persecution
or dismissal of so many patriotic and deserving officers, which led
Gouvion-Saint-Cyr and his comrades, through disgust, to avoid or decline
accepting high rank, in the scandalous promotion of club brawlers and
docile nullities, in the military dictatorship of the civil proconsuls,
in the supremacy conferred on Lechelle and Rossignol, in the
subordination forced on Kleber and Marceau, in the absurd plans of a
demagogue with huge epaulettes like Cartaux,[3322] in the grotesque
orders of the day issued by a swaggering inebriate like Henriot,[3323]
in the disgrace of Bonaparte, and in the detention of Hoche.--In the
civil order of things, it was worse. Not only was the rule of regulating
promotion by merit not recognized but it was applied in an inverse
sense. In the central government as in the local government, and from
top to bottom of the hierarchy, from the post of minister of foreign
affairs down to that of president of a petty revolutionary committee,
all offices were for the unworthy. Their unfitness kept on increasing
inasmuch as incessant weeding out worked against them, the functionary,
degraded by his work, growing worse along with his function.--Thus
the constitutional rights of merit and capacity ended in the practical
privilege of incapacity and demerit. And in the allotment of grades and
social advantages, distributive justice had given way to distributive
injustice, while practice, contrary to theory, instituted permanently,
on the one hand, the exclusion or retirement of competent, instructed,
expert, well-bred, honorable and respected men and, on the other hand,
brought forward illiterate, inept and rude novices, coarse and vulgar
brutes, common blackguards, men used up or of tarnished reputations,
rogues ready for anything, fugitives from justice, in short the
adventurers and outcasts of every kind and degree.[3324] The latter,
owing their success to perversion or lack of conscientiousness,
derived their principal title from their vigorous fists and a fixed
determination to hold on to their places as they had obtained them,
that is to say by main force and by the murder or exile of their
rivals.--Evidently, the staff of officials which the Declaration of
Human Rights had promised was not the staff on duty ten years later
there was a lack of experience.[3325] In 1789, careers were open to
every ambition; down to 1799, the rivalry of ambitions had simply
produced a wild uproar and a brutal con