Therefore, the nobility could
impose all sorts of burdens upon those who were unarmed. During the
interval in which society centralized and acquired more and more a
modern economic form, the discrepancies in status remained, while
commensurately the physical or imaginative force which had once
sustained inequality declined, until the social equilibrium grew to be
extremely unstable. Add to this that France, under the monarchy, was ill
consolidated. The provinces and towns retained the administrative
complexity of an archaic age, even to local tariffs. Thus under the
monarchy privilege and inequality pervaded every phase of life, and, as
the judiciary must be, more or less, the mouthpiece of society, the
judiciary came to be the incarnation of caste.
Speaking broadly, the judicial office, under the monarchy, was vendible.
In legal language, it was an incorporeal hereditament. It could be
bought and sold and inherited like an advowson, or right to dispose of a
cure of souls in the English Church, or of a commission in the English
army. The system was well recognized and widespread in the eighteenth
century, and worked fairly well with the French judiciary for about
three hundred years, but it was not adapted to an industrial
environment.
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