d men and interruption of education
during the Revolution.--General or special instruction rare
in 1800.--Small number of competent candidates.--Easy
promotion due to the lack of competitors.--Importance and
attraction the prizes offered.--The Legion of Honor.--The
imperial nobility.--Dotations and majorities.--Emulation.

Let us now consider the career which he thus opens to them and the
prizes he offers. These prizes are in full view, ranged along each
racecourse, graduated according to distances and more and more striking
and magnificent. Every ambition is provided for, the highest as well
as the lowest, and these are countless; for they consist of offices of
every grade in the civil and military hierarchies of a great centralized
State whose intervention is universal, under a government which
systematically tolerates no authority or influence outside of itself
and which monopolizes every species of social importance for its own
functionaries.[3335]--All these prizes, even the smallest and most
insignificant, are awarded by it. In the first place, Napoleon has two
or three times as many offices to bestow, on the soil of old France
alone, as the former kings; for, even in the choice of their staff of
officials, the latter were not always free; in many places they did not
have, or no longer had the right of appointment. At one time, this right
be longed from time immemorial to provincial or municipal corporations,
laic or ecclesiastic, to a certain chapter, abbey or collegiate church,
to a bishop in his diocese, to the seignior in his seignory. At another
time the king, once possessing the right, had surrendered or alienated
it, in whole or in part through gratuitous favor and the concession of
a survivorship or for money and through the sale of an office; in brief,
his hands were tied fast by hereditary or acquired privileges There are
no privileges now to fetter the hands of the First Consul. The entire
civil organization dates from him. The whole body of officials is thus
of his own selection, and under him it is much more numerous than that
of the ancient Regime; for he has extended the attributions of the
State beyond all former bounds. Directly or indirectly, he appoints by
hundreds of thousands the mayors and councilors of municipalities and
the members of general councils, the entire staff of the administration,
of the finances, of the judicature, of the clergy, of the University,
of pu