Pure democracy does not exist anymore than absolute despotism. “If we take the term in the strict sense,” Rousseau says very well, “there never has been a real democracy, and there never will be. It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed.”1
The idea of a whole people as sovereign and legislator is so shocking to common sense that Greek political scientists, who must have understood a little of freedom, have never spoken of democracy as a legitimate government, at least when they want to express themselves precisely. Aristotle, especially, defines democracy as the excess of republic (politia), as despotism is the excess of monarchy.2
If there is no democracy properly so called, the same can be said of perfect despotism, which is likewise a being of pure abstraction. “It is an error to believe that there is any authority in the world despotic in all respects; there never has been and there never will be; the most immense power is always limited in some area.”3
But in forming clear ideas, there is no reason why we should not consider these two forms of government as two theoretical extremes that all possible governments approach to a greater or lesser degree. In this strict sense, I believe I can define democracy as an association of men without sovereignty. “But when the whole people”, says Rousseau, “decrees for the whole people, it is considering only itself; and if a relation is then formed, it is between two aspects of the entire object, without there being any division of the whole. In that case the matter about which the decree is made is, like the decreeing will, general. This act is what I call a law.”4 What Rousseau prominently calls law is precisely what can no longer bear the name.
There is a passage from Tacitus on the origin of governments that deserves attention. After having recounted, like others, the history of the Golden Age, where repeating that vice, by introducing itself into the world, necessitated the establishment of public force, he adds: “Then sovereignties were born, and, for many peoples, they have had no end. Other nations have preferred laws, either at first, or after they had become disgusted with kings.”5
I have spoken elsewhere of the opposition of kings and laws;6 what I observe here is that by thus opposing sovereignties to republics, Tacitus implies that there is no sovereignty in republics. His subject did not lead him to pursue this idea, which is very apt.
Since no people or individual can possess coercive power over itself, if there were a democracy in its theoretical purity, clearly there would be no sovereignty in this state: for it is impossible to understand by this word anything other than a restraining power which acts on the subject and which is placed outside of him. Hence this word subject, which is a relative term, is foreign to republics, because there is no sovereign properly so called in a republic, and there can be no subject without a sovereign, as there can be no son without a father.
Even in aristocratic governments, where sovereignty is much more palpable than in democracies, the word subject is avoided; and the ear finds lighter words which include no exaggeration.
In all the countries of the world there are voluntary associations of men who have come together for some purpose of interest or benevolence. These men have voluntarily submitted themselves to certain rules which they observe as long as they find it good: they have even submitted themselves to certain penalties that they suffer when they have contravened the statutes of the association: but these statutes have no other sanction than the very will of those who have formed them, and as soon as there are dissenters, there is not among them any coercive force to constrain them.
It suffices to enlarge the idea of these corporations to get a fair idea of true democracy. The ordinances that would emanate from a people constituted in this way would be regulations, not laws. The law is so little the will of all, that the more it is the will of all, the less it is law: so that it would cease to be law, if it were, without exception, the work of all those who must obey it.
But as pure democracy does not exist, neither does the state of purely voluntary association. One starts only from this theoretical power to understand; and it is in this sense that one can affirm that sovereignty is born at the moment when the sovereign begins not to be all the people, and that it is strengthened as it is less than all the people.
This spirit of voluntary association is the constitutive principle of republics; it necessarily has a primitive germ: it is divine, and no one can produce it. Mixed to a greater or lesser degree with sovereignty, the common basis of all governments, this “greater” and “lesser” form the different physiognomies of non-monarchical governments.
The observer, and especially the foreign observer who lives in a republican country, distinguishes very well the effect of these two principles. Sometimes he feels sovereignty, and sometimes the spirit of community which serves to supplement it; public force acts less and above all shows itself less than in monarchies; it seems as if it defies itself. A certain family spirit, which is easier to feel than to articulate, relieves sovereignty from acting in a host of circumstances in which it would elsewhere intervene; a thousand little things go on by themselves, and—as the common phrase goes, without knowing how—order and arrangement show themselves on all sides; common property is respected even by the impoverished, and right down to general propriety, everything gives the observer pause for thought.
