The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

Necker’s return to power was greeted by several weeks of popular jubilation on the streets of Paris. Bonfires were lit, and his fallen predecessors were burned in effigy. On the Pont Neuf, excited crowds stopped passing coaches and forced those inside to emerge and bow to the statue of the legendary ‘good king’ Henry IV. But symbols of authority, such as guard posts and the houses of prominent officials, were also attacked, and troops were called out several times to clear the streets. They fired into the crowds, killing several demonstrators and wounding many more. The climax of these commotions came during the fourth week of September, when the parlement returned in triumph from its exile. Necker knew that nothing less than the abandonment of the previous ministry’s entire programme would satisfy public demand, and the recall of the parlements with all their old powers was the keystone of this policy. Accordingly, the Paris parlement reconvened on 24 September, amid renewed demonstrations and further bloodshed. The court’s first act was to ban all further tumults, while opening a judicial inquiry into the conduct of the police authorities. The magistrates realized, as they watched the price of bread inching upwards, that public effervescence could easily slip beyond anybody’s control. The return of the provincial parlements in the course of October, however, proved less turbulent. The days of bonfires, fireworks, and parades that greeted the restoration of the martyred ‘senators’ passed off in good humour. The first edict that the restored courts were required to register was the convocation of the Estates-General, which, in a further attempt to boost confidence, Necker now brought forward to January 1789.

  No parlement hesitated to register. This was, after all, what they had been clamouring for over a year. But the Parisian magistrates remained deeply suspicious of the government’s intentions. They remembered that in July Brienne had invited all and sundry to propose ideas for how the Estates should be constituted, while reserving the king’s own position. The edict now before them said nothing about the form of the assembly, or how it was to be chosen. Many wondered whether the intention was to establish a body as docile and powerless as the provincial assemblies had proved to be. It was to thwart such despotic wishes in advance that the parlement declared, in its formula of registration, that the constitution of the Estates-General must follow the last recorded precedent. It should meet ‘according to the forms observed in 1614’.

  In 1614 the Estates-General (which had achieved very little) had met in three almost numerically equal but separately elected chambers representing the orders of clergy, nobility, and third estate. They had voted separately, by order. Throughout eighteen months of clamour for the Estates, hardly anybody appears to have been aware of this, or thought the question worth investigation. Even now it was several days before the truth became common knowledge. But once it did, the implications, if this precedent were followed, were obvious. The nobility and clergy would be enormously over-represented, both numerically and in terms of their share of the national wealth. Together they would always be able to outvote the third estate.

  None of the provincial assemblies established in 1778 or 1787 had followed these principles. In them, third-estate numbers had been doubled, and voting was by head. Even the ancient but still active estates of Languedoc had double third-estate representation. And fresh in everybody’s mind, above all, was the example set in Dauphiné since the summer. In several provinces the noblemen who led the protests against the Lamoignon coup turned to the idea of resurrecting long-defunct provincial estates as a better shield against despotism than the parlements had proved to be. When, in the aftermath of the Day of Tiles, 106 noblemen of Dauphiné assembled to draft a petition to the king calling for provincial representation to be restored, they found themselves supported by the three orders of the city of Grenoble. At the prompting of the non-noble leaders of this urban movement, the judge Mounier and the young Protestant advocate Barnave, it was agreed to summon a meeting of representatives of the three orders of the entire province. They came together on 21 July in a nobleman’s mansion at Vizille, calling for the Estates-General, the return of the parlements, and the restoration of the province’s estates. Third-estate deputies at Vizille outnumbered the other two orders put together; and all present agreed that in the restored estates the third should be double the size of the other two, all deputies should be elected, and voting should be by head. On 2 August Brienne, now desperate for support from any quarter, agreed to revive the Dauphiné estates. Naturally enough other provinces without estates at once began to clamour for similar treatment, on similar terms; but before he fell Brienne only had time to authorize further progress in Dauphiné itself. He announced an assembly of the three orders of the province to draw up a constitution for the restored estates. It met at Romans on 5 September, and by the end of the month had produced a plan incorporating all the Vizille principles. It offered an obvious model for the Estates-General, beside which the forms of 1614 looked absurdly retrograde. By the beginning of October the pamphleteers of Paris were falling over themselves to point this out.

