The commonalty is the heir of the privileged classes. In fact, the rights of the barons, which were taken from them as "usurpations," only passed over to the commonalty. For the commonalty was now called the "nation." "Into the hands of the nation" all _prerogatives_ were given back. Thereby they ceased to be "prerogatives":[69] they became "rights."[70] From this time on the nation demands tithes, compulsory services; it has inherited the lord's court, the rights of vert and venison, the--serfs. The night of August 4 was the death-night of privileges or "prerogatives" (cities, communes, boards of magistrates, were also privileged, furnished with prerogatives and seigniorial rights), and ended with the new morning of "right," the "rights of the State," the "rights of the nation." The monarch in the person of the "royal master" had been a paltry monarch compared with this new monarch, the "sovereign nation." This _monarchy_ was a thousand times severer, stricter, and more consistent. Against the new monarch there was no longer any right, any privilege at all; how limited the "absolute king" of the _ancien régime_ looks in comparison! The Revolution effected the transformation of _limited monarchy_ into _absolute monarchy_. From this time on every right that is not conferred by this monarch is an "assumption"; but every prerogative that he bestows, a "right." The times demanded _absolute royalty_, absolute monarchy; therefore down fell that so-called absolute royalty which had so little understood how to become absolute that it remained limited by a thousand little lords. What was longed for and striven for through thousands of years,--to wit, to find that absolute lord beside whom no other lords and lordlings any longer exist to clip his power,--the _bourgeoisie_ has brought to pass. It has revealed the Lord who alone confers "rightful titles," and without whose warrant _nothing is justified_. "So now we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other god save the one."[71] Against _right_ one can no longer, as against a right, come forward with the assertion that it is "a wrong." One can say now only that it is a piece of nonsense, an illusion. If one called it wrong, one would have to set up _another right_ in opposition to it, and measure it by this. If, on the contrary, one rejects right as such, right in and of itself, altogether, then one also rejects the concept of wrong, and dissolves the whole concept of right (to which the concept of wrong belongs).