The very men who had most to fear from the fury of the people declaimed loudly in their presence on the cruel injustice under which the people had always suffered. They pointed out to each other the monstrous vices of those institutions which had weighed most heavily upon the lower orders; they employed all their powers of rhetoric in depicting the miseries of the people and their ill-paid labour; and thus they infuriated while they endeavoured to relieve them. Such was the attitude of the French nation on the eve of the revolution, but when I consider this nation in itself it strikes me as more extraordinary than any event in its own annals. Was there ever any nation on the face of the earth so full of contrasts and so extreme in all its actions; more swayed by sensations, less by principles; led therefore always to do either worse or better than was expected of it, sometimes below the common level of humanity, sometimes greatly above it--a people so unalterable in its leading instincts that its likeness may still be recognised in descriptions written two or three thousand years ago, but at the same time so mutable in its daily thoughts and in its tastes as to become a spectacle and an amazement to itself, and to be as much surprised as the rest of the world at the sight of what it has done--a people beyond all others the child of home and the slave of habit, when left to itself; but when once torn against its will from the native hearth and from its daily pursuits, ready to go to the end of the world and to dare all things. 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. * * * * * FRANÇOIS MIGNET History of the French Revolution