It can be said, in general, that all men are born for monarchy. This government is the oldest and the most universal.1 Before the time of Theseus, there was no question of a republic in the world; democracy especially was so rare and so fleeting that it is permissible to ignore it. Monarchical government is so natural that men identify it with sovereignty without realizing it; they seem to be tacitly agreed that there is no true sovereign wherever there is no king. I have given some examples which it would be easy to multiply.
This observation is especially striking in all that has been said for or against the question which forms the subject of the first book of this work. Opponents of divine origin always rail against kings and speak only of kings. They do not want to believe that the authority of kings comes from God; but it is not a question of royalty in particular: it is a question of sovereignty in general. Yes, all sovereignty comes from God; in whatever form it exists, it is not the work of man. It is one, absolute, and inviolate by its nature. Why, then, is it a question of royalty, as if the inconveniences relied upon to oppose this system are not the same in every kind of government? This is because, once again, monarchy is the natural government, and is confounded with sovereignty in ordinary discourse by disregarding other governments, just as the exception is neglected by stating the general rule.
I shall observe on this subject that the vulgar division of governments into three species—monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic—rests entirely upon a Greek prejudice that seized upon the schools in the Renaissance, and which we have not figured out how to undo. The Greeks always saw the whole world in Greece; and as the three kinds of government balanced each other well enough in this country, the statesmen of this nation imagined the general division of which I speak. But if we want to be exact, rigorous logic does not enable us to establish a genre on an exception: and, to speak with precision, we should say: “Men in general are ruled by kings. However, we see nations where sovereignty belongs to many, and these governments can call themselves aristocracy or democracy according to the number of persons who form the sovereign.”
Men must always be reminded of history, which is the first master in politics, or rather, the only one. When we say that man is born for liberty, we utter a phrase devoid of sense.
If a being of a higher order took up the natural history of man, certainly it is in the history of facts that he would look for instruction. Once he knows what man is, and what he has always been, what he does and what he has always done, he would write; and no doubt he would reject as madness the idea that man is not what he ought to be and that his state is contrary to the laws of creation. The mere enunciation of this proposition is sufficient to refute it.
History is experimental politics, that is to say, the only good politics; and just as in physics a hundred volumes of speculative theories disappear before a single experiment, so in political science no system can be admitted if it is not the more or less probable corollary of well-attested facts.
If one asks what the government most natural to man is, history is there to respond: it is monarchy.
This government has its disadvantages, no doubt, like all others; but all the declamations that fill modern books on these kinds of abuses are pitiful. It is pride that begets them, not reason. As soon as it is rigorously demonstrated that peoples are not all made for the same government, that each nation has its own which is best for it; above all, that “freedom […] is not within the grasp of all peoples, and the more we meditate on this principle established by Montesquieu, the more we feel its truth,”2 we no longer understand what is meant by dissertations on the vices of monarchical government. If their aim is to make these abuses more vividly felt by the unfortunates who are destined to endure them, this is a most barbarous pastime; if it is to induce them to revolt against a government made for them, it is an unspeakable crime.
But the subjects of monarchies are not reduced to saving themselves from despair by philosophical meditations; they have something better to do, which is to suffuse themselves with the excellence of this government, and to learn to envy nothing of the others.
Rousseau, who throughout his life has not been able to forgive God for not having made him born a duke and a peer, has shown much anger against a government that is based on distinctions. He complains chiefly of hereditary succession which exposes peoples “to risk having children, monsters, and imbeciles for rulers to avoid having to dispute over the choice of good kings.”3
We have no need to answer this chambermaid’s objection, but it is useful to observe how infatuated this man was with his own false ideas of human action. “When one king dies,” he said, “another is needed; elections leave dangerous intervals; they are stormy … intrigue and corruption are introduced. It is difficult for one to whom the state has been sold not to sell it in turn, etc… What has been done to prevent these evils? Crowns have been made hereditary in some families, etc.”
Would it not be said that all monarchies were at first elective, and that nations, considering the infinite disadvantages of this government, afterwards decided in their wisdom on hereditary monarchy?
We know how this supposition accords with history; but this not the point. What is important to repeat is that no people ever gave themselves a government; that every idea of convention and deliberation, and that all sovereignty is a creation, is chimerical.
