all Frenchmen, in theory, enjoy rights in common;
unfortunately, this is only the theory. In reality, in all state
relationships (dans la cite), the new-comers appropriate to themselves
the offices, the pretensions, and more than the privileges of their
predecessors; the latter, consisting of large and small land-owners,
gentlemen, parliamentarians, officials, ecclesiastics, notables of
every kind and degree, are immediately deprived of the rights of man.
Surrendered to rural jacqueries and to town mobs, they undergo, first,
the neglect and, next, the hostility of the State: the public gendarme
has ceased to protect them and refuses his services; afterwards, on
becoming a Jacobin, he declares himself their enemy, treats them
as enemies, plunders them, imprisons them, murders them, expels or
transports them, inflicts on them civil death, and shoots them if they
dare return; he deprives their friends or kindred who remain in France
of their civil rights; he deprives the nobles or the ennobled of their
quality as Frenchmen, and compels them to naturalize themselves afresh
according to prescribed formalities; he renews against the Catholics the
interdictions, persecutions and brutalities which the old government
had practiced against the Calvinist minority.--Thus, in 1799 as in 1789,
there are two classes of Frenchmen, two different varieties of men,
the first one superior, installed in the civic fold, and the second,
inferior and excluded from it; only, in 1799, the greatest inequality
consigned the inferior and excluded class to a still lower, more remote,
and much worse condition.

The principle (of equalite), nevertheless, subsists. Since 1789 it is
inscribed at the top of every constitution; it is still proclaimed in
the new constitution. It has remained popular, although perverted and
disfigured by the Jacobins; their false and gross interpretation of
it could not bring it into discredit; athwart the hideous grotesque
caricature, all minds and sentiments ever recur to the ideal form of
the cite to the veritable social contract, to the impartial, active, and
permanent reign of distributive justice. Their entire education, all the
literature, philosophy and culture of the eighteenth century, leads
them onward to this conception of society and of rights; more profoundly
still, they are predisposed to it by the inner structure of their
intelligence, by the original cast of their sensibility7 by the
hereditary defects and