mbly was addressing itself to
the task of regenerating France by endowing her with a constitution.
This task appeared comparatively simple and was taken up with a light
heart; it was only by degrees that the assembly discovered the
difficulties in the way, and it proved to be only after two years of
hard labour that it could get its constitution accomplished. And even
then it proved almost useless.

The Constitution may be left for the present, to be considered when, in
1791, it became operative. The general trend of the assembly, however,
was to dissociate itself from practical concerns of government, to
interest itself in the theories of politics, and both in its attitude
toward the events of the day, and in its constitutional policy, to
weaken the executive. The executive and the Bourbon regime were
synonymous, and so the men of the National Assembly, with no
responsibility as it seemed for the good government of France, {76}
tried hard, at the moment when a vigorous and able executive was more
than necessary, to pull down the feeble one that existed. It was the
Nemesis that Bourbonism had brought on itself.

In the midst of these debates the practical question of disorder thrust
itself forward once more in very insistent form, and with very
remarkable results, on the night of the 4th of August. In parts of
France the excitement had taken the form of a regular Jacquerie in
which the isolated country houses and families of the aristocracy had
suffered most. Details were accumulating and a terrible picture was
unfolded before the assembly that night. How was the evil to be dealt
with?

It was the injured themselves who indicated the remedy, at their own
personal sacrifice. The nobles of the assembly, led by Noailles,
d'Aiguillon, Beauharnais, Lameth, La Rochefoucauld, declared that if the
people had attacked the property of the nobles, it was because that
property represented the iniquities of feudalism, that the fault lay
there, and that the remedy was not to repress the people but to
suppress the institution. They therefore proposed to the Assembly that
instead of issuing proclamations calling on the people to {77} restore
order, it should vote decrees for the abolition of feudalism.

And so feudalism, or what passed by the name, went by the board amid
scenes of wild enthusiasm. All the seigneurial rights accumulated
during a thousand years by the dominant military caste, the right of
justice, the priv