Certain nations are destined for, perhaps condemned to elective monarchy: Poland, for example, was subject to this form of sovereignty. It made an effort in 1791 to change its constitution for the better. See what this produced: we could have predicted the outcome without fail. The nation was too much in agreement; there was too much reasoning, too much prudence, too much philosophy in this great enterprise; the nobility, by a generous devotion, renounced its right to the crown. The third estate entered into the administration; the people were relieved, they acquired rights without insurrection; the immense majority of the nation, and even of the nobility, gave themselves over to the new project; a humane and philosophical king supported it with all his influence; the crown was fixed in an illustrious house already related to Poland, and the personal qualities of its chief recommended him to the veneration of Europe. What do you think? Nothing was more reasonable: this was itself the impossibility. The more a nation is agreed on a new constitution, the more wills united to sanction the change, the more united are the workers to raise the new edifice, above all, the more there are written laws calculated a priori, the more it will be proved that what the multitude wants will not happen. It was the arms of Russia, it is said, that overthrew the new Polish constitution. So what! no doubt, there must always be a cause, what does it matter whether this one or another?
If a Polish stable boy or a cabaret servant claiming to be sent from heaven had undertaken this same work, no doubt, he might have been unsuccessful; but, after all, it would have ranked among things possible, for in that case there would have been no proportion between cause and effect, an invariable condition in political creations, so that man feels that he can concur only as an instrument, and that the mass of men born to obey never stipulate the conditions of their obedience.
If some philosopher is saddened by the harsh condition of human nature, the father of Italian poetry may console him.4
Let us pass on to examine the principal characteristics of monarchical government.
Mirabeau has said somewhere in his book on the Prussian monarchy: “A king is an idol that is put there, etc.” Putting aside the reprehensible form of this thought, he is certainly right. Yes, no doubt, the king is there at the centre of all the powers, as the sun is there at the centre of the planets: he rules and animates.
Monarchy is a centralized aristocracy. In all times and places, the aristocracy commands. Whatever form is given to governments, birth and wealth are always placed in the first rank, and nowhere do they rule more harshly than where their empire is not founded on law. But in a monarchy, the king is the centre of this aristocracy: it is, indeed, the aristocracy that commands as everywhere; but it commands in the king’s name, or if you like, the king is illumined by the light of the aristocracy.
“It is a sophism very familiar to royalist political theorists,” says Rousseau, “to give liberally to this magistrate (the king) all the virtues which he would need, and to suppose that the prince is always what he ought to be.”5
I do not know what royalist writer made this strange supposition: Rousseau should have cited him. As he read very little, it is probable that he assumed this assertion, or that he took it from some dedicatory epistle.
But, in always avoiding exaggerations, we can be assured that the government of one is that where the vices of the sovereign have the least influence on the governed peoples.
Recently, at the opening of the republican Lyceum in Paris, a quite remarkable truth was spoken:
“In absolute governments,6 the faults of the master can scarcely throw away everything at once, because his will alone cannot do everything; but a republican government is obliged to be essentially reasonable and just, because the general will, once misled, drags everything along with it.”7
This observation is most just: the king’s will is far from being able to do everything in the monarchy. It is supposed to do everything, and that is the great advantage of this government, but in fact it serves little more than to centralize advice and enlightenment. Religion, laws, customs, opinion, and class and corporate privileges constrain the sovereign and prevent him from abusing his power; it is even quite remarkable that kings are much more often accused of lacking will than of abusing it. It is always the prince’s council that rules.
But the pyramidal aristocracy which administers the state in monarchies has particular characteristics which deserve our full attention.
In all countries and in all possible governments, high offices will always belong (with some exceptions) to the aristocracy, that is to say, to nobility and wealth, most often united. Aristotle, in saying that this must be so, enunciates a political axiom that simple common sense and the experience of all ages do not permit us to doubt. This privilege of the aristocracy is really a natural law.8
Now it is one of the great advantages of monarchical government that by it the aristocracy loses, as far as the nature of things permits, all that can be offensive to the lower classes. It is important to understand the reasons for this.
1. This kind of aristocracy is legal; it is an integral part of government, everyone knows this, and it does not awaken in anyone’s mind the idea of usurpation and injustice. In republics, on the contrary, the distinction between persons exists as in monarchies, but it is harsher and more insulting because it is not the work of the law, and because popular opinion regards it as a habitual insurrection against the principle of equality admitted by the Constitution.
There was perhaps as much distinction of persons, as much arrogance, properly as much aristocracy in Geneva as in Vienna. But what a difference in cause and effect!
