rough his
education and through his instinct. By virtue of this instinct, which
is despotic, by virtue of this education, which is classic and Latin,
he conceives human associations not in the modern fashion, Germanic and
Christian, as a concert of initiations starting from below, but in the
antique fashion, pagan and Roman, as a hierarchy of authorities imposed
from above. He puts his own spirit into his civil institutions, the
military spirit; consequently, he constructs a huge barracks wherein,
to begin with, he lodges thirty million, men, women, and children, and,
later on, forty-two million, all the way from Hamburg to Rome.

The edifice is, of course, superb and of a new style. On comparing it
with other societies in surrounding Europe, and particularly France as
she was previous to 1789, the contrast is striking.--Everywhere else the
social edifice is a composition of many distinct structures--provinces,
cities, seignories, churches, universities, and corporations. Each has
begun by being a more or less isolated block of buildings where, on
an enclosed area, a population has lived apart. Little by little the
barriers have given way; either they have been broken in or have tumbled
down of their own accord; passages have been made between one and the
other and new additions have been put up; at last, these scattered
buildings have all become connected and soldered on as annexes to the
central pile. But they combine with it only through a visible and
clumsy juxtaposition, through incomplete and bizarre communications: the
vestiges of their former independence are still apparent athwart their
actual dependence. Each still rests on its own primitive and appropriate
foundations; its grand lines subsist; its main work is often almost
intact. In France, on the eve of 1789, it is easily recognized what she
formerly was; for example, it is clear that Languedoc and Brittany were
once sovereign States, Strasbourg a sovereign town, the Bishop of Mende
and the Abbess of Remiremont, sovereign princes;[2327] every seignior,
laic, or ecclesiastic, was so in his own domain, and he still possessed
some remnants of public power. In brief, we see thousands of states
within the State, absorbed, but not assimilated, each with its own
statutes, its own legal customs, its own civil law, its own weights
and measures; several with special privileges and immunities; some with
their own jurisdiction and their own peculiar administration, with