions and gigantic ambitions, the sense of a composed dignity, a sober elegance despite the common simplicity of the clothes and attitudes, an irrevocable advance, inevitable of men and women who feel like communities on the march determined to change their condition all together. Read More