The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  What is the Third Estate? was only the most eloquent among hundreds of no less vehement pamphlets denouncing the privileged orders appearing over the winter. And events in certain provinces seemed to bear out all their worst predictions. In Brittany the news of the Result of the Council became known as the third-estate deputies were arriving for the estates. They promptly agreed to transact no business until reform of the estates was accepted by the other two orders. The nobility, who had flocked in in unprecedented numbers for such an important meeting, refused all compromise, and on 3 January a royal order suspended proceedings for a month to allow tempers to cool. The nobility, enraged, continued to deliberate, in the teeth of bitter and increasingly violent denunciations from most of the province’s major towns. When the aristocratic parlement of Rennes forbade illicit municipal assemblies it was ignored, and some of its staunchest traditional supporters, the city’s law students, forsook it to join in the demands for reform of the estates. In an ill-judged attempt to exploit popular animosity towards the well-heeled bourgeois who led the reform movement, certain nobles set their chairmen, servants, and other dependants to organizing demonstrations against reform. On 26 January a vast crowd was assembled in the city centre calling for the maintenance of the Breton constitution and a lowering of the price of bread. It was attacked by bands of patriotic students, and several days of fighting culminated in the nobility being besieged in their meeting hall. In the end they fought their way out, sword in hand, and several people were killed. By the beginning of February the tumults had subsided somewhat; but the estates had achieved nothing, all hope of reconciliation between nobles and third estate in Brittany had gone; and the whole country had witnessed nobles prepared to fight rather than abandon their privileges.

  These months also witnessed the emergence of third-estate leaders. Before November 1788 there had hardly been any. Only the names of the foremost Grenoble patriots, Mounier and Barnave, were widely known, and the campaign for doubling the third and vote by head had to be launched and orchestrated by the metropolitan aristocrats of Duport’s society. But once launched it was soon beyond the society’s control, and commoners began to speak for themselves. They wrote pamphlets: Volney’s periodical The People’s Sentinel did much to articulate and focus bourgeois grievances in Brittany, in the south the burden of generations of civil disabilities inspired the pen of the protestant pastor Rabaut de Saint-Étienne, while Robespierre’s first foray into politics was his appeal To the Artesian Nation to abandon the archaic and privilege-ridden structure of the provincial estates of Artois. They organized town meetings and drafted petitions to local, provincial, and central authorities. In Brittany the patriots of Nantes and other cities marshalled bands of volunteers to go to Rennes to fight the ‘iron swords’. And setting the pace of this activity almost everywhere were lawyers. ‘Everything would have been calm in Franche Comté’, a bitter Besançon nobleman confided to his diary,4 ‘if ten advocates had been hanged.’ Ever since the end of the first Assembly of Notables the constitutional crisis had revolved around an attempt to browbeat the courts, raising issues to which no lawyer could remain indifferent. And once the Estates-General were won, the problem of their composition was a lawyer’s paradise. Besides, petty judges and advocates were the only members of the third estate with wide experience of public life, and the confidence to speak out which it bred. Such men expected their talents to be recognized and drawn upon in the new political order, resenting any suggestion of limiting their opportunities. Noble insistence on maintaining political privileges reminded them of the pride and arrogance of aristocratic magistrates whom they had all encountered in their professional lives, qualified to sit in judgement not by ability and knowledge, but by birth and wealth. The annals of judicial life in the later eighteenth century were littered with quarrels and clashes between bench and bar, petty and sovereign courts, whose legacy of bitterness, hitherto accepted as one of the unavoidable tribulations of the calling, now surfaced. Further occasions for such antagonisms to work themselves out were provided by the elections of the spring.

