The revolution ensued from the obstacles which the bourgeoisie had to overcome by violence, since it appeared from evidence that the passage from the old forms to the new forms of production--or of property, if we borrow the language of jurists--could not be realized by the quieter ways of successive and gradual reforms. It brought in its train the upheaval, the friction and the intermingling of all the old classes of the Ancient Regime, and the rapid and bewildering formation at the same time of new classes, in the very rapid but very intensive period of ten years, which, compared with the ordinary history of other times and other countries, seems to us like centuries. This rapid succession of monumental events brought to light the most characteristic moments and aspects of the new or modern society, and that so much the more clearly since the militant bourgeoisie had already created for itself intellectual means and organs which had given it with the theory of its own work the reflex consciousness of its movement. The violent expropriation of the great part of the old property, that is to say, of the property crystallized in fiefs, in royal and princely domains and in mortmain, with the real and personal rights derived therefrom, put at the disposal of the state, which by the necessity of things had become an exceptional, terrible and all-powerful government, an extraordinary mass of economic resources; thus, there were, on the one side, the singular policy of the assignats which finally annulled themselves, and on the other side, the formation of the new proprietors who owed their fortune to the chances of gambling, to intrigue and to speculation. And who again would have dared thereafter to swear upon the ancient, sacred altar of property, when his recent and authentic title rested in so evident a manner upon the knowledge of fortunate circumstances? If it had ever passed through the head of so many troublesome philosophers, beginning with the Sophists, that law is a creation of man, useful and convenient, this heretical proposition might seem thenceforth a simple and intuitive truth to the meanest of the beggars in Paris. Had not the proletarians with all the common people given the impulse to the revolution in general by the expected movements of April, 1789, and did they not afterwards find themselves, as it were, driven anew from the stage of history after the failure of the revolt of Prairial in 1795? Had they not carried on their shoulders all the ardent defenders of liberty and equality? Had they not held in their hands the Paris Commune, which was, for a time, the impulsive organ of the Assembly and of all France; had they not finally the bitter disillusion of having created new masters for themselves with their own hands? The bewildering consciousness of this disillusion constitutes the psychological motive, rapid and immediate, of the conspiracy of Babeuf, which, for that very reason, is a great fact in history, and bears in