The Explosion of 1789 351
aside, when the Parlement of Paris, on its reinstatement, made it a first order of
business to declare that the coming Estates must meet as in 1614, and hence pre-
sumably in three houses, with one vote for each order.
This action of the Paris Parlement opened the breach of a sharp class antago-
nism between Third Estate and nobility. It was an action by no means necessitated
by a tenderness for constitutional law, since even in 1614 there had been no fixed
form of assembly for the Estates General, and more pertinent modern precedents
could be found, in Dauphiny and Languedoc, for the joint session of the three or-
ders. The ruling of the Parlement seemed purely political, and leaders of the Third,
who in supporting the Parlement had supposed that they shared in a national
protest against ministerial despotism, now concluded that they had only played the
Parlement’s game. We begin now to hear sarcastic references to the all noble Par-
lement, and to find phrases where aristocracy and despotism are coupled together
as a common evil, as that “aristocracy is despotism at retail.” Nor did the Parlement
hold the good will of the Third Estate when, immediately after declaring for a
“legitimate” freedom of the press, it lacerated and burned one of Sieyès’ pamphlets
at the steps of the Palais de Justice on December 17, 1788, and condemned one of
Mirabeau’s tracts in the following February.^6
The French bourgeoisie, the leaders of the Third Estate—lawyers, government
officers, merchants, emerging industrialists, doctors, writers, printers and publish-
ers, owners of what might be called government bonds, “bourgeois” living on
landed rents—had no economic grievances at all commensurate with the anger
that they now felt. It was the lower classes that had the economic troubles. The
upper stratum of the Third Estate had prosperity; it wanted status, or a better sta-
tus than the existing status- system afforded it. Its members believed, as did the
minority of liberal nobles, that the old “orders” no longer described the real charac-
ter of the French people. It seemed absurd for men otherwise so much alike to be
segregated only by law. If the Revolution was not the work of vanity, as Talleyrand
held, it was the work of a deeply wounded self- respect. For generations the French
bourgeois had accepted the social system. He had accepted the scale of values
which made his own position inferior. In relations between noble and bourgeois
there had been class consciousness, but not much class conflict. Embarrassment,
resentment, frustration, envy, humiliation, hostility, if felt, had somehow been sup-
pressed as useless or unworthy or part of life’s ordinary course. Now, at the end of
6 Arrêt de la cour du Parlement, rendu les chambres assemblées, les pairs y séant, qui condamne un im-
primé ayant pour titre Délibération à prendre par le Tiers Etat dans toutes les municipalités du Royaume de
France à être lacéré et brulé par l ’exécuteur de la Haute Justice (December 17, 1788). It seems likely that
this refers to the Délibérations à prendre... drafted by Sieyès in conjunction with the group about the
Duke of Orléeans and published with Instructions données par S.A.S. Monseigneur le duc d ’Orléans à ses
représentants dans les bailliages (n.p., 1789). See also P. Bastid, Sieyès et sa pensée (Paris, 1939), 50–51.
This arrêt, together with the arrêt of December 5, gives an excellent statement of the conservatism or
aristocratic reformism of the Parlement as of the end of 1788, as Sieyès does of the radicalism of the
Third Estate. The Parlement expresses dismay that, at a time when the upper orders have agreed to a
surrender of tax privileges, this Délibération... should be found in the ordinary mails in great num-
bers, circulated by a concerted movement, and breathing un esprit de système qui cherche à preparer
sourdement une rêvolution dans les principes du gouvernement. The Parlement condemned Mirabeau’s
Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin in February 1789, on the eve of the elections to the Estates General.