  The system by which the deputies of 1789 were chosen was extremely complex. Regulations issued on 24 January prescribed that the basic constituencies should be the ancient bailliage and sénéchaussée jurisdictions. In order to ensure a rough parity of size and population, however, smaller (or ‘secondary’) bailliages and sénéchaussées were grouped. There were other exceptions, too. Eight major towns, including Lyons, Rouen, and Paris itself, were accorded separate representation. A number of small districts not granted separate representation initially were also accorded it later after petitions of protest. The greatest exception of all was the treatment of certain pays d’états. The regulation of 24 January effectively ended agitation for reforming or reviving provincial estates by making clear that they would not, contrary to earlier expectations, be the means of electing the national deputies. Nevertheless it was thought prudent to allow this right to the newly constituted estates of Dauphiné, and those of the technically distinct kingdom of Navarre. Brittany might have won it too, had it not been for the bitter quarrels that had marked the last attempts to convene the estates. After that it was decided to elect the Breton third-estate deputies by bailliages, the nobility and clergy choosing theirs in special assemblies representing the whole province.

  With these exceptions, each of the 234 constituencies was to have an electoral assembly for each order. Every noble enjoying full transmissible nobility was entitled to participate in the noble assemblies, as was every beneficed clergyman in the clerical ones. Monasteries and chapters, however, were only allowed elected representatives: and the very numbers of the third estate made indirect representation the only possibility. Accordingly, every male taxpayer over 25 had the right to attend a primary assembly, which chose two delegates for every hundred households to sit in the assembly electing the ultimate third-estate deputies. Each constituency was to be represented in the Estates-General by two clerical, two noble, and four third-estate deputies, and choosing them was the main function of the electoral assemblies. But they were also required by tradition to draw up cahiers, or grievance-lists, to guide the deputies in their deliberations. In the third estate every village and every urban guild and corporation was entitled to send one in, and they were conflated at the local electoral assembly into a single cahier for the order. Inevitably in this process many of the concerns of the king’s poorer subjects were edited out. In many districts the ultimate text of cahiers was transparently based on models carefully put together and circulated by patriotic activists. Nevertheless the cahiers produced a picture of the outlook and preoccupations of a whole nation unique in Europe before the twentieth century. And the very fact of being asked to articulate their grievances and aspirations (with the implicit promise of redress) concentrated the minds of everybody involved on the seriousness of what was at stake. Throughout 1788 popular involvement in public affairs had been unprecedented, but still confined to a few major cities. The drafting of the cahiers drew in people throughout the country. The elections of 1789 were the most democratic spectacle ever seen in the history of Europe, and nothing comparable occurred again until far into the next century.

  Nor did the government make any serious attempts to influence the outcome. It was rumoured that ministers hoped to use the diplomatic embarrassments created by Mirabeau’s scurrilous Secret History of the Court of Berlin, published in January, to prevent its notorious author from being elected; but if that was so they failed. Necker in any case thought that government interference in the elections would do more harm than good, creating bad blood in an assembly that ought to be inspired by goodwill. And yet the very rules he laid down affected the results in important ways. They ensured that the electoral assemblies of the first estate were dominated by parish priests rather than members of the ecclesiastical corporations who had hitherto monopolized the government of the Church. They excluded from the second-estate assemblies all new nobles whose status had not yet
become fully hereditary, and swamped formerly dominant groups, such as courtiers and sovereign court magistrates, with petty nobles of long lineage, often slender means, and little public experience. And the indirect system adopted for the third estate effectively eliminated peasants, artisans, and everybody without abundant leisure from the stage at which deputies were chosen, while allowing the possibility of electing members of the other two orders.

  The Estates-General were summoned to meet at Versailles on 27 April, and the elections ordered to be completed by then. In the event the Estates did not convene until 5 May, and the last elections were not over until far into July. These late elections, including those of Paris which were only completed in May, were influenced by the course of events in the body to which they were electing. But most went forward in March and April, and their background was continual pamphleteering, prolonged cold weather, and a slowly rising level of popular discontent as the harvest shortfalls of the previous summer pushed bread prices inexorably upwards, and the attendant industrial crisis swelled the ranks of the unemployed. Incidents were reported from all over the country of market-day riots, popular price-fixing, and ransacking of barns, warehouses, monasteries, and country houses where hoarding of grain and flour was suspected. In Provence there was also widespread refusal to pay tithes or taxes, and at Marseilles men of property became so alarmed at the inability of the established authorities to maintain order that on 23 March electors of all three estates combined to take over the city’s government and set up a ‘patriotic guard’ of substantial citizens. It was an idea with an important future nationally, but at this stage many found the overthrow of legitimate authorities shocking.

