The perusal of these “Letters” will probably convince many readers that this Revolution did not benefit humanity to a quarter of the extent which its enthusiasts would have us believe it did. In fact, Redhead, like most travellers in France at that period, soon came to the conclusion, from personal and unprejudiced observation, that the much-vaunted great Revolution had been a failure. The class which was to have more especially benefited by it was reduced to a greater depth of degradation and poverty in the first decade of the nineteenth century than ever it had been under the _ancien régime_: the peasantry and the working classes in general were for the most part out of employment; and the pernicious forced recruiting system which Napoleon had introduced was draining the country of useful men, whose place in the fields and manufactories had to be filled by incompetent lads, old men, and even by girls and women. At least a third of the arable land had gone out of cultivation, and French manufactures had sunk to the utmost insignificance. The rich landowners who had hitherto helped the peasantry were either dead, in exile or else bankrupt. The village school, like the village church, was generally closed; and the rustic population were endeavouring to escape the conscription which weighed so heavily on the country. Higher education was also at a standstill: the richly endowed universities, colleges, and public schools which had been founded in the eighteenth century, had been pillaged, many of their buildings were in ruins, and their libraries confiscated by the Revolutionaries, had not yet been restored. So it was with the scientific and literary institutions in the capital and larger towns, though in 1802 some of these were beginning to slowly revive. The Revolution was, in short, an orgy of brute force, a destroyer producing nothing great either in art, literature, or science. David was the representative painter, and his pictures, when put up for auction in a modern sale-room, now fetch scarcely the price of the canvas and frames on which they are painted and stretched. The exquisite highly finished art-work of the eighteenth century in bronze, furniture, and ceramic, which still sells for fabulous prices at Christie’s and the Hôtel Drouet, was lost; and it was not until the Empire was well established that it began gradually to improve, a proof, if one were needed, that the artistic taste of the nation had not been entirely extinguished in the general disorder that had overwhelmed the capital and country. The utmost licentiousness reigned supreme in Paris at this period; and Redhead’s description of the nightly and indecent scenes in the Palais Royal, which proved so attractive to British and other foreign bachelors, shows that they were not unlike those that draw crowds of tourists to the heights of Montmartre in 1906. The shop windows in 1802, as at present, were filled with abominable and blasphemous prints: and the whole atmosphere