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The Estates General of 1789 was a general assembly representing the French estates of the realm: the clergy (First Estate), the nobility (Second Estate), and the commoners (Third Estate). Since each operated as a separate body, the First and Second Estates could combine to outvote the Third, despite representing less than 5% of the population, while both were largely exempt from tax.

Summoned by King Louis XVI, the Estates General of 1789 ended when the Third Estate formed the National Assembly and, against the wishes of the King, invited the other two estates to join. This signaled the outbreak of the French Revolution. It was the last of the Estates General of the Kingdom of France.

The suggestion to summon the Estates General came from the Assembly of Notables installed by the King on February 22, 1787. This institution had not been called since 1614. In 1787, the Parlement of Paris was refusing to ratify Charles Alexandre de Calonne’s program of badly needed financial reform, due to the special interests of its noble members. Calonne was the Controller-General of Finances, appointed by the King to address the state deficit.

In the 1789 elections, the First Estate returned 303 deputies, representing 100,000 Catholic clergy. The Church as a whole owned nearly 10% of all French land, in addition to receiving annual tithes paid by peasants. However, more than two-thirds of the clergy lived on less than 500 livres per year, and were often closer to the urban and rural poor than those elected for the Third Estate, where voting was restricted to male French taxpayers, aged 25 or over.

As a result, half of the 610 deputies elected to the Third Estate in 1789 were lawyers or local officials, nearly a third businessmen, while fifty-one were wealthy land owners. Some clergy were also elected as Third Estate delegates, most notably the abbé Sieyès. Despite their status as elected representatives of the Third Estate, many of these nobles were executed by guillotine during the Terror.

The Estates-General convened in the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi on May 5, 1789, near the Palace of Versailles rather than in Paris; the choice of location was interpreted as an attempt to control their debates. As was customary, each Estate assembled in separate rooms, whose furnishings and opening ceremonies deliberately emphasised the superiority of the First and Second Estates. The Second Estate ruled only landowners could sit as deputies, excluding the immensely popular Comte de Mirabeau.

To prevent the Third Estate being outvoted by the other two, Sieyès sought to combine all three. His method was to require all deputies be approved by the Estates-General as a whole, instead of each Estate verifying its own members. This meant their legitimacy derived from the Estates-General, forcing them to continue sitting as one body.

Sitting as the Estates-General, on June 10 members of the Third Estate began verifying their own deputies, a process completed on June 17. Two days later, they were joined by over 100 members of the First Estate, and declared themselves the National Assembly. The remaining deputies from the other two Estates were invited to join, but the Assembly made it clear they intended to legislate with or without their support.

In an attempt to prevent the Assembly from convening, King Louis XVI closed the Salle des États, claiming he needed it for a royal speech. On June 20, the Assembly met in a tennis court outside Versailles, and swore not to disperse until a new constitution had been agreed. Messages of support poured in from Paris and other cities; by June 27, they had been joined by the majority of the First Estate, plus forty-seven members of the Second, and King Louis XVI backed down.

Even these limited reforms went too far for Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI younger brother, Prince Charles Philippe, Comte d’Artois; on their advice, King Louis XVI dismissed Necker again as chief minister on July 11.

Jacques Necker (1732 – 1804) was a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI. He was a reformer, but his innovations sometimes caused great discontent. Necker was a constitutional monarchist, a political economist, and a moralist, who wrote a severe critique of the new principle of equality before the law.

On July 12, the Assembly went into a non-stop session after rumours circulated the King was planning to use the Swiss Guards to force it to close. The news brought crowds of protestors into the streets, and soldiers of the elite Gardes Françaises regiment refused to disperse them.

On the 14th, many of these soldiers joined the mob in attacking the Bastille, a royal fortress with large stores of arms and ammunition. Its governor, Bernard-René de Launay, surrendered after several hours of fighting that cost the lives of 83 attackers. Taken to the Hôtel de Ville, he was executed, his head placed on a pike and paraded around the city; the fortress was then torn down in a remarkably short time.

Although rumoured to hold many prisoners, the Bastille held only seven: four forgers, a lunatic, a failed assassin, and a deviant nobleman. Nevertheless, as a potent symbol of the Ancien Régime, its destruction was viewed as a triumph and Bastille Day is still celebrated every year. In French culture, some see its fall as the start of the Revolution.

Alarmed by the prospect of losing control of the capital, King Louis XVI appointed the Marquis de Lafayette commander of the National Guard, with Jean-Sylvain Bailly as head of a new administrative structure known as the Commune. On July 17, Louis XVI visited Paris accompanied by 100 deputies, where he was greeted by Bailly and accepted a tricolore cockade to loud cheers. However, it was clear power had shifted from his court; he was welcomed as ‘Louis XVI, father of the French and king of a free people.’

The short-lived unity enforced on the Assembly by a common threat quickly dissipated. Deputies argued over constitutional forms, while civil authority rapidly deteriorated. On July 20, former Finance Minister Joseph Foullon and his son were lynched by a Parisian mob, and neither Bailly nor Lafayette could prevent it.

In rural areas, wild rumours and paranoia resulted in the formation of militia and an agrarian insurrection known as la Grande Peur. The breakdown of law and order and frequent attacks on aristocratic property led much of the nobility to flee abroad. These émigrés funded reactionary forces within France and urged foreign monarchs to back a counter-revolution.