e working men, is a sign of our times not lightly to be passed
over. From Voltaire before the Revolution to Anatole France, at {10}
the present day, the tradition and development is continuous and
logical.

It now remains to be said that if this is the line along which the
perspective of the Revolution is to be sought, this is not the place in
which the details of that perspective can be adequately set out. That
must be reserved for a history of far larger dimensions, and of much
slower achievement, of which a number of pages are already written. In
this volume nothing more can be attempted than a sketch in brief form,
affording a general view of the Revolution down to the year 1799, when
Bonaparte seized power.

{11}

CHAPTER II

VERSAILLES

At the close of the 18th century France had more nearly reached her
growth than any of her great European rivals; she was far more like the
France of to-day, than might at first be supposed by an Englishman,
American or German, thinking of what his own country accomplished
during the 19th century. Her population of about 25,000,000 was three
times more numerous than that of England. Paris, with 600,000
inhabitants or more, was much nearer the present-day city in size than
any other capital of Europe, except Naples. Socially, economically,
politically, notwithstanding gross abuses, there was great development;
and the reformer who remodelled the institutions of France in 1800
declared that the administrative machine erected by the Bourbons was
the best yet devised by human ingenuity. Large manufacturing cities
and a number of active ports indicated the advent of a great economic
period.

{12} All this reposed, however, on a very incongruous foundation.
Feudalism, mediaevalism, autocracy, had built up a structure of caste
distinction and class privilege to which custom, age, stagnation and
ignorance, lent an air of preordained and indispensable stability. The
Church, most privileged of all corporations, turned her miracles and
her terrors, both present and future, into the most powerful buttress
of the fabric. The noblesse, supreme as a caste, almost divided
influence with the Church. The two, hand in hand, dominated France
outside the larger towns. Each village had its cure and its seigneur.
The cure collected his tithes and inculcated the precepts of religion,
precepts which at the close of the 18th century, preached Bourbonism as
one of the essential mani