Estates General and then the National Assembly

The Estates General was called for the 5th May 1789 at Versailles.  Louis XVI unable to navigate the economic crisis that was engulfing the monarchy and a failure on the part of his ministers of finance to reform the tax system.  The belief was that by calling the representatives of the clergy (the first estate), the nobility (the second estate) and the people (third estate) would be able to come together to formulate a way forward.

Across the nation representatives were elected from their constituencies (by men over the age of twenty one who pay tax).  As part of the process Cahiers de Doléances were drawn up.  Initially meant as a form of forum for reform these cahiers turned into a list of grievances.  It gave people the chance to air long held and little heard problems.  Some now believed that the Estates General had been assembled to solve these problems.

There was great debate as to how decisions would be made in the Estates General.  After much protestation the Third Estate was granted double voting rights as they represented the great majority of the French people.  It would transpire however this was irrelevant as the estates were to vote by order.  This meant the Third Estate could be effectively by the other two estates.

To overcome this impasse Abbé Sieyès proposed that the other two Estates should join them.  What started as a trickle of clergy On the 17th June the Third Estate declared that they were now the National Assembly and sought to establish some form of legislative authority.  When the National Assembly found their meeting place the Salle des États it was suggested that they meet at a Tennis Court.  It was on this spot they declared they would not dissolve until they had agreed a constitution for France.

Germaine De Staël on the make-up of the Three Estates .  Taken from Considerations on the Principle events of the French Revolution, Germaine De Staël, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis (2008) p118

The Estates of General of France were, as I have just mentioned, divided into three orders- the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate- and accustomed to deliberate separately, like three great nations: each presented its grievances to the King, and each confined itself to its particular interests, which had, according to circumstances, more or less connection with the interests of the public at large.  In point of numbers, the Third Estate comprised almost the whole nation, the two whole other orders forming scarcely a hundredth part of it.  Having gained greatly in relative importance in the course of the last two centuries, the Third Estate demanded, in 1789, that the mercantile body, or the towns, without reference to the country, should have enough deputies to render the number of the representatives of their body equal to that of the two other orders together; and this demand was supported by motives and circumstances of the greatest weight.

The Marquis de Bouille on the calling of the Estates General.  Taken from Memoirs Relating to the French Revolution by the Marquis de Bouille, Cadell and Davies, London (1797) p88

Necker, faithful to his principles, suffered a fermentation to be excited among the people, by writings dispersed through the provinces, calculated to prepare the public mind for a revolution. The States General consisted of men very proper for the execution of his purposes. The ecclesiastical members were principally chosen from among the inferior clergy, without livings or property opposed to those of the higher order, who were fewer in number. Among the representatives of the nobility were many of those subtle, daring, enterprising men, who had introduced themselves with a view to corrupt and divide that order: lastly, the third estate were allowed a double representation. This assembly was open to that description of men, so numerous and so dangerous in France, who lived by their talents, their literary abilities, and their industry, deriving their importance from the weakness and credulity of mankind. Lawyers, principally of the lowest class, physicians, artists, writers of little or no eminence, and men without either rank or property; such were those who now represented, or were eligible to represent the French nation; that nation whose passions, already in a state of fermentation, they strove still more to inflame.

Germaine De Staël on the opening of the Estates General.  Taken from Considerations on the Principle events of the French Revolution, Germaine De Staël, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis (2008) p132

On the rising of the Assembly, the popular party, that is, the majority of the Third Estate, a minority of the nobility, and several members of the clergy, complained that M. Necker had treated the Estates General like a provincial administration, in speaking to them only of measures for securing the public debt and improving the system of taxation.  The grand object of their assembling was, doubtless, to form a constitution; but could they expect that the King’s minister should be the first to enter on questions which it belonged to the representatives of the nation to introduce?

