请将“On 8 August 1788, Loménie announced the convocation of the états généraux for 1 May 1789. The news took a while to spread in the conditions of the time, but by winter it had come to the ears of the peasants, who in many parts of the country rebelled against their living conditions. The winter of 1788-9 brought dire distress to very many French people. The early months of 1788 had been dry, then in July and August continuous rain had rotted the meagre grain crop before the harvest. The winter that followed was very cold. In many districts, the winegrowers lost three-quarters of their vines. Collective peasant actions became widespread from the end of the year. In several places, there was just a refusal to pay tax, but elsewhere hedges were torn down, mills and ovens destroyed, and landlords threatened. Even so, none of this was entirely new. What was new in the winter of 1788-9 was that this coincided with the announcement of the états généraux and with it the hope for possible improvement in conditions of life. This situation made the actions into forms of expression of a public that was more than local in scale, and it was seen as such by the lords as well as the peasants.
The agricultural crisis did not just affect the peasants, it raised the price of bread and subsequently had an effect also on the employment of artisans. Because the cold winter of 1787-8 had damaged almost all the mulberry trees in Italy, the French silk-weavers had no more work in the summer of 1788. In Lyon alone, 22,000 were unemployed. By the following winter, the crisis had reached almost all branches of production apart from luxury goods.
A campaign for 'doubling' steadily developed. In August, the parlement de Paris had announced that the états généraux would be convened according to the procedure applied in 1614-15. According to this, each estate would be equally represented, the estates would debate separately, and a single cahier de doléances would be compiled on the basis of the complaint books forwarded to them by the provincial assemblies. This cahier would then be sent to the king, who for his part would respond after the sessions ended - if, indeed, he responded at all. In autumn the demand arose that the immensely greater number who belonged to the Third Estate should be represented by at least a double number of delegates. Especially active in this campaign from November on was a political association known as the 'Committee of Thirty', though it very soon had more members than that. Similar debating circles also emerged in other towns, but the Paris circle not only included members of all three estates, but even some great nobles who were critical of the government. The Committee used the wealth and influence of its members, published and distributed a whole flood of propaganda material, and petitioned the parlement. The petition was banned, along with the further distribution of pamphlets, but at the end of December 1788 the royal council agreed to the doubling, following unrest in Paris - according to Jean Michaud16 - and in January corresponding election procedures were announced. The demand for double representation of the Third Estate did not put in question the existence of the estates as such. It was simply a demand for reform. But it created none the less a political climate in which the text of Sieyès that was written as part of the campaign, though published only after its conclusion, very rapidly found an immense distribution. To the question he posed, 'What is the Third Estate?' the author answered, with propagandist effectiveness: 'Everything.'17 In the year of its appearance, Sieyès's text already went through four editions.
Early in 1789, the political public was decisively expanded, both geographi-cally and socially, by the assemblies that the crown convened to prepare for the états généraux. The privileged estates continued to meet separately for these baillages, to appoint their delegates to the états généraux and write up their doléances. Two things, however, were now apparent: that the members of the lower clergy were not prepared simply to accept their superiors as repre-sentatives - which Rolf Reichardt18 sees as possibly a result of the experience of forms of representation in the provincial assemblies - and that both the First and Second Estates, besides doléances, the stubborn arrogance of which was shortly to be ascribed the rubric 'feudalism', also formulated demands indicating that there was a considerable basis for the strategies of rectification and rationalisation of rule in which the crown, even by pursuing them half-heartedly, had already come up against the structures of its own ruling apparatus. The nobility could see no society without privileges, but many nobles were ready to renounce certain of their privileges that stood in flagrant contradiction with the changed norms, or brought more hostility than direct advantage.19
There were different modes of procedure for the Third Estate. Besides the special regulations for Paris - where suffrage was on the basis of possession of either an office or a master's credentials, or else a capitation tax assessment of at least 6 livres - there was a combination of corporate and numerical rules, and a system of election and debate with either two levels or even three (where several baillages were combined). Apart from in Paris, all free male taxpayers were admitted to the local assemblies. About a third of those allowed actually did attend.20 The elections to the lower assemblies were held publicly, but secret ballots were held for election of the deputies to Versailles. A good half of the rural lower assemblies were led by local judges who exercised seigneurial jurisdiction, or else by royal officials. This was expressed in the formulations of the doléances as well as in the fact that many of those attending profited materially from seigneurial privileges. In some cases, prepared cahiers de doléances were distributed to the assemblies, in other cases, some of those present felt moved to subsequently compile additional cahiers of their own. In the election of deputies in the baillage assemblies, the better- off and more educated had greater weight. In their compilation of the general cahiers, many grievances of the local peasants fell by the wayside. The assembly of the sénéchaussée Villefranche-de-Rouergue, for example, refused to transmit a grievance about the milling monopoly. Rights of this kind, so the delegates from the villages were instructed, were not a matter of privilege but of property, and property had to be respected no matter who owned it.21 Even so, half of the general cahiers demanded the abolition of seigneurial jurisdiction, and over half of them the abolition of seigneurial taxes.22 It has been contested whether these and similar demands heralded the events of the following summer, after George V. Taylor published in 1972 his contention that the cahiers did not have any kind of revolutionary character, since even Enlightenment ideas are hardly present in them. We need not go into this debate here. The public that produced these cahiers, however, was no longer that of the ancien régime. And this was so for reasons based in the specific structure of the ancien régime in France - I return here to the historical dialectic with which I began this chapter. One can scarcely imagine that an English peasant in the late eighteenth century would be unaware what a petition to Parliament meant. But, in France in 1789, it is recorded in many districts that peasants thought that simply recording their grievances in the cahier meant that these would automatically be remedied. They went home believing that they were already free of seigneurial taxes, nobles' hunting rights, and other exactions. They behaved accordingly until they were instructed differently. It was unclear to many that this was supposed to be no more than a survey of opinion. After all, in living memory there had never been a king who wanted to know what most oppressed ordinary people. How could they assume that this great exercise would not have far-reaching results?
Taylor23 and Furet24 have already noted how the stage structure of the assemblies operated as a ‘revolutionary seminar' for the delegates who were eventually sent to Versailles. For an interpretation that would understand the events of summer and autumn 1789 as the work of a peaceful and educated élite, the preparation of the états généraux plays a particularly significant role, though this is not to be gainsaid even in the context of a different interpretation. It should be borne in mind, however, as Ran Halévie points out,25 that around three-quarters of the delegates of the Third Estate did not take part in elaborating the new constitution and new administrative structures when the états généraux was converted into the Constituent Assembly. Halévie assumes that they were appointed because the decisions of the baillage assemblies still expressed the clientele structure of the ancien régime. Yet Halévie himself emphasises the break that this public made with the established structures of the ancien régime. Thus it was individuals that were elected - sometimes after debate! - rather than corporations, and not even the spokesmen of factions; factions relating to the practice of generalised rule were unknown in France, precisely because there were no structures of regular public participation in this practice. Those who stood for election, or at least some of them, represented views that had long been expressed in reading societies or other debating circles, and found broad distribution in the publications of 1788-9. To many of these deputies, moreover, it must have seemed nonsensical that, after all this expenditure, they were simply to be sent to Versailles on the basis of traditional mandates - as 'emissaries' - and then to return home. After all these great words, they were to be returned to the situation of 1615, and after such a festive detour, spend their time in Versailles debating on what points the king could most humbly be beseeched.”翻译为中文