ON MAY 4, 1789, THE DEPUTIES TO THE ESTATES GENERAL SOLEMNLY marched to the church of Saint Louis in Versailles to attend a service marking the opening of the assembly. “If you had seen the king, you would have said, ‘How good he is! How joyful he is!’” wrote Jean-François Gaultier de Biauzat, a Third Estate member.1 Just six weeks later, on June 20, he and the other deputies from that body found themselves locked out of their meeting hall by the king’s officials. They responded by taking a dramatic oath not to let any opposition, even that of the king, prevent them from creating a new constitution based on the principles of liberty and equality for France. By the beginning of July, the deputies had carried out a true revolution, claiming power for themselves in the name of the nation they represented. The king’s only chance to stop their movement was a resort to force, and the storming of the Bastille on July 14 would demonstrate that he no longer had the means to uphold the absolutist system he had been born to maintain.
Although the financial crisis had forced the king into summoning the Estates against his will, the pageantry surrounding its opening aimed to emphasize not only the authority of the monarchy but also that of the other institutions to which it was so closely tied, the Church and the nobility. The royal master of ceremonies notified the upper clergy that they were to appear in their most splendid ecclesiastical robes. Nobles were to wear cloaks with gold trim and “hats with white plumes in the style of Henri IV”; one noble deputy spent 1,300 livres on his costume. The Third Estate deputies, however, were forbidden to show off and told to purchase somber black cloaks. “The distinction in dress could give the idea that there will be others, either in the method of receiving the cahiers or in the counting of votes,” a disgruntled Third Estate deputy wrote.2
The commoners defied instructions to group themselves according to their home provinces and instead mingled with their new colleagues from other parts of the kingdom, a gesture that emphasized their claim to speak for a united French people. The huge crowd that lined the streets of Versailles to watch the elaborate parade used the occasion to make a statement of its own. The spectators reserved their most enthusiastic cheers for the simply dressed deputies, who truly “represented the nation,” as the Protestant pastor Rabaut Saint-Étienne, a Third Estate deputy, put it. There was an especially warm welcome for “père Gérard,” the one peasant deputy, a Breton farmer who wore his crudely tailored Sunday clothes. Among the deputies, Necker’s daughter, the brilliant young Madame de Staël, distinguished one man in particular: Mirabeau, whose “great head of hair stood out.” It helped him make the impression of “a power such as one imagined in a tribune of the people,” she wrote.3
The formal opening session, held on May 5, 1789, put the political and social hierarchy of the monarchy on full display. As the deputies took their seats in one of the grand halls of the palace, the Salle des Menus Plaisirs, Louis XVI looked down on them from his throne, with Marie-Antoinette seated to his left. Below the monarchs, on either side of a table reserved for the principal ministers, the deputies of the two privileged orders sat facing each other. At the far end of the hall, opposite the king, were the benches reserved for the representatives of the Third Estate. Around three sides of the hall, galleries allowed as many as two thousand spectators to watch the proceedings.
The staging of the session impressed the deputies, but the content did not. The king made only brief remarks. Necker, the finance minister, delivered the main speech, taking three hours to read an explanation of the government’s dire financial situation. The marquis de Ferrières, writing to his wife, said the oration was “much beneath what one had the right to expect from a man with such a great reputation.” He was careful not to say so to Madame de Staël, however, who was already poised to use her salon to exercise political influence. Necker wanted to avoid falling into the trap that had led to Calonne’s failure at the Assembly of Notables, that of seeming to withhold vital information from the deputies. Where he saw an opportunity, Necker tried to demonstrate his and the king’s sympathy for good causes. Toward the end of his speech, he denounced the suffering inflicted on the victims of the slave trade, whom “we stuff into the hold of a vessel in order to proceed under full sail to deliver them to the chains that await them,” and expressed the hope that France and Britain could work together to end this “barbarous trade.”4 What Necker’s speech completely lacked, however, was a plan of action for the deputies to debate, either on the slave trade or any other subject. Above all, he did not address the most pressing issue facing the deputies: whether to meet and vote by head or by order.
On the morning of May 6, when they arrived at the meeting hall, the Third Estate deputies immediately found themselves confronting a momentous decision. The clergy and the nobles were directed to separate rooms to begin verifying their credentials. If the Third Estate agreed to do likewise, it would be acquiescing to the idea that the Estates General consisted of three distinct chambers. Mirabeau immediately made his first decisive intervention: he convinced his colleagues that the only way to compel the clergy and nobility to accept voting by head in a single assembly was for the Third Estate to refuse to take any action in the absence of the deputies from the other orders.
