to 1750 the Estates-General was never convoked. The
centralization of political power was complete. 'The
State! I am the State.' These famous words imputed to
Louis XIV expressed no vain boast of royal power. Speaking
politically, France was a pyramid. At the apex was the
Bourbon sovereign. In him all lines of authority converged.
Subordinate to him in authority, and dominated by him
when he willed it, were various appointive councils,
among them the Council of State and the so-called Parliament
of Paris, which was not a parliament at all, but a semi-
judicial body entrusted with the function of registering
the royal decrees. Below these in the hierarchy of
officialdom came the intendants of the various provinces
--forty or more of them. Loyal agents of the crown were
these intendants. They saw to it that no royal mandate
ever went unheeded in any part of the king's domain.
These forty intendants were the men who really bridged
the great administrative gulf which lay between the royal
court and the people. They were the most conspicuous,
the most important, and the most characteristic officials
of the old regime. Without them the royal authority would
have tumbled over by its own sheer top-heaviness. They
were the eyes and ears of the monarchy; they provided
the monarch with fourscore eager hands to work his
sovereign will. The intendants, in turn, had their
underlings, known as the sub-delegates, who held the
peasantry in leash. Thus it was that the administration,
like a pyramid, broadened towards its base, and the whole
structure rested upon the third estate, or rank and file
of the people. Such was the position, the power, and