CONVOCATION OF THE STATES-GENERAL
Louis XVI, grandson of Louis XV, came to the throne in 1774. He showed
some, but not all, of the characteristics of his family. He was of
sluggish intelligence, and extremely slow, not to say embarrassed, in
speech. He was heavy in build and in features. His two great
interests were locksmithing, which he had learned as a boy, and running
the deer and the boar in the great royal forests, St. Germain,
Fontainebleau, Rambouillet. He had all the Bourbon _insouciance_, and
would break off an important discussion of the Council from
indifference, incompetence, or impatience, to go off hunting. Worst of
all, for an autocrat, he had not in his nature one particle of those
qualities that go to make up the man of action, decision, energy,
courage, whole-heartedness. In this he represented the decay of his
race, surfeited with power, victim of the system it {36} had struggled
so long and so hard to establish. At the best he had flashes of common
sense, which, unfortunately for himself, he was never capable of
translating into deeds. He was full of good intentions, of a certain
underlying honesty and benevolence, all rather obscured by his boorish
exterior and manners. Like his ancestors, he ate and drank
voraciously, but, unlike them, he did not care for women. He even
showed some indifference for his wife at first, but later, when she
bore children, he appeared to the public in the character of a good
father of the family. In that and some of his other traits he had
elements of popularity, and he remained in a way popular almost to the
moment of his trial in 1792.
Marie Antoinette of Austria, his wife, was of very different mould; and
in her everything made for unpopularity. She had begun under the worst
auspices. The French public detested the Austrian alliance into which
Madame de Pompadour had dragged France, and had felt the smart of
national disgrace during the Seven Years' War, so that a marriage into
the Hapsburg-Lorraine family after the conclusion of that war, was very
ill received. To make the matter worse a catastrophe marked the
wedding ceremonies, and at a great {37} illumination given by the city
of Paris, a stampede occurred, in which hundreds of lives were lost.
The Austrian princess, _l'Autrichienne_, as she was called from the
first, did not mend matters by her conduct. Until misfortune sobered
her and brought out her stronger and better side, she was incurably
light-headed and frivolous. She was always on the very edge of a _faux
pas_, and her enemies did not fail to accuse her of frequent slips
beyond the edge. The titled riffraff that had adorned the Louis XV-du
Barry court was swept out on the accession of the young Queen, but only
to be replaced by a new clique as greedy as the old, and not vastly
more edifying. Richelieu and d'Aiguillon only made way for Lauzun,
the Polignacs, and Vaudreuil. And if it was an improvement to have a
high-born queen rule Versailles instead of a low-born courtesan, the
difference was not great in the matter of outward dignity, and
especially of the expenditure of public money. Millions that cannot be
computed for lack of proper accounts were poured out for the Queen's
amusements and for the Queen's favourites, men and women.
It was the Controleur whose function was to fill the Court's bottomless
purse. Under this strain and that of the American war, a man of {38}
humble origin but of good repute as an economist and accountant was
called to the office, the Geneva banker, Jacques Necker. For three
years he attempted to carry the burden of the war by small economies
effected at many points, which produced the minimum of result with the
maximum of friction. Finally, in 1781, the Queen drove him from
office. Necker himself provided the excuse by the publication of his
_Compte rendu_, a pamphlet which first put the financial crisis fairly
before the public.
All that the public knew up to this time was that while the Court
maintained its splendour and extravagance, the economic and financial
situation was rapidly getting worse. There was no systematic audit,
there was no budget, there was no annual account published, so that the
finances remained a sealed book, a private matter concerning the King
of France only. But here, in Necker's pamphlet, was an account of
those finances, that revealed to a certain extent the state of affairs,
and, which was even more important, that constituted an appeal to the
public to judge the King's administration. Louis was furious at his
minister's step, and not only dismissed him, but banished him from
Paris.
