It is time to go back to the title of this chapter: What should have been
done amidst the confusion and disputes over the forthcoming EstatesGeneral?
Summon the Notables? No. Allow the Nation and its affairs to
languish? No. Negotiate with interested parties to get them all to give
some ground? No. There should have been recourse to the great means
of an extraordinary representation. It is the Nation that should have been
consulted.
This means answering two further questions: Where is the Nation to
be found? Who is entitled to consult it?
1. Where is the Nation? Where it is. In the forty thousand parishes
covering the whole territory, in all the inhabitants and all the contributors
to the public establishment—that is where the Nation is to be found.
It ought to have been possible to make a territorial division able to produce
an initial level of representation by means of the formation of circumscriptions,
or arrondissements, made up twenty to thirty parishes.
These circumscriptions could, following the same plan, have been
grouped together to form provinces, and these latter could then have sent
a number of genuinely extraordinary representatives to the capital with
special powers to determine the constitution of the Estates-General.