Comte de Ségur writing about the Estates General.  Taken from Memoirs of Louis Philippe Comte de Segur, The Folio Society, London (1960) p27

The Estates General were to meet on April 27, but this was deferred till May 4.  For some time there was uncertainty about the venue: Orléans was considered because it was central and seemed far enough away from Paris to escape from the ferment that possessed this great city, and then there was talk of Soissons, with the court established at Compiègne.  It is probable that the choice of either of these places would have furnished more opportunities of preventing the Revolution.  However, the expense of transporting the Court on the one hand and laziness on the other, and perhaps also the observation that these two twins belonged to my father, led to the decision to stay put and to choose Versailles.

Barère on problems the Third Estate faced in the Estates General on the 23rd of June 1789.  Taken from Memoirs of Bertrand Barère Volume 1, H. S. Nichols, London (1896) p214-215

The Court hastened to peruse the list of grievances and to open its famous royal session of the 23rd of June. It was during this lit de justice, held at the Hotel des Menus, in the presence of the three estates, that it was sought to humiliate the Commons by allowing them to wait outside in the rain until the hall was opened, while the representatives of the two privileged orders had for some time taken their seats to prostrate themselves at the foot of the throne like the vile slaves who had repulsed the entry of the deputies of the Commons. These two orders went before the King : the Commons remained seated. The two orders cheered lustily each speech and act pronounced or read in the Assembly; the Commons were silent. When the meeting adjourned, the two orders, with the exception of the two minorities of the clergy and nobility which had already coalesced with the Commons, rushed to the doors by which the King was to pass in order to regain the equipages of the cortege. The Commons retained their seats. The King commanded the three orders to separate, and at once to repair to their chambers to vote, each in private. The master of the ceremonies had no need to advise the two orders : they had disappeared with the bodyguard and the royal procession.

The Commons, twice summoned by the Marquis de Breze to obey the command of the King, retorted with the fine and energetic apostrophe of the Count de Mirabeau : " Go and tell your master that we are here by the power of the people, and that we shall not go away save at the point of the bayonet." The president of the National Assembly, M. Bailly, added that the Commons were going to deliberate upon what they had just heard, and that they would not leave the chamber until they were ready to publish the result of their debate.

During all this time, and just as the King had risen to terminate the sitting, the deputies of the Commons (to the number of 600) put on their hats, and thus debated the annulling of the King's regulations and of the King's session, which had violated the rights of the French people. All this would be treated to-day as rebellion ; but it was only through the courage of its representatives that the French could regain and preserve their rights.

These events are undoubtedly known ; but here are some that are not. When the King had got into his carriage, which stood in the grand avenue of the castle, M. d'Artois bent forward and told him that the deputies of the Commons refused to leave the chamber, and that they ought to be sabred by the bodyguard. The King, in these words, coldly replied :

"To the castle!"

M. d'Artois insisted more energetically : " Give the order for them to be cut down ; other wise all is lost."

" Go and do it yourself."

More insistence. The King, growing impatient, said to M. d'Artois : "Go to the devil! To the castle, to the castle!" I have these facts from one of the bodyguard, one of my countrymen, and from the King's private physician.

Comte de Ségur writing about the Estates General.  Taken from Memoirs of Louis Phillippe Comte de Ségur, The Folio Society, London (1960) p32

There is nothing more dangerous than taking high handed action merely to test one’s strength, and the height of folly is to repeat such action after experience has demonstrated that neither can nor knows how to follow it up.  A wise and enlightened government will never undertake something unless it has the ability and the will to carry it through.  If one merely looked at results, it would be tempting to say that the purpose of all this pomp and glitter, this high handedness and display of troops, was to discredit royal authority instead of consolidating it, and that these measures had been suggested by treacherous advisors who wished to ruin the king and the court.  But nothing would be further from the truth, for the court always exaggerated its own strength and the weakness of its own enemies, and though it could cow them and reduce them to obedience by a mere display of force- though as soon as it came to a choice between actually using the troops or climbing down, the latter course was always adopted.  The success of all the stages of the Revolution can be attributed to this inconsistency on the part of the Court, this faulty relationship between its plans and its actions.  The people were conscious of royal authority only when it was menacing and unpredictable.  The best way of demonstrating the truth of my argument is to give a brief account of the events that followed the séance royale of June 23, though the later events of the Revolution furnish many other examples.  On June 24 a few cures joined the Third Estate, which had already been reinforced by the nobility of Dauphiné.  The next day forty seven deputies of the nobility, including my father, also joined the Third Estate.   These forty seven deputies formed almost the whole of the minority of the nobility, who had always voted the credentials of deputies of all the Orders should be examined together, and that the Estates General should deliberate as a whole and not by Orders.  On the 26th members of the clergy continued to flock to the Assembly of the Third Estate, so that a large majority of the Estates General was already to be found there.  On the 27th the King ordered the members of the clergy and the nobility to do precisely that!  And so resistance always ended in giving way, and the sole purpose of the struggle seemed to be to give the popular party a triumph, to increase its demands, and to give it to understand that it would obtain everything it dared to ask for.