{39} From 1783 to 1787 the finances were in the hands of Calonne, whose
management proved decisive and fatal. His dominant idea was that of a
courtier,--always to honour any demand made on the treasury by the King
or Queen. To do less would be unworthy of a _gentilhomme_ and a
devoted servant of their Majesties. So Calonne, bowing gracefully,
smiling reassuringly, embarked on a fatal course, borrowing where he
could, anticipating in one direction, defaulting in another, but
always, and somehow, producing the louis necessary to the enjoyment of
the present moment. He reached the end of his tether towards the close
of 1786.
It was during Calonne's administration that occurred the famous affair
of the diamond necklace. It was a vulgar swindle worked on the
Cardinal de Rohan by an adventuress, Mme. de La Motte Valois. Trading
on his credulity and court ambitions, she persuaded him to purchase a
diamond necklace, which the Queen, so he was told, greatly wished but
could not afford. Marie Antoinette was personated in a secret
interview given to Rohan, and Mme. de La Motte got possession of the
diamonds. Presently the jewellers began to press Rohan for payment,
and the secret came out. The {40} King was furious, and sent Rohan to
the royal prison of the Bastille, while Mme. de La Motte was handed
over to the legal procedure of the Parlement of Paris.
This incident created great excitement, and was much distorted by
public report. It left two lasting impressions, one relating to Mme.
de La Motte, the other to the Queen. The adventuress was too obvious a
scapegoat to be spared. While Rohan was allowed to leave the Bastille
after a short imprisonment, the woman was brought to trial, and was
sentenced to public whipping and branding. Her execution was carried
out in bungling fashion, and at the foot of the steps leading to the
law courts, whence Danton's voice was to reverberate so loudly in his
struggle with so-called Justice ten years later, a disgraceful scene
occurred. The crowd saw La Motte struggling in the hands of the
executioners and rolling with them in the gutter, heard her uttering
loud shrieks as the branding iron was at last applied to her shoulders.
The impression produced by this revolting spectacle was profound, and
was heightened by the universal belief that Marie Antoinette was not
less guilty in one direction than Madame de La Motte had been in
another. The outbreak of slander and {41} of libel against the Queen
goes on accumulating from this moment with ever-increasing force until
her death, eight years later. A legend comes into existence, becomes
blacker and blacker, and culminates in the atrocious accusations made
against her by Hébert before the Revolutionary Tribunal; Messalina and
Semiramis are rolled into one to supply a fit basis of comparison. And
the population of Paris broods over this legend, and when revolution
comes, makes of Marie Antoinette the symbol of all that is monstrous,
infamous and cruel in the system of the Bourbons; makes of her the
marked victim of the vengeance of the people.
Meanwhile Calonne was struggling to keep his head above water, and in
the process had come into conflict with the Parlements, or corporations
of judges. At last, in 1786, he went to the King, admitted that he had
no money, that he could borrow no more, and that the only hope lay in
fundamental reform. He proposed, therefore, a number of measures, of
which the most important were that money should be raised by a stamp
tax, that a land tax should be the foundation of the revenue, and that
it should apply to all proprietors, noble, cleric, and of the Third
Estate, with no {42} exceptions. There was no chance, however, as
matters stood, of persuading the Parlements to register decrees for
these purposes, so Calonne proposed that the King should summon an
assembly of the notables of France to give their support to these
reforms. Here again, although Calonne and Louis did not realize it,
was an appeal to public opinion; the monarchy was unconsciously
following the lead of the philosophers, of the dramatists, and of
Necker.
In January, 1788, the Notables assembled, "to learn the King's
intentions," one hundred and fifty of them, mostly nobles and official
persons. In February Calonne put his scheme before them, and then
discovered, to his great astonishment, that they declined to give him
the support, which was all he wanted of them, and that, on the
contrary, they wished to discuss his project, and, in fact, held a very
adverse opinion of it. In this the Notables were not factious; they
merely had enough sense of the gravity of the situation to perceive
that a real remedy was needed, and that Calonne's proposal did not
supply it. His idea was good enough in the abstract, but in practice
there was at least one insurmountable objection, which was that the
land tax could not be established until a cadastral survey of France
had {43} been undertaken--a complicated and lengthy operation. Very
soon Calonne and the Notables had embarked on a contest that gradually
became heated, until finally Calonne appealed from the Notables to the
public by printing and circulating his proposals. The Notables replied
by a protest, and declared that the real reform was economy and that
the Controleur should place before them proper accounts. This proved
the end of Calonne, his position had long been weak, he now toppled
over, and was replaced by Loménie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse.
