Chapter 1
That the General Will Is Indestructible
As long as several men together consider themselves to be a single body, they have but a single will, which is concerned with their common preservation and the general well-being. Then all the energies of the state are vigorous and simple; its maxims are clear and luminous; there are no entangled, contradictory interests; the common good is clearly apparent everywhere, demanding only good sense in order to be perceived. Peace, union, equality are enemies of political subtleties. Upright and simple men are difficult to deceive on account of their simplicity. Traps and clever pretexts do not fool them. They are not even clever enough to be duped. When, among the happiest people in the world, bands of peasants are seen regulating their affairs of state under an oak tree109 and always acting wisely, can one help scorning the refinements of other nations, which make themselves illustrious and miserable with so much art and mystery?
{225} A state thus governed needs very few laws; and in proportion as it becomes necessary to promulgate new ones, this necessity is universally understood. The first to propose them merely says what everybody has already felt; and there is no question of either intrigues or eloquence to secure the passage into law of what each has already resolved to do, once he is sure the others will do likewise.
What misleads argumentative types is the fact that, since they take into account only states that were badly constituted from the beginning, they are struck by the impossibility of maintaining such an administration in them. They laugh when they imagine all the foolishness a clever knave or a sly orator could get the people of Paris or London to believe. They do not know that Cromwell would have been sentenced to hard labor by the people of Berne, and the Duke of Beaufort imprisoned by the Genevans.110
But when the social bond begins to relax and the state to grow weak, when private interests begin to make themselves felt and small societies begin to influence the large one, the common interest changes and finds opponents. Unanimity no longer reigns in the votes; the general will is no longer the will of all. Contradictions and debates arise, and the best advice does not pass without disputes.
Finally, when the state, on the verge of ruin, subsists only in an illusory and vain form, when the social bond of unity is broken in all hearts, when the meanest interest brazenly appropriates the sacred name of the public good, then the general will becomes mute. Everyone, guided by secret motives, no more expresses his opinion as a citizen than if the state had never existed; and iniquitous decrees having as their sole purpose the private interest are falsely passed under the name of laws.
Does it follow from this that the general will is annihilated or corrupted? No, it is always constant, unalterable, and pure; but it is subordinate to other wills that prevail over it. Each man, in detaching his interest from the common interest, clearly sees that he cannot totally separate himself from it; but his share of the public misfortune seems insignificant to him compared to the exclusive good he intends to make his own. Apart from this private good, he wants the general good in his own interest, just as strongly as anyone else. Even in selling his vote for money he does not extinguish the general will in himself; he evades it. The error he commits is that of changing the thrust of the question and answering a different question from the one he was asked. Thus, instead of saying through his vote, “It is advantageous to the state,” he says, “It is advantageous to this man or that party that this or that view should pass.” Thus the law of the public order in the assemblies is not so much to maintain the general will there, as to bring it about that it is always questioned and that it always answers.
{226} I could present here a number of reflections on the simple right to vote in every act of sovereignty, a right that nothing can take away from the citizens, and on the right to state an opinion, to offer proposals, to divide, to discuss, which the government always takes great care to allow only to its members.111 But this important subject would require a separate treatise, and I cannot say everything in this one.
It is clear from the preceding chapter that the manner in which general business is taken care of can provide a rather accurate indication of the present state of mores and of the health of the body politic. The more harmony reigns in the assemblies, that is to say, the closer opinions come to unanimity, the more dominant too is the general will. But long debates, dissensions, and tumult betoken the ascendance of private interests and the decline of the state.
This seems less evident when two or more orders enter into its constitution, such as the patricians and the plebeians in Rome, whose quarrels often disturbed the comitia, even in the best of times in the republic. But this exception is more apparent than real. For then, by the vice inherent in the body politic, there are, as it were, two states in one. What is not true of the two together is true of each of them separately. And indeed even in the most tumultuous times, the plebiscites of the people, when the senate did not interfere with them, always passed quietly and by a large majority of votes. Since the citizens have but one interest, the people had but one will.
At the other extreme of the circle, unanimity returns. It is when the citizens, having fallen into servitude, no longer have either liberty or will. Then fear and flattery turn voting into acclamation. People no longer deliberate; either they adore or they curse. Such was the vile manner in which the senate expressed its opinions under the emperors; sometimes it did so with ridiculous precautions. Tacitus observes that under Otho, the senators, while heaping curses upon Vitellius, contrived at the same time to make a frightful noise, so that, if by chance he became master, he would be unable to know what each of them had said.112
{227} From these various considerations there arise the maxims by which the manner of counting votes and comparing opinions should be regulated, depending on whether the general will is more or less easy to know and the state more or less in decline.
There is but one law that by its nature requires unanimous consent. This is the social compact. For civil association is the most voluntary act in the world. Since every man is born free and master of himself, no one can, under any pretext whatever, place another under subjection without his consent.113 To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.114
If, therefore, at the time of the social compact, there are opponents to it, their opposition does not invalidate the contract; it merely prevents them from being included in it. They are foreigners among citizens. Once the state is instituted, residency implies consent. To inhabit the territory is to submit to sovereignty.115
Aside from this primitive contract, the vote of the majority always obligates all the others. This is a consequence of the contract itself. But it is asked how a man can be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How can the opponents be both free and placed in subjection to laws to which they have not consented?
I answer that the question is not put properly. The citizen consents to all the laws, even to those that pass in spite of his opposition, and even to those that punish him when he dares to violate any of them. The constant will of all the members of the state is the general will; through it they are citizens and free.116 When a law is proposed in the people’s assembly, what is asked of them is not, to be precise, whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether or not it conforms to the general will that is theirs. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on this matter, and the declaration of the general will is drawn from the counting of votes. When, therefore, the opinion contrary to mine prevails, this proves merely that I was in error, and that what I took to be the general will was not so. If my private opinion had {228} prevailed, I would have done something other than what I had wanted. In that case I would not have been free.
This presupposes, it is true, that all the characteristics of the general will are still in the majority. When they cease to be there, there is no longer any liberty regardless of the side one takes.
In showing earlier how private wills were substituted for the general will in public deliberations, I have given an adequate indication of the possible ways of preventing this abuse. I will discuss this again at a later time. With respect to the proportional number of votes needed to declare this will, I have also given the principles on the basis of which it can be determined. The difference of a single vote breaks a tie vote; a single opponent destroys a unanimous vote. But between a unanimous and a tie vote there are several unequal divisions, at any of which this proportionate number can be fixed in accordance with the condition and needs of the body politic.
Two general maxims can serve to regulate these ratios: one, that the more important and serious the deliberations are, the closer the prevailing opinion should be to unanimity; the other, that the more the matter at hand calls for speed, the smaller the prescribed difference in the division of opinion should be. In decisions that must be reached immediately, a majority of a single vote should suffice. The first of these maxims seems more suited to the laws, and the second to public business. Be that as it may, it is the combination of the two that establishes the ratios that best help the majority to render its decision.
With regard to the elections of the prince and the magistrates, which are, as I have said, complex acts, there are two ways to proceed, namely, by choice or by lots. Both of these have been used in various republics, and at present we still see a very complicated mixture of the two in the election of the Doge of Venice.
“Voting by lot,” says Montesquieu, “is of the essence of democracy.” I agree, but why is this the case? “Drawing lots,” he continues, “is a way of electing that harms no one; it leaves each citizen a reasonable hope of serving the homeland.”117 These are not reasons.
