ABSTRACT
During the last decade or so before the French Revolution, some of the traits became visible of a social and political pattern that, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and their immediate consequences were over, more or less established itself for the rest of the nineteenth century. It seems desirable to touch upon a few of its essential features, if only to correct some misapprehensions the reader's mind may harbor and to soften the unrealistically definite colors in which the various ideological traditions have painted it.
