Reason's empire is growing by the day. Increasingly it requires the restoration of rights that were usurped. Sooner or later every single class will come to be bound by the limits of the social contract … True human bonds may have been destroyed during the long night of feudal barbarism. Every notion may have been overturned and justice corrupted. But as light begins to dawn, gothic absurdity will have to take flight, and the last vestiges of ancient ferocity will fall and be annihilated … The question is then whether we will simply substitute one evil for another or whether true social order in all its beauty will come to replace ancient disorder.

I fear that at the end of all these agitations which rock thrones, sovereigns may be more powerful than ever before.