Hardly an aristocrat in France had shown
military talent for a generation, while, when the revolution began, men
like Jourdan and Kleber, Ney and Augereau, and a host of other future
marshals and generals had been dismissed from the army, or were eating
out their hearts as petty officers with no hope of advancement. Local
privileges and inequalities were as intolerable as personal. There were
privileged provinces and those administered arbitrarily by the Crown,
there were a multiplicity of internal tariffs, and endless municipal
franchises and monopolies, so much so that economists estimated that,
through artificial restraints, one-quarter of the soil of France lay
waste. Turgot, in his edict on the grain trade, explained that kings in
the past by ordinance, or the police without royal authority, had
compiled a body "of legislation equivalent to a prohibition of bringing
grain into Paris," and this condition was universal. One province might
be starving and another oppressed with abundance.
Meanwhile, under the stimulant of applied science, centralization went
on resistlessly, and the cost of administration is proportionate to
centralization.
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