What had happened? Why this enthusiasm of crowd and intellectuals for a new day? Why these celebrations within celebrations? Even today, almost one hundred and fifty years later, the words “French Revolution” rouse our blood, literature is divided into opposing camps by which either the revolution or the monarchy is condemned, and there are many who hold in abhorrence the events of those days and the theories that brought them into being and believe that the awful bath of blood might have been avoided--as though revolutions were the work of men and not natural occurrences like tidal waves that the individual can neither bring into being nor arrest in their course. In the history of the human race we see again and again how one social stratum after another climbs up, pushing aside the one that preceded it. When, as in France, a monarchy and aristocracy has been in power long enough to weaken in its rule because security and luxury have undermined its morale and its strength, another stratum, scenting this weakness, seeks to wrest to itself this power which its fresh and undrained life force fits it more ably to use. In France this social stratum was the Bourgeoisie, the Third Estate, which from the beginning of the new era--the sixteenth century--had grown strong commercially and illustrious in art and literature, but had not yet achieved any political rights. The nobility, however, preferred to die rather than allow the power which they had held for hundreds of years to pass from their hands--quite naturally, for the function of government is their only element. So came the unequal battle in which from the beginning the victory was to the young and powerful stratum. To the ruling class form alone was left, while the class which aspired to rule possessed passion. Like all young, unpractised and fanatical fighters, their representatives shot far beyond their goal, and because, though victors, they were still unpractised in the use of power, they abused it, destroyed senselessly whatever still lived of the old régime, and then turned upon each other until the strongest pushed the others aside and became supreme. These strongest among the strong were successively the leaders of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies: first Mirabeau, later the so-called Terrorists, among them Danton, Robespierre and Marat, and finally Napoleon. The democratic idea was victorious in the French Revolution despite Napoleon, who, at first, embodied this idea in himself, and whose Empire was only the short reaction which follows all new experiments. Its consequences have persisted to our own day, when as the revolution’s final result one monarchy after another in the European scene has gone into eclipse.