In order to apply a remedy to the evils he demonstrated as well as to those which he foresaw, M. Necker had borrowed some shreds from the great system of local assemblies devised by M. Turgot; he had proposed to the king and already organized in Berry the formation of provincial assemblies, recruited in every district (generalite) from among the three orders of the noblesse, the clergy, and the third estate.  A part of the members were to be chosen by the king; these were commissioned to elect their colleagues, and the assembly was afterwards to fill up its own vacancies as they occurred.  The provincial administration was thus confided almost entirely to the assemblies.  That of Berry had already abolished forced labor, and collected two hundred thousand livres by voluntary contribution for objects of public utility.  The assembly of Haute-Guyenne was in course of formation.  The districts (generalites) of Grenoble, Montauban, and Moulins claimed the same privilege.  The parliaments were wroth to see this assault upon their power.  Louis XVI. had hesitated a long while before authorizing the attempt.  “The presidents-born, the councillors, the members of the states-districts (pays d’etats), do not add to the happiness of Frenchmen in the districts which are under their administration,” wrote the king in his marginal notes to M. Necker’s scheme.  “Most certainly Brittany, with its states, is not happier than Normandy which happens to be without them.  The most just and most natural among the powers of the parliaments is that of hanging robbers of the finances.  In the event of provincial administrations, it must not be taken away.  It concerns and appertains to the repose of my people to preserve privileges.”

The instinct of absolute power and the traditions of the kingship struggled in the narrow mind and honest heart of Louis XVI. against the sincere desire to ameliorate the position of his people and against a vague impression of new requirements.  It was to the former of these motives that M. de Vergennes appealed in his Note to the king on the effect of the Report.  “Your Majesty,” he said, “is enjoying the tranquillity which you owe to the long experience of your ancestors, and to the painful labors of the great ministers who succeeded in establishing subordination and general respect in France.  There is no longer in France clergy, or noblesse, or third estate; the distinction is factitious, merely representative and without real meaning; the monarch speaks, all else are people, and all else obey.

“M.  Necker does not appear content with this happy state of things.  Our inevitable evils and the abuses flowing from such a position are in his eyes monstrosities; a foreigner, a republican, and a Protestant, instead of being struck with the majestic totality of this harmony, he sees only the discordants, and he makes out of them a totality which he desires to have the pleasure and the distinction of reforming in order to obtain for himself the fame of a Solon or a Lycurgus.