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tion. It was not an exclusively radical group. D'Epremesnil was among the group, as was a fellow "constitutionalist" from the Parlement, Sabatier de Cabre. They did their best to argue for the preservation of a separate noble order as a bulwark against the corrupting power of monied property that they claimed would overwhelm a general representation. The majority of Duport's club, however, were adamant that the Third Estate should have a representation at least equal to the other two combined and that the assembly should then deliberate and vote in common.
A striking number of the Society were men whose reputations had been made as "public men" and patriotic celebrities. Their self-image already presupposed a sympathetic rapport between leaders and citizens. The Par-lementaire Target, for example, who broke most decisively with his conservative colleagues, was already the god of the basoche, huzzahed from the galleries. His first great trial oration had been a sentimental epic worthy of the most mawkish invention of Rousseau. It had involved the rights of the villagers of Salency in Picardy to choose their own annual "Rose Queen"— the rosiere. The ritual had been adopted by the bien-pensant nobility as a bucolic idyll and Orleans' mistress Mme de Genlis had gone to Salency to play the harp at the crowning of the rosiere. When the local seigneur had claimed that the right to select the rosiere belonged to him, not the village elders, and had taken the case all the way to the Parlement of Paris, Target had represented it in court as a classic trial of strength between innocence and force. In 1788 he rehearsed many of the same themes, amplified to the scale of national politics.
Lafayette, his kinsman de Noailles, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, the Duc de Luynes and the Duc de Lauzun were likewise citizens whose rhetoric was all the more influential because they hailed from the summit of the peerage. For many of them, moreover, this was merely the second stage of a crusade that had begun in America. They were courtiers against the court, aristocrats against privilege, officers who wanted to replace dynastic with national patriotism. Though he was committed to a national assembly, Lafayette was not without some anxieties about the consequences of popular politics. And in an attempt to bring him closer to their line the Parlement made the "Hero of the Two Worlds" an honorary councillor. This worried his fellow member of the Thirty, Condorcet, who knew Lafayette's weakness for adulation. To the American Philip Mazzei he wrote:
If you go to Lafayette's house, try to exorcise the devil of aristocracy that will be there to tempt him in the guise of a councilor of Parlement or a Breton noble. For that purpose take
along in your pocket a little vial of Potomac water, and a sprinkler made from the wood of a Continental army rifle and make your prayers in the name of Liberty, Equality and Reason, which are but a single divinity in three persons.
Others among Duport's group included Talleyrand, already observing Lafayette with a leery eye; Mirabeau, whose boiling polemical radicalism was at this time compromised by scandals of every kind, sexual, monetary and diplomatic, collapsing about his ears; Genevan bankers like Claviere and Panchaud, both ex-allies of Calonne's and now reverting to their democratic principles of 1782; the Abbes Morellet and Sieyes; the Provencal pastor Rabaut Saint-Etienne and not least Louis-Sebastien Mercier, the prophet of the apocalypse. The "conspiracy of well-intentioned
men," as they designated themselves, also included a number of those who had provided the brains for Calonne's reform program, among them Du Pont de Nemours and the Abbe Louis.
While they disagreed on many details, the majority of the Club all subscribed to some basic principles that marked a dramatic break with Parlementaire argument. They rejected outright the axiom that there had, all along, been some sort of "fundamental constitution" that the
Parlements had been concerned to conserve. The only true "fundamental law," added Rabaut Saint-Etienne, was salus populi lex est (the welfare of the people is the supreme law). The mere fact, added Target, that antiquarians had to go rummaging around in the history of Charlemagne and the Carolingians was proof enough that Trance had no constitution and it was now necessary to create one from scratch.
Beyond Paris, there were provincial storm centers where urban champions of the Third Estate, following Mounier's example in the Dauphine, were embattled with more conservative nobles over the structure of their provincial Estates—and by extension over national representation. The fiercest such combat took place in Brittany, where a young generation of lawyers in towns like Nantes and Rennes (schooled in street tactics by the battles for the Parlement) now used oratory and crowd pressure to press for a radical redefinition of representation. Arthur Young, the English agricultural writer who visited Nantes in September, found it "as enflamme in the cause of liberty as any town in Trance can be" and listened to conversations that "prove how great a change is effected in the midst of the French." The polemics issuing from the reading clubs and political committers that mushroomed in the Breton towns in 1788 made a point of ridiculing the sanction of antiquity, especially dear to the province's nobil-ity.