If we keep in mind that the election of leaders is a function of government and not of sovereignty, we will see why the method of drawing lots is more in the nature of democracy, where the administration is all the better the fewer decisions it makes.
In every true democracy the magistracy is not an advantage but a heavy burden that cannot justly be imposed on one private individual rather than {229} another. The law alone can impose this burden on the one to whom it falls by lot. For in that case, with the condition being equal for all and the choice not depending on any human will, there is no particular application that alters the universality of the law.
In any aristocracy, the prince chooses the prince; the government is preserved by itself, and it is there that voting is appropriate.
The example of the election of the Doge of Venice, far from destroying this distinction, confirms it. This mixed procedure suits a mixed government. For it is an error to regard the government of Venice as a true aristocracy. For although the populace there has no part in the government, the nobility is itself the people. A multitude of poor Barnabites118 never come119 near any magistracy and have nothing to show for their nobility but the vain title of excellency and the right to be present at the grand council. Since this grand council is as numerous as our general council in Geneva,120 its illustrious members have no more privileges than our simple citizens. It is certain that, aside from the extreme disparity between the two republics, the bourgeoisie of Geneva exactly corresponds to the Venetian patriciate. Our natives and inhabitants correspond to the citizens121 and people of Venice. Our peasants correspond to the subjects on the mainland. Finally, whatever way one considers this republic, apart from its size, its government is no more aristocratic than ours. The whole difference lies in the fact that, since we do not have leaders who serve for life, we do not have the same need to draw lots.
Elections by lot would have few disadvantages in a true democracy, where, all things being equal both in mores and talents as well as in maxims and fortunes, the choice would become almost indifferent. But I have already said there is no such thing as a true democracy.
When choice and lots are mixed, the former should fill the positions requiring special talents, such as military posts. The latter is suited to those positions, such as judicial offices, where good sense, justice, and integrity are enough, because in a well-constituted state these qualities are common to all the citizens.
Neither the drawing of lots nor voting has any place in a monarchical government. Since the monarch is by right the only prince and sole magistrate, the choice of his lieutenants belongs to him alone. When the Abbot of Saint-Pierre proposed multiplying the Councils of the King of France and {230} electing the members by ballot, he did not realize that he was proposing to change the form of government.122
It remains for me to speak of the manner in which the votes are cast and counted in the people’s assembly. But perhaps in this regard the chronicle of the Roman system of administration will explain more clearly all the maxims I could establish. It is not beneath the dignity of a judicious reader to consider in some detail how public and private business was conducted in a council made of two hundred thousand men.
Chapter 4
On the Roman Comitia123
We have no especially reliable records of the earliest period of Rome’s history. It even appears quite likely that most of the things reported about it are fables.124 And in general the most instructive part of the annals of peoples, which is the history of their founding, is the part we most lack. Experience teaches us every day the causes that lead to the revolutions of empires. But since peoples are no longer being formed, we have almost nothing but conjecture to explain how they were formed.
The customs we find established attest at the very least to the fact that these customs had an origin. Of the traditions that go back to these origins, those that are supported by the greatest authorities and that are confirmed by the strongest reasons should pass for the most certain. These are the maxims I have tried to follow in attempting to find out how the freest and most powerful people on earth exercised its supreme power.
After the founding of Rome, the newborn republic, that is, the army of the founder, composed of Albans, Sabines, and foreigners, was divided into three classes, which took the name tribus [thirds or tribes] from this division. Each of these tribes was divided into ten curiae, and each curia into decuriae, at the head of which were placed leaders called curiones and decuriones.
Moreover, from each tribe was drawn a body of one hundred horsemen or knights, called a century. It is clear from this that these divisions, being hardly necessary in a market town, originally were exclusively military. But it appears that an instinct for greatness led the small town of Rome to provide itself in advance with a system of administration suited to the capital of the world.
{231} One disadvantage soon resulted from this initial division. With the tribes of the Albans125 and the Sabines126 always remaining constant, while that of the foreigners127 grew continually, thanks to their perpetual influx, this latter group soon outnumbered the other two. The remedy that Servius found for this dangerous abuse was to change the division and, in place of the division based on blood, which he abolished, to substitute another division drawn from the areas of the town occupied by each tribe. In place of the three tribes, he made four. Each of them occupied one of the hills of Rome and bore its name. Thus, in remedying the inequality of the moment, he also prevented it from happening in the future. And in order that this division might not be merely one of localities but of men, he prohibited the inhabitants of one quarter from moving into another, which prevented the bloodlines from mingling with one another.
He also doubled the three ancient centuries of horsemen and added to them twelve others, but always under the old names, a simple and judicious means by which he achieved the differentiation of the body of knights from that of the people, without causing the latter to murmur.
To the four urban tribes, Servius added fifteen others called rural tribes, because they were formed from the inhabitants of the countryside, divided into the same number of cantons. Subsequently, the same number of new ones were brought into being, and the Roman people finally found itself divided into thirty-five tribes, a number at which they remained fixed until the end of the republic.
There resulted from this distinction between the tribes of the city and those of the countryside an effect worth noting, because there is no other example of it, and because Rome owed to it both the preservation of its mores and the growth of its empire. One might have thought that the urban tribes soon would have arrogated to themselves power and honors, and would have wasted no time in vilifying the rural tribes. What took place was quite the opposite. The early Romans’ taste for country life is well known. They inherited this taste from the wise founder who united liberty with rural and military labors and, so to speak, relegated to the town arts, crafts, intrigue, fortune, and slavery.
Thus, since all the illustrious men in Rome lived in the country and tilled the soil, people became accustomed to look only there for the mainstays of the republic. Since this condition was that of the worthiest patricians, it was honored by everyone. The simple and laborious life of the villagers was preferred to the lazy and idle life of the bourgeois of Rome. And someone who would have been merely a miserable proletarian in the town became a respected citizen as a field worker. It was not without reason, said Varro, that {232} our great-souled ancestors established in the village the nursery of those robust and valiant men who defended them in time of war and nourished them in time of peace. Pliny says positively that the tribes of the fields were honored on account of the men who made them up; however, cowards whom men wished to vilify were transferred in disgrace to the tribes of the town. When the Sabine Appius Claudius came to settle in Rome, he was decked with honors and inscribed in a rural tribe that later took the name of his family. Finally, freedmen all entered the urban tribes, never the rural ones. And during the entire period of the republic, there was not a single example of any of these freedmen reaching any magistracy, even if he had become a citizen.
This maxim was excellent, but it was pushed so far that it finally resulted in a change and certainly an abuse in the administration.
First, the censors, after having long arrogated to themselves the right to transfer citizens arbitrarily from one tribe to another, permitted most of them to have themselves inscribed in whatever tribe they pleased. Certainly this permission served no useful purpose and deprived the censorship of one of its greatest resources. Moreover, with the great and the powerful having themselves inscribed in the tribes of the countryside, and the freedmen who had become citizens remaining with the populace in the tribes of the town, the tribes in general no longer had either place or territory. On the contrary, they all found themselves so intermixed that the members of each could no longer be identified except by the registers, so that in this way the idea of the word tribe shifted from referring to property to referring to persons, or rather it became almost a chimera.
In addition, it happened that since the tribes of the town were nearer at hand, they were often the strongest in the comitia, and sold the state to those who deigned to buy the votes of the mob that composed them.
