Page:French Revolution (Belloc 1911).djvu/105

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sides by the squires, or, again, the future historian of our modern industrial civilisation may understand it when he describes how the wealthy manufacturers abandoned the cities in which their wealth was made, to dwell outside and apart from the living interests of their people.

With the return of the royal family to Paris, and with the presence of the Assembly within the heart of the national life, one prime factor appears, which is this: that while the National Assembly proceeds step by step to what it imagines to be a complete attainment of democracy (though how partial will soon be seen), the resistance of the Crown is transformed into a resistance of the mere Court. The attack on the Revolution becomes a personal thing. The King is still wholly the chief of the Executive; he can give what commands he wills to the armed force; he controls receipts and payments; he is for all active purposes the Government. But he is no longer considering that prime function of his, nor even using it to restore his old power. He acts henceforward as an individual, and an individual in danger. The Queen, whose view of the Revolution and its dangers had always been a purely personal one, is the directing will in the court-group from this moment, October 1789, onwards; and the chief preoccupation of that group for eighteen months is personal safety. Surrounded by the pomp of the Tuileries and amid all the external appearances of a power still greater than that of any other monarch