‘He [Louis XVI] is an honest man, and wishes really to do good, but he has not either genius or education to show the way towards that good which he desires.’
From the diary of Gouverneur Morris, US ambassador to France 1792–4, who first went to France on business in 1789
THERE ARE TWO very contradictory images of Louis XVI as the Revolution approached. On the one hand, the wavering fop, the man who couldn’t control his wife’s spending, the coward who took refuge from reality by riding off into the forest at every opportunity, and wrote ‘Rien’ in his diary for 14 July 1789. On the other, there is the King who tried every means possible – exiling parliament, convening assemblies, offering concessions, changing ministers (he even recalled Necker in August 1788) – in the hope of dragging France over the seemingly impenetrable wall of opposition that the aristocrats had constructed around their privileges.
The problem was that he was both of these men, and everyone knew it. This was why his last attempt to avoid the crisis was huge, ambitious, worthy – and doomed to failure.
Everything started to go fatally wrong for Louis XVI in mid-1788. With the aristocratic parliamentarians resisting change and stirring up popular discontent, the weather tipped the poorer sections of French society into outright despair.
There had been heavy rains and flooding in many parts of France in the autumn of 1787, meaning that fewer crops had been sown. In the Rhône valley, floods had been so bad that mills had been swept away. As a result, hopes were not especially high for the grain harvest of 1788. Then at about 6.30 a.m. on Sunday, 13 July 1788, in a sort of deadly premonition of Bastille Day, a biblical hailstorm hit France, rampaging in the course of four hours from Poitiers in the west of France, along the Loire, across Paris and up to Lille and the Belgian border. Hailstones ranging in size from a walnut to a turkey’s egg, often propelled by gusts of wind reaching 150 kph, felled trees, smashed windows, stripped roofs, toppled chimneys and steeples, killed farm animals and of course ruined crops. It was estimated that about 100,000 hectares of land were made unharvestable.
Louis XVI himself was caught in the storm. He had stayed the night at Rambouillet, in his hunting forest near Versailles, and was on his way back on the morning of the thirteenth when, according to his attendant Félix d’Hézecques, he was ‘assailed by a terrible hailstorm, the like of which we rarely see. The whole procession was obliged to shelter in the hangars at the village of Trappes, but not before several riders had been injured. The countryside was covered with felled trees and crushed birds and animals.’
Crown agents sent out instructions to farmers to plough up the damaged fields immediately and sow mustard seed, beetroot, cabbages, chicory and turnips – but everyone knew that grain, and therefore bread, was going to be cruelly short. Almost immediately, a new wave of rural emigration began, filling the larger towns, and especially Paris, with hungry, disgruntled paupers.
The bad weather continued. At the end of August 1788, heavy rains forced grape farmers in central France to harvest early. In mid-November, there was widespread frost, damaging fruit trees, as well as the ground crops sown in the ravaged wheat fields. This was the early visiting card of a bitterly cold winter that would see Paris snowbound on New Year’s Eve, enduring temperatures of minus 20 °C. Cruellest of all, sudden hard frosts were interspersed with short spells of unseasonably mild weather.
To a highly religious people, it must have seemed as though God was sending them a message about the year to come. It was becoming increasingly clear that the King, previously God’s political representative in France, was not going to provide their daily bread in His place.
Meanwhile, Louis XVI was still battling to salvage something from the political situation. On 8 August, with horror stories about the plague of hailstones still doing the rounds of France’s churches, inns and markets, he announced that he was convening the États généraux. This was the ancient means of consulting the people in times of crisis, whereby representatives of all three of France’s estates were called to deliver an opinion on the course of action that a sovereign should take.
Typically, the Paris parliament declared that this session of the États généraux – the first since 1614 – should follow convention and favour the privileged. The noble parliamentarians wanted each of the three estates to have the same number of representatives, even though the lowest class, the tiers état or Third Estate, comprised some 96 per cent of the population. In any case, as things stood, the system of voting by estate meant that the nobility and the clergy could outvote two to one any attempt to democratize the tax system, and then claim it as a ‘democratic’ decision.
Louis XVI defied the parliamentarians, first instructing them to debate whether the number of tiers état representatives should be doubled, and then, when they voted against this, by declaring unilaterally that that was how it was going to be. Louis decreed that at the next États généraux, to begin on May Day 1789, there would be at least a thousand delegates, called députés,fn1 with half of them commoners – he was doubling the tiers état’s presence. It was still not fair representation – because of the division into three estates, these 50 per cent of the delegates would still only have 33.3 per cent of the votes while representing 96 per cent of the population, but it was a symbolic move in the right direction. Any vote in favour of the status quo by two estates to one would look dubious if the delegates against were just as numerous as those in favour.
To rub even more salt into the aristocrats’ wounds, Louis XVI recalled Jacques Necker yet again to be his Finance Minister. The great reformer, who was still considered a potential saviour by the people, was back, and went straight into action, forbidding the export of grain, subsidizing imports, and even importing a national stock of grain and giving local authorities the power to release it into local markets. It was exactly what the French people wanted – except, of course, for the rich merchants who had hoped to speculate at a time of low supply.
For such a famously weak man, Louis XVI was showing a real talent for political boxing.
On 24 January 1789, in an attempt to rouse public support, Louis published an open letter saying that ‘from the extremities of his realm and the least known dwellings, everyone should be sure to send His Majesty their wishes and claims.’ At the États généraux, the delegates would, he said, ‘advise and assist’ him in his politics by expressing ‘the desires and complaints of our people, so that by mutual confidence and love between the sovereign and his subjects, the promptest possible remedy may be found for the state’s ills, and so that abuses of all sorts may be reformed’.
One thing was certain – the ‘desires and complaints’ of the aristocrats and the clergy would be that Louis XVI should give up politics and go hunting, because he was trying to hand power to the uppity commoners.
Once again, the selection process for delegates to the États généraux was not going to be totally democratic. The nobles and the clergy were so few in number that they met in large towns and put together a list of likely candidates. There was one democratic change for the clergy – every humble parish priest would now have the chance to vote for a delegate – meaning that the power of the rich, noble bishops was to be greatly reduced.
Meanwhile the tiers état had to whittle down about 26 million people to just under 600 delegates. To do so, each town had to elect a representative who would then vote for a district representative, who would in turn vote for a regional representative, who would then have a vote in the election for the actual delegate sent to the États généraux in Versailles. It was a long, tortuous process, which was why the country was given almost five months to carry out the vote.
No one thought to invite women to the États généraux, and they weren’t even allowed to vote for delegates – suffrage was restricted to men over the age of 25. What was more, the election of tiers état delegates was to be administered by the clergy, who had a vested interest in the result, and voting was to be done after mass, presumably following a sermon about God’s wish for a status quo in which bishops always had food on their table and gold on their fingers. It wasn’t going to be a secret ballot, either, meaning that anyone voting for a pro-reform candidate would have to do so under the disapproving eyes of the local bigwigs.
