The Days of the French Revolution (4 page)

Well aware of the opposition that his proposals aroused among both the privileged orders and the members of the
parlements
, who were now confirmed in their belief that a strong and favoured aristocracy was a necessary bulwark against royal absolutism, Calonne suggested that they should be submitted for approval to a special Assembly of Notables, a convention nominated by the King, of which Henri IV had been able to make successful use in the past.

This Assembly of 144 members, including mayors and magistrates as well as nobles and prelates, met in February 1787, and Calonne, revealing the existence of an immense annual deficit, opened the proceedings with challenging words: ‘Only in the abolition of abuses lies the means to answer our need. The abuses which we must wipe out for the public good are of the widest extent, enjoy the greatest protection, have the deepest roots and the most spreading branches.’ But already the opponents of Calonne’s policies were combining to render them unworkable. Both the Comte de Provence and the King’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, voiced their disapproval of him. So did Loménie de Brienne, the sickly, ingratiating and scarcely less than agnostic Archbishop of Toulouse, who hoped to succeed him. So did Étienne d’Aligre, one of the leading magistrates in the Paris
parlement
. So did the adherents of Necker who chose to believe their hero’s assertion that France had been solvent at the time of his enforced resignation. So did the influential Archbishop of Narbonne who declared, ‘M. de Calonne wishes to bleed France to death. He is merely asking us whether to make the incision on the feet, the arms or the jugular vein.’ So did Marie Antoinette, who strongly condemned Calonne’s publication of an
avertissement
which, distributed free all over France as an appeal to public opinion, was condemned by a member of her
Household as ‘a terrible diatribe against the clergy and the nobility’. Obliged to listen to these voices raised in condemnation of his Minister, the King at first supported him, then wavered, and constantly asked for advice. ‘He asked advice of everybody,’ wrote Pierre Malouet, a well-informed government official, ‘and seemed to be saying to every person he approached, “What can I do? What should be done?”’ In the end Calonne was dismissed and exiled to his estates in Lorraine, whence, threatened with proceedings against him by the Paris
parlement
, he fled to England, the first of the
émigrés
.

Brienne replaced him; but when he presented to the Notables a shadowy version of the proposals he had formerly rejected out of hand, the Notables were in no mood to accept from the Archbishop even so mild a concoction of the medicines that they had refused to take from Calonne. Their Assembly was dissolved and they went home, having demonstrated the firm determination of most of their number to prevent the King’s Ministers tampering with their privileges.

The land tax and other measures which the Notables had rejected now had to be presented to the Paris
parlement
. And
parlement
, among whose members were several who had sat with the Notables, was equally determined not to let them pass, protesting that any new taxation required the assent of the Estates General, a consultative body of clergy, nobles and representatives of the Commons or Third Estate, which had not met since 1614 in the reign of Louis XIII. Confronted by the intransigence of
parlement
and worried by a crisis in foreign affairs, the King and Brienne, backed by Chrétien de Lamoignon, Keeper of the Seals, the one strong man in the Government, decided to use force. They dispatched troops to the Palais de Justice and had two of the leading and most intractable
parlementaires
, Jean Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil and Goislard de Montsabert, arrested. Three days later, on 8 May 1788, after the King had invoked his right to enforce various edicts to which they had objected, the Paris
parlement
and all the provincial
parlements
were deprived of their power of opposing the monarch’s will.

That summer violence erupted all over France. ‘In Dauphiny and other Provinces,’ reported the
chargé d’affaires
at the British
Embassy in Paris, ‘no Taxes whatever can be collected, and accounts of some fresh act of Revolt and disobedience arrive every day from different parts of the Kingdom.’ Protesting that they were acting in defence of the
parlements
, nobles and magistrates came together to block the Government’s attempt to impose equality of taxation. There were riots in Brittany, Burgundy, Béarn and Provence. In Pau and Rennes violent demonstrations were provoked among the population by local
parlementaires
. In Dauphiné there were clashes between troops and the townspeople of Grenoble in which twenty soldiers were wounded and two demonstrators killed. In Paris there was fighting in the streets and an effigy of Brienne was burned before cheering crowds.

As the prospect of national bankruptcy grew more daunting, Brienne turned in desperation to the clergy, but they, in an extraordinary meeting of their Assembly, condemned the Government’s reforms and granted only a small proportion of the money for which they had been asked. Forced to accept defeat, Brienne announced on 5 July that the Estates General would be summoned to Versailles in May the following year; and a few weeks later he handed in his resignation. The King had now no alternative but to reappoint Necker, to recall the
parlements
and to agree to the replacement of de Lamoignon by the supposedly more moderate Charles de Barentin.

The general satisfaction aroused by the announcement that the Estates General were to be reconvened was, however, soon overcast by the further declaration by the Paris
parlement
that they should be composed as they had been in 1614, which was to say that the three orders whose representatives were to meet at Versailles, the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate, or Commons, were to have an equal number of delegates. This meant that, if each order were to vote separately, the clergy and nobility could always combine in defence of their privileges to thwart the aspirations of the Third Estate. The popularity of
parlement
, which the middle class had formerly been inclined to view as a bulwark against despotic government, collapsed, as Professor Goodwin has observed, overnight. ‘Thus it was that, in the autumn and winter of 1788, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy was trans
formed into a social and political conflict between the privileged and unprivileged classes. As the issues broadened, the solidarity of the privileged orders weakened. A split appeared even in the ranks of the
parlement
of Paris between the conservative magistrates and those with liberal inclinations…The Third Estate also found champions of its claims among the lay and clerical aristocracy…Lastly, there was formed in these months, in opposition to the coalition of the conservative aristocracy, a combination of liberal theorists and politicians who assumed the style of the “patriotic” or “national” party.’ ‘The controversy has completely changed,’ wrote a contemporary witness, Jacques Mallet du Pan, the journalist. ‘King, despotism and constitution are now relatively minor questions. The war is between the Third Estate and the other two orders.’

