With these words he walked out of the hall, followed by the Comte d’Artois, looking ‘full of pride’, by the contented nobles, who had been assured of their continuing privileges, and by some of the clergy, leaving it free for further debate by the Commons unrestrained by his presence. Mirabeau seized his opportunity. ‘Gentlemen,’ he called, rising to his feet, his powerful voice echoing round the walls while trumpets sounded outside as the royal coach rattled away. ‘We are being dictated to in an insulting manner…I demand that you assume your legislative powers and adhere to the faith of your oath. It allows us to disband only after we have made the Constitution.’
The twenty-seven-year-old Grand Master of the Ceremonies, Henri-Éverard de Dreux Brézé, interrupted him to remind him of the King’s order to disperse. But Mirabeau stood his ground. ‘Yes, Sir,’ he replied. ‘We have heard the orders that the King has been advised to give. But you have no right to speak here. Go tell your master that we are here by the will of the people and that we shall not stir from our seats unless forced to do by bayonets.’ Sieyès and Bailly both supported him. ‘The assembled nation,’ Bailly asserted, ‘cannot be given orders.’ The question of their inviolability was then put to the vote and carried by 493 votes to 34.
According to the Duc d’Orléans, Brézé then rushed off to report to the King what had happened; and ‘the King went pale with anger and uttered strong oaths. “Well then, clear them out by force,” he ordered…Brézé returned to carry out this order but found that the Deputies had by then dispersed.’ Other witnesses, however, reported that the King responded to the Third Estate’s revolt with weary resignation, saying ‘Eh bien, foutre! Qu’ils restent. Well, damn it, let them stay.’ Certainly, on 27 June, when most of the clergy and forty-seven of the nobility led by the Duc d’Orlèans had joined the National Assembly, he decided that he would have to give his approval to a measure which he felt no longer able to prevent. After news had been received from Paris that unless he authorized joint meetings of all three orders, a mob thirty thousand strong would besiege the palace, he asked the remaining clergy and the rest of the nobility to follow the example of their colleagues.
The first stage of the Revolution was over and had been achieved without bloodshed. ‘History,’ Mirabeau proudly declared, ‘has too often recounted the actions of nothing more than wild animals, among which at long intervals we can pick out some heroes. Now we are given hope that we are beginning the history of man.’
But while the National Assembly, under the Presidency of the Archbishop of Vienne, turned to the business of framing a constitution, the King turned to the army to save him from forces over which he was losing all control. He ordered six regiments up from the eastern frontier, then, following riots in Paris, another ten. As these troops converged upon Paris and Versailles the atmosphere in the capital and in the country at large grew ever more tense. There were increasingly frequent outbreaks of violence, a military prison was invaded by the mob, passers-by who declined to declare their support of the Third Estate were attacked in the streets. As the price of bread rose, there were riots in protest against the landowners, tithe-owners and merchants who were held responsible. In many towns the liberal-minded upper bourgeoisie encouraged the petite bourgeoisie to voice their protests against the reactionary attitudes of the aristocracy. They urged them to provide a lead for the journeymen and workers, to ensure that the hopes of a fairer society aroused by the calling of the Estates General would not be shattered so soon.
‘Oh my fellow-citizens,’ ran one of the numerous pamphlets published at this time and written by a member of the upper bourgeoisie, a doctor, ‘keep close watch on the conduct of the King’s Ministers…Their aim is to dissolve our National Assembly, and the only means whereby they can do so is civil war. In private, Ministers are talking of…sending against you a formidable force of soldiers and bayonets!’
‘A large number of troops already surround us,’ Mirabeau declared in a violent speech on 8 July. ‘More are arriving each day. Artillery are being brought up…These preparations for war are obvious to anyone and fill every heart with indignation.’
Already the troops, mostly foreign mercenaries, had reached the high ground around Paris and were dispatched to protect strategic points such as the bridges of Sèvres and St Cloud and the Royal Treasury. The National Assembly protested at these movements, asking why a King, who was loved by twenty-five million Frenchmen, should surround the throne ‘at such great expense with several thousand foreigners’. The King replied that the troops were in Paris to protect it from disorder, not to overawe it, but his words were rendered suspect by his dismissal of Necker whose place was filled by the sternly conservative Baron de Breteuil. To supervise the military actions, the experienced Maréchal de Broglie, a confirmed royalist, had already been summoned from Alsace to take over the Ministry of War.
The news of the dismissal of Necker caused the utmost consternation amongst the 600,000 people of Paris: treasury notes slumped in value, stockbrokers held an emergency meeting and closed the Stock Exchange, financiers and investors spoke gloomily of bankruptcy, artisans, journeymen and workers feared that the price of bread which had already almost doubled within the past two months would become more expensive still. They had long suspected that the aristocrats and land-owners had advocated the hoarding of grain so as to destroy the Third Estate. Now their suspicions seemed fully justified.
Concerned to defend property against the mobs that were rampaging about the town, breaking into gunsmiths’ and sword-cutlers’ shops and threatening the houses of the richer citizens, the Electors who had made the final selection of the Parisian deputies in the Estates General met at the Hôtel de Ville. Here they established themselves as an unofficial municipal authority and decided to organize a militia. Mostly well-to-do themselves – of the 379 men who attended the meeting the majority were lawyers, doctors and merchants – they agreed that the militia, soon to be called the National Guard, should be a bourgeois body composed only of respectable citizens prepared to serve one day in four, more than most wage-earners could afford to do.
As one Elector observed ‘the situation in Paris [was] becoming highly ominous’. In the Place Vendôme a band of demonstrators hurled stones at the troops of the Royal Allemand Regiment; near the Tuileries a regiment of dragoons, commanded by the Prince de Lambesc, were also stoned and bombarded with garden chairs. Two companies of Gardes-françaises, confined to barracks for insubordination, broke out and rushed off shouting, ‘We are the soldiers of the nation! Long live the Third Estate!’ They were arrested and incarcerated in the Abbaye prison but were released by the mob. Other mobs marched through the streets pillaging bakers’ shops and threatening to burn down the theatres if they did not close immediately, since people had no right to enjoy themselves in the midst of public misfortunes. Wax busts of Necker and the Duc d’Orléans, borrowed from Curtius’s waxworks, were paraded about accompanied by black and white standards, symbols of ‘mourning for the disgrace of an idolized Minister’. And in the gardens of the Palais Royal huge crowds collected. These gardens, which were surrounded by some of the most expensive shops and brothels in Europe and which had been thrown open to the public by the Duc d’Orléans, had long been the haunt not only of men-about-town and ladies of fashion but also of political agitators and public orators, and so it was here that people anxious for news, eager to spread rumours, or hungry for excitement naturally gathered. Most of them were delighted now to learn that the detested customs barriers which encircled Paris in order to exact heavy tolls upon all meat, wines, vegetables and other commodities entering the city, had been destroyed.