The capture of the Bastille was the chief incident in a group of three days that showed suddenly, as lightning shows things on a dark night, those national characteristics which Lafayette so completely misunderstood that he could not serve them: the extreme rapidity of Gallic organization, its automatic and spontaneous growth from below, its high military aptitude, the twin growths of exaltation upon the one hand and ferocity upon the other, the effect of song and of blood upon the populace, the temper that made it impossible for the two massed divisions of foreign mercenaries to coerce Paris, the supreme importance of Paris itself when in those days Paris recaptured its secular leadership of the French people--all this was to Lafayette no more than a violent and incomprehensible change of condition: the levelling of a platform, as it were, upon which the constitution was to rise. Rise it did, and on its rising he appeared in another and greater character than he had hitherto borne; for it was more under his direction than is commonly allowed that the New Régime took shape. It was he who framed the armed militia which was the physical basis of the whole construction. He was the head and the designer of that great force in Paris, well armed, more or less trained, but remaining wholly civic and domestic in character, which took the name of the National Guard. A man might do worse than examine and fix finally for history the rôle of this force during the first two years in which the Revolution was permitted to develop its rapid progress within the frontiers of the French monarchy, without assault from the commercial oligarchy of England, the ancient privileges of the German states, the despotism of Prussia, or the heterogeneous, but enormous, might of Austria and the empire. In the opinion of the present writer the National Guard of Paris, with Lafayette, as its commander-in-chief, was not only an indispensable adjunct to the first phase of the French Revolution, but was, on the material side, the instrument of it. The voluntary quality of that force, its association with the political debates of the moment, its long agreement with the people and its lack of opportunity for display, its final collapse when the Revolution became a truly military and French thing and a crusade, have tended to obscure for posterity its true character up to the outbreak of the great war.