Description

RARISSIVE POSTER, produced by the royal printing house in January 1789 to mark the convening of the Estates-General: first act of the French Revolution.

It reproduces the King's letter and the rules governing the convocation (setting out the organisation of the elections and the drafting of the cahiers de doléances), for distribution in French towns. The name of the town is left blank on this copy, which was probably never used; on a copy of the poster in the Musée Carnavalet, the name was handwritten in ink. It should also be noted that the text of the regulations shows some minor differences from the text published in volume form by the Imprimerie Royale: commas have been cut or added, capital letters have been removed from the beginning of each article, "..." has been replaced by "...".send copies"rather thanwill send copies". in Article VI, "or they are"rather thanthey are"in Article XXIII, "Bailiwick & Seneschalsea"rather thanBailiwick or Seneschalsea"in Article XXIX, "Members of the Third Estate"rather thanMembers of the Third Estate"in Article XXXIII, "will be"rather thanand will name"in Article XLIII.
For Louis XVI, convening the Estates General, which had not been held since 1614, was the only possible response to a financial and social crisis - yet their transformation into a National Assembly usurping royal authority marked the start of the French Revolution and the fall of the Ancien Régime.

By 1786, the Royal Treasury, depleted in particular by France's participation in the American Revolution, was threatened with ruin. But the Assembly of Notables of 1787 and then the Parliament of Paris rejected the financial reforms proposed by Louis XVI's ministers. They argued that only the Estates General should decide on tax matters. The people approved the parliament's stance, seeing it as a sign of resistance to the tyranny of absolute monarchy. The king and the parliaments engaged in a tug-of-war, at the end of which Louis XVI finally gave in: the convening of the Estates General was ordered.

Implementation, however, proved problematic: how could the status of the provinces be determined and the legitimacy of the elections ensured? Popular enthusiasm waned when the King announced that, as in 1614, the clergy, nobility and Third Estate would have the same number of deputies - despite the fact that the latter order, representing 90 to 98% of the population, bore the brunt of the tax burden. Jacques Necker, Minister of Finance, eventually reversed this decision, doubling the number of representatives of the Third Estate.

In January 1789, the regulations were drawn up. Divided into 51 articles, it opened with a profession of goodwill:

His Majesty wished that from the extremities of His Kingdom and from the least known dwellings, everyone could be assured of sending His wishes and complaints to Him; His Majesty being able to reach only through His love that part of these peoples, which the extent of His Kingdom and the apparatus of the throne seem to distance from Him [...] His Majesty therefore recognised with true satisfaction that, by means of the gradual Assemblies ordered throughout France for the representation of the Third Estate, He would thus have a sort of communication with all of them....] His Majesty therefore recognised with genuine satisfaction that by means of the gradual Assemblies ordered throughout France for the representation of the Third Estate, He would thus have a kind of communication with all the Inhabitants of his Kingdom. [...] Finally, His Majesty, in accordance with the custom observed by the Kings of his predecessors, determined to gather the States General of the Kingdom around his residence, not to hinder in any way the freedom of their deliberations, but to preserve for them the character dearest to his heart, that of counsel and friend.

In fact, these same regulations tended to muffle the voices of the populations furthest from central power: bailliages and sénéchaussées were divided into "principal" and "secondary" constituencies according to their size and age; while the number of deputies was usually calculated in relation to the number of electors, in the case of rural parishes, the proportion remained the same but for the number of "principal" and "secondary" deputies.lights"(households) rather than individuals; the cahiers de doléances, which were reworked several times before being read at Versailles, hardly reflected the problems of the poorest peasants; the representatives of the Tiers-état, who had to finance their travel and have leisure time to campaign, were overwhelmingly well-to-do bourgeois. And although the right to vote was granted to certain women (owners of fiefdoms or businesses, members of religious communities or guilds), none of them were elected. In addition to these considerations, the rules, which were highly complex, often seemed unclear to those responsible for applying them. The king himself acknowledged its imperfections, and announced optimistically that he intended to instruct the Estates General to amend it: "His Majesty thought it best to respond to the wishes of his Peoples by reserving for the Assembly of the States General the task of remedying the inequalities that could not be avoided, and of preparing a more perfect system for the future.."

In the end, almost 6 million French people took part in the electoral process, writing 25,000 lists of grievances. On 5 May, the 1,200 or so deputies met in Versailles. But even before the debates began, the representatives of the Third Estate took offence at the preferential treatment given to deputies from the other two orders, and the talks dragged on. On 10 June, while Louis XVI, preoccupied by the death of the Dauphin, turned his attention elsewhere, the Third Estate invited members of the other orders to join them, forming a National Assembly usurping the power of the King. Ten days later, this same assembly, finding its meeting room closed on the orders of Louis XVI, gathered in the Salle du Jeu de Paume and took an oath not to separate until a new constitution had been drafted. This event marked the first act of the Revolution.