Question

Can anyone interpret this for me?
the Third Estate discovered that royal decree granting double representation also upheld the traditional voting "by orders", i.e. that the collective vote of each Estate would be weighed equally.

Answer 1

The third estate found out that the traditional voting system (which gave each estate theoretically equal voting power) was in contradiction to the royal decree (that presumably allotted the first two estates) double the voting power. Essentially, during the building up the the french revolution, one of the main points of contention was that the third estate, comprised of the majority, essentially had no power in comparison to the 1st and 2nd.

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