In Germany the territorial formula of cuius regio, eius religio applied that is, in each petty state the population had to conform to the religion of the ruler.
More than 20 years on, however, these face-offs seem less like the Lincoln-Douglas debates than like the petty squabbling of a small population of New York intellectuals.
But one is confronted by a civilian population full of petty selfishness, nastiness and ignorance, while patting you on the back for your service.
In court filings, he opposed reducing the prison population by making petty theft, vehicle theft and forgery punishable by jail instead of prison.
In the Sahel region of Mauritania, a traditional subsistence economy composed of livestock raising, agriculture, crafts, and petty trading supports most of the population.
Responding to the Tory challenge, Labour increased sentence lengths and sent more petty criminals to jail, swelling the prison population by a third to 83,000.At the same time, the definition of crime has expanded.
The main economic activity among participants from the general population was subsistence farming and petty trade.
"Rather than addressing narrow interests and petty concerns, politicians should appeal to the general population and the greater good," says Traag.
Several of the FN mayors elected in 2014, notably David Rachline in Fréjus and Robert Ménard in Beziers, have pursued a campaign of petty harassment and denigration of their local Muslim populations.
While black residents made up roughly 67percentt of Ferguson's population, police seemed to only enforce certain petty municipal laws against African-Americans.
