At once, according to their custom, the jurists put themselves at the service of the new reign. And no dogma was better suited their to authoritative instinct; no axiom furnished them so convenient a fulcrum on which to set up and turn their logical wheel. This wheel, which they had latterly managed with care and caution under the ancient Régime, had suddenly in their hands turned with frightful speed and effect in order to convert the rigid, universal, and applied laws, the intermittent processes, the theoretical pretensions, and the worst precedents of the monarchy into practice. This meant * the use of extraordinary commissions, * accusations of lésé majesté, * the suppression of legal formalities, * the persecution of religious beliefs and of personal opinions, * the right of condemning publications and of coercing thought, * the right of instruction and education, * the rights of pre-emption, of requisition, of confiscation, and of proscription, in short, pure and perfect arbitrariness. The result is visible in the deeds of Treilhard, of Berlier, of Merlin de Douai, of Cambacérès, in those of the Constituant and Legislative Assemblies, in the Convention, under the Directory, in their Jacobin zeal or hypocrisy, in their talent for combining despotic tradition with tyrannical innovation, in their professional skill in fabricating on all occasions a snare of plausible arguments with which to properly strangle the individual, their adversary, to the profit of the State, their eternal master.