They fancy that they can be free and yet not be
just!" He had been, for three months, the foremost personage in the
nation. He was destined in after years, and under conditions strangely
altered, to be once more the dictator of France. More than once,
without public favour, but by mere power of political thinking, he
governed the fortunes of the State. He never again possessed the heart
of the people.

The Assembly deemed it a good bargain to restore the tithe to the
land; and the clergy knew so well that they had no friends that, on
August 11, they solemnly renounced their claim. In this way the
Assembly began the disendowment of the Church, which was the primitive
cause of the Reign of Terror and the Civil War.

All these things are an episode. The business of the Assembly, from
the end of July, was the Constitution. The first step towards it was
to define the rights for which it exists. Such a declaration,
suggested by America, had been demanded by the electors in several of
the instructions, and had been faithfully reproduced by Mounier, July
9. It appeared, on the following day, that Lafayette had already got
the required document in his pocket. Another text was produced, ten
days later, by Sieyes, and another by Mounier, which was a revision of
Lafayette's. Several more came out soon after.

On July 27 the archbishop of Bordeaux, in laying down the outline of
the new institutions, observed that it was necessary to found them on
principles defined and fixed. On the same day Clermont Tonnerre
brought forward his analysis of the available ideas contained in the
instructions. He went at once to the heart of the matter. Some
instructions, he said, contemplated no more than the reform of
existing institutions, with the maintenance of controlling tradition
and the historic chain. Others conceived an entirely new system of
laws and government. The distinction between the two was this, that
some required a code of principles which must be the guide in
preparing the Constitution; the others wished for no such assistance,
but thought it possible to bind past and future together. The main
conflict was between the authority of history and the Rights of Man.
The Declaration was the signal of those who meant to rescue France
from the ancestors who had given it tyranny and slavery as an
inheritance. Its opponents were men who would be satisfied with good
government, in the spirit of Turgot and the enlightened reformers of
his