The Aristocratic Resurgence 341
ing May 8, 1788.^12 By far the greatest number appeared in provincial towns, now
roused to a high degree of political agitation. It seems that roughly half may have
come from the Third Estate, half from the nobility. The most common theme of
these writings was the May Edicts. And in this outburst of pamphlets, widely rep-
resentative of classes and regions, only a pitiful tenth of them supported the gov-
ernment. Nine- tenths attacked the royal policy, which is to say that both nobles
and non- nobles rallied to the parlements against the crown. The parlements were
idealized as defenders of liberty. The new Plenary Court was denounced as a
drumhead body, a group of royal appointees set up to give obsequious approval to
government measures. The country rejected the Plenary Court as in any way repre-
senting it, and accused the government of crushing the bodies that had ventured
upon opposition.
The Aristocratic Revolt
If revolution means the concerted defiance of government, the French Revolution
began in the summer of 1788. It then took the form of a great stirring of the con-
stituted or corporate bodies against the king. A German historian, Martin
Göhring, has called this phenomenon of 1788 the Triumph der ständischen Idee, a
triumph of the moment only, followed in 1789 by the “breakthrough to the mod-
ern state.”^13 The French call these events of 1788 the révolte nobiliaire.
The nobility seized the initiative, while the Third Estate, unused to politics,
lacking channels of joint action, and still feeling the timidity of a middle class, was
willing enough, for the time being, to let the authorities be defied by persons of
greater consideration. Even of America it had been said that there could be no
revolution without leading families. France now saw a demonstration of Montes-
quieu’s principle, or of the eighteenth- century truism, that nobility served as a
check upon despotism, or, in broader terms, that an absolutist regime could best be
resisted if there were some kind of grandees outside the machinery of the state
itself.
The French aristocracy had been strengthening its position since the death of
Louis XIV. We saw, as long ago as Chapter III, the wavering between segregation
and assimilation in the relations of nobility to bourgeoisie. There had been a good
deal of assimilation in France, more so than anywhere east of the Rhine. Hence in
France some nobles and some bourgeois saw a good deal of each other socially,
especially in Paris. Hence, also, there were nobles who were not yet aristocrats—
anoblis, nobles for life only, nobles of noblesse inachevée—so that the nobility was by
no means a solid class. On the whole, however, aristocratic self- segregation had
prevailed, along with a mounting aristocratic class- consciousness. Parlements had
adopted regulations to assure the social purity of their membership. After 1783
every one of the 135 French bishops was a nobleman. Of the seventy- five minis-
12 R. W. Greenlaw, “Pamphlet Literature in France during the Period of the Aristocratic Revolt,”
in Journal of Modern History (1957), 349–54.
13 These are chapter headings in M. Göhring, Weg una Sieg der modernen Staatsidee in Frankreich
(Tübingen, 1947).