  Nor did Necker do anything to discourage them. On taking office he released all journalists imprisoned under Brienne for writing anti-ministerial tracts, and made it clear that he no longer intended to operate traditional controls on the press and publishing. He clearly believed that the wider the public debate, the freer he would be in making final decisions about the form the Estates would take. But he had not expected the parlements’ intervention, and he was anxious not to let it pre-empt the issue. This was why, on 5 October, he announced that the Assembly of Notables would be reconvened in November to advise the king on all the problems involved. The effect was to fan public excitement still further and concentrate the attention of the educated public on the question of how best the nation could be represented. And since the parlement had thrown its weighty support behind the forms of 1614, the debate was initially conducted in terms of them. From the very start it was clear that most non-nobles found them unacceptable. How could what was good for Dauphiné not be good for the nation as a whole? And what were the real motives of the parlement? Was its intention merely to preserve the inequitable privileges of the first two orders, while keeping the most numerous and productive citizens in permanent political subjection? Now at last hostility to the ‘privileged orders’, which Calonne had tried so unsuccessfully to foment in March 1787, began to develop; and by the time the Notables convened on 6 November many of them were thoroughly alarmed. The magistrates of the parlement, so recently national heroes, now found themselves treated with hostility and suspicion, as did anybody who spoke up for the forms of 1614. By now, something like a nation-wide consensus seemed to be emerging in favour of ‘doubling the third’ and vote by head.

  Not all nobles opposed it. In fact one largely noble group did a good deal to consolidate the consensus during the sittings of the Notables. Another of Brienne’s prohibitions revoked by Necker was the ban on political clubs. Throughout September and October they mushroomed in Paris, and early in November a particularly distinguished group began to meet at the house of one of the parlement’s leading radical magistrates, Adrien Duport. Later it would be remembered as the Society of Thirty, although its membership was nearer sixty. Drawn from the cream of the capital’s legal, literary, and social life, it included five peers, two dozen magistrates, celebrities like Lafayette, the mathematician Condorcet, and Target, the leading advocate of the Paris bar. There was Talleyrand, the newly appointed bishop of Autun; and Mirabeau, who described the society as ‘a conspiracy of decent folk’ (honnêtes gens). Nine-tenths of them were noblemen, but their aim was not to defend noble interests. What they opposed was the forms of 1614, and privileges of all sorts. ‘War on the privileged and privileges, that’s my motto’, Mirabeau had written in August.2 ‘Privileges are useful against Kings, but are contemptible against Nations and ours will never have any public spirit until it is rid of them.’ The society now bent all its efforts towards whipping up this public spirit by deliberately playing on the social anxieties and resentme
nts of the bourgeoisie. In pamphlets commissioned by the society, and distributed in both capital and provinces at the affluent members’ expense, the middle classes were assured that the forms of 1614 were a plot by the privileged orders to keep them down. Typical enough was the Essai sur les Privilèges by the salon-haunting canon Sieyès of Chartres. Denouncing privilege as parasitic and socially divisive, creating unearned expectations, he implied (quite misleadingly) that privilege was a noble and clerical monopoly. Meanwhile the society was also circulating model petitions around the provinces on which municipalities could base appeals to Necker for doubling the third and vote by head; and in the course of November a national petitioning movement took shape. In towns all over the country the municipal authorities came under pressure from respectable bourgeois, who had often discussed the issues and concerted their actions in local literary clubs and discussion circles, to assemble town meetings to press the king for equitable third-estate representation. By the end of December over 800 petitions had been received. All this activity proved self-accelerating, and was soon far beyond the control of societies like Duport’s which had done so much to focus it. ‘Here one great issue absorbs all other objects’, an anonymous Parisian correspondent could write to Poland by 24 November.3 ‘There is no talk of anything but the claims of the third estate; nothing is written but pamphlets about the form of the Estates-General.’