The ‘wishes, claims, desires and complaints’ of the people were to be recorded in ‘cahiers de doléances’, a medieval-sounding name that could be translated as ‘grievance notebooks’. In practice they were complaints books. And eventually there would be between 40,000 and 60,000 of them – according to different estimates – written after public meetings to discuss how the people of France envisaged their social and political future.
Many of these cahiers de doléances have survived, and they can often be found on the websites of French towns or regions, both as scans of the original pages and in transcripts of the text. There are also thousands of them in the Bibliothèque nationale. They range from long, well-structured treatises on general reforms to 20 lines describing the hard life of a village ploughman. Those bearing signatures show that some of the contributors could barely scratch their surnames, and lists of contributors printed alongside the doléances show that some people didn’t sign at all, presumably because they were illiterate.
In French history books, these cahiers are usually quoted as stinging indictments of everything that was wrong with pre-Revolution France. The vast majority of them abound with tales of privilege, corruption, oppression and abuse. The implication is, of course, that the Revolution couldn’t come soon enough.
The weakness with this argument is obvious. Of course the cahiers describe the terrible inequalities that blighted France in 1789. That was what they were designed to do. If a company chairperson asks for a frank assessment of the problems afflicting the workforce, he or she is not going to hear that everything is wonderful – especially (and this is the key point) if he or she has asked for the assessment precisely because he or she has been trying to improve things, and keeps getting stopped by the overpaid, self-preserving company directors. The complaints will be even more outspoken if the workers know that the idea is to put together an overwhelming list of problems so that the chairperson can force the company directors to give in and accept change.
Surely it is a point in Louis XVI’s favour that he commissioned the cahiers de doléances. This was free speech at its freest. It was not just a few irritated intellectuals writing obscene plays about the King’s sexual problems; this was to be a hard-hitting analysis of genuine everyday problems that affected the well-being and survival of the whole population. In democratic terms, it was much more representative than a yes-no referendum, which is so often presented these days as a victory for the people. Here was a leader saying, ‘Go on, say exactly what you think, and no one will get locked up for doing so.’ Compare that, for example, with the number of people who would later be guillotined or hacked to bits for criticizing the Revolution.
Complicated though it was, Louis and his ministers tried to make the consultation process as wide as possible – within the bounds of what was considered democratic at the time. At previous États généraux, in 1467 and 1484 for example, delegates had met to discuss all the grievances in the cahiers before presenting a summary to the King. This time, though, in theory, each état – nobility, clergy and commoners – in every parish was to fill out its own complaints book that would be forwarded to its delegate, who would then produce a list of the most frequent grievances that would be debated in front of the King. In many towns, individual professions were invited to submit their own cahier – in Évreux in Normandy, for example, 18 different trades listed their grievances, including butchers, bakers, clockmakers, bailiffs, basket-makers, gardeners, wigmakers and horse renters.
As with the election of delegates, the writing of the cahiers de doléances was not what we would now call democratic. For a start, women were excluded, as they had been from becoming delegates – though in reality some women who were heads of their family did get to participate in the meetings. Secondly, the cahiers obviously had to be written by someone literate – a village priest, for example, who might be tempted to edit the grievances of his illiterate parishioners to protect himself and the clergy. Many of the discussions to decide what to write were held in churches, priests’ houses, or even the local château, so some commoners must have felt as though they were in hostile territory. Lastly, servants, the unemployed and beggars were not invited to offer their opinions on the grounds that they didn’t pay tax – which was arch hypocrisy given that the whole of the noble and clerical états were tax-exempt and yet had the right to produce their own cahiers.
Some of the commoners seem to have imagined that Louis XVI was going to wave his magic wand and solve everyone’s individual problems: a cahier written in the village of Vuzon, near Orléans, denounces the immoral goings-on ‘chez certain residents … where debauched people get together’ (these debauched people presumably wrote their own cahier about the spoilsports next door). The town of Corbeil asked for its bridge over the Seine to be repaired. In Moux, Burgundy (where cahier was misspelled as cayer) some parishioners were unhappy that tax collectors had taken away ‘the cow whose milk was meant to feed the baby still in the crib’. In Étiolles, now just south of Paris-Orly airport, residents complained about soldiers from a nearby barracks hunting in their fields: ‘They come on horseback or in coaches, in all weathers, at any season, into wheat fields that are ready to harvest, into grape vines ready to be picked.’ The farmers’ main complaint was that they couldn’t attack the hunters without fear of being fined. (This, by the way, was where Louis XV used to come hunting, and where his mistress Madame de Pompadour (then Madame d’Étiolles) would lie in wait, hoping to catch his attention.)
Other cahiers were much more general and idealistic: in Champmotteaux, near Paris, people hoped that soon ‘public worries will dissolve, and fair weather will succeed the storms that have afflicted good citizens’ (a poetic reference to both the social situation and the bad weather). In Gouloux, not far from Dijon, residents requested ‘the suppression of all exemptions by privilege and … the equal repartition of a single income tax’. You don’t get much more sweeping than that.
Since most people today believe that France was a boiling mass of revolutionary resentment in 1789, it may come as a surprise that one common theme in most of the cahiers written by, or on behalf of, the tiers état is their desire for a strong monarchy, and their gratitude to the King for asking their opinion. Even though, by definition, the ‘grievance notebooks’ describe everything that is wrong with France, they also come across as a profession of faith – or hope, in any case – from the commoners that things will be put right by their benevolent King. As the people of the above-mentioned village of Champmotteaux put it, they hoped that after the current problems have been solved: ‘the prince so worthy of love will be truly called the father of his people’. In nearby Ballancourt, they predicted (in heavily misspelt French) that ‘God will crown His Majesty’s good deeds. He [the King] will inspire the zeal, loyalty, respect and love of his subjects, the happiness of his people, and the contentedness and tranquillity of his kingdom.’
Obviously, these pro-monarchy comments could be dismissed as a case of ‘flattery will get us everywhere’, but at the very least it shows a willingness to take part in the consultation process with the monarch. Ordinary people weren’t dismissing it as a pointless exercise, let alone demanding Louis XVI’s head on the point of a sword.
The proof that le peuple seem to have been aware of what Louis XVI, via his various ministers, had been trying to achieve over the previous years is that the demands made by the tiers état in their cahiers de doléances matched almost exactly the measures that Necker, Calonne, Brienne and co. had been presenting to parliament. In general, people wanted to improve their life through reform, not revolution.
Most of the commoners were desperate to replace the complex, unfair tax system with a simple per capita income tax and a property tax – without any exemptions for the aristocracy or the clergy. They wanted the corvée (free labour provided to the lord or King) to be abolished. They denounced the inefficiency and corruption of judges (many of whom were noble parliamentarians, of course), and demanded an end to all vestiges of feudal law. Peasants wanted the right to hunt and fish on their own land rather than letting noble (and royal) riders come trampling through their crops. Many commoners also hinted politely that the royal family might be able to live off their property rather than receiving money from the state.
Some suggested that noble titles should no longer be inherited, and must be given only for services to the nation. There were also many calls for one-man one-vote (not one-woman) at the États généraux instead of representation according to one’s estate.