"What
does it matter to us," wrote the lawyer Volney in his journal
The Sentinel of the People, "what our fathers have done or how and why they have done it . . . ? The essential rights of man, his natural relations to his
fellows in the state of society—these are the eternal bases of every form of government." The Patriotic Reflections of the Rennes law professor Jean Lanjuinais were harsher in their parody of conservative obstruction:
Negro slaves—you are reduced to the condition of brutes—but no innovations! Children of Asiatic kings—the custom is that the eldest of you strangle his brothers—but no innovations! People of Brittany you are badly off and the nobility is well off—but no innovations!
What is required, insisted Lanjuinais, is a constitution for the present, not the veneration of relics. "Would the garment of 1614 fit us any better than the garment of a child fits a man in the prime of life?" Likewise, the term privilege, which had been synonymous with liberties in the contest between crown and Parlements, was now deemed to be its antithesis. Political probity now required not that privileges be protected but obliterated.
Throughout much of France (and in some cases even in obstreperous Brittany) the nobility were ready to concede at least part of these demands made by their own radicals as well as bona fide spokesmen of the Third. As would be shown by the cahiers—statements of local complaints and expectations—a majority of the privileged class was prepared to abandon the most conspicuous feature of its status: exemption from taxation. So much of this exemption had been eroded that it was hardly a grand sacrifice, especially for the better-off nobles, who flourished it as a concession. But the command that they melt their order entirely into some more general union of the Nation was much more divisive, both between and within provinces. The repeated claim, that separate orders should persist simply because they had survived so long, increasingly fell on deaf ears.
At the end of 1788, then, the sanction of the past lost its power to persuade. The Parlementaire lawyer Pierre Lacretelle went so far as to regret that all monuments and ancient usages had not been consumed in a great fire (something the Revolution would symbolically enact in 1793). Instead, Condorcet and like-minded members of the Duport group argued, reason should guide the framers of a new constitution. "True principles, rationally determined," the Comte d'Antraigues agreed, would show that political liberty and civil equality before the law were the proper bases of such a new order. But d'Antraigues, a friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's, went on to make the much more radical case (typical of the citizen-nobility) that the state and the People were one and the same:
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The Third Estate is the People and the People is the foundation of the State; it is in fact the State itself; the other orders are merely political categories while by the immutable laws of nature the People is everything. Everything should be subordinated to it [the People]; its safety should be the first law of the State. ... It is in the People that all national power resides and it is for the People that all states exist. . . .
D'Antraigues' flirtation with popular sovereignty would not be long-lived. Elected a deputy to the Estates-General, he came to repent of his polemic and became as zealous a counter-revolutionary as he had been a proto-democrat. But his tract nonetheless went into fourteen editions and boiled down to the popular axiom "The Third Estate is not an order, it is the nation itself."
Once this revolutionary proposition became a common truism, the defense of separate orders took on the color of sectional interest, selfish, unpatriotic and heedless of the concerns of the common people. And because the King had asked to hear those concerns, such views could even be represented as antimonarchical. Necker's insistence on the strictly provisional nature of his administration and his abstention from declaring on the crucial issues of doubling the Third and voting by head opened up a political vacuum that was filled by arguments rather than solutions. On December 5 that space was made even wider when the Parlement of Paris backed away from its earlier intransigence. It now pronounced itself in
agreement with Target that there was indeed no constitutional precedent for the Estates-General to follow. Instead, "reason, liberty and the general wish [voeu general]" would indicate the shape of the new institution!
Necker's interim solution had been to convene a second Assembly of the Notables to offer advice on the form of the Estates-General. But while its predecessor had been more radical than expected, the opposite was true of the second Assembly. Only a minority took up the "national" positions. Worse, the princes of the blood—with the important exceptions of Orleans and, more surprisingly, the King's brother Provence—declared, in a memorandum drawn up on December 5, that "the State is in peril" and that
a revolution is being prepared in the principles of government, brought on by the agitation of minds. Institutions held sacred and by which the monarchy has prospered for so many centuries have
now been converted into problematic questions or even decried as injustices.
