ts)_ over three-quarters of the territory in all the electoral
districts; nothing remained of the old province but its name and an
administrative circumscription. At another time, without mutilating the
corporate body, it had enervated and deformed it, or dislocated and
disjointed it.

Corporations and local bodies, thus deprived of, or diverted from, their
purpose, had become unrecognisable under the crust of the abuses which
disfigured them; nobody, except a Montesquieu, could comprehend why they
should exist. On the approach of the revolution they seemed, not organs,
but excrescences, deformities, and, so to say, superannuated
monstrosities. Their historical and natural roots, their living germs
far below the surface, their social necessity, their fundamental
utility, their possible usefulness, were no longer visible.

_II.--The Body-Social of a Despot_

Corporations, and local bodies being thus emasculated, by the end of the
eighteenth century the principal features of modern France are traced; a
creature of a new and strange type arises, defines itself, and issues
forth its structure determining its destiny. It consists of a social
body organised by a despot and for a despot, calculated for the use of
one man, excellent for action under the impulsion of a unique will, with
a superior intelligence, admirable so long as this intelligence remains
lucid and this will remain healthy; adapted to a military life and not
to civil life and therefore badly balanced, hampered in its development,
exposed to periodical crises, condemned to precocious debility, but able
to live for a long time, and for the present, robust, alone able to bear
the weight of the new dominion and to furnish for fifteen successive
years the crushing labour, the conquering obedience, the superhuman,
murderous, insensate effort which its master, Napoleon, exacts.

However clear and energetic the ideas of Napoleon are when he sets to
work to make the New Regime, his mind is absorbed by the preoccupations
of the sovereign. It is not enough for him that his edifice should be
monumental, symmetrical, and beautiful. First of all, as he lives in it
and derives the greatest benefit from it, he wants it habitable, and
habitable for Frenchmen of the year 1800. Consequently, he takes into
account the habits and dispositions of his tenants, the pressing and
permanent wants for which the new structure is to provide. These wants,
however, must not be theoret