Such was the case with the Catholic Church to which, every five years, it granted, in exchange for its voluntary gift (of money), cruel favors or obnoxious prerogatives, the prolonged persecution of Protestants, the censorship of intellectual speculation, and the right of controlling schools and education.[2305] Such was the case with the universities benumbed by routine; with latest provincial "Etats," constituted in 1789, as in 1489.

Such was the case with noble families subjected by law to the antique system of substitutions and of primogeniture, that is to say, to social constraint which, devised long ago for private as well as for public interest in order to secure the transmission of local patronage and political power.

This system, however, became useless and corrupting, fecund in pernicious vanities,[2306] in detestable calculations, domestic tyrannies, forced vocations, and private bickering, from the time when the nobles, become frequenters of the court, had lost political power and renounced local patronage.
Thus deprived of, or diverted from, their purpose, the corporate bodies had become unrecognizable 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 outgrowths, 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.

Only their present inconvenience was felt; people suffered by their friction and burden; their lack of harmony and incoherence created dissatisfaction; annoyance due to their degeneracy were attributed to radical defects; they were judged to be naturally unsound and were condemned, in principle, because of the deviations and laws which the public power had imposed on their development.
Suddenly, the public power, which had produced the evil by its intervention, pretended to remove it by a still greater intervention: in 1789 it again intruded itself on corporate bodies, not to reform them, not restore each to its proper channel, not to confine each with proper limits, but to destroy them outright.