On the other hand some of the chief inhabitants of parishes, and even men of rank, began at once to draw nearer to the peasantry, as soon as the peasantry had become a power in the State. A landed proprietor exercising a heritable jurisdiction over a village near Paris complained that the King’s Edict debarred him from taking part, even as a mere inhabitant, in the proceedings of the Parochial Assembly. Others consented, from mere public spirit, as they said, to accept even the office of Syndic. It was too late: but as the members of the higher classes of society in France thus began to approach the rural population and sought to combine with the people, the people drew back into the isolation to which it had been condemned and maintained that position. Some parochial assemblies refused to allow the Seigneur of the place to take his seat among them; others practised every kind of trick to evade the reception of persons as low-born as themselves, but who were rich. ‘We are informed,’ said the Provincial Assembly of Lower Normandy, ‘that several municipal bodies have refused to receive among their members landowners not being noble and not domiciled in the parish, though these persons have an undoubted right to sit in such meetings. Some other bodies have even refused to admit farmers not having any property in land in the parish.’ Thus then the whole reform of these secondary enactments was already novel, obscure, and conflicting before the principal laws affecting the government of the State had yet been touched at all. But all that was still untouched was already shaken, and it could barely be said that any law was in existence which had not already been threatened with abolition or a speedy change by the Central Government itself. This sudden and comprehensive renovation of all the laws and all the administrative habits of France, which preceded the political Revolution of 1789, is a thing scarcely thought of at the present time, yet it was one of the severest perturbations which ever occurred in the history of a great people. This first revolution exercised a prodigious influence on the Revolution which was about to succeed it, and caused the latter to be an event different from all the events of the same kind which had ever till then happened in the world and from those which have happened since.[84]