The first act of that great drama was the attempt of reformers and patriots to destroy feudalism,with its privileges and distinctions and injustices,by unscrupulous and wild legislation, and to give a new constitution to the State.

It was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land-tenure.

He never sought to revive feudalism; all its abominations perished.

Neither Louis XVIII., nor Charles X., nor Louis Philippe, nor Louis Napoleon, ever attempted to restore feudalism, or unequal privileges, or arbitrary taxation.

Each was outgrowing feudalism and producing a larger and larger group of businessmen, professionals, tradesmen, craftsmen and maturing a middle class and a proletariat.

One very specious objection is made as regards feudalism, which some clear-minded people obstinately confound with chivalry.

If the consulate, which was a powerful expression of the most prominent system of independence, did no succeed in suppressing feudalism in Provence as in Italy, it at least so transformed it, that it deprived it of its most unjust and insupportable elements.

Thus Richelieu undermined feudalism in France, and established absolutism as one of the needed forces of his turbulent age, even as Napoleon gave law and order to France when distracted by the anarchism of a revolution which did not comprehend the liberty which was invoked.

Why, then, should they longer trouble themselves to uphold feudalism, this mother of sectionalism, this colossal sham?

He detested feudalism and the privileges of the clergy.

Let it be far from me to uphold despotism of any sort; but it is a mistake to identify feudalism with it.

This great principle, sacred in the eyes both of great and small, maintained feudalism, and in so doing it maintained itself amidst all the chaos and confusion of repeated revolutions and social disturbances.