The States-General was the nearest approach to a representative parliamentary system that was known to France. {294} But the States-General had not been summoned to aid the deliberations of a French monarch in the course of many reigns. France had lived under what was practically a despotism untempered by an expression of organized public opinion for several generations. It was so long since the States-General had been convoked that the very forms and ceremonies incidental to or essential to its convocation had passed out of living memory, and had to be painfully ascertained by much groping after authority and precedent. In the end, however, authority and precedent were ascertained, and the States-General, composed of representatives of the three estates of the realm--the Church, the Nobility, and the People--met with much ceremony at Versailles. They were called together for the ostensible purpose of dealing with the financial difficulties that threatened to make the country bankrupt. But it was soon clear that they, or at least the majority of their members, intended to accomplish much more than that. The news that travelled slowly in those days from the capital of France to the capital of England grew to be interesting and important with an interest and an importance that were not to cease in steady activity for more than a quarter of a century. Event followed event with startling rapidity. The members of the Third Estate severed themselves from the Church and the Nobility, met in the Tennis Court in Versailles, and declared themselves a National Assembly. The people of Paris, profoundly agitated, and fearing that the King intended to suppress the insurgent National Assembly by force, broke out into riots, which culminated in an attack upon the famous and detested prison in the Faubourg St. Antoine, the Bastille. The Bastille had not for many years been a serious instrument of oppression, but its record was an evil record, and it represented in the eyes of the people of Paris all that was most detested and most detestable in the old order. The Bastille was captured; its few prisoners were borne in triumph through the streets, while its commander, De Launay, was decapitated and his head carried about on the point of a pike. [Sidenote: 1789--The French Revolution]