Everywhere the preparatory assemblies were disturbed, they were tumultuous in many spots; in Provence, as well as in Brittany, they became violent. In his province, Mirabeau was the cause or pretext for the troubles. Born at Bignon, near Nemours, on the 9th of March, 1749, well known already for his talent as a writer and orator as well as for the startling irregularities of his life, he was passionately desirous of being elected to the States-general. “I don’t think I shall be useless there,” he wrote to his friend Cerruti. Nowhere, however, was his character worse than in Provence: there people had witnessed his dissensions with his father as well as with his wife. Public contempt, a just punishment for his vices, caused his admission into the states-provincial to be unjustly opposed. The assembly was composed exclusively of nobles in possession of fiefs, of ecclesiastical dignitaries, and of a small number of municipal officers. It claimed to elect the deputies to the States-general according to the ancient usages. Mirabeau’s common sense, as well as his great and puissant genius, revolted against the absurd theories of the privileged: he overwhelmed them with his terrible eloquence, whilst adjuring them to renounce their abuseful and obsolete rights; he scared them by his forceful and striking hideousness. “Generous friends of peace,” said he, addressing the two upper orders, “I hereby appeal to your honor! Nobles of Provence, the eyes of Europe are upon you, weigh well your answer! Ye men of God, have a care; God hears you! But, if you keep silence, or if you intrench yourselves in the vague utterances of a piqued self-love, allow me to add a word. In all ages, in all countries, aristocrats have persecuted the friends of the people, and if, by I know not what combination of chances, there have arisen one in their own midst, he it is whom they have struck above all, thirsting as they were to inspire terror by their choice of a victim. Thus perished the last of the Gracchi, by the hand of the patricians; but, wounded to the death, he flung dust towards heaven, calling to witness the gods of vengeance, and from that dust sprang Marius, Marius less great for having exterminated the Cimbri than for having struck down at Rome the aristocracy of the noblesse.”
Mirabeau was shut out from the states-provincial and soon adopted eagerly by the third estate. Elected at Marseilles as well as at Aix for the States-general, he quieted in these two cities successively riots occasioned by the dearness of bread. The people, in their enthusiasm, thronged upon him, accepting his will without a murmur when he restored to their proper figure provisions lowered in price through the terror of the authorities. The petty noblesse and the lower provincial clergy had everywhere taken the side of the third estate. Mirabeau was triumphant. “I have been, am, and shall be to the last,” he exclaimed, “the man for public liberty, the man for the constitution. Woe to the privileged orders, if that means better be the man of the people than the man of the nobles, for privileges will come to an end, but the people is eternal!”
Brittany possessed neither a Mounier nor a Mirabeau; the noblesse there were numerous, bellicose, and haughty, the burgessdom rich and independent. Discord was manifested at the commencement of the states-provincial assembled at Rennes in the latter part of December, 1788. The governor wanted to suspend the sessions, the two upper orders persisted in meeting; there was fighting in the streets. The young men flocked in from the neighboring towns; the states-room was blockaded. For three days the members who had assembled there endured a siege; when they cut their way through, sword in hand, several persons were killed the enthusiasm spread to the environs. At Angers, the women published a resolution declaring that “the mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts of the young citizens of Angers would join them if they had to march to the aid of Brittany, and would perish rather than desert the nationality.” When election time arrived, and notwithstanding the concessions which had been made to them by the government, the Breton nobles refused to proceed to the nominations of their order if the choice of deputies were not intrusted to the states-provincial; they persisted in staying away, thus weakening by thirty voices their party in the States-general.
The great days were at hand. The whole of France was absorbed in the drawing up of the memorials (cahiers) demanded by the government from each order, in each bailiwick. The weather was severe, the harvest had been bad, the suffering was extreme. “Famine and fear of insurrection overthrew M. Necker, the means of providing against them absorbed all his days and nights and the greater part of the money he had at his disposal.” Agitators availed themselves ably of the misery as a means of exciting popular passion. The alms-giving was enormous, charity and fear together opened both hearts and purses. The gifts of the Duke of Orleans to the poor of Paris appeared to many people suspicious; but the Archbishop of Paris, M. de Juigne, without any other motive but his pastoral devotion, distributed all he possessed, and got into debt four hundred thousand livres, in order to relieve his flock. The doors of the finest houses were opened to wretches dying of cold; anybody might go in and get warmed in the vast halls. The regulations for the elections had just been published (24th of January, 1789). The number of deputies was set at twelve hundred. The electoral conditions varied according to order and dignity, as well as according to the extent of the bailiwicks; in accordance with the opinion of the Assembly of notables, the simple fact of nationality and of inscription upon the register of taxes constituted electoral rights. No rating (cens) was required.