A republican people being, therefore, a people less governed than any other, we understand that the working of sovereignty must be supplemented by public spirit, so that the less wisdom a people has in perceiving what is good, and the less virtue it has in doing it of its own accord, the less it is suited to a republic.
All the advantages and disadvantages of this government can be seen at a glance; on its good days it eclipses all else, and the marvels it produces seduce even the cool observer who weighs up everything. But, in the first place, it is suited only to very small nations, for the formation and continuance of the spirit of association are difficult in proportion to the number of associates, which need not be proven.
In the second place, justice does not have that calm and impassive course which we commonly see in monarchy. In democracies, justice is sometimes weak and sometimes impassioned: it is said that, in these governments, no head can brave the sword of the law. This means that the punishment of an illustrious guilty or accused man is a true pleasure for the plebs, who thus console themselves for the inevitable superiority of the aristocracy, and public opinion powerfully favours these kinds of judgements; but if the guilty man is obscure, or in general if the crime does not wound the pride or the immediate interest of the majority of the people, this same opinion resists the action of justice and paralyses it.
In a monarchy, the nobility being only an extension of the royal authority, it partakes up to a certain point in the inviolability of the monarch, and this immunity (always infinitely lesser than that of the sovereign) is graduated in such a way that it belongs to fewer people the more significant it is.7
In a monarchy, immunity, differently graduated, is for the few; in a democracy, it is for the many.
In the first case, it scandalizes the plebs; in the second case, it makes them happy. I believe it to be good in both cases: that is to say, I believe it to be a necessary element of each government, which amounts to the same thing, for what constitutes a government is always good, at least in an absolute sense.
But when you compare government to government, it is another matter. It is then a question of weighing up the goods and ills that result for the human species from the various social forms. It is from this point of view that I believe monarchy to be superior to democracy in the administration of justice, and I speak not only of criminal justice, but of civil justice. The same weakness is seen in the latter as in the former.
The magistrate is not sufficiently superior to the citizen; he has the air of an arbitrator rather than a judge; and, forced to be circumspect even when he speaks in the name of the law, it is clear that he does not believe in his own power; he is strong only in the solidarity of his equals, because there is no sovereign, or the sovereign is not sufficiently sovereign.
One thing that follows, in particular, is that monarchy is the only government in which the foreigner is the equal of the citizen before the courts. In republics, there is no equal to the iniquity, or, if you like, the impotence of the courts when it comes to deciding between a foreigner and a citizen; the more democratic the republic, the more striking this impotence. What man living near one of these states has not said a thousand times: “It is impossible to obtain justice against these people!” It is because the less sovereignty is separated from the people, the less it exists, if we may put it this way; it is because the associates accept that justice be done among themselves, at least as far as the interest of each individual rigorously demands it; but they refuse it with impunity to the foreigner, who cannot ask it of a sovereign who does not exist, or who does not exist entirely.
What deceives many superficial observers is that they often mistake the police for justice. One must not be fooled by a certain regulatory pedantry which the people are mad for, because it serves to annoy the rich. In a town where one is fined for leading a horse at a trot, one can kill a man with impunity, provided that the assassin was born in a shop.
Cromwell would have been put to ‘the bells’ by the people of Berne, and the Duc de Beaufort on the treadmill by the Genevese.8
Rousseau is mistaken on two counts: if a Cromwell were born in Berne, he would be put in the irons, not by the people, but by their Excellencies the Sovereign Lords of the Canton, which is not quite synonymous.
As for Geneva, a handful of men who are not Dukes of Beaufort,9 but vile scoundrels, the shame and scum of the human race, have, to the letter, just put to the discipline the honest people whose throats they did not slit; and the proof that the blunderers and kings of the markets could never be repressed as easily as Rousseau asserts, is that he, Rousseau, was never put to the discipline, and that he was always able, safe and sound, to be a detestable citizen in Geneva and to contaminate his country with impunity.