Chateaubriand on the National Assembly.  Taken from Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, Penguin Classics, London (2014) p106

The evening sittings surpassed the morning sittings in violence and scandal: people speak better and more boldly by candlelight.  In the evening the Riding-hall became a veritable playhouse, in which was enacted one of the greatest dramas in the world.  The leading characters still belonged to the old order of things; their terrifying substitutes, hidden behind them, spoke little or not at all.  At the end of a stormy discussion, I saw a common looking deputy mount the tribune, a man with a grey, impassive face and neatly dressed hair, decently clad like the steward of a good house or a village notary who was careful of his appearance.  He read out a long and boring report, and nobody listened to him; I asked his name: it was Robespierre.  The men who wore shoes were ready to leave the drawing room, and already the clogs were kicking at the door.

Arthur Young on the National Assembly.  Taken from Witnesses to the Revolution American and British Commentators in France 1788-1794, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London (1989) p50

The step the Commons have taken of declaring themselves the National Assembly… is in fact an assumption of all the authority in this kingdom.  They have at one stroke converted themselves into the Long Parliament of Charles I.  It needs not the assistance of much penetration to see that if such a pretension and declaration are done away, kings, lords and clergy are deprived of their shares in the legislature of France.  So bold, and apparently desperate a step, full in the teeth of every other interest in the realm, equally destructive of the royal authority, by parlements and the army, can never be allowed.  If it is not opposed, all other powers will lie in ruins around that of the Commons.  With what anxious expectations must one therefore wait to see if the crown will exert itself firmly on the occasion, with such an attention to an improved system of liberty, as is absolutely necessary to the moment!  All things considered, that is, the characters of those who are in possession of power, no well digested system and steady execution are to be looked for.

Thomas Jefferson (American ambassador to France) on the National Assembly.  Taken from Witnesses to the Revolution American and British Commentators in France 1788-1794, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London (1989) p51

23rd June Louis was about an hour in the house delivering his speech and declaration….On coming out, a feeble cry of “vive le roy” was raised by some children, but the people remained silent and sullen.  When the Duc d’Orleans followed however their applauses were excessive …. He had ordered in the close of his speech that the members should follow him, and resume their deliberations the next day.  The noblese followed him, and so did the clergy, except about 30 who, with the Tiers, remained in the room and entered into deliberation.  They protested against what the king had done, adhered to all their former proceedings, and resolved the inviolability of their own persons.  An officer came twice to order them out of the room in the king’s name, but they refused to obey.  In the afternoon the people, uneasy, began to assemble in great numbers.

Letter VI from the summer of 1790 Helen Maria Williams recounts her visit to the National Assembly.  Taken from Letters Written in France, Broadview Literary Texts, Ormskirk (2002) p80-82

I have been at the National Assembly, where, at a time when the deputies from the provinces engrossed every ticket of admission, my sister and I were admitted without tickets, by the gentleman who had the command of the guard, and placed in the best seats, before he suffered the doors to be open to other people.  We had no personal acquaintance with this gentleman, or any claim to his politeness, except that of being foreigners and women; but these are, of all claims, the most powerful to the urbanity of French manners…..

