e fury of the people declaimed
loudly in their presence on the cruel injustice under which the people
had always suffered. They pointed out to each other the monstrous vices
of those institutions which had weighed most heavily upon the lower
orders; they employed all their powers of rhetoric in depicting the
miseries of the people and their ill-paid labour; and thus they
infuriated while they endeavoured to relieve them.

Such was the attitude of the French nation on the eve of the revolution,
but when I consider this nation in itself it strikes me as more
extraordinary than any event in its own annals. Was there ever any
nation on the face of the earth so full of contrasts and so extreme in
all its actions; more swayed by sensations, less by principles; led
therefore always to do either worse or better than was expected of it,
sometimes below the common level of humanity, sometimes greatly above
it--a people so unalterable in its leading instincts that its likeness
may still be recognised in descriptions written two or three thousand
years ago, but at the same time so mutable in its daily thoughts and in
its tastes as to become a spectacle and an amazement to itself, and to
be as much surprised as the rest of the world at the sight of what it
has done--a people beyond all others the child of home and the slave of
habit, when left to itself; but when once torn against its will from the
native hearth and from its daily pursuits, ready to go to the end of the
world and to dare all things.

Such a nation could alone give birth to a revolution so sudden, so
radical, so impetuous in its course, and yet so full of reactions, of
contradictory incidents and of contrary examples. Without the reasons I
have related the French would never have made the revolution; but it
must be confessed that all these reasons united would not have sufficed
to account for such a revolution anywhere else but in France.

* * * * *

FRANCOIS MIGNET

History of the French Revolution

Francois Auguste Alexis Mignet was born at Aix, in Provence,
on May 8, 1796, and began life at the Bar. It soon became
apparent that his true vocation was history, and in 1818 he
left his native town for Paris, where he became attached to
the "Courier Francais," in the meantime delivering with
considerable success a series of lectures on modern history at
the Athenee. Mignet may be said to