Rousseau's appeal for a return to the blessed days when the real
sovereignty had lain in the hands of the people and when the king had
been merely the servant of his people.

When Montesquieu published his "Persian Letters" in which two
distinguished Persian travellers turn the whole existing society of
France topsy-turvy and poke fun at everything from the king down to
the lowest of his six hundred pastry cooks, the book immediately went
through four editions and assured the writer thousands of readers for
his famous discussion of the "Spirit of the Laws" in which the noble
Baron compared the excellent English system with the backward system of
France and advocated instead of an absolute monarchy the establishment
of a state in which the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial
powers should be in separate hands and should work independently of each
other. When Lebreton, the Parisian book-seller, announced that Messieurs
Diderot, d'Alembert, Turgot and a score of other distinguished writers
were going to publish an Encyclopaedia which was to contain "all the new
ideas and the new science and the new knowledge," the response from
the side of the public was most satisfactory, and when after twenty-two
years the last of the twenty-eight volumes had been finished, the
somewhat belated interference of the police could not repress the
enthusiasm with which French society received this most important but
very dangerous contribution to the discussions of the day.

Here, let me give you a little warning. When you read a novel about
the French revolution or see a play or a movie, you will easily get the
impression that the Revolution was the work of the rabble from the
Paris slums. It was nothing of the kind. The mob appears often upon the
revolutionary stage, but invariably at the instigation and under the
leadership of those middle-class professional men who used the hungry
multitude as an efficient ally in their warfare upon the king and
his court. But the fundamental ideas which caused the revolution were
invented by a few brilliant minds, and they were at first introduced
into the charming drawing-rooms of the "Ancien Regime" to provide
amiable diversion for the much-bored ladies and gentlemen of his
Majesty's court. These pleasant but careless people played with the
dangerous fireworks of social criticism until the sparks fell through
the cracks of the floor, which was old and rotten just like the rest of
the building.