The hall of the National Assembly is long and narrow; at each end there is a gallery, where the common people are admitted by applying very early in the morning for numbers, which are distributed at the door; and the persons who first apply secure the first numbers.  The seats also being numbered, all confusion and disorders are prevented.  The galleries at the side of the hall are divided into boxes, which are called tribunes.  They belong to the principle members of the National Assembly, and to these places company are admitted with tickets.  Rows of seats are placed round the hall, raised one above another, where the members of the Assembly are seated; and immediately opposite the chair of the president, in the narrow part of the hall, is the tribune which the members ascend when they are going to speak.  One capital subject of debate in this Assembly is, who shall speak first; for all seem more inclined to talk than to listen; and sometimes the president in vein rings a bell, or with the vehemence of French action stretches out his arms, and endeavours to impose silence; while the Huissers, persons who are appointed to keep order, make the attempt with as little success as the president himself.  But one ceases to wonder that the meetings of the National Assembly are tumultuous, on reflecting how important are the objects of its deliberations.

Arthur Young reports on a visit to the National Assembly. Witnesses to the Revolution American and British Commentators in France 1788-1794, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London (1989) p98

No other person spoke without notes…… It can hardly be conceived how flat this mode of debate renders the transactions of the Assembly.  Who would be in the gallery of the English House of Commons, if Mr Pitt were to bring a written speech, to be delivered on a subject on which Mr Fox was to speak before him? And in proportion to its being uninteresting to the hearer, is another evil, that of lengthening their sittings, since there are ten persons who will read their opinions, to one that is able to deliver an impromptu. The want of order, and every kind of confusion, prevails now almost as much as when the Assembly sat at Versailles.  The interruptions given are frequent and long: and speakers, who have no right by the rules to speak, will attempt it.

Gouverneur Morris at this point in France on business from the United States on the National Assembly. Witnesses to the Revolution American and British Commentators in France 1788-1794, Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1989) p75

There are some able men in the National Assembly, yet the best heads among them would not be injured by experience, and unfortunately there are a good number who, with much imagination, have little knowledge, judgement, or reflection.  You may consider the revolution as complete; that is to say, the authority of the king and of the nobility is completely subdued, but yet I tremble for the constitution.  They have all the romantic spirit, and all those romantic ideas of government which, happily for America, we were cured of before it was too late.  They are advancing rapidly… the whole army of France have declared for liberty, and… His majesty… does not know a single regiment that would obey him.

Thomas Jefferson (ambassador to France) in one of his last reports talks about the situation in France in September 1789.  This report is believed to have come from the British Embassy.  Taken from Witnesses to the Revolution American and British Commentators in France 1788-1794, Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1989) p74

Civil war is much talked about and expected: and this talk and expectation has a tendency to beget it.  What are the events which may produce it? (1) The want of bread, were it to produce a commencement of disorder, might allay itself to more permanent causes of discontent, and thus continue the effect beyond its first cause.  (2) A public bankruptcy.  Great numbers of the lower as well as higher classes of citizens depend for subsistence on their property in the public funds. (3) The absconding of the King from Versailles.

Edmund Burke on Louis XVI and the National Assembly.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p125-126

Remember that your parliament of Paris told your king, that in calling the states together, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of their zeal in providing for the support of the throne.  It is right that these men should hide their heads.  It is right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel had brought on their sovereign and their country.  Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep; to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy; to neglect these provisions, preparations, and precautions, which distinguish benevolence from imbecility; and which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom.  For want of these, they have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage and insult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant.  Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at an hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.

Edmund Burke on Louis XVI and the National Assembly.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p129-131

Judge, Sir of my surprise, when I found that a very great proportion of the Assembly (a majority, I believe, f the members who attended) were composed of practitioners in the law.  It was not composed of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in universities; - but for the most greater part, as it must in such a number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession……  From the moment I read the list I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow…..Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well.

Edmund Burke on Louis XVI and the National Assembly.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p161

The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty.  They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them; domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority.