rse, the Republic was likewise the mere work of a number of
ambitious, fanatical, and malevolent spirits. That simultaneously
efforts were being made to introduce the Republic in Lisbon, Naples,
and Messina, as in England, under the influence of the Dutch example,
is a fact which is not mentioned at all.

Although M. Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, it does
not occur to him that the transition from absolute to constitutional
monarchy is everywhere effected only after violent struggles and after
passing through the stage of the Republic, and that even then, the old
dynasty, being useless, must give way to a usurping collateral branch.
Consequently, he has nothing but the most trivial commonplaces to
utter respecting the overthrow of the English restored monarchy. He
does not even cite the proximate causes: the fears entertained by the
great new landowners, who had been created by the Reformation, at the
prospect of restoration of Catholicism, when they would have been
obliged to surrender all the former Church property which had been
stolen, which meant that the ownership of seven-tenths of the entire
soil of England would have changed hands; the horror of the trading
and industrial middle class at Catholicism, which by no means suited
its commerce; the nonchalance with which the Stuarts had sold, for
their own advantage and that of the Court nobility, the whole of
English industry and commerce, that is, had sold their own country, to
the Government of France, which was then maintaining a very dangerous,
and in many respects, successful competition with the English.

As M. Guizot everywhere leaves out the most important factors, there
is nothing for him to do but to present an extremely inadequate and
banal narration of merely political events.

The great riddle for M. Guizot, which he can only solve by pointing to
the superior intelligence of the English, the riddle of the
conservative character of the English Revolution, is explained by the
continuous alliance which united the middle class with the largest
section of the great landowners, an alliance that essentially
distinguishes the English Revolution from the French Revolution, which
destroyed large landed property by parcelling out the soil. This class
of large landowners, which had originated under Henry VIII, unlike the
French feudal land-ownership in 1789, did not find itself in conflict
but rather in complete harmony with the conditions of l