In general, justice is always weak in democracies when it operates alone, and always cruel or negligent when it relies on the people.
Some political scientists have claimed that one of the beautiful aspects of republican government is the wisdom of the people in entrusting the exercise of their authority only to worthy men. No one, they say, chooses better than the people: when it comes to their own interests, nothing can seduce them, merit alone governs them.
I do not know if there is not a great deal of illusion in this idea: democracy could not subsist for a moment if it were not tempered by aristocracy, and especially by hereditary aristocracy, which is perhaps more indispensable in this government than in the monarchy. The mere right to vote in a republic gives neither splendour nor power. When Rousseau tells us, in the preamble to the Contrat Social, that in his quality as citizen of a free state he is for his part sovereign, a sudden smirk breaks out in the most benevolent reader; you only count in a republic as far as birth, alliances, and great talent give you influence; a simple citizen is effectively nothing. The men of this class in Athens were worth so little that they refused to attend the Assembly; those who so refused had to be threatened with a fine; they had to be promised a salary, or, to put it better, an alms of three obols, to induce them to come to the square to make up the quorum prescribed by law, which must have amused endlessly the Pentakosiomedimnoi.10 In the comedies of Aristophanes, one often finds jokes about these rulers at so much per session, and nothing is better known in history than the Triobolon dicasticon.11
The mass of the people therefore has very little influence on elections, as on other affairs. It is the aristocracy which chooses, and, as we know, it chooses very well. When the crowd has meddled in affairs, it was by a kind of insurrection, sometimes necessary to stop the too rapid action of the aristocracy, but always very dangerous and producing the most terrible effects. “We can, however,” says Rousseau, “form an idea of the difficulties caused sometimes by the people being so numerous, from what happened in the time of the Gracchi, when some of the citizens had to cast their votes from the roofs of buildings.”12 He should have noticed that voting on the roofs accompanies cutting throats in the streets, and that at the time of the Gracchi the Roman Republic no longer existed. In calm times, the people allow themselves to be led by their leaders; it is then that they are wise, because they do little; it is then that they decide very well, because things are decided for them. When it contents itself with the power it holds from the Constitution, and without daring, so to speak, to put it to use, it relies on the enlightenment and wisdom of the aristocracy; when, on the other hand, the leaders, sufficiently restrained by the fear of being deprived of the exercise of power, use it with a wisdom that justifies this confidence—it is then that republics shine. But when this respect is lost on the one hand, and this fear on the other, the state marches with great strides towards its ruin.
Rousseau, in weighing the advantages of monarchical and republican governments, did not fail to grasp and exaggerate in his own way the superiority of the latter in terms of the choice of persons who occupy the places.
An essential and inevitable defect which will always rank monarchical below republican government, is that in a republic the public voice hardly ever raises to the highest positions men who are not enlightened and capable, and such as to fill them with honour; while in monarchies those who rise to the top are most often merely petty blunderers, petty swindlers, and petty intriguers, whose petty talents cause them to get into the highest positions at Court, but, as soon as they have got there, serve only to make their ineptitude clear to the public.”13
I have no doubt that in a republic a watchmaker’s apprentice would be put in shackles who came out of his stall to call the first men of the state petty blunderers, petty swindlers, petty intriguers, etc. But in a monarchy one is less vulnerable: one can be amused by another species just as by a street performer or a monkey; one can even allow him to print his books in the capital, but this is pushing indulgence too far.14
Let us see, however, what may be true in this diatribe, for if the core were true, the form would be less reprehensible.
The most ancient of secular historians showed himself to be more loyal than Rousseau to a monarchy that he had every right to dislike.
