Christopher Hibbert - The Days of the French Revolution

In 1614 each of the three orders had retired to examine the credentials of its deputies on its own. Now, in 1789, they were again expected to conform to this rule, and the next day both nobles and clergy, meeting in the halls allocated to them, began to do so; but the Third Estate contended that the credentials of every deputy should be examined at an assembly of the entire convention. They remained in the large hall in the Rue des Chantiers. No rostrum had yet been built there; and the public, who were freely admitted, crowded round the deputies, offering them advice, shaking them by the hand, clapping them on the back, cheering popular speakers, booing others. The confusion of the early debates was aggravated by the deputies not yet knowing one another, by conflicts between those who favoured conciliation and those who did not, by their disinclination to adopt any rules of procedure which might indicate that they were organized as a separate order and thus at the mercy of the combined voting power of the privileged orders. A dean was appointed to supervise the debates, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, a respected astronomer and member of the French Academy whose father had been a court painter and custodian of the royal art collection at Versailles. But he found it impossible to exercise much control over them.

By the end of the month it had at least been decided that a concerted effort must be made by the Commons to persuade the parish priests among the clergy to come to join them. There were good grounds for hope that many of these priests would respond with enthusiasm. It was certainly well known that they were quite out of sympathy with the more conservative of the prelates and that there had been bitter exchanges during debates in the clergy’s hall. An abbé who had spoken slightingly of the Third Estate had been roughly told by a priest to hold his tongue; another priest had forcefully reminded the bishops, ‘In this place, my lords, we are all equal’; a third told the reactionary Abbé Maury, ‘The village priests may not have the talents of Academicians but they have at least the sound common sense of villagers!’

Encouraged by these disputes among the clergy, a large delegation from the Third Estate, led by the enormously fat Gui Jean Baptiste Target, a deputy from Dauphiné, proceeded to the hall where the clergy were assembled. ‘The gentlemen of the Commons,’ announced Target, ‘invite the gentlemen of the clergy, in the name of the God of Peace and for the national interest, to meet them in their hall to consult upon the means of bringing about the concord which is so vital at this moment for the public welfare.’ A number of the clergy greeted these words with cheers and would have accepted the invitation immediately had not the more conservative amongst them insisted on discussing it first. The deputation thereupon returned to the Commons who decided to remain in session until the clergy’s answer arrived. Hours passed and the answer did not come. The invitation was repeated; the clergy replied that they needed further time to consider it; the Commons said they were prepared to wait all day and all night if necessary.

Alarmed by the overtures being made to the priests and by the growing unrest in Paris and Versailles which was exacerbated by food shortages, the bishops turned to the King and asked him to intervene. Consequently, on 4 June, Necker proposed that each order should examine the credentials of its own members but allow the others to raise objections when the results were announced. If no decision could be reached, the King was to act as arbitrator.

On the day that this proposal was announced, however, the Dauphin died at the age of eight. Overwhelmed with grief the King shut himself up in his rooms at Versailles then withdrew for a week to Marly. While he was away, the Parisian deputies, whose elections had been delayed, began to settle themselves into the rooms reserved for them at Versailles and to harden the Commons’ determination ‘to appear formidable in the eyes of their enemies’. Among the Parisian deputies was the Abbé Sieyès who proposed that the clergy and nobility should now be asked to join the Commons, that those who did not should be considered to have forfeited their rights as representatives – in other words, that the Third Estate should constitute itself the representative body of the nation as a whole without the King’s consent.

A roll on which the names of clergy and nobles willing to join the Commons was accordingly opened on 12 June. Over the next few days not a single noble put down his name; as an order they merely promised to consider the Third Estate’s request ‘with their most studied attention’. But on 13 June three curés from Poitou appeared at the entrance to the Commons’ hall. They agreed, they said, to having their names put down on the roll. Their words were greeted with an outburst of clapping and cheering as deputies rushed towards them, embracing them with tears in their eyes. The next day another six priests, and two days later a further ten, followed their example.

Encouraged by this break in the privileged orders’ ranks, Sieyès now proposed that, as the Third Estate represented ninety-six per cent of the nation, they should immediately start the work the country was waiting to see performed. As a first step the name of Estates General should be officially abandoned and the Third should confer upon itself a title that implied its unique authority.

The debate that ensued was stormy, and at the centre of the storm was a vehemently gesticulating figure with bloodshot eyes and a massive neck, the Comte de Mirabeau.

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau was then forty years old. His great-grandfather, whose ancestors had been rich merchants of Marseilles, had been created a marquis after acting as a suitably indulgent host to King Louis XIV; his outspoken grandfather had been so badly wounded at Cassano in 1705 that, obliged thereafter to wear an arm in a sling and his head supported by a silver stock, he was wont to say that it was a battle in which he had lost his life; his father had also served as a soldier for a time, but had resigned his commission early to become a farmer and the author of various radical books, which brought upon him the disfavour of the Government who required him to remain upon his farm to the south of Fontainebleau.

Honoré, his eldest surviving son, was born here in 1749 with two teeth in his mouth and an inexhaustible energy which was to be the despair of his family and household. At the age of three he contracted smallpox which left his face deeply pitted for life and thus increased his ugliness and contributed to the dislike his difficult father felt for him. After attending a military school in Paris he received a commission in the cavalry regiment which his grandfather had once commanded, but, like his father, he did not remain in the army long. Unattractive as his appearance was, his vivacity, charm, adventurous high spirits and entertaining conversation made him attractive to women for whom he himself had a voracious sexual appetite, making love to anyone who would have him and committing incest, so it was said, with his sister. A young lady to whom his colonel was attached fell in love with him and this led to a scandal which ended with his being imprisoned on the Île of Ré. In the hope that he might settle down and restore the family fortunes, he was, upon his release, married to the plain and extremely rich daughter of the Marquis de Marignane from whom he soon parted and, deep in debt, was incarcerated in prison once again. Removed from the Château d’If to a less rigorous confinement near Pontarlier, he made use of his relative freedom to visit the town where he was introduced into the house of a local nobleman whose pretty if rather vapid and ill-educated wife, Marie-Thérèse de Monnier, or Sophie, as he called her, fell helplessly in love with him. He fled to Switzerland where Sophie joined him; from Switzerland they travelled together to Holland where he made a precarious living by journalism and where he heard that he had been sentenced to death for rapt et vol at Pontarlier and beheaded in effigy; and from Holland he was brought back to France by the police and imprisoned yet again at Vincennes.