The First Revolutionary Step 69 



peuple is absolutely necessary, inasmuch as it will insure to you 

 the attachment of the people, that imposing mass, without which 

 you would be nothing but single individuals, nothing but slender 

 reeds which might easily be broken one by one ? Do you not see 

 that you require the word people, because it informs the people 

 that you have united your fate to theirs, because it will teach 

 them to center in you all their thoughts and all their hopes?" 



Especially the last part of this oration aroused great animosity 

 in the assembly. 1 "It was succeeded, not by cries, but by convul- 

 sions of rage." 2 Many deputies interpreted Mirabeau's words 

 as intended to intimidate and lord it over the assembly. The 

 commons had become strong in working against difficulties and 

 they would not tolerate any restriction whatever of their inde- 

 pendence. Some of them believed Mirabeau wished to discredit 

 their body by raising either the people against it or, if his title 

 were accepted, the upper classes. It is in this connection that 

 Biauzat remarks that from eight hundred to twelve hundred day- 

 laborers attended the sessions, 3 and Duquesnoy, that Mirabeau 

 was a rascal and sold to the court. 4 The majority of the deputies 

 had no political training and, not having suffered from the abuses 

 of an absolute form of government as Mirabeau had, they could 

 not understand this attitude towards this question of constituting 

 the assembly. They could not appreciate his conception of the 

 significance of the word people. If his title, representatives of 

 the French people, had been adopted as generally as was that of 

 Sieyes, national assembly, we are inclined to believe that the cause 

 of popular sovereignty would have received a greater impulse 

 towards wholesome development than it did by the passing of the 

 declaration of the rights of man even. The meaning of the word 

 people was, as Mirabeau said, subject to the very broadest inter- 

 pretation. His own conception of it was perhaps very similar to 



1 Courrier de Provence, Lettre XI, 53, 54; Journal des etats-generaux, 

 I, 119; Biauzat, II, 120; Duquesnoy, I, 100; Dumont, 75-77; La revolution 

 francaise, XVI, 537, 538. 



2 Dumont, 74-75. 



8 Biauzat, II, 120. 



4 Duquesnoy, I, 100-1 ; Young, 168, writes June 17 : "There is a sus- 

 picion that he [Mirabeau] has received 100,000 livres from the queen." 



69 



