- Formerly, among all classes and in
all the provinces, there were a large number of families that had
taken root on the spot, living there a hundred years and more. Not
only among the nobles, but among the bourgeoisie and the Third-Estate,
the heir of any enterprise was expected to continue his calling. This
was so with the seignorial chateau and extensive domain, as with the
bourgeois dwelling and patrimonial office, the humble rural domain,
farm, shop and factory, all were transmitted intact from one
generation to another.[85] Great or small, the individual was not
exclusively interested in himself; his thoughts also traveled forward
to the future and back to the past, on the side of ancestors and on
that of descendants, along the endless chain of which his own life was
but a link; he possessed traditions, he felt bound to set examples.
Under this twofold title, his domestic authority was uncontested;[86]
his household and all his employees followed his instructions without
swerving and without resistance. When, by virtue of this domestic
discipline, a family had maintained itself upright and respected on
the same spot for a century, it could easily advance a degree; it
could introduce one of its members into the upper class, pass from the
plow or trade to petty offices, and from these to the higher ones and
to parliamentary dignities, from the four thousand posts that ennoble
to the legalized nobility, from the lately made nobles to the old
nobility.
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