This strategy was not without risks. As the stalemate continued, rumors spread that the king might declare the Estates General a failure and impose his own decrees to deal with the financial crisis. Few Third Estate deputies were genuinely eager for an outright confrontation with the clergy and the nobility, and many responded positively to efforts to negotiate some kind of compromise. The Third Estate delegation from Brittany, the province where hostilities between commoners and nobles had been most violent, led the opposition to such proposals. From the start of the meeting, the Breton deputies held regular meetings to agree on a common position in the debates. Their “Breton Club” soon attracted members from other provinces, particularly those where there had been conflicts during the elections, and began to take on the appearance of an organized faction.
As the stalemate dragged on, the six hundred Third Estate deputies, most of whom had known only a few other colleagues from their local district when they arrived, began to learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses. By May 19, when the Third Estate agreed to name representatives to meet with the other orders to seek a solution to the impasse, Adrien Duquesnoy was able to characterize almost all of them: “Rabaut de Saint-Étienne, ambitious, a writer of books, but they say he is moderate and wise… Le Chapelier, a very violent madman, an extremist Breton… Barnave, gilder of words without great ideas, fairly dangerous.” Mirabeau stood out: “This man is a ferocious beast, an enragé,” wrote Duquesnoy. “He speaks in convulsions, his face is contorted, he spits out his words in a fury.” Throughout the month of May, a clear majority of the Third Estate deputies continued to support the moderates. Not all the deputies from the privileged orders were bent on confrontation. At the beginning of June, Ferrières told his wife, “It doesn’t really matter to me, in the last analysis, whether we vote in common or separately.” Among the clergy, many of the parish priests rebelled against the hard line preached by their aristocratic superiors. Meanwhile, some Third Estate deputies were already talking openly about a unilateral move to break the deadlock. Despite his own personal doubts, as early as May 15 Duquesnoy had written, “I have no doubt that, before the end of the month, the Third will have decided to declare that it alone is the nation.”5
From the moment the Estates General opened, some deputies turned to the media to rouse public support. Mirabeau was at the forefront of this effort; conveniently enough, his mistress of the moment, Madame Lejay, owned a printing shop in Paris, and she was eager to help him launch a newspaper that promised to help pay for his exorbitant spending. Mirabeau’s sometime collaborator Brissot, the activist behind the Friends of the Blacks, saw newspapers as essential if the country was going to make reforms. With newspapers, said Brissot, “one can teach the same truth at the same moment to millions of men; through the press, they can discuss it without tumult, decide calmly and give their opinion.” When the government banned the two publicists’ initiatives, Mirabeau insisted that he had the right to publish what he called Lettres à mes commettants (Letters to my constituents). Many other deputies also sent regular reports back to their home communities, where some of them were printed and sold: Mirabeau’s innovation was to publish his letters in Paris and offer them to the public there as well as to his voters in Provence. More or less faithful versions of motions made in the sessions of the three orders were quickly rushed into print in Paris, and by the end of May, Gaultier de Biauzat was complaining that journalists were less concerned with accuracy than with filling their pages.6
These early newspapers were overwhelmingly supportive of the Third Estate. Étienne Le Hodey de Saultchevreuil, one of the first independent journalists, denounced the nobles’ “wall of pride that tries to halt the torrent of the general opinion.” He warned against a maneuver by the clerical deputies to lure the Third Estate into accepting the separate existence of its order: “It’s a sneaky trick, characteristic of the clergy. For more than eight hundred years, it has always behaved the same way.” Such editorial comments made journalists active participants in shaping public reactions, and the population responded eagerly to their efforts. The English traveler Arthur Young, who found himself in Paris in June 1789, observed the intense public interest in the proceedings and in anything published about them. “The business going forward at present in the pamphlet shops of Paris is incredible,” he wrote in early June. “Every hour produces something new. Thirteen came out today, sixteen yesterday, and ninety-two last week.”7
For those most engaged with the ongoing political struggle, reading printed accounts was not enough. They were impelled to express themselves directly. In the Palais-Royal, the main gathering place in Paris for newshounds, Young saw “expectant crowds… at the doors and windows” of coffeehouses, “listening à gorge déployé [with their mouths agape] to certain orators, who from chairs or tables harangue each his little audience.” He added, “The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined.” Those who could manage it—such as the young Parisian lawyer Camille Desmoulins, whose schoolmate Maximilien Robespierre was among the deputies—took public coaches to Versailles and crowded into the public gallery to listen to the Third Estate deputies. Young joined them. “The room is too large,” he grumbled. “None but stentorian lungs, or the finest clearest voices can be heard; however the very size of the apartment, which admits 2000 people, gave a dignity to the scene.” On the day he attended, he heard an all-star lineup that included an hour-long improvised oration by Mirabeau, delivered with “warmth, animation, and eloquence,” as well as speeches by Sieyès, Mounier, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, and Barnave. Young was, however, alarmed that “the spectators in the galleries are allowed to interfere in the debates by clapping their hands, and other noisy expressions of approbation.” Such manifestations of public opinion, he feared, could “overrule the debate and influence the deliberations.”8 What Young feared was just what many supporters of the Third Estate hoped for: that by bringing behavior familiar from public theaters into politics, ordinary people could influence the course of events.