Regarding the curiae, since the founder had created ten curiae in each tribe, the entire Roman people, which was then contained within the town walls, was composed of thirty curiae, each of which had its temples, its gods, its officials, its priests, and its feasts called compitalia, similar to the paganalia later held by the rural tribes.
When Servius established this new division, since this number thirty could not be divided equally among his four tribes, and since he did not want to alter it, the curiae became another division of the inhabitants of Rome, independent of the tribes. But there was no question of the curiae either in the rural tribes or among the people that composed them; for since the tribes had become a purely civil establishment and another system of administration had been introduced for the raising of troops, the military divisions of Romulus were found to be superfluous. Thus, even though every citizen was inscribed in a tribe, there were plenty who were not inscribed in a curia.
Servius established still a third division, which bore no relationship to the two preceding ones and which became, in its effects, the most important of all. He divided the entire Roman people into six classes, which he {233} distinguished neither by place nor by person, but by wealth. Thus the first classes were filled by the rich, the last by the poor, and the middle ones by those who enjoyed a moderate fortune. These six classes were subdivided into 193 other bodies called centuries, and these bodies were distributed in such a manner that the first class alone contained more than half of them, and the last contained only one. Thus it was that the class with the smallest number of men was the one with the greatest number of centuries and that the entire last class counted only as a single subdivision, even though it alone contained more than half the inhabitants of Rome.
In order that the people might have less of a grasp of the consequences of this last form, Servius feigned giving it a military air. He placed in the second class two centuries of armorers, and two centuries of artillery in the fourth. In each class, with the exception of the last, he made a distinction between the young and the old, that is to say, between those who were obliged to carry arms and those whose age exempted them by law. This distinction, more than that of wealth, produced the necessity for frequently retaking the census or roll call. Finally, he wished that the assembly would be held in the Campus Martius, and that all those who were of age to serve should come there with their arms.
The reason he did not follow this same division of young and old in the last class is that the populace of which it was composed was not accorded the honor of bearing arms for the homeland. It was necessary to possess a hearth in order to obtain the right to defend it. And of the innumerable troops of beggars who today grace the armies of kings, there is perhaps no one who would not have been disdainfully chased from a Roman cohort, when the soldiers were the defenders of liberty.
In addition there was a distinction in the last class between the proletarians and those that are called capite censi. The former, not completely reduced to nothing, at least gave citizens to the state, sometimes even soldiers in times of pressing need. As for those who possessed nothing at all and could be reckoned only by counting heads, they were regarded as absolutely worthless, and Marius was the first who deigned to enroll them.
Without deciding here whether this third method of reckoning was good or bad in itself, I believe I can affirm that it could be made practicable only by the simple mores of the early Romans, their disinterestedness, their taste for agriculture, their dislike for commerce and for the passion for profits. Where is the modern people among whom their devouring greed, their unsettled spirit, their intrigue, their continual displacements, their perpetual revolutions of fortunes could allow such an establishment to last twenty years without overturning the entire state? It must also be duly noted that the mores and the censorship, which were stronger than this institution, corrected its defects in Rome, and that a rich man found himself relegated to the class of the poor for having made too much of a show of his wealth.
{234} From all this, it is easy to grasp why mention is almost never made of more than five classes, even though there were actually six. The sixth, since it furnished neither soldiers for the army nor voters for the Campus Martius128 and was virtually of no use in the republic, was hardly ever counted for anything.
Such were the various divisions of the Roman people. Let us now look at the effect these divisions had on the assemblies. When legitimately convened, these assemblies were called comitia. Ordinarily they were held in the Roman forum or in the Campus Martius, and were distinguished as comitia curiata, comitia centuriata, and comitia tributa, according to which of the three forms was the basis on which they were organized. The comitia curiata were based on the institution of Romulus, the comitia centuriata on that of Servius, and the comitia tributa on that of the tribunes of the people. No law received sanction, no magistrate was elected save in the comitia. And since there was no citizen who was not inscribed in a curia, a century, or a tribe, it followed that no citizen was excluded from the right of suffrage and that the Roman people was truly sovereign both de jure and de facto.
For the comitia to be legitimately assembled and for what took place to have the force of law, three conditions had to be met: first, the body or the magistrate who called these assemblies had to be invested with the necessary authority to do so; second, the assembly had to be held on one of the days permitted by law; third, the auguries had to be favorable.
The reason for the first regulation needs no explanation. The second is an administrative matter. Thus the comitia were not allowed to be held on holidays and market days, when people from the country, coming to Rome on business, did not have time to spend the day in the public forum. By means of the third rule, the senate held in check a proud and restless people and appropriately tempered the ardor of seditious tribunes. But these latter found more than one way of getting around this constraint.
The laws and the election of leaders were not the only matters submitted to the judgment of the comitia. Since the Roman people had usurped the most important functions of the government,129 it can be said that the fate of Europe was decided in its assemblies. This variety of objects gave rise to the various forms these assemblies took on according to the matters on which they had to pronounce.
{235} In order to judge these various forms, it is enough to compare them. In instituting the curiae, Romulus had intended to contain the senate by means of the people and the people by means of the senate, while he dominated both equally. He therefore gave the people, by means of this form, all the authority of number to balance that of power and wealth that he left to the patricians. But in conformity with the spirit of the monarchy, he nevertheless left a greater advantage to the patricians through their clients’ influence on the majority of the votes. This admirable institution of patrons and clients was a masterpiece of politics and humanity, without which the patriciate, so contrary to the spirit of the republic, could not have subsisted. Only Rome had the honor of giving the world this fine example, which never led to any abuse, and which, for all that, has never been copied.
Since this same form of curiae had subsisted under the kings until Servius, and since the reign of the last Tarquin was not considered legitimate, royal laws were generally known by the name leges curiatae.
Under the republic, the curiae, always limited to the four urban tribes and including no more than the populace of Rome, were unable to suit either the senate, which was at the head of the patricians, or the tribunes, who, plebeians though they were, were at the head of the citizens who were in comfortable circumstances. The curiae therefore fell into discredit and their degradation was such that their thirty assembled lictors together did what the comitia curiata should have done.
The division by centuries was so favorable to the aristocracy that at first it is difficult to see how the senate did not always prevail in the comitia that bears this name and by which the consuls, the censors, and other curule magistrates were elected. In fact, of the 193 centuries that formed the six classes of the entire Roman people, the first class contained 98, and, since the voting was counted by centuries only, this first class alone prevailed in the number of votes over all the rest. When all its centuries were in agreement, they did not even continue to count the votes. Decisions made by the smallest number passed for a decision of the multitude; and it can be said that in the comitia centuriata business was settled more by who had the most money than by who had the most votes.
But this extreme authority was tempered in two ways. First, since ordinarily the tribunes, and always a large number of plebeians, were in the class of the rich, they balanced the authority of the patricians in this first class.
The second way consisted in the following. Instead of at the outset making the centuries vote according to their order, which would have meant always beginning with the first, one century was chosen by lot, and that one130 alone proceeded to the election. After this, all the centuries were called on {236} another day according to their rank, repeated the same election, and usually confirmed it. Thus the authority of example was removed from rank in order to give it to lot, in accordance with the principle of democracy.
There resulted from this custom still another advantage, namely that the citizens from the country had time between the two elections to inform themselves of the merit of the provisionally named candidate, so that they did not have to vote without knowledge of what was at stake.
But on the pretext of speeding things up, this custom was finally abolished and the two elections were held on the same day.
