In the rearrangement of powers consequent to the eighteenth of Brumaire and the adoption of the constitution of the year VIII, the able men of the republic had been provided for, partly in lucrative offices connected with administration, partly in the tribunate and the legislature. The greatest were in the former, and their acknowledged leader was Benjamin Constant, the friend of Mme. de Staël. They represented in a measure the courage and the idealism of the Revolution, but they were in a false position, and showed neither wisdom nor prudence. Accordingly, they made a serious tactical blunder, and fixed upon certain doubtful paragraphs introductory to the civil code in order to manifest their discontent with Bonaparte's self-assertion. They resisted not only the reintroduction of such antiquated barbarisms as the confiscation by the state of property belonging to those who for any reason were deprived of their civil rights, and of the goods of unnaturalized strangers who died within its limits, but attacked likewise provisions of the judicial and financial statutes which were wisely conceived, and were of great utility to the country, some of them being in part their own work. As they talked, their friends in the legislature voted. By a provision of the constitution both these assemblies were to be continuous, one fifth of the old members retiring every year; but a method of designating the class to be retired first, and of choosing their successors, was not presented. When the appointed time for this change arrived, the First Consul was so determined to be rid of the troublesome republicans in the tribunate that he even contemplated expelling them by force, or abolishing the body as a whole. "There are twelve or fifteen metaphysicians there," he had said on one occasion, "fit only to be drowned. It is a kind of vermin which I have in my clothes, but I shall not allow myself to be attacked like Louis XVI. No, I shall not endure it." However, a less violent method was found by Cambacérès, and adopted. The senate had been so constituted as to represent the political indifference which made possible Bonaparte's political career, and from the beginning it was a subservient tool. On several occasions--as, for instance, when about to admit Daunou to their number--the members had been made to feel the terrors of its creator's wrath. The constitution and its interpretation being their special charge, they were now ordered as a constitutional measure to select not merely the names of both the tribunes and legislators who should leave, but also those of their successors. Needless to say that all the ardent and outspoken men like Daunou, Constant, and Chénier went out. The only man of importance among those chosen to the tribunate was Carnot. Fifteen generals or superior officers and twenty-five officials took seats in the legislature.