请将“The revolutionary public of summer 1789 was not the culmination of a long-standing criticism of rule that then expanded qualitatively, but rather a result of the fact that there was not that kind of public in France until 1787, at least not as an element that regular forms of ruling practice had been developed to deal with. It goes without saying that the French crown, just like any other generalised power under the ancien régime, had to take into account opposition tendencies and regular resistance. But, from the start of the seventeenth century, this happened increasingly less in forms of an established public. The crown's most important sources of information about the actual state of the country, about popular moods and resistances, were not assemblies, but rather the intendants and parlements. No états généraux had been convened since 1614, and, from the end of the seventeenth century, sessions of the provincial estates came to an end in one pays d'état after another. After the 1720s, there were no longer any official assemblies of the nobility. These were still held only for the clergy, who decided on the level of their don gratuit to the crown, and on these occasions expressed either directly or - as in 1788 after the partial emancipation of the Protestants - by their refusal of the amount of tax demanded, the demands or protests of the senior clergy. Towns, corporations and provinces negotiated their privileges directly and in mutual competition. These competitive relationships to the generalised power, however, did not sum up to a comprehensive critical public.
It is true that the struggles around Jansenism provoked a tendency critical of the ruling power with a wide reach across the kingdom, but this remained largely confined to the better-off inhabitants of the towns. The same is true of the literary public of the time. As we have already explained, this last was relatively little developed in comparison with England, since publishers of periodicals drew their profit from privilege and did not seek to reach wider circles of readers by dealing with new subjects and reducing their prices. The membership of the académies remained similarly limited, as did to a lesser extent that of the Masonic lodges. From the mid-eighteenth century, newspaper reporting began to change, along with the social composition and social forms of learned societies, and in the 1780s the system of censorship broke down. The idea became widespread among nobles, the ennobled, and wealthy or at least not actually poor non-nobles, that the world could be improved if human reason was allowed to develop without hindrance. This was the context in which a multitude of improvement proposals arose, reaching from the new methods of agricultural production through to the regulation of midwifery, and it was likewise the context of the reform plans that the crown's advisers developed and in part even put into practice. In the latter case, this meant the crown acting ‘tyrannically' against all who had a share in the royal governing power. The practice of rule that historians later described as ‘enlightened absolutism' produced as much discontent in France as it did, precisely because such enlightened absolutism was ‘more absolute' than the non-enlightened. The immediate effect of almost all of the crown's reform attempts was a bitter opposition from one corporation or other of royal office-holders. 
During the last two centuries of the ancien régime, the political public whose demands the French crown had to deal with was above all its own government personnel. When the financial crisis reached such a level in the mid- 1780s that the previous practice of attempting reforms and then withdrawing them either entirely or in part in the face of resistance from the parlements and other corporations could no longer be continued, the crown now sought to come to terms with its regular government public by a form of representation - still in the limits of the ‘political public' of the ancien régime - that had not been made use of since 1626. An assembly of notables was designed to give the crown support against the parlement de Paris - exiled in 1787 - and the other parlements. What the crown saw as ‘public opinion' at this time, and consequently sought to have represented by the assembly of notables, was socially very restricted. Nonetheless, all estates and nearly all provinces were represented, in other words urban office-holders, magistrates of the royal high courts, members of the higher clergy, the higher noblesse d'épée and the royal princes. Most of the notables came from provincial towns, and most but not all were either noble or ennobled.11
It is immaterial in the present context whether it could have been foreseen in advance that the notables could not be used for implementing the proposed reforms, and stabilising in this way the entire corrupt financial system - the structure of which had been made particularly clear by the spectacular bank-ruptcies of certain financiers. Even the resignation of Calonne, who had himself profited considerably from the existing financial system, and the appointment of Loménie de Brienne as first minister, need not be gone into here. Only two points have to be emphasised: first, that because the notables refused to act as instruments of the royal reform policy and demanded a reform of ruling practice that would involve the participation of a political public, the crown finally found itself forced to summon the états généraux - initially for 1792, then already for 1789; secondly, that the government received the agreement of the notables for the introduction of a new regional and local administration, and immediately started work on this.
The introduction of provincial and municipal assemblies, and the procla-mation of the états généraux, marked the beginning of the development of that public out of which the Revolution arose. It was the French crown itself that set under way the process of constitution of a revolutionary public. This did not arise from the spread of particular demands, but rather from the linking of many particular disputes into a specific political context. From 1787, this process was regularly organised by the crown.
The first step was the introduction of provincial, departmental and munici-pal assemblies in the pays d'élection, half-heartedly and under the constraint of fiscal needs. Half-heartedly, since though representatives of the taxpayers were elected, the local seigneurs and priests were members of the municipal assemblies ex officio. Fiscally and administratively, because the new institu-tions could not even participate in the making of political decisions, but were seen as executive organs that would facilitate the operation of the intendants and make this more effective. The fact of election, however, unavoidably led to a politicisation of administrative practice, an attitude of expectancy that also spread to the pays d'état, and led there to the recall of the états généraux being demanded - in many cases, successfully.
As Rolf Reichardt has shown,12 the reform of local administration was, in many respects, constitutive for the emergence of a revolutionary public. This was firstly because many hopes were bound up with this renovation. True, in many communities scarcely anyone was seriously interested, while in others it was reported that the elections had inflamed passions.13 Reichardt cites as a typical phenomenon the expression of Abbé Périgord (later Talleyrand-Péri- gord): ‘There is nothing that the provincial assemblies can not accomplish, and there is no healing renovation that can be brought about without them'.14 Secondly, the administrative reform promoted the rise of a revolutionary public because it very quickly emerged that there were quite considerable differences as to what kind of reform should be effected. More than a few provincial nobles saw the new arrangements as an opportunity to carve out a commanding position for themselves, after advance into high positions in the army and 'administration' had been made much more difficult, and the respect of nobles who had nothing more to their name than their noble status had declined. A Paris police commissioner wrote in 1787 that ambitious peo-ple from the Second Estate viewed the innovation as an opportunity 'de faire enfin un personnage'.15 According to Reichardt, there were many indications of estate conflict within the provincial assemblies, and he adds that experiences of this kind continued in the subsequent debates over the selection of delegates for the états généraux and the content of the cahiers de doléances that were to be drawn up for the king. Ultimately, the new institutions organised official advice sessions on 'public' affairs. Even if only a few people were involved in these, a far greater number gained experience in this way of a practice that was new to them, that of formal debate. More than a few of the names that appear in 1787 as members of the departmental assemblies are later to be found among the delegates to the assemblies of baillage which appointed the delegates to the états généraux. And more than a few were among the personnel of the administrative districts created in 1790 - corresponding to the structures that in 1787 were introduced for just two years.”翻译为中文