This he did by means which were as remarkable as the personage who devised them--and remarkable, too, not for their negative, but for their constructive quality. Broadly stated, the Revolution utterly expunged all the governmental and social guarantees of the preceding monarchy, destroying not merely the absolute power of one man with its sanction of divine right, but all the checks upon it to be found either in the ancient traditions of the people or in their ancient institution of parliaments. It will be clear to the careful student of the Revolutionary governments that while there was a gradual clarifying of opinion antecedent to the Consulate, and a vague longing for guarantees of individual rights higher than the acts of any assembly, however representative it claimed to be, nevertheless great ideas, great conceptions, great outlines, had all remained in their inchoate state, and that of the several succeeding constitutions each had been more worthless than the one before. Almost any kind of a constitution will serve an enlightened nation which has confirmed political habits, if it chooses to support a fundamental law not hostile to them; and none, however ingenious, can stand before recalcitrant populations. The Revolutionary constitutions of France, excepting perhaps that of 1791, were alike feeble; and in the stress applied to the one democratic land of Europe by her dynastic enemies all around, they were not worth the paper and ink used to record them. Under each had developed a pure despotism of one kind or another, on the plea that in war there must be a single head, either an executive committee or an executive man. These persons or person had, on pleas of necessity or expediency, gradually arrogated to the executive all the powers of government, befooling the people more or less completely by the specious formalities of various kinds through which the popular will was supposed to find expression. No one understood this fact better than Napoleon Bonaparte; and since it seemed that the supreme power had to be in the hands of some one man or clique, he was easily tempted to grasp it for himself when it became clear that the profligate and dishonest Directory had run its course. He did not make the situation, but he used it. History does not record that the French nation was shocked or discouraged by the events of the eighteenth of Brumaire; on the contrary, the occurrences in Paris and at St. Cloud seemed commonplace to a storm-tossed people, and the results were welcomed by the majority in every class.