which banished them all in different directions. At the end of
the year there were more than seven hundred magistrates in exile. The
king transformed his council into a parlement, under the presidency of
M. Maupeou, from whom it took its name, but it was received with a storm
of popular insult and ridicule. Public opinion throughout the nation was
aroused; all the princes of the blood, excepting one, and thirteen peers
protested to the king "against the reversal of the laws of the State,"
and the name of the _Etats Generaux_ was openly pronounced in the
parlements of Toulouse, Besancon, Rouen, and even in Paris. "Richelieu
and Louis XIV had destroyed the political importance of the nobility;
Louis XV destroyed the great institution of the magistracy,--what was
there remaining to prop up the ancient edifice and to cover the
monarchy?"

The ribald Parisians circulated this _Pater_, and found amusement in it:
"Our Father who art at Versailles, your name be glorified, your reign is
shaken, your will is executed no more on the earth than in heaven; give
us our daily bread, which you have taken from us; pardon your
parlements, which have sustained your interests, as you pardon your
ministers who have sold them: do not succumb any longer to the
temptations of the Du Barry, but deliver us from the devil of the
chancellor."

In the midst of the general decadence, which affected alike royalty, the
clergy, and the nobles, in the general confusion and inequality of all
laws and procedure, a formidable spirit of investigation began to stir.
The nation had no written constitution, everything depended upon custom,
and was maintained only by a sort of public opinion, which constantly
varied. The contradictions and anomalies in all branches of the public
administration were rendered even more hopeless by the general
corruption and clashing of individual interests: "France has no general,
positive, written law ... which defines all the powers," said Lally
Tollendal in the chambre de la noblesse in 1789. Both the civil and the
penal law bristled with the most flagrant injustice, the accused was
frequently allowed no defence; torture, mutilations, and the
death-penalty were awarded with the most shocking facility and for the
most inadequate crimes,--the complete innocence of the victim was but
too frequently recognized after his execution. "If I were accused of
having stolen the towers of Notre-Dame," said one, "I would consider it
prud