22 Ethel Lee Hoivie 



before the law in matters of taxation and to increase the royal 

 revenue the king undertook to solve the problem on June 23 when 

 in his first set of declarations he declared that, " the king annuls 

 as anticonstitutional, contrary to the letters of convocation and 

 opposed to the interest of the state, the restrictions of power, 

 which by preventing the liberty of the deputies in the states- 

 general prevents them from deliberating separately by order or 

 in a general assembly, in accordance with the distinct vote of the 

 three orders. 



" If, contrary to the intentions of the king, some of the deputies 

 have rashly taken the oath not to depart from a certain form of 

 deliberation, his majesty leaves it to their conscience to consider 

 if the dispositions which he is about to make deviate from the 

 letter or the spirit of the engagement which they would have 

 taken. 



" The king permits the deputies who feel bound by their in- 

 structions to ask new powers from their constituents, but his 

 majesty enjoins them to remain in the states-general, in order 

 to be present at all the deliberations on the pressing affairs of the 

 state and to give their opinion on these questions. 



"His Majesty declares that in the following sessions of the 

 states-general he will not suffer the cahiers or the mandates to be 

 considered as imperative; they should be only simple instructions 

 confided to the conscience and the free opinion of the deputies 

 who have been chosen. "^°^ 



Many of the nobles did not feel released from their oath by 

 this action of the king and protested against the deliberation in 

 common before new instructions had been given to them. The 

 king, therefore, in a conseil d'etat held at Versailles June 27, 

 supplemented his declaration of June 23 by a ruling, in which he 

 provided for a new convocation of electors of the clergy and 

 nobility to give new instructions to the deputies who felt them- 

 selves bound by their imperative mandates. In this ruling the 

 king refers to Article V of his declaration of June 23, in which 

 he permitted the deputies to ask new instructions, then states 



101 Proces-verhal de I'assemblee nationale, I, No. 5, Declaration du roi, 

 4. Articles III-VI. 



304 



