XIV
But one step now remained in order to legalise the revolution in progress. Each deputy had received a sort of mandate or instruction from those who named him at the moment of his election. Such instructions or mandates, which had been given at a time when people could hardly anticipate the state of things which had since arisen, limited, or seemed to limit, the action of a deputy to particular points which had especially attracted the attention of his constituents.
The conservative party contended that these mandates were imperative, the liberal party that they were not. According to the first supposition, the States-General could do no more than redress a few grievances; according to the other, they could create a perfectly new system of government.
The Bishop of Autun, in the first speech he delivered in the National Assembly—a speech which produced considerable effect—argued in favour of his own liberty and that of his colleagues, and his views were naturally enough adopted by a body which, feeling its own force, had to determine its own power. Hence, on the record of two great decisions—the one solving the States-General into the “National Assembly;” the other extending and fixing that Assembly’s authority—decisions which, whatever their other results, were at least fatal to the power and influence of the class to which he belonged by birth, but from which he had, in spite of himself, been severed in childhood—was indelibly inscribed the name of the once despised and still disinherited cripple of the princely house of Périgord.