2. Since the influence of the hereditary aristocracy is inevitable (the experience of all ages leaves no doubt on this point), the best that can be imagined in order to deprive this influence of what may be too wearisome for the pride of the lower classes is that it should not establish an insurmountable barrier between families in the state, and that none of them should be humiliated by a distinction that it can never enjoy.
Now this is precisely the case with a monarchy based on good laws. There is no family the merit of whose head cannot enable it to pass from the second rank to the first, independently even of this flattering aggregation, where, before it has acquired in time the influence which it is in fact due, all or at least a host of the offices in the state are accessible to merit, which take the place of and narrow hereditary distinctions.9
This movement of general ascension that pushes all families towards the sovereign and that constantly fills all the voids left by those who die out; this movement, I say, fosters a salutary emulation, stokes the flame of honour, and turns all individual ambitions towards the good of the state.
3. And this order of things will seem even more perfect if we consider that the aristocracy of birth and office, already made very gentle by the right that belongs to any family and to any individual to enjoy in turn the same distinctions, still loses all that may be too offensive to the lower classes, by the universal supremacy of the monarch before whom no citizen is more powerful than another; the man of the people, who finds himself insignificant compared to a great lord, compares himself to the sovereign, and this title of subject which submits them both to the same power and to the same justice is a kind of equality which dulls the inevitable pain of self-respect.
In these last two respects, aristocratic government yields to monarchy. In the latter, one unique family is separated from all the others by opinion, and is considered, or may be considered, as belonging to another nature. The greatness of this family humiliates no one because no one compares himself to it. In the first case, on the contrary, sovereignty residing on the heads of several men no longer makes the same impression on the mind, and the individual whom chance has made a member of the sovereign is great enough to excite envy, but not to stifle it.
In a government of many, sovereignty is not a unity, and although the parts that make it up theoretically represent unity, they are far from making the same impression on the mind. The human imagination does not grasp this whole which is only a metaphysical being; on the contrary, it takes pleasure in detailing each unit of the general whole, and the subject respects the less a sovereignty whose elements taken separately are not sufficiently above him.
Hence sovereignty in these kinds of governments does not have the same intensity, nor consequently the same moral force.
Hence also offices, that is to say, power delegated by the sovereign, obtain in a government of one an extraordinary consideration quite particular to monarchy.
In a government of many, the offices occupied by the members of the sovereign enjoy the consideration attached to this quality. It is the man who honours the office, but among the subjects of these governments, offices elevate their occupants very little above their fellows, and bring them no nearer to the members of the government.
In monarchy, offices, reflecting a brighter light on the people, dazzle more: they furnish an immense career for all manner of talents and fill the void that would otherwise stand between the nobility and the people. In general, the exercise of delegated power always raises the civil servant out of the class in which he was fixed by birth, but the exercise of high office in particular raises the new man to the first rank and prepares him for nobility.
If the individual placed by the caprice of birth in the second rank does not want to content himself with the possibility of passing into the first, and with the supplementary means furnished by the offices for doing so depending only on time, as far as the nature of things permits, it is clear that this man is ill, and, consequently, we have nothing to say to him.
All in all, it can be argued without exaggeration that monarchy involves as much and perhaps even more liberty and equality than any other government, which does not mean that polyarchy does not contain a large number of men freer than is generally the case in monarchies, but that monarchy does or can give more liberty and equality to a greater number of men, which should be well noted.
As for the vigour of this government, no one recognized it better than Rousseau. “All respond,” he says, “to the same motive, all the springs of the machine are in the same hands, everything marches towards the same goal; there are no opposing movements that destroy each other, and one cannot imagine any constitution in which less effort produces a greater action. Archimedes, sitting tranquilly on the shore and pulling a great ship afloat without difficulty, represents for me a skilful monarch governing his vast States from his study and moving all while appearing unmoved.”
The word skilful is superfluous in this piece. Monarchical government is precisely that which best does without the skill of the sovereign, and this is perhaps just the first of its advantages. Rousseau’s comparison could be put to greater use by making it more exact. The glory of Archimedes was not in pulling Hieron’s galley behind him, but in imagining the machine capable of executing this movement, and monarchy is precisely this machine. Men did not create it, because they do not create anything; it is the work of the eternal Geometer who needs not our consent to arrange his plans, and the greatest merit of the engine is that a mediocre man can put it into play.
