Four times a year a bundle of elaborately drawn papers, prepared by the prefecture, are submitted to these innately blind paralytics, large sheets divided into columns from top to bottom, with tabular headings from right to left, and covered with printed texts and figures in writing - details of receipts and expenses, general centimes, special centimes, obligatory centimes, optional centimes, ordinary centimes, extra centimes, with their sources and employment;preliminary budget, final budget, corrected budget, along with legal references, regulations, and decisions bearing on each article. In short, a methodical table as specific as possible and highly instructive to a jurist or accountant, but perfect jargon to peasants, most of whom can scarcely write their name and who, on Sundays, are seen standing before the advertisement board[26] trying to spell out the Journal Officiel, whose abstract phrases, beyond their reach, pass over their heads in aerial and transient flight, like some confused rustling of vague and unknown forms. To guide them in political life, much more difficult than in private life, they require a similar guide to the one they take in the difficult matters of their individual life, a legal or business adviser, one that is qualified and competent, able to understand the prefecture documents, sitting alongside of them to explain their budget, rights and limits of their rights, the financial resources, legal expedients, and consequences of a law; one who can arrange their debates, make up their accounts, watch daily files of bills, attend to their business at the county town, throughout the entire series of legal formalities and attendance on the bureaus, - in short, some trusty person, familiar with technicalities, who they might choose to select. - Such a person was found in Savoy, before the annexation to France, a notary or lawyer who, practicing in the neighborhood or at the principal town, and with five or six communes for clients, visited them in turn, helped them with his knowledge and intelligence, attended their meetings and, besides, served them as scribe, like the present secretary of the mayoralty, for about the same pay, amounting in all to about the same total of fees or salaries.[27] - At the present time, there is nobody in the municipal council to advise and give information to its members; the schoolmaster is their secretary, and he cannot be, and should not be, other than a scribe. He reads in a monotonous tone of voice the long financial enigma which French public book-keeping, too perfect, offers to their divination, and which nobody, save one who is educated to it, can clearly comprehend until after weeks of study.
They listen all agog. Some, adjusting their spectacles, try to pick out among so many articles the one they want, the amount of taxes they have to pay. The sum is too large, the assessments are excessive; it is important that the number of additional centimes should be reduced, and therefore that less money should be expended. Hence, if there is any special item of expense which can be got rid of by a refusal, they set it aside by voting No, until some new law or decree from above obliges them to say Yes. But, as things go, nearly all the expenses designated on the paper are obligatory; willingly or not, these must be met, and there is no way to pay them outside of the additional centimes; however numerous these are, vote them they must and sanction the centimes inscribed. They accordingly affix their signatures, not with trust but with mistrust, with resignation, and out of pure necessity. Abandoned to their natural ignorance, the twenty-seven thousand petty municipal councilors of the country are no more passive, more inert, more constrained than ever; deprived of the light which, formerly, the choice of the prefect or a restricted suffrage could still throw into the darkness around them, there remains to them only one safe tutor or conductor; and this final guide is the official of the bureaus, especially this or that old, permanent chief, or under clerk, who is perfectly familiar with his files of papers. With about four hundred municipal councils to lead, one may imagine what he will do with them: nothing except to drive them like a flock of sheep into a pen of printed regulations, or urge them on mechanically, in lots, according to his instructions, he himself being as automatic and as much in a rut as they are.
VI. The larger Communes.
Effects of the law on the urban commune. - Disproportion between the administrative capacity of its elected representatives and the work imposed on them. - Lack of a special and permanent manager. - The municipal council and the mayor. - The general council and the intermediary committee. - The prefect. - His dominant rule. - His obligatory concessions. - His principal aim. - Bargains between the central authority and the local Jacobins. - Effect on this on local government, on the officials, and in local finances.
Let us now look at the other side of the scale, on the side of the large urban communes, of which there are 223, with above 10,000inhabitants, 90 of these above 20,000 inhabitants, 9 of the latter above 100,000 inhabitants, and Paris, which has 2,300,000.[28] We see at the first glance cast upon an average specimen of these human anthills, a town containing from 40,000 to 50,000 souls, how vast and complex the collective undertaking becomes, how many principal and accessory services the communal society must co-ordinate and unite together in order to secure to its members the advantages of public roads and insure their protection against spreading calamities: