but d'Argenson foretold that it would open with
the slaughter of priests in the streets of Paris. Thirty-eight years
later these words came true at the gate of St. Germain's Abbey. As the
supporter of the Pretender he was quite uninfluenced by admiration for
England, and imputed, not to the English Deists and Whigs but to the
Church and her divisions and intolerance, the unbelieving spirit that
threatened both Church and State. It was conventionally understood on
the Continent that 1688 had been an uprising of Nonconformists, and a
Whig was assumed to be a Presbyterian down to the death of Anne. It
was easy to infer that a more violent theological conflict would lead
to a more violent convulsion. As early as 1743 his terrible foresight
discerns that the State is going to pieces, and its doom was so
certain that he began to think of a refuge under other masters. He
would have deposed the noble, the priest, and the lawyer, and given
their power to the masses. Although the science of politics was in its
infancy, he relied on the dawning enlightenment to establish rational
liberty, and the equality between classes and religions which is the
perfection of politics. The world ought to be governed not by
parchment and vested rights, but by plain reason, which proceeds from
the complex to the simple, and will sweep away all that interposes
between the State and the democracy, giving to each part of the nation
the management of its own affairs. He is eager to change everything,
except the monarchy which alone can change all else. A deliberative
assembly does not rise above the level of its average members. It is
neither very foolish nor very wise. All might be well if the king made
himself the irresistible instrument of philosophy and justice, and
wrought the reform. But his king was Lewis XV. D'Argenson saw so
little that was worthy to be preserved that he did not shrink from
sweeping judgments and abstract propositions. By his rationalism, and
his indifference to the prejudice of custom and the claim of
possession; by his maxim that every man may be presumed to understand
the things in which his own interest and responsibility are involved;
by his zeal for democracy, equality, and simplicity, and his dislike
of intermediate authorities, he belongs to a generation later than his
own. He heralded events without preparing them, for the best of all he
wrote only became known in our time.

Whilst Montesquieu, at the height of his