rrupting, fecund in pernicious vanities,[2306] in detestable
calculations, domestic tyrannies, forced vocations, and private
bickering, from the time when the nobles, become frequenters of the
court, had lost political power and renounced local patronage.

Thus deprived of, or diverted from, their purpose, the corporate bodies
had become unrecognizable under the crust of the abuses which disfigured
them. Nobody, except a Montesquieu, could comprehend why they should
exist; on the approach of the Revolution, they seemed, not organs, but
outgrowths, deformities, and, so to say, superannuated monstrosities.
Their historical and natural roots, their living germs far below the
surface, their social necessity, their fundamental utility, their
possible usefulness, were no longer visible. Only their present
inconvenience was felt; people suffered by their friction and burden;
their lack of harmony and incoherence created dissatisfaction; annoyance
due to their degeneracy were attributed to radical defects; they were
judged to be naturally unsound and were condemned, in principle, because
of the deviations and laws which the public power had imposed on their
development.

Suddenly, the public power, which had produced the evil by its
intervention, pretended to remove it by a still greater intervention: in
1789 it again intruded itself on corporate bodies, not to reform them,
not restore each to its proper channel, not to confine each with proper
limits, but to destroy them outright. Through a radical, universal, and
extraordinary amputation, the like of which is not mentioned in history,
with the rashness of the theorist and the brutality of the butcher, the
legislator extirpated them all, as far as he could, even including the
family, while his fury extended beyond the present into the future.
To legal abolition and total confiscation, he added the systematic
hostility of his preventive laws, together with a fresh obstacle in
the shape of his new constructions; during three successive
legislatures[2307] he provided against their future regeneration,
against the permanent instincts and necessities which might one day
resuscitate stable families, distinct provinces, and an orthodox church,
against artistic, industrial, financial, charitable, and educational
corporations, against every spontaneous and organized group, and against
every collective, local, or special enterprise. In place of these he
installed synthetic bodies or in