Brienne replaced him; but when he presented to the Notables a shadowy version of the proposals he had formerly rejected out of hand, the Notables were in no mood to accept from the Archbishop even so mild a concoction of the medicines that they had refused to take from Calonne. Their Assembly was dissolved and they went home, having demonstrated the firm determination of most of their number to prevent the King’s Ministers tampering with their privileges.
The land tax and other measures which the Notables had rejected now had to be presented to the Paris parlement. And parlement, among whose members were several who had sat with the Notables, was equally determined not to let them pass, protesting that any new taxation required the assent of the Estates General, a consultative body of clergy, nobles and representatives of the Commons or Third Estate, which had not met since 1614 in the reign of Louis XIII. Confronted by the intransigence of parlement and worried by a crisis in foreign affairs, the King and Brienne, backed by Chrétien de Lamoignon, Keeper of the Seals, the one strong man in the Government, decided to use force. They dispatched troops to the Palais de Justice and had two of the leading and most intractable parlementaires, Jean Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil and Goislard de Montsabert, arrested. Three days later, on 8 May 1788, after the King had invoked his right to enforce various edicts to which they had objected, the Paris parlement and all the provincial parlements were deprived of their power of opposing the monarch’s will.
That summer violence erupted all over France. ‘In Dauphiny and other Provinces,’ reported the chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy in Paris, ‘no Taxes whatever can be collected, and accounts of some fresh act of Revolt and disobedience arrive every day from different parts of the Kingdom.’ Protesting that they were acting in defence of the parlements, nobles and magistrates came together to block the Government’s attempt to impose equality of taxation. There were riots in Brittany, Burgundy, Béarn and Provence. In Pau and Rennes violent demonstrations were provoked among the population by local parlementaires. In Dauphiné there were clashes between troops and the townspeople of Grenoble in which twenty soldiers were wounded and two demonstrators killed. In Paris there was fighting in the streets and an effigy of Brienne was burned before cheering crowds.
As the prospect of national bankruptcy grew more daunting, Brienne turned in desperation to the clergy, but they, in an extraordinary meeting of their Assembly, condemned the Government’s reforms and granted only a small proportion of the money for which they had been asked. Forced to accept defeat, Brienne announced on 5 July that the Estates General would be summoned to Versailles in May the following year; and a few weeks later he handed in his resignation. The King had now no alternative but to reappoint Necker, to recall the parlements and to agree to the replacement of de Lamoignon by the supposedly more moderate Charles de Barentin.
The general satisfaction aroused by the announcement that the Estates General were to be reconvened was, however, soon overcast by the further declaration by the Paris parlement that they should be composed as they had been in 1614, which was to say that the three orders whose representatives were to meet at Versailles, the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate, or Commons, were to have an equal number of delegates. This meant that, if each order were to vote separately, the clergy and nobility could always combine in defence of their privileges to thwart the aspirations of the Third Estate. The popularity of parlement, which the middle class had formerly been inclined to view as a bulwark against despotic government, collapsed, as Professor Goodwin has observed, overnight. ‘Thus it was that, in the autumn and winter of 1788, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy was transformed into a social and political conflict between the privileged and unprivileged classes. As the issues broadened, the solidarity of the privileged orders weakened. A split appeared even in the ranks of the parlement of Paris between the conservative magistrates and those with liberal inclinations…The Third Estate also found champions of its claims among the lay and clerical aristocracy…Lastly, there was formed in these months, in opposition to the coalition of the conservative aristocracy, a combination of liberal theorists and politicians who assumed the style of the “patriotic” or “national” party.’ ‘The controversy has completely changed,’ wrote a contemporary witness, Jacques Mallet du Pan, the journalist. ‘King, despotism and constitution are now relatively minor questions. The war is between the Third Estate and the other two orders.’
Politics now became of all-consuming interest. Noisy discussions took place every night in the coffee-houses of the Palais Royal where there passed from hand to hand a stream of freshly printed pamphlets, propounding the ideas of a new declaration of rights, new conceptions of national sovereignty, and France’s need of a constitution.
The business going forward in the pamphlets shops is incredible [Arthur Young was soon to write]. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new things were published, and to procure a catalogue of all. Every hour produces something new. Thirteen came out today, sixteen yesterday and ninety-two last week…This spirit of reading political tracts, they say, spreads into the provinces, so that all the presses of France are equally employed…Is it not wonderful that, while the press teems with the most levelling and even seditious principles that if put in execution would overturn the monarchy, nothing in reply appears, and not the least step is taken by the Court to restrain this extreme licentiousness of publication? It is easy to conceive the spirit that must be raised among the people. But the coffee-houses in the Palais Royal present yet more singular and astonishing spectacles; they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening à gorge deployée to certain orators, who from the chairs or table harangue each his little audience. The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined.