Whence all this? One thing springs immediately to the attention of the student of French history: what we here have learned to recognise as a characteristic trait of the movement of the French proletariat is to be found almost without change in all the actions of the French middle-classes. Indeed, it is evidently an inheritance that the proletariat has assumed. Unnoticeably the one movement passes into the other. The French proletariat is led into history by the hand of the bourgeoisie. Long after the proletariat in France had begun an independent agitation, the influence of this former movement was conspicuous. Not only in the method of strife; as well in the programmes and ideals of the French proletariat, this middle-class spirit stands even to our latest time, so that we can understand why Proudhon, the greatest theorist of the revolutionary movement, as late as after 1848 had influence in the circles of the French proletariat. That Proudhon was really a bourgeois theorist is often denied, but is none the less true; however revolutionary his phraseology may be, all his proposals for reform--whether the exchange and credit banks, or the wage theory, or the "establishment of value,"--point to an upholding, a strengthening, an ethicizing of individualistic production and the exchange of individual service. But no one who looks at the matter will wonder at the long predominance of middle-class influence in the French proletarian movement. What prestige the French, especially the Parisian, middle-class has won in the eyes of the populace, in the course of later French history! How many chaplets of fame have been laid upon its brow since the days of 1793! In no other land, Italy perhaps excepted, has it proved itself so valiant, daring, successful. If the French bourgeoisie, as no other in the world, has made a free path for itself in so short a time through the overcoming of feudal institutions, truly the iron broom of Napoleon has done a great share of this work. But we must not forget that it is the revolution of 1793--the uprising of the middle class--which has levelled the ground; that is the historic significance of the Reign of Terror, and with it of the middle-class that since those days has borne an aureole upon its head.