This crisis led to the great French Revolution.
But revolutionary sentiment was not an inevitable explosion of bourgeois or lower-class rage.
The bone of contention became the structure of the Estates-General. The parlement of Paris had decreed that it should be constituted in the form it had had in 1614:
This upset progressives in every class. Many realized that there could be no regeneration of the state unless the Third Estate was included in the process of reform in a meaningful way.
A noble-led Committee of Thirty began to demand a redefinition of the Estates and to propagandize the bourgeois themselves to stand up for their rights.
The key demands:
Such agitation created a sense of grievance in the bourgeois.
Sieyès' pamphlet put things very clearly [p. 154]: "What is the Third Estate? Everything [in other words, the whole productive ation]. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing . What does it want to be? Something ." Ostensibly this was a very moderate demand, but...
The elections for the Estates-General (which were based on a very wide franchise, including large numbers of peasants) raised all sorts of expectations. Everyone, of all ranks, looked forward to their meeting as their chance to get a fair shake.
The royal government was soon forced to grant double representation to the Third Estate, but it could not bring itself to allow voting by head.
This question made the first days of the meeting into a confrontation between the Third Estate and the rest. It was not that the nobles and the clergy were dead-set against meaningful reform. Rather, they were fearful of losing too much in the opening rounds.
The representatives of the Third Estate were equally determined. Although they were hardly "average" Frenchmen, they had become convinced that they were the true representatives of the "nation" (note: not "kingdom"). A fair shake, vote by head, was the minimum they would accept.
Thus there was a paralyzing conflict in an assembly that was supposed to save the nation, and on whose success everyone depended. And at the same time, another crisis was sweeping across France.
In the spring of 1789, food prices were soaring in the aftermath of the worst harvest anyone could remember. The government was still strapped for funds, and Necker had taken a hands-off stance. Neither his ministry nor the court as a whole were offering any leadership.
In this overheated political atmosphere the conflict over voting touched off the revolution.
In May and June, 1789, the Estates sat at Versailles and struggled for power within the assembly. The key issue became one of common deliberations and specifically common verification of the credentials of representatives.
Common deliberations would emphasize that it was the body as a whole that represented the nation.
Separate deliberation and verification would emphasize the old distinction between orders and frustrate the aspirations of the Third Estate.
Division in the First Estate (clergy): Parish priests enjoyed a great deal of representation, and they were no aristocrats. They were drawn from the Third Estate, they were poorly paid, and they suffered from the oppression both of their own superiors and the local nobility. Their sympathy with the Third Estate was a weakness in the defenses of the other two orders.
On June 10, 1789, after five weeks of deadlock, Sieyè proposed that the representatives of the Third Estate issue a last invitation to the other orders to join them, and then proceed, whether the others showed up or not, to verify all credentials of the assembly. This was a revolutionary claim to power.
Several priests showed up to take their seats next to the Third Estate, though not yet as part of it.
On June 17th, after some days of verification, the Third Estate went farther, and adopted the title of National Assembly. Then it provisionally authorized all existing taxes and guaranteed the national debt. In other words, the new National Assembly was asserting its sovereignty within the state.
Louis XVI, finally decided to do something. He also decided to hold a Royal Session on June 23, in which he would assert his leadership. Until then, the hall where the Third Estate, was meeting was closed. When the Third Estate, or National Assembly, showed up on the 18th, the day after their dramatic resolutions, they found the doors locked. They refused to be cowed. They assembled instead on the royal Tennis Court and swore an oath not to disperse before writing a constitution for France.
Note how the political atmosphere had changed. The "constitution" was no longer something to be defended, but something that needed to be created. (Like the American Constitution, written in 1787, and which in 1789 had just come into force).
After this, all efforts to reassert royal leadership fell flat. The National Assembly declared that voting by head would take place. The king was convinced that the assembly would have to be repressed by an army, and Necker (the reforming minister) dismissed.
Both in Paris and the countryside, there was great excitement. A lack of affordable food, wandering beggars and brigands who threatened the peasants and the crops. People blamed the privileged orders for their troubles. In Paris it was obvious to bourgeois and poor people alike that troops were moving and that the National Assembly, the focus of of all their hopes, was threatened. The peasants, who had thought that the Estates-General would relieve them of obligations to their landlords, believed that the nobles would use brigands to save their privileges.
In July, the city of Paris organized itself for defense against the king and the nobles -- the voter assemblies in the districts and for the city as a whole created a militia to stave off food riots and attacks from the king. Then, when the king dismissed Necker, they began to seize arms from royal magazines. One of these was the Bastille, which on July 14th fell to a crowd of citizens.
Revolt of Paris -- Fall of the Bastille -- dissuaded the king from using force against the National Assembly.
But another revolt was more decisive, the revolt of the peasants. The month of July saw the Great Fear -- peasants, fearing attacks by brigands, attacked noble houses and destroyed the documents that recorded feudal privileges on the land. An amazingly effective revolt, in that those feudal rights were never restored.
The royal government lost its nerve. The initiative remained with the National Assembly in which the orders were now united, if shakily, by the need to preserve an orderly process of reform before violence destroyed all social discipline. Property and the state had to be preserved and regenerated, and quickly.
The National Assembly took its most dramatic actions on August 4, in a night meeting to formulate reforms that would satisfy and pacify the peasants. A leading liberal noble, the Duc d'Aiguillon, was set to renounce some of his privileges on the land, which was supposed to inspire others to do the same. Then these privileges would be abolished, leaving other property rights in land intact. Even those abolished would be redeemed by the state, so that those with feudal property would retain much of their wealth.
The Duc d'Aiguillon's proposals, which included a very practical scheme for payments to those who were to lose rights, set off a orgy of patriotic renunciation.
Renounced were:
This was a revolution in thinking, one that would result in the abolition of the feudal regime and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen before the end of August. This revolution in thinking had taken place in the one body that could claim to represent France, that still enjoyed some moral authority. But such a radical change after centuries and millenia of privilege could hardly be effected overnight.
Indeed, the question was, could it be effected at all?
Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution. .
Michael P. Fitzsimmons, "Privilege and the Polity in France, 1786-1791," AHR 92(1987): 269-295.
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