NOVEL WEB Chapter 43: The Pamphlet War
Louis's statement to the Parlement of Paris was not a rock cast into a pool; it was a boulder cast from a mountain, and splash-back inundated the entire nation. The fact that the King was convoking the Estates-General, an organization so old and dormant it was effectively mythological, ignited France with a frantic, anarchic, and thrilling political ferment. For the first time since Louis VII's time, one hundred and seventy-five years previously, the citizens of France, by some means, were being consulted. The monarchy, in a solitary act of despair, had flung wide the doors to public discussion.
The struggle was no longer a rarefied war fought within the golden halls of Versailles or stodgy courts of Paris. It exploded outward, becoming everyone's all-devouring passion within every city, every town, every village. The central, immediate question, to which all else hung, was a dry question of procedure that became a fiery rivalry over national conscience: How would the Estates-General vote?
This question became the new battlefield. The Old Guard, led by a shaken but resilient Vergennes and the furious judges of the Parlement, immediately began a campaign to insist upon the "form of 1614." This was the historical precedent, the way it had always been done. The three estates—the First (Clergy), the Second (Nobility), and the Third (everyone else)—would meet and deliberate in their own separate chambers. When it came time to vote on an issue, each estate would cast a single, collective vote.
The logic was simple and, for the privileged, perfect. It ensured that the First and Second Estates, whose interests were almost always aligned, could always outvote the Third Estate two to one. It was a system designed to preserve the status quo, to make fundamental change impossible.
The future leaders of the Third Estate, a new and educated class of lawyers, merchants, and thinkers, saw through this for the trap that it was. They organized a frenzy calling for a very different system: vote par tête, or voting by head. In this system, all those newly elected delegates from all three estates would come together as a single body, a National Assembly, and every man would cast a single vote. Because the King had already insisted that the Third Estate should have as many delegates as both the other two combined (a concession so nicknamed the "doubling of the Third"), voting by head would give them a very real numerical majority. It would be a council of dinosaurs or a genuine revolution.
The battle over this procedural point was fought not with swords, but with ink and paper. A "pamphlet war" of unprecedented scale erupted in Paris. The printing presses, which had been so busy with Beaumarchais's theatrical propaganda, were now running day and night, churning out thousands of political tracts, essays, and polemics. The city seemed to be drowning in paper, its citizens suddenly, ravenously hungry for political argument.
The Old Guard's propaganda was well-funded and professionally produced. Their leaflets, frequently authored by respected members of the Académie Française, were replete with ominous warnings and appeals to tradition. They claimed that voting by head would be a violation of the "ancient constitution" of France, a sacred, unwritten agreement that had informed the kingdom for a thousand years. They claimed that it would release into civil life the horrors of "mob rule," letting the unlettered rabble swamp the collective wisdom of their social superiors. They positioned themselves as noble champions of order, tradition, and stability against a rising sea of anarchy.
But their arguments sounded old, defensive, and dated. The Third Estate's propaganda, by contrast, was electric, emotional, and new. It was a language of rights, reason, and justice that sounded both fresh and exhilarating. And a single pamphlet, more so than any other, defined the spirit of the age.
Beaumarchais himself took it to Louis, his face radiant with the excitement of a man who beholds a masterpiece. "It must be read by you, Your Majesty," he said, holding forth the thin, poorly printed pamphlet. "It's the talk of every coffee house, every salon. It's selling even faster than my Figaro."
The title was brief: Qu'est-ce que le tiers-état? — What Is the Third Estate? It was penned by a provincial, biting-witted clergyman, a certain Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès.
Louis read it that night. There were no flowery phrases; it stung, it was reasonable, and it was lethal. Sieyès asked three simple questions:
"What is the Third Estate? Everything."
"What has it been so far in the political dispensation? Nothing."
"What does it ask? To become something."
It was a manifesto against the very idea of privilege. It claimed, with icy anger, that the Third Estate—the twenty-five millions who worked, who produced, who paid taxes—comprised the nation. The nobility and the clergy, Sieyès claimed, did not belong to the nation; they were a cancer on it, a rootless parasitic class that did nothing but consume. The Third Estate, by a simple act, should just pronounce itself to be, and remain, the National Assembly with or without the other two orders. It was the most revolutionary manifesto Louis had ever read.
While the war of pamphlets raged, Louis was suddenly and extremely ill-at-ease. He was no longer a participant within a two-faction war. Having instigated his national discussion, he became its inadvertent referee. Emissaries from every quarter were crowding Versailles, asking his favor, his intercession.
He granted a formal audience to a group of high-ranking nobles, led by a cousin of the King, the Prince de Conti. They presented him with a petition, a "supplication" that was in reality a thinly veiled threat. They warned him of the "total dissolution of the state" if he were to grant voting by head. They spoke of the horrors of democracy, of the chaos that would ensue if the "sacred distinctions of rank" were dissolved.
Two days later, he received a very different kind of delegation: a party of sedately attired lawyers and merchants from Paris, whom Louis III had selected as typifying his city's bourgeoisie. They spoke with emotion and sense, maintaining that vote by head was no revolutionary innovation, but a question of straightforward justice. "Sire," their leader declared, "how can it be that two hundred thousand of your subjects should prevail against twenty-five million? You have summoned your nation to a hearing. We ask but that its voice be distinctly heard."
Louis was between the crossfires of the very same controversy he himself had called into being. His own mind was a whirlpool of tension. He himself had summoned up this populist genie with very specific intent to break the privilege of the nobility. Sieyès and the Third Estate were his allies by necessity to that end. But he was also an absolutist King, a man who from youth upwards had been educated with a sense of ordering, hierarchy, and his own divine right. Sieyès' radical, democratic vision frightened him to bits just as much as the nobles' selfish recalcitrance irritated him. If, as a result, the Third Estate did come to be "everything," then what was to be left to the King?
The HUD was a meaningless hodgepodge of mutually incompatible projections. One course or another would profoundly and irrevocably alienate a vast section of citizens. There was no clear, logical way forward.
Outmanueuvred, Louis did what was possible. He held out for time. He issued a general, neutral statement to the effect that a question of supreme historical importance, such as procedure to be followed by the Estates-General, was one to be decided by King's sense of wisdom nearer to date of assembling.
It was an act that pleased nobody. It angered the Third Estate, who felt it was a potential act of treachery, and it put the nobility on edge, with their prized privileges suspended. The political temperature, already boiling, increased by ten degrees. The frenzy surrounding pamphlets increased. The entire country was now breathlessly anticipating the King to come up with a decision that would not only dictate a rule of procedure to a meeting, but the fate of France itself.