Of Particular Sovereignties and Nations
The same power which decreed social order and sovereignty has also decreed different modifications of sovereignty according to the differing character of nations.
Nations are born and die like individuals; nations have fathers, in the literal sense, and founders ordinarily more famous than their fathers, although the greatest merit of these founders is to penetrate the character of the infant-people and place it in circumstances wherein it may most fully develop its powers.
Nations have a general soul and a true moral unity which makes them what they are. This unity is especially manifested through language.
The Creator has marked out over the globe the limits of nations, and St. Paul has spoken philosophically to the Athenians when he said to them: And [He] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation (Acts, XVII, 26). These bounds are visible, and we always see each people tending to fill completely one of the enclosed spaces between these bounds. Sometimes invincible circumstances hurl two nations into one another and force them to mingle: then their constituent principles interpenetrate, and the result is a hybrid nation which may be more or less powerful and famous than if it were of pure stock.
But several national precepts thrown into the same receptacle may cause mutual harm. The seeds are squeezed and smothered; the men who compose them, condemned to a certain moral and political mediocrity, will never attract the eyes of the world despite a great number of individual merits, until a great jolt, starting one of these seeds germinating, allows it to engulf the others and assimilate them to its own substance. Italiam! Italiam!1
Sometimes one nation subsists amid a much more numerous one, refusing to amalgamate because there is not enough affinity between them, and retains its moral unity. Then, if some extraordinary event comes to disorganize the dominant nation, or prompts a great movement, we will be very surprised to see the other resist the general impetus and produce a contrary movement. Hence the miracle of the Vendée. The other malcontents of the kingdom, though in much greater numbers, could not have accomplished anything of this kind, because these discontented men are only men, whereas the Vendée is a nation. Salvation can even come from this, for the soul that presides over these miraculous efforts, like all active powers, has an expansive force that makes it tend constantly to enlarge, so that it can, in gradually assimilating what resembles itself and pressing out the rest, finally acquire enough supremacy to achieve a prodigy. Sometimes the national unity is strongly pronounced in a very small tribe; as it cannot have a language of its own, to console itself it appropriates that of its neighbours by an accent and particular forms. Its virtues are its own, its vices are its own; in order not to have the ridiculous ones of others, it makes them its own; without physical strength, it will make itself known. Tormented by the need to act, it will be conqueror in its own way. Nature, by one of those contrasts that it loves, will place it, playfully, beside frivolous or apathetic peoples who will make it noticed from afar. Its brigandage will be cited in the realm of opinion; at last, it will make its mark, it will be cited, it will succeed in putting itself in the balance with great names, and it will be said: I cannot decide between Geneva and Rome.2
When we speak of the spirit of a nation, the expression is not as metaphorical as we think.
From the differing character of nations arises the different modifications of governments. We can say that each has its own character, for even those that belong to the same class and bear the same name present different shades to the eye of the observer.
The same laws cannot suit different provinces, which have different customs, live in opposite climates, and cannot bear the same form of government…
The general objects of every good institution must be modified in each country by the relationships which spring as much from the local situation as from the character of the inhabitants; and it is on the basis of these relationships that we must assign to each people a particular system of institutions which is the best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it is intended…
There is only one good government possible in a state: and as a thousand events can change the relations of a people, not only can different governments be good for different peoples, but for the same people in different times! …
There has always been much discussion about the best form of government, without considering that each of them is the best in some cases, and the worst in others! …
We must not, therefore, believe that “all forms of government are appropriate to all countries; liberty, for example, not being the fruit of all climates, is not within the grasp of all peoples.” The more we meditate on this principle established by Montesquieu, the more one senses its truth. The more we challenge it, the more this leads to establishing it by new proofs…
When, therefore, we ask what the best government is absolutely, we formulate a question as insoluble as it is indeterminate; or, if you will, it has as many good solutions as there are possible combinations in the absolute and relative positions of peoples.
From these certain principles arises a consequence which is no less certain: that the social contract is a chimera. For if there are as many different governments as there are different peoples; if the forms of these governments are forcibly prescribed by the power which has given to each nation this or that moral, physical, geographical, and economic composition, it is no longer permissible to speak of a pact. Each mode of sovereignty is the immediate result of the Creator’s will, like sovereignty in general. For one nation, despotism is as natural and legitimate as democracy is for another,3 and if a man established for himself these unshakable principles4 in a book expressly written to establish that “one must always go back to a convention”,5 if he wrote in one chapter that “man was born free,”6 and in another that “liberty, not being a fruit of all climates, is not made for all peoples”,7 this man would be, without contradiction, one of the most ridiculous in the world.
