The advice was wise. Philip the Fair followed it. Thus it came about that for the first time since nine centuries, and thanks to the communal insurrections, the bourgeois--those plebeians who represented the subjugated class--took their seats in the national assembly beside the seigneurs, who represented the oppressors, and the bishops, their accomplices. Before these States General, that thus came into existence, the king now appeared in humble posture, affecting poverty and good will, and obtained the levies of men and subsidies that he needed. After Philip the Fair, his descendants, greedy, prodigal and needy, convoked a national assembly whenever they required a new levy of taxes or of men. The bourgeois deputies ever appeared at these assemblies in a defiant mood. They never were convoked except to exact gold and the blood of their race from them. To exact is the correct term. Vain it was for the bourgeois deputies to refuse, as they did, the levies of men and moneys that seemed to them unjust. Their refusal was annulled, and the method of annulment was this: The States General consisted of three estates--the nobility, the clergy and the bourgeoisie--each being represented by an equal number of deputies. Accordingly, the bourgeoisie was out-voted by the combined estates of the nobility and the clergy, both of which were ever found anxious to meet the royal wishes on the head of taxation. The reason was plain. The prelates and seigneurs, being exempt of taxation in virtue of the privileges of the nobility of the one and the alleged sanctity of the other, and sharing, thanks to the prodigalities of the kings, in the taxes levied on the bourgeoisie, granted with gladsome hearts all the levies for money that the crown ever requested. Thus stood things at the beginning of the reign of John II. Though the position of the people continued to be grievous, yet marked progress had been made. CHAPTER II. ETIENNE MARCEL. The hopeless minority in which the bourgeoisie found itself in the States General rendered its participation in government a fiction. It remained for a great man and the proper juncture in order to turn the fiction into a reality. The juncture set in during the year 1355, when King John II found his treasury empty through his ruinous prodigalities, and Gaul in flames through the pretensions of the King of England to the ownership of the country and his efforts to reconquer it, while in the south Charles the Wicked, King of Navarre, whom John II. had given his daughter in marriage, was arms in hand, capturing several provinces to which he laid claim as part of his wife's dower. The man of the occasion arose in Etienne Marcel.