Such a plan of action is the republic—­the only one that befits the trying period of transformation.  It is the government of passion, the government of crises, the government of revolutions.  So long as revolutions are unfinished, so long does the instinct of the people urge them to a republic; for they feel that every other hand is too feeble to give that onward and violent impulse necessary to the Revolution.  The people (and they act wisely), will not trust an irresponsible, perpetual, and hereditary power to fulfil the commands of the epochs of creation—­they will perform them themselves.  Their dictatorship appears to them indispensable to save the nation; and what is a dictatorship but a republic?  It cannot resign its power until every crisis be over, and the great work of revolution completed and consolidated.  Then it can again resume the monarchy, and say, “Reign in the name of the ideas I have given thee!”

XIII.

The Constituent Assembly was then blind and weak, not to create a republic as the natural instrument of the Revolution.  Mirabeau, Bailly, La Fayette, Sieyes, Barnave, Talleyrand, and Lameth acted in this respect like philosophers, and not great politicians, as events have amply proved.  They believed the Revolution finished as soon as it was written, and the monarchy converted as soon as it had sworn to preserve the constitution.  The Revolution was but begun, and the oath of royalty to the Revolution as futile as the oath of the Revolution to royalty.  These two elements could not mingle until after an interval of an age—­this interval was the republic.  A nation does not change in a day, or in fifty years, from revolutionary excitements to monarchical repose.  It is because we forgot it at the hour when we should have remembered it, that the crisis was so terrible, and that we yet feel its effects.  If the Revolution, which perpetually follows itself, had had its own natural and fitting government, the republic—­this republic would have been less tumultuous and less perturbed than the five attempts we made for a monarchy.  The nature of the age in which we live protests against the traditional forms of power:  at an epoch of movement—­a government of movement—­such is the law.

XIV.

The National Assembly, it is said, had not the right to act thus; for it had sworn allegiance to the monarchy and recognised Louis XVI., and could not dethrone him without a crime.  The objection is puerile, if it originates in minds who do not believe in the possession of the people by dynasties.  The Assembly at its outset had proclaimed the inalienable right of the people; and the lawfulness of necessary insurrection, and the oath of the Tennis Court (Serment du Jeu de Paume), were nought but an oath of disobedience to the king and of fidelity to the nation.  The Assembly had afterwards proclaimed Louis XVI. king