The parliaments had their cause to avenge: absolute monarchy had stolen from them the authority which they had usurped from the States-General. Enforced registrations[271], beds of justice, sentences of exile, while making the magistrates popular, drove them to demand liberties of which, in their hearts, they were not the sincere upholders. They called for the restoration of the States-General, not daring to admit that they wished to secure the legislative and political power for themselves; and thus they hastened on the resurrection of a body of which they had gathered the inheritance, a body which, on returning to life, would at once reduce them to their own department. Men are almost invariably deceived as to their true interests, whether moved by wisdom or passion: Louis XVI. restored the parliaments which forced him to summon the States-General; the States-General, converted into a National Assembly and soon into a Convention, destroyed the throne and the parliaments, and sent to their deaths both the judges and the monarch from whom justice emanated. But Louis XVI. and the parliaments acted in this manner because they were the unconscious instruments of a social revolution. [Sidenote: State-General.] The idea of the States-General was, therefore, in all men's heads; only they did not see whither it would lead them. It was the question, for the crowd, how to make up a deficit which the smallest banker of today would undertake to remove. The application of so violent a remedy to so small an evil proves that the public was being carried towards unknown political regions. For the year 1786, the only year of which the financial state has been affirmed, the revenue amounted to 412,924,000, the expenditure to 593,542,000 livres, leaving a deficit of 180,618,000 livres, which was reduced to 140 millions through economies amounting to 40,618,000 livres. In this budget, the Royal Household figures for the immense sum of 37,200,000 livres: the Princes' debts, the purchase of country-seats, and the Court malversations were the cause of this additional burden. It was desired to have the States-General in the form they assumed in 1614. The historians always quote this form as though one had never heard speak of States-General or of a demand for their convocation since 1614. And yet in 1651 the orders of the nobility and the clergy, meeting in Paris, demanded States-General. A bulky collection of acts passed and speeches delivered on that occasion exists. The Parliament of Paris, which was then all-powerful, far from seconding the wishes of the two upper orders, quashed their meetings as illegal: as indeed they were.