  In any case, though stretched, the normal forces of law and order still seemed capable of preventing popular passions from boiling over completely. This was most graphically shown when, late in April, disorder reached Paris. The outbreak was precipitated by electoral excitement following the first meetings of the sixty districts in which members of the capital’s third-estate electoral assembly were to be chosen, on 21 April. On the twenty-third, as the assembly of the Sainte-Marguérite district was discussing its cahier, one of its more prominent members, the wallpaper manufacturer Reveillon, remarked that the price of bread ought to be brought down to levels that wage-earners on 15 sous a day could afford. Reveillon was well known for his benevolence towards the unemployed, but in the highly charged atmosphere of the occasion his words were interpreted as a call for wage reductions. Similar remarks by Henriot, a saltpetre manufacturer, in another electoral assembly had the same effect. Over the next few days rumours of wage reductions swept the faubourg Saint-Antoine, the capital’s working east end, and on the twenty-seventh Henriot’s house was sacked by angry crowds. In response, troops posted in the district were reinforced, but the next day they were swamped by several thousand rioters who stormed Reveillon’s house and factory and destroyed everything in them. In the evening a strong detachment of the French Guards was brought in and opened fire; after two hours of further tumult the crowd dispersed leaving twenty-five dead and almost as many more wounded. Rumour magnified the casualties to hundreds, and there was much dark talk of plots. This was the atmosphere that greeted the deputies now arriving at Versailles for the opening of the Estates. The rioters were known to have cheered the names of the king, of Necker, and the third estate. But they had also shouted ‘down with the rich!’ as they sacked prominent citizens’ property, and the full force of authority had been deployed too late to prevent them. The capital must have appeared to the deputies even more disturbed than their native provinces.

  Who then were these men, in whom the boundless hopes and expectations aroused by months of frenzied debate and discussion were invested? What sort of deputies had the elections produced? The first-estate deputation represented a clear defeat for the established Church hierarchy. Three-quarters of the 303 clerical deputies elected were ordinary parish priests. Only 46 were bishops; so that the nobles, canons, and regulars who had hitherto controlled all the levers of power in the Church were exposed as lacking the confidence of their subordinates. The clerical cahiers reinforced this impression, with demands for higher stipends, abolition of tithe impropriation, unrestricted access to diocesan administrative posts, canonries, and bishoprics, and church government by elected synods. Third-estate propagandists had campaigned hard for such results, and welcomed them as a sign that the clergy would be sympathetic in the Estates to the ‘patriotic’ cause. They paid less attention to issues on which the clergy were united: the need to retain and indeed increase the Church’s control over education, and to limit the toleration enjoyed by Protestants. In return for the surrender of their fiscal privileges, the clergy expected that the new order would confirm and reinforce the authority of the Catholic Church within the nation. The clerical consensus on these matters far outweighed the order’s internal disagreements about the position of parish priests, but such deeper solidarities escaped the notice of most observers in the excitement of the elections. Their true importance would only emerge at a later stage, as yet scarcely foreseen by anybody.