Clergy-bashing was frequent and varied. There were demands for the Church’s money to be spent on charity for the poor. Many thought that all monks and nuns in priories and convents who didn’t actually do anything except pray should be asked to take on practical work, like teaching and nursing. Some parishes wanted to elect their priest, which might have given rise to some extreme election promises (‘Vote for me and get access to the aristocrats’ section of heaven’).
Naturally, the tiers état’s fiercest criticism of the clergy was aimed at the obscenely rich bishops (it has been said that this was especially the case when poor parish priests transcribed villagers’ demands). In Mirabeau, Provence, the cahier bristled with fury: ‘Of all the abuses that exist in France, the most damaging for the people, the most desperate for the poor, is the immense wealth, the idleness, the exemptions, and the unheard-of luxury enjoyed by the senior clergy. Most of this wealth is made up of the sweat of the people.’
Even so, religion itself did not usually come under attack, and some cahiers requested extra holy days and religious processions to ward off the hail and frost that had decimated the previous year’s crops.
Tellingly, almost none of the commoners’ most frequent doléances expressed opposition to what Louis XVI had been trying to do for 15 years or so. If the tiers état’s main demands had been enacted, it would have been as though Necker’s original plans had finally been voted through – although Louis XVI might have found himself a little poorer than he intended, and Marie-Antoinette would certainly not have been able to afford any more necklaces for a while.
In short, if the tiers état had got their way in May 1789, there would have been no revolution – unless of course the aristocrats and bishops had drawn their swords and bibles and stormed the palace of Versailles. Which was, in fact, more or less what they were about to do.
It would be a mistake to forget the cahiers de doléances written by the 4 per cent or so of the population that made up the other two états.
The main demands of the nobility were predictable. They wanted their rights to their titles and properties to be confirmed, and for the three estates voting system to be conserved. They also wanted the abolition of lettres de cachet – warrants signed by the King that could imprison or exile anyone, including an aristocrat, without trial. This was the weapon that Louis XVI had often used against recalcitrant parliamentarians, so abolishing it would make the Crown even less powerful against militants in favour of the unfair status quo.
Surprisingly, though, there were voices for change even amongst the nobility. Or amongst people who were posing as reformers, anyway.
Louis XVI’s cousin, Louis Philippe d’Orléans, the great-grandson of the Philippe d’Orléans who had tasted power as regent for Louis XV, had his eye on the throne in case of a partial revolution. He was now overtly setting himself up as a liberal, a sort of ‘people’s prince’ in favour of constitutional monarchy, and started to conspire actively against Louis XVI. As we shall see, he would later be suspected of organizing some of the riots that led to the downfall of Versailles – indeed, during the Revolution he would change his name to ‘Philippe Égalité’ and vote in favour of his cousin’s execution. Not that it did him much good – he himself was guillotined during la Terreur in 1793.
In 1787, Louis Philippe had called for the États généraux to be convened, claiming this to be a pro-democracy stance. In early 1789, he got his secretary Laclos to pen a 40-page plan advising ‘liberal’ nobles what to put in their cahiers – or rather instructing them: the plan was entitled Instructions sent by Monsieur the Duc d’Orléans. Amongst his first suggestions were calls for freedom of expression and a guarantee that no one could be imprisoned without the authority of a judge – this sounds very liberal, but it was no doubt a bit of self-preservation in case Louis XVI took offence at his political manoeuvrings.
Louis Philippe declared himself in favour of fiscal reform – ‘income tax will be general and equally applied’. Again, all very liberal, though he specified that reform must be voted by the (non-democratic) États généraux, which would meet regularly to confirm or revoke taxes. He also said that ‘in the case of a change of reign, or a regency’, the États généraux would be convened ‘within six weeks to two months’. What he seemed to be saying was: ‘Put me on the throne and you’ll have a constitutional monarchy almost immediately.’
However, given that upholding the estates system would assure the clergy and the nobility of victory when any reform was debated, this was fake democracy at its most hypocritical. Louis Philippe’s new monarchy or regency would be no more subject to democratic control than Louis XVI was. In fact, the two pro-privilege estates would be much easier to control than the headstrong parliament that was standing up against Louis XVI’s reforms.
And some of Louis Philippe’s ‘instructions’ to his peers supported the status quo at its quo-est. As one of the richest men in France, and the owner of the Palais-Royal in central Paris, he advised the nobles to demand that ‘all property rights be inviolable, that no one may be deprived of them, even in the public interest, unless he is compensated at the highest price and with minimum delay’. He was determined that no reforms would make him or his class any poorer.
Louis Philippe’s influence on the noble estate’s cahiers de doléances is clear. Many of them made liberal-sounding noises while resisting real change. Some offered to end feudal rights (as long as they were compensated by the peasants concerned); to reduce the number of overpaid, often fake, jobs held by certain nobles (who usually had a decent income from their lands anyway); to encourage free trade and major building projects like roads and canals (which they could invest in). Some aristocrats even said that they would like to be seen as protectors of the poor (the occasional charitable handout made them look good – a policy that Louis Philippe himself adopted during the winter of 1788–9).
In short, a lot of the nobles’ ‘liberalism’ was no more than false electoral promises and fake news.
The clergy, meanwhile, did something similar, reaffirming their key rights while making apparent concessions.
They restated their own importance to the nation – the clergy of Saintonge on the southwest coast warned that ‘the throne and the altar share the same foundation; neither can be toppled without the other.’
In Montargis, near Orléans, the clergy’s cahier opened its chapter on religion with a clause suggesting a backward move: ‘Since our holy religion possesses a purity that admits no dilution, let it be requested of the King that, respectful of his sacred vow, he should permit, throughout his kingdom, no public worship other than that of the Catholic religion.’ This was an open attack on Louis XVI for allowing Protestants and Jews the freedom to worship.
These same clergymen of Montargis demanded that all schoolteachers should be Catholic, and that authors of blasphemous and immoral books should be subject to ‘humiliating punishments’. In the cahiers, plenty of priests seized the opportunity to take a swipe at freethinking. In Auch, they moaned that ‘a spirit of philosophy and impiety has caused the most lethal attack on faith and morals.’
However, there were also clergymen with more truly Christian concerns. Many offered to pay taxes (as long as the nobles did), called for a clean-up of the justice system, for more free schools, for more vets to be trained so that poor farmers could keep their animals alive, and for quack doctors to be outlawed, to prevent poor, gullible people wasting their money on fake remedies. Many churchmen seemed to have real sympathy for the plight of their poorer flocks – as long as they kept the faith, of course.
Women’s exclusion from the official process did not stop them publishing some of their own – unofficial – lists of grievances. In the Bibliothèque nationale, there is a Cahier des doléances des demoiselles, an anonymous eight-point plan that begins by asking women: ‘Should we observe with indifference the advent of this memorable time that is to define for ever the happiness of France?’
It is subtitled ‘A speech given by Mademoiselle P…, presiding over the assembly’, though it is not clear which assembly this was, or if the text was ever read out in public. No matter: here was a woman saying ‘this is how a cahier de doléances would look if only we had gender equality.’
