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AMBITION AND SELF-ESTEEM.
I.Rights and benefits.
The assignment of right .-- Those out of favor and the preferred under former governments .-- Under the Ancient Regime .-- During the Revolution .-- French conception of Equality and Rights .-- Its ingredients and its excesses .-- The satisfaction it obtains under the new regime .-- Abolition of legal incapacity and equality in the possession of rights.
-- Confiscation of collective action and equality in the deprivation of rights .-- Careers in the modern State .-- Equal right of all to offices and to promotion .-- Napoleon's distribution of employments .-- His staff of officials recruited from all classes and parties.
Now that the State has just made a new allotment of the burdens and duties which it imposes it must make a new assignment of the rights and benefits it confers.

Distributive justice, on both sides, and long before 1789, was defective, and, under the monarchy, exclusions had become as obnoxious as exemptions; all the more because, through a double iniquity, the ancient Regime in each group distinguished two other groups, one to which it granted every exemption, and the other which it made subject to every exclusion.

The reason is that, from the first, the king, in the formation and government of the kingdom, in order to secure the services, money, collaboration or connivance which he needed, was obliged to negotiate always with corporations, orders, provinces, seignories, the clergy, churches, monasteries, universities, parliaments, professional bodies or industrial guilds and families, that is to say with constituted powers, more or less difficult to bring under subjection and which, to be kept in subjection, stipulated conditions.
Hence, in France, so many different conditions: each distinct body had yielded through one or several distinct capitulations and possessed its own separate statute.

Hence, again, such diversely unequal conditions: the bodies, the best able to protect themselves, had, of course, defended themselves the best.