352 Chapter XV
1788, these things seem to have come to the surface. The class issue was politi-
cized; it seemed possible to do something about it. Inequalities were condemned
by the government itself, by the Americans, by the course of history, and the en-
lightenment of the age. What had been accepted and lived with now met with hot
rejection.
But the situation was not visibly improving at the end of 1788. If the Estates
General were to assemble in 1789 with a sharp emphasis on the orders, and if
France should be governed in the future through such Estates, there would be an
accentuation (a “new sanction” in Condorcet’s phrase) of legal differences that had
been easier to put out of mind so long as no Estates General ever met at all. Shoals
of pamphlets protested against the ruling of the Parlement of Paris. The King
called another Assembly of Notables to adjudicate the matter. Another disap-
pointment, or even insult: the Assembly agreed with the Parlement, and even
threatened to boycott the coming Estates if the difference of orders were not ob-
served. The government had long shown an inclination to side with the Third, and
Necker (recalled to office in September) now announced that the Third Estate
should have double representation; that is, it should send to Versailles as many
deputies as the two other orders combined. This was encouraging to the Third, but
also disappointing, and in the circumstances seriously inadequate and evasive.
Necker and the King, alarmed and confused by the rising spirit of protest, and
warned against concession by various persons at the court, remained noncommittal
on procedures to be used after the Estates assembled. If the Estates were to sit,
deliberate, and vote as three separate chambers, it would obviously make no differ-
ence how many deputies any one chamber might contain. A few tens of thousands
of noble families would have an equal voice with the rest of twenty- six million
people. Two plus two would make five, as Sieyès said.
The King’s government again contributed to the revolutionary education of the
country by the procedures that it instituted for the choice of deputies to the Es-
tates General. For one thing, the government called for actual elections. Elections
themselves were a new and exciting experience for the world of the day, for even
where Provincial Estates had been active in France, as in Brittany and Languedoc
and Artois, the deputies of all three orders sat in them either by personal right, or
ex officio, or by appointment; the same was true of the Belgian and Dutch estate-
assemblies, nor was actual election of members the most characteristic feature of
the British or Irish House of Commons. The royal electoral ordinance of January
1789 prescribed that all deputies to the Estates General should be elected: nobles
by nobles, clergy by clergy, Third Estate by Third Estate.
The elections took place in March and April. There was no individual voting in
the privacy of a polling booth. Elections occurred in open meetings, somewhat as
in America at the time, or in the English counties and open boroughs, or in the
General Council at Geneva. Each meeting, in addition to choosing its deputies,
and in accordance with the royal ordinance and the now revived ancient usage,
drew up a statement for the deputies to take with them, a cahier des doléances or
memorandum of grievances in which all kinds of ideas on local and national affairs
might be expressed. The electoral meetings thus became deliberative assemblies, in
which speeches were made, and people had the chance to express and compare