Strictly speaking, the comitia tributa were the council of the Roman people. They were convened only by the tribunes. The tribunes were elected and passed their plebiscites there. Not only did the senate hold no rank in them, it did not even have the right to be present. And since the senators were forced to obey the laws upon which they could not vote, they were less free in this regard than the humblest citizens. This injustice was altogether ill conceived, and was by itself enough to invalidate the decrees of a body to which none of its members were admitted. If all the patricians had been present at these comitia by virtue of the right they had as citizens, having then become simple private individuals, they would not have had a great deal of influence on a form of voting that was tallied by counting heads and where the humblest proletarian had as much clout as the leading figure in the senate.
Thus it can be seen that besides the order that resulted from these various distributions for gathering the votes of so great a people, these distributions were not reducible to forms indifferent in themselves, but each one had effects relative to the viewpoints that caused it to be preferred.
Without going further into greater detail here, it is a consequence of the preceding clarifications that the comitia tributa were the most favorable to the popular government, and the comitia centuriata most favorable to the aristocracy. Regarding the comitia curiata, in which the populace of Rome alone formed the majority, since these were good only for favoring tyranny and evil designs, they fell of their own weight into disrepute, and even the seditious abstained from using a means that made their real intent only too apparent. It is certain that all the majesty of the Roman people is found only in the comitia centuriata, which alone were complete, given that the comitia curiata lacked the rural tribes, and the comitia tributa lacked the senate and the patricians.
As for the manner of collecting the votes, among the early Romans it was as simple as their mores, though not as simple as in Sparta. Each gave his vote in a loud voice, and a clerk marked it down accordingly. The majority vote in each tribe determined the tribe’s vote; the majority vote of the tribes determined the people’s vote; and the same went for the curiae and the centuries. This custom was good as long as honesty reigned among the citizens and each was ashamed to cast his vote publicly in favor of an unjust proposal or an unworthy subject. But when the people became corrupt and votes were {237} bought, it was fitting that they should cast their votes in secret in order to restrain the buyers through distrust and to provide scoundrels the means of not being traitors.
I know that Cicero condemns this change and attributes the ruin of the republic partly to it.131 But although I am aware of the weight that Cicero’s authority should have here, I cannot agree with him. On the contrary, I think that, by not having made enough changes of this sort, the fall of the state was accelerated. Just as the regimen of healthy people is not suitable for the sick, one should not want to govern a corrupt people by means of the same laws that are suited to a good people. Nothing proves this maxim better than the long life of the Republic of Venice, whose shadow still exists, solely because its laws are suited only to wicked men.
Tablets were therefore distributed to the citizens by means of which each man could vote without anyone knowing what his opinion was. New formalities were also established for collecting the tablets, counting the votes, comparing the numbers, and so on. None of this prevented the integrity of the officials in charge of these functions132 from often being under suspicion. Finally, to prevent intrigue and vote trafficking, edicts were passed whose sheer multiplicity is proof of their uselessness.
Toward the end of the period of the republic, it was often necessary to have recourse to extraordinary expedients in order to make up for the inadequacy of the laws. Sometimes miracles were alleged. But this means, which could deceive the populace, did not deceive those who governed it. Sometimes an assembly was unexpectedly convened before the candidates had time to carry out their intrigues. Sometimes an entire session was spent on talk, when it was clear that the populace was won over and ready to take the wrong side on an issue. But finally ambition eluded everything; and what is unbelievable is that in the midst of so much abuse, this immense people, by virtue of its ancient regulations, did not cease to choose magistrates, pass laws, judge cases, or expedite private and public business, almost as easily as the senate itself could have done.
When it is not possible to establish an exact proportion between the constitutive parts of the state, or when indestructible causes continually alter the relationships between them, a special magistracy is then established that does not make up yet another body alongside them. This magistracy restores each term to its true relationship to the others, which reinstates each term in its true relationship, and which creates a link or a middle term either between {238} the prince and the people or between the prince and the sovereign, or on both sides at once, if necessary.
This body, which I will call the tribunate, is the preserver of the laws and the legislative power. It serves sometimes to protect the sovereign against the government, as the tribunes of the people did in Rome; sometimes to sustain the government against the people, as the Council of Ten now does in Venice; and sometimes to maintain equilibrium between the two, as the ephors did in Sparta.
The tribunate is not a constitutive part of the city and it should have no share in either the legislative or the executive power. But this is precisely what makes its own power the greater. For although it is unable to do anything, it can prevent everything. It is more sacred and more revered as a defender of the laws than the prince who executes them and the sovereign who gives them. This was very clearly apparent in Rome when the proud patricians, who always scorned the entire populace, were forced to bow before a humble official of the people, who had neither auspices nor jurisdiction.
A well-tempered tribunate is the firmest support of a good constitution. But if it has the slightest bit too much force, it undermines everything. As for weakness, there is none in its nature; and provided it is something, it is never less than it ought to be.
It degenerates into tyranny when it usurps the executive power, of which it is merely the moderator, and when it wants to dispense from the laws it ought only to protect.133 The enormous power of the ephors, which was without danger as long as Sparta preserved its mores, hastened corruption once it had begun. The blood of Agis, who was slaughtered by these tyrants, was avenged by his successor. The crime and the punishment of the ephors equally hastened the fall of the republic; and after Cleomenes, Sparta was no longer anything. Rome also perished in the same way, and the excessive power of the tribunes, which they had gradually usurped, finally served, with the help of the laws that were made to protect liberty, as a safeguard for the emperors who destroyed it. As for the Council of Ten in Venice, it is a bloody tribunal, equally horrifying to the patricians and the people, and which, far from proudly protecting the laws, no longer serves any purpose, after their degradation, beyond that of delivering blows in the dark that no one dares notice.134
{239} Just like the government, the tribunate is weakened as a result of the multiplication of its members. When the tribunes of the Roman people, who at first were two in number, then five, wanted to double this number, the senate let them do so, certain that one faction could be used to hold the other in check; and this did not fail to happen.
The best way to prevent usurpations by so formidable a body, one that no government has yet made use of, would be not to make this body permanent, but to regulate the intervals during which it would be suppressed. These intervals, which ought not be so long as to allow abuses time to grow in strength, can be fixed by law in such a way that it is easy to shorten them, as needed, by means of extraordinary commissions.
This way seems to me to have no disadvantage, for since, as I have said, the tribunate is not part of the constitution, it can be set aside without doing the constitution any harm; and it seems bound to be effective because a newly reestablished magistrate begins not with the power his predecessor had, but with the power the law gives him.
The inflexibility of the laws, which prevents them from adapting to circumstances, can in certain instances make them harmful and render them the instrument of the state’s downfall in time of crisis. The order and the slowness of formal procedures require a space of time that circumstances sometimes do not permit. A thousand eventualities can present themselves, which the legislator has not foreseen, and it is a very necessary bit of foresight to realize that not everything can be foreseen.
It is therefore necessary to avoid the desire to strengthen political institutions to the point of removing the power to suspend their effect. Sparta itself allowed its laws to lie dormant.
But only the greatest dangers can counterbalance the danger of altering the public order, and the sacred power of the laws should never be suspended except when it is a question of the safety of the homeland. In these rare and obvious cases, public safety can be provided for by a special act that confers the responsibility for it on someone who is most worthy. This commission can be carried out in two ways, according to the type of danger.