Young’s visit to the Estates General happened to fall on a crucial day, June 15, 1789, as the Third Estate deputies were on the brink of moving from their parliamentary sit-down strike to a genuine revolution. Representatives of the privileged orders were prepared to yield their special tax privileges, but the majority of both the clergy and the nobility adamantly refused to give way on the question of their separate existence. In both of their chambers, however, a minority was prepared to accept union with the Third Estate, which gave Third Estate leaders hope that if they kept up the pressure long enough, they would eventually prevail. The conservative opposition counted on support from the royal court, where the king’s younger brother the comte d’Artois and the queen actively opposed any concessions and worked to undermine the position of Necker, who, for his part, still hoped to find a compromise that would lead to a British-style constitution. The royal family was distracted, however, by a domestic tragedy: on June 4, their oldest son died, making it difficult for the king to give public affairs his full attention.
By the second week of June, even moderates had become convinced that radical steps were necessary to end the deadlock with the privileged orders. At a meeting of the club formed by the Breton deputies, Sieyès offered a plan: the Third Estate would announce a roll call of all the deputies from the three orders and declare that, once this procedure was completed, the resulting assembly would be the sole representative of the nation. The Third Estate, Sieyès’s motion proclaimed, “cannot wait any longer for the deputies of the privileged classes without making itself guilty in the eyes of a nation which had an undoubted right to demand from it a better use of its time.”9 The sense of urgency reflected in Sieyès’s motion was heightened by the reports the deputies received daily about disorder in the provinces, where riots over bread prices continued. Peasants’ nerves were on edge because of rumors about “brigands” supposedly plotting to sabotage the crops in the fields before they could be harvested.
Sieyès’s motion had revolutionary implications. The Third Estate deputies were now claiming the power to take action without the consent of the representatives of the other two orders or the approval of the king. If their move succeeded, it would overturn the absolute monarchy and the centuries-old French social hierarchy. For the moment, however, the deputies were simply six hundred men who were, as they very well knew, going well beyond what the electoral assemblies that chose them had authorized. The noble deputies were not impressed: the marquis de Ferrières described the motion as “an insolent act.” The first sign that the Third Estate might nevertheless prevail came on June 13. The names of the Third Estate deputies from the province of Poitou had just been read off when three parish priests from that province who were deputies to the clergy entered the hall. “We come… led by the banner of reason, guided by love of the public good and the cry of our conscience, to place ourselves with our fellow citizens and our brothers,” the curé Jacques Jallet announced. The Journal des Etats Généraux helped readers share the emotions of the moment, telling them how “the room echoed with applause; everyone crowded around the curés; tears of joy flowed, they were embraced.”10
The debate that Arthur Young heard two days later marked a new stage in the unfolding of the parliamentary revolution Sieyès had launched: the issue was the name the deputies would give themselves now that they were no longer merely the representatives of one estate but instead of the whole population. The assembly rejected the cautious Mounier’s wordy proposal that they call themselves the “legitimate assembly of the representatives of the larger part of the nation, acting in the absence of the smaller part.” When Mirabeau suggested “representatives of the French people,” there were objections that the word “people” would confer too much influence on the lower classes, whom even he admitted were “not yet ready to understand the system of its rights and the holy theory of liberty.” The deputies finally settled on two simple words: “National Assembly.”11 The meaning was clear: the deputies asserted that they were the sole representatives of the entire French community, leaving no room for particular groups such as the nobility or the clergy or even the king. To underline this claim, the Assembly declared on June 17 that it was “one and indivisible.”
