The French revolutionary upheaval from 1789 to 1793 is presented as the escalation of a political allegory: the people, long treated as the support of royal power, become strong enough to overthrow and destroy the monarch. The passage compresses the change into two images, linking 1789 with the throwing off of the rider and 1793 with the people devouring him.

The People as the King’s Mount

The argument begins with the claim that people mistakenly credit the king for what they themselves accomplish. They fight, yet the glory is assigned to the king; they pay, yet his apparent generosity wins their affection. The crown, in this account, is raised by the poor and gives them back only a farthing. The people are figured as the horse beneath an equestrian statue: the king seems elevated, but his height depends on the very population that sustains him.

The image develops as the horse changes from an ass into a lion. Its transformation makes visible a political force that royal display conceals: the people are not merely a pedestal but a power capable of acting against its rider. The metaphor turns the familiar image of a monarch mounted above the populace into an account of how that arrangement may be overturned.

From Overthrow to Destruction

The passage assigns distinct stages to the French upheaval. In 1789, the lion throws its rider; in 1793, it devours him. The first image signifies the overthrow of the ruler, while the second intensifies that reversal into the ruler’s destruction. The distinction gives the Revolution a compressed narrative arc, moving from popular revolt against royal authority to a more extreme violence against it.

These dates belong to the passage’s political comparison rather than to a detailed account of particular battles, leaders, or institutions. Its emphasis is the change in the relation between ruler and ruled: the figure once carried by the people becomes vulnerable to the force that had upheld him.

The English Counterpoint

The French example also sharpens the passage’s account of England. After recalling that the people had thrown or devoured their rider in earlier English upheavals, the narrator says that the lion had relapsed into the donkey and taken up the pack-saddle of crown-worship. The text identifies this renewed submission, not the French Revolution, as what was then occurring in England under Queen Anne.

The contrast sets revolutionary power against political restoration and popular deference. The French sequence demonstrates what happens when the people’s strength breaks through royal authority; the English scene asks how a population capable of such force can return to reverence for the crown. The Revolution therefore functions both as a historical reference and as the sharpest example in the passage’s warning that the people may overthrow their rider, yet later consent to carry one again.