Christopher Hibbert - The Days of the French Revolution

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 transformed 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’.