  The second Assembly of Notables met on 6 November against this background. It was not expected to sit for long, but in the event it went on until 12 December, amid mounting public agitation. A handful of new members had been added to those summoned in 1787, but they did not affect the Assembly’s overwhelmingly noble character. Necker confronted it with fifty-four questions about the form of the Estates, but by now the public was only interested in two. Strenuous efforts were made by certain members, led by the elder of the king’s two brothers, Provence, and by Orléans, hungry as ever for popular acclaim, to persuade the Assembly to reject the forms of 1614. But most members seem to have been scared by the popular passions aroused since September, and they feared that if the traditional forms of the Estates were abandoned, the nobility and clergy might be swamped. And so only 33 Notables voted in favour of doubling the third, with 111 against. Vote by head, it is true, was only openly opposed by 50, but nobody voted in favour of it. Most thought this issue should be decided by the Estates themselves, once they met. Every word uttered in the second Assembly of Notables was known outside almost at once, and it was being denounced long before it broke up as a mere mouthpiece for the privileged orders. Even when it unanimously reiterated its commitment of 1787 to fiscal equality nobody was impressed. All its long proceedings achieved was to make a meeting of the Estates on 1 January impossible. They were now postponed until April or May, amid suspicions that they might yet not be allowed to convene at all.

  Opponents of the forms of 1614 had more success in the unlikely quarter of the parlement of Paris. On 5 December, after a carefully planned lobbying operation by Duport and d’Eprémesnil, now back from his summer-long exile and anxious to retain his popularity, the court was persuaded by a narrow majority to qualify its disastrous declaration of 25 September. All it had meant by the forms of 1614, it now announced, was that the electoral constituencies should be the ancient jurisdictions of bailliages (in the north) and sénéchaussées (in the south). But the narrowness of the majority for this statement was eye-catching, and it was noticed that the parlement had not endorsed the third estate’s claims. And any conciliatory impact the movers of this declaration may have helped to make was eclipsed when, soon after the Notables dispersed, five of the seven princes of the blood petitioned the king not to grant either a doubling of the third or vote by head. The third should be content, they said, with fiscal equality. To give in to their other aspirations under pressure from outrageous public clamour would open the floodgates to attacks on wealth and property as well as privilege. It would lead on to complete destruction of the king’s faithful nobility. The king, however, was still smarting from the ‘noble revolt’ of the previous summer, and regarded his nobility as anything but faithful. He ignored the princes’ petition (which raised a new outcry against the intransigence of the privileged when it appeared in print) and tersely informed the parlement that he was not interested in their views on public affairs. These were now matters between him and the assembled nation—which many took as a hint that in the end the monarch’s natural benevolence would put him on the third estate’s side.

  By mid-December Necker knew that crucial decisions could not be put off much longer. Quite apart from the clamour of public debate and pamphleteering in Paris, there was growing confusion in the provinces over the issue of provincial estates. On this the minister obviously had no coherent policy. It was generally expected that estates like those of Dauphiné would soon be established where they did not exist; and there was a widespread assumption that deputies to the Estates-General would be chosen by them. Consequently the form of provincial estates was of particular importance. But few nobles, even if they accepted doubling the third, seemed prepared to abandon vote by order; and where estates already existed they showed no desire to give up traditional forms and procedures. How could the third be effectively doubled in Brittany, where every nobleman enjoyed a right to sit in person, and they regularly turned up in their hundreds? Any practical reform was bound to deprive most noblemen of their time-honoured political rights. Non-noble Bretons had in fact been complaining for years about under-representation in the provincial estates, and they now saw that if the Vizille principles were to be adopted in other provinces their position would become even more glaringly anomalous. So when a meeting of the Breton estates was announced for January, a town meeting in Rennes demanded that it should abolish all tax privileges in the province and widen third-estate representation. Prosperous, commercial Nantes went even further. On 4 November it called for limitation of noble and clerical numbers and demanded that the first two orders agree to these changes in advance or face a strike by third-estate deputies. Meanwhile meetings of other provincial estates were being authorized; and only in Dauphiné, where the pattern elaborated at Romans in September was followed, was there no serious dissension. Elsewhere those with privileged representation showed themselves determined to maintain it, even against fellow members of their own orders. In Provence, Artois, and Franche Comté only certain types of noble had traditionally participated, but they adamantly refused to admit others even for the purpose of electing deputies to the Estates-General. At the same time they spurned third-estate claims to increased representation and open election of members. Inevitably, the disappointed groups deluged the government with petitions.

