Other pamphlets of 1788 and 1789 indicate a tendency to discuss constitutional law from the historical and crudely comparative standpoint, and to apply the conclusions to the present conditions, but in the attempt to formulate their results, they are less clear and coherent. One of these drawn up in 1789 devotes one hundred and thirty-seven pages to the discussion of the influence of Montesquieu in the present Revolution, and denounces him for not declaring boldly that France was a despotism. It concluded that France has in reality no constitution.[85] How far the king meant that the States-General should possess a constitutional character is difficult to determine. The Letter of Summons repeatedly asserts the desire to affect a “fixed and constant order in all parts of the administration.”[86] Mirabeau claimed that the king himself had recognized “the necessity of giving France a fixed method of government,”[87] and La Marck confirmed this declaration.[88] We shall perhaps have attributed sufficient meaning to these hazy avowals if we say that Louis XVI., partly from his paternal spirit, and partly from a desire for relief from financial crises, meditated, in his more liberal moods, granting the nation some sort of a _charter_, in the formulation of which he wished the assistance of the States-General. This resuscitated institution convened at Versailles, May 5, 1789. The first months were occupied in the disputes over the verification of the powers of the deputies. On May 28, a representative of the nobility, Count de Crillon, said that “he was of the firm opinion that it was less for maintaining than for establishing the Constitution that they were called together.”[89] On June 15, Abbé Siéyès announced that those whose powers had been verified represented ninety-six per cent. of the nation, and suggested as a fitting name, “_Assemblée des représentants_.” Mirabeau, at the same session, offered a series of resolutions that provoked much discussion, one of which affirmed that their first duty was “to agree upon and to fix legally the principles for the regeneration of the kingdom, to assure the rights of the people, to adopt the basis of a wise and useful constitution, and, to secure these rights from all attempts, they shall be put under the safeguard of the legislative power of the king and of the National Assembly.” Rabaud de Saint Étienne, in another series of resolutions, expressed the same conviction.[90] Two days later, the name “National Assembly” was adopted and an oath taken “to fulfill with zeal and fidelity the duties which devolve upon us.”[91] Debarred from the place usually occupied by the Assembly by the carpenters who were at work upon it, the members of the third estate held their meeting, June 20, in the Tennis Court at Versailles, and there adopted the resolution which declared the National Assembly a Constitutional Convention, and subscribed to the following, known as the