The mixture of fear and contempt with which the men of property—at least above the level of the humblest small-holders—regarded the poorer and propertyless sections of society was accompanied by an organisation of defences against attack on their interests from below as vigorous as their own onslaught on the positions of power and prestige to which an effete noblesse had been clinging from above. If their hostility to the ‘people’ was now more conscious and more openly expressed than formerly, this was perhaps because they now had more to be afraid of. The inarticulate masses could not have been equally an object of fear before they became the masses, and this they did only with the rise in population, and especially urban population, in the course of the eighteenth century. They were also, if only to a very slight extent, ceasing to be totally inarticulate.

We must be careful, however, not to draw the wrong conclusions from these developments. The popular movement in the French Revolution has too often been envisaged in the light of ideas derived from the study of very different conditions in England, where social and political conditions had been diverging from those of France at least since the later centuries of the Middle Ages. In rural England the system of large landowner, substantial tenant farmer and agricultural labourer had established a social pattern which is only rarely to be found in France. This is why the application of presuppositions about commons and enclosures derived from English experience has led to such a radical misinterpretation of French agrarian history at the time of the revolution.