The preparatory labors had been conducted without combination, the elections could not be simultaneous; no powerful and dominant mind directed that bewildered mass of ignorant electors, exercising for the first time, under such critical circumstances, a right of which they did not know the extent and did not foresee the purport. “The people has more need to be governed and subjected to a protective authority than it has fitness to govern,” M. Malouet had said in his speech to the assembly of the three orders in the bailiwick of Riom. The day, however, was coming when the conviction was to be forced upon this people, so impotent and incompetent in the opinion of its most trusty friends, that the sovereign authority rested in its hands, without direction and without control.
“The elective assembly of Riom was not the most stormy,” says M. Malouet, who, like M. Mounier at Grenoble, had been elected by acclamation head of the deputies of his own order at Riom, “but it was sufficiently so to verify all my conjectures and cause me to truly regret that I had come to it and had obtained the deputyship. I was on the point of giving in my resignation, when I found some petty burgesses, lawyers, advocates without any information about public affairs, quoting the Contrat social, declaiming vehemently against tyranny, abuses, and proposing a constitution apiece. I pictured to myself all the disastrous consequences which might be produced upon a larger stage by such outrageousness, and I arrived at Paris very dissatisfied with myself, with my fellow-citizens, and with the ministers who were hurrying us into this abyss.”
The king had received all the memorials; on some few points the three orders had commingled their wishes in one single memorial. M. Malouet had failed to get this done in Auvergne. “The clergy insist upon putting theology into their memorials,” he wrote to M. de Montmorin, on the 24th of March, 1789, “and the noblesse compensations for pecuniary sacrifice. I have exhausted my lungs and have no hope that we shall succeed completely on all points, but the differences of opinion between the noblesse and the third estate are not embarrassing. There is rather more pigheadedness amongst the clergy as to their debt, which they decline to pay, and as to some points of discipline which, after all, are matters of indifference to us; we shall have, all told, three memorials of which the essential articles are pretty similar to those of the third estate. We shall end as we began, peaceably.”
“The memorials of 1789,” says M. de Tocqueville [L’ancien regime et la Revolution, p. 211], “will remain as it were the will and testament of the old French social system, the last expression of its desires, the authentic manifesto of its latest wishes. In its totality and on many points it likewise contained in the germ the principles of new France. I read attentively the memorials drawn up by the three orders before meeting in 1789,—I say the three orders, those of the noblesse and clergy as well as those of the third estate,—and when I come to put together all these several wishes, I perceive with a sort of terror that what is demanded is the simultaneous and systematic abolition of all the laws and all the usages having currency in the country, and I see at a glance that there is about to be enacted one of the most vast and most dangerous revolutions ever seen in the world. Those who will to-morrow be its victims have no idea of it, they believe that the total and sudden transformation of so complicated and so old a social system can take effect without any shock by the help of reason and its power, alone. Poor souls! They have forgotten even that maxim which their fathers expressed four hundred years before in the simple and forcible language of those times: ‘By quest of too great franchise and liberties, getteth one into too great serfage.’”
However terrible and radical it may have been in its principles and its results, the French Revolution did not destroy the past and its usages, it did not break with tradition so completely as was demanded, in 1789, by the memorials of the three orders, those of the noblesse and the clergy, as well as those of the third estate.
One institution, however, was nowhere attacked or discussed. “It is not true,” says M. Malouet, “that we were sent to constitute the kingship, but undoubtedly to regulate the exercise of powers conformably with our instructions. Was not the kingship constituted in law and in fact? Were we not charged to respect it, to maintain it on all its bases?” Less than a year after the Revolution had begun, Mirabeau wrote privately to the king: “Compare the new state of things with the old regimen, there is the source of consolations and hopes. A portion of the acts of the National Assembly, and the most considerable too, is clearly favorable to monarchical government. Is it nothing, pray, to be without Parliaments, without states-districts, without bodies of clergy, of privileged, of noblesse? The idea of forming but one single class of citizens would have delighted Richelieu. This even surface facilitates the exercise of power. Many years of absolute government could not have done so much as this single year of revolution for the kingly authority.”