AS DRAMATIC AS THE RESISTANCE OF THE PARIS JUDGES MAY HAVE BEEN, it was the reactions of the rest of the population to the court reform plan that were more indicative of events to come. The most drastic response was not long in coming. On June 7, 1788, in the mountain-ringed city of Grenoble, the capital of the southeastern province of Dauphiné and home of the regional parlement, wrote one historian, “the alarm bells sounded from all sides, the town’s gates were closed and nailed shut.” Soldiers “opened fire on the people and charged them with bayonets and sabers.… The people tore up parts of the streets and armed themselves with the stones. They climbed up on the roofs and used tiles and paving stones to drive the troops away.”1
Grenoble’s “Day of the Tiles” was the first outbreak of revolutionary political violence in France—the first moment when the population rose up and overwhelmed the authorities. The royal commander’s report left no doubt about the gravity of the situation. “The people… [were] out of control.… The countryside joined in, peasants came from all over, armed with axes, pitchforks and guns,” he wrote. His own residence and office had been overrun and looted, and he decided he had no choice but to release the parlementary judges he had been ordered to arrest. He then allowed them to reoccupy their palace.2
The Day of the Tiles and the protests against the Brienne-Lamoignon court reform in other parts of the country showed a much greater determination to contest royal authority than the pamphlet campaigns and lawyers’ strikes that had greeted the Maupeou coup in 1771. Even more worrisome for the king and his ministers, however, was the chain of events that unfolded in Dauphiné in the weeks and months following the uprising in Grenoble. As the central government tried to carry through its program, resistance in that province prepared the way for a genuine revolution in France’s political institutions, one whose principles found an echo in many other parts of the country.
Brienne and Lamoignon had expected fierce resistance to their reform from regional capitals such as Grenoble that were the seats of parlements, but they had assumed they would find support from the population at large, to whom they promised speedier and less expensive judicial procedures. Events in Dauphiné quickly demonstrated that parlementary rhetoric against “ministerial despotism,” the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment, the example of the American Revolution, and government ministers’ own criticisms of the deficiencies of the monarchy were not so much trickling as pouring down to people of all classes. In particular, the Day of the Tiles showed that the lower classes, the overwhelming majority of the population, could be mobilized in a political cause even if it was not directly linked to the price of bread and other immediate concerns. Brienne and Lamoignon had not imagined that peasants might take up their pitchforks to support privileged judges and educated lawyers.
Just as they had not anticipated that peasants might intervene in a constitutional dispute, the ministers had not imagined that commoners might displace members of the privileged classes as leaders of a political movement. That happened for the first time in Dauphiné, where even local nobles accepted the program articulated by the local judge Jean-Joseph Mounier, a typical successful member of France’s Third Estate. The son of a cloth merchant, Mounier was just twenty-nine years old at the time of the Day of the Tiles. Like so many lawyers, he admired the British government, with its balance of powers and its structure that promoted cooperation between aristocrats and the better-off members of the rest of the population. Mounier’s special gift, in the summer of 1788, was his ability to see how to turn the anger at absolutism that had boiled over in Grenoble into an organized movement to transform France into a constitutional monarchy.
Just a week after the Day of the Tiles, Mounier helped convene a meeting of local officials in Grenoble that set in motion a genuine local revolution. The meeting’s participants condensed political ideas that had been germinating for several decades into a manifesto announcing that “taxes can only be legally imposed with the consent of the population, united in a national assembly of freely elected representatives.” To make this abstract principle a reality, they called for an assembly of representatives from the whole province of Dauphiné. This proposal openly defied the royal government, which had not authorized any such initiative. Mounier and his allies foreshadowed the passions of the Revolution when they described their opponents as “traitors to the country” and claimed for themselves the label of “patriots.”3
The provincial assembly Mounier and his supporters advocated met a month later in the small mountain town of Vizille, outside of Grenoble, now the home of the national museum dedicated to the French Revolution. Mounier had worked carefully to get representatives of the two privileged orders, the clergy and the nobility, to cooperate with spokesmen for the Third Estate like himself and his even younger colleague Antoine Barnave, another future revolutionary leader. The Vizille assembly adopted resolutions proclaiming that “the law should be the expression of the general will,” words that evoked Rousseau’s Social Contract and that would find their way into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen a year later.4 The most influential aspect of the assembly’s resolutions was their proposal to reconstitute Dauphiné’s provincial estates. The Vizille delegates proposed that the three estates of the province—clergy, nobles, and commoners—continue to elect deputies separately, but they called for the “doubling” of the Third Estate’s allotment: the latter would have twice as many deputies as the other orders, so that the assembly as a whole would be evenly divided between the privileged groups and the commoners. Instead of meeting as three separate bodies, all the members of the estates would form one assembly and vote “by head,” so that majority rule would prevail.
