I want to conclude by bringing together some of the features that I have thus far described separately, to see how the Revolution emerged naturally from the Ancien Régime whose portrait I have just painted.

When we reflect that it was in France that the feudal system most completely lost its ability to protect or serve without losing its capacity to harm or vex, it becomes less surprising that the Revolution that would so violently sweep away the old European constitution should have erupted here rather than elsewhere.

When we note that the nobility, having lost its former political rights and having ceased, more than anywhere else in feudal Europe, to administer and lead the population, nevertheless not only preserved but greatly increased its pecuniary immunities and individual advantages; and that, while becoming a subordinate class, it remained privileged and closed, or, as I put it earlier, became less and less of an aristocracy and more and more of a caste; it will come as no surprise that its privileges should have seemed so inexplicable and detestable to the French, or that democratic envy should have flared up in the French heart so intensely that it still burns there today.

When we observe, finally, that this nobility, separated from the middle class that it had rejected from its bosom, and from the people whose heart it had allowed to escape, was utterly isolated in the nation's midst, apparently at the head of an army but in reality a corps of officers without soldiers, we can understand how, after having stood for a thousand years, it could have been toppled in one night.