With the falling of the Bastille a new ideal arose, full-winged, before Madame Roland. Before the 14th of July she had no idea that out of the events she watched so eagerly anything more than a reform of the existing régime would grow; the old régime, stripped of its abuses and regulated by a liberal constitution, was all she had asked. Now all was changed; compromise, half-way measures, were at an end. Instead of reforms she demanded “complete regeneration.” She saw in the sudden uprising of the people the “sovereign” exercising “the divine right of insurrection.” It was what Jean Jacques Rousseau had declared in the _Social Contract_ the people had the right to do if the government under which they were living was unjust. She seems to have gone at once to the conclusion that, since the rightful “sovereign,” had at last asserted itself, an immediate regeneration was to follow, abuses were to be wiped out, tyranny destroyed, selfishness annihilated, equality created, and the world to run at last with precision and to the satisfaction of all concerned. To her the fall of the Bastille was the revolution of society. “Friends of humanity, lovers of liberty,” she wrote afterwards, “we believed it had come to regenerate the human kind, to destroy the terrible misery of that unhappy class over which we had so often mourned. We welcomed it with transports.” Their transports soon turned to irritation; for the immediate regeneration she had pictured was replaced by struggles more fierce than ever before. To those of her liberal aspirations, determined on a constitutional government, recognizing the sovereignty of the people and the equality of men, two political courses were open at that moment. They could unite with the liberal party of reform in a struggle to frame a constitution; could insist while this was doing upon respect for the National Assembly; could recognize the difficulty of the situation; could respect the laws and be patient;—or they could refuse alliance with this party on the ground that reforms were no longer the need of France, but that complete regeneration must be demanded; could suspect, and induce others to suspect, the sincerity of all those who applied the doctrines less vigorously than they did; could encourage by excuses or tacit sympathy the riotous party which with incredible fecundity was spreading over France, explaining its actions as the lawful efforts of the sovereign people to get rid of its oppressors and to take possession of its own rights.