The plan for the Dauphiné estates was an ingenious attempt to lay out a path by which France could make the transition from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional system without setting off a dangerous social upheaval. The proposal for the “doubling of the Third” in the provincial estates was meant to satisfy demands for a greater public role for the more educated and wealthier members of the bourgeoisie, even though the clergy and the nobility would still have an influence out of proportion to their numbers. The plan assumed that the issues uniting members of all three estates, particularly their opposition to arbitrary royal power, would outweigh the matters on which they might disagree. While the Vizille resolutions stressed the historic rights of the province, the delegates had no intention of breaking up the kingdom. In response to letters from like-minded reformers in the southwestern province of Béarn who were also trying to revive their local estates, the Dauphinois insisted that “we should see our fatherland in the whole of France.”5
The resistance to the court reform plan was not limited to Dauphiné. Assembled to vote on their annual “free gift” to the government, representatives of the Catholic clergy denounced the proposed changes in the “ancient constitution” and blamed “the errors of that rash philosophy which seems to have been trying for so long to give new laws to the world.” In Brittany, the province’s nobles organized a network that flooded the province with pamphlets against the reforms. From the far-off Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, where the government had cracked down on the island’s equivalent of the parlement by abolishing the Conseil supérieur (Superior Council) of the main port city, Cap Français, in 1787, denunciations of “ministerial despotism” swelled the chorus of complaints. The polemics inspired by the crisis had a profound impact on those who read the published tracts. When Madame Roland, the brilliant daughter of a Paris artisan, now married to an older man devoted to the cause of reform, declaimed one tract aloud, she found herself “sounding much like one possessed,” she wrote, adding, “There is stuff to fill the chest of a stentor and to bring down the ceilings.”6
Brienne had hoped that the elements of “philosophy” incorporated in the reforms would win support, and that they would drive the king to ally with members of the Third Estate. “Since the nobility and the clergy abandon the king, who is their natural protector,” he told one confidant, “he must throw himself into the arms of the commons and use them to crush the other two.” Even many of those who sympathized with the spirit of Brienne’s measures still opposed the use of the king’s absolute power to force them through, however. As one lawyer wrote, “there are now three parties in the realm and in Paris: Royalists, Parlementaires, and Nationals.” And “the last two [were] making common cause,” even though the “Nationals” had no real love for the judges.7
Looming over the debate about the court-reform plan was the ongoing government financial crisis. As the failure of the Assembly of Notables and the resistance of the parlements had shown, no one wanted to take responsibility for helping the government raise taxes. The only solution, as both Brienne and his opponents recognized, was to get the consent of a genuinely representative assembly, one whose authority to make laws and impose taxes could not be contested. Within the framework of the French monarchy, this meant summoning the Estates General, and inviting all of the king’s subjects, or at least the men among them, to express their “grievances” and to elect representatives who would debate governmental policy. When Brienne insisted that the king approve the convening of the Estates, Louis XVI exclaimed, “What, Archbishop, you must think we are lost!… They might overturn the state and the monarchy.”8
Despite the king’s fears, on July 5, 1788, Brienne announced the drastic step of immediately calling the Estates General. A proclamation issued the next day had the king announce, “It is in the midst of the Estates that I wish, in order to assure forever the liberty and happiness of my people, to consummate the great work I have begun of regenerating the kingdom.” Since the last meeting of the Estates General had been in 1614–1615, there was no institutional memory of how deputies should be chosen and what procedures they should follow. Brienne suspended political censorship, inviting anyone who wished to voice an opinion on these questions to do so, a move that unleashed a torrent of new pamphlets. He may well have hoped to delay the actual meeting of the body for as long as he could, and even to demonstrate that consensus on these issues could not be achieved; an observer at the time complained that “he raised endless questions designed to divide the people, to persuade us that holding the Estates had become almost impossible.”9 In the meantime, he also continued to try to cope with the financial crisis through new loans, hoping to buy time and perhaps make the summoning of the Estates General unnecessary.
