The institutions given to France by the National Assembly of 1789 and those given to it in the Consulate exhibited a direct contrast seldom found outside the region of abstract terms. Local customs, survivals of earlier law, such as soften the difference between England and the various democracies of the United States, had no place in the sharp-cut types in which the political order of France was recast in 1791 and 1799. The Constituent Assembly had cleared the field before it began to reconstruct. Its reconstruction was based upon the Rights of Man, identified with the principle of local self-government by popular election. It deduced a system of communal administration so completely independent that France was described by foreign critics as partitioned into 40,000 republics; and the criticism was justified when, in 1793, it was found necessary to create a new central Government, and to send commissioners from the capital into the provinces. In the Constitution of 1791, judges, bishops, officers of the National Guard, were all alike subjected to popular election; the Minister of War could scarcely move a regiment from one village to another without the leave of the mayor of the commune. In the Constitution of 1799 all authority was derived from the head of the State. A system of centralisation came into force with which France under her kings had nothing to compare. All that had once served as a check upon monarchical power, the legal Parliaments, the Provincial Estates of Brittany and Languedoc, the rights of lay and ecclesiastical corporations, had vanished away. In the place of the motley of privileges that had tempered the Bourbon monarchy, in the place of the popular Assemblies of the Revolution, there sprang up a series of magistracies as regular and as absolute as the orders of military rank. [83] Where, under the Constitution of 1791, a body of local representatives had met to conduct the business of the Department, there was now a Préfet, appointed by the First Consul, absolute, like the First Consul himself, and assisted only by the advice of a nominated council, which met for one fortnight in the year. In subordination to the Préfet, an officer and similar council transacted the local business of the Arrondissement. Even the 40,000 Maires with their communal councils were all appointed directly or indirectly by the Chief of the State. There existed in France no authority that could repair a village bridge, or light the streets of a town, but such as owed its appointment to the central Government. Nor was the power of the First Consul limited to the administration. With the exception of the lowest and the highest members of the judicature, he nominated all judges, and transferred them at his pleasure to inferior or superior posts.