The Aristocratic Resurgence 333
turned local oligarchs out of office. These events were so uniform and so nearly si-
multaneous as to raise the suspicion, then and since, of conspiratorial methods.
Actually, it is hard to find anything more conspiratorial than the committees of
correspondence of the American Revolution. Though such judgments can only be
impressionistic, there seems to have been a more nearly universal rising in France
in 1789 than in America in 1775.
So much being said for the uniqueness of the French Revolution, the pattern
used in foregoing chapters will be applied to it in the following pages. Reforms
favored by the government, along the lines of enlightened despotism, were op-
posed by the upper classes, which played a political role in certain constituted bod-
ies, notably the parlements and the Provincial Estates. These classes were in fact
enjoying an “aristocratic resurgence,” for the French aristocracy was by no means
decadent, and many of its members desired more active positions in public life. The
constituted bodies defended what they called the historic constitution of the king-
dom, and favored a form of constitutional monarchy, in which, however, their own
powers and privileges would be preserved or extended, and a society of ranks and
orders would be maintained. They obtained the convening of the Estates General,
with representation by “order,” but the bulk of the country refused to embody itself
according to these older forms. Demand arose for representation of persons, not of
status, and for an entirely new constitution for France. The idea of the people as a
constituent power, able to make or unmake all political institutions, and to issue
grants of authority, was applied in France, as nowhere else except in America up to
this time. The sovereignty claimed for the people meant that no one else, neither
hereditary magistrate, nor manorial seigneur, nor even the King, could hold public
authority by virtue of his own right or status. There should be no irremovable per-
sons in government, with delicate reservations for the King himself. There should
be no self- recruiting public powers. The law should know no classes or orders. All
persons should be citizens, with equality of rights. Constitutionally at least, this
was the essence of the Revolution of 1789.
MINISTERS AND PARLEMENTS, 1774–1788If the Revolution seemed to begin in 1789 with astonishing violence, it was be-
cause it had not really begun in 1789 at all. In a way it had begun a quarter of a
century before, with the propaganda campaign of the philosophes, and especially
with the quarrels between the royal government and the parlements, whose climax
in the 1760’s has been described in Chapter IV.
The French parlements, as has been explained, were corporate bodies, or
benches of judicial magistrates, each acting as a supreme court of law for its part
of the country, and asserting the power to “verify” laws or taxes proposed by the
crown, which in effect meant to consent to them before enforcing them in the
courts. These magistrates, who numbered about eleven hundred in all the parle-
ments combined, were mostly nobles, often of several generations of noble de-
scent; and they owned their seats as a form of property, acquired them usually by
inheritance, and occupied them irremovably and for life. They were by no means