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Fourth Estate
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The term Fourth Estate refers to the press, both in its explicit capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues. The term goes back at least to Thomas Carlyle in the first half of the 19th century.
Novelist Jeffrey Archer in his work The Fourth Estate made this observation: "In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the 'Estate General'. The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate, three hundred nobles. The Third Estate, six hundred commoners. Some years later, after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, 'Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.'"
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In On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), Thomas Carlyle writes:
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This was not Carlyle's first use of the term. If, indeed, Burke did make the statement Carlyle attributes to him, Burke's remark may have been in the back of Carlyle's mind when he wrote in his French Revolution (1837), "A Fourth Estate, of Able butts, springs up."[2] In this context, the other three estates are those of the French States-General: the church, the nobility and the commoners, although in practice the latter were usually represented by the middle class bourgeoisie.
Burke, as author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, could have had in mind precisely these three estates, or the three referred to by Henry Fielding in the quotation below.
The term Fourth Estate has less frequently referred to the proletariat in opposition to the three recognized estates of the French Ancien Régime.
An early citation for this use—earlier than for the one that now prevails—is Henry Fielding in Covent Garden Journal (1752):
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Fourth Estate has referred to "the public press" since at least as far back as the early 1800s. More generally, it has also been used to refer to any group other than the clergy, nobility, or commons that wields political power[1].
- ^ Qtd. from Thomas Carlyle, "The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns [Lecture V, May 19, 1840," from On Heroes and Hero Worship, The Victorian Web, accessed November 18, 2006; qtd. also in part in "The Mass Media as Fourth Estate," in Cultsock.com.
- ^ Chap. 39, Section V: "The Fourth Estate," in French Revolution, rpt. in The French Revolution, World Wide School (online library), accessed November 18, 2006.
- ^ Quoted in worldofquotes.com.
- "The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns," from On Heroes and Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyle.
- "Section V: The Fourth Estate" of French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle, as posted in the online library of World Wide School.