In all future ages the ruins of that great House of France, which had seemed destined to extend over the whole of Europe, will be the wonder of mankind; but those who read its history with attention will understand without difficulty its fall. Almost all the vices, almost all the errors, almost all the fatal prejudices I have had occasion to describe, owed either their origin, or their duration, or their extent to the arts practised by most of the kings of France to divide their subjects in order to govern them more absolutely. But when the middle classes were thus thoroughly severed from the nobility, and the peasantry from the nobility, as well as from the middle classes--when, by the progress of the same influences within each class, each of them was internally subdivided into minute bodies, almost as isolated from each other as the classes to which they belonged, the result was one homogeneous mass, the parts of which no longer cohered. Nothing was any longer so organised as to thwart the Government--nothing so as to assist it; insomuch that the whole fabric of the grandeur of the monarchy might fall to pieces at once and in a moment as soon as the society on which it rested was disturbed. And the people, which alone seem to have learnt something from the misconduct and the mistakes of all its masters, if indeed it escaped their empire, failed to shake off the false notions, the vicious habits, the evil tendencies which those masters had imparted to it, or allowed it to assume. Sometimes that people has carried the predilections of a slave into the enjoyment of its liberty, alike incapable of self-government and hostile to those who would have directed it. I now resume my track; and, losing sight of the old and general facts which have prepared the great Revolution I design to paint, I proceed to the more particular and more recent incidents which finally determined its occurrence, its origin, and its character. FOOTNOTES: [59] See Notes LII. and LIII. [60] See Note LIV., Example of the Mischievous Effects of the Pecuniary Rights of the Clergy. [61] See Note LV. [62] See Note LVI., Superiority of Method adopted in the _Pays d’État_. [63] See Note LVII., Repair of Roads, how regarded. [64] See Note LVIII., Commitments for Non-performance of Compulsory Labour. [65] See Note LIX. [66] See Note LX., Escort of Galley-slaves. [67] See Note LXI. [68] See Note LXII. [69] See Note LXIII. CHAPTER XIII. SHOWING THAT TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MEN OF LETTERS BECAME THE LEADING POLITICAL MEN OF FRANCE, AND OF THE EFFECTS OF THIS OCCURRENCE.