The introduction assures men that women can ‘focus our minds on other things than frivolities; and women, whom they [men] take too little notice of when it comes to politics, are just as fit to talk about it as they are’.
The author’s suggestions include a plea that ‘fathers should give the same education to both their sons and daughters’, so that ‘women of the next generation will be well enough educated to get involved in all occupations, and, without flattering ourselves, things will be all the better for it’.
Things get slightly surreal when the author demands a tax on unmarried men that will be divided between the state and ‘poor single girls who have passed the age of 40 and can prove that they truly wanted to get married’, but overall it is a simple call for the most basic equal rights.
The Bibliothèque nationale also has a more teasingly written Cahier des représentations & doléances du beau sexe (the fair sex), which was published in 1789, and apparently written by women who had been infuriated by the all-male discussions for the official cahiers de doléances. It is addressed to the King (‘Sire’), and starts by saying that ‘we are accused of being chatty … [but] these grievances come after the endless and insolent chattering of the men.’
Its only downfall is that it was obviously written by a bunch of moralizing female aristocrats, and includes a diatribe against ‘worldly women [a euphemism for chic ladies of ill repute] and a call for people to attack them in the street and ‘cover the carriage, its mistress and her servants in mud’. If these loose women are aristocrats ‘out alone, without a male escort or servants, at an hour at which they are abandoned to everything that is most vile and scornful in the class of low-life women’, then the authors think they should be sent to a convent for several months. It is a bizarre tirade that might well have been intended as a warning to some of Marie-Antoinette’s more shameless friends.
But overall, even these moralizing women are serious in their wish for a better France (‘We admit that there are abuses, and they must be reformed’) and in their grievance that ‘we have been both surprised and humiliated not to be invited to the États généraux.’
In the light of the predictable division along class lines in the official cahiers de doléances, the question was: How on earth were the États généraux going to achieve anything?
The equally predictable answer was that they weren’t. The social climate was simply too tense for reasoned debate.
Today, on show in the salle du Jeu de paumefn2 in Versailles, there are some engravings from 1789 that illustrate this. One shows noble and clerical delegates driving to the États généraux in a luxurious carriage pulled by lions. Its pair is a drawing of tiers état delegates in a much simpler vehicle harnessed to a cow and some dogs. Together, they give a neat visual summary of the divisions that the États généraux was going to do nothing to reduce.
In the same room, amongst the marble busts of famous Revolution-era activists, is a severe-looking man in a tight wig and high clerical collar, his mouth clenched above a small but forceful chin. The general impression he creates is one of moral rigidity and impatience. This was an abbot from Chartres called Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. In January 1789, when Louis XVI was issuing his call for the cahiers de doléances to be written, Sieyès published a well-founded but inflammatory pamphlet called Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (What is the Third Estate?). In his view, it meant much more than being neither an aristocrat nor a cleric.
Sieyès was a high-ranking member of the Church – a former chaplain to one of Louis XVI’s aunts and an advisor to France’s clerical assembly, the body that managed the Church’s tax income. But he seems to have grown discontented with life in the establishment, first writing an Essay on Privileges in 1788 (‘the object of all privileges is to be exempt from the law’), and then his best-known pamphlet that was designed to give the motley mix of commoners in the tiers état a sense of shared identity.
The most commonly quoted lines from Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? are the opening points in his introduction, which are a typically French exercise in answering one’s own rhetorical questions:
It is highly effective rhetoric, though, like the chants for a protest march, and must have grabbed the attention of every literate French person who opened it, and every illiterate one who heard about it.
After the introduction, in some 80-odd dense pages (probably beyond the reading ability of most members of the tiers état), Sieyès explains his aspirations for a society in which the 4 per cent of nobles and clergy in the population would lose their privileges and the 96 per cent obtain the political rights they deserve. Nobles, he says ‘are a burden on the nation’, while the tiers état has to do ‘all the work that maintains society’, so that denying them fair representation is ‘a social crime’. The only solution, Sieyès said, was to scrap the three estates and have a single electorate, ‘the nation’, which would make all laws: ‘Its will is always legal. It is the law.’ The implication was clear – the commoners would take all the decisions.
Sieyès did not say that he wanted to overthrow the monarchy (the word doesn’t even appear in the text), and he accuses the nobles of threatening ‘the King and the People’, so he even seemed to see some common cause between the tiers état and Louis XVI. He simply wanted to take privilege out of the political equation, so that the King would implement the commoners’ reforms instead of having to bow to the rich parliamentarians’ opposition. Which was more or less what Louis XVI had been trying to do for years.
Sieyès took his ideas to their logical conclusion, and warned that it was no use the tiers état even participating in the États généraux unless its interests were going to be justly represented: ‘By its presence it would only consecrate the oppression of which it would be the eternal victim.’ He didn’t call for a boycott – on the contrary, he urged delegates to demand fair representation in every vote there. But he was undermining the whole process before it began.
In early 1789, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? became a nationwide bestseller. It didn’t bode well for the discussions at Versailles in May.
In April 1789, there was an outbreak of social unrest in Paris that would neatly sum up much of what was to happen later in the year.
After the cruel winter and bad harvests of the previous year, bread prices had risen. As the election of Parisian delegates for the États généraux got under way, there were rumblings of discontent from poor workers that they were not allowed to vote – in Paris, the tax threshold for voters was set higher than elsewhere (for once, low taxes were a disadvantage because they excluded you from the vote). With Sieyès’s ideas doing the rounds, and every café and street corner echoing to the sound of political debate, feelings were running high.
On 23 April, one of Paris’s best-known industrialists and employers went to speak at a debate held by tiers état voters. This was Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, owner of the Paris wallpaper factory that had made the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons and hosted the world’s first-ever manned flight.
Réveillon was a poor worker made good. He had started out as a humble carpenter and built up a business that had allowed him to buy a mansion just outside the eastern edge of Paris, with a garden big enough for balloon-testing, and workshops that employed about 350 workers.
One of the secrets of Réveillon’s financial success was that he had managed to outmanoeuvre the powerful craftsmen’s guilds by saying that his production methods were too new to fit in with their traditional definitions of skilled trades. It was a version of union-busting, and had earned him enemies amongst a well-off and well-organized section of the working population. He had got permission to do this thanks to the royal patronage he earned from the Montgolfiers’ airborne exploits, so he was seen as a bit of a ‘privilégié’. Even so, he was known as a fairly benevolent employer, paying decent wages despite ignoring the guilds’ set rates.
So when Réveillon stood up to speak about bread prices at the debate on 23 April, his listeners would have known him as a 60-something self-made man who lived in luxury (he was rumoured to have 50,000 books in his library, and thousands of bottles of wine in his cellar), but who prided himself as someone who understood the concerns of the underprivileged. After all, he still lived on site, and saw the poor houses of his workers every time he stepped, or rode, out of his front gate.
There were of course no microphones at the meeting, so not everyone would have heard his every word. And there were hungry, anxious people present, so not everyone would have appreciated the subtleties of his economic arguments.
