tour in the
departments in 1815.) "Everywhere, almost, the women are your declared
enemies."]

[Footnote 3275: Law of Ventose 17, year VIII, title 3, articles 6, 7, 8,
9.--Exemption is granted as a favor only to the ignorantin brothers and
to seminarians assigned to the priesthood.--Cf. the law of March 10,
1818, articles 15 and 18.]

CHAPTER III. AMBITION AND SELF-ESTEEM.

I. Rights and benefits.

The assignment of right.--Those out of favor and the
preferred under former governments.--Under the Ancient
Regime.--During the Revolution.--French conception of
Equality and Rights.--Its ingredients and its excesses.--The
satisfaction it obtains under the new regime.--Abolition of
legal incapacity and equality in the possession of rights.
--Confiscation of collective action and equality in the
deprivation of rights.--Careers in the modern State.--Equal
right of all to offices and to promotion.--Napoleon's
distribution of employments.--His staff of officials
recruited from all classes and parties.

Now that the State has just made a new allotment of the burdens and
duties which it imposes it must make a new assignment of the rights
and benefits it confers. Distributive justice, on both sides, and long
before 1789, was defective, and, under the monarchy, exclusions had
become as obnoxious as exemptions; all the more because, through a
double iniquity, the ancient Regime in each group distinguished two
other groups, one to which it granted every exemption, and the other
which it made subject to every exclusion. The reason is that, from the
first, the king, in the formation and government of the kingdom, in
order to secure the services, money, collaboration or connivance which
he needed, was obliged to negotiate always with corporations, orders,
provinces, seignories, the clergy, churches, monasteries, universities,
parliaments, professional bodies or industrial guilds and families, that
is to say with constituted powers, more or less difficult to bring under
subjection and which, to be kept in subjection, stipulated conditions.
Hence, in France, so many different conditions: each distinct body had
yielded through one or several distinct capitulations and possessed its
own separate statute. Hence, again, such diversely unequal conditions:
the bodies, the best able to protect themselves, had, of course,
defended themselves the best. Their statutes, written