The towns of France at this period could neither establish an octroi on articles of consumption, nor levy a rate, nor mortgage, nor sell, nor sue, nor farm their property, nor administer that property, nor even employ their own surplus revenues, without the intervention of an Order in Council, made on the report of the Intendant. All their public works were executed in conformity to plans and estimates approved by the Council. These works were adjudged to contractors before the Intendant or his Sub-delegates, and were generally intrusted to the engineers or architects of the State. These facts will doubtless excite the surprise of those who suppose that the whole present condition of France is a novelty. But the Central Government interfered more directly in the municipal administration of the towns than even these rules would seem to indicate; its power was far more extended than its right to exercise it. I meet with the following passage in a circular instruction, addressed about the middle of the last century by a Comptroller-General to all the Intendants of the Kingdom: ‘You will pay particular attention to all that takes place in the municipal assemblies. You will take care to have a most exact report of everything done there and of all the resolutions taken, in order to transmit them to me forthwith, accompanied with your own opinion on the subject.’ In fact it may be seen, from the correspondence of the Intendant with his subordinate officers, that the Government had a finger in all the concerns of every town, the least as well as the greatest. The Government was always consulted--the Government had always a decided opinion on every point. It even regulated the public festivities, ordered public rejoicings, caused salutes to be fired, and houses to be illuminated. On one occasion I observe that a member of the burgher guard was fined twenty livres by the Intendant for having absented himself from a _Te Deum_. The officers of these municipal corporations had therefore arrived at a becoming sense of their own insignificance. ‘We most humbly supplicate you, Monseigneur’ (such was the style in which they addressed the King’s Intendant), ‘to grant us your good-will and protection. We will endeavour not to show ourselves unworthy of them by the submission we are ready to show to all the commands of your Greatness.’ ‘We have never resisted your will, Monseigneur,’ was the language of another body of these persons, who still assumed the pompous title of Peers of the City. Such was the preparation of the middle classes for government, and of the people for liberty.