Today, no one can quite agree what he actually said, but the gist seems to have been that one way to cut the price of bread was to abolish the import duty on grain and open up the market. Supplies would then flood in, and prices would automatically drop. In this way, even the poorest workers at his factory would be able to afford to eat, just as they could back in the days when they earned 15 sous instead of the current 25.
To Réveillon, no doubt the key part of his message was ‘cut the price of bread’. To the rumour-mongers who left the meeting and started gossiping about him, it was ‘15 sous instead of the current 25’. It was alleged that he wanted to cut wages almost in half.
The upshot was that on 27 April, a crowd of poor Parisians marched towards the Hôtel de Ville (city hall, about a kilometre from Réveillon’s factory), shouting amongst other things, ‘death to the rich’ and ‘throw the effing priests in the river’. Outside the Hôtel de Ville, on the place de Grève, where criminals were executed and which has given its name to the modern French language as the word for an industrial strike (une grève), an effigy of Réveillon was burned. The mob then returned to Réveillon’s factory and tried to storm it, but were stopped by about 50 soldiers.
Next day, a crowd reassembled to protest outside the factory, and were visited by the royal troublemaker Louis Philippe d’Orléans, who gave a speech, threw cash to the crowd and earned himself an ovation before going back to his own life of luxury. Tellingly, it is generally accepted that none of Réveillon’s employees were in this crowd – he had probably been able to explain to them how he had been misquoted.
On the evening of 28 April, a carriage belonging to Louis Philippe’s wife crossed the army barricade, allowing the mob to break through and enter Réveillon’s property. For two hours, rioters rampaged around the compound, destroying everything they could lay their hands on. Furniture, mirrors and doors were smashed or burned, as were Réveillon’s stocks of paper, his clothes and his accounts books. They even ripped out his iron banisters and marble fireplaces. (A few days later, while taking refuge in the nearby Bastille, Réveillon issued a statement saying that the estimated cost of repairs to his house was 50,000 to 60,000 livres – not a very diplomatic message to broadcast while people were still rioting about bread prices.)
During the riot at the factory, soldiers opened fire on the mob, killing – depending on whom you believe – between 25 and 900 rioters.fn3 A dozen or so soldiers were also killed, and about 80 injured. Réveillon and his family were still at home at the time, and had to climb over the wall to escape with their lives.
Réveillon himself was at a loss to understand what had gone wrong. There have since been conspiracy theories that Louis Philippe and/or his secretary Laclos encouraged or even organized the riot. Why else, people ask, did Louis Philippe’s carriage emerge unscathed? Why did no one in the crowd attack him after they had been chanting ‘death to the rich’? Certainly, at the very least, Louis Philippe’s visit to the barricades was a piece of shameless politicking.
But Réveillon may well have been simply a victim of fake news, and an easy target for mob violence, especially if the mob had been incited by the guilds whose financial power Réveillon had undercut. Tellingly, even in modern French historical sources, the element of populist vandalism powered by fake news is often downplayed, probably to avoid sullying the image of the idealistic peuple of 1789. In France, the pillaging of France’s most famous wallpaper factory is usually referred to neutrally as the ‘Réveillon Affair’. In the Larousse online encyclopedia, it gets just three rather misleading lines: ‘The wallpaper factory of J-B Réveillon was pillaged and burnt by its workers, who were joined by many workers from the neighbourhood. The army intervention caused 300 deaths.’
In other words, according to this modern encyclopedia, the event was an example of pre-revolutionary terror tactics by Louis XVI’s regime.
In a short booklet called the Exposé justificatif, written while Réveillon was in hiding at the Bastille, he did his best to defend his name, claiming that he paid most of his workers 30, 35 or 40 sous per day, and had only said that he would like them ‘to be able to live on 15 sous a day’. He argued that during the previous harsh winter, when it was so cold that he had been forced to shut down some of his workshops, ‘I kept on ALL the workers without exception, and paid them the same daily rate as before.’ Réveillon claimed that: ‘Cruel enemies (I don’t know who they can be) dared to depict me to the people as a barbarian who puts no value on the sweat of the unfortunate.’ He ended his argument for the defence by asking: ‘What are my faults? I have never hurt anyone, even the ill-intentioned. I have made people ungrateful, but never poor.’
The unfortunate thing for him was that springtime in Paris in 1789 was not a season for subtle economic debate. Feelings were running much too high. Which is why the États généraux were about to suffer much the same fate as Réveillon’s reputation and his factory.
The night before the delegates were due to parade through Versailles on their way to their first debating session, it was raining heavily. Louis XVI was worried. According to his page, Félix d’Hézecques, ‘while getting ready for bed, the King was constantly looking out of the window at the weather. He gave the order that, if it had stopped raining at five in the morning, tapestries should be hung along the route of the procession.’ A poignant detail, as though Louis wanted everyone to feel welcome when they visited his home town.
However, the King and his entourage were well aware by now that confrontation was inevitable. As Hézecques describes it (albeit with hindsight and extreme loyalty to Louis XVI): ‘Rare were those who came with pure and honest intentions.’ He lists the conflicts between the upper and lower clergy, between ‘provincial’ and Versailles aristocrats, and the tiers état and everyone else, before concluding that ‘all these delegates, who should have had just one goal, that of supporting the virtuous monarch in his noble projects, brought only their secret hatreds, an unfortunate spirit of division, and all the passions that can grow in the human heart.’
Amongst ordinary people, the sense of expectation was overwhelming. Heralds in violet coats embroidered with royal fleurs-de-lys toured Versailles on white horses, accompanied by troops and trumpeters, to proclaim the opening of the États généraux. Residents had rented out their windows and balconies at extortionate prices to spectators who wanted to watch the King and the delegates parade. Meanwhile delegates from all over the country moved into inns and supporters’ houses, and the whole town was abuzz with plots and predictions.
Ceremonies began on 1 May, four days before the official start of the debates – and, coincidentally, one day after George Washington had been sworn in in New York as the first President of the USA (not that the news would have travelled across the Atlantic yet).
On the fourth, which turned out to be rain-free, 1,139 delegates met at the church of Notre-Dame de Versailles, a few streets away from the château. In a diplomatic move, the King and his party went to join them there, riding in a dozen carriages pulled by plumed horses, and preceded by a troop of mounted falconers, their birds on their wrists (perhaps Louis hoped to get in a bit of sparrow-hunting on the way).
The official procession then began, with delegates divided into their estates, parading between ranks of soldiers who were keeping the huge crowds at bay – people from Paris and the whole country had flooded in to attend what everyone recognized as the great showdown that would determine the fate of the nation.
In the cortège, divisions between the factions were clearly visible. The 578 tiers état delegates were dressed in simple black suits with short capes, the costume of an ordinary lawyer. They were followed by the 270 nobles in all their finery, with plumed hats, blue coats, and cloaks and waistcoats covered in cloth of gold, many of the men wearing the medals of the noble orders they belonged to. Unlike the tiers état, the nobles were allowed to carry swords. The clergy’s 291 delegates came next, and were divided between simply dressed parish priests and the high clergy in their surplices and capes, with pride of place given to the venerable 76-year-old Archbishop (and delegate) of Rouen, Dominique de la Rochefoucauld, in his purple robes.
