THE DEPUTIES left Versailles and held their first meeting on October 19, in one of the halls of the Archbishop’s palace. On November 9, they moved to the Riding House, near the Tuileries. The rest of the year 1789 saw the decrees that despoiled the clergy, destroyed the old magistracy, and created the currency of assignats; the resolution of the Commune of Paris that formed the first Committee of Inquiry; and the mandate that instructed the judges to prosecute the Marquis de Favras.[8]
The Constituent Assembly, despite everything that can be said against it, remains the most illustrious popular assembly that has ever appeared among the nations, as much for the grandeur of its transactions as for the magnitude of its results. There was no political question so profound that the Assembly did not discuss and properly resolve it. What it could have achieved, if it had held itself to the notebooks of the Estates-General and not tried to go beyond! All that human experience and human intelligence has ever conceived, discovered, and elaborated over the last three centuries can be found in these notebooks. The many different abuses of the old regime are indicated in them, along with proposed remedies for their cure. Every kind of freedom is demanded, even the freedom of the press; every improvement necessary for industry, factories, commerce, roads, the army, taxation, finance, schools, public education, etc. We have crossed over abysses of crime and heaps of corpses to no profit. The Republic and the Empire have achieved nothing. The Empire only regulated the brute strength of arms that the Republic set in motion and has bequeathed us centralization, a vigorous type of administration which I look on as an evil, but which was perhaps the only system that could replace the local administrations once these had been destroyed and ignorant anarchy led men around by the nose. All in all, we haven’t advanced one step since the Constituent Assembly: its labors were like those of Hippocrates, that great physician of antiquity, who established and extended the boundaries of science at one and the same time. Let us speak of a few members of this Assembly, beginning with Mirabeau, who epitomizes and towers over them all.