Everybody sees the crisis approaching. Fénelon say, as early as 1709: “The old machine will break up at the first shock.” It does not break up yet. The Madame de Chateauroux, about 1742: “I see plainly that there will be a general overthrow, if no remedy be used.” Yes, Madam, everybody sees it, the king and your successor, Madame de Pompadour, as well as the economists, the philosophers, foreigners, everybody. All admire the long-suffering nature of this people: it is Job sitting among the nations. O meekness! O patience! Walpole laughs at it, but I mourne over it. That unfortunate people still loves; still believes; is obstinante in hoping. It is ever waiting for its saviour. Which? Its God-man, its king.

Ridiculous yet affecting idolatry. What will this God, this king, do? He possesses neither the firm will, nor the power, perhaps, to cure the deeply-rooted, inveterate, universal evil now consuming, parching, famishing the community, draining its life’s blood from its veins, from its very hearts.

The evil consists in this, that the nation, from the highest to the lowest, is organized so as to go on producing less and less, and paying more and more. SHe will go on declining, wasting away, giving, after her blood, her marrow; and there will be no end to it till having reached the last gasp, and just expiring, the convulsion of the death-struggle arouses her once more, and raises the pale feeble body on its legs — Feeble? — grown strong perhaps by fury…. The peasant having no goods to seize, the exchequer can lay hold of nothing but the cattle; it is gradually exterminated. No more manure. The cultivation of wheat, though extended in the seventeenth century, by immense clearings of waste land, decreases in the eighteenth. The earth can no longer repair as the cattle may become extinct, so also the land now appears dead.

Not only does the land produce less, but it is less cultivated. In many places, it is not worth while to cultivate it. Large proprietors, tired of advancing to their peasants sums that never return, neglect the land which would require expensive improvements. The portion cultivated grows less, adn the desert expands. People talk of agriculture, write books on it, make expensive experiments, paradoxical schemes of cultivation; — and agriculture, devoid of succour, of cattle, grows wild…. As we approach 1798, Nature yields less and less. Like a beast over-fatiqued, unwilling to move one step further, and preferring to lie down and die, she waits, and produces no more. Liberty is not only the life of man, but also that of nature. (48-49)

In a year of scarcity, he [the king] was hunting, as usual, in the forest of Senart. He met a peasant carrying a bier, and inquited “whither he was conveying it? — To such a place. — For a man or woman? — A Man. — What did he die of? — Hunger.

That dead man is Old France, and that bier, the coffin of Old Monarchy. Therein let us bury, and for ever, the dreams in which we once fondly trusted, paternal royalty, the government of grace, the clemency of the monarch, and the charity of the priest; filial confidence, implicit belief in the gods here below. That fiction of the old world, that deceitful legend, which was ever on the tongue, was to substitute love in the place of law. (55)

…the evil was less in the man than in the institution itself; that it might be more than the condemnation of the king — the condemnation of ancient royalty. That religion is at an end. Louis XV or Louis XVI, infamous or honest, the god is nevertheless stall a man; if he is not so by vice, he is by virtue, by easy good nature. Human and feeble, incapable of refusing, of resisting, every day sacrificing the people to the courtiers, and like the God of the priests, damning the many, and saving the elect.

As we have already said: The religion of grace, partial for the elect, and the government of grace, in the hands of favourites, are perfectly analogous. Privileged mendicity, whether it be filthy and monastic, or gilded, as at Versailles, is ever mendicity. Two paternal powers; ecclesiastical paternity, characterized by the Inquisition; and monarchical paternity, by the Red Book and the Bastille. (66)

…  France is in good hands. Everything is going on well. So good-natured a king, such an amiable queen. The only difficulty is, that, independently of the the privileged paupers at Versailles, there is another class, no less noble, and far more numerous, the provincial privileged paupers, who have nothing, receive nothing, say they; they rend the air with their exclamations. Those men, long before the people, will begin the Revolution,

By-the-by, there is a people. Between these paupers and those paupers, who are all persons of fortune, we had forgotten the people. the people! Oh! that is the business of the farmers of the revenue….Tax-gathering was nothing but an organized warfare; it caused an army of two hundred thousand drones to oppress the soil. Those locusts devoured, wasted everything. To drain substance out of a people, thus devoured, it was necessary to have cruel laws, terrible penalties, the galleys, gibbets, racks…. The load weighing upon fewer shoulders, became more and more oppressive. The two privileged orders paid whatever they pleased….

Kind-hearted men, you who weep over the evils of the Revolution (doubtless with too much reason), shed also a few tears for the evils which occasioned it. (69-70)