"Whenever the French Constitution shall be rendered conformable to its declaration of rights, we shall then be enabled to give to France, and with justice, the appellation of a _Civic Empire_; for its government will be the empire of laws, founded on the great republican principles of _elective representation_ and the rights of man. But monarchy and hereditary succession are incompatible with the _basis_ of its Constitution." Now this was the very constitution which Paine, in his answer to Burke, had made comparatively presentable; to this day it survives in human memory mainly through indulgent citations in "The Rights of Man." Those angels who, in the celestial war, tried to keep friendly with both sides, had human counterparts in France, their constitutional oracle being the Abbé Sievès. He had entered warmly into the Revolution, invented the name "National Assembly," opposed the veto power, supported the Declaration of Rights. But he had a superstitious faith in individual executive, which, as an opportunist, he proposed to vest in the reigning house. This class of "survivals" in the constitution were the work of Sieyès, who was the brain of the Jacobins, now led by Robespierre, and with him ignoring republicanism for no better reason than that their title was "Société des Amis de la Constitution."* Sieyès petted his constitution maternally, perhaps because nobody else loved it, and bristled at Paine's criticism. He wrote a letter to the _Moniteur_, asserting that there was more liberty under a monarchy than under a republic He announced his intention of maintaining monarchical executive against the new party started into life by the King's flight. In the same journal (July 8th,) Paine accepts the challenge "with pleasure."** Paine himself was something of an opportunist; as in America he had favored reconciliation with George III. up to the Lexington massacre, so had he desired a _modus vivendi_ with Louis XVI. up to his flight.* But now he unfurls the anti-monarchical flag. * The club, founded in 1789, was called "Jacobin," because they met in the hall of the Dominicans, who had been called Jacobins from the street St. Jacques in which they were first established, anno 1219. ** It was probably this letter that Gouverneur Morris alludes to in his "Diary," when, writing of a Fourth of July dinner given by Mr. Short (U. S. Chargé d'Affaires), he mentions the presence of Paine, "inflated to the eyes and big with a letter of Revolutions."