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GENERAL VIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE OF FRANCE
Without a preconcerted plan a person who visits Paris will be lost among the multitude of captivating subjects which require his attention, and he will return to his native country having seen many things but obtained a knowledge of none.
Apart from the private motive which brought me here I live in France only for the good of my country.
My inquiries, conversations and labours, are directed to that end. On the final result of this examination of the state of the French Republic depends my future resolutions and my future destiny.
After twelve years of active engagement on the disturbed theatre of public life; after having seen the rise and fall of contending factions at home and abroad; after having beheld the theories I had studied completely belie themselves in practice, I may, I think, be entitled to give an opinion on political occurrences and public establishments.
On such considerations I proceed to describe the governments, laws, institutions, manners, relative form, internal resources and ultimate view of a people, whom I have seen at one time frivolous, abject and superstitious; at another period starting like Lazarus from a dead repose, roused to a vindication of national liberty; afterwards the base tools of sanguinary demagogues, furious, vindictive and cowardly, renouncing their obligations to God and man, and astounding the civilised world by their folly and their crime—next sighing after that regulated freedom and social order for which they had shed the blood of millions, but never been worthy or able enough to establish; lastly, conscious of their unfitness to be free, relapsing again into the bosom of that ancient despotism, which they had disdainfully trodden under foot, with all the superadded terrors of military government, and a suspicious administration; laughing at the very names of public virtue and public liberty, and themselves the terror and the mockery of Europe. These are great events, worthy of solemn investigation; they have no parallel in the history of mankind. The principal agents in these scenes merit alternate pity and indignation, but the scenes themselves illustrate and present to our minds during the short space of ten years the history of men for ages.