58 Chapter III
PROBLEMS OF ADMINISTRATION, RECRUITMENT,
TAXATION, AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESSEither segregation or assimilation had its difficulties. So far as privileged and he-
reditary aristocracy was a problem, the use of homeopathic methods, the infusion
of new doses of privileged and hereditary aristocrats to allay the obstinacy of the
old ones, was obviously no permanent solution. It stored up more hereditary aris-
tocracy for the future. It maintained the aristocratic scheme of values, the admira-
tion for aristocratic status as the proper goal of ambition, as the animating spirit
or incentive throughout all walks of life. To keep movement into the aristocracy
relatively open had in a certain sense a democratizing effect upon the aristocracy
and upon society at large. It had, also, and perhaps more so, an aristocratizing ef-
fect upon the middle class and upon all society, for the successful merchant or
lawyer could not rest easy merely with a comfortable income or the satisfactions of
occupational status and what I have called functional rank, but felt obliged also to
acquire a general social recognition, which would become hereditary for his chil-
dren, and enable him or his children to occupy a secure vantage point from which
to look downward as well as up.
Many difficulties were thus created. One was the administrative inefficiency or
embarrassment that followed, in complex civilian or military organizations, when
social rank and functional rank failed to correspond. It was hard for a man of high
functional rank to secure respect or obedience from a subordinate whose social
rank surpassed his own. A serious study of the history of army rank, that is, of the
ordering of generals, colonels, majors, captains, etc., might throw light upon this
curious subject. Louis XIV had systematized such purely functional rank in the
French army, and had favored promotion by seniority or merit rather than by social
class. The indignant Duke of Saint- Simon (who had himself failed of promotion
to general), complained that in this way all men in the service were thrown into “a
complete equality,” with seigneurs mixed “in a crowd of officers of every kind,” and
with a gradual “forgetting by everybody, and in everybody, of all difference of per-
son or origin,” so that everyone’s career came to depend “on the minister or even
on his clerks.”^28 To the aristocratic political school, which held that hereditary
nobility was the bulwark against despotism, it seemed that by such practices a king
might turn army officers, and indeed all his subordinates, into his tools or crea-
tures. But with the aristocratic resurgence after Louis XIVs death, it was the op-
posite problem that prevailed. The progressive discrimination against bourgeois of-
ficers caused discontent among the bourgeoisie, and probably also, by reducing the
competition between noble and bourgeois, and narrowing the field from which
commissioned ranks were recruited, led to a loss of professional competence.
The same problem existed in civilian branches of government. In some coun-
tries, notably in Prussia and Russia, civil servants were assigned an assimilated
military rank, or put in a stated order of social precedence. Even Lenin, much later,
it may be recalled, was the son of a middle- class inspector of schools, who enjoyed
28 Quoted by E. Boutaric, Institutions militaires de la France avant les armées permanentes (Paris,
1863), 428.