  In the case of the nobility, too, the elections brought rejection of groups hitherto taken for leaders of the order. Courtiers expected almost automatic election. (‘Most of the young Nobility’, reported the Duke of Dorset on 19 February,5 ‘are … quitting this Capital, ambitious of being deputed to the great National Assembly.’) But once in the long-unvisited provinces where their estates lay, they frequently found themselves bitterly opposed by local squires resentful of their lofty ways. Often they were returned with great difficulty, although in the end they did better than the bishops in the clerical order, securing around a third of the representation. Among them were the Duke d’Orléans, and several members of the Society of Thirty such as Lafayette. On the other hand the elections were a complete disaster for the robe nobility of the sovereign courts. Only twenty-two members of this proud, articulate, and self-confident oligarchy secured seats, although they included heroes of the 1788 struggles like Duport, Fréteau, and d’Eprémesnil. But few rough country squires were returned either, despite their showing at the electoral assemblies. The largest contingent among the 322 who sat as noble deputies was made up of town-dwelling scions of old-established provincial families, not poor, but whose only previous experience of public life, if they had any at all, had been in the army. Like the parish clergy, they recognized that they were being presented with a unique opportunity to vent the frustrations and resentments of generations, and many of the noble electoral assemblies were extremely stormy. Some split, returned rival lists of deputies, and drew up rival cahiers. The nobility of Brittany, outraged that their province’s delegation was not to be returned by its estates, voted to boycott the elections, and no Breton nobles ever sat in the Estates-General.

  Noble cahiers reflected their authors’ disarray. Only on agreement to give up all fiscal privileges was there near unanimity. A mere 8 per cent of cahiers, it is true, called for voting by head in the Estates; but the number insisting on vote by order on all occasions barely exceeded 40 per cent, the rest being prepared for one form or another of compromise. Nobility, almost 40 per cent thought, should be the reward of services and talent rather than riches; but no other question rallied opinion on a comparable scale. After the Estates met, the noble deputies would polarize into a ‘liberal’ minority of around ninety who were prepared to seek ways of coming to terms with third-estate aspirations, and an intransigent majority. The liberals tended to be younger, more metropolitan, better travelled, and better read; but they were drawn, like their opponents, from right across the social spectrum of the nobility. The second order in the State, therefore, came to the political tests of 1789 in confusion. Prepared and in many ways eager for change, they were nevertheless unnerved by the hostility towards them that had sprung up since the autumn; and, torn apart by internal resentments and snobberies far more complex than those affecting the clergy, they had none of the first order’s de
eper unity to fall back on. For all its impressive combination of wealth, power, and place, the French nobility was far weaker, less well organized, and less self-confident than its third-estate opponents imagined. These disadvantages were fully mirrored by the deputies sent to represent it at Versailles.

  The third-estate deputies, by contrast, were remarkably homogeneous and united. No peasants or artisans got beyond the first electoral stage, when the minority who voted at all (in Paris, even, only a quarter of the 50,000 or so electors chose to exercise their right) tended to be people of some education and leisure, and to prefer others like themselves. Those who went to the secondary assemblies, not to mention those finally returned for the Estates-General, were expected to pay their own expenses. More important still, the elections were inevitably dominated by people experienced in public speaking, handling meetings, and drafting documents. This meant above all the lawyers and office-holders who had been so conspicuous in all the public agitation since September 1788. Two-thirds of those elected had some form or other of legal qualifications. A quarter were advocates or notaries, among them people like Barnave and Robespierre. Forty-five per cent (294) were holders of venal offices, including many senior judges from bailliage and sénéchaussée courts who had been entrusted by electoral regulations with the organization of the third-estate assemblies. In contrast there were only 99 deputies involved in trade or industry. Only 9 members of the other two orders benefited from Necker’s decision to allow electors to choose outside their orders, although they included Sieyès from the clergy and Mirabeau from the nobility. But although the third-estate contingent boasted these and other celebrities who had come to public notice during the struggles of the preceding two years—men like Mounier, the leader of the Dauphiné patriots, Target the pride of the Parisian bar, and eminent scientists like the astronomer Bailly—most of the deputies were unknown and untested outside their own localities. Apart from their similar social and educational background, what united them more than anything was their commitment to voting by head and civil and fiscal equality. Any doubts about this commitment did not survive the first days of the Estates’ meeting.