Such a nation could alone give birth to a Revolution so sudden, so radical, so impetuous in its course, and yet so full of reactions, of contradictory incidents and of contrary examples. Without the reasons I have related the French would never have made the Revolution; but it must be confessed that all these reasons united would not have sufficed to account for such a Revolution anywhere else but in France. I am arrived then at the threshold of this great event. My intention is not to go beyond it now, though perhaps I may do so hereafter. I shall then proceed to consider it not only in its causes but in itself, and I shall venture finally to pass a judgment on the state of society which it has produced. SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER. ON THE PAYS D’ÉTATS, AND ESPECIALLY ON THE CONSTITUTIONS OF LANGUEDOC. It is not my intention minutely to investigate in this place how public business was carried on in each of the provinces called Pays d’États, which were still in existence at the outbreak of the Revolution. I wish only to indicate the number of them; to point out those in which local life was still most active; to show what were the relations of these provinces with the administration of the Crown; how far they formed an exception to the general rules I have previously established; how far they fell within those rules; and lastly, to show by the example of one of these provinces what they might all have easily become. Estates had existed in most of the provinces of France--that is, each of them had been administered under the King’s government by the _gens des trois états_, as they were then called, which meant the representatives of the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Commons. This provincial constitution, like most of the other political institutions of the Middle Ages, occurred, with the same features, in almost all the civilised parts of Europe--in all those parts, at least, into which Germanic manners and ideas had penetrated. In many of the provinces of Germany these States subsisted down to the French Revolution; in those provinces in which they had been previously destroyed they had only disappeared in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Everywhere, for two hundred years, the sovereigns had carried on a clandestine or an open warfare against them. Nowhere had they attempted to improve this institution with the progress of time, but only to destroy and deform it whenever an opportunity presented itself and when they could not do worse. In France, in 1789, these States only existed in five provinces of a certain extent and in some insignificant districts. Provincial liberty could, in truth, only be said to exist in two provinces--in Brittany and in Languedoc: everywhere else the institution had entirely lost its virility, and was reduced to a mere shadow. I shall take the case of Languedoc separately, and devote to it in this place a closer examination.