Normandy confined herself to declarations and speeches; other provinces went beyond those bounds: Brittany claimed performance “of the marriage contract between Louis XII. and the Duchess Anne.” Notwithstanding the king’s prohibition, the Parliament met at Rennes. A detachment of soldiers having been ordered to disperse the magistrates, a band of gentlemen, supported by an armed mob, went to protect the deliberations of the court. Fifteen officers fought duels with fifteen gentlemen. The court issued a decree of arrest against the holders of the king’s commission. The youth of Nantes hurried to the aid of the youth of Rennes. The intermediary commission of the states ordered the bishops to have the prayers said which were customary in times of public calamity, and a hundred and thirty gentlemen carried to the governor a declaration signed by the noblesse of almost the whole province. “We, members of the noblesse of Brittany, do declare infamous those who may accept any place, whether in the new administration of justice or in the administration of the states, which is not recognized by the laws and constitutions of the province.” A dozen of them set off for Versailles to go and denounce the ministers to Louis XVI. Being put in the Bastille, eighteen of their friends went to demand then back; they were followed by fifty others. The officers of the Bassigny regiment had taken sides with the opposition, and discussed the orders sent to them. Among the great lords of the province, attached to the king’s own person, MM. de La Tremoille, de Rieux, and de Guichen left the court to join their protests to those of their friends; the superintendent, Bertrand de Molleville, was hanged in effigy and had to fly.
In Bearn, the peasantry had descended from the mountains; hereditary proprietors of their little holdings, they joined the noblesse to march out and meet the Duke of Guiche, sent by the king to restore order. Already the commandant of the province had been obliged to authorize the meeting of the Parliament. The Bearnese bore in front of their ranks the cradle of Henry IV., carefully preserved in the Castle of Pau. “We are no rebels,” they said: “we claim our contract and fidelity to the oaths of a king whom we love. The Bearnese is free-born, he will not die a slave. Let the king have all from us in love and not by force; our blood is his and our country’s. Let none come to take our lives when we are defending our liberty.”
Legal in Normandy, violent in Brittany, tumultuous in Bearn, the parliamentary protests took a politic and methodical form in Dauphiny. An insurrection amongst the populace of Grenoble, soon supported by the villagers from the mountains, had at first flown to arms at the sound of the tocsin. The members of the Parliament, on the point of leaving the city, had been detained by force, and their carriages had been smashed. The troops offered little resistance; an entry was effected into the house of the governor, the Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, and, with an axe above his head, the insurgents threatened to hang him to the chandelier in his drawing-room if he did not convoke the Parliament. Ragged ruffians ran to the magistrates, and compelled them to meet in the sessions-hall. The members of Parliament succeeded with great difficulty in pacifying the mob. As soon as they found themselves free, they hastened away into exile. Other hands had taken up their quarrel. A certain number of members of the three orders met at the town hall, and, on their private authority, convoked for the 21st of July the special states of Dauphiny, suppressed a while before by Cardinal Richelieu.
The Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre had been superseded by old Marshal Vaux, rough and ready. He had at his disposal twenty thousand men. Scarcely had he arrived at Grenoble, when he wrote to Versailles. “It is too late,” he said. The prerogatives of royal authority were maintained, however. The marshal granted a meeting of the states-provincial, but he required permission to be asked of him. He forbade the assembly to be held at Grenoble. It was in the Castle of Vizille, a former residence of the dauphins, that the three orders of Dauphiny met, closely united together in wise and patriotic accord. The Archbishop of Vienne, Lefranc de Pompignan, brother of the poet, lately the inveterate foe of Voltaire, an ardently and sincerely pious man, led his clergy along the most liberal path; the noblesse of the sword, mingled with the noblesse of the robe, voted blindly all the resolutions of the third estate; these were suggested by the real head of the assembly, M. Mounier, judge-royal of Grenoble, a friend of M. Necker’s, an enlightened, loyal, honorable man, destined ere long to make his name known over the whole of France by his courageous resistance to the outbursts of the National Assembly. Unanimously the three orders presented to the king their claims to the olden liberties of the province; they loudly declared, however, that they were prepared for all sacrifices and aspired to nothing but the common rights of all Frenchmen. The double representation of the third in the estates of Dauphiny was voted without contest, as well as equal assessment of the impost intended to replace forced labor. Throughout the whole province the most perfect order had succeeded the first manifestations of popular irritation.
It was now more than a year since Brienne had become chief minister. MM. de Segur and de Castries had retired, refusing to serve under a man whom they did not esteem. Alone, shut up in his closet, the archbishop listened without emotion to the low murmur of legal protests, the noisy tumult of insurrections. “I have foreseen all, even civil war. The king shall be obeyed, the king knows how to make himself obeyed,” he kept repeating in the assured tones of an oracle. Resolved not to share the responsibility of the reverse he foresaw, Baron de Breteuil sent in his resignation.
