Encouraged by this break in the privileged orders’ ranks, Sieyès now proposed that, as the Third Estate represented ninety-six per cent of the nation, they should immediately start the work the country was waiting to see performed. As a first step the name of Estates General should be officially abandoned and the Third should confer upon itself a title that implied its unique authority.
The debate that ensued was stormy, and at the centre of the storm was a vehemently gesticulating figure with bloodshot eyes and a massive neck, the Comte de Mirabeau.
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau was then forty years old. His great-grandfather, whose ancestors had been rich merchants of Marseilles, had been created a marquis after acting as a suitably indulgent host to King Louis XIV; his outspoken grandfather had been so badly wounded at Cassano in 1705 that, obliged thereafter to wear an arm in a sling and his head supported by a silver stock, he was wont to say that it was a battle in which he had lost his life; his father had also served as a soldier for a time, but had resigned his commission early to become a farmer and the author of various radical books, which brought upon him the disfavour of the Government who required him to remain upon his farm to the south of Fontainebleau.
Honoré, his eldest surviving son, was born here in 1749 with two teeth in his mouth and an inexhaustible energy which was to be the despair of his family and household. At the age of three he contracted smallpox which left his face deeply pitted for life and thus increased his ugliness and contributed to the dislike his difficult father felt for him. After attending a military school in Paris he received a commission in the cavalry regiment which his grandfather had once commanded, but, like his father, he did not remain in the army long. Unattractive as his appearance was, his vivacity, charm, adventurous high spirits and entertaining conversation made him attractive to women for whom he himself had a voracious sexual appetite, making love to anyone who would have him and committing incest, so it was said, with his sister. A young lady to whom his colonel was attached fell in love with him and this led to a scandal which ended with his being imprisoned on the Île of Ré. In the hope that he might settle down and restore the family fortunes, he was, upon his release, married to the plain and extremely rich daughter of the Marquis de Marignane from whom he soon parted and, deep in debt, was incarcerated in prison once again. Removed from the Château d’If to a less rigorous confinement near Pontarlier, he made use of his relative freedom to visit the town where he was introduced into the house of a local nobleman whose pretty if rather vapid and ill-educated wife, Marie-Thérèse de Monnier, or Sophie, as he called her, fell helplessly in love with him. He fled to Switzerland where Sophie joined him; from Switzerland they travelled together to Holland where he made a precarious living by journalism and where he heard that he had been sentenced to death for rapt et vol at Pontarlier and beheaded in effigy; and from Holland he was brought back to France by the police and imprisoned yet again at Vincennes.
At Vincennes he occupied his time in writing passionate letters to Sophie and the obscene Erotica biblion as well as political works of a less self-indulgent nature, including his celebrated attack on prison abuses, Lettres de cachet, which was published after his release from Vincennes in 1782 and translated into English in 1787. This treatise, which led to the closure of the prison of Vincennes, added some lustre to his literary reputation, but he was otherwise regarded with as widespread misgiving as ever. He grew tired of Sophie, who consoled herself with a young army officer and then committed suicide, while he began an affair with Madame de Nehra, the daughter of a Dutch statesman, whom he was to desert in turn for Madame Lejay. At the same time he became involved in no less than three scandalous law suits, after which he had to leave France again, first for Holland, then for England.
‘He had a tall, square, heavy figure,’ wrote someone who met him at a dinner party at about this time. ‘The abnormally large size of his head [in which the eyes were unnaturally protuberant] was exaggerated by a mass of curled and powdered hair. He wore evening dress with enormous buttons of coloured stone, and the buttons of his shoes were equally large. His whole costume was remarkable for an extravagant fashionableness which went well beyond the bounds of good taste…He had a reserved expression, but his eyes were full of fire. Trying to be polite, he bowed too low, and his first words were pretentious and rather vulgar compliments.’
‘His vanity was certainly excessive,’ added another observer, the fastidious and percipient law reformer, Sir Samuel Romilly, who translated one of Mirabeau’s political theses into English, ‘and, like many of his countrymen who were active in the calamitous Revolution which afterwards took place, not sufficiently scrupulous about the means by which [the reform of society] was to be accomplished.’ Yet, for all his manifest faults, Mirabeau, ‘in his public conduct as well as in his writings, was desirous of doing good…His ambition was of the noblest kind and he proposed to himself the noblest ends.’
Certainly, if he was rude and provocative, argumentative, overbearing and vain, immoral and unscrupulous both with regard to women and to money, Mirabeau was une force de la nature who could not be disregarded. ‘I am a mad dog,’ he said himself, ‘from whose bites despotism and privilege will die.’ Charming when he chose to be, a gifted conversationalist, possessed of a rare gift for mastering complex issues, and combining a powerful intelligence with a deep knowledge of the ways of the world, Mirabeau was bound to be one of the most dominant figures in the Third Estate to which, having been rejected by his own order, he was elected as deputy for Aix. He was also one of the most distrusted. The Comtesse de La Tour du Pin described in her memoirs the effect he had upon the other deputies when he first appeared amongst them:
He entered the Chamber alone and took his place near the middle of the rows of backless benches which stretched one behind the other. There arose a very low but widespread murmur – a susurro–and the deputies already seated in front of him moved one bench forward, while those behind him moved back a little. He thus remained isolated in the middle of a very obvious space. Smiling contemptuously, he sat down.
During the debate on the Third Estate’s new title he aroused further distrust by his apparent desire to stem the tide of feeling that was pushing the Commons towards appropriation of complete sovereignty to itself. He proposed that the Third Estate should rename themselves ‘Representatives of the French People’, and was immediately asked whether he would have translated ‘people’ as populus, meaning the whole nation including the privileged orders, or – what was, in fact, his intention – as plebs, meaning the Commons alone. Made aware of the ambiguity in Mirabeau’s title, the Third Estate then turned to the consideration of other names, and tempers rose as some deputies made suggestions that others considered inappropriate or misleading. Voices grew higher and more angry, while outside the hall a summer storm raged, the wind howling at the windows. Bailly was urged to bring the session to a close, but he remained in his place, cool and imperturbable, until the tempest subsided and the most violent of the protesters left the hall. He then proposed that the rest of the deputies should also withdraw to meet again in calmer mood the following morning.
It was in such an atmosphere of confusion and uproar that so many of the debates were conducted. Often a hundred or so deputies were on their feet at the same time; and usually there was an impatient throng of them pushing against each other by the iron steps that led up to the rostrum. According to Arthur Young, who occasionally joined the noisy spectators in the public galleries, ‘Monsieur Bailly was absolutely without power to keep order’. There were still no rules of procedure and when it was suggested that lessons might be learned from the House of Commons in London, the proposal was rejected contemptuously as yet another example of that intolerable anglomania which the Comtesse de La Tour du Pin said had become so extreme at Court that people took to affecting English accents. So the debates remained uncontrolled: tedious speeches, prepared beforehand, were read out at length irrespective of whether or not they were relevant to the issues in dispute, petitioners arrived at the doors insisting that their grievances be immediately considered and from the galleries there came an almost continuous roar of approval or disapprobation and the occasional piece of rotten fruit.