Politics now became of all-consuming interest. Noisy discussions took place every night in the coffee-houses of the Palais Royal where there passed from hand to hand a stream of freshly printed pamphlets, propounding the ideas of a new declaration of rights, new conceptions of national sovereignty, and France’s need of a constitution.

The business going forward in the pamphlets shops is incredible [Arthur Young was soon to write]. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new things were published, and to procure a catalogue of all. Every hour produces something new. Thirteen came out today, sixteen yesterday and ninety-two last week…This spirit of reading political tracts, they say, spreads into the provinces, so that all the presses of France are equally employed…Is it not wonderful that, while the press teems with the most levelling and even seditious principles that if put in execution would overturn the monarchy, nothing in reply appears, and not the least step is taken by the Court to restrain this extreme licentiousness of publication? It is easy to conceive the spirit that must be raised among the people. But the coffee-houses in the Palais Royal present yet more singular and astonishing spectacles; they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening
à gorge deployée
to certain orators, who from the chairs or table harangue each his little audience. 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.

These orators and journalists harangued the customers in the Café de Foy, the Régence, the Caveau and the Procope. Meetings were held in the fashionable salons of Madame de Tessé and Madame de Genlis. In masonic lodges the theories and writings of the
philosophes
were disseminated. Political clubs, which had been suppressed by the Government, reopened and found scores of new members; and new clubs were founded and soon fully subscribed. In cities all over France, the common practice of the upper floors of buildings being occupied by bourgeois families and the lower by the common people made the dissemination of revolutionary ideas between classes all the more rapid and effective.

‘Scarcely six months had passed since I left France,’ wrote Jacques Pierre, the pamphleteer, after a visit to America. ‘I scarcely knew my fellow countrymen on my return. They had advanced an enormous distance.’ Some of the liberal sentiments expressed by the ‘patriots’ were highly suspect in their sincerity: there were professedly progressive bishops who had their idea on ministerial appointments, there were
soi-disant
‘nationalist’ lawyers anxious to dissociate themselves publicly from their conservative colleagues who had now become so unpopular. But most of the leading and more influential members of the ‘patriotic’ party were genuinely attached to the cause of liberalism and reform.

Nearly all these leaders were members of a secretive body known as the Committee of Thirty of which very little is known. The Committee, founded in November 1788, usually met at the house of a rich magistrate and
parlementaire
, Adrien Duport. Many of its other members were equally rich, able to finance the authorship and distribution of pamphlets, the circulation of lists of grievances which were intended to serve as models for others, and the dispatch of agents to the provinces. They included the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt and the Duc d’Aiguillon, the Marquis de Condorcet and the Vicomte de Noailles. Among their number were also three men whose influence on the course of events during the next few months was to be far more profound. One of these was the Abbé de Talleyrand-Périgord who became Bishop of Autun in January 1789 and lived to become known to the world as Prince Talleyrand. Another was the Marquis de Lafayette, a tall, thin,
solemn, conceited young man with a long nose, reddish hair and a receding forehead who had fought with distinction in America and dreamed, it was said, of becoming a kind of ‘George Washington under Louis XVI’. The Third was the Abbé Sieyès.

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès was forty years old. Although of a naturally reflective, analytical turn of mind, he had wanted as a boy to go into the army rather than the Church. But his pious and ambitious middle-class parents had overborne his own wishes and he had spent ten years in a seminary. There, however, he spent more time in the study of political philosophy, of Locke, Condillac and Bonnet, than of those religious writers pressed upon him by his tutors who concluded that they might turn him into a ‘gentlemanly, cultured canon, yet he was by no means fitted for the Ministry of the Church’.

He nevertheless entered the Church on the completion of his studies, and began slowly to rise in its hierarchy, though without any hope of becoming a bishop since he was not a member of the aristocracy, a class whom he consequently viewed with peculiar animosity. Ordained priest in 1773, he became secretary to the Bishop of Tréguier two years later, then Chancellor of the Diocese of Chartres and a member of the Provincial Assembly of Orléans. A small, thin man, austere, rather cynical, unfailingly if distantly polite, he made few friends, appeared indifferent to the society of women and was ill at ease with his social inferiors. As one of the twelve clerical representatives at the Provincial Assembly of Orléans, however, he did display a deep concern for the plight of the poor and argued for a programme of radical reform. But he was no orator: his voice was weak, his manner formal, his delivery, as one who listened to him commented, ‘ungraceful and ineloquent’. He made little impression and was soon discouraged. So, seeing scant hope for any improvement in the social order, disliking the Church, distrusting the
parlements
, and despairing of the monarchy’s ability to escape from the thrall of a reactionary nobility, Sieyès made up his mind to emigrate to America. And, having saved about 50,000
livres
, he was just about to sail when the outburst of political discussion which erupted in France in 1788 persuaded him to change his mind. He took to writing. Never having published
anything before, he made no mark with his first two pamphlets; but his third, ‘What is the Third Estate?’, powerfully persuasive though rather boringly written, was as influential as any other pamphlet produced at this time. Formulating the grievances of the unprivileged classes and identifying the Third Estate with the nation as a whole, Sieyès answered the question of his pamphlet’s title, ‘What is the Third Estate?’–‘Everything. What has it been up till now in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.’ That ‘something’ included the rights to have as many representatives as the other two orders combined as well as to have its votes counted by head rather than by order. It also included the right to share in the framing of a constitution free from interference by any outside influence.