Unfortunately for Brienne, the monarchy’s credit was no longer sufficient to give him the time he hoped for. By the beginning of August 1788, the royal treasury was virtually empty, and no bankers were willing to lend the government more money. On August 16, Brienne announced that the government would have to pay its obligations by printing paper treasury notes that would be redeemed at some future date. The measure was, in effect, a declaration of bankruptcy. “The alarm was universal,” the journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan wrote. “The public funds dropped sharply; many people gave up their carriages and some of their domestics.… The financial distress was at its peak; only four hundred thousand livres in the royal treasury.”10 There was no choice except to call in the one man who always seemed able to get bankers to lend: Jacques Necker, the finance minister Louis XVI had dismissed seven years earlier.
On his way to Paris the day after the announcement, one traveler “heard the cries of happiness of the inhabitants in all the small towns and villages” as the news of Necker’s appointment spread.11 Through his connections with the world of finance, Necker obtained the short-term loans Brienne had been unable to arrange. The justice minister Lamoignon was dismissed shortly afterward and Necker reinstated the parlements, leaving it up to the Estates General to decide whether to make reforms to the court system. Initially, Necker wanted to convene that assembly as quickly as possible, but it soon became apparent that the effort would take time: there were too many difficult questions about how the elections should be organized to make a date earlier than May possible. In places where movements like the one in Dauphiné to restore or reinvigorate provincial estates had blocked the Notables’ plans to create provincial assemblies, Necker gave in to local demands, further eroding the authority of the royal government.
In addition to dealing with financial and political issues, Necker also had to confront the most serious social and economic crisis France had experienced since the last years of Louis XIV’s reign—one even worse than 1775, the year of the flour war. The decade of the 1780s had been a hard one for the French population. After many years of increases, prices for crops began to fall around the start of the decade, just as landlords had started a widespread push to raise rents on leases that had been set years earlier on favorable terms for tenants. Landowners were in a strong bargaining position because of the continued growth of the population, which left more poor peasants competing for the chance to rent land; population growth also caused the subdivision of peasant landholdings, leaving many of them too small to support a family. These trends were exacerbated by a cycle of bad weather. In a country whose economy was so dependent on agriculture, the aftereffects of a string of bad years could not be easily overcome. As their income shrank, the peasant farmers who made up the overwhelming majority of the population cut back on their spending, hurting commerce and manufacturing even before Calonne’s 1786 free trade treaty with Britain flooded the country with cheap imported goods.
The year 1787 saw a successful harvest, allowing landowners to refill granaries that had been depleted. They also took advantage of the opportunity to export their crops, permission to do so being one of the reforms Calonne had proposed and that Brienne had implemented in June 1787. From the spring onward, unfortunately, 1788 was a disaster for much of the countryside. During the planting season, drought conditions prevailed. Summer brought devastating storms that ruined crops in wide areas. The worst of these, a pelting hailstorm that flattened wheat fields across northern France, struck on July 13, 1788. That was in the midst of the ongoing crisis over the court reforms, just a week after Brienne’s announcement of elections for the Estates General. The archbishop of Paris wrote that farmers’ losses “are so great, and their situation so deplorable that it has not been possible to overstate them.”12 One did not need to be an economic expert to foresee the consequences that would follow over the next twelve months. Grain would be in short supply, especially in northern France, where both the heavily populated rural areas and the insatiably hungry capital had to be fed. Bread prices would inevitably rise, provoking protests and outbreaks of violence against grain merchants and bakers. As consumers were forced to use most of their income for food, demand for other goods would fall, which would raise unemployment and force businesses into bankruptcy.
The local authorities who were normally expected to maintain order and ensure adequate supplies were in disarray. On August 17, 1788, the intendant of the province of Champagne in northeastern France wrote to Brienne describing the critical situation in the textile-manufacturing center of Troyes: “The journeymen and workers are beginning to grumble, and they are even putting up placards in which they threaten to burn down the merchants who refuse to buy.” But the intendant hesitated to act until he received instructions from the government, whose attention was completely absorbed by the financial crisis. In the meantime, tension in Troyes became so acute that the local officials “believed it necessary to establish day and night patrols in order to overawe the evil-minded.”13 By the time the intendant’s letter reached Versailles, Brienne, the minister to whom it had been addressed, was gone, leaving local officials with little clue about what they were supposed to do.