If increasing the activity of government is enough to remedy the situation, it is concentrated in one or two of its members. Thus it is not the authority of the laws that is altered, but merely the form of their administration. But if the peril is such that the apparatus of the laws is an obstacle to their being protected from it, then a supreme leader is named who silences all the laws and briefly suspends the sovereign authority. In such a case, the general {240} will is not in doubt, and it is evident that the first intention of the people is that the state should not perish. In this manner, the suspension of legislative authority does not abolish it. The magistrate who silences it cannot make it speak; he dominates it without being able to represent it. He can do anything but make laws.
The first way was used by the Roman senate when, by a sacred formula, it entrusted the consuls with the responsibility for providing for the safety of the republic. The second took place when one of the two consuls named a dictator,136 a custom for which Alba had provided Rome the precedent.
In the beginning days of the republic, there was frequent recourse to dictatorship, since the state did not yet have a sufficiently stable basis to be capable of sustaining itself by the force of its constitution. Since the mores at that time made many of the precautions superfluous that would have been necessary in other times, there was no fear either that a dictator would abuse his authority or that he would try to hold on to it beyond his term of office. On the contrary, it seemed that such a great power was a burden to the one in whom it was vested, so quickly did he hasten to rid himself of it, as if a position that stood in the place of the laws would have been too troublesome and dangerous!
Thus it is not so much the danger of its being abused as it is that of its being degraded that makes one criticize the injudicious use of this supreme magistracy in the early days of the republic. For while it was being wasted on elections, dedications, and purely formal proceedings, there was reason to fear that it would become less formidable in time of need, and that people would become accustomed to regard as empty a title that was used exclusively in empty ceremonies.
Toward the end of the republic, the Romans, having become more circumspect, were as unreasonably sparing in their use of the dictatorship as they had formerly been lavish. It was easy to see that their fear was ill founded; that the weakness of the capital then protected it against the magistrates who were in its midst; that a dictator could, under certain circumstances, defend the public liberty without ever being able to make an attack on it; and that Rome’s chains would not be forged in Rome itself, but in its armies. The weak resistance that Marius offered Sulla and Pompey offered Caesar clearly demonstrated what could be expected of internal authority in the face of external force.
This error caused them to make huge mistakes, for example, failing to name a dictator in the Catilinian affair. For since this was a question merely of the interior of the town and, at most, of some province in Italy, a dictator, with the unlimited authority that the laws gave him, would have easily quelled the conspiracy, which was stifled only by a coming together of fortuitous events, which human prudence has no right to expect.
{241} Instead of that, the senate was content to entrust all its power to the consuls. Whence it happened that, in order to act effectively, Cicero was forced to exceed this power on a crucial point. And although the first transports of joy indicated approval of his conduct, eventually Cicero was justly called to account for the blood of citizens shed against the laws, a reproach that could not have been directed against a dictator. But the eloquence of the consul carried the day. And since even he, Roman though he was, preferred his own glory to his homeland, he sought not so much the most legitimate and safe way of saving the state as he did the way that would get him all the honor for settling this affair.137 Thus he was justly honored as the liberator of Rome and justly punished as a lawbreaker. However brilliant his recall may have been, it undoubtedly was a pardon.
For the rest, whatever the manner in which this important commission was conferred, it is important to limit a dictatorship’s duration to a very short period of time that cannot be prolonged. In the crises that call for its being established, the state is soon either destroyed or saved; and once the pressing need has passed, the dictatorship becomes tyrannical or needless. In Rome, where the dictators had terms of six months only, most of them abdicated before their terms had expired. If the term had been longer, perhaps they would have been tempted to prolong it further, as did the decemvirs with a one-year term. The dictator only had time enough to see to the need that got him elected. He did not have time to dream up other projects.
Just as the declaration of the general will takes place through the law, the declaration of the public judgment takes place through the censorship. Public opinion is the sort of law whose minister is the censor, and his task is only to apply it to particular cases, after the example of the prince.
Thus the censorial tribunal, far from being the arbiter of the people’s opinion, is merely its spokesman; and as soon as it deviates from this opinion, its decisions are vain and futile.
It is useless to distinguish the mores of a nation from the objects of its esteem, for all these things derive from the same principle and are necessarily intermixed. Among all the peoples of the world, it is not nature but opinion that decides the choice of their pleasures. Reform men’s opinions, and their mores will soon become purified all by themselves. Men always love what is good or what they find to be so; but it is in this judgment that they make mistakes. Hence this is the judgment whose regulation is the point at issue. {242} Whoever judges mores judges honor, and whoever judges honor derives his law from opinion.
The opinions of a people arise from its constitution. Although the law does not regulate mores, legislation is what gives rise to them. When legislation weakens, mores degenerate; but then the judgment of the censors will not do what the force of the laws has not done.
It follows from this that the censorship can be useful for preserving mores, but never for reestablishing them. Establish censors while the laws are vigorous. Once they have lost their vigor, everything is hopeless. Nothing legitimate has any force once the laws no longer have force.
The censorship maintains mores by preventing opinions from becoming corrupt, by preserving their rectitude through wise applications, and sometimes even by making a determination on them when they are still uncertain. The use of seconds in duels, which had been carried to the point of being a craze in the kingdom of France, was abolished by the following few words of the king’s edict: “As for those who are cowardly enough to call upon seconds.” This judgment anticipated that of the public and suddenly fixed it. But when the same edicts tried to declare that it was also an act of cowardice to fight duels (which of course is quite true, but contrary to common opinion), the public mocked this decision; it concerned a matter about which its mind was already made up.
I have said elsewhere138 that since public opinion is not subject to constraint, there should be no limitation placed upon the tribunal established to represent it. It is impossible to show too much admiration for the skill with which this device, entirely lost among us moderns, was put into effect among the Romans and even better among the Lacedaemonians.
When a man of bad mores put forward a good proposal in the council of Sparta, the ephors ignored it and had the same proposal put forward by a virtuous citizen. What honor for the one, what shame for the other; and without having given praise or blame to either of the two! Certain drunkards of Samos139 defiled the tribunals of the ephors. The next day, a public edict gave the Samians permission to be filthy. A true punishment would have been less severe than impunity such as this. When Sparta made a pronouncement on what was or was not decent, Greece did not appeal its judgments.
{243} Chapter 8
On Civil Religion140
At first men had no other kings but the gods, and no other government than a theocratic one. They reasoned like Caligula, and then they reasoned correctly. A lengthy alteration of feelings and ideas is necessary before men can be resolved to accept a fellowman as a master, in the hope that things will turn out well for having done so.
By the mere fact that God was placed at the head of every political society, it followed that there were as many gods as there were peoples. Two peoples who were alien to one another and nearly always enemies could not recognize the same master for very long. Two armies in combat with one another could not obey the same leader. Thus national divisions led to polytheism, and this in turn led to theological and civil intolerance, which are by nature the same, as will be stated later.
The fanciful notion of the Greeks that they had rediscovered their gods among the beliefs of barbarian peoples arose from another notion they had of regarding themselves as the natural sovereigns of these peoples. But in our day it is a ridiculous bit of erudition that equates the gods of different nations—as if Moloch, Saturn, and Chronos could have been the same god; as if the Phoenicians’ Baal, the Greeks’ Zeus, and the Romans’ Jupiter could have been the same; as if there could be anything in common among chimerical beings having different names!
