If, lastly, it be borne in mind that the French nobility, severed from the middle classes whom they had repelled, and from the people whose affections they had lost, was thus alone in the midst of the nation--apparently the head of an army, but in reality a body of officers without soldiers--it will be understood how that which had stood erect for a thousand years came to perish in a night. I have shown how the King’s Government, having abolished the franchises of the provinces, and having usurped all local powers in three-quarters of the territory of France, had thus drawn all public affairs into its own hands, the least as well as the greatest. I have shown, on the other hand, how, by a necessary consequence, Paris had made itself the master of the kingdom of which till then it had been the capital, or rather had itself become the entire country. These two facts, which were peculiar to France, would alone suffice, if necessary, to explain why a riot could fundamentally destroy a monarchy which had for ages endured so many violent convulsions, and which, on the eve of its dissolution, still seemed unassailable even to those who were about to overthrow it. France being one of the states of Europe in which all political life had been for the longest time and most effectually extinguished, in which private persons had most lost the usage of business, the habit of reading the course of events, the experience of popular movements and almost the notion of the people, it may readily be imagined how all Frenchmen came at once to fall into a frightful Revolution without foreseeing it; those who were most threatened by that catastrophe leading the way, and undertaking to open and widen the path which led to it. As there were no longer any free institutions, or consequently any political classes, no living political bodies, no organised or disciplined parties, and as, in the absence of all these regular forces, the direction of public opinion, when public opinion came again into being, devolved exclusively on the French philosophers, it might be expected that the Revolution would be directed less with a view to a particular state of facts, than with reference to abstract principles and very general theories: it might be anticipated that instead of endeavouring separately to amend the laws which were bad, all laws would be attacked, and that an attempt would be made to substitute for the ancient constitution of France an entirely novel system of government, conceived by these writers. The Church being naturally connected with all the old institutions which were doomed to perish, it could not be doubted that the Revolution would shake the religion of the country when it overthrew the civil government; wherefore it was impossible to foretell to what pitch of extravagance these innovators might rush, delivered at once from all the restraints which religion, custom, and law impose on the imagination of mankind.