The Persians greatly esteem fine service, and among them this is the surest way to achieve the highest honours.15
We see that at the court of the great king, petty intriguers did not exclude men of merit; but, to generalise the thesis, I would first like it to be explained by what magic these prodigious meetings of talents which have illustrated different centuries have always exhibited their brilliance under the influence of a single man.
Alexander, Augustus, Leo X, the Medici, Francis I, Louis XIV, and Queen Anne have sought out, employed, and rewarded more great men of all kinds than all the republics of the world put together.
It is always one man who has given his name to his century; and it is only by the choice of men that he has been able to merit this honour.
What spectacle is comparable to that of the century of Louis XIV? An absolute and almost adored sovereign, doubtless no one hindered him in the distribution of favours; and what man chose men better?
Colbert managed his finances; the terrible talents of Louvois presided over war; Turenne, Coudé, Catinat, Luxembourg, Berwick, Créqui, Vendôme, and Villars led his land armies; Vauban secured France; Dugay-Trouin, Tourville, Jean Bart, Duquesne, Forbin d’Oppède, d’Estrées, and Renaud commanded his fleets; Talon, Lamoignon, d’Aguesseau sat in his courts; Bourdaloue and Massillon preached before him; the episcopate received from his hand this same Massillon, Fléchier, Bossuet, and that great Fénelon, the honour of France, the honour of his century, the honour of humanity. In his royal academies, the talents gathered under his protection shone with a unique brilliance; it was he who made France the true fatherland of talents of all kinds, the arbiter of fame, the dispenser of glory.
It may be said that since chance placed a host of great men under his hand, he did not even have the merit of choice. So what? Does one imagine that his century lacked mediocre men, thinking themselves fit for everything, and demanding everything? This species teems on all sides and at all times. But it is precisely here that I would confront the extreme admirers of republican government. This form of government, as we cannot stress enough, does not endure. It only exists, it only shines, by a rare confluence of great talents and great virtues, and this union is necessarily concentrated on a very small number of heads. What do we say, in effect, when we say that the people chooses its agents perfectly? We say that one wise man chooses another: this is the whole miracle.
Rousseau lived in Paris under the deplorable reign of Louis XV: he was witnessing, so to speak, the agony of France. Regarding some documents distributed by Madame de Pompadour, he hastened to write that, in monarchies, one saw only petty blunderers, petty swindlers, and petty intriguers attaining high offices. It is not to be wondered at: this man never saw but one point.
I do not deny, however, that monarchical government is more prone than any other to err in the choice of persons; but the eternal declamations on the errors of blind patronage are much less well-founded than we commonly imagine. First of all, if you listen to pride, kings always choose poorly, for there is no malcontent who does not prefer himself unquestioningly to the lucky chosen one; moreover, princes are too often accused when only the people should be accused. In times of universal degradation, people complain that merit does not prevail; but where, then, is this forgotten merit? One is obliged to exhibit it before accusing the government. Under the last two French reigns, we have certainly seen very mediocre men in important offices; but to which men of merit, then, were they preferred? Now that a revolution, the most complete that has ever been, has broken all the chains that could hold talent captive, where are they? You will find them, perhaps, joined to profound immorality; but as for talents of this kind, it is empires’ very instinct of preservation that has kept them away from the high office. Moreover, as a sacred writer has said very aptly, “there is a certain skill which is but for evil.”16 It is this talent which has been enflaming France for five years.17 Among even the most outstanding men who have appeared in this theatre bathed in blood and tears, if one examines carefully, one will find little or no real political talent. They have done evil very skilfully; that is the best we can say of them! Fortunately, the most famous of them have written, and when all passions repose in the grave, posterity will read in these indiscreetly traced pages that the most monstrous errors dominated these proud men, and that the previous government, which fended them off, which enchained them, which punished them, was unknowingly fighting for its own preservation.