But if it is asked how in pagan cultures, where each state has its own cult and its own gods, there are no wars of religion, I answer that it was for this very reason that each state, having its own cult as well as its own government, did not distinguish its gods from its laws. Political war was theological as well. The territories of the gods were, so to speak, fixed by national boundaries. The gods of one people had no rights over other peoples. The gods of the pagans were not jealous gods. They divided dominion over the world among themselves. Moses himself and the Hebrew people sometimes countenanced this idea in speaking of the god of Israel. It is true they regarded as nothing the gods of the Canaanites, a proscribed people destined for destruction, and whose land they were to occupy. But note how they spoke of the divinities of {244} neighboring peoples whom they were forbidden to attack! “Is not the possession of what belongs to your god Chamos,” said Jephthah to the Ammonites, “lawfully yours? By the same right we possess the lands our victorious god has acquired for himself.”141 It appears to me that here was a clear recognition of the parity between the rights of Chamos and those of the god of Israel.
But when the Jews, while in subjection to the kings of Babylon and later to the kings of Syria, wanted to remain steadfast in not giving recognition to any other god but their own, their refusal, seen as rebellion against the victor, brought them the persecutions we read of in their history, and of which there is no other precedent prior to Christianity.142
Since, therefore, each religion was uniquely tied to the laws of the state that prescribed it, there was no other way of converting a people except by enslaving it, nor any other missionaries than conquerors. And with the obligation to change cult being the law of the vanquished, it was necessary to begin by conquering before talking about it. Far from men fighting for the gods, it was, as it was in Homer, the gods who fought for men; each asked his own god for victory and paid for it with new altars. Before taking a fortress, the Romans summoned its gods to leave it. And when they allowed the Tarentines to keep their angry gods, it was because at that point they considered these gods to be in subjection to their own and forced to do them homage. They left the vanquished their gods, just as they left them their laws. A wreath to the Capitoline Jupiter was often the only tribute they imposed.
Finally, the Romans having spread their cult and their gods, along with their empire, and having themselves often adopted the gods of the vanquished by granting to various peoples the right of self-government,143 the peoples of this vast empire gradually found themselves to have multitudes of gods and cults, which were nearly the same everywhere. And that is how paganism finally became a single, identical religion throughout the known world.
Such were the circumstances under which Jesus came to establish a spiritual kingdom on earth. In separating the theological system from the political system, this made the state cease being united and caused internal divisions that have never ceased to agitate Christian peoples. But since this new idea of an otherworldly kingdom had never entered the heads of the pagans, they {245} always regarded the Christians as true rebels who, underneath their hypocritical submission, were only waiting for the moment when they would become independent and the masters, and adroitly usurp the authority they pretended in their weakness to respect. This is the reason for the persecutions.
What the pagans feared happened. Then everything changed its appearance. The humble Christians changed their language, and soon this so-called otherworldly kingdom became, under a visible leader, the most violent despotism in this world.
However, since there has always been a prince and civil laws, this double power has given rise to a perpetual jurisdictional conflict that has made all good polity impossible in Christian states, and no one has ever been able to know whether it is the priest or the master whom one is obliged to obey.
Nevertheless, several peoples, even in Europe or nearby, have wanted to preserve or reestablish the ancient system, but without success. The spirit of Christianity has won everything. The sacred cult has always remained or again become independent of the sovereign and without any necessary link to the body of the state. Mohammed had very sound opinions. He tied his political system together very well, and as long as the form of his government subsisted under his successors, the caliphs, this government was utterly unified, and for that reason it was good. But as the Arabs became prosperous, lettered, polished, soft, and cowardly, they were subjugated by barbarians. Then the division between the two powers began again. Although it is less apparent among the Mohammedans than among the Christians, it is there all the same, especially in the sect of Ali; and there are states, such as Persia, where it never ceases to be felt.
Among us, the kings of England have established themselves as heads of the church, and the czars have done the same. But with this title, they became less its masters than its servants. They have acquired not so much the right to change it as the power to maintain it. They are not its legislators; they are merely its princes. Wherever the clergy constitutes a body,144 it is master and legislator in its own sphere. Thus there are two powers, two sovereigns, in England and in Russia, just as there are everywhere else.
Of all the Christian writers, the philosopher Hobbes145 is the only one who clearly saw the evil and the remedy, who dared to propose the reunification {246} of the two heads of the eagle and the complete restoration of political unity, without which no state or government will ever be well constituted. But he should have seen that the dominating spirit of Christianity was incompatible with his system, and that the interest of the priest would always be stronger than that of the state. It is not so much what is horrible and false in his political theory as what is just and true that has caused it to be hated.146
I believe that if the facts of history were developed from this point of view, it would be easy to refute the opposing sentiments of Bayle and Warburton, the one holding that no religion is useful to the body politic, while the other maintains, to the contrary, that Christianity is its firmest support.147 We could prove to the first that no state has ever been founded without religion serving as its base, and to the second that Christian law is at bottom more injurious than it is useful for the strong constitution of the state. To succeed in making myself understood, I need only give a bit more precision to the excessively vague ideas about religion that are pertinent to my subject.
When considered in relation to society, which is either general or particular,148 religion can also be divided into two kinds, namely, the religion of the man and that of the citizen. The first—without temples, altars, or rites and limited to the purely internal cult of the supreme God and to the eternal duties of morality—is the pure and simple religion of the Gospel, the true theism, and what can be called natural divine law.149 The other, inscribed in a single country, gives it its gods, its own titulary patrons. It has its dogmas, its rites, its exterior cult prescribed by laws. Outside the nation that practices it, everything is infidel, alien, and barbarous to it. It extends the duties and rights of man only as far as its altars. Such were all the religions of the early peoples, to which the name of civil or positive divine law can be given.
There is a third sort of religion, which is more bizarre. In giving men two sets of legislation, two leaders, and two homelands, it subjects them to contradictory duties and prevents them from being simultaneously devout men and citizens. Such is the religion of the Lamas and of the Japanese, and {247} such is Roman Christianity. It can be called the religion of the priest. It leads to a kind of mixed and unsociable law that has no name.
Considered from a political standpoint, these three types of religion all have their faults. The third is so evidently bad that it is a waste of time to amuse oneself by proving it. Whatever breaks up social unity is worthless. All institutions that place man in contradiction with himself are of no value.
The second is good in that it unites the divine cult with love of the laws and in that, in making the homeland the object of its citizens’ admiration, it teaches them that all service to the state is service to its tutelary god. It is a kind of theocracy in which there ought to be no pontiff other than the prince and no priests other than the magistrates. To die for one’s country is, then, to become a martyr; to violate its laws is to be impious; to subject a guilty man to public execration is to deliver him to the wrath of the gods: sacer estod.150 However, it is bad in that, being based on error and lies, it deceives men, makes them credulous and superstitious, and drowns the true cult of the divinity in an empty ceremony. It is also bad when, on becoming exclusive and tyrannical, it makes a people bloodthirsty and intolerant, so that men breathe only murder and massacre, and believe they are performing a holy action in killing anyone who does not accept their gods. This places such a people in a natural state of war with all others, which is quite harmful to its own security.
Thus there remains the religion of man or Christianity (not that of today, but that of the Gospel, which is completely different). Through this holy, sublime, true religion, men, in being the children of the same God, all acknowledge one another as brothers, and the society that unites them is not dissolved even at death.
But since this religion has no particular relation to the body politic, it leaves laws with only the force the laws derive from themselves, without adding any other force to them. And thus one of the great bonds of a particular society remains ineffectual. Moreover, far from attaching the hearts of the citizens to the state, it detaches them from it as from all the other earthly things. I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.151
We are told that a people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable. I see but one major difficulty in this assumption, namely that a society of true Christians would no longer be a society of men.
