Once this barrier has disappeared, no other embankment remains and the inundation spreads all over France like over an immense plain.  With other nations in like circumstances, some obstacles have been encountered; elevations have existed, centers of refuge, old constructions in which, in the universal fright, a portion of the population could find shelter.  Here, the first crisis sweeps away all that remains, each individual of the twenty-six scattered millions standing alone by himself.  The administrations of Richelieu and Louis XIV. had been a long time at work insensibly destroying the natural groupings which, when suddenly dissolved, unite and form over again of their own accord.  Except in Vendée, I find no place, nor any class, in which a good many men, having confidence in a few men, are able, in the hour of danger, to rally around these and form a compact body.  Neither provincial nor municipal patriotism any longer exists.  The inferior clergy are hostile to the prelates, the gentry of the province to the nobility of the court, the vassal to the seignior, the peasant to the townsman, the urban population to the municipal oligarchy, corporation to corporation, parish to parish, neighbor to neighbor.  All are separated by their privileges and their jealousies, by the consciousness of having been imposed on, or frustrated, for the advantage of another.  The journeyman tailor is embittered against his foreman for preventing him from doing a day’s work in private houses, hairdressers against their employers for the like reason, the pastry-cook against the baker who prevents him from baking the pies of housekeepers, the village spinner against the town spinners who wish to break him up, the rural wine-growers against the bourgeois who, in the circle of seven leagues, strives to have their vines pulled up,[14] the village against the neighboring village whose reduction of taxation has ruined it, the overtaxed peasant against the under taxed peasant, one-half of a parish against its collectors, who, to its detriment, have favored the other half.

“The nation,” says Turgot, mournfully,[15] “is a society composed of different orders badly united and of a people whose members have few mutual liens, nobody, consequently, caring for any interest but his own.  Nowhere is there any sign of an interest in common.  Towns and villages maintain no more relation with each other than the districts to which they are attached; they are even unable to agree together with a view to carry out public improvements of great importance to them.”

The central power for a hundred and fifty years rules through its division of power.  Men have been kept separate, prevented from acting in concert, the work being so successful that they no longer understand each other, each class ignoring the other class, each forming of the other a chimerical picture, each bestowing on the other the hues of its own imagination, one composing an idyll, the other framing a melodrama,