ABSTRACT
The evidence for the army's ways of thinking is abundant. There, as elsewhere, talk of reform was in the air in the 1780s as it had been for half a century. The army, if one listens to the grumbling, was locked in a cold war with the court, wealth, cities, and the whole French constitution. At that point there appeared a new social ideal equality of opportunity for all. It was an ideal that for the Enlightenment had meaning mainly within single institutions, and that the logic of democracy and Romanticism transformed by extending it to the whole of society. In the nobility the spirit of caste and reaction appears somehow to have mingled with more enlightened and liberal views to form a mentality that at first glance seems illogical and inconsistent. It is true that this way of seeing things may have been less pronounced early in the revolution.
