es, owing to the legal prerogatives and effective
preferences by which the court nobles benefited at the expense of the
provincial nobility,

* the noblesse at the expense of plebeians,

* the prelates and beneficiaries at the expense of poorly-paid cures and
vicars,

* the two highest orders of the clergy at the expense of the third,

* the bourgeoisie at the expense of the people,

* the towns at the expense of the rural districts,

* this or that town or province at the expense of the rest,

* the artisan member of a corporation at the expense of the free
workman,

and, in general, the strong, more or less well-to-do, in league and
protected, at the expense of the weak, more or less needy, isolated and
unprotected (indefendus).[3201]

One hundred years before the Revolution a few clairvoyant, open-hearted
and generous spirits had already been aroused by this scandalous
disproportion.[3202] Finally, everybody is shocked by it, for, in each
local or social group, nearly everybody is a sufferer, not alone
the rural, the peasant, the artisan, and the plebeian, not alone the
citizen, the cure and the bourgeois notable," but again the gentleman,
the grand seignior, the prelate and the King himself.[3203] Each is
denouncing the privileges of all others that affect his interests, each
striving to diminish another's share in the public cake and to keep his
own, all concurring in citing natural right and in claiming or accepting
as a principle liberty and equality, but all concurring in misconception
and solely unanimous in destroying and in allowing destruction,[3204] to
such an extent that, at last, the attack being universal and no defense
anywhere, social order itself perishes, entirely owing to the abuses of
it.

On the reappearance of the same abuses, the lack of distributive justice
in revolutionary France became still more apparent than in monarchical
France. Through a sudden transposition, the preferred of the former
Regime had become the disgraced, while the disgraced of the former
Regime had become the preferred; unjust favor and unjust disfavor still
subsisted, but with a change of object. Before 1789, the nation was
subject to an oligarchy of nobles and notables; after 1789, it
became subject to an oligarchy of Jacobins big or little. Before
the Revolution, there were in France three or four hundred thousand
privileged individuals, recognizable by their red heels or silver
shoe-buckles. After the Revo