charged by the electors with a
specific commission, which was to place certain representations before
the King. This meant that in the stage previous to the election of
these delegates, the electors should draw up a statement of their
complaints and a mandate or instructions for their representatives.
This was in fact done, {48} and many thousands of _cahiers_, as they
were called, were drawn up all over France, in which the demands of as
many individuals, or corporations, or bodies of electors were stated.
These were summarized into three cahiers for each province, and
eventually into three, one from each order, for all France, and these
last three were in due course presented to Louis XVI.

As a source of information on the economic and social condition of a
country, the cahiers are the most wonderful collection of documents
available for the historian. Many of them have been more or less
faithfully published, and at the present day the French government is
liberally helping on the work of making them public. But in a work of
this scope it is impossible to go at length into the state of affairs
which they depict; only the most salient features can be dealt with.

First, then, it must be said that the cahiers present at the same time
remarkable uniformity and wide divergence. The agreement lies partly
in their general spirit, and partly in the repetition of certain
formulas preached throughout the country by eager pamphleteers and
budding political leaders. The divergence can be placed under three
chief heads: the markedly different character of a great part {49} of
the cahiers of the clergy from those of the other two orders;
provincial divergence and peculiarities of local customs; demands for
the maintenance of local privileges. Of the last class, Marseilles, a
port with many commercial and political privileges, affords perhaps the
most extreme example. The uniformity is to be seen especially in the
general spirit of these complaints to the King. One feels, while
reading the _cahiers_, the unanimity of a long-suffering people anxious
for a release from intolerable misgovernment,--more than that, anxious
to have their institutions modernized, but all in a spirit of complete
loyalty and devotion to the King and to all that was wise, and good,
and glorious, and beneficent, that he still seemed to represent. The
illusion of Bourbonism was at that moment, so far as surface
appearances went, practically untouch