I even say that this supposed society would not, for all its perfection, be the strongest or the most durable. By dint of being perfect, it would lack a bond of union; its destructive vice would be in its very perfection.
{248} Each man would fulfill his duty; the people would be subject to the laws; the leaders would be just and moderate, the magistrates would be upright and incorruptible; soldiers would scorn death; there would be neither vanity nor luxury. All of this is very fine, but let us look further.
Christianity is a completely spiritual religion, concerned exclusively with things heavenly. The homeland of the Christian is not of this world. He does his duty, it is true, but he does it with a profound indifference toward the success or failure of his efforts. As long as he has nothing to reproach himself for, it matters little to him whether everything is going well or poorly down here. If the state is flourishing, he hardly dares to enjoy the public felicity, for fear of becoming puffed up with his country’s glory. If the state is in decline, he blesses the hand of God that weighs heavily on his people.
For the society to be peaceful and for harmony to be maintained, every citizen without exception would have to be an equally good Christian. But if, unhappily, there is a single ambitious man, a single hypocrite, a Catiline, for example, or a Cromwell, he would quite undoubtedly gain the upper hand on his pious compatriots. Christian charity does not readily allow one to think ill of one’s neighbors. Once he has discovered by some ruse the art of deceiving them and of laying hold of a part of the public authority, behold a man established in dignity! God wills that he be respected. Soon, behold a power! God wills that he be obeyed. Does the trustee of this power abuse it? He is the rod with which God punishes his children. It would be against one’s conscience to expel the usurper. It would be necessary to disturb the public tranquility, use violence, and shed blood. All this accords ill with the meekness of a Christian. And after all, what difference does it make whether one is a free man or a serf in this vale of tears? The essential thing is getting to heaven, and resignation is but another means to that end.
What if a foreign war breaks out? The citizens march without reservation into combat; none among them dreams of deserting. They do their duty, but without passion for victory; they know how to die better than how to be victorious. What difference does it make whether they are the victors or the vanquished? Does not providence know better than they what they need? Just imagine the advantage a fierce, impetuous, and passionate enemy could draw from their stoicism! Set them face to face with those generous peoples who were devoured by an ardent love of glory and homeland. Suppose your Christian republic is face to face with Sparta or Rome. The pious Christians will be beaten, crushed, and destroyed before they realize where they are, or else they will owe their safety only to the scorn their enemies will conceive for them. To my way of thinking, the oath taken by Fabius’ soldiers was a fine one. They did not swear to die or to win; they swore to return victorious. And they kept their promise. Christians would never have taken such an oath; they would have believed they were tempting God.
But I am deceiving myself in talking about a Christian republic; these terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. {249} Its spirit is too favorable to tyranny for tyranny not to take advantage of it at all times. True Christians are made to be slaves.152 They know it and are hardly moved by this. This brief life has too little value in their eyes.
Christian troops, we are told, are excellent. I deny this. Is someone going to show me some? For my part, I do not know of any Christian troops. Someone will mention the crusades. Without disputing the valor of the crusaders, I will point out that, far from being Christians, they were soldiers of the priest; they were citizens of the church; they were fighting for its spiritual country that the church, goodness knows how, had made temporal. Properly understood, this is a throwback to paganism. Since the Gospel does not establish a national religion, no holy war is possible among Christians.
Under the pagan emperors, Christian soldiers were brave. All the Christian authors affirm this, and I believe it. This was a competition for honor against the pagan troops. Once the emperors were Christians, this competition ceased. And when the cross expelled the eagle, all Roman valor disappeared.
But leaving aside political considerations, let us return to right and determine the principles that govern this important point. The right that the social compact gives the sovereign over the subjects does not, as I have said, go beyond the limits of public utility.153 The subjects, therefore, do not have to account to the sovereign for their opinions, except to the extent that these opinions are of significance to the community. Now it is of great consequence to the state that each citizen have a religion that causes him to love his duties. But the dogmas of that religion are of no interest to either the state or its members, except to the extent that these dogmas relate to morality and to the duties that the one who professes them is required to fulfill toward others. Each man can have in addition such opinions as he pleases, without it being any of the sovereign’s business to know what they are. For since the other world is outside the province of the sovereign, whatever the fate of subjects in the life to come, it is none of its business, as long as they are good citizens in this life.
{250} There is, therefore, a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which it belongs to the sovereign to establish, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject.154 While not having the ability to obligate anyone to believe them, the sovereign can banish from the state anyone who does not believe them. It can banish him not for being impious but for being unsociable, for being incapable of sincerely loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing his life, if necessary, for his duty. If, after having publicly acknowledged these same dogmas, a person acts as if he does not believe them, he should be put to death; he has committed the greatest of crimes: he has lied before the laws.
The dogmas of the civil religion ought to be simple, few in number, precisely worded, without explanations or commentaries. The existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent divinity that foresees and provides; the life to come; the happiness of the just; the punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the social contract and of the laws—these are the positive dogmas.155 As for the negative dogmas, I am limiting them to just one, namely, intolerance. It is part of the cults we have excluded.
Those who distinguish between civil and theological intolerance are mistaken, in my opinion. Those two types of intolerance are inseparable. It is impossible to live in peace with those one believes to be damned. To love them would be to hate God, who punishes them. It is absolutely necessary to either reclaim them or torment them. Whenever theological intolerance is allowed, it is impossible for it not to have some civil effect;156 and once it does, the {251} sovereign no longer is sovereign, not even over temporal affairs. Thenceforward, priests are the true masters; kings are simply their officers.
Now that there no longer is and never again can be an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be shown to all those who tolerate others, as long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of a citizen. But whoever dares to say, “Outside the church there is no salvation” ought to be expelled from the state, unless the state is the church and the prince the pontiff. Such a dogma is good only in a theocratic government; in all other forms of government it is ruinous. The reason why Henry IV is said to have embraced the Roman religion should make every decent man, and above all any prince who knows how to reason, leave it.157
After laying down the true principles of political right and attempting to establish the state on this basis, it remains to support the state by means of its external relations, which would include the laws of nations—commerce; the {252} law of war and conquests; public law, leagues, negotiations, treaties, and so on.158 But all that forms a new subject that is too vast for my nearsightedness. I should always have set my sights on things that are nearer at hand to me.
END
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1 [Letter to Moultou, January 18, 1762.]
2 [Letter to Duchesne, May 23, 1762.]
3 [“Ce livre n’étant point fait pour la France,” letter to Duchesne, May 23, 1762.]
4 [Rousseau gives the Latin: “foederis aequas / Dicamus leges” (bk. 11, line 302).]
5 [Rousseau has only one word, civil, where we have two, “civil” and “civic.” This translation generally translates civil as “civil,” but it should be remembered that “civic” may also be right.]
6 [The free state is the Republic of Geneva; Rousseau held that the sovereign authority in Geneva was the general council, an assembly of all the citizens.]
7 [Rousseau uses three words with related meanings: contrat (contract), pacte (compact), and convention (agreement). In Rousseau’s day convention means “agreement” (accord or pacte); it does not mean the same thing as modern English “convention”—Oxford English Dictionary (OED), senses 9 and 10: “a rule or practice based upon general consent”; it acquired this meaning in French only in the nineteenth century. The same is true in English: Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, when he argues that justice is established by convention, uses “agreement” as a synonym for “convention” (carefully distinguishing his usage of the word from what he recognizes to be “the usual sense of the word” in which “convention” is used as a synonym for “promise,” since he is writing about a tacit not an explicit agreement), though Hume’s argument points directly to the more modern sense of the word (which the OED [accessed April 24, 2011] dates to 1778) and this modern sense may indeed derive from Hume.]
