This was the case in all compartments as on every story, owing to the multitude, enormity and diversity of honorific or useful privileges, owing to the legal prerogatives and effective preferences by which the court nobles benefited at the expense of the provincial nobility, * the noblesse at the expense of plebeians, * the prelates and beneficiaries at the expense of poorly-paid cures and vicars, * the two highest orders of the clergy at the expense of the third, * the bourgeoisie at the expense of the people, * the towns at the expense of the rural districts, * this or that town or province at the expense of the rest, * the artisan member of a corporation at the expense of the free workman, and, in general, the strong, more or less well-to-do, in league and protected, at the expense of the weak, more or less needy, isolated and unprotected (indefendus).[3201] One hundred years before the Revolution a few clairvoyant, open-hearted and generous spirits had already been aroused by this scandalous disproportion.[3202] Finally, everybody is shocked by it, for, in each local or social group, nearly everybody is a sufferer, not alone the rural, the peasant, the artisan, and the plebeian, not alone the citizen, the cure and the bourgeois notable," but again the gentleman, the grand seignior, the prelate and the King himself.[3203] Each is denouncing the privileges of all others that affect his interests, each striving to diminish another's share in the public cake and to keep his own, all concurring in citing natural right and in claiming or accepting as a principle liberty and equality, but all concurring in misconception and solely unanimous in destroying and in allowing destruction,[3204] to such an extent that, at last, the attack being universal and no defense anywhere, social order itself perishes, entirely owing to the abuses of it.
On the reappearance of the same abuses, the lack of distributive justice in revolutionary France became still more apparent than in monarchical France.

Through a sudden transposition, the preferred of the former Regime had become the disgraced, while the disgraced of the former Regime had become the preferred; unjust favor and unjust disfavor still subsisted, but with a change of object.

Before 1789, the nation was subject to an oligarchy of nobles and notables; after 1789, it became subject to an oligarchy of Jacobins big or little.

Before the Revolution, there were in France three or four hundred thousand privileged individuals, recognizable by their red heels or silver shoe-buckles.

After the Revolution, there were three or four hundred thousand of the privileged, recognizable by their red caps or their carmagnoles.[3205] The most privileged of all, the three or four thousand verified nobles, presented at court and of racial antiquity, who, by virtue of their parchments, rode in the royal carriages, were succeeded by three or four thousand Jacobins of a fresh sprout, no less verified and accepted, who, by virtue of their civic patent, sat in the club of the rue Saint-Honore and the latter coterie was still more dominant, more exclusive, more partial than the former one.
Consequently, before the Revolution, the burden of taxation was light for the rich or the well-to-do, crushing for the peasants or the common people; after the Revolution, on the contrary, the peasants, the common people, paid no more taxes,[3206] while from the rich and the well-to-do the government took all, not alone their income but their capital .-- On the other hand, after having fed the court of Versailles, the public treasury had to feed the rabble of Paris, still more voracious; and, from 1793 to 1796, the maintenance of this rabble cost it twenty-five times as much as, from 1783 to 1786, the maintenance of the court.[3207] Finally, at Paris as at Versailles, the subordinates who lived on the favored spot, close to the central manger, seized on all they could get and ate much more than their allowance.