By the late 1780s the Bastille had become so unpopular, and so costly to maintain, that plans were afoot to transfer all its inmates to Vincennes. Flysheets were circulating demanding its closure, along with attacks on the lettre de cachet. The country was deep in an economic crisis whose details were exposed in 1781 by the director-general of finances, Jacques Necker, in his Compte rendu au roi – an act of open government which earned him great popularity but also contributed to his dismissal later that year. Brought back amid worsening financial turmoil in 1788, he helped to convene the Estates-General – an assembly of representatives of the nobility, the Church and the tiers état or common people – in an attempt to stave off growing popular discontent. It was to be too little, too late; in June 1789 the tiers état representatives transformed themselves into the National Assembly. The beginnings of a parliamentary democratic structure were in place. Necker's dismissal, for a second time, on 11 July was received with fury by the majority of the population. The unpopularity of the fortress was increasingly mirrored by that of the regime it represented – nowhere more so than in the Faubourg, which before the revolution represented some ten per cent of the total area of Paris.