This word king is a talisman, a magical power which gives all forces and talents central direction. If the sovereign has great talents, and if his individual action can immediately contribute to the general movement, doubtless this is good, but instead of his person, his name suffices.
As long as the aristocracy is healthy, as long as the name of king is sacred to it, and as long as it loves royalty with passion, the State is unshakeable, whatever the qualities of the king. But as soon as it loses its greatness, its pride, its energy, its faith, the spirit is withdrawn, the monarchy is dead, and its cadaver is left to the worms.
Tacitus said of republican governments: “Some nations, weary of kings, preferred laws to them.”10 He was thus opposing the rule of laws to that of a man, as though the one excluded the other. This passage could furnish an interesting dissertation on the differences between ancient and modern monarchy. Tacitus, secretly irritated with the government of one, doubtless may have exaggerated, but it is also true that all the monarchies formed in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire have a particular character which distinguishes them from monarchies outside Europe; Asia especially, eternally the same, has never known anything but the government of one, modified in a way suited to her, but which does not suit us. The Greek monarchy itself is not our own, and the government of the Roman emperors not being a monarchy properly so called, but rather a military and elective despotism, most of the reflections made on these kinds of governments do not apply to European monarchy.
Perhaps it would be possible to explain in metaphysical terms why the ancient monarchies were differently constituted than ours; but this would be to fall into the all-too-common fault of talking about everything in terms of everything. The difference of which I speak is a fact that it suffices to recall.
Without insisting on nuance, I will only point out one characteristic feature, namely that antiquity did not contest the right of kings to condemn to death—all the pages of history present judgments of this nature that historians report with no sign of disapproval. It is still the same in Asia where no one contests this right of sovereigns.
Among us, ideas are different. If a king, on his private authority, kills a man, European wisdom will not counsel retaliation or rebellion, but all the world will say, “this is a crime.” On this point there are not two ways of thinking, and opinion is so strong that it protects us sufficiently.
In general, even agreeing that all powers eminently reside on the heads of his kings, the European does not believe that they have the right personally to exercise any branch of judicial power: and, as a matter of fact, they do not meddle with it. Abuses in this regard prove nothing; universal conscience has always protested. This is the great character, the physiognomy of our governments. Each monarchy in Europe has its own particular traits, and, for example, it would not be surprising to find a little Arabism in Spain and Portugal, but all these monarchies have a family resemblance which brings them together, and it can be said of them with the greatest truth:
… Facies non omnibus una;
Nec diversa tamen, qualem decet esse sororum.
[“They do not all have one visage;
Yet are alike as sisters should be.”]
I will be careful not to deny that Christianity has modified all these governments for the better, nor that the public law of Europe has been infinitely perfected by this salutary law, but we must also bear in mind our common origin and the general character of the northern peoples who have taken the place of the Roman Empire in Europe.
“The government of the Germans,” Hume has rightly said, “and that of all the northern nations, who established themselves on the ruins of Rome, was always extremely free; and those fierce people, accustomed to independence and inured to arms, were more guided by persuasion than authority, in the submission which they paid to their princes. The military despotism, which had taken place in the Roman empire, and which, previously to the irruption of those conquerors, had sunk the genius of men, and destroyed every noble principle of science and virtue, was unable to resist the vigorous efforts of a free people; and Europe, as from a new epoch, rekindled her ancient spirit, and shook off the base servitude to arbitrary will and authority, under which she had so long laboured. The free constitutions then established, however impaired by the encroachments of succeeding princes, still preserve an air of independence and legal administration, which distinguish the European nations; and if that part of the globe maintain sentiments of liberty, honour, equity, and valour superior to the rest of mankind, it owes these advantages chiefly to the seeds implanted by those generous barbarians.”11
These reflections are strikingly true. It is in the midst of the forests and ice of the North that our governments were born. It is there that the European character was born, and however much it has been modified since then under the different latitudes of Europe, we are still all brothers, durum genus [“a hardy race”]. The fever that is currently afflicting all the nations of this part of the globe is a great lesson for statesmen: et documenta damus qua simus origine nati [“and we give proof from what stock we are sprung”].
It is in Asia that it is said: It is better to die than to live; it is better to sleep than to wake; it is better to be seated than to walk etc.
Reverse these maxims—you have the European character. The need to act and eternal restlessness are our two characteristic features. The frenzy for enterprise, discovery, and travel exists only in Europe.12 I do not know what indefinable force agitates us without respite. Movement is the moral as well as the physical life of the European; for us, the greatest evil is not poverty, nor servitude, nor sickness, nor even death; it is rest.
