354 Chapter XV
appointed permanent committees of correspondence to remain in touch with the
deputies. Electoral organization in some places developed into revolutionary orga-
nization. In Paris and other cities, in the summer of 1789, it was the electors who
took over the city government in the municipal revolutions.
The complexities in the electoral process are worth noting for several reasons.
They illustrate the corporatist legal framework which the principle of uniform na-
tional citizenship was so soon to demolish. They show how the whole country could
be suddenly aroused to political action without previous habit or experience. And
they explain why the Estates General, when they met in May, exhibited the charac-
teristics that they did. The noble suffrage, at the district level, had favored the nu-
merous country nobility who had the longest lineage and the least modern ideas.
The three hundred noble deputies at the Estates General were usually bound, as
Lafayette was, by mandates from their constituents which forbade any merger of the
three orders. For the clergy, on the other hand, the electoral system favored the par-
ish priests, who were close to the people, at the expense of monastic and cathedral
clergy, who were likely to be more aristocratic, or withdrawn from the world, or
both. The three hundred clerical deputies at Versailles were predominantly curés,
with a sprinkling of liberal bishops (since it was liberals among the bishops that the
curés at the district level most willingly elected), so that the clergy, in the Estates
General, was to a large degree in a mood for very extensive renovation in both
church and state. For the Third Estate, the sifting through successive assemblies had
favored the most active, articulate, persistent, and politically interested kinds of
men. Well over half the 648 deputies of the Third at the Estates General were law-
yers. As many as 278 held some kind of government office, 166 were lawyers in
private practice from prominent barristers in Paris to small country notaries, 85
were merchants or business men, 67 lived by the income or management of their
own property, usually land, and 31 were of various professions, mainly doctors.^7
It is in fact hard to identify a single peasant or workingman among these 648
deputies of the Third. Their absence is of course not remarkable, at a time when the
lower income groups were barely literate, if at all, and would scarcely even be wor-
thy of comment, were there not whole schools of modern historians who make an
issue of the bourgeois and undemocratic character of the leadership in the revolu-
tion of 1789. It cannot be demonstrated, because it probably is not true, that more
general popular participation would have favored a more equal, free, liberal, pro-
gressive, productive, open, tolerant, or dynamic form of society. The lowest classes
were the most faithfully attached to customary superiors. The year 1789 in France,
among its other surprises, was to produce a peasant rebellion, but it was neverthe-
less the smaller kinds of tenants and agricultural laborers, along with the hordes of
7 For these figures and their significance see A. Cobban, The Myth of the French Revolution: an
Inaugural Lecture (London, 1955), with the reply to it by G. Lefebvre, Annales historiques de la Révolu-
tion française (Oct.−Dec, 1956), 337–45· For the elections to the Estates General see B. Hyslop, Guide
to the General Cahiers of 1789 (N.Y., 1936), pp. 3–31; G. Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution
(Eng. trans., Princeton, 1947); pp. 62–75, and the more recent J. Cadart, Le régime electoral des Etats-
Généaux de 1789 (Paris, 1952), a law school work with a doubtful thesis, in which the author, by stress-
ing the nearly universal suffrage and almost ignoring the difference of orders, argues that Louis XVI’s
“royal democracy” was more democratic than the constitution of 1791.