The classical interpretation of the French Revolution marks August 4, 1789 as the propitious moment of liberalism. That night, the members of the National Assembly abolished serfdom outright and ended the feudal regime that included seigneurial oppression, inequitable and burdensome taxation, and the absence of adequate representation. This event has been seen traditionally as the starting point of a series of dramatic reforms that broke with the absolutist, corporate structure of eighteenth-century France by eliminating the discriminatory privileges of titled persons and disaggregating the collective body of the corporation. Guild masters and mistresses, as members of this social structure that held the vital links of corporate groups in the “great chain” leading directly to the “authority of the throne,” remained in existence, but not for long. By March 1791, the National Assembly issued the d'Allard law, abolishing guilds across France. In June, the Le Chapelier laws forbade workers associations altogether. The revolutionary ideology that ended the guild focused on its long, oppressive, and fruitless form of institutionalized “brigandage” for the master and “servitude” for the laborer. Jealous of their authority and hungry for more wealth and power, the corporate fathers had transformed mastership from a system of renewal into a system of exclusion by means of which, “the richest and the strongest ordinarily succeeded in keeping out the weakest.” The Revolution dissolved this hierarchically ordered society into a collection of free and equal individual citizens, having no links with one another except as fellow citizens of the French nation.