Their community no longer belongs to them, but to the government; its chiefs are functionaries who depend on him, and not on it; it no longer issues its mandate; all its legal mandatories, all its representatives and directors, municipal or general councilors, mayors, sub-prefects or prefects, are imposed on it from above, by a foreign hand, and, willingly or not, instead of choosing them, it has to put up with them.
VI.

Local Elections under the First Consul.
Lists of notables .-- Senatus-consultes of the year X.
-- Liberal institution becomes a reigning instrument.
-- Mechanism of the system of appointments and candidatures.
-- Decree of 1806 and suppression of candidatures.
At the beginning, an effort was made to put in practice the constitutional principle proposed by Sieyes: Power in future, according the accepted formula, must come from above and confidence from below.

To this end, in the year IX, the assembled citizens appointed one-tenth of their number, about 500,000 communal notables, and these, likewise assembled, appointed also one-tenth of their number, about 50,000 departmental notables.

The government selected from this list the municipal councilors of each commune, and, from this second list, the general councilors of each department .-- The machine, however, is clumsy, difficult to set going, still more difficult to manage, and too unreliable in its operation.

According to the First Consul, it is an absurd system, "a childish piece of ideology; a great nation should not be organized in this way."[4115] At bottom,[4116] "he does not want notables accepted by the nation.