mous, as fatality--it completes its work, and when that is
ended, says, "Let us rest; and let us assume monarchy."

XII.

Such a plan of action is the republic--the only one that befits the
trying period of transformation. It is the government of passion, the
government of crises, the government of revolutions. So long as
revolutions are unfinished, so long does the instinct of the people urge
them to a republic; for they feel that every other hand is too feeble to
give that onward and violent impulse necessary to the Revolution. The
people (and they act wisely), will not trust an irresponsible,
perpetual, and hereditary power to fulfil the commands of the epochs of
creation--they will perform them themselves. Their dictatorship appears
to them indispensable to save the nation; and what is a dictatorship but
a republic? It cannot resign its power until every crisis be over, and
the great work of revolution completed and consolidated. Then it can
again resume the monarchy, and say, "Reign in the name of the ideas I
have given thee!"

XIII.

The Constituent Assembly was then blind and weak, not to create a
republic as the natural instrument of the Revolution. Mirabeau, Bailly,
La Fayette, Sieyes, Barnave, Talleyrand, and Lameth acted in this
respect like philosophers, and not great politicians, as events have
amply proved. They believed the Revolution finished as soon as it was
written, and the monarchy converted as soon as it had sworn to preserve
the constitution. The Revolution was but begun, and the oath of royalty
to the Revolution as futile as the oath of the Revolution to royalty.
These two elements could not mingle until after an interval of an
age--this interval was the republic. A nation does not change in a day,
or in fifty years, from revolutionary excitements to monarchical repose.
It is because we forgot it at the hour when we should have remembered
it, that the crisis was so terrible, and that we yet feel its effects.
If the Revolution, which perpetually follows itself, had had its own
natural and fitting government, the republic--this republic would have
been less tumultuous and less perturbed than the five attempts we made
for a monarchy. The nature of the age in which we live protests against
the traditional forms of power: at an epoch of movement--a government of
movement--such is the law.

XIV.

The National Assembly, it is said, had not the right to act thus; for it
had sworn allegiance