It was in these troubled circumstances that the preparations for the Estates General were carried out. Brienne’s lifting of censorship restrictions in early July unleashed a cacophony of opinions about how the Estates should be structured and what powers they ought to have. As soon as the judges of the Paris Parlement were allowed to resume their functions, they weighed in with a pronouncement meant to settle the debate. On September 25, 1788, the parlement decreed that the upcoming assembly should follow the “forms of 1614,” the procedures followed at the Estates’ last meeting. This meant that the three orders—the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate—would each have approximately the same number of deputies, and that each group would meet and vote separately. Unanimous support from all three would be needed to pass any laws or approve new taxes.
The judges provided no explanation of their ruling; most likely, they wanted to prevent the king and the ministers from setting their own rules for the assembly. But their intervention backfired badly. Everyone realized that the parlement’s decree would give the two privileged orders an ironclad veto against any significant reforms. Hopes for an increased political voice for the Third Estate would be crushed, even though the clergy and nobility seemed prepared to concede that they would pay the same taxes as commoners. As Mallet du Pan wrote, “the public debate has been transformed. Now the king, despotism, the constitution, have become secondary: it is a war between the Third Estate and the two other orders.” Madame Roland told a friend that the parlement had left the country with the choice of “vegetating sadly under the rod of one despot, or suffering under the iron yoke of several assembled despots.”14 Reluctant to clash openly with the parlement, Necker and the king decided to reconvene the Assembly of Notables and ask their advice on the procedures to be followed in the Estates General.
Alarmed by the spread of disorder and the radical ideas circulating in the country, the Second Assembly of Notables, which met from November 6 to December 12, 1788, took a far more conservative position on the questions presented to it than its predecessor. Liberal nobles such as Lafayette and the duc d’Orléans were outnumbered by a majority that firmly backed the Paris Parlement. Even as the Notables resisted demands for change, however, members of the Third Estate were becoming more vocal in demanding it. In assemblies in cities and even in some villages, resolutions were passed urging the “doubling of the Third” and equality of taxation. Members of social groups that had previously been content to leave politics to traditional elites now demanded to be heard. In the small town of Limoges, the 72 members who signed a resolution included 22 merchants, 16 lawyers and local officials, 27 representatives of the artisanal trades, and 4 peasants. In the larger southern city of Nîmes, 1,100 people participated in a public meeting.15
The province of Brittany, which, like Dauphiné, had maintained its traditional estates, became a battleground that showed how violent the conflict between the privileged groups and their opponents could become. The province had a large population of poor nobles who felt especially threatened by the increasingly wealthy merchants and lawyers of its towns, many of them beneficiaries of the growth of slave trading and overseas commerce. The Breton Estates were due to hold their annual meeting in December 1788. In early October, the municipal council of the provincial capital, Rennes, spoke out strongly for reforms in favor of the Third Estate similar to those that had been adopted in Dauphiné. The movement quickly spread to the other cities of the province; meanwhile, the nobles struck back with a resolution of their own opposing any changes to the provincial constitution. As the two camps hurled pamphlets at each other, local authorities also had to contend with a string of bread riots that affected most of the towns in the region.
Forced to choose between the intransigent Notables and an increasingly powerful movement of public opinion, Necker and the king tried to find a compromise. On December 27, they issued a decision. The Third Estate got its key demand: it would be allowed to elect some 600 deputies, twice as many as the other two orders. Necker also insisted that the Third Estate be allowed to elect deputies who were members of the clergy or the nobility. This provision opened the way for some liberal nobles and clergy to win seats they would otherwise have been denied by the members of their own order. Knowing that these decisions would anger members of the privileged orders, Necker optimistically assured them that “it will never enter the minds of the Third Estate to seek to diminish the prerogatives… of the first two orders.”16 Dodging the most controversial question, the royal announcement said nothing about whether the Estates General would meet as a single assembly with vote by head, or as three separate chambers, in which case the doubling of the Third would not enable them to outvote the other orders.
Diminishing the prerogatives of the privileged orders was precisely the aim of the most effective propagandist for the Third Estate, the abbé Emmanuel Sieyès. Like many sons of modest commoner families, Sieyès had studied for the priesthood more because it offered a secure career than out of any sense of religious vocation. For a decade prior to the Revolution, Sieyès was a canon and church administrator for the diocese of Chartres, home of France’s most famous medieval cathedral. In his free time, he devoted himself to studying political theory. Like so many of those who would become revolutionaries, he was frustrated to see less intelligent men promoted ahead of him because they had noble status. By 1788, he was ready to join the chorus of critics denouncing aristocratic privilege.
