The Aristocratic Resurgence 343
These short- lived provincial assemblies, an experiment that led nowhere, at least
advanced the political education of a great many people. In the assembly of Orléa-
nais the clergy and Third Estate, finding that the Duke of Luxembourg paid no
taxes at all, engaged in protracted arguments with the nobility. The plebeian Abbé
Sieyès learned a good deal as a member of this body. The assembly of Auvergne, of
which Lafayette was a member, set itself firmly against new taxation, ignored the
King’s explicit charge of tax evasion by wealthy landlords, urged respect for provin-
cial liberties, and asked for the revival of the old Estates of Auvergne, which had
not met since 1651. The ancient Estates, more than the new provincial assembly,
would give a prominent role to the organized nobles and the upper clergy.^16
Before 1787, only in Brittany and Languedoc were the Provincial Estates of
importance. Elsewhere they had died out by the middle of the seventeenth cen-
tury. In 1787 demands were heard for revival of Provincial Estates in various parts
of the country. It was a long- delayed reaction against Richelieu and Louis XIV, a
demand to make France a constitutional monarchy, not on the English model, but
on the model of a France that had long since passed away. It would be a France in
which the King ruled over a confederation of provinces, each guarding its own
liberties and exemptions in taxes and administration, and each carrying on its own
affairs through its own churchmen, its own nobles and gentry, and its own opulent
dignitaries of the King’s good towns.
In Provence, for example, no estates had met since 1639. The province, by its
liberties, enjoyed certain advantages in taxation. It was one of those outlying parts
of France where the law distinguished “noble” from “common” land, somewhat as
in Eastern Europe, with the all- important difference that the distinction had be-
come fictitious, since it was estimated in Provence that six times as many com-
moners as nobles owned land of this noble type. Noble land was free of certain
onerous taxes. Alarmed by Calonne’s attack on tax exemptions in 1787, and
aroused by the humbling in 1788 of the Parlement of Aix, certain leaders brought
about the revival of the Estates of Provence. By the precedents of 1639 only fief-
owning nobles sat for the nobility, and only mayors and other oligarchs sat for the
twenty- six privileged towns. In 1787 there were a great many nobles who owned
no fiefs, and a great many bourgeois who did not feel themselves properly repre-
sented by the mayors. A lively political struggle developed at this local or provin-
cial level, significant in illustrating the complexity of the issues. It was no simple
dispute between noble and bourgeois, but one more accurately described as a clash
between privileged and nonprivileged persons, the former comprising fief- owning
nobles, parlementaires, mayors, owners of noble land, and others who benefited
from the old provincial constitution; the latter consisting of nobles who owned no
fiefs, numerous bourgeois, and others who had no advantage to gain by the main-
tenance or revival of historic liberties of Provence. From this lively scene Mirabeau
was elected in 1789 to the Estates General.^17
16 An account of the Orléanais assembly may be found in P. Bastid, Sieyès et sa pensée (Paris, 1939),
42–45; of that of Auvergne in L. R. Gottschalk, Lafayette between the American and the French Revolu-
tion (Chicago, 1950), 331– 63.
17 J. Egret, “La pré- Révolution en Provence, 1787–89,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française
(1954), 97–126.