United States or Bolivia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


One feels, while reading the cahiers, the unanimity of a long-suffering people anxious for a release from intolerable misgovernment, more than that, anxious to have their institutions modernized, but all in a spirit of complete loyalty and devotion to the King and to all that was wise, and good, and glorious, and beneficent, that he still seemed to represent.

Each of these provincial meetings elected two bishops and two other ecclesiastics, either regular or secular. These deputies received, from their constituents, instructions called cahiers to be taken by them to the Ordinary Assembly of the clergy, which was held in Paris.

To give you an idea of what that means. Thirty years ago the Cahiers, or Instructions, of 1789 were published in six large volumes. The editors lamented that they had not found everything, and that a dozen cahiers were missing in four provinces.

Under the kings of France its aspirations were satisfied. The country was great and glorious. That loyalty was held to be a duty will perhaps be less generally recognized, but I think that enough has been written in this book to show it. The evidence of the cahiers is chiefly on that side. Most Frenchmen believed that a king should govern, and that they had a good and well-meaning king.

No one can read the cahiers without seeing that the whole nation was ready for the great transformation which within a year was to destroy a great part of the social and political system under which the French had lived for centuries. Almost all the cahiers agreed that the prevailing disorder and the vast and ill-defined powers of the king and his ministers were perhaps the fundamental evils.

And when we pass from personal to political subjects there is almost no limit to the rashness of the pamphleteers. It was not the most sane and judicious part of the nation which became most conspicuous by its writings at this time and in this manner. The pamphlets are noticeably less conservative than the cahiers, which were likewise produced in the spring of 1789.

Chopin published during his lifetime forty-one Mazurkas in eleven cahiers of three, four and five numbers. Op. 6, four Mazurkas, and op. 7, five Mazurkas, were published December, 1832. Op. 6 is dedicated to Comtesse Pauline Plater; op. 7 to Mr. Johns.

Judges were to give reasons for their decisions. Amiens, A. P., i. 747, Section 7. The cahiers show that everybody was opposed to the use of lettres de cachet as they then existed; but most of the cahiers that had anything to say about them expressed a desire to keep something of the kind. They are considered necessary for reasons of state, or in the interest of families. Desjardins, 407.

Not many of the cahiers are so modest as this one. Some of them are many pages long, arranged under heads, divided into numbered paragraphs. These contain a general scheme of legislation, and often also particular and local petitions. They ask that such a lawsuit be reviewed, that such a dispute be favorably settled.

First, then, it must be said that the cahiers present at the same time remarkable uniformity and wide divergence. The agreement lies partly in their general spirit, and partly in the repetition of certain formulas preached throughout the country by eager pamphleteers and budding political leaders.