Sieyès’s polemical tract What Is the Third Estate? put the case against the privileged classes more strongly than any other prerevolutionary pamphlet. “The plan of this work is very simple,” Sieyès announced. “We have three questions to ask: 1st. What is the Third Estate? Everything. 2nd. What has it been in the political order up to now? Nothing. 3rd. What does it demand? To become something.” Members of the Third Estate performed all the useful work necessary for society to function, he said: they raised the crops, manufactured the necessities of life, and, like Sieyès himself in his church post, did the work for which nobles and church dignitaries claimed credit. The Third Estate, Sieyès wrote, “has… within itself all that is necessary to constitute a complete nation.” He emphasized the numerical disparity between the 25 million members of the Third Estate and “about 200,000 nobles or priests.” Despite their impressive titles, the nobility were nothing more than parasites living off the sweat of the commoners. “If the privileged order were abolished,” Sieyès wrote, “the nation would be not something less but something more.” The nation, he explained, was “a body of associates living under a common law and represented by the same legislature.” If the privileged orders did not accept these common laws, they thereby excluded themselves from membership in the nation.17
Pursuing the logic of his argument that the Third Estate constituted the true nation, Sieyès also insisted that it had the power to disregard all existing institutions. “If we lack a constitution we must make one; the nation alone has that right,” he announced. He did offer the holders of privileges a pathway to citizenship: if they were willing to give up all claims to special status and live under the same laws as everyone else, they could, as individuals, become members of the national community. As property-owners, the majority of them would still be better off than most of the population. But Sieyès insisted that any truly national legislature had to consist of only one chamber in which all votes would be counted equally. In contrast to more moderate Third Estate spokesmen, such as Jean-Joseph Mounier, Sieyès meant to defeat the nobility, not to reach a compromise with them. On the subject of the clergy, the group to which he himself belonged, Sieyès was less vehement. He included working parish clergy as part of the Third Estate, although he opposed giving the Church any special political representation.
Sieyès was one of a number of activists who belonged to the “Society of Thirty,” a loose network of radical reformers who came together in an attempt to make sure the elections to the Estates General would favor their ideas. The society’s membership was a mixture of two main groups: on the one hand, liberal nobles and clergy who were prepared to sacrifice the prerogatives of their order for what they saw as the greater good, and on the other, Third Estate figures eager to seize the opportunity to create a new society in which their talents would give them leading roles. Many members of the Society of Thirty also belonged to Brissot’s antislavery group, the Friends of the Blacks, and had developed their ideas about liberty and equality in its debates.
Although the propagandists of the Society of Thirty all shared certain objectives, they differed on the details. What they shared was a hostility to hereditary privilege, as well as a conviction that royal power needed to be put under constitutional control through the establishment of a representative legislature. Sieyès saw little role for the king, who would simply be the head of the government that would be established by the “constituent” or constitution-making assembly he hoped to see convened. Other patriot pamphleteers were willing to concede to the king a greater role, provided he committed himself to a new role as a constitutional monarch and allied himself with the Third Estate. Mirabeau, well aware of how the nobility and the Church had often opposed royal initiatives, promised that if he was elected to the Estates General, he would be “a zealous monarchist” who would work to “restore royal authority” at the expense of ministers and privileged groups. Only a few isolated individuals rejected the whole idea of remaking the French constitution. In his private journal, the marquis de Bombelles, a well-connected courtier, complained that “many of our friends are becoming crazy; anyone who raises his voice in favor of the old forms is dismissed out of hand.”18
The issues that would divide the country became increasingly clear as the assemblies that were to choose deputies for the Estates General began to convene in early 1789. Brittany remained a flash point. In January, when the Breton Estates met, fighting broke out in the streets of Rennes as domestic servants of the local nobles attacked bourgeois law students. Accounts written by Third Estate supporters denounced “the odious conspiracy of the nobility, this abominable race,” and complained that “the Third Estate is nothing, gets nothing, is left with exclusions, humiliations and tax burdens.”19 Third Estate groups from Nantes and other cities in the region hurried to the capital to support their colleagues, and the province nearly descended into civil war. In the end, the Breton nobles never did elect deputies to the Estates General, and the province’s Third Estate delegation was one of the most radical, bringing its experience of polarizing conflict to Versailles.