One of the greatest results of this character is that the European can only with great difficulty bear to be an absolute stranger to government. The inhabitant of Asia does not seek to penetrate that dark cloud which envelops or forms the majesty of the monarch. For him his master is a god, and he has no other relationship with this superior being than that of prayer. The laws of the monarch are oracles. His graces are heavenly gifts, and his anger is a calamity of invincible nature. The subject who honours himself by calling himself a slave receives from him a benefit like a dew, and the rope like a thunderclap.
Observe, however, how supreme wisdom has balanced these terrible elements of oriental power. This absolute monarch can be deposed; his right to ask for the head that displeases him is not contested, but often his own is demanded. Sometimes the laws deprive him of his sceptre and his life; sometimes sedition seizes him on this high throne and casts him down into the dust. How, then, are the weakness that prostrates and the energy that strangles found in the same souls? There is no other answer than that of Dante.
So wills the One who can do all he wills.
But he has wanted to do otherwise for us. Seditions are for us rare events; and the wisest of the nations of Europe, in making the inviolability of its sovereigns a fundamental principle, have merely sanctioned general opinion in this part of the world. We do not want sovereigns to be judged, we do not want to judge them. Exceptions to this rule are rare; they occur only in bouts of fever, and as soon as we are cured, we call them crimes. Providence has said to all the sovereigns of Europe: “You shall not be judged”; but it immediately adds: “You shall not judge”—this is the price of this inestimable privilege.
Tacitus, in describing with his vigorous brush the abasement of the Romans under the sceptre of the emperors, supports this universal recklessness which is the first fruit of servitude and that changes public affairs into something foreign.13
It is precisely this recklessness that is not in the character of modern Europeans. Always anxious, always alarmed, the veil that hides the workings of government from them disheartens them; submissive subjects, rebellious slaves, they want to ennoble obedience and, as the price of their submission, they demand the right to complain and to enlighten power.
Under the name of the Fields of Mars or of May, of Parliaments, of States, of Cortes, of Establishments, of Diets, of Senates, of Councils, etc., all the peoples of modern Europe have been involved to a greater or lesser extent in administration under the empire of their kings.
The French, who exaggerate everything, have drawn several equally fatal theoretical conclusions from this factual truth, the first of which is “that the King’s National Council had once been and must again be a co-legislator”.14
I do not wish to examine here whether Charlemagne’s Parliament was really a legislator; great publicists have made the question very problematical; but let us suppose that the affirmative has been proved: because the assemblies of Charlemagne’s time would have been co-legislators, should we conclude that they must be so today? No, undoubtedly not, and the opposite conclusion would be far more sensible. In politics, we must always keep in mind what jurisconsults call the last state, and although we must not take this word in too narrow a sense, we must not give it too much latitude either.
When the Franks conquered the Gauls, they formed a hybrid people by mixing with them; but it is easy to see that this people was at first more Frankish than Gallic, and that the combined action of time and climate must have made it more Gallic than Frankish every day, so that we would be unwise and illiterate indeed to look (at least word for word) for the public law of modern France in the capitularies of the Carolingians.
If we rid ourselves of all prejudice and party spirit, if we renounce exaggerated ideas and all the theoretical daydreams born of French fever, European common sense will agree on the following propositions:
1. The king is sovereign; no one shares sovereignty with him, and all powers emanate from him.
2. His person is inviolable; no one has the right to depose or judge him.
3. He has no right to condemn to death, nor even to any corporal punishment. The power to punish originates in him, and that is enough.
4. If he imposes exile or prison in cases where reasons of state should forbid judicial review, he cannot be too reserved, nor act too much on the advice of an enlightened council.
5. The king cannot judge in civil matters; the magistrates alone, in the name of the sovereign, can rule on property and agreements.
6. Subjects have the right, by means of certain bodies, councils, or assemblies of different composition, to inform the king of their needs, to denounce abuses to him, and to make their grievances and their most humble remonstrances known to him legally.
It is in these sacred laws, all the more truly constitutional because they are written only in the heart, particularly in the paternal communication between the prince and his subjects, that we find the true character of the European monarchy.