Next came non-delegates, headed by priests from Paris and Versailles who had been invited to give their blessing to the occasion. This was Louis XVI’s own idea – on 29 April he had written to the Archbishop of Paris saying that he wanted to ‘turn towards God to ask for his assistance and his celestial favour at this great and remarkable assembly of the États généraux’, and asking the archbishop to bring along the Holy Sacrament. Louis needed all the help he could get. So on 4 May, everyone saw the Archbishop of Paris solemnly carrying the Holy Sacrament, and sheltering beneath an awning carried by Louis XVI’s brothers Charles and Louis Stanislas, and Charles’s sons, 13-year-old Louis Antoine and Charles Ferdinand, aged only 11.
Finally it was the turn of the royal couple. Louis XVI had refused the distinction of having his own awning, and walked unshaded, his gold cloak and jewel-encrusted coat glittering in the sun, along with a hat featuring a huge 140-carat diamond called le Régent that both Louis XV and XVI had worn at their coronation, and which Marie-Antoinette had since requisitioned as part of her finery. Now it was back where it belonged.
Next to Louis XVI in the procession came Marie-Antoinette, her silver dress spangled with diamonds and her hair decorated with crown imperials – large, lily-like flowers that are often cultivated because they keep moles away.
According to Félix d’Hézecques, the crowd’s sympathies were made very obvious. The tiers état were greeted by loud applause that stopped abruptly when the nobles appeared. The only high-ranking delegate to attract any cheers was the self-styled liberal, Louis Philippe, who had decided to parade as part of the cortège of swordless tiers état delegates rather than with the royal family (where he might have been asked to help carry the archbishop’s awning). Relative silence also greeted the arrival of the clergy, and then, finally, came Louis XVI who ‘received a few marks of affection’ – a very muted phrase which suggests that Hézecques was shocked by the lack of public enthusiasm for the King. Apparently there were no shouts at all of ‘Vive la Reine!’ Marie-Antoinette was greeted with stony silence, or even hissing. She was definitely out of favour.
Apart from Louis Philippe, the bishops and the royal couple, the most noticeable individual in the procession was 51-year-old Michel Gérard from Rennes in Brittany, the only peasant delegate, who chose to parade in his working clothes. The causes he had come to defend were an abolition of the tax on distillers of homemade alcohol and a pay rise for parish priests. He was the only tiers état delegate whom Louis XVI had gone to greet personally, an apparently spontaneous and yet hugely symbolic meeting of the highest and lowest members of the social pecking order at the États généraux. It was another sign of the King’s almost naive attempt to treat these proceedings as a momentous, yet even-handed, coming-together of the different groups that made up the nation.
The route of the procession led its members two kilometres or so to another church, the cathedral of Saint Louis, where the delegates heard a rousing sermon from the Bishop of Nancy, Anne-Louis-Henri de la Fare. He was a duke, but he believed that the Church should bear its share of the country’s financial burdens. He gave a speech contrasting this show of wealth and luxury with the abject living conditions of the peasantry. It apparently sent Louis XVI to sleep, but he was awoken by a thunderous round of applause that shook the more reverential believers in the cathedral – it was the first time anyone had ever clapped a sermon there. Hézecques called the applause a ‘lack of respect for the Divinity’ and ‘the first blow of the axe to the altar’.
The actual opening of the États généraux the next day was no less disrespectful of traditions. It began in an orderly enough fashion, with the delegates taking their places in the debating chamber that had been set up in the Menus-Plaisirs, the rather austere set of buildings that had previously been home to Louis XVI’s party accessories. This was where the 1787 Assemblée des notables had taken place.
It could be said, though, that returning there was something of a diplomatic gaffe. The Assemblée des notables had been a much smaller gathering. And two years earlier, the relatively modest, improvised setting had almost been a gesture of humility – the King and his notables did not need to meet in palatial surroundings. Now, though, commoners were coming to debate in Versailles. It might have been more tactful to house them in grander surroundings – the Grand Trianon, for example, where Louis XIV used to hold ministerial get-togethers. But that would have meant inviting all the delegates into the palace grounds, a potentially threatening move. The basic problem was, of course, that France had no building for its elected representatives – for the simple reason that it had had no elected representatives.
Paintings show that the debating chamber set up in the Menus-Plaisirs was a vast hall packed with delegates, and it was apparently hard to make oneself heard unless one spoke with a clear, firm voice. On a raised platform at the top of the room stood a throne, under a violet canopy adorned with golden fleurs-de-lys. The tiers état delegates were seated in front of the throne, in the centre of the room. Along the wall to the left of the throne were the nobility, and opposite them, the clergy.
When Louis XVI and his family came to take their places on the royal stage, all of them dressed in full regalia to impress on everyone the solemnity of the occasion, Louis noticed that his cousin, Louis Philippe, was sitting out in the chamber, having now joined the noble delegates. The King sent a message asking him to sit with his family. Louis Philippe, typically, refused. The revolt had begun before a single speech had been given.
Louis XVI then welcomed the delegates, saying (by all accounts in a clear, firm voice) that ‘the day that my heart has awaited for so long has arrived’, repeating his old idea that taxes were felt harshly because of their ‘unequal distribution’, and recognizing that ‘minds are agitated, but an assembly of the representatives of the nation will no doubt heed the counsel of wisdom and prudence’. He ended with a wish that ‘a happy harmony may reign in this assembly, and that this time may be forever remembered as one of happiness and prosperity for the Kingdom’.
As he spoke, a ray of sunlight shone through the skylights in the ceiling and lit up the King’s face. According to Hézecques, this ‘inspired a sentiment of profound veneration in all generous hearts’ (and especially the superstitious ones, it is tempting to add). In any case, the speech seemed to unite the room for an instant, and Louis XVI received a hearty ovation.
This was, however, one of the last moments of harmony that the monarchy would enjoy. Louis invited Necker to stand up and outline his proposals on how to stabilize the nation’s finances without overtaxing the poor, and the Swiss financier killed off all the goodwill that the King’s short speech had earned him by pulling a ream of paper out of his pocket and rambling on in characteristically absurd detail for one and a half hours.
When Necker’s voice gave out with the effort of making himself heard, he got a doctor to read the rest of his text – for another hour. What was worse, he seemed to be offering nothing more than a watered-down version of his earlier, radical plans to democratize taxes and voting, with a bottom line that what he needed was 56 million livres to pay off the national debt and cure the country’s problems.
This was exactly what the delegates did not want to hear. At a time when politics had been distilled into impatient three-line demands like the introduction to Sieyès’s Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? and when more than 1,000 delegates had come to Versailles armed with their cahiers of complaints and reforms, Necker’s verbiage made it sound as though nothing was ever going to change.
As the first day’s session came to an end with no concrete signs that progress was going to be made, it had become a virtual certainty that pent-up frustrations were about to explode.
