The revolutionary strifes had wearied the brain of France and had predisposed it to accept accomplished facts.

Distracted by the talk about royalist plots and Jacobin plots, cowering away from the white ogre and the red spectre, the more credulous part of the populace was fain to take shelter under the cloak of a great soldier, who at least promised order.

Everything favoured the drill-sergeant theory of government.

The instincts developed by a thousand years of monarchy had not been rooted out in the last decade.

They now prompted France to rally round her able man; and, abandoning political liberty as a hopeless quest, she obeyed the imperious call which promised to revivify the order and brilliance of her old existence with the throbbing blood of her new life.
The French constitution was now to be reconstructed by a self-appointed commission which sat with closed doors.