CHAPTER LX.——­LOUIS XVI.—­CONVOCATION OF THE STATES-GENERAL. 1787-1789.

Thirteen years had rolled by since King Louis XV. had descended to a dishonored grave, and on the mighty current which was bearing France towards reform, whilst dragging her into the Revolution, King Louis XVI., honest and sincere, was still blindly seeking to clutch the helm which was slipping from his feeble hands.  Every day his efforts were becoming weaker and more inconsistent, every day the pilot placed at the tiller was less and less deserving of public confidence.  From M. Turgot to M. Necker, from Calonne to Lomenie de Brienne, the fall had been rapid and deep.  Amongst the two parties which unequally divided the nation, between those who defended the past in its entirety, its abuses as well as its grandeurs, and those who were marching on bewildered towards a reform of which they did not foresee the scope, the struggle underwent certain moments of stoppage and of abrupt reaction towards the old state of things.  In 1781, the day after M. Necker’s fall, an ordinance of the minister of war, published against the will of that minister himself, had restored to the verified and qualified noblesse (who could show four quarterings) the exclusive privilege of military grades.  Without any ordinance, the same regulation had been applied to the clergy.  In 1787, the Assembly of notables and its opposition to the king’s projects presented by M. de Calonne were the last triumph of the enthusiastic partisans of the past.  The privileged classes had still too much influence to be attacked with success by M. de Calonne, who appeared to be in himself an assemblage of all the abuses whereof he desired to be the reformer.  A plan so vast, however ably conceived, was sure to go to pieces in the hands of a man who did not enjoy public esteem and confidence; but the triumph of the notables in their own cause was a fresh warning to the people that they would have to defend theirs with more vigor.” [Memoires de Malouet, t. i. p. 253].  We have seen how monarchy, in concert with the nation, fought feudality, to reign thenceforth as sovereign mistress over the great lords and over the nation; we have seen how it slowly fell in public respect and veneration, and how it attempted unsuccessfully to respond to the confused wishes of a people that did not yet know its own desires or its own strength; we shall henceforth see it, panting and without sure guidance, painfully striving to govern and then to live.  “I saw,” says M. Malouet in his Memoires, “under the ministry of the archbishop (of Toulouse, and afterwards of Sens), all the avant-couriers of a revolution in the government.  Three parties were already pronounced:  the first wanted to take to itself all the influence of which it despoiled the king, whilst withstanding the pretensions of the third estate; the second proclaimed open war against the two upper orders,