The conception that All should rule is coeval with society. But the words so used by Sabattier were not a mere opinion nor a mere reiteration of justice. They were spoken in that assembly of lawyers which formed the chief body of the State, and once spoken in such an air they were creative.
This memorable declaration of July 1787 launched the Revolution.
Nothing can reinvigorate itself or snatch itself from decay save by a return upon itself and a recapture of its own past. To revive the States-General was to bring back to life the vigour of the Middle Ages, and to renew—at the close of this last long and glorious but exhausted phase in the national life—the permanent energy of Gaul.
When in the eleventh century the great transition from the Dark Ages to mediæval civilisation was accomplished, there came, along with the new Gothic architecture and the new national tongues, as the last fruit of that florescence, an institution known in each province of Christendom by some local name (for the creation was local and spontaneous) but everywhere bearing the same characters, in formation, object, and inner nature. This Institution had for its purpose the affirmation of a doctrine fundamental in the Faith, that sovereignty lies and can only lie with the community. This Institution had for instrument wherewith to enforce that right a conception at once as mystical and as plain as any that the Faith has admitted or revealed in her strict dogmas, the conception of representation: two men should speak for thousands; the spirit of a community should enter and be seen through individuals who should speak with the voice of districts; these representatives should be the very numbers for whom they stood: an institution as tangible, as real, as visible as the Sacrament; as mysterious as the Presence of the Lord. It was a miracle of faith, but it conquered; and even to-day, woefully corrupt, there resides in Representation something of majesty and a power in moments of great dangers or of great national desire to gleam for a moment through the dead body of an Institution whose whole principle of popular sanctity has been forgotten.
The theory of Representation sprang, I say, naturally from that young and happy time when Europe arose from sleep: the century of the Christian reaction against Asia.
The valleys of the Pyrenees, a scene of continual armed endeavours, spurred on by the constant pressure of Islam, first organised the idea.
The cool and cleanly little town of Jaca—an outpost on the Roman road into Spain that led down to the frontiers of the Moors—the little frontier town of Jaca saw the first strict gathering of the kind in the very first of the Crusades: but Jaca was not alone; it was throughout Christendom a natural, a simultaneous growth. The southern cities of Gaul, the great provinces, Languedoc, Bearn, distant and isolated Brittany, the compact England of the thirteenth century, followed; lastly, and not till the opening of the fourteenth century, a united and majestic gathering of Representatives, designed to bring before the Crown at Paris the voice, complaint, or will of all its subjects, emerged.
These assemblies, a Cortes in Spain, a Parliament in England, were in France called Estates—and that rare one which stood, not for one province of Gaul, but for all combined, was known as the States-General. Like every other institution of its kind it was alive with the mediæval passion for Reality. Not abstract statistics nor some crude numerical theory, but the facts of society were recognised in, or rather everywhere translated into, these representative bodies. There were corps of nobles—since the Middle Ages, descending from the Roman centuries and their rich landed class, had nobles for a reality. The priests were separate; the commoners. In some cases (notably in towns) special corporations had special delegates; in all—especially in the States-General of France—the various aspects of the State were present in the shape of innumerable statements and mandates enforced upon the Representatives (and therefore the servants) of clerical and commercial corporations, of territorial units, of municipal authorities.
So long as the high attempt of the Middle Ages was maintained so long these councils flourished. That attempt bent down and failed in the sixteenth century—and with it declined, corrupted, or disappeared the corporate assemblies which were to the political sincerity of the Middle Ages what the universities were to its intellectual eagerness, the Gothic to its majestic insistence upon eternal expression.