onstitutions, through
restrictions put upon electoral rights and repeated sales of municipal
offices,[2301] it had handed over municipal authority to a narrow
oligarchy of bourgeois families, privileged at the expense of the
taxpayer, half separated from the main body of the public, disliked
by the lower classes, and no longer supported by the confidence or
deference of the community. And in the parish and in the rural canton,
it had taken away from the noble his office of resident protector
and hereditary patron, reducing him to the odious position of a mere
creditor, and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse position
of an absentee creditor.[2302]--So that in the parish and in the
rural canton, it had taken away from the noble his office of resident
protector and hereditary patron, reducing him to the odious position of
a mere creditor, and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse
position of an absentee creditor.[2303] Thus, as to the clergy, it had
almost separated the head from the trunk by superposing (through
the concordat) a staff of gentleman prelates, rich, ostentatious,
unemployed, and skeptical, upon an army of plain, poor, laborious, and
believing curates.[2304]

Finally, it had, through a protection as untimely as it was aggressive,
sometimes conferred on the corporation oppressive privileges which
rendered it offensive and mischievous, or else fossilized in an obsolete
form which paralyzed its action or corrupted its service. Such was
the case with the corporations of crafts and industries to which, in
consideration of financial aid, it had conceded monopolies onerous to
the consumer and a clog on industrial enterprises. Such was the case
with the Catholic Church to which, every five years, it granted, in
exchange for its voluntary gift (of money), cruel favors or obnoxious
prerogatives, the prolonged persecution of Protestants, the censorship
of intellectual speculation, and the right of controlling schools and
education.[2305] Such was the case with the universities benumbed by
routine; with latest provincial "Etats," constituted in 1789, as in
1489. Such was the case with noble families subjected by law to the
antique system of substitutions and of primogeniture, that is to say,
to social constraint which, devised long ago for private as well as for
public interest in order to secure the transmission of local patronage
and political power. This system, however, became useless and
co