The government itself had long labored to instill in the mind of the people any number of ideas that have since been called revolutionary – ideas hostile to the individual and to private rights and friendly to violence.

The king was the first to demonstrate how contemptuous one could be toward the most ancient and apparently well-established institutions. Louis XV shook the monarchy and hastened the Revolution as much by his innovations as by his vices, as much by his energy as by his lethargy. When the people witnessed the downfall and disappearance of the parlement, which was nearly as old as the monarchy itself and previously thought to be as unshakable, they vaguely understood that a time of violence and hazard was approaching, one of those times in which everything becomes possible, when few things are so old as to be respectable or so new that they cannot be tried.

Louis XVI spoke throughout his reign of reforms to be tried. There were few institutions whose imminent ruin his words did not herald, before the Revolution arrived to sweep them all away in fact. After removing some of the worst of these from the law books, he soon put them back. It was as if his intent had been only to uproot, leaving it to others to pull down.