ll presaged an approaching collision between the
executive power and the power of the Assembly. Whence arose this sudden
decomposition? It is now the moment for throwing a glance over this
labour of the Constituent Assembly and its framers.

BOOK VII.

I.

The Constituent Assembly had abdicated in a storm.

This assembly had consisted of the most imposing body of men that had
ever represented, not only France, but the human race. It was in fact
the oecumenical council of modern reason and philosophy. Nature seemed
to have created expressly, and the different orders of society to have
reserved, for this work, the geniuses, characters, and even vices most
requisite to give to this focus of the lights of the age the greatness,
_eclat_, and movement of a fire destined to consume the remnants of an
old society, and to illumine a new one. There were sages, like Bailly
and Mounier; thinkers, like Sieyes; factious partisans, like Barnave;
statesmen like Talleyrand; men, epochs, like Mirabeau, and men,
principles like Robespierre. Each cause was personified by what most
distinguished each party. The very victims were illustrious. Cazales,
Malouet, Maury, sounded forth in bursts of grief and eloquence the
successive falls of the throne, the aristocracy, and the clergy. This
active centre of the thoughts of a century, was sustained during the
whole time by the storm of perpetual political conflict. Whilst they
were deliberating within, the people were acting without, and struck at
the doors. These twenty-six months of consultations were one
uninterrupted sedition. Scarcely had one institution crumbled to pieces
in the tribune, than the nation swept it away to clear the space for
another institution. The anger of the people was only its impatience of
obstacles, its madness was only the excitement of its reason. Even in
its fury it was always a truth that agitated it. The tribunes only
blinded, by dazzling it. The unique characteristic of this Assembly was
that passion for the ideal which it always felt itself irresistibly
urged on to accomplish. An act of perpetual faith in reason and justice:
a holy passion for the good and right, which possessed it, and made it
devote itself to its work; like the statuary who seeing the fire in the
furnace, where he was casting his bronze, on the point of being
extinguished, threw his furniture, his children's bed, and even his
house into the flame, preferring rather that all should p