  These were the circumstances in which the first great decision about the Estates-General was taken. Necker spent the whole of the week before Christmas with the king, and on 27 December, in a document entitled Result of the King’s Council of State, he finally pronounced on the central questions in public debate since September. The third estate in the Estates-General was to be doubled. The advice of the Notables was therefore rejected, and the public pressure built up over the autumn had triumphed. The Notables had also opposed allowing deputies to be elected for and by orders other than their own. This, too, Necker ignored, to the alarm of some third-estate supporters who feared that highly placed noble or clerical candidates might be elected by over-deferential commoners. But in one thing he followed the Notables. He did not concede vote by head. He expressed the hope that, once the Estates had met, they would agree to deliberate and vote in common; but it must be by their own free choice. In this way Necker attempted to avoid alienating the first two orders while retaining the good will of the third. And so the popularity he craved so much remained unimpaired. But the price of this achievement was to leave a fundamental issue unresolved. Every elector casting his vote in the subsequent spring was aware that those he was helping to choose would need to confront it before they considered anything else.

&nb
sp; The Result of the Council marked the end of the first phase in the electoral campaign. It had witnessed a transformation in the political atmosphere whose speed and scale astonished everyone. Since September public opinion had completely repolarized. The political consensus against despotism, which had exulted in the downfall of Brienne and Lamoignon and brought Necker to new peaks of public idolatry, still existed; but constitutional questions had now been pushed into the background by social ones, and on them the consensus had broken down. The bourgeoisie, hitherto mere spectators in public life, had suddenly realized that they were being offered a permanent role in it, and that by their own efforts they might make it a dominant role. But in the process all their latent resentments and antagonisms towards what were now always described as the privileged orders were aroused and inflamed. Not all those involved in this campaign were members of the third estate. Most of Duport’s society certainly were not. But in their own orders such people remained a minority, and the ferocity of the anti-noble and anti-clerical sentiments soon being widely expressed ensured that they made few further converts. Instead, alarmed nobles and clerics sought protection in the very precedents and privileges that educated commoners were now finding so obnoxious. Bourgeois fury at their intransigence then redoubled. It found its most eloquent expression in January 1789 in Sieyès’s pamphlet What is the Third Estate? which argued that there was no place in a properly constituted nation for privileged groups of any sort. The third estate, which had hitherto counted for nothing in the political order, was in fact everything; for a nation, Sieyès declared, was a body of associates living under a common law, and privileges by definition were exceptions to common law. The nobility were a caste of idle, burdensome usurpers, and there should be no question of allowing them to be chosen as third-estate deputies. Sieyès refused completely to believe in the good faith of nobles who had renounced fiscal privileges, pointing to a whole range of others they had not offered up. He suggested that the third-estate deputies, once elected, should set themselves up without further ado as a national assembly, and have no dealings with the other two orders. By now, indeed, it was a commonplace for the third-estate cause to be called national; and ‘patriotism’, which ever since the crisis of 1771 had meant opposition to despotic government, was increasingly taken over as a label for third-estate aspirations.