New Wine in Old Wineskins

You might, if you pleased, have profited of our [the English] example and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls and, in all, the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected, but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished.... You had all these advantages in your ancient states, but you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors.... Respecting your ancestors, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a

Art · Political science · Visual arts · Wine · European Political History Analysis · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History

• Origins of the French Revolution

  Open Access•Gail Bossenga•History Compass•2007

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• Political pamphlets, the society of thirty, and the failure to create a discourse of national reform during the French pre-revolution, 1788–1789

  Kenneth Margerison•History of European Ideas•1993

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• Encyclopédistes , Magistrates, and the Corporate General Will

  Jeffrey Ryan Harris•French Historical Studies•2022

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