Whatever the exalted and blind pride of the eighteenth century may say, this is all we need. These elements, combined in different ways, produce an infinity of nuances in monarchical governments: it is conceivable, for example, that the men charged with bearing to the foot of the throne the representations and grievances of the subjects may form bodies or assemblies; that the members who compose these assemblies or bodies may differ in number, in quality, in the nature and extent of their powers; that the mode of elections, the interval and duration of sessions, etc., vary the number of combinations still further: facies non omnibus una [“their faces were not all alike…”]; but you always find the general character, that is, always chosen men legally bearing to the father the complaints and wishes of the family: nec diversa tamen [“…nor yet unlike”].
Let us completely reject the judgement of passionate or over-systematic men and let us turn only to that precious common sense which makes and preserves all that is good in the universe. Take the most educated, most wise, most religious European, even the greatest friend of royalty, and ask him: “Is it just, is it expedient that the king should govern solely through his ministers? That his subjects should have no legal means of communicating with him as a body, and that abuses should continue until an individual is enlightened and powerful enough to put things to rights, or until an insurrection brings them to justice?” He will answer you without hesitation, “No”. Now, what is really constitutional in any government is not what is written on paper; it is what is written in the universal conscience. What generally displeases us, what ill-suits our ancient, unquestionable, universal character and usages, is ministerial government or the vizierate. Oriental immobility accommodates itself very well to this form of government, and even refuses to accept any other; but the bold race of Japheth does not want it, because this form indeed does not suit it. On all sides there are cries of despotism, but public opinion often is misled, and takes one thing for another. People complain about the excess of power; it seems to me that it is rather the displacement and weakening of power that offends. As soon as the nation is condemned to silence and the individual alone can speak, it is clear that each individual taken separately is less strong than those in power; and as man’s first ambition is to obtain power, and his greatest fault is to abuse it, it follows that all the individuals in the nation are weaker than the those in power, it follows that all the depositories of delegated power, being unconstrained and not directly answerable to opinion, seize the sceptre and divide it into small fragments proportional to the importance of their offices, so that everyone is king except the king. These reflections explain how, in most monarchies, one can complain both of despotism and of the weakness of government. These two complaints contradict each other only on the face of it. The people complain of despotism because they are not strong enough against the disordered action of the delegated power, and they complain of the weakness of government because they no longer see a centre; because the king is not king enough, because the monarchy has changed into a tiresome aristocracy; because every subject who does not participate or who participates but little in this aristocracy always sees a king next to him, and deplores his nullity, so that the government is both hated as despotism and despised as weak.
The remedy for such great evils is not hard to find: it is only a matter of reinforcing the authority of the king and restoring to him his quality of a father by re-establishing the ancient and legitimate correspondence between him and the large family. As soon as the nation possesses some means of making its voice heard legally, it becomes impossible for vice and incapacity to seize offices or to hold them for long, and direct correspondence with the king restores to monarchical government that paternal character necessary to monarchy in Europe.
How many errors power has committed! And how it has ignored the means of preserving itself! Man is hungry for power; he is infinite in his desires, and, always dissatisfied with what he has, he loves only what he has not. We complain about the despotism of princes; we should complain about that of man. We are all born despots, from the most absolute monarch in Asia to the child who smothers a bird in his hand for the pleasure of seeing that there is in the world a being weaker than himself. There is no man who does not abuse power, and experience proves that the most abominable despots, if they were to seize the sceptre, would be precisely those who howl against despotism. But the author of nature has set limits to the abuse of power: he has willed it to destroy itself as soon as it has passed these natural limits. He has engraved this law everywhere; and, in the physical world as in the moral world, it surrounds us and speaks to us at every moment. Observe this gun: up to a certain point, the more you extend it, the more you increase its effect: but if you pass this limit by a hair, you will see it diminish. Observe this telescope: up to a certain point, the more you increase its dimensions, the more effect it will produce; but beyond that, invincible nature turns the efforts you make to perfect the instrument against you. This is the straightforward image of power. To conserve itself it must restrain itself, and always it must avoid that point where its ultimate effort brings its final moment.
Assuredly, I do not like popular assemblies any more than anyone else; but French madness must not disgust us with the truth and wisdom that are to be found in the golden mean. If there is one incontestable maxim, it is that in all seditions, in all insurrections, in all revolutions, the people always begin by being right, and always end by being wrong. It is false that every people should have its national assembly in the French sense; it is false that every individual should be eligible for the national council; it is false even that he should be able to be an elector with no distinction of rank or fortune; it is false that this council should be a co-legislator; it is false, finally, that it must be composed in the same way in different countries. But because these exaggerated propositions are false, does it follow that no one has the right to speak for the common good in the name of the community, and that we are forbidden to be right because the French have performed a great act of madness? I do not understand this consequence. What observer would not be frightened by the current state of mind throughout Europe? Whatever the cause of such a general impulse, it exists, and it threatens all sovereignties.