It is, therefore, because France was degenerating, it is because it lacked talent, that kings seemed too willing to welcome the mediocrity presented by intrigue. There is a very gross error, into which we nevertheless fall daily without noticing it. Although we recognise the hidden hand which directs everything, yet such is the illusion which results from the action of second causes, that we quite commonly reason as if this hand did not exist. When we contemplate the games of intrigue around thrones, the words accident, fortune, misfortune, chance, etc., present themselves quite naturally, and we pronounce them a little too quickly without realising that they make no sense.
Man is free, no doubt; man can make mistakes, but not enough to disturb the general plans. We are all attached to the throne of the Eternal by a flexible chain which reconciles the autocracy of free agents with the divine supremacy.18 Without contradiction, such and such a king may for such and such a time keep true talent from its proper place, and this unhappy faculty may be extended more or less, but in general there is a secret force which carries each individual to his place: otherwise the State could not subsist. We recognise in the plant an unknown power, a plastic force, essentially one, which produces and preserves, which invariably moves towards its goal, which appropriates what serves it, which rejects what harms it, which carries to the very last fibril of the last leaf the sap it needs, and fights with all its strength the diseases of the vegetal body. This force is even more visible and admirable in the animal kingdom! How blind we are! How can we believe that the body politic does not also have its law, its soul, its plastic force, and that everything is subject to the whim of human ignorance? If the moral mechanisms of empires were made manifest to us, we would be freed from a host of errors: we would see, for example, that such and such a man, who seems to us to be made for such and such an office, is a disease which the vital force pushes to the surface, while we deplore the misfortune which prevents him from insinuating himself into the sources of life. These words talent and genius deceive us every day; often these qualities are not where we think we see them, and often they belong to dangerous men.
As for those rare times when empires must perish, they depart visibly from the ordinary cycle of events. Then, all the ordinary rules being suspended, the faults of the government which is going to dissolve prove nothing against this form of government. They are merely symptoms of death, and nothing more: everything must perish to make room for new creations:
And nothing, so that all may last,
Lasts eternally.19
We must submit; but in the ordinary course of things, I invite the subjects of monarchies to lay hands on their consciences and ask themselves if they know of many true talents, and of pure talents, which are overlooked or restrained by the sovereign. If they should listen to the response of their conscience, they would learn to content themselves with the boons they possess, instead of envying the imaginary perfections of other governments.
To hear the agitators of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a senate of sages, whereas juridical murders, hazardous ventures, extravagant choices, and above all mad and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogative of this kind of government.
But who has ever spoken more ill of democracy than Rousseau, who clearly determines that it is made only for a people comprised of gods?20
It remains to be seen how a government which is made only for gods is nevertheless proposed to men as the only legitimate government: for if this is not the sense of the social contract, the social contract has no sense.21
But that is not all.
Besides, how many conditions that are difficult to unite does such a government presuppose! First, a very small State, where the people can readily be got together and where each citizen can with ease know all the rest; secondly, great simplicity of manners, to prevent business from multiplying and raising thorny problems; next, a large measure of equality in rank and fortune, without which equality of rights and authority cannot long subsist; lastly, little or no luxury.22
If democracy is only suitable for very small States, how can this form of government be proposed as the only legitimate form of government, and, if it may be so called, as a formula which must resolve all political questions?
Rousseau is not at all embarrassed by this difficulty. “It is useless,” he says, “to bring up abuses that belong to great States against one who desires to see only small ones,” that is to say:
I, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, do solemnly declare, so that no person can be ignorant of it, that I do not want a great empire. If there have been in the world Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Tartars, etc., all these nations were abuses, which took place only because I was not there. I do not want these peoples, who are so difficult to assemble. In vain does unity of language demonstrate the natural unity of these great families; in vain does the disposition of seacoasts, rivers, and mountains form vast basins plainly destined to contain these nations; in vain does the experience of all centuries serve to demonstrate the intention of the Creator. I am embarrassed neither by metaphysics, geography, or history. I do not want great States. I extend my philosophical measure line over the surface of the globe; I divide it like a chessboard, and, in the middle of each square of 2,000 measures per side, I build a charming city of Geneva which I fill with gods for greater surety.