30181. Sergent, Necker takes the measure of France: spring 1789.
To surrender to a majoritarian view of representation, they went on, was to deliver France to extraordinary dangers. Should the Third Estate's "revolution in the constitution of the state" prevail, they foresaw kings coming and going according to the caprice of public opinion dressed up as the national will.
The Memorandum of the Princes was not unperceptive about the dangers of the course into which the monarchy was being swept in a state of rudderless optimism. But to the pamphleteers of the Third Estate it was taken as direct evidence of a conspiracy against the "popular monarchy" in the process of being created. As the debate intensified the government was even more reluctant to provide direction. On December 27 an
exceptionally summary edict, without any kind of preamble, deepened this confusion. Against the advice of the Assembly of the Notables it proclaimed that the Third Estate would indeed have double representation. But it refrained from ordering deliberation in common and votes by head, a decision that made a mockery of the generosity towards the Third. Necker's view seems to have been that somehow the Estates-General would make up its own mind without too much disorder.
All these fumbling initiatives, second thoughts and obfuscations were in the strongest contrast to the Patriots of the Third Estate, whose view had
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the virtue <>l claril v and decisiveness. Away with those who had for so long purported to represent the People but, when that representation was at hand, revealed themselves to be not its champions but its oppressors. Any current issue could be converted into the rhetoric of Patriots and Privileged. In his petition on behalf of Citizens Domiciled in Paris, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (ex-Jesuit and physician) had argued for the doubling of the Third on the basis of exactly this distinction. His tract had been adopted by the Six Merchant Guilds of the city and six thousand copies had been distributed under their aegis. The Parlement attempted to suppress its circulation and on the eighth of December took steps against Guillotin himself. He was arraigned before the court but the crowd demonstration in his favor was so noisily intimidating that his triumphant acquittal was virtually a foregone conclusion.
the reborn Nation: its labor. Many of the tracts that had designed the identity of the Third Estate had already drawn an invidious contrast between venally acquired privilege and the productivity of the roturier, a term that itself conjured up the emblem of the laboring shovel. A memorandum on the Estates-General drawn up by the municipal officers of Nantes was emphatic on this point:
The third estate cultivates the fields, constructs and mans the vessels of commerce, sustains and directs manufactures, nourishes and vivifies the kingdom. ... It is time that a great people count for something. . . .
The cahier of a village in the Vosges, Hareville-sous-Montfort, would make the same point more invidiously. The nobility that claimed it
supported His Majesty, it explained, "only does so at the price of drawing fat pensions off the state," whereas it is "the Third Estate that pays all the time and which works night and day to cultivate the land which produces grain to feed all of the people."
The many prints that began to appear around this time, featuring the tiller of the soil bearing on his back the two privileged orders, made essentially the same point.
It was left to the Abbe Sieyes' Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-Etat?, the most incisive of all the pamphlets, to make the schism between the useful and the useless derisive. "What is necessary that a nation should prosper?" asked the first
of his famous rhetorical questions. "Individual efforts
and public
functions" came the answer. And it was the Third Estate that supplied all 303
82. "Let's hope that the game finishes well." A woman of the Third Estate carries the weight of the other two orders.
of the former. The Third Estate, then, was not a mere "order." It was the Nation itself. Those who claimed a special status outside the Nation were thereby confessing their parasitism. By mischance and misappropriation the Third Estate, which was everything, had been, politically, nothing. Only when the fecklessness of the privileged had threatened the destruction of the patrie could it seek to be, as Sieyes modestly put it, "something."
The Third Estate was an idea and an argument before it was a social reality. And Sieyes' pamphlet was its most inspired invention: cogent, lucid— apparently indisputable except by invoking the unfrightening phantom of historicity. It not only gave form and shape to the new national polity, it pointed a threatening finger at those who separated themselves from it. "It is impossible to say what place the nobility and clergy ought to occupy in the social order," he warned. "This is equivalent to asking what place should be assigned to a malignant disease which preys upon and