The debts of the crown at the accession of Francis II aggregated forty-three millions of livres,[258] upon which interest had to be paid, without including pensions and salaries due to officers and servants of the royal household, and the gendarmerie, which were from two to five years in arrears,[259] a sum so great that if the entire revenue of the crown for a decade could have been devoted to its discharge, it would not have been possible to liquidate it. The result was the provinces abounded with poor men driven to live by violence and crime, while even the nobility, because of their reduced incomes, and the soldiery on account of arrears of wages, were driven to plunder the people.[260] Even members of the judiciary and the clergy had recourse to illicit practices.[261] The regular provincial administration was powerless to suppress evils so prevalent, whose roots were found in the condition of society. It was in vain that the crown announced that it was illegal to have recourse to arms for redress of injuries and commanded the governors in the provinces, the bailiffs, seneschals, and other similar officers to stay within their jurisdictions and vigilantly to sustain the provost-marshals in suppressing sedition or illegal assemblies. Some men thought the remedy lay in more drastic penalties and advocated the abolishment of appeal in criminal causes, as in Italy and Flanders.[262] But history in many epochs shows that the social maladies of a complex society cannot be so cured. Obviously the true remedy lay in searching out the causes of the trouble and destroying them, and this was the intent of the demand for the States-General. The summons of the States-General of Orleans and the further act of the government in announcing that it would summon a national council of the French clergy to meet in Paris on January 10, 1561, unless the Council General was called in the meantime, were equivalent to promises that reform would be undertaken in both state and church. The double announcement was the simultaneous recognition of one necessity—reformation. CHAPTER III THE STATES-GENERAL OF ORLEANS