When Lebreton, the Parisian book-seller, announced that
Messieurs Diderot, d'Alembert, Turgot and a score of other
distinguished writers were going to publish an Encyclopaedia
which was to contain ``all the new ideas and the new science
and the new knowledge,'' the response from the side of the
public was most satisfactory, and when after twenty-two years
the last of the twenty-eight volumes had been finished, the
somewhat belated interference of the police could not repress
the enthusiasm with which French society received this most
important but very dangerous contribution to the discussions
of the day.
Here, let me give you a little warning. When you read a
novel about the French revolution or see a play or a movie,
you will easily get the impression that the Revolution was the
work of the rabble from the Paris slums. It was nothing
of the kind. The mob appears often upon the ``evolutionary
stage, but invariably at the instigation and under the
leadership of those middle-class professional men who used the
hungry multitude as an efficient ally in their warfare upon
the king and his court. But the fundamental ideas which
caused the revolution were invented by a few brilliant minds,
and they were at first introduced into the charming drawing-rooms
of the ``Ancien Regime'' to provide amiable diversion
for the much-bored ladies and gentlemen of his Majesty's court.
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