Certainly, it is the duty of statesmen to seek to ward off the storm; and it will certainly not be achieved by timid immobility or recklessness. It is for the wise men of all nations to reflect deeply on the ancient laws of monarchies, on the good customs of each nation, and on the general character of the peoples of Europe. It is in these sacred sources that they will find remedies appropriate to our ills, and the wise means of regeneration infinitely removed from the absurd theories and exaggerated ideas which have done us so much harm.
The first and perhaps the only source of all the ills we experience is contempt for antiquity, or, what amounts to the same thing, contempt for experience: whereas there is nothing better than what is proven, as Bossuet said very well. The laziness and proud ignorance of this century are much better suited to theories which cost nothing and which flatter pride than to the lessons of moderation and obedience which must be painfully sought from history. In all the sciences, but especially in politics, whose many and changing events are so difficult to grasp as a whole, theory is almost always contradicted by experience. May Eternal Wisdom shed his rays on men destined to fix the destiny of others! May the peoples of Europe also close their ears to the voice of the sophists, and, turning their eyes away from all theoretical illusions, fix them only on those venerable laws which are rarely written down, of which it is impossible to assign either dates or the authors, and which the peoples have not made, but which have made the peoples.
These laws come from God: the rest is human!
1 In terris nomen imperii [Regium] id primum fuit. [“That (‘King’) was the first title of imperium in the world.”] (Sallust, De coniuratione Catilinae, 2). Omnes antiquae gentes regibus quondam paruerunt. [“All ancient nations once submitted to kings.”] (Cicero, de Legibus, III, 2). Natura commenta est regem. [“Nature invented kingship.”] (Seneca, de Clementia, 1). In the new world, which is also a world new, the two peoples who had made rather large steps towards civilization, the Mexicans and the Peruvians, were ruled by kings; and even among the savages the rudiments of monarchy were found.
2 Contrat social, 3, VIII.
3 Contrat social, 3, VI.
4 Vuolsi cose colà dove si puote
Ciò che si vuole e più non dimandare.
(Dante, Inferno, ch. III)
[“It is thus willed there where is power
To do that which is willed; and farther ask not.”
(tr. Charles Eliot Norton)]
Man, do you want to sleep soundly? Put your foolish head on this pillow.
5 Contrat social, 3, VI.
6 We must say arbitrary: for every government is absolute.
7 Speech delivered at the opening of the republican Lycée on December 31, 1794, by M. de la Harpe. (Journal de Paris, 1795, No. 114, 461)
8 Αριστίνδην και πλσυτίνδην δει αἵρεισθαι τιυς ἅρχοντας. “The high magistrates belong to the nobility and to wealth.” (Aristotle, Politics, II). Optimam rempublicam esse duco … quae sit in potestatem optimorum [“I regard the best government as […] one which is in the power of the aristocracy.”]. (Cicero, de Legibus, III, 17). — “princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, MEN OF RENOWN.” [Maistre’s French rendering has “ET QUI ONT UN NOM” — “AND WHO WERE CALLED BY NAME”] (Numbers 16:2).
9 Lettres d’un royaliste savoisien, letter 4, p. 193.
10 Quidam, statim aut postquam regum pertaesum, leges maluerunt. (Tacitus, Annales, III, 26).
11 Hume’s History of England, book I, appendix i: The anglo-saxon government and manners.
12 A modern theosophe has remarked, in a work that everyone may read with pleasure as a masterpiece of elegance, that all the great navigators were Christians (Homme de désir, 1790, p. 70, §40). He could have said the same about Europeans. [Homme de désir, by gnostic mystic-philosopher Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. He taught that ecclesiastical organization was to disappear in place of a spiritualized Christianity whose authority was derived from a supra-rational faculty whence we derive knowledge of God.]
13 Incuria reipublicae velut alienae. (Tacitus) [the original has “inscitia rei publicae ut alienae” – “men were ignorant of public affairs as being alien to them”]
14 I am speaking, as is clear, only of monarchical systems that deviated more or less from what was called the ancien régime.