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My own study of the cahiers confirms this opinion. See, however, a long, argumentative article in the cahier of the Third Estate of Rennes, A. P., v. 540, Sections 48-50. See also that of Bellocq, A. P., ii. 276, Section 61. T. Aix. A P., i. 697. Villiers-sur-Marne, A. P., v. 216.
Many cahiers ask for elective municipal or village authorities. Many would sweep away the old officers of the crown, the intendants and military governors, the farmers general, and the very clerks. These men were hated as tax-gatherers, and distrusted as members of the old ring which had misgoverned the country.
His other plan was that the King should make himself master of the revolution before its complete explosion; he advised his Majesty to go to the Assembly, and there, in person, to demand the cahiers, and to make the greatest sacrifices to satisfy the legitimate wishes of the people, and not to give the factious time to enlist them in aid of their criminal designs.
When this complex process had been completed and the three residual cahiers had been given to the king, the States-general, the only representative body of France, was dissolved. Thus it should be with our national history. Already the clergy have presented their cahiers in the shape of church histories and theological essays innumerable.
The divergence can be placed under three chief heads: the markedly different character of a great part of the cahiers of the clergy from those of the other two orders; provincial divergence and peculiarities of local customs; demands for the maintenance of local privileges.
Thus it was hoped to keep power in the hands of the nation. But only two years before the cahiers were drawn up, another nation, which it had recently been the fashion much to admire in France, had appointed its deputies to draw up its constitution. This nation was at least as superior to the French in political experience as it was inferior in the arts and sciences that adorn life.
Each village and town throughout France had an opportunity to tell quite frankly exactly what it suffered from the existing system, and what reforms it wished that the Estates General might bring about. These cahiers were the "last will and testament" of the old régime, and they constitute a unique historical document, of unparalleled completeness and authenticity.
Nobility is no longer to be bought and sold, but shall be accorded only for merit or long service, perhaps only on the nomination of the Provincial Estates. Except in the most democratic cahiers, these concessions are not disputed. On the other hand, the Commons ask for a share of the chances hitherto reserved for the nobles.
It has been said that the greater number of the cahiers of the clergy were composed under the prevailing influence of the parish priests. These men felt themselves to be wronged in the distribution of church property. They would take from the few who had much and give to the many who had little.
Usually at this hour the Den presented a very different appearance, the children, with slates and cahiers, working laboriously round the table, Jane Anne and mother knitting or mending furiously, Mere Riquette, the old cat, asleep before the fire, and a general schoolroom air pervading the place.
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