The First Revolutionary Step . 45 



it alone assumed the authority of deciding the powers and the 

 organization of the national assembly ; it decreed that instead of 

 a states general there should be a national assembly in which the 

 orders would be fused. And the statement that the assembly 

 should not allow any interference in its work nor any veto power 

 which was now directed against the deputies of the other orders, 

 was a few days later made absolute. It was expanded so that it 

 included the king himself. Thus the assembly considered itself 

 as possessing the sovereign power in France. Henceforth there 

 should not be a government by divine right of kings, but a gov- 

 ernment by divine right of the people. 



Certain deputies developed in their speeches these ideas of na- 

 tional sovereignty which were soon after put into practice. But 

 what was, it may well be asked, the meaning and the significance 

 of such a lengthy discussion? At least two problems confronted 

 the commons in this act of constituting themselves, namely to de- 

 termine and set forth the powers, the principles, and the policy, 

 which they should assume as an assembly and to discover how far 

 public opinion would follow and support the assembly in its de- 

 crees. Sieves answered the first question by proposing that the 

 assembly should assume all the representative power, all the 

 power of the states general, that the privileged classes should 

 have no independent existence, but that they should be swallowed 

 up in this newly created nation. In dealing with the second ques- 

 tion the use of diplomacy was thought more expedient. The mo- 

 tion defined the existence and the powers of the assembly, and 

 the title, to which the public would chiefly look, could be easily 

 modified as the principle for which the assembly stood, namely, a 

 national assembly, was in the eyes of the public realized. What 

 but that hindered Sieves from proposing the title, national as- 

 sembly, which public opinion had already consecrated? This 

 formula had repeatedly been used before, and even by the king 

 and the ministry. Sieyes had already proposed it in the con- 

 clusion of his famous monograph, Qu'est-ce que le tiers ctaif 

 Mirabeau had used the expression continuously both in his private 

 and public letters and in his speeches, and other deputies had em- 

 ployed it in their writings. Since the opening of the states gen- 



45 