Doubtless this tone is permissible when one comes up against errors that are so far beyond serious refutation. I do not know why, moreover, Rousseau was willing to admit that democratic government leads to minor abuses; he had found a very simple way of justifying it: to judge it only by its theoretical perfections, and to regard the evils it produces as small anomalies without consequences, which need not attract the attention of the observer.
Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is: the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.23
Drink, Socrates, drink! and console yourself with these distinctions: the good people of Athens only seem to want what is wrong.
Such is the partisan spirit: it does not want to see, or it only wants to see one side. This ridiculousness is especially striking in the outrageous eulogies that Rousseau and his followers have delivered for democracy and especially for ancient democracy.
I remember reading in one of these panegyrics that “the superiority of popular government over government of one is alone decided by the superiority of the interest which the history of republics inspires compared with that of monarchies.”
It is always the same illusion. Since democracy can only subsist by virtue, energy, and public spirit, if a nation has received from the Creator the aptitude for this government, it is certain that, in the time of its vigour, it must, by the very nature of things, give birth to a dazzling group of great men whose deeds give to its history an inexpressible charm and interest.
Moreover, in popular governments there is more action, more movement—and movement is the life of history.
Unfortunately, the happiness of the people is in peace, and almost always the pleasure of the reader relies upon their sufferings.
Let us repeat it, because nothing is more true: nothing equals the salad days of republics; but it is a flash. Moreover, in admiring the beautiful effects of this government, we must also consider the crimes and follies to which it has given birth, even in happy times; for the influence of the wise is not always sufficient—though nearly so—to keep in check the disordered action of the people.
Is it not better to be Miltiades than the favourite of the greatest monarch in the world? Yes, no doubt, on the day of the battle of Marathon. But a year later, the day this great man was thrown into prison to finish his days, the question becomes doubtful.
Aristides and Cimon were banished; Themistocles and Timothy died in exile; Socrates and Phocion drank the hemlock. Athens did not spare one of its great men.
I do not wish to deny that the Athenians were admirable in some respects, but I also believe, with one of the ancients, that they have been too much admired.24 When I read the history of this “slight, suspicious, violent, hateful people, jealous of power,”25 and almost never knowing how to help themselves, I am very much in favour of the sentiment of Voltaire, who called the Athenian democracy the government of the rabble.26
Condorcet was no less an enemy of this government and of all those that resemble it. He complained of the “pedant Mably who was always looking for examples in the despotic anarchies of Greece.”27
And it is truly a great error to reason too much in politics by the examples left to us by antiquity. It is in vain that one would want to make of us Athenians, Lacedemonians, or Romans. Perhaps we should say “Nos sumus argillae deterioris opus” [“we are the work of inferior clay”]; at least if they were not better, they were different. Man is always the same, it is often said. It is rashly said; but the thoughtful politician does not make up his mind by these fine axioms, the insubstantiality of which is clear when we come to the examination of particular cases. Mably says somewhere “It is Titus Livius who taught me all I know about politics.” This is certainly a great honour for Livy, but I am sorry for Mably.
1 Contrat social, 3, IV.
2 This is the remark of an English author who has collected good material for a history of Athens. See Young’s History of Athens. [William Young, his History published in 1786. cf. Aristotle’s Politics 3.7 for the definitions of democracy and despotism.]
3 Montesquieu, Grandeur et décadence des Romains, ch. XXII.
4 Contrat social, 2, VI.
5 Postquam exui aequalitas, et, pro modestia ac pudore, ambitio et vis incedebat, provenere dominationes, multosque apud populos aeternum mansere. Quidam statim, aut postquam regum pertaesum, leges maluere. (Tacitus, Annales, III, 26)
6 [See p. 240.]
