But they combine with it only through a visible and clumsy juxtaposition, through incomplete and bizarre communications: the vestiges of their former independence are still apparent athwart their actual dependence.

Each still rests on its own primitive and appropriate foundations; its grand lines subsist; its main work is often almost intact.

In France, on the eve of 1789, it is easily recognized what she formerly was; for example, it is clear that Languedoc and Brittany were once sovereign States, Strasbourg a sovereign town, the Bishop of Mende and the Abbess of Remiremont, sovereign princes;[2327] every seignior, laic, or ecclesiastic, was so in his own domain, and he still possessed some remnants of public power.

In brief, we see thousands of states within the State, absorbed, but not assimilated, each with its own statutes, its own legal customs, its own civil law, its own weights and measures; several with special privileges and immunities; some with their own jurisdiction and their own peculiar administration, with their own imposts and tariffs like so many more or less dismantled fortresses, but whose old feudal, municipal, or provincial walls still rose lofty and thick on the soil comprehended within the national enclosure.
Nothing could be more irregular than this total aggregate thus formed; it is not really an entire whole, but an agglomeration.

No plan, good or bad, has been followed out; the architecture is of ten different styles and of ten different epochs.