At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, he foresaw its importance in his volume "La voix du Citoyen", published the same year, and predicted the course which events would take. In the Estates-General and (after he took the "Tennis Court Oath") in the National Constituent Assembly, where he sat as deputy for the Third Estate in the bailiwick of Dourdan, he professed Liberalism and proposed various financial laws, without affiliating to any particular faction. A partisan of constitutional monarchy even after King Louis XVI's flight to Varennes (June 1791), he became the target for the suspicions of the Jacobin Club.