A modern France could not arise until venal officeholding was replaced by impersonal, merit-based bureaucracy. But the regime could not attack those rights frontally without delegitimating the entire system of law on which its own power rested. The rule of law, an important component of a modern political system, had developed early on in France, well before the rise of accountable political institutions and capitalism. As a result, it protected not a modern political system and a liberal market economy but rather traditional social privilege and an inefficient state-directed economic system.
