All those who felt themselves aggrieved by the daily application of existing laws were soon enamoured of these literary politics. The same taste soon reached even those who by nature or by their condition of life seemed the farthest removed from abstract speculations. Every tax-payer wronged by the unequal distribution of the _taille_ was fired by the idea that all men ought to be equal; every little landowner devoured by the rabbits of his noble neighbour was delighted to be told that all privileges were, without distinction, contrary to reason. Every public passion thus assumed the disguise of philosophy; all political action was violently driven back into the domain of literature; and the writers of the day, undertaking the guidance of public opinion, found themselves at one time in that position which the heads of parties commonly hold in free countries. No one in fact was any longer in a condition to contend with them for the part they had assumed. An aristocracy in all its vigour not only carries on the affairs of a country, but directs public opinion, gives a tone to literature, and the stamp of authority to ideas; but the French nobility of the eighteenth century had entirely lost this portion of its supremacy; its influence had followed the fortunes of its power; and the position it had occupied in the direction of the public mind had been entirely abandoned to the writers of the day, to occupy as they pleased. Nay more, this very aristocracy whose place they thus assumed, favoured their undertaking. So completely had it forgotten the fact that general theories, once admitted, inevitably transform themselves in time into political passions and deeds, that doctrines the most adverse to the peculiar rights, and even to the existence, of the nobility were looked upon as ingenious exercises of the mind; the nobles even shared as a pleasant pastime in these discussions, and quietly enjoyed their immunities and privileges whilst they serenely discussed the absurdity of all established customs.