If sovereignty is not anterior to the people, these two ideas are at least collateral since it takes a sovereign to make a people. It is as impossible to imagine a human society, a people, without a sovereign, as a hive and a swarm of bees without a queen: for by virtue of the eternal laws of nature, the swarm exists either in this way or not at all. Society and sovereignty were thus born together; it is impossible to separate these two ideas. Picture to yourself an isolated man: there is, then, no question of laws or of government, since he is not quite fully a man and there is not yet any society. Put the man in contact with his fellows: from that moment you suppose a sovereign. The first man was king over his children;1 each isolated family was governed in the same way. But as soon as the families joined together, they needed a sovereign, and this sovereign made a people by giving them laws, since there is no society but by the sovereign. Everyone knows this famous verse:
The first who was king was a fortunate soldier.2
Perhaps nothing falser has ever been said; on the contrary, it must be said that: the first soldier was paid by a king.
There was a people, a civilization of some kind, and a sovereign as soon as men joined together. The word people is a relative term which has no meaning separate from the idea of sovereignty: for the idea of a people implies that of an aggregation around a common centre, and without sovereignty there can be no political cohesion or unity.
We must, therefore, exile to the world of fantasy the ideas of choice and deliberation in the establishment of society and sovereignty. This operation is the immediate work of nature or, to put it better, of its Author.
If men have rejected such simple and obvious ideas, they are to be pitied. Let us accustom ourselves to seeing in human society only the expression of the divine will. The more these false teachers have tried to isolate us and detach the branch from its stem, the more we must attach ourselves to it, on pain of desiccation and decay.
1 In observing that there can be no human association without some sort of domination, I do not intend to establish an exact parity between paternal authority and sovereign authority: everything has been said on this point. [cf. Filmer’s Patriarcha]
2 [Lefranc de Pompignan, Didon (act III, scene III); Maistre quotes Voltaire, who borrowed this line for his Mérope (act I, scene III).]