Chapter 4

What it ended

The initial impulse of the French Revolution was destructive. The

revolutionaries wanted to abolish what, by the end of 1789, everybody
was calling the old or former order, the ancien rgime. When, in the
summer of 1791, the Constituent Assembly nalized the constitution
on which it had been working since June 1789, the deputies thought it
would be useful in such a fundamental document to list the main things
that their revolution had got rid of, what they called the institutions
which wounded liberty and equality of rights. And so the constitution
declared that:
There is no longer either a nobility or a peerage, or hereditary
distinctions, or distinctions of orders, or a feudal regime, or any of the
corporations or decorations for which proofs of nobility were required, or
which implied distinctions of birth, or any other superiority but that of
public ofcials in the exercise of their duties.

There is no longer venality or heredity of public ofce.

There is no longer for any part of the nation or for any individual any
privilege or exception to the common law of all the French.

There are no longer either guilds, or corporations of professions, arts and

crafts.
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