In most parts of France, the election process proceeded more smoothly. The rules laid down by the government allowed almost every adult male to take part in an assembly, but the regulations also underlined the distinctions in status that were fueling the debates about equality all over the country. Nobles holding fiefs—properties with seigneurial rights—could participate personally in their baillage assembly, although anoblis, individuals who had not inherited their status, found themselves assigned to the Third Estate. Whereas the rules for the nobility favored the group’s more privileged members, those for the order of the clergy had the reverse effect. All parish clergy—the priests, almost all originally commoners, who actually conducted services in churches—had the right to vote personally in the assemblies. They heavily outnumbered the bishops and other members of the church hierarchy, who were usually nobles. Government officials deliberately favored the lower clergy because, as one intendant put it, they were in a position to give “the most accurate picture of the needs and the misery of the people.” They also correctly assumed that the often underpaid parish priests would be more willing than their wealthy superiors to give up the Church’s tax immunity.20 Monks and nuns, who often came from noble families, were familiar targets of Enlightenment criticism and were thus limited to one representative per community.
Electoral procedures were more complex for the Third Estate than for either of the privileged orders. One reason was that the ranks of the Third Estate were far more numerous. In the countryside, assemblies were held in every parish. Although all male residents could attend, the need to draw up written cahiers de doléances, or statements of grievances, meant that the assemblies were usually dominated by the most literate. The parish assemblies compiled cahiers and chose delegates for a district assembly, which then sent delegates to the baillage assemblies. There, so-called general cahiers were drafted, and then deputies to the Estates General were finally chosen. In towns and cities, guild organizations held their own assemblies, which sometimes witnessed fights between guild masters and journeymen. A general assembly then chose the town’s representatives to the baillage assembly. Although almost all male members of the Third Estate had a chance to participate at some level, the multilayered nature of the process acted as a filter that favored the election of the most articulate and educated, especially members of the legal profession. Those finally chosen for the Estates General included no artisans and only one peasant, even though the peasantry made up the overwhelming majority of the population.
The thousands of cahiers drafted by the electoral assemblies constituted an extraordinary survey of public opinion, that phenomenon that had come to loom so large in the eighteenth century’s political thinking. There was a clear difference between the parish-level cahiers compiled in village and guild assemblies, which often highlighted concrete local issues, and the more general cahiers from the baillages, which sometimes turned into veritable treatises on political theory. The literate lawyers and others who gained influence as the electoral process moved from its initial stages to the baillage general assemblies unquestionably changed the tone of the Third Estate cahiers, but they did not simply ignore the concerns of the poor and less educated. A statistical analysis of the cahiers carried out in the late twentieth century convincingly showed that the lower-level cahiers reflected genuine peasant concerns, especially their hostility to the numerous seigneurial privileges that affected their daily lives. The clumsily written cahier of the parish of Longnes in the western province of Maine asked for the elimination of taxes on salt and foodstuffs, the ending of noble tax exemptions, and a ban on abuses benefiting the nobles, such as expensive road projects. The Longnes cahier also included requests for closer regulation of millers and harsher punishments for horse thieves. In the northern French village of Silly-le-Multien, the schoolteacher Pierre Delahaye noted with pleasure that the peasants had not hesitated to denounce the damage their local seigneur, the mighty prince de Conti, caused to their crops during his hunts.21
The general cahiers from the Third Estate added political and constitutional issues that were rarely mentioned at the village level: demands for elected provincial estates and regular meetings of the Estates General, legal protections for individual freedoms, the abolition of the lettres de cachet that Mirabeau had denounced, and the end of various forms of noble privileges. On constitutional matters, the cahiers of the nobility were often in tune with those of the Third Estate: four of the six most frequent demands in both sets of cahiers were the same, including the issues of taxation in general, the creation or revival of provincial estates, regular meetings of the Estates General, and a veto on taxation for that body. Both groups denounced censorship and infringements on individual liberty (such as the lettres de cachet).22 The clergy, too, joined in this critique of the principles and practices of royal absolutism: as Louis XVI had feared, the summoning of the Estates General revealed a generalized demand for representative government.
Where the Third Estate and the nobility differed most sharply was on the issue of noble privileges: both peasants and urban bourgeois elites were hostile to them, whereas nobles, although generally willing to accept equal taxation, defended their other privileges as “property” that deserved to be protected by law. Unlike the liberal nobles of Dauphiné, who had agreed that all their province’s deputies should be chosen in a single assembly of all three orders, those in the rest of the kingdom were generally unwilling to endorse voting by head in the upcoming Estates General, which they saw as a dangerous threat to their position. The intransigence of the nobility reflected the strong influence of the group’s more conservative provincial members. Issues such as the reservation of military officer posts for their sons and hunting rights mattered more to them than they did to the wealthy grandees at Versailles.