Meanwhile the treasury was found to be empty; Brienne appealed to the clergy, hoping to obtain from ecclesiastical wealth one of those gratuitous gifts which had often come in aid of the State’s necessities. The Church herself was feeling the influence of the times. Without relaxing in her pretensions to the maintenance of privileges, the ecclesiastical assembly thought itself bound to plead the cause of that magistracy which it had so, often fought. “Our silence,” said the remonstrances, “would be a crime, of which the nation and posterity would never absolve us. Your Majesty has just effected at the bed of justice of May 8, a great movement as regards things and persons. Such ought to be a consequence rather than a preliminary of the States-general; the will of a prince which has not been enlightened by his courts may be regarded as a momentary will. Your Majesty has issued an edict carrying the restoration of the plenary court, but that court has recalled an ancient reign without recalling ancient ideas. Even if it had been once the supreme tribunal of our kings, it now presents no longer that numerous assemblage of prelates, barons, and lieges united together. The nation sees nothing in it but a court-tribunal whose complaisance it would be afraid of, and whose movements and intrigues it would dread in times of minority and regency. . . . Our functions are sacred, when, from the height of the altars, we pray heaven to send down blessings on kings and on their subjects; they are still so, when, after teaching people their duties, we represent their rights and make solicitations on behalf of the afflicted, on behalf of the absent despoiled of their position and their liberty. The clergy of France, Sir, stretch forth to you their suppliant hands; it is so beautiful to see might and puissance yielding to prayer! The glory of your Majesty is not in being King of France, but in being King of the French, and the heart of your subjects in the fairest of your domains.” The assembly of the clergy granted to the treasury only a poor gift of eighteen hundred thousand livres.
All the resources were exhausted, disgraceful tricks had despoiled the hospitals and the poor; credit was used up, the payments of the State were backward; the discount-bank (caisse d’escompte) was authorized to refuse to give coin. To divert the public mind from this painful situation, Brienne proposed to the king to yield to the requests of the members of Parliament, of the clergy, and of the noblesse themselves. A decree of August 8, 1788, announced that the States-general would be convoked May 1, 1789: the re-establishment of the plenary court was suspended to that date. Concessions wrested from the weakness and irresolution of governments do not strengthen their failing powers. Brienne had exhausted his boldness as well as his basenesses; he succumbed beneath the outcry of public wrath and mistrust. He offered the comptroller-generalship to M. Necker, who refused. He told XVI. “Mercy,” is the expression in Brienne’s own account, “that under a minister who, like me, had lost the favor of the public, he could not do any good.” A court-intrigue at last decided the minister’s fall. The Count of Artois, egged on by Madame de Polignac, made urgent entreaties to the queen; she was attached to Brienne; she, however, resigned herself to giving him up, but with so many favors and such an exhibition of kindness towards all his family, that the public did not feel at all grateful to Marie Antoinette. Already Brienne had exchanged the archbishopric of Toulouse for that of Sens, a much richer one. “The queen offered me the hat and anything I might desire,” writes the prelate, “telling me that she parted from me with regret, weeping at being obliged to do so, and permitting me to kiss her (l’embrasser) in token of her sorrow and her interest.” “After having made the mistake of bringing him into the ministry,” says Madame Campan [Memoires, t. i. p. 33], “the queen unfortunately made an equally grave one in supporting him at the time of a disgrace brought upon him by the despair of the whole nation. She considered it only consistent with her dignity to give him, at his departure, ostensible proofs of her esteem, and, her very sensibility misleading her, she sent him her portrait adorned with precious stones and the patent of lady of the palace for his niece, Madame de Courcy, saying that it was necessary to indemnify a minister sacrificed by the trickery of courts and the factious spirit of the nation. I have since seen the queen shed bitter tears over the errors she committed at this period.”
On the 25th of August, 1788, the king sent for M. Necker.
A burst of public joy greeted the fall of the detested minister and the return of the popular minister. There were illuminations in the provinces as well as at Paris, at the Bastille as well as the houses of members of Parliament; but joy intermingled with hate is a brutal and a dangerous one: the crowd thronged every evening on the Pont-Neuf, forcing carriages as well as foot passengers to halt in front of Henry IV.‘s statue. “Hurrah for Henry IV.! To the devil with Lamoignon and Brienne!” howled the people, requiring all passers to repeat the same cry. It was remarked that the Duke of Orleans took pleasure in crossing over the Pont-Neuf to come in for the cheers of the populace. “He was more crafty than ambitious, more depraved than naturally wicked,” says M. Malouet: “resentment towards the court had hurried him into intrigue; he wanted to become formidable to the queen. His personal aim was vengeance rather than ambition, that of his petty council was to effect an upheaval in order to set the prince at the head of affairs as lieutenant-general and share the profits.”
The tumult in the streets went on increasing; the keeper of the seals, Lamoignon, had tried to remain in power. M. Necker, supported by the queen, demanded his dismissal. His departure, like that of Brienne, had to be bought; he was promised an embassy for his son; he claimed a sum of four hundred thousand livres; the treasury was exhausted, and there was no finding more than half. The greedy keeper of the seals was succeeded by Barentin, premier-president of the Court of Aids. Two dummies, one dressed in a simarre (gown) and the other in pontifical vestments, were burned on the Pont-Neuf: the soldiers, having been ordered to disperse the crowds, some persons were wounded and others killed; the mob had felt sure that they would not be fired upon, whatever disorder they showed; the wrath and indignation were great; there were threats of setting fire to the houses of MM. de Brienne and de Lamoignon; the quarters of the commandant of the watch were surrounded. The number of folks of no avocation, of mendicants and of vagabonds, was increasing every day in Paris.