What the Assembly meant to do with the powers it claimed became clear on June 17, the day on which, as Sieyès put it, the Assembly definitively “cut the cable” binding it to existing institutions. The deputies, their ranks now strengthened by a number of other clergy who had followed the example of the three priests from Poitou, struck at the heart of royal authority by declaring that existing taxes, which had “not been consented to by the nation, are all illegal.” Recognizing that the government needed revenue, the Assembly hastened to add that the old taxes would continue to be collected until they could be replaced by a new system, but it left no doubt that it meant to strip Louis XVI of the power to raise money on his own authority. Furthermore, the deputies “put the creditors of the state under the protection of the honor and loyalty of the French nation,” objecting in advance to any move by the king to declare bankruptcy and thus free himself from the Assembly’s authority.12
An absolute monarch could not let such a direct challenge go unanswered, but the king was slow in responding. In the meantime, his own cousin, the duc d’Orléans, tried to persuade the noble deputies to join the Third Estate. Although only eighty-eight of them supported him, they included some of the most prominent members of their order. On June 19, a majority of the clergy voted to join the National Assembly. When the members of the National Assembly convened on the morning of June 20, however, they found the doors of the Salle des Menus Plaisirs closed. The king had ordered preparations for a “royal session” at which he would announce his intentions. Fearing that the king might be about to dismiss the Estates General or even put them under arrest, the deputies searched for a room large enough to hold them. Eventually they found the king’s indoor tennis court, the jeu de paume. There, their president, the astronomer Sylvain Bailly, called on them to swear a solemn oath that they would not allow themselves to be dispersed until they had given France a constitution. Defiantly, they announced that “the National Assembly exists wherever its members come together”: even if the king succeeded in forcing them to quit Versailles, they would still assert their right to reunite in some other location and continue their work. A delegation of wealthy plantation-owners claiming to represent the colony of Saint-Domingue, who had been seeking admission to the Assembly, seized the opportunity to identify themselves with the patriotic cause by offering to swear the oath along with the deputies; in the heat of the moment, their offer was accepted. The question of whether their inclusion meant putting the institution of slavery under the protection of the nation, and thereby creating a major contradiction that would haunt the Assembly’s efforts to guarantee the ideal of liberty, was not brought up.
Inside the royal palace, the king, his ministers, and members of the royal family frantically tried to craft a response to what the king’s younger brother, the comte d’Artois, called the “illegality of the deliberation of June 17 and the defiance of the session at the tennis court.” Necker and the ministers closest to him urged the king to avoid a confrontation. If the king took a hard line, warned the foreign minister, the comte de Montmorin, “the Third may not dissolve itself, and then the troubles will reach their peak”; this crisis, moreover, would occur at a time when the government had no resources to combat the rebellious group.13 But making an alliance with commoners was psychologically impossible for the monarchs, who had spent their entire lives among their fellow aristocrats. All of Louis XVI’s education and experience militated against such a gamble, and Marie-Antoinette, who had been included in meetings of the royal council since late 1788, was even more opposed to concessions. Necker, dismayed by the king’s intransigence, offered his resignation; he did not accompany the monarch when the royal session was held on June 23.
At the royal session, the king promised some substantial reforms. He assured the deputies that all taxes would henceforth require the “consent of the representatives of the nation,” and he implied that there would be regular meetings of the Estates General, although he did not specify how often they would take place. Throughout the kingdom, there would be provincial estates, structured more or less on the model proposed in Dauphiné in 1788. The Estates General was invited to reform the system of lettres de cachet and to “investigate and make known to His Majesty the most suitable means of reconciling liberty of the press with the respect due to religion, morals, and the honor of citizens.”
