Instead of this, they spoke of the services which their forefathers had rendered six hundred years ago; of the superstitious veneration due to a past, which was now detested; of the necessity of a nobility to uphold the honour of arms and the traditions of military valour. In opposition to a proposal to admit the peasantry to the franchise in the provincial assemblies, and even to preside over those bodies, M. de Bazancourt, a Councillor of State, declared that the kingdom of France was based upon honour and prerogative: so great was the ignorance and so deep the obscurity in which absolute power had concealed the real laws of society, even from the eyes of those to whom it was most interested in making them known. The language of the nobles was often arrogant, because they were accustomed to be the first; but it was irresolute, because they doubted of their own right. Who can depict the endless divisions in the bosom of the assailed parties? The spirit of rivalry and contention raged amongst those who were thus isolated themselves--the nobles against the priests (the first voice raised to demand the confiscation of the property of the clergy was that of a noble[136]), the priests against the nobles, the lesser nobility against the great lords, the parish priests against the bishops.[137] The discussion roused by the King’s Edicts, after having run round a vast circumference of institutions and laws, always ended at the two following points, which practically expressed the objects of the contest. 1. In the States-General, then about to meet, were the commons to have a greater number of representatives than each of the two other Orders, so that the total number of its deputies should be equal to those of the nobility and clergy combined? 2. Were the Orders to deliberate together or separately? This reduplication of the commons and the fusion of the three Orders in one assembly appeared, at the time, to be things less novel and less important than they were in reality. Some minor circumstances which had long existed, or were then in existence, concealed their novelty and their magnitude. For ages the provincial Estates of Languedoc had been composed and had sat in this manner, with no other result than that of giving to the middle class a larger share of public business, and of creating common interests and greater facility of intercourse between that class and the two higher Orders. This example had been copied, subsequently, in the two or three provincial assemblies which were held in 1779: instead of dividing the classes, it had been found to draw them together.