al suffrage in political society, he was likewise
determined to place it in local society. He had been ordered to apply an
abstract principle, that is to say, to legislate according to a summary,
superficial, and verbal notion which, purposely curtailed and simplified
to excess, did not correspond with its aim. He obeyed and did nothing
more; he made no effort outside of his instructions. He did not propose
to himself to restore local society to its members, to revive it, to
make it a living body, capable of spontaneous, co-ordinate, voluntary
action, and, to this end, provided with indispensable organs. He did
not even take the trouble to imagine, how it really is, I mean by
this, complex and diverse and inversely to legislators before 1789,
and adversely to legislators before and after 1789 outside of France,
against all the teachings of experience, against the evidence of nature,
he refused to recognize the fact that, in France, mankind are of two
species, the people of the towns and the people of the country, and
that, therefore, there are two types of local society, the urban
commune and the rural commune. He was not disposed to take this capital
difference into consideration; he issued decrees for the Frenchman in
general, for the citizen in himself, for fictive men, so reduced that
the statute which suits them can nowhere suit the actual and complete
man. At one stroke, the legislative shears cut out of the same stuff,
according to the same pattern, thirty-six thousand examples of the same
coat, one coat indifferently for every commune, whatever its shape,
a coat too small for the city and too large for the village,
disproportionate in both cases, and useless beforehand, because it
could not fit very large bodies, nor very small ones. Nevertheless, once
dispatched from Paris, people had to put the coat on and wear it;
it must answer for good or for ill, each donning his own for lack of
another better adjusted; hence the strangest attitudes for each, and, in
the long run, a combination of consequences which neither governors nor
the governed had foreseen.

V. Rural or urban communes.

No distinction between the rural and the urban commune.
--Effects of the law on the rural commune.--Disproportion
between the intelligence of its elected representatives and
the work imposed upon them.--The mayor and the municipal
council.--Lack of qualified members.--The secretary of the
mayoral