The clergy cahiers differed from those of the other two orders in a number of ways. The cahier of the clergy in the diocese of Digne, in Provence, wanted any issues involving religion that came up in the Estates General to be referred to a general council of the Church. The priests of Digne also wanted stricter policing of drinking establishments, “whose frequentation,” they noted, “is so pernicious to religion.” They wanted bans on gambling and on fairs on religious holidays, which often turned into raucous popular festivals. Rather than the freedom of the press sought by the other orders, the priests of Digne wanted an end to “the circulation of works against religion and good morals”; they also sought a promise that Protestant rights would still be limited. At the same time, however, their cahier called for social equality within the Church, where “benefices, dignities and ecclesiastical appointments should be acquired solely on merit.” Relatively few cahiers from any of the orders made any mention of slavery, but several cahiers from the clergy used explicitly religious arguments to denounce it. “In the eyes of religion the difference in skin colors cannot create any distinction among its children,” the clergy of Melun wrote.23
In addition to drafting cahiers, the assemblies had to choose deputies. The noble deputies came from the upper ranks of the aristocracy, starting at the top with the duc d’Orléans, a cousin of the king. They included a number of prominent liberals, such as Lafayette and the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who had been members of the Friends of the Blacks and the Society of Thirty. Reform-minded nobles, however, were outnumbered by conservatives, who intended to defend their hereditary privileges. More than four-fifths of the noble deputies had been military officers at some point in their lives and had therefore absorbed a respect for hierarchy and a concern with honor that set them apart from their colleagues from the other orders.24 The electoral regulations guaranteed that the deputies representing the clergy would be less aristocratic. Given the chance to outvote their hierarchical superiors in the election process, ordinary curés took advantage of their superiority in numbers; three-quarters of the clergy’s deputies came from their ranks. The parish priests included the largest group of deputies from genuinely humble social backgrounds, including several sons of artisans and peasants.
Among the 600 deputies from the Third Estate, the dominant groups were those with legal training: 218 of them had held positions as judges or magistrates, and an additional 181 identified themselves as lawyers. By definition, members of these two groups were educated and had a considerable investment in the idea of the law itself as the main instrument for structuring society. Sharing their educational background were several dozen doctors, professors, and men of letters. A few of these had distinguished themselves as pamphleteers during the previous years, but on the whole, men of letters were poorly represented in the assembly; Brissot, for instance, failed to win a seat. The same was true of manufacturers and merchants, cutting against the long-held tendency to regard the French Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution made in the interests of promoting a capitalist economy based on the free market. Only about 100 of the Third Estate’s deputies came from such professions. Most of the Third Estate deputies were economically well off and certainly richer than the peasants, artisans, and laborers who made up the overwhelming majority of the unprivileged population, and quite a few of them had made it to the borderline of noble status and had close relations with members of the aristocracy. They were men who had succeeded under the rules of the existing society, but many were also frustrated that their status meant that “all roads to advancement [were] barred,” as Antoine Barnave, one of the leaders of the Dauphiné delegation, lamented in his journal.25
The art of political campaigning was new to France in 1789, and it was considered unseemly for individuals to put themselves forward too brazenly. No one violated that precept more flagrantly than Mirabeau. Sure that his talents and his booming voice would make him a major figure, he was prepared to go to any lengths to make sure he would have a seat in the Estates General. He tried to secure a nomination from several different provinces and even negotiated with the wealthy colonists of Saint-Domingue, a possibility that fell through when he learned that he would have to own a plantation with at least fifty slaves in order to represent them. Frustrated by his efforts to win a seat among the nobles, Mirabeau finally turned to the Third Estate of his native Provence, boasting of his rejection by his own order and convincing the electors that, in spite of his aristocratic title, he would be “the man of public liberty, the man of the constitution.”26 He was triumphantly elected to represent the city of Aix.
