ir Country."

FRENCH REVOLUTION: STORMING OF THE BASTILLE

A.D. 1789

WILLIAM HAZLITT

In the scenes of blood and terror which accompanied it, and
in the dramatic episodes and strange actors appearing upon
its stage--in these respects, if not in the calculable
effects of the uprising on France and the world, the French
Revolution was the most extraordinary outbreak of modern
times.

Matters in France at this time, or during the next few
years, might have taken a very different course had not the
Eastern powers of Europe been absorbed in their own
quarrels, which culminated in the final "scramble for Polish
territory." As it was, France was left through the early
years of the Revolution to struggle with her own affairs.

Under Louis XV, loved at the beginning of his reign,
execrated by his people at its close, France had fallen into
bankruptcy and disgrace. The monarchy was weakened through
its head. Louis determined that it should live as long as he
survived; he cared nothing for its future. The peasantry of
France at this time had become keenly alive to the wrongs
under which they had long suffered in comparative silence.
The disfranchised bourgeois, or middle class, had lately
grown in wealth and now thought more about their political
rights. The "common" people were staggering under the burden
of taxation, from which the privileged nobility and clergy
were largely exempt.

The intellectual life of France during the second half of
the eighteenth century was profoundly affected by the
literature of the period, especially by the radical and
revolutionary writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and their
followers, and in many things the extreme views of these men
seemed to find confirmation in the calmer reasonings of
Montesquieu on the powers and limitations of governments.
Democratic ideas were in the air, and all except the
privileged classes were ready for general revolt. Frenchmen
returning from America reported the successful working of
the new order of things inaugurated by the Revolution there,
and this gave stronger impulse to the revolutionary tendency
in France.

When the well-meaning but weak-willed Louis XVI came to the
throne he found himself confronted with conditions before
which a far abler mona