The king had received all the memorials; on some few points the three orders had commingled their wishes in one single memorial.  M. Malouet had failed to get this done in Auvergne.  “The clergy insist upon putting theology into their memorials,” he wrote to M. de Montmorin, on the 24th of March, 1789, “and the noblesse compensations for pecuniary sacrifice.  I have exhausted my lungs and have no hope that we shall succeed completely on all points, but the differences of opinion between the noblesse and the third estate are not embarrassing.  There is rather more pigheadedness amongst the clergy as to their debt, which they decline to pay, and as to some points of discipline which, after all, are matters of indifference to us; we shall have, all told, three memorials of which the essential articles are pretty similar to those of the third estate.  We shall end as we began, peaceably.”

“The memorials of 1789,” says M. de Tocqueville [L’ancien regime et la Revolution, p. 211], “will remain as it were the will and testament of the old French social system, the last expression of its desires, the authentic manifesto of its latest wishes.  In its totality and on many points it likewise contained in the germ the principles of new France.  I read attentively the memorials drawn up by the three orders before meeting in 1789,—­I say the three orders, those of the noblesse and clergy as well as those of the third estate,—­and when I come to put together all these several wishes, I perceive with a sort of terror that what is demanded is the simultaneous and systematic abolition of all the laws and all the usages having currency in the country, and I see at a glance that there is about to be enacted one of the most vast and most dangerous revolutions ever seen in the world.  Those who will to-morrow be its victims have no idea of it, they believe that the total and sudden transformation of so complicated and so old a social system can take effect without any shock by the help of reason and its power, alone.  Poor souls!  They have forgotten even that maxim which their fathers expressed four hundred years before in the simple and forcible language of those times:  ’By quest of too great franchise and liberties, getteth one into too great serfage.’”

However terrible and radical it may have been in its principles and its results, the French Revolution did not destroy the past and its usages, it did not break with tradition so completely as was demanded, in 1789, by the memorials of the three orders, those of the noblesse and the clergy, as well as those of the third estate.