When the French democracy was attacked by its monarchical neighbors, the newly aroused national energy of the French people was placed enthusiastically at the service of the military authorities.

The success of the French armies, even during the disorders of the Convention and the corruption of the Directory, indicated that revolutionary France possessed possibilities of national efficiency far superior to the France of the Old Regime.
Neither the democrats nor Napoleon had, in truth, broken as much as they themselves and their enemies believed with the French national tradition; but unfortunately that aspect of the national tradition perpetuated by them was by no means its best aspect.

The policy, the methods of administration, and the actual power of the Committee of Public Safety and of Napoleon were all inherited from the Old Regime.
Revolutionary France merely adapted to new conditions the political organization and policy to which Frenchmen had been accustomed; and the most serious indictment to be made against it is that its excesses prevented it from dispensing with the absolutism which social disorder and unwarranted foreign aggression always necessitate.

The Revolution made France more of a nation than it had been in the eighteenth century, because it gave to the French people the civil freedom, the political experience, and the economic opportunities which they needed, but it did not heal the breach which the Bourbons had made between the political organization of France and its legitimate national interests and aspirations.

France in 1815, like France in 1789, remained a nation divided against itself,--a nation which had perpetuated during a democratic revolution a part of its national tradition most opposed to the logic of its new political and social ideas.