346 Chapter XIV
should take part in the operations of government. They did not agree on how this
was to be done. Were existing constituted bodies—clergy, nobles, Third Estate;
parlements, provinces with corporate liberties—to be the units of political partici-
pation? Was France really made up, or “constituted,” of these? Or should such
bodies, and France itself, be “reconstituted”? Should the old elements be trans-
muted into a “nation,” a community made up of individual persons, or at least of
proprietors and taxpayers without legalized special status?
The Parlement of Paris, no sooner restored, gave its answer to these questions,
an answer that should have surprised no one familiar with its record, but which
aroused the ire of a bourgeoisie now heated to a high degree of political conscious-
ness. The coming Estates General, the parlement announced as its considered legal
opinion, should be organized in 1789 as at their last meeting, in 1614–1615. That
is, they should be a convocation of the Three Orders. They should remain so for all
future time.
A second Assembly of Notables, dominated like the first by princes and great
noblemen, published similar opinions in December 1788. The problem before the
country, declared one of its most eminent spokesmen, was “to distinguish the three
constitutional orders of the State, whose essence is to act separately in their delib-
erations in the Estates General.” But even in this august body there was a dissent-
ing view, hinted at by the Provost of the Merchants of Paris, who was no plebeian.
The true problem, he said, was “for all orders to be united and merged in the Order
of Citizen, the primitive Order of nature, reason and duty.”^21
The issue was joined at the end of 1788. The Third Estate knew what it wanted,
as will be seen in the next chapter. But opposition to it was also forming, and be-
fore the year 1788 was out there were hints of a program that was to characterize
the counterrevolution for the next dozen years. The princes of the blood published
a statement at the close of the second Assembly of Notables. If the Third Estate,
they warned, demanded too much in the coming Estates General, the upper two
orders might repudiate the Estates, secede from them, and deny their legality. The
higher orders would turn instead to the parlements as the only bodies able to de-
fine the law. They would urge the people to refuse taxes. They would disseminate
the idea that no action of these illegal Estates General could be accepted as the
national will.^22
This princely pronouncement infuriated the Third Estate. “Are we Russian
slaves or Polish serfs?” one of them demanded. We know that France was very dif-
ferent from Poland.
21 Discours prononcésàa la cloture de l ’Assemblée des Notables (n.p.n.d. [1788]), 9, 15.
22 See H. Carré, La fin des parlements, 1788−90 (Paris 1912), 63–64.