f polemics planned for the needs
of a cause, or a passage of eloquence arranged for popular effect is a
legal deposition, a secret report, a confidential dispatch, a private
letter, or a personal memento.

The nearer a document approaches this type, the more it merits
confidence, and supplies superior material.--I have found many of
this kind in the national archives, principally in the manuscript
correspondence of ministers, intendants, sub-delegates, magistrates, and
other functionaries; of military commanders, officers in the army,
and gendarmerie; of royal commissioners, and of the Assembly; of
administrators of departments, districts, and municipalities, besides
persons in private life who address the King, the National Assembly, or
the ministry. Among these are men of every rank, profession, education,
and party. They are distributed by hundreds and thousands over the
whole surface of the territory. They write apart, without being able to
consult each other, and without even knowing each other. No one is so
well placed for collecting and transmitting accurate information. None
of them seek literary effect, or even imagine that what they write will
ever be published. They draw up their statements at once, under the
direct impression of local events. Testimony of this character, of the
highest order, and at first hand, provides the means by which all other
testimony ought to be verified.--The footnotes at the bottom of the
pages indicate the condition, office, name, and address of those
decisive witnesses. For greater certainty I have transcribed as often as
possible their own words. In this way the reader, confronting the texts,
can interpret them for himself, and form his own opinions; he will have
the same documents as myself for arriving at his conclusions, and, if he
is pleased to do so, he may conclude otherwise. As for allusions, if he
finds any, he himself will have introduced them, and if he applies them
he is alone responsible for them. To my mind, the past has features of
its own, and the portrait here presented resembles only the France of
the past. I have drawn it without concerning myself with the discussions
of the day; I have written as if my subject were the revolutions of
Florence or Athens. This is history, and nothing more, and, if I may
fully express myself, I esteem my vocation of historian too highly to
make a cloak of it for the concealment of another. (December 1877).

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BOOK