All these people, who have been transported far outside of civic relationships by historic right, are brought back, in 1789, by philosophic right. After the declarations of the Constituent Assembly, there are no longer in France either Bretons, Provençals, Burgundians or Alsatians, Catholics, Protestants or Israelites, nobles or plebeians, bourgeois or rurals, but simply Frenchmen, * all with the one title of citizens, * all endowed with the same civil, religious and political rights, * all equal before the State, * all introduced by law into every career, collectively, on an equal footing and without fear or favor from anybody; * all free to follow this out to the end without distinction of rank, birth, faith or fortune; * all, if they are good runners, to receive the highest prizes at the end of the race, any office or rank, especially the leading honors and positions which, thus far reserved to a class or coterie, had not been allowed previously to the great multitude. Henceforth, all Frenchmen, in theory, enjoy rights in common; unfortunately, this is only the theory. In reality, in all state relationships (dans la cité), the new-comers appropriate to themselves the offices, the pretensions, and more than the privileges of their predecessors; the latter, consisting of large and small land-owners, gentlemen, parliamentarians, officials, ecclesiastics, notables of every kind and degree, are immediately deprived of the rights of man. Surrendered to rural jacqueries and to town mobs, they undergo, first, the neglect and, next, the hostility of the State: the public gendarme has ceased to protect them and refuses his services; afterwards, on becoming a Jacobin, he declares himself their enemy, treats them as enemies, plunders them, imprisons them, murders them, expels or transports them, inflicts on them civil death, and shoots them if they dare return; he deprives their friends or kindred who remain in France of their civil rights; he deprives the nobles or the ennobled of their quality as Frenchmen, and compels them to naturalize themselves afresh according to prescribed formalities; he renews against the Catholics the interdictions, persecutions and brutalities which the old government had practiced against the Calvinist minority.--Thus, in 1799 as in 1789, there are two classes of Frenchmen, two different varieties of men, the first one superior, installed in the civic fold, and the second, inferior and excluded from it; only, in 1799, the greatest inequality consigned the inferior and excluded class to a still lower, more remote, and much worse condition.