tendant appoints or directs.[1314] Except through his
justiciary rights, so much curtailed, the seignior is an idler in public
matters.[1315] If, by chance, he should desire to act in an official
capacity, to make some reclamation for the community, the bureaus of
administration would soon make him shut up. Since Louis XIV, the higher
officials have things their own way; all legislation and the entire
administrative system operate against the local seignior to deprive
him of his functional efficiency and to confine him to his naked title.
Through this separation of functions and title his pride increases, as
he becomes less useful. His vanity deprived of its broad pasture-ground,
falls back on a small one; henceforth he seeks distinctions and not
influence. He thinks only of precedence and not of government.[1316]
In short, the local government, in the hands of peasants commanded by
bureaucrats, has become a common, offensive lot of red tape. "His
pride would be wounded if he were asked to attend to it. Raising taxes,
levying the militia, regulating the corvees, are servile acts, the works
of a secretary." He accordingly abstains, remains isolated on his manor
and leaves to others a task from which he is excluded and which he
disdains. Far from protecting his peasantry he is scarcely able to
protect himself or to preserve his immunities. Or to avoid having his
poll-tax and vingtiemes reduced. Or to obtain exemption from the militia
for his domestics, to keep his own person, dwelling, dependents, and
hunting and fishing rights from the universal usurpation which places
all possessions and all privileges in the hands of "Monseigneur
l'intendant" and Messieurs the sub-delegates. And the more so because he
is often poor. Bouille estimates that all the old families, save two or
three hundred, are ruined.[1317] I Rouergue several of them live on an
income of fifty and even twenty-five louis, (1000 and 500 francs). In
Limousin, says an intendant at the beginning of the century, out of
several thousands there are not fifteen who have twenty thousand livres
income. In Berry, towards 1754, "three-fourths of them die of hunger."
In Franche-Comte the fraternity to which we have alluded appears in a
humorous light, "after the mass each one returning to his domicile, some
on foot and others on their Rosinantes." In Brittany "lots of gentlemen
found as excisemen, on the farms or in the lowest occupations." One M.
de la Morandais becomes