Promotion, under the old monarchy, was slow, and in the first place, because the monarchy was old and because in every order which is not new each new generation finds that every office is filled, and next, because, in this old order founded on tradition and heredity, future vacancies were supplied long beforehand. The great social staircase led to several stories ; each man could ascend every step of his own flight, but he could not mount above it; the landing reached, he found closed doors and nearly insurmountable barriers. The story above was reserved to its own inhabitants; they occupied it now and were still to occupy it in time to come; the inevitable successors of the titular possessor were seen around him on each step, his equals, peers and neighbors, one or the other often designated by name as his legal heir, the purchaser of his survivorship. In those days, not only was the individual himself considered, his merits and his services, but likewise his family and ancestry, his state and condition, the society he entered into, the "salon" he maintained, his fortune and his followers; these antecedents and surroundings composed the quality of the personage; without this requisite quality, he could not go beyond the landing-place. Strictly speaking, a personage born on the upper steps of one story might sometimes succeed in mounting the lowest steps of the next story, but there he stopped. In short, it was always considered by those on the lower story that the upper story was inaccessible and, moreover, uninhabitable.
Accordingly, most of the public offices, in the finances, in the administration, in the judiciary, in the parliaments, in the army, at court, were private property as is now the case with the places of advocates, notaries and brokers; they had to be bought to enable one to follow these pursuits, and were very dear; one had to possess a large capital and be content beforehand to derive only a mediocre revenue from it, 10, 5 and sometimes 3 % on the purchase-money.[11]
The place once acquired, especially if an important one, involved official parade, receptions, an open table, a large annual outlay;[12]
it often ran the purchaser in debt ; he knew that his acquisition would bring him more consideration than crowns. On the other hand, to obtain possession of it, he had to secure the good-will of the body of which he became a member, or of the patron who bestowed the office.
That is to say, he must be regarded by his future colleagues as acceptable, or by the patron as a guest, invited, and feasible friend, in other words, provide sponsors for himself, furnish guarantees, prove that he was well-off and well-educated, that his ways and manners qualified him for the post, and that, in the society he was about to enter, he would not turn out unsuitable. To maintain one's self in office at court one was obliged to possess the tone of Versailles, quite different from that of Paris and the provinces.[13]
To maintain one's self in a high parliamentary position, one was expected to possess local alliances, moral authority, the traditions and deportment handed down from father to son in the old magistrate families, and which a mere advocate, an ordinary pleader, could not arrive at.[14] In short, on this staircase, each distinct story imposed on its inmates a sort of distinct costume, more or less costly, embroidered and gilded, I mean a sum of outward and inward habits and connections, all obligatory and indispensable, comprising title, particle and name: the announcement of any bourgeois name by a lackey in the ante-chamber would be considered a discord;consequently, one had one's self ennobled in the current coin, or assumed a noble name gratis. Caron, son of a watchmaker, became Beaumarchais; Nicolas, a foundling, called himself M. de Champfort;Danton, in public documents, signed himself d'Anton; in the same way, a man without a dress-coat hires or borrows one, no matter how, on going out to dine; all this was tolerated and accepted as a sign of good behavior and of final conformity with custom, as in testimony of respect for the usages of good society.
Through this visible separation of stories, people had acquired the habit of remaining in the condition in which they were placed; they were not irritated by being obliged to stay in it ; the soldier who enlisted did not aspire to become an officer; the young officer of the lower noblesse and of small means did not aspire to the post of colonel or lieutenant-general; a limited perspective kept hopes and the imagination from fruitlessly launching forth into a boundless future: ambition, humbled to the ground at the start, walked instead of flying; it recognized at the outset that the summits were beyond its reach; to be able to mount upward one or two steps was enough. -In general, a man obtained promotion on the spot, in his town, corporation or parliament. The assistant-counselor who pleaded his first case in the court of Grenoble or of Rennes calculated that, in twenty years, he would become first judge at Grenoble or at Rennes, rest twenty years or more in office, and he aimed at nothing better.
Alongside of the counselor of a (court) presidency, or of an "election" magistrate, of a clerk in the salt-tax bureau, or in the frontier custom-house, or in the bureau of "rivers and forests,"alongside of a clerk in the treasury or ministry of foreign affairs, or of a lawyer or prosecuting attorney, there was always some son, son-in-law or nephew, fitted by domestic training, by a technical apprenticeship, by moral adaptation, not only to perform the duties of the office, but to be contented in it, pretend to nothing beyond it, not to look above himself with regret or envy, satisfied with the society around him, and feel, moreover, that elsewhere he would be out of his element and uncomfortable.