The notables elect the provincial councillors in the proportion, usually, of one to every canton, and their delegates elect the chief of the canton, who voices the wishes of the natives to the government.
On the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887 he was excluded from the throne by his youth; but during the reign of Odo, who had succeeded Charles, he succeeded in gaining the recognition of a certain number of notables and in securing his coronation at Reims on the 28th of January 893.
In accordance with the consistent policy of inclusion and toleration by which the whole of his official life was characterized, he induced the council to call the assembly of notables, which met at Fontainebleau in August 1560 and agreed that the States General should be summoned, all proceedings against heretics being meanwhile suppressed, pending the reformation of the church by a general or national council.
The emperor even permitted Jewish wholesale merchants, notables and their sons, to wear swords (January 2, 1782), and especially insisted that Christians should behave in a friendly manner towards Jews."
He had offered himself as a candidate for the office of secretary to the Assembly of Notables which the king had just convened, and to bring his name before the public published another financial work, the Denonciation de 'agiotage, which abounded in such violent diatribes that he not only lost his election, but was obliged to retire to Tongres; and he further injured his prospects by publishing the reports he had sent in during his secret mission at Berlin.