7 These infinite nuances, these admirable combinations so far above all human calculations, are designed to lead us constantly back to the contemplation of that hidden force which has set number, weight, and measure to everything. In the physical world, we are no doubt surrounded by marvels, but the springs driving them are blind and the laws rigid. In the moral or political world, admiration is exalted to the point of rapture when one reflects that the laws of this order, no less sure than physical laws, have at the same time a flexibility which allows them to be combined with the action of the free agents who operate in this order of things. It is a watch, all the parts of which vary continually in their forces and dimensions, and which always marks the time exactly. [cf. the analogy in Considerations on France, p. 53].
8 Contrat social, 4, I.
9 [François de Vendôme, duc de Beaufort, was a prominent figure in the Fronde. Although accounts from the period describe him as a mediocre and unscrupulous character, his popularity led the Parisian mob to dub him “king of the markets”.]
10 “Wishing to leave all the magistracies in the hands of the well-to-do, as they were, but to give the common people a share in the rest of the government, of which they had hitherto been deprived, Solon made an appraisement of the property of the citizens. Those who enjoyed a yearly increase of five hundred measure (wet and dry), he placed in the first class, and called them Pentakosiomedimnoi.” (Plutarch, Lives, Solon 18.1)
11 A payment of three obols to Athenian jurymen, instituted by Pericles.
12 Contrat social, 3, XV.
13 Contrat social, 3, VI.
14 The French government has done itself great harm by closing its eyes too much to such excesses: it has cost the throne and the life of the unfortunate Louis XVI. “Books have done everything,” said Voltaire. No doubt, because they have allowed all books.
15 Herodotus, 3.154. Elsewhere he says: “of all the men I know, none are more given to honouring those distinguished by valour than the Persians.” (Herodotus., 7.238)
16 Ecclesiastes 21:15.
17 This date fixes that of this work. [1794]
18 See the opening of Considerations on France, p. 53.
19 François de Malherbe, Ode au Roi Henri le Grand, 1596.
20 Contrat social, 3, IV.
21 Let it not be said that Rousseau expressly recognises other governments as legitimate: we must not be fooled by words; he himself has taken the trouble to outline his profession of faith. “Every legitimate government,” he says, “is republican.” (2, VI) And, to avoid any equivocation, here is the note: “I do not mean by this word ‘government’ only an aristocracy or a democracy, but in general any government guided by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the government must not be confounded with the sovereign, but must be the minister of the sovereign. Then monarchy itself is a republic.” (2, VI) Thus wherever the law is not the expression of the will of all the people, the government is not legitimate… we must remember this.
22 Contrat social, 3, XIII.
23 Contrat social, 2, III.
24 Atheniensium res gestae sicut ego existimo salis amplae magnificaeque fuere; verum aliquanto minores tamen quam fama feruntur. [“The deeds of the Athenians were indeed glorious enough; and yet somewhat lesser than fame makes them out to be.”] (Sallust, The War with Catiline, VIII) For example, in admiring the heroes of Plataea, Thermopylae, and Salamis, it is permissible to recall the exclamation of Caesar on the battlefield where he had just crushed the hordes of Asia by making sport of them: “Happy Pompey, what enemies you had to fight!”
25 Populus acer, suspicax, mobilis, adversarius, invidus potentiae. (Cornelius Nepos, in Timoth. III)
26 “When I supplicated you to be the restorer of the beaux-arts of Greece, my prayer did not go so far as to implore you to restore Athenian democracy: I do not like the government of the rabble. You would have given the government of Greece to M. de Lentulus, or to some other general who would have prevented the new Greeks from doing as much mischief as their ancestors.” (Voltaire to the King of Prussia, 28 October 1773. Oeuvres de Voltaire, vol. 86, p. 51)
To say it in passing, I do not know why people have insisted on making this man one of the saints of the French Revolution, of which he would have liked only the irreligious side. He is responsible for it in large part, and yet he would have abhorred it. There shall never be men, not only more proud, but more conceited and more hostile to any kind of equality.
27 Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, Paris, 1791, p. 299 – Mably being also one of the oracles of the day, it is good to have him judged by his peers.