or unwritten,
guaranteed to them precious privileges which the other bodies, much
weaker, could neither acquire nor preserve. These were not merely
immunities but likewise prerogatives, not alone alleviations of taxation
and militia dispensations, but likewise political and administrative
liberties, remnants of their primitive sovereignty, with many other
positive advantages. The very least being precedence, preferences,
social priority, with an incontestable right to rank, honors, offices,
and favors. Such, notably, were the regions-states possessing their
own government (pays d'etats), compared with those which elected the
magistrates who apportioned taxation (pays d'election),[3301] the
two highest orders, the clergy and the nobles, compared with the
third-estate, and the bourgeoisie, and the town corporations compared
with the rest of the inhabitants. On the other hand, opposed to these
historical favorites were the historical disinherited, the latter
much more numerous and counting by millions--the taxable commons, all
subjects without rank or quality, in short, the ordinary run of men,
especially the common herd of the towns and particularly of the country,
all the more ground down on account of their lower status, along with
the Jews lower yet, a sort of foreign class scarcely tolerated, with
the Calvinists, not only deprived of the humblest rights but, again,
persecuted by the State for the past one hundred years.

All these people, who have been transported far outside of civic
relationships by historic right, are brought back, in 1789, by
philosophic right. After the declarations of the Constituent Assembly,
there are no longer in France either Bretons, Provencals, Burgundians
or Alsatians, Catholics, Protestants or Israelites, nobles or plebeians,
bourgeois or rurals, but simply Frenchmen,

* all with the one title of citizens,

* all endowed with the same civil, religious and political rights,

* all equal before the State,

* all introduced by law into every career, collectively, on an equal
footing and without fear or favor from anybody;

* all free to follow this out to the end without distinction of rank,
birth, faith or fortune;

* all, if they are good runners, to receive the highest prizes at the
end of the race, any office or rank, especially the leading honors and
positions which, thus far reserved to a class or coterie, had not been
allowed previously to the great multitude.

Henceforth,