From now on, things moved very quickly. Instead of Louis XVI leading the combined delegates in ‘happy harmony’ to decisions marked by ‘wisdom and prudence’, the tiers état made its bid for power.
The plan was for each estate to read its cahiers de doléances individually, then come together for plenary sessions at which issues would be decided according to how each estate voted – that is, the nobles and the clergy could join to outvote the tiers état by two estates to one.
However, the tiers état had begun their debates early. They had already decided to oppose the usual practice whereby commoners had to kneel when they addressed the King, and Paris delegates had proposed a motion that ‘in all political societies, all men are equal’ (and, more worryingly in the light of subsequent events, ‘the will of everyone shapes the law; public force ensures its execution’). With this spirit of defiance in the air, they were keen to impose their majority, and they moved into the main chamber, calling for the others to join them there, to form a single house with one delegate, one vote. Predictably, both the nobles and the clergy voted not to do so (though by no means unanimously – in a bizarre coincidence, exactly 114 voters from each of the two estates wanted to go and join the tiers état).
While delegates from each section of the population carried on talking to themselves, with the tiers état becoming increasingly demanding, tragedy struck Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Their seven-year-old son Louis Joseph, the heir to the throne, died. He had been ill for a long time, with (amongst other things) tuberculosis, curvature of the spine and unidentified fevers. He had watched the procession of the delegates from a crib set up on a balcony of the palace of Versailles, waving feebly as his parents passed. After the ceremony, with his condition worsening, he had been sent to the supposedly healthy air of a royal château in the nearby forest of Meudon, where Louis XVI had been riding the ten kilometres to visit him almost every day. He had even gone there immediately after the opening of the États généraux on 5 May. The boy died at one in the morning on 4 June. It must have seemed like a grim omen of what was to come for the monarchy. Louis took mass in private that day, and saw only his immediate entourage. He also asked for audiences with delegates to be postponed for a few days, but the tiers état refused, prompting him to ask them: ‘Are there no fathers in this assembly?’
Sieyès, the author of Qu’est-ce le tiers état?, decided that his fellow commoners had waited long enough, and proposed an ultimatum. The tiers état would vote on a new power structure, with or without the other two estates. He called for rebel nobles and clergymen to join the tiers état and agree that from now on, all debates would be decided on a one-man, one-vote basis, by a single assembly instead of the three estates. A few reforming clergymen broke ranks, but it was obvious that the bishops and the nobles weren’t going to give up their privileges, so the commoners went ahead.
The only real question was what to call their new, single house of parliament. Sieyès suggested ‘Assembly of known and verified representatives of the French nation’. A 30-year-old-lawyer called Jean-Joseph Mounier, the delegate who had been sent to ask the clergy to join the debate, had a slightly different suggestion: ‘Legitimate assembly of representatives of the majority of the nation, acting in the absence of the minority parties’. Fortunately for posterity, the representatives plumped for the much shorter ‘Assemblée nationale’, which is what the lower house of the French parliament is called today.fn4
Despite the delegates’ defiance, the creation of the Assemblée nationale was not an anti-monarchistic move. The delegates invented an oath for themselves, which began very conventionally: ‘We swear to God, to the King and to the Country to fulfil with zeal the functions that we have been given.’ (They could have added ‘by ourselves’.)
On 20 June, three days after their oath, the members of the new Assemblée nationale arrived to find guards posted in front of locked doors. Foolishly, Louis XVI had reacted by shutting the Menus-Plaisirs. Delegates were told that the building had to be prepared for the next session that the King was going to attend in person. As an excuse, this was about as believable as saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t vote for tax reform because my arm hurts.’
It seems hard to fathom. Louis XVI, the man who had invited free speech by calling for his people to fill whole books with their complaints and demands, seriously thought that he could silence dissent by denying the delegates a debating chamber. Did he honestly believe that closed doors meant closed mouths? If so, it was a measure both of his naivety and his isolation.
Louis XVI seems to have believed that everyone would simply get together at the États généraux and calmly agree sensible reforms that he would then implement. He apparently had no inkling that the tiers état would come to Versailles intending to scrap their country’s law-making process and take power.
Perhaps the biggest problem was that Louis was also being counselled by a Swiss economist who thought that politics was about tables of profit and loss, as well as a gaggle of noble and royal ‘advisors’ (including his disgruntled wife) who were urging him to show these uppity commoners who was boss.
Sadly, there was no far-sighted politician to advise Louis to go to the new Assemblée and shout, ‘Power to the people!’ If he had openly declared his support for the tiers état, they would probably have carried him to the throne and sworn him in as their spiritual leader.
Louis XVI, though, was not following events closely enough to understand what was going on. Almost every day, he left Versailles, either to visit his son or to go deer hunting, or both – his diary for 3 June read: ‘To Meudon on horseback at 4.30 a.m., return by carriage at 10, hunted deer at Marly’. In the first weeks of the États généraux the whole town of Versailles was in uproar, with new political pamphlets appearing every day (Hézecques was horrified to see servants reading them while they stood on duty), but Louis XVI was physically absent half the time, and when present, he often shut himself away (especially just after his son’s death and funeral – which took place on the thirteenth).
He may not have realized it, but he had now lost all hold on the reins of power and was slowly but surely toppling from the saddle of monarchy.
With their doors closed, the rebel delegates needed a new debating chamber. One of them had an idea. This was a Parisian doctor called Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who, ironically considering the tool that would later be named after him, had long been a vocal advocate of ‘one vote per head’. He suggested going to meet in an indoor tennis court.
This was an interesting choice. The court, known as the salle du Jeu de paume, a name dating from when tennis was played with the palm of one’s hand, was tucked away down a side street just a few yards outside the palace fences. The rebel delegates were going to be moving very close to the heart of royal power. Also, the room, although very high-ceilinged, was tiny – little bigger than a modern tennis court. Today, it is open to visitors, and if there are 50 tourists inside, peacefully milling about, it feels full. Guillotin was proposing that 500-odd vociferous delegates would be crammed in there. Even more if nobles and members of the clergy joined them.
Too bad for the town’s tennis players – Guillotin was asked to go and prepare the empty room. Being a doctor, he decided on a layout with seats in a semi-circle facing a table, like a public dissection – an apt metaphor for what the delegates were planning to do to the process of government.
There, in the packed, stuffy room, its walls painted black so that players could see the tennis ball more clearly, the delegates swore a famous oath, ‘le serment du Jeu de paume’, vowing ‘never to separate, and to meet wherever circumstances demand, until the constitution of the Kingdom is established and consolidated on firm foundations’.
But even now, they were not planning to do away with Louis XVI. The oath (which was mainly written by the above-mentioned Sieyès and Mounier) began: ‘The National Assembly, considering itself summoned to write the Kingdom’s constitution, re-establish public order and uphold the true principles of the monarchy …’ And as we all know, the first principle of monarchy is to have a monarch.
