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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONSTITUTIONAL STAGE
THE bankruptcy towards which France was staggering under the regime of an untaxed privileged noblesse drove the Court into the dangerous step of attempting to do something, and after desperate efforts to carry on the old corruption by means of financing operations under Calonne and others, aided by an assembly of the “Notables,” which was a kind of irregular taxing council, the Court was at last compelled to summon the States-General to meet on the 4th May 1789. This was a body which was pretty much analogous to a Parliament of our mediæval kings, that is little more than a machine for levying taxes, but which attempted to 137 sell its fiscal powers to the King for redress of certain grievances. This States-General had not met since 1614. Bickering between the three houses,—Clergy, Noblesse, and Commons,—immediately began, but the latter, which was middle-class in spirit though including some of the lower nobility, gave tokens of its coming predominance from the first. On the 20th of June the Court attempted a coup d'état, and the Third Estate held its ~ celebrated session in the Tennis Court, and so broke with the old feudal idea, and became the constituent “National Assembly,” the Court making a feeble resistance at the time.
Concurrently with this legal and constitutional movement came what M. Taine well calls “the spontaneous anarchy” of the peasants in the Provinces, with which the attack of Réveillon’s Factory in Paris was in sympathy. The King, Queen and Court expected to put down these disturbances easily, but the occurrences on the night of the Necker