What is contemporary France?  To answer this question we must know how this France is formed, or, what is still better, to act as spectator at its formation.  At the end of the last century (in 1789), like a molting insect, it underwent a metamorphosis.  Its ancient organization is dissolved; it tears away its most precious tissues and falls into convulsions, which seem mortal.  Then, after multiplied throes and a painful lethargy, it re-establishes itself.  But its organization is no longer the same:  by silent interior travail a new being is substituted for the old.  In 1808, its leading characteristics are decreed and defined:  departments, arondissements, cantons and communes, no change have since taken place in its exterior divisions and functions.  Concordat, Code, Tribunals, University, Institute, Prefects, Council of State, Taxes, Collectors, Cours des Comptes, a uniform and centralized administration, its principal organs, are still the same.  Nobility, commoners, artisans, peasants, each class has henceforth the position, the sentiments, the traditions which we see at the present day (1875).  Thus the new creature is at once stable and complete; consequently its structure, its instincts and its faculties mark in advance the circle within which its thought and its action will be stimulated.  Around it, other nations, some more advanced, others less developed, all with greater caution, some with better results, attempt similarly a transformation from a feudal to a modern state; the process takes place everywhere and all but simultaneously.  But, under this new system as beneath the ancient, the weak is always the prey of the strong.  Woe to those (nations) whose retarded evolution exposes them to the neighbor suddenly emancipated from his chrysalis state, and is the first to go forth fully armed!  Woe likewise to him whose too violent and too abrupt evolution has badly balanced his internal economy.  Who, through the exaggeration of his governing forces, through the deterioration of his deep-seated organs, through the gradual impoverishment of his vital tissues is condemned to commit inconsiderate acts, to debility, to impotency, amidst sounder and better-balanced neighbors!  In the organization, which France effected for herself at the beginning of the (19th) century, all the general lines of her contemporary history were traced.  Her political revolutions, social Utopias, division of classes, role of the church, conduct of the nobility, of the middle class, and of the people, the development, the direction, or deviation of philosophy, of letters and of the arts.  That is why, should we wish to understand our present condition our attention always reverts to the terrible and fruitful crisis by which the ancient regime produced the Revolution, and the Revolution the new regime.