Mirabeau was not the only one to pour his efforts into the pursuit of a deputy’s seat. In the northern French town of Arras, a young lawyer, Maximilien Robespierre, put himself forward as a spokesman for the common people. In doing so, he defied the local municipal officials, who had expected to be elected easily. To outmaneuver them, Robespierre and his allies had to prevail in four different local meetings, starting with the committee of the local lawyers and culminating with the municipal electoral assembly. By contrast, the marquis de Ferrières, who would represent his order in the district of Saumur, claimed that he was chosen “without having sought it, or foreseen it,” even though “several richer and more important persons worked hard to get themselves elected.” This was not because the contests among the privileged orders were less heated than those among the Third Estate: the nationally known mathematician and writer Condorcet complained that he was blocked by the nobility of Mantes because of opposition from “the aristocrats, the parlement judges, the plantation owners, zealous Catholics and half of the slave-traders.”27
As the elections proceeded, social unrest continued to rock the country. In late April, violence exploded in the working-class faubourg of Saint-Antoine in Paris when a rumor spread that a wealthy elector, the wallpaper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Reveillon, had said that workers’ wages were too high. A large crowd attacked his house in the Saint-Antoine, on the eastern side of the city. “They carried away everything they found, burned the papers, the wallpaper designs and even banknotes, devastated the gardens, cut down the trees,” the noble deputy Ferrières wrote to his wife. Elsewhere in the city, crowds “stopped everyone passing by, asked if they were from the Third Estate, and insulted or mistreated those who were nobles.”28 At least sixty rioters were killed; rumors at the time put the death toll much higher. Such outbreaks of violence were a warning that the deputies making their way to Versailles for the meeting of the Estates General would be under pressure not just to approve constitutional reforms, but to convince the mass of the population that something would be done to meet its immediate needs.
The anger that fueled the Reveillon riot was given political expression in a number of pamphlets whose authors claimed to speak for a “fourth estate” made up of those too poor to have had a voice in the electoral assemblies. One radical pamphlet claimed to be a “petition from 150,000 workers and artisans of Paris.” It complained that “one can hardly identify, among the 400 electors, four or five who, knowing our needs, our situation, and our sufferings, can take an informed interest in them.” This populist current found a particularly eloquent spokesman in the fictitious person of the Père Duchêne, a rough-hewn man of the people who was destined to play a major role in French life for the next ten years. This “gruff, ill-mannered, warm-hearted stove setter” had been invented as a character in a popular play, but now he was co-opted for a wider audience. Given a voice by pamphleteers, he was ready to denounce “the atrocious and criminal abuses that have enslaved and eaten away at us for so many centuries!” Duchêne was styled as a former sailor whose every other word was foutre (fuck) or bougre (bugger), and the idea of speaking directly to his social betters did not scare him. “If the king is there,” he proclaimed, “I’ll explain myself with even more assurance.” He demanded that the powerful elites respect “the poor man who works tirelessly to feed them, and whom they have the barbarous vanity to treat with disdain,” and he laid out a program for the Estates General that included an end to the luxury of the upper clergy, a reformed tax system that would hit the rich “without pity,” and laws that would “punish the selfish monopolists, the insatiable hoarders who stuff themselves with wealth at the expense of the indigent multitude.” Addressing the deputies, he cried out, “Let wheat be cheaper, and let the worker live.… Do something for the subsistence of the poor.… That is your first obligation.”29
The figure of the Père Duchêne, given voice in this case by an obscure writer named Antoine-François Lemaire, would be used by numerous journalists in the years to come to show that the common people were no longer asking for pity but instead had very real demands. In this case, he called for a repeal of Calonne’s free trade treaty with Britain and for the institution of a single method of capital punishment for all, regardless of their social standing. Such pleas would be a constant challenge to the wealthier and more educated elites who dominated the Estates General elections. Other pamphlets were similarly challenging. One, titled Remonstrances, Complaints and Grievances of French Women, challenged the claim of the Estates General to represent “the whole nation, when half and more of the Nation will not have seats there.” The author called for French women to form their own Estates General to put forward their demands.30
Over the course of the elections, millions of people had the unprecedented experience of taking part in open debates about the most fundamental aspects of their society. Even after the electoral assemblies finished their work, those who had participated in them remained mobilized. In many towns, committees of electors continued to meet, expecting to receive regular reports from the deputies they had chosen, and ready to remind them of the commitments they had made to push for specific reforms. Hopes were high, but so were fears. Would the king be willing to accept real limits on his power? Nobles worried about the future of their privileges, and clergy feared a backlash against the Church fueled by Enlightenment ideas. Most importantly, however, members of the Third Estate feared that the privileged orders would find a way to stop the movement for equality and ignore their pressing needs, despite the momentum they had gained in the months leading up to the opening of the Estates General. The propertied classes feared the anger of the common people, as expressed in outbreaks like the Reveillon riot and the other disturbances sweeping the country. To satisfy so many contradictory expectations and calm so many conflicting fears would be a monumental challenge.