Yet even as he offered reforms that went beyond anything he had conceded before, the king also made it clear that he would not accept either the political revolution or the social revolution implied by the National Assembly’s declarations. He “declared void the resolutions made by the deputies of the Third Estate on the 17th of this month, and all subsequent ones,” and he emphatically asserted that the “distinction of the three orders of the State” remained “inherent in the constitution of his kingdom.” He decreed that the deputies of the three orders would deliberate in common “upon matters of general welfare,” but insisted that they meet and vote separately on any issues that concerned the privileges of the nobility or the clergy. Recognizing the strength that the new National Assembly drew from the publicity of its proceedings, he prohibited the admission of spectators to the meetings. He reasserted his exclusive command of the military, and he ended with an unmistakable threat, telling the deputies that, “if, by a calamity remote from my mind, you abandon me in so worthy an undertaking, alone I will effect the happiness of my people, alone I will consider myself their true representative.”14
As many deputies recognized, Louis XVI was resorting to the procedures of a lit de justice to override opposition. Once his words had been read, he left the hall, and the royal master of ceremonies, the marquis de Dreux-Brézé, ordered the deputies to disperse. The nobles and the upper clergy obeyed, but the other deputies remained in their seats. Sieyès and the Assembly president, Bailly, addressed their colleagues, trying to convince them that, as Sieyès put it, “you are today what you were yesterday,” but it took Mirabeau, with his flair for dramatic improvisation, to find words to restore his colleagues’ courage. Speaking directly to Dreux-Brézé, he thundered, “I tell you that if you have orders to make us leave here, you should ask for orders to employ force, because we will only be driven from our places by bayonets.”15 Emboldened by Mirabeau’s oratory, the deputies reaffirmed their stand and declared the members of the Assembly immune to arrest.
By the time the king ordered troops to clear the hall, the Assembly had ended its session on its own terms and the news of its actions was spreading throughout Versailles and Paris. “The ferment in Paris is beyond conception,” Arthur Young wrote. “The language that was talked, by all ranks of people, was nothing less than a revolution in the government, and the establishment of a free constitution.” In Versailles, a crowd surrounded the palace, demanding Necker’s reinstatement. Having failed to overawe the deputies, the king was forced to give way. “The royal session only served to make the Third triumph,” the noble deputy Ferrières wrote. On the 24th, the majority of the deputies from the clergy joined the Assembly’s ranks. When the crowd outside spotted the archbishop of Paris, who was still refusing to do so, stones were thrown at his coach, breaking the windows. Ferrières reported rumors that forty thousand Parisians were coming to attack the recalcitrant nobles; discipline among the Gardes françaises, the military garrison of the capital, was said to be disintegrating.16 A day later, with the duc d’Orléans at their head, some fifty noble deputies defected from their order and joined the Assembly.
A few court figures still tried to convince the king to stand firm, but by the 26th, he had decided that, at least for the moment, further resistance was impossible. On June 27, the National Assembly was debating yet another act of defiance of royal authority—the admission of deputies representing the French colony of Saint-Domingue, whom the king had explicity excluded from the Estates General—when word of a new development arrived: the monarch had instructed the remaining holdouts among the clergy and the nobility to enter the Assembly even if the mandates from their electors explicitly forbade them to accept vote by head in a single chamber. The question of whether France’s overseas slave colonies formed an integral part of the nation was postponed, and the president, Bailly, called on the deputies to “abandon themselves to the joy that a so ardently desired reunion… must produce in the heart of all the French.” In Paris, Arthur Young, concluding that “the whole business now seems over, and the revolution complete,” packed his bags to resume his tour of the countryside.17
In fact, as Young and the rest of the world would soon discover, the Revolution was just beginning. Many of the nobles deeply resented the order to join the National Assembly and obeyed it only when the comte d’Artois warned them that the king’s life might be in danger if they continued to resist. Still, they did so with “tears in their eyes and rage and despair in their hearts,” according to one deputy. When the Assembly resumed its meetings on June 30, several hundred noble deputies simply failed to appear; many of them insisted that they had to return home to request permission from their electors to ignore instructions not to agree to a common assembly. Meanwhile, with the great question of vote by head settled, the National Assembly started on the work of fulfilling its promise to give France a free constitution. On July 3 and 4, the deputies returned to the question they had been debating on June 27, when the arrival of the nobles had interrupted them: Would France’s overseas slave colonies be fully included in the nation? The deputies, a number of whom either owned property in the colonies or represented cities dependent on colonial trade, recognized that they were confronting one of the issues that had sparked the American Revolution. “If the British Parliament had admitted colonial deputies, America would still be English,” the marquis de Sillery said. The deputy Dominique-Joseph Garat agreed that representatives of the slaveowning colonists should be seated in the Assembly, although he would have liked them to promise “that they will never oppose any effort that the assembly may make to find ways to end this crime as soon as possible.”18 On July 4, in the first recorded roll-call vote in the Assembly, a motion to seat six deputies from Saint-Domingue, was approved. France thus became the first European country to make its overseas territories integral parts of the nation. It was at the price, however, of creating an obvious contradiction between the principles of liberty and equality, on the one hand, and the reality of slavery, on the other.