Loménie was an agreeable courtier, and well liked by the Queen, but he
was also a liberal, an encyclopedist, and a member of the Assembly of
Notables. He succeeded in getting the approval of that body for a loan
of 60,000,000 francs, and then, on the 1st of May, 1787, dissolved it.
The new minister had, however, come to the opinion that his
predecessor's programme was the only possible one, and as soon as he
had got rid of the Notables, his late colleagues, he attempted to get
the Parlement of Paris to register the new laws.
The Parlement resisted; and popular discontent became a serious feature
of the situation. The Chancellor, Lamoignon, was burnt {44} in effigy
by the mob. In July, 1787, the Parlement of Paris demanded that the
States-General of the kingdom should be assembled. For a whole year
the struggle between the judges and the ministers grew hotter and
hotter. The arrest of d'Éspréménil, one of the leaders of the
Parlement, in May, 1788, led to severe rioting in Paris, and only the
energetic use of police and troops saved the situation. Not only did
the provincial Parlements support that of Paris in its resistance to
the Court, but the provinces themselves began to stir, and finally, a
month after d'Éspréménil's arrest, a large meeting at Grenoble decided
to call together the old Estates of the province, the province of
Dauphiné.
This was almost civil war, and threatened to plunge France back into
the conditions of two centuries earlier. The Government ordered troops
to Grenoble to put down the movement. The commanding general, however,
on arriving near the city, found the situation so alarming that he
agreed to a compromise, whereby the Estates were to hold a meeting, but
not in the capital of the province. Accordingly, at the village of
Vizille, on the 21st of July, several hundred persons assembled,
representing the three orders, nobility, clergy, and {45} Third Estate
of the province; and of these it had been previously agreed that the
Third Estate should be allowed double representation.
The leading figure of the assembly of Vizille was Jean Joseph Mounier.
He was a middle class man, a lawyer, upright, intelligent, yet
moderate, who felt the need of reform, and who was prepared to labour
for it. He inspired all the proceedings at Vizille, and as secretary
of the Estates, had the chief part in drawing up its resolutions.
These demanded the convocation of the States-General of France, pledged
the province to refuse to pay all taxes not voted by the
States-General, and called for the abolition of arbitrary imprisonment
on the King's order by the warrant known as the _lettre de cachet_.
The effect of the resolutions of the assembly of Vizille through France
was immediate. They were simple, direct, and voiced the general
feeling; they also indicated that the moment had come for interfering
in the chronic mismanagement of affairs. So irresistible was their
force that Loménie de Brienne and the King accepted them with hardly a
struggle. The minister was now at the end of his borrowing powers and
in the month of August his tenure of power came to a close. Before
{46} leaving office he suspended payments, and issued a decree
convoking the States-General for the 1st of May, 1789. He was
succeeded by Necker.
It was unfortunate for the Bourbon monarchy that at this great crisis a
king and a minister should have come together, both lacking initiative,
both lacking courage, and yet not even sympathetic, but, on the
contrary, lacking mutual confidence and refusing one another mutual
support. And while Louis lacked executive vigour, so Necker tended
always to lose himself in figures, in details, in words, in fine
sentiments, and to neglect the essential for the unimportant. He was
well intentioned but narrow, and merely followed the current of events.
From all parts of France advice and representations reached him as to
the conditions under which the States-General should be convoked.
Their last meeting had been held as far back as 1614, so that there was
naturally much uncertainty on questions of procedure. Partly to clear
this, partly to find some support for his own timidity, Necker called
the Notables together again. They met in November and helped to settle
the conditions under which the elections {47} to the States-General and
their convocation should take place.
