The representative assembly through which a society makes its laws, decides its taxes, controls its spending, and holds its rulers to account through open debate and recorded votes — an institution that grew out of medieval councils summoned to grant a ruler money, won the long struggle over the power of the purse, shifted from advising a monarch to governing in his place, and then spread across the world as the working machinery of representative government, carrying both its promise of consent and its persistent failures of inclusion.
In 1789, the French king called the Estates-General to Versailles because he had run out of money and needed permission to raise more. He had not summoned it in 175 years. The delegates of the common people refused to be sent home once the cash was voted. They declared themselves a National Assembly and swore not to disband until they had given France a constitution. A king had called a meeting to ask for taxes. The meeting decided it was the government. That reversal is the whole story of the parliament in miniature: an assembly invited to say yes to money discovers that the power to say no is the power to rule.