IV.—­The Prefect Absolute

Yet another institution which Napoleon gave to the Modern Regime in France is the Prefect of a Department.  Before 1870, when this prefect appointed the mayors, and when the council general held its session only fifteen days in the year, this Prefect was almost omnipotent; still, at the present day, his powers are immense, and his power remains preponderant.  He has the right to suspend the municipal council and the mayor, and to propose their dismissal to the head of the state.  Without resorting to this extremity, he holds them with a strong hand, and always uplifted over the commune, for he can veto the acts of the municipal police and of the road committee, annul the regulations of the mayor, and, through a skilful use of his prerogative, impose his own.  He holds in hand, removes, appoints or helps appoint, not alone the clerks in his office, but likewise every kind and degree of clerk who, outside his office, serves the commune or department, from the archivist down to and comprising the lowest employees, such as forest-guards of the department, policemen posted at the corner of a street, and stone-breakers on the public highway.

Such, in brief, is the system of local and general society in France from the Napoleonic time down to the date 1889, when these lines are written.  After the philosophic demolitions of the revolution, and the practical constructions of the consulate, national or general government is a vast despotic centralised machine, and local government could no longer be a small patrimony.

The departments and communes have become more or less vast lodging-houses, all built on the same plan and managed according to the same regulations, one as passable as the other, with apartments in them which, more or less good, are more or less dear, but at rates which, higher or lower, are fixed at a uniform tariff over the entire territory, so that the 36,000 communal buildings and the eighty-six department hotels are about equal, it making but little difference whether one lodges in the latter rather than in the former.  The permanent taxpayers of both sexes who have made these premises their home have not obtained recognition for what they are, invincibly and by nature, a syndicate of neighbours, an involuntary, obligatory association, in which physical solidarity engenders moral solidarity, a natural, limited society whose members own the building in common, and each possesses a property-right more or less great according to the contribution he makes to the expenses of the establishment.

Up to this time no room has yet been found, either in the law or in minds, for this very plain truth; its place is taken and occupied in advance by the two errors which in turn, or both at once, have led the legislator and opinion astray.

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THOMAS CARLYLE

Frederick the Great