These orators and journalists harangued the customers in the Café de Foy, the Régence, the Caveau and the Procope. Meetings were held in the fashionable salons of Madame de Tessé and Madame de Genlis. In masonic lodges the theories and writings of the philosophes were disseminated. Political clubs, which had been suppressed by the Government, reopened and found scores of new members; and new clubs were founded and soon fully subscribed. In cities all over France, the common practice of the upper floors of buildings being occupied by bourgeois families and the lower by the common people made the dissemination of revolutionary ideas between classes all the more rapid and effective.
‘Scarcely six months had passed since I left France,’ wrote Jacques Pierre, the pamphleteer, after a visit to America. ‘I scarcely knew my fellow countrymen on my return. They had advanced an enormous distance.’ Some of the liberal sentiments expressed by the ‘patriots’ were highly suspect in their sincerity: there were professedly progressive bishops who had their idea on ministerial appointments, there were soi-disant ‘nationalist’ lawyers anxious to dissociate themselves publicly from their conservative colleagues who had now become so unpopular. But most of the leading and more influential members of the ‘patriotic’ party were genuinely attached to the cause of liberalism and reform.
Nearly all these leaders were members of a secretive body known as the Committee of Thirty of which very little is known. The Committee, founded in November 1788, usually met at the house of a rich magistrate and parlementaire, Adrien Duport. Many of its other members were equally rich, able to finance the authorship and distribution of pamphlets, the circulation of lists of grievances which were intended to serve as models for others, and the dispatch of agents to the provinces. They included the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt and the Duc d’Aiguillon, the Marquis de Condorcet and the Vicomte de Noailles. Among their number were also three men whose influence on the course of events during the next few months was to be far more profound. One of these was the Abbé de Talleyrand-Périgord who became Bishop of Autun in January 1789 and lived to become known to the world as Prince Talleyrand. Another was the Marquis de Lafayette, a tall, thin, solemn, conceited young man with a long nose, reddish hair and a receding forehead who had fought with distinction in America and dreamed, it was said, of becoming a kind of ‘George Washington under Louis XVI’. The Third was the Abbé Sieyès.
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès was forty years old. Although of a naturally reflective, analytical turn of mind, he had wanted as a boy to go into the army rather than the Church. But his pious and ambitious middle-class parents had overborne his own wishes and he had spent ten years in a seminary. There, however, he spent more time in the study of political philosophy, of Locke, Condillac and Bonnet, than of those religious writers pressed upon him by his tutors who concluded that they might turn him into a ‘gentlemanly, cultured canon, yet he was by no means fitted for the Ministry of the Church’.
He nevertheless entered the Church on the completion of his studies, and began slowly to rise in its hierarchy, though without any hope of becoming a bishop since he was not a member of the aristocracy, a class whom he consequently viewed with peculiar animosity. Ordained priest in 1773, he became secretary to the Bishop of Tréguier two years later, then Chancellor of the Diocese of Chartres and a member of the Provincial Assembly of Orléans. A small, thin man, austere, rather cynical, unfailingly if distantly polite, he made few friends, appeared indifferent to the society of women and was ill at ease with his social inferiors. As one of the twelve clerical representatives at the Provincial Assembly of Orléans, however, he did display a deep concern for the plight of the poor and argued for a programme of radical reform. But he was no orator: his voice was weak, his manner formal, his delivery, as one who listened to him commented, ‘ungraceful and ineloquent’. He made little impression and was soon discouraged. So, seeing scant hope for any improvement in the social order, disliking the Church, distrusting the parlements, and despairing of the monarchy’s ability to escape from the thrall of a reactionary nobility, Sieyès made up his mind to emigrate to America. And, having saved about 50,000 livres, he was just about to sail when the outburst of political discussion which erupted in France in 1788 persuaded him to change his mind. He took to writing. Never having published anything before, he made no mark with his first two pamphlets; but his third, ‘What is the Third Estate?’, powerfully persuasive though rather boringly written, was as influential as any other pamphlet produced at this time. Formulating the grievances of the unprivileged classes and identifying the Third Estate with the nation as a whole, Sieyès answered the question of his pamphlet’s title, ‘What is the Third Estate?’–‘Everything. What has it been up till now in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.’ That ‘something’ included the rights to have as many representatives as the other two orders combined as well as to have its votes counted by head rather than by order. It also included the right to share in the framing of a constitution free from interference by any outside influence.
While the great political debate, fired by such pamphlets as Sieyès’s, raged in the cafés, clubs and salons of Paris, Necker gave much thought to the problems posed by the forthcoming convocation of the Estates General. In the hope that they might be persuaded to give way to popular demand by allowing the Third Estate as many representatives as the other two orders combined, as ‘What is the Third Estate?’ demanded, he summoned another Assembly of Notables. But the Notables were not to be persuaded. They held by a large majority to the view that the presumptions of the Third Estate were to be firmly resisted. Disregarding the Notables’ verdict – and concerned by warnings from the intendants in the provinces that civil war would break out if the privileged orders were allowed to have their way – Necker set about persuading his fellow Ministers and the royal family to issue an edict granting what had become known as ‘double representation’ to the Third Estate.
There were heated discussions at Court where both the King and Queen, as well as the Comte de Provence, were eventually persuaded to support Necker’s views, and on 27 December it was announced that the Third Estate would, indeed, have ‘double representation’. It was not, however, made clear whether voting would be by head, in which case the Third Estate – relying on the liberals among the nobility and the clergy – would be able to count on a majority, or by order, which would mean that their apparent advantage of numbers would be nullified.
Early in the New Year the elections began. Almost everyone aged twenty-five and over whose name appeared on the taxation rolls – or, in Paris, who did not pay less than six livres in taille–was entitled to vote; and voting in most areas was heavy. In all, 1,201 representatives were elected, 291 nobles, 300 clergy and 610 members of the Third Estate. Apart from the Duc d’Orléans there were few members of the noblesse de cour amongst the noble representatives, most of them being landowners of a conservative cast of mind from the provinces, though there were about ninety nobles who regarded themselves as liberals, including such celebrated figures as the Marquis de Lafayette, who was elected, with difficulty, at Riom. Less than a sixth of the representatives of the clergy were prelates; most were parish priests, many of whom had studied the Encyclopédie Among the Third Estate middle-aged professional men were dominant, especially lawyers, though there were a few who were elected from outside their order, for example the Abbé Sieyès, who was chosen as one of the twenty deputies for Paris after being rejected by the clergy of Montfort-l’Amaury.