Even closer to Burke was Guizot, who pointed to the eruption of the ‘Third Estate’s struggle against the nobility and the clergy’ as the moment when the French Revolution ceased to have ‘liberty’ as its goal and aimed exclusively at ‘power’, paving the way for the subsequent, interminable struggles—‘those of the poor against the rich, of the common people against the bourgeoisie, of the rabble against respectable folk [honnêtes gens]’.17
