356 Chapter XV
by a few noblemen and a good many priests, was obviously in a revolutionary
frame of mind. The King was indeed irresolute, but he had an impossible choice:
whether he sided with a now revolutionary Third Estate, or with an equally aroused
nobility, he would by choosing one make an enemy of the other; and it would take
power as well as good will to mediate between them. The noble order was indeed
obstinate, but any nobleman might be excused if after reading Sieyès on the Tiers
Etat, or Mirabeau on the Order of the Cincinnati, he thought that concessions
would endanger the fundamentals of his way of life. And it was Sieyès and Mira-
beau who were now emerging as leaders of the Third, if only because in a group of
men who did not yet know one another the authorship of a famous pamphlet was
enough to make a man known.
For six weeks the Three Estates engaged in parliamentary maneuvers. The Third
refused to consider itself as an estate at all. It urged the others to join with it, as a
few of the clergy did, whereupon the Third, again calling on the others to unite,
proclaimed itself the National Assembly, the only true representative of the French
people. It even had the audacity to “authorize” existing taxes, implying that such
authorization might be withdrawn, and taxpayers invited to withhold payment if
the government proved obdurate. To this revolutionary arrogation of power the
King replied by locking the deputies out. They met in the Tennis Court and took
their famous oath: that wherever they might meet the National Assembly would
be in being, and that they would not dissolve before writing a constitution.
The King now at last offered a program on which he asked for agreement. There
would be equality of taxation, assurance of individual liberties, freedom of the
press, numerous reforms of detail, and consent to legislation and taxation in peri-
odic future meetings of the Estates General. But the estates should remain as es-
tates. There should be constitutional monarchy, but “the ancient distinction of the
three orders” was to be “conserved in its entirety as essential to the constitution of
the realm.” Provincial Estates were to be introduced in all parts of the country. In
each of them, half the members would be Third Estate elected by Third Estate;
three tenths, nobles elected by nobles; two tenths clergy elected by clergy, with a
certain number of those elected required to be bishops.^10
The King’s program of June 1789 was less than he had supported in Calonne’s
time two years before. It was about what the parlements and the provincial estates
had wanted in 1788. The King’s rallying to such a program represented the high
point of the aristocratic resurgence, and the same ideas of a France governed
through parlements and estates were to remain for ten years one of the orthodoxies
of the counterrevolution. What had happened was that the King of France, forced
to choose, had chosen to side with the nobles, probably neither quite willingly nor
quite knowingly, perhaps with an obscure feeling that, if force must be used, it
would be easier and more fitting to force the Third Estate than to force the nobil-
ity. In any case, monarchy and aristocracy were now allied in a way quite new in
French history, in an alliance which in time was to prove fatal to them both. Even
the most moderate of deputies of the Third, in June 1789, men like Malouet, a
10 The King’s speech of June 23 may be found in Archives parlementaires. The King favored joint
meeting of the three orders “for the present session of the estates only.”