Had the Revolution reached its term in the Constitution of 1791, and had war with Europe been avoided, the National Guard of Paris would easily be apparent as the chief factor in that achievement: and Lafayette made it. It was he who impressed it with its particular character, he who, in consonance with his theory of the state, made it a middle class, or, as we should say to-day, a _capitalist_ organization; he who forbade it to develop as such French institutions normally develop, into a powerful military instrument, and yet he who, with his considerable talent for command, made it strong enough to act as a powerful police and to be in his hands a real weapon of authority that gave him a permanent and high direction in all that followed its enrolment and formation. It is true to say that Lafayette and his National Guard saved the monarchy in the days of October, 1789, when Paris marched upon Versailles. It is still truer to say that throughout 1790 and early ’91 it and he were physically the masters of Paris. Had Lafayette loathed, as the king loathed, the religious quarrel in which the parliament of the Revolution engaged, had he with his armed force supported the crown in its resistance to the attempted schism with Rome, it is conceivable, or even probable, that the Revolution would have found a peaceable futile and ignoble termination. But to Lafayette the religious policy of the Assembly seemed the most natural of things. Of the enduring vigour of Catholicism he knew nothing. Catholicism was for him, as for most well-to-do and educated men of that time, a venerable superstition, still pleasant to many women and to crowds of the rural poor, worthy, therefore, of a comfortable decline and of decent burial, but quite incapable of provoking a civil war. That same violence of popular instinct which had made the St. Bartholomew in Paris and which was now about to make a furious assault upon the priesthood, was alien to him in either of its diverse and contradictory forms. Even in the end of its life, when contemporary fashion gave Lafayette some idea of religion, it was the written gospel, not the living Church, of which he spoke; and in this early part of the Revolution he could neither conceive the strength of the old national vision in its obscure remnant nor the corresponding strength of the exasperation which the resistance of the hierarchy to the revolutionary “Constitution of the Clergy” would arouse. The first sign that Lafayette’s middle-class “constitutional” ideal (and the militia force which was the backing of it) might fail was his inability to secure for the king a free passage from the Tuileries to the suburb of St. Cloud on the Monday of Holy Week in 1791. The populace was already half in power, the National Guard and their leader no longer wholly masters of the [Illustration: ARMAND GASTON, CARDINAL DE ROHAN After Rigaud, in Museum of Versailles _To face p. 131_ ]