Opening of the Estates-General

Why the king called them

By 1787 the French crown was close to bankruptcy. The century’s wars, above all the costly intervention in the American War of Independence, had been paid for with loans, and by the late 1780s servicing the debt took about half of the state’s spending. Reform meant taxing the privileged, and the privileged refused: an Assembly of Notables called in 1787 would not approve new taxes, and the parlements, the kingdom’s high courts, insisted that only the Estates-General could consent to them.

The Estates-General was the kingdom’s old representative assembly, in which the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate — everyone else — each sat as a separate order. It had not met since 1614. On 8 August 1788 the government gave way and fixed its meeting for May 1789; a week later the treasury suspended payments, and Louis XVI recalled the Genevan banker Jacques Necker to steer the country to the meeting.

Three orders, one question

How the Estates-General would vote decided everything. If each order voted separately, as in 1614, the clergy and nobility could always outvote the Third Estate two to one. If deputies voted by head, the Third might carry the day. On 25 September 1788 the Parlement of Paris ruled that the Estates should meet in the forms of 1614 — and lost its popularity overnight. On 27 December the king’s council gave the Third Estate as many deputies as the other two orders together, but said nothing about how they would vote.

The pamphlets of that winter put the question in its sharpest form. In January 1789 the abbé Sieyès, a cleric of the diocese of Chartres, published the most famous of them:

Elections and cahiers

The electoral rules of 24 January 1789 were, for their time, remarkably broad. In the Third Estate almost every man of 25 or over whose name was on the tax rolls could vote, in assemblies that chose electors, who in turn chose the deputies. Each assembly also drew up a cahier de doléances, a book of grievances, and tens of thousands were written across the kingdom, from village parishes and town guilds up to the bailliages, the electoral districts of the day.

The cahiers asked for regular meetings of the Estates, consent to taxes, fairer taxation and an end to arbitrary arrest; in the countryside many complained of seigneurial dues. Almost none questioned the monarchy. The deputies who arrived at Versailles — lawyers above all, among the Third Estate — came convinced they had a mandate to give France a constitution.

The opening

The Estates opened with a ceremony that made the old hierarchy plain. On 4 May the deputies walked in procession through Versailles to Mass at the church of Saint-Louis: the Third Estate in plain black at the head, the richly dressed nobles and clergy behind, the king last.

The next day, 5 May, the three orders gathered in the great hall of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs. Louis XVI spoke briefly, the Keeper of the Seals, Charles de Barentin, spoke after him, and then Jacques Necker spoke for about three hours; when his voice gave out, an assistant read much of the speech for him. It was a financial report — he put the deficit at some 56 million livres — and on the question everyone had come for, how the orders would vote, he suggested only that they might deliberate together on some matters and left the choice to them. Deputies who had hoped the popular minister would lead them towards reform left disappointed.

Six weeks of deadlock

The quarrel began the next morning over a formality. Every deputy’s credentials had to be verified, and the nobles and clergy withdrew to their own rooms to verify theirs by order. The Third Estate stayed in the great hall and refused to do anything separately, since to verify by order was to accept voting by order. For five weeks nothing moved: conciliation talks between the orders failed in early June, while Mirabeau, a noble elected by the Third Estate of Aix, became its most formidable voice.

On 10 June, on a motion by Sieyès, the Third invited the other orders one last time to join it. On the 12th it began calling the roll of all the deputies in common, and the next day three parish priests from Poitou crossed over, followed by more in the days after. On 17 June it declared itself the National Assembly.

Three days later, finding its hall shut, the Assembly swore in a nearby tennis court not to separate until France had a constitution.