The Explosion of 1789 353
their ideas and discover how many others there were who agreed with them. Each
meeting was a little school of political education, and there were forty thousand
such meetings.
The royal government authorized a nearly universal manhood suffrage, and
more people actually participated in the election of 1789 than in any election in
France for many decades to come. Louis XVI, by his electoral ordinance, aroused
the whole country down to the remotest village to a high pitch of political expec-
tation. He invited all his subjects to reflect upon their troubles and formally state
their complaints. The sense of a new era took on a more definite and practical tone;
everywhere there was a feeling that changes of great magnitude were actually
going to be made. But in this heightened state of political consciousness the legal
difference in order was at the same time reinforced.
It was not easy, in the absence of any established machinery, for so large a coun-
try to choose a few hundred delegates to go to Versailles, and to choose them in
such a way that they would have any real representative authority when they got
there. Electoral assemblies were therefore arranged at various levels. At the top
were about two hundred principal district assemblies, the bailliages, at which the
men who were to go to the Estates General were actually chosen. Below the prin-
cipal districts were various subdistricts and subassemblies. In the incidence of
these subdistricts the difference between the legal orders was very great.
For example, in any one of a hundred towns a nobleman, a priest, and a lawyer
might live as neighbors and acquaintances in the same street. For the election, each
went his separate way to a different assembly. The nobleman proceeded directly to
the principal district assembly, where he met with other noblemen of the whole
district, all noblemen (with the usual disputes over cases of marginal status) having
the right to appear personally in the noble assembly at this level. The priest like-
wise went directly to the principal district assembly, where he met with the bishop
or bishops of the district (if any), with all the other parish priests in person, and
with a few delegates sent by monastic houses and cathedral clergy. The lawyer,
however, simply went to a meeting with other lawyers in his own town. For the
Third Estate, in the towns, the lowest assemblies were meetings of the gilds and
other occupational associations, to which another meeting was added for non-
corporés who belonged to no such gild or association. Each of these various bod-
ies—like the shoemakers at Arras whom Robespierre befriended—deliberated,
drafted a cahier, and sent deputies to an assembly of the town as a whole, which in
turn deliberated, drafted a cahier and sent deputies to the principal district assem-
bly (there might even be another intermediate step), where they met with other
deputies from other towns of the district, and with the deputies sent by the peas-
ants. The peasants, meanwhile, met in their villages, where all men twenty- five
years old and listed on the tax rolls were admitted to the assembly, and where they
too deliberated, drafted a cahier, and sent deputies to meet with those of the towns
at the principal district assembly. Here, where townsmen and especially lawyers
gained an easy ascendancy over deputies of the peasants, if only by greater fluency
in public speaking and knowledge of public affairs, another cahier was drafted for
the whole Third Estate of the district, and deputies were chosen to represent the
Third Estate at Versailles. Many of these electoral assemblies, their business done,