explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural 
saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the 
French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from 
north to south. The typographic principles of uniformity, 
continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient 
feudal and oral society. The Revolution was carried out by the 
new literati and lawyers.

     In England, however, such was the power of the ancient 
oral traditions of common law, backed by the medieval 
institution of Parliament, that no uniformity or continuity of 
the new visual print culture could take complete hold. The 
result was that the most important event in English history has 
never taken place; namely, the English Revolution on the lines of 
the French Revolution. The American Revolution had no 
medieval legal institutions to discard or to root out, apart from