From the colonial issue and slavery, the deputies turned to laying the bases of the constitution. On July 6, a thirty-man committee was appointed to propose the basic outlines of a new constitution, and on July 9, the Dauphinois deputy Mounier laid out the main issues that would have to be decided. As he had in his native province, the moderate Mounier hoped to incorporate some elements of existing institutions into the new order, even as he recognized there would also have to be fundamental changes. “We will never abandon our rights, but we will know not to exaggerate them,” he proclaimed. “We will not forget that the French are not a new people, just emerging from the heart of the woods to form an association, but a great society of 24 million people… for whom the principles of the true monarchy will always be sacred.”19
Just before they listened to Mounier’s careful weighing of the issues involved in designing a constitution, the deputies had a sharp reminder that their ability to carry out that project was still not assured. For more than a week, reports had been streaming in that military units were on the march, heading toward Paris from their frontier garrisons. The deputies were particularly anxious because the regiments being assembled were primarily composed of foreign troops, and it was feared that they did not share the enthusiasm for the revolutionary movement that the soldiers of the Gardes françaises in Paris had demonstrated. Mirabeau put the deputies’ concerns into sharp words, as he had so many times before: “As troops advance from all directions, as camps form all around us, as the capital is surrounded, we ask ourselves with astonishment: does the king doubt the loyalty of his peoples?” The deputies were not the only ones fearful about the buildup of troops. A published Letter of the Ladies of Paris to the Officers of the Camp asked them, “Would you pierce a pretty breast, caressed by the innocent hands of a little citizen? Would you make our beloved children, our husbands, our brothers, fall at our feet?”20
Mirabeau’s speech was in response to a statement by the king justifying the summoning of troops to the area: it was out of concern, the king said, about the continuing popular disturbances, and the increasing unreliability of the main force charged with maintaining order in Paris, the Gardes françaises. “There is a spirit of insubordination and independence among the troops that is indeed difficult to control,” the deputy Duquesnoy wrote on June 30.21 Two soldiers from the Gardes françaises had been arrested for disobedience; on June 29, a crowd had freed them and brought them back in triumph to the Palais-Royal. This alliance between the unruly population in Paris and the mutinous soldiers was a sign, from the government’s point of view, that it risked losing all control of the capital.
Behind the scenes, conservative courtiers pressed Louis XVI to take decisive action. The Assembly’s determined resistance to the king on June 23 had caught him and his more conservative advisers unprepared, but by the beginning of July, a plan was ready. The baron de Breteuil, one of the royal ministers, agreed to take Necker’s place, and the baron de Batz, a financial speculator, put together a scheme to issue paper money and raise an emergency loan to provide the necessary funds. On July 4, Breteuil’s confidant the marquis de Bombelles wrote in his private journal, “We have the hope of seeing the royal authority reestablish itself for the greater good of this country, for which no other government except pure monarchy is appropriate.”22
The crucial question was whether the army would obey orders in the face of popular resistance. The royal military commander, Victor-François, duc de Broglie, warned that “if there is an uprising, it will not be possible for us to defend all of Paris.” Nor was it clear what Louis XVI planned to do if the National Assembly stood firm and he lost control of the capital. One idea was for the royal family to move to the fortress of Metz in Alsace, close to the border where he might hope to obtain foreign support. Broglie was not persuaded. “Yes, we can go to Metz, but what will we do once we get there?” he asked, doubtful that it would be possible to bring the country back under control if the king abandoned Paris. In spite of Broglie’s hesitation, however, on the night of July 11, the plan was set in motion. Necker was abruptly dismissed and ordered to leave the kingdom without passing through Paris or communicating with anyone, and the commanders of the troops stationed in the capital were told to be ready to deal with any protests there. Gaston de Lévis, a noble deputy with ties to the king’s brother, the comte de Provence, passed a warning to his wife in Paris: “Don’t go out at all tomorrow, there will surely be a dreadful commotion, one can’t know how things will go.”23 France would now find out which was more powerful: the ringing words of the National Assembly’s resolutions of the previous month, or the bayonets of the king’s soldiers.