ABSTRACT
French interest in the English Constitution was remarkable during the eighteenth century. The French Revolution was in the full sense a social revolution, in changing the class-structure of French society, it changed also the nature of the French State. It did so by a union of the middle and working classes against the economic privileges implied in a feudal system. The French Revolution could no more have avoided dictatorship in its day than the Russian Revolution in our own. The men who pleaded for English ideas in 1789 were pleading for evolutionary change in a revolutionary situation. The century begins with an interest in the English Constitution which burgeons rapidly into widespread enthusiasm. At the commencement of the Revolution, the enthusiasm revives, and it has behind it the best-known names of the National Assembly. The advocates of an English model were, throughout, an intellectual élite who, however sincere, had no basis of support in mass-opinion outside.