On 23 June, Louis XVI made one more half-hearted attempt to prop up the three estates system, apparently because he simply wanted to impose his authority. He went to the freshly prepared Menus-Plaisirs and gave a speech to a combined session of the nobles, clergy and commoners. First he expressed his impatience that no concrete measures to improve the daily life of the people had been decided – ‘a perfect agreement should have been born out of simple love for the country, yet a disastrous division is sowing alarm in everyone’s minds.’ In other words, all they had done for almost two months was argue about voting rights, when the people wanted action. This much was true.
He then ordered that a paper should be read out: ‘The King’s Intentions’. In this, he promised to let the États généraux establish fairer taxes, to guarantee free speech, put an end to all elements of feudal law, and reform the clergy as long as the central tenets of religion remained intact. It was more or less exactly what the commoners were demanding. But his language was out of date. Jean Sylvain Bailly, a Parisian astronomer and mathematician, and the tiers état delegate who had been elected president of the Assemblée nationale, noted in his memoirs that Louis used phrases like ‘the King wishes it’ and ‘the good deeds of the King towards his people’, when most of the delegates were now talking about their own rights.
The conclusion to ‘The King’s Intentions’ was almost defiant. Louis informed delegates that ‘knowing your cahiers, and the perfect agreement between the general wishes of the people and my benevolent intentions … I will march towards the goal that I wish to attain, with all the courage and firmness that it inspires in me.’ It sounded like a threat – coming from the least threatening man in the room.
At the end of the session, Louis told the assembly: ‘I order you, Messieurs, to separate immediately, and to go tomorrow morning to the chambers that have been assigned to each of your estates so that you can recommence discussions.’
Louis XVI left, and the nobles followed him, as did the bishops. But the commoners and members of the lower clergy stayed put. Even so, workers began removing seats, and a 27-year-old aristocrat called Henri-Évrard de Dreux-Brézé, who had inherited the job of Royal Master of Ceremonies from his father, asked Bailly whether he had heard the King’s order to leave the room.
Bailly replied that he could not disband the Assemblée before it had debated what it had just heard. He is usually quoted as telling young Dreux-Brézé: ‘The assembled nation cannot receive orders.’ But Bailly himself stressed in his memoirs that ‘I respected the King too much to give such a reply’, and that what he actually said was: ‘Monsieur, the assembly is adjourned after the royal session, and I cannot disband it until it has deliberated on that.’
At this point, another delegate, Honoré Gabriel de Mirabeau, waded in. He was a 40-year-old aristocrat who, according to his own father, was ‘as ugly as Satan’s son’ (he had a giant head and a complexion ravaged by smallpox), and who had been imprisoned at his father’s request for debt and eloping with another man’s wife. These imprisonments by lettre de cachet (royal seal) had predictably turned Mirabeau against royalty. He had tried to get himself elected as a noble delegate, but they had rejected him, so he had joined the tiers état, for whom he now considered himself a mouthpiece, thereby ironically proving the aristocrats’ arrogant belief that they knew what was best for the common people. Mirabeau would later become a turncoat and a secret advisor to Louis XVI, while remaining a parliamentarian and claiming to support the Revolution.
After Bailly had given his measured reply to Dreux-Brézé, Mirabeau bellowed something along the lines of: ‘Tell those who sent you that bayonets have no power against the will of the people!’
In his memoirs, Bailly noted disapprovingly that ‘many have approved this reply, but it wasn’t a reply. It was an aside that he should not have made … Had anyone talked about bayonets? Had anyone threatened force? Had Monsieur de Brézé uttered any threat at all? No.’
The true commoner Bailly was respectful of due process, polite and cool-headed, a worthy leader of the new National Assembly. Hardly surprising that he would be silenced by the guillotine in 1791.
Dreux-Brézé went to Louis to tell him what had just happened, to which Louis replied with a rare bout of swearing: ‘Well, if they don’t want to leave, then fuck it, let them stay!’fn5
After this failed showdown, some of the nobles decided to join the National Assembly – among them was, of course, the opportunistic Louis Philippe. Meanwhile, in the streets of Versailles, delegates who were known to be against unifying the three estates were insulted or attacked. Arthur Young reports that the Bishop of Beauvais had a stone thrown at his head; the Archbishop of Paris had to change lodgings after all his windows were broken; and the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld was ‘hissed and booed’ wherever he went.
Louis XVI realized that matters had got beyond his control and on 27 June 1789 (another day on which he noted ‘Rien’ in his diary), he surrendered completely and ordered the remaining clergy and nobles to unite with the others.
On 9 July, the delegates confirmed the status of the National Assembly, and renamed it the Assemblée nationale constituante, since its purpose was to write a new constitution (although in everyday speech it was still usually referred to as the Assemblée nationale, or just Assemblée). The lawyer Mounier presented a long theoretical paper on what constituted a constitution, the key phrase of which was: ‘For a constitution to be good, it must be founded on human rights.’ (Though, of course, Mounier wrote ‘the rights of men’.) This was the idea that would lead a month later to the groundbreaking Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (citizen) for which the French Revolution is famous.
Incidentally, it is often forgotten that both this new constitution and the declaration of human rights were conceived from a monarchistic point of view. Mounier wrote in his paper that:
A constitution that would precisely determine the rights of the monarch and those of the nation would be as useful to the King as it would be to our fellow citizens. He wants his subjects to be happy; he will benefit from their happiness; and when he acts in the name of the laws that he will have agreed with the representatives of his people, then no organization, no individual, whatever their rank and wealth, will dare to oppose his power. The King’s lot will be a thousand times more glorious than that of the most absolute despot.
Radical revolutionaries would argue that this was a half-hearted proposal designed to flatter and convince Louis XVI, or that Mounier should have gone the whole nine metres and suggested abolishing the monarchy. But as we have seen from the cahiers de doléances, a republic was not what most French people wanted. They wanted a fairer society overseen by a monarch. Mounier was simply respecting the majority view.
Debates about the wording of this new constitution would go on for two more years, long after the storming of the Bastille, but when it was finally voted through in 1791, it was a document designed to set up a constitutional monarchy, with Louis XVI at its head, and with his own head still very much in place.fn6
To sum up, by 9 July 1789, five days before the violent events that are commemorated today as the official start of the Revolution, France had a (more or less) democratically elected parliament, with a majority of non-aristocratic, non-clerical members. The commoners had finally managed to wrest power away from the rich, self-serving magistrates who had resisted all the democratic reforms that both Louis XV and Louis XVI had tried to impose on them. The members of the new Assemblée nationale constituante were about to vote on fair taxes, equal representation, free speech and an end to the abuses of privilege, while maintaining a monarchy. Everyone could now calm down and get on with the practical reforms that the country so urgently needed.
And as Bailly had said, they had achieved all this without anyone reaching for their bayonet – indeed, he admitted in his memoirs that at one point armed guards were on their way to oust the delegates from the Menus-Plaisirs, but they had been recalled, presumably by the King. Louis XVI clearly did not want violence in Versailles. In fact, the only fatality during the États généraux had been one delegate who died of apoplexy just before the first debate.
A revolution of sorts had been enacted, bloodlessly. As the French say when they are happy about the result of something, ‘Que demande le peuple?’ What more could the people ask for?
Well, that was precisely the problem…