The old constitutional theory of the States-General was that it was an
assembly of the whole French nation, represented by delegates, and
divided into three classes. Thus it was tribal in that it comprised
every Frenchman within its scope, and feudal in that it formed the
caste distinctions, noble, clergy, people. In other words it afforded
little ground for comparison with the English Parliament; the point at
which it approached it nearest being in the matter of the power to vote
the taxation levied by the Crown; but this power the States-General had
lost so far back as the 15th century.
This fundamental conception entailed another, which was that the
delegates of the nation were not members of a parliament or debating
assembly, but were mere mandatories charged by the electors with a
specific commission, which was to place certain representations before
the King. This meant that in the stage previous to the election of
these delegates, the electors should draw up a statement of their
complaints and a mandate or instructions for their representatives.
This was in fact done, {48} and many thousands of _cahiers_, as they
were called, were drawn up all over France, in which the demands of as
many individuals, or corporations, or bodies of electors were stated.
These were summarized into three cahiers for each province, and
eventually into three, one from each order, for all France, and these
last three were in due course presented to Louis XVI.
As a source of information on the economic and social condition of a
country, the cahiers are the most wonderful collection of documents
available for the historian. Many of them have been more or less
faithfully published, and at the present day the French government is
liberally helping on the work of making them public. But in a work of
this scope it is impossible to go at length into the state of affairs
which they depict; only the most salient features can be dealt with.
First, then, it must be said that the cahiers present at the same time
remarkable uniformity and wide divergence. The agreement lies partly
in their general spirit, and partly in the repetition of certain
formulas preached throughout the country by eager pamphleteers and
budding political leaders. The divergence can be placed under three
chief heads: the markedly different character of a great part {49} of
the cahiers of the clergy from those of the other two orders;
provincial divergence and peculiarities of local customs; demands for
the maintenance of local privileges. Of the last class, Marseilles, a
port with many commercial and political privileges, affords perhaps the
most extreme example. The uniformity is to be seen especially in the
general spirit of these complaints to the King. One feels, while
reading the _cahiers_, the unanimity of a long-suffering people anxious
for a release from intolerable misgovernment,--more than that, anxious
to have their institutions modernized, but all in a spirit of complete
loyalty and devotion to the King and to all that was wise, and good,
and glorious, and beneficent, that he still seemed to represent. The
illusion of Bourbonism was at that moment, so far as surface
appearances went, practically untouched.
The noblesse and the clergy conducted their elections by means of small
meetings and chose their delegates from among themselves. The Tiers
Etat elected as its representatives men of the upper middle class and
professional class; the lower classes, ignorant and politically
untutored, were unrepresented and accepted tutelage with more or less
alacrity--more in the provinces, less in Paris. But in addition, a
{50} small number of men belonging to the privileged orders sought and
obtained mandates from the lower. Sieyès and a few other priests,
Mirabeau and a few other nobles, were elected to the States-General by
the Third Estate.
Sieyès, of powerful mind, a student of constitutionalism, terse and
logical in expression, had made a mark during the electoral period with
his pamphlet, _Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat?_ What is the Third Estate?
His reply was: It is everything; it has been nothing; it should be
something. This was a reasonable and forceful exposition of the views
of the twenty-five millions. Mirabeau, of volcanic temperament and
morals, with the instinct of a statesman and the conscience of an
outlaw, greedy of power as of money, with thundering voice, ready
rhetoric, and keen perception, turned from his own order to the people
for his mandate. He saw clearly enough from the beginning that reform
could not stop at financial changes, but must throw open the government
of France to the large class of intelligent citizens with which her
developed civilization had endowed her.
The outstanding fact brought out by this infiltration of the noblesse
and clergy into the {51} Third Estate, was clear: the deputies to the
States-General, whichever order they belonged to, were nearly all
members of the educated middle and upper class of France. Part of the
deputies of the noblesse stood for class privilege, and so did a
somewhat larger part of those of the clergy. But a great number in
both these orders were of the same sentiment as the deputies of the
Third Estate. They were intelligent and patriotic Frenchmen, full of
the teaching of Voltaire, and Rousseau, and Montesquieu, convinced by
their eyes as well as by their intellect that Bourbonism must be
reformed for its own sake, for the sake of France, and for the sake of
humanity.
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