The sudden dismissal of the entire ruling staff, executive, or consultative, political, administrative, provincial, municipal, ecclesiastical, educational, military, judicial and financial, summon to take office all who covet it and who have a good opinion of themselves.

All previously existing conditions, birth, fortune, education, old family and all apprenticeships, customs and ways which retard and limit advancement, are abolished: There are no longer any guarantees or sponsors; all Frenchmen are eligible to all employments; all grades of the legal and social hierarchy are conferred by a more or less direct election, a suffrage becoming more and more popular, by a mere numerical majority.

Consequently, in all branches of the government under central or local authority and patronage, there is the installation of a new staff of officials.

The transposition which everywhere substitutes the old inferior to the old superior, is universal,[3319] "lawyers for judges, bourgeois for statesmen, former plebeians for former nobles, soldiers for officers, officers for generals, cures for bishops, vicars for cures, monks for vicars, stock-jobbers for financiers, self-taught persons for administrators, journalists for publicists, rhetoricians for legislators, and the poor for the rich." A sudden jump from the bottom to the top of the social ladder by a few, from the lowest to the highest rung, from the rank of sergeant to that of major-general, from the condition of a pettifogger or starving newspaper-hack to the possession of supreme authority, even to the effective exercise of omnipotence and dictatorship--such is the capital, positive, striking work of the Revolution.
At the same time, and as an after-effect, a revolution is going on in minds and the moral effect of the show is greater and more lasting than the events themselves.

The minds have been stirred to their very depths; stagnant passions and slumbering pretensions are aroused.