The Explosion of 1789 355
domestic servants and other dependents, who most willingly accepted the preemi-
nence of the nobility. It was not the conservatives that feared mass support. The
Parlements of Paris and of Grenoble both urged a fully universal male suffrage,
wider than the King granted, and there were many proposals that peasant deputies
should be themselves peasants. The purpose was to weaken the upper stratum of
the Third Estate. Had the Third, at Versailles in May and June 1789, had a great
admixture of peasants and artisans it would have in all probability been more doc-
ile. “In France, in Holland and elsewhere,” said Sieyès in January, probably think-
ing of the brawls at Rennes and the Orange party in Holland, “we have terrible
examples of the coalition between the last class of society and the privileged or-
ders. Let us tell the truth: in every country in the world the R belongs to the Aris-
tocracy.” By R (which he wrote C, for canaille) he meant the rabble; it was already
necessary not to say such things too bluntly.^8
The Overturn: May to August
The Estates General met at Versailles on May 4, 1789.^9 It was a tremendous
event, the climax of the earnest labors of forty thousand lesser assemblies. Again
there was disappointment. The ancient etiquette was absurdly incongruous and
politically explosive. Nothing could have more flagrantly asserted the differing
dignity of the orders. In the ceremonial opening procession the six hundred depu-
ties of the Third Estate marched first, meekly clad for the day in black “bourgeois”
costume, and followed by the noble order alive with color, then by the dark mass of
priests who preceded the magnificent bishops, with the King and the royal family
at the end. The opening session fell very flat. The country had looked forward to it
for months, as to a salvation in time of trial; but none of the speakers rose to the
occasion, and Necker’s address was lengthy, technical, and monotonous. Neither
Louis XVI nor Necker had made any decisions; they had no proposals for which
they sought backing or which they were prepared to enforce. They left matters in
the hands of the deputies, expressing the hope that everyone would prove reason-
able and cooperative. This was a good deal to ask of men who for the most part had
never seen each other before, who had no organization or accepted basis of leader-
ship, and among whom each one had only the vaguest ideas of what his colleagues
from other parts of France might be thinking or how far they were prepared to go.
It is not easy to do justice to all parties in the deadlock that followed. The great
immediate issue, and what the Third Estate desired, was that all three orders
should merge and sit as a single house, in which decisions would be made by a
majority of the twelve hundred members, considered as individuals, so that the
nobility and the clergy would cease to exist as separate chambers and could on oc-
casion be outvoted. Such a merger, however, was obviously intended only as a step
toward further changes. The nobility firmly resisted. The Third Estate, supported
8 Tiers Etat, 41n.
9 The present section mainly follows Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution (Eng. trans.,
Princeton, 1947).