voluntarily restrict itself in its faculty of
bestowing or withholding offices, authority, consideration, influence,
or salaries, every desirable and every desired good thing; as far as it
can, it retains these in its own hands to distribute them as it pleases,
and in its own interest to bestow them on its partisans and to deprive
its adversaries of them, to attract clients and create minions. The
four thousand offices of prefect, sub-prefect, and councilors of the
prefecture, department, and arrondissement, the four hundred thousand
offices of mayor, assistants, and municipal councilors, and added to
these, the innumerable salaried employments of auxiliary or secondary
agents, from the secretary-general of the prefecture down to the
secretary of the mayor, from the scribes and clerks of the prefecture
and sub-prefecture down to the staff of the municipal police and of the
octroi in the towns, from the city or department architect down to the
lowest road-surveyor, from the watchmen and superintendents of a canal
or harbor down to the field-guards and stone-breakers or the highway,
directly or indirectly, the constitutional government disposes of
them in the same fashion as the imperial government, with the same
interference in the most trifling details and in the most trifling
affair. Commune or department, such local society remains under the
second Regime what it was under the first one, an extension of the
central society, an appendix of the State, an adjunct of the great
establishment of which the seat is at Paris. In these adjuncts,
controlled from above, nothing is changed, neither the extent and limits
of the circumscription, nor the source and hierarchy of powers, nor
the theoretic framework, nor the practical mechanism, not even the
names.[4146] After the prefects of Empire come the prefects of the
Restoration, the same in title and uniform, installed in the same
mansion, to do the same work, with equal zeal, that is to say, with
dangerous zeal, to such an extent that, on taking leave of their final
audience, on setting out for their department, M. de Talleyrand,
who knows men and institutions profoundly, gives them, as his last
injunction, the following admirable order: "And, especially, no zeal!
"--According to the recommendation of Fouche, "the Bourbons slept in the
bed of Napoleon," which was the bed of Louis XIV., but larger and more
comfortable, widened by the Revolution and the Empire, adapted to the
fig