ose skepticism and laxity were notorious, honor, in default of faith,
maintained the same spirit; nearly the whole of them, great and
small, had subordinated their interests, welfare and security to the
maintenance of their dignity or to scruples of conscience. They had
allowed themselves to be stripped of everything; they let themselves be
exiled, imprisoned, tortured and made martyrs of, like the Christians
of the primitive church; through their invincible meekness, they were
going, like the primitive Christians, to exhaust the rage of their
executioners, wear out persecutions, transform opinion and compel the
admission, even with those who survived in the eighteenth century, that
they were true, deserving and courageous men.

V. The Bourgeoisie.

Where recruited.--Difference between the functionary of the
ancient regime and the modern functionary.--Appointments
seen as Property.--Guilds.--Independence and security of
office-holders.--Their ambitions are limited and satisfied.
--Fixed habits, seriousness and integrity.--Ambition to
secure esteem.--Intellectual culture.--Liberal ideas.
--Respectability and public zeal.--Conduct of the bourgeoisie
in 1789-1791.

Below the nobles and the clergy, a third class of notables, the
bourgeoisie, almost entirely confined to the towns,[4174] verged on
the former classes through its upper circles, while its diverse groups,
ranging from the parliamentarian to the rich merchant or manufacturer,
comprised the remainder of those who were tolerably well educated, say
100 000 families, recruited on the same conditions as the bourgeoisie
of the present day: they were "bourgeois living nobly," meaning by this,
living on their incomes, large manufacturers and traders, engaged in
liberal pursuits-lawyers, notaries, procureurs, physicians, architects,
engineers, artists, professors, and especially the government officials;
the latter, however, very numerous, differed from ours in two essential
points. On the one hand, their office, as nowadays with the notaries'
etude, or a membership of the stock-board, was personal property.
Their places, and many others, such as posts in the judiciary, in the
finances, in bailiwicks, in the Presidial, in the Election,[4175] in
the salt-department, in the customs, in the Mint, in the department of
forests and streams, in presidencies, in councils, as procureurs du roi
in various civil, administrative and cri