all, communes and departments alike, into a chaos in
which, under the old monarchy, they would never have fallen.

Before 1789, collective legal entities (persons), provincial and
communal, still existed. On the one hand, five or six great local
bodies, represented by elective assemblies, full of life and
spontaneously active, among others those of Languedoc and Brittany,
still provided for and governed themselves. The other provinces, which
the central power had reduced to administrative districts, retained, at
least, their historic cohesion, their time-honored name, the lament for,
or at least the souvenir of, their former autonomy, and, here and there,
a few vestiges or fragments of their lost independence; and, better yet,
these old, paralyzed, but not mutilated bodies, had just assumed new
life, and under their renewed organism were striving to give the
blood in their veins a fresh start. Twenty-one provincial assemblies,
instituted over the entire territory, between 1778 and 1787, and
provided with powers of considerable importance, undertook, each in its
own sphere, to direct provincial interests. Communal interest, also,
had its representatives in the urban or rural communes. In the towns, a
deliberative assembly, composed of the leading notables and of delegates
elected by all the corporations and communities in the place, formed an
intermittent municipal council the same as to-day, but much more ample,
which voted and passed resolutions on important occasions; there was a
board of management at the head of it, "the town corps," comprising
the various municipal officials, the mayor, his lieutenant, sheriffs,
prosecuting attorney, treasurer, and clerk,[4114] now elected by the
deliberative assembly, now the legal purchasers, heirs, and proprietors
of their office, the same as a notary or advocate of to-day owns
his office, protected against administrative caprices by a royal
acquittance, and, for a money consideration, titular in their towns, the
same as a parliamentarian in his parliament, and hence planted in, or
grafted upon, the commune like a parliamentarian among his peers, and,
like him, defenders of local interests against the central power.--In
the village, the heads of families met together on the public square,
deliberated in common over common affairs, elected the syndic, likewise
the collectors of the taille, and deputies to the intendant; of their
own accord, but with his approval, they taxed themse