.)]

[Footnote 5417: Travels in France, I. 240, 263.]

[Footnote 5418: What an impression this view must have made on Lenin who
sought, between 1906 and 1909 in Paris, the means and ways with which to
re-create the French revolution in Russia. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5419: Beugnot, I. 115, 116.]

[Footnote 5420: Archives nationales, proces-verbaux and cahiers of the
States-General, vol. XIII, p. 405. (Letter of the Marquis de Fodoas,
commandant of Armagnac, to M. Necker, may 29, 1789.)]

[Footnote 5421: Ibid. Vol. CL, p. 174. ( Letter from the intendant of
Tours of March 25, 1789.)]

[Footnote 5422: "Lenin deviated from Marx not in preaching the necessity
for violent proletarian revolution, but by advocating the creation of an
elite party of professional revolutionaries to hasten this end, and by
arguing for the dictatorship of this party rather than the working class
as a whole." The Guinness Encyclopedia page 269. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5423: Archives nationales, H, 784. (Letters of M. de
Langeron, military commandant at Besancon, October 16 and 18, 1789). The
consultation is annexed.]

[Footnote 5424: Arthur Young, I, 344.]

CHAPTER V. SUMMARY.

I. Suicide of the Ancient Regime.

These two forces, radical dogma and brute force, are the successors and
executors of the Ancient regime, and, on contemplating the way in
which this regime engendered, brought forth, nourished, installed and
stimulated them we cannot avoid considering its history as one long
suicide, like that of a man who, having mounted to the top of an immense
ladder, cuts away from under his feet the support which has kept him
up.--In a case of this kind good intentions are not sufficient; to be
liberal and even generous, to enter upon a few semi-reforms, is of
no avail. On the contrary, through both their qualities and defects,
through both their virtues and their vices, the privileged wrought their
own destruction, their merits contributing to their ruin as well
as their faults.--Founders of society, formerly entitled to their
advantages through their services, they have preserved their rank
without fulfilling their duties; their position in the local as in
the central government is a sinecure, and their privileges have become
abuses. At their head, a king, creating France by devoting himself
to her as if his own property, ended by sacrificing her as if his
own property; the public purse is his private purse, while passions,
vanities, pe