No nation having been able to give itself the character and composition that render it fit for such and such a government, all have agreed not only to believe this truth abstractly, but to believe that the divinity intervened directly in the establishment of their particular sovereignty.
The Holy Scriptures show us the first king of the chosen people, elected and crowned by an immediate intervention of the divinity;8 the annals of all the nations of the world assign the same origin to their particular governments. Only the names are changed. All of them, after having traced the succession of their princes to a more or less remote period, finally arrive at those mythological times whose true history would instruct us far better than any other. All of them show us the cradle of sovereignty surrounded by miracles; always divinity intervenes in the foundation of empires; always the first sovereign, at least, is a favourite of Heaven: he receives the sceptre from the hands of the divinity. The divinity communicates with him, inspires him, engraves on his forehead the sign of its power, and the laws that he dictates to his fellow men are only the fruit of his celestial communications.
These are fables, it will be said. In truth, I do not know anything about that, but the fables of all peoples, even modern peoples, enfold many realities. The Holy Ampulla,9 for example, is only a hieroglyph; one only need know how to read. The power of healing attributed to certain princes or certain dynasties of princes is also due to this universal dogma of the divine origin of sovereignty. Let us not be surprised, then, that the ancient founders have spoken so much of God. They felt that they had no right to speak in their own name. It is of them, moreover, that it was necessary to say without exaggerating “est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus ipso [“there is a god within us, when he stirs, we become inflamed” Ovid, Fasti, VI, lines 5–6]”.10 The philosophers of this age have complained much of the alliance between the empire and the priesthood, but the wise observer cannot refrain from admiring the obstinacy of men in intertwining these two things; the further back we go towards antiquity, the more religious legislation we find. All that nations relate to us about their origin proves that they are agreed in regarding sovereignty as divine in its essence: otherwise they would have told quite different tales. They never speak to us of a primordial contract, of voluntary association, of popular deliberation. No historian cites the primary assemblies of Memphis or Babylon. It is a true folly to imagine that universal prejudice is the work of sovereigns. A particular interest may well abuse the general belief, but it cannot create it. If that of which I speak had not been based on the prior assent of peoples, not only could it not have been forcibly adopted, but the sovereigns could not have imagined such a fraud. In general, every universal idea is natural.
1 <The keen vision of one J. de Maistre is not required to recognize with him the disadvantages of the excessive fragmentation of Italy. But the constant adversary of the Revolution, the honest and Christian politician, would with all his energy have disapproved of the methods of a Cavour and a Garibaldi. There was a way to unite the forces and resources of the brilliant peninsula while respecting its rights.> [Count Camillo Benso di Cavour—described by Benjamin Disraeli as “utterly unscrupulous”—sometime Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, convinced King Charles Albert to revert to constitutional monarchy and to go to war against Austria, leading to the king’s abdication; he also exacerbated the waning influence of the Catholic Church by ordering the closure of half of the monastic houses within Sardinian territories. Garibaldi, general, popular hero, and intense anticlerical and social reformer, was privately supported and publicly opposed by Cavour in his expedition against Sicily, later winning Naples and ostensibly leading a private expedition against the Papal States, but with the secret complicity of the Italian government.]
2 [For Maistre, in the world-historical struggle between the forces of secularism and those of religion, Geneva and Rome stand for the latter; yet Protestant Geneva is only nominally on the same side as Catholic Rome. In his Oeuvres, Maistre characterizes Protestantism as “le sans-cullottisme de la religion”, and in Considerations on France, p. 73, states that Protestantism and the French Revolution partake of a common source.]
3 Will it be said that, even in this hypothesis, there is always a pact according to which each contracting party is bound to maintain the government as it is? In this case, for despotism or absolute monarchy, the pact will be precisely that which Rousseau ridicules at the end of his pitiful chapter on slavery. “I make with you a convention entirely at your expense and entirely for my benefit, that I will observe so long as I please, and that you will observe so long as I please.” (Contrat social, 1. I, ch. IV)
4 Contrat social, 1. I, ch, IX, 11; 1. III, ch. I, II, III.
5 Contrat social, 1. I, ch. V.
6 Contrat social, 1. I, ch. I.
7 Contrat social, 1. III, ch. VIII.
8 [1 Kings 10:1]
9 [See note 46, p. 25, in the Essay on the Generative Principle.]
10 [The transcription is wrong—the actual line is est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.]