8 [Here Rousseau follows Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, ch. 5.]
9 [Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace, bk. 1, ch. 3, §8.]
10 “Learned research on public right is often nothing more than the history of ancient abuses, and taking a lot of trouble to study them too closely gets one nowhere.” Treatise on the Interests of France along with Her Neighbors, by the Marquis d’Argenson. This is just what Grotius has done.
11 [Philo of Alexandria (20 BC–AD 50), best known as author of Antiquities of the Jews. The text referred to here is the Embassy to Gaius.]
12 [Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1, ch. 2, 1252a.]
13 See a short treatise of Plutarch titled “That Animals Reason.” [Ulysses’ companions were turned into beasts by Circe.]
14 [Rousseau is referring to the Patriarcha of Robert Filmer, published posthumously in 1680 and refuted by John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and James Tyrrell.]
15 [Rousseau’s target here is Hobbes.]
16 [Romans 13:1.]
17 [Grotius, Law of War and Peace, bk. 1, ch. 3, §12.]
18 [This is what Hobbes would say.]
19 [Cf. Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise §228.]
20 [Hobbes, De Cive, ch. 8, and Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, bk. 6, ch. 3.]
21 [See Rousseau’s essay “The State of War” in this volume.]
22 [“Real” is used here in the same way that we talk about “real estate,” i.e., real relations are proprietary relations.]
23 [At this point the following passage was added to the 1782 edition: “The Romans, who had a better understanding of and a greater respect for the right of war than any other nation, carried their scruples so far in this regard that a citizen was not allowed to serve as a volunteer unless he had expressly committed himself against the enemy and against a specifically named enemy. When a legion in which Cato the son first served had been reorganized, Cato the Elder wrote Popilius that if he wanted his son to continue to serve under him, he would have to make him swear the military oath afresh, since, with the first one having been annulled, he could no longer take up arms against the enemy. And this very same Cato wrote to his son to take care to avoid going into battle without swearing this military oath afresh. I know the siege of Clusium and other specific cases can be raised as counterexamples to this, but for my part I cite laws and customs. The Romans were the ones who transgressed their laws least often and are the only ones to have such noble laws.”]
24 [Cf. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, bk. 10, ch. 3.]
25 [An attack on Grotius, who cites poets in the course of his argument.]
26 [Rousseau’s phrase is la liberté conventionelle.]
27 [When Rousseau writes about a moral person, being, or body, he is using moral in a technical sense. In law a moral person is an entity capable of being legally responsible; corporations are therefore moral persons. This translation reproduces Rousseau’s terminology, but one could often simply substitute “artificial” in order to grasp his sense.]
28 The true meaning of this word is almost entirely lost on modern men. Most of them mistake a town for a city and a townsman for a citizen. They do not know that houses make a town but citizens make a city. Once this mistake cost the Carthaginians dearly. I have not found in my reading that the title of citizen has ever been given to the subjects of a prince, not even in ancient times to the Macedonians or in our own time to the English, although they are closer to liberty than all the others. Only the French adopt this name citizen with complete familiarity, since they have no true idea of its meaning, as can be seen from their dictionaries. If this were not the case, they would become guilty of treason for using it. For them, this name expresses a virtue and not a right. When Bodin wanted to speak about our citizens and townsmen, he committed a terrible blunder, for he mistook the one group for the other. Mr. d’Alembert was not in error, and in his article titled “Geneva” he has carefully distinguished the four orders of men (even five, counting ordinary foreigners) who are in our town [i.e., Geneva], and of whom only two make up the republic. No other French author I am aware of has grasped the true meaning of the word citizen. [Cf. Jean Bodin, The Six Books of the Republic, bk. 1, ch. 6.]
29 [It is this argument, which undermines the notion of a constitution that must be preserved and respected, that led to Rousseau’s book being condemned by the government of Geneva as destructive of all systems of government.]
30 [Rousseau’s term is être de raison, which corresponds to the scholastic ens rationis. Eighteenth-century dictionaries distinguish êtres de raison from êtres réels. This particular person—Tom Smith—or this particular dog—Fido—is real; humankind or the domesticated dog is an abstraction or être de raison.]
31 [Rousseau’s title is Du domaine réel. “Real” refers to property in land (as in “real estate”), whereas domaine is a somewhat old-fashioned synonym for “property” but is used particularly for property in land.]
32 [Rousseau here follows the chapter on property in Locke’s Two Treatises, Second Treatise.]
33 [Here and below, Rousseau writes fond but must mean fonds. The mistake seems to have been fairly common, but, as Jean-François Féraud points out in his Dictionnaire critique de la langue française of 1787–1788, fond means “bottom” (as in the bottom of a cup) whereas fonds means “land.” They are two quite different words.]
34 [Cf. Hobbes, De Cive, ch. 12, §7.]
35 Under bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory. It serves merely to maintain the poor man in his misery and the rich man in his usurpation. In actuality, laws are always useful to those who have possessions and harmful to those who have nothing. Whence it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only insofar as they all have something and none of them has too much.
36 For a will to be general, it need not always be unanimous; however, it is necessary for all the votes to be counted. Any formal exclusion is a breach of generality.
37 [The Catholic James II was expelled from Britain in the revolution of 1688 and replaced by William and Mary. Rousseau is right to regard the word “abdication” as fundamental; it implies that no revolution had taken place and therefore implicitly denies a right of revolution. However, Jean Barbeyrac was more sympathetic to the arguments of Locke than Rousseau perhaps recognizes.]
38 “Each interest,” says the Marquis d’Argenson [in Considerations on the Former and Present Government of France], “has different principles. The accord of two private interests is formed in opposition to that of a third.” He could have added that the accord of all the interests is found in the opposition to that of each. If there were no different interests, the common interest, which would never encounter any obstacle, would scarcely be felt. Everything would proceed on its own and politics would cease being an art.
39 “It is true,” says Machiavelli, “that some divisions are harmful to the republic while others are helpful to it. Those that are accompanied by sects and partisan factions are harmful while those are beneficial that maintain themselves without sects and partisan factions. Since, therefore, a ruler of a republic cannot prevent enmities from arising within it, he at least ought to prevent them from becoming sects,” The History of Florence, Book VII. [Rousseau here quotes the Italian.]
40 [Lycurgus was the author of the constitution of Sparta, Solon the key figure in the construction of Athenian democracy. Numa and Servius (the second and sixth kings of Rome) played crucial roles in the construction of Roman institutions; on Servius, see Book IV, Chapter 4.]
41 Attentive readers, please do not rush to accuse me of contradiction here. I have been unable to avoid it in my choice of words, given the poverty of the language. But wait.
42 [Rousseau agrees with Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise, ch. 8.]
43 [Rousseau’s word is magistrat; but in eighteenth-century French, a “magistrate” can be someone who exercises justice (as with the English word) or someone responsible for what the French call police—a term that covers all measures to order a society—in other words, any member of the executive. Rousseau’s examples cover both senses of the word. In modern French, one can say that the president of France is the first magistrate, which is to say only that he is the highest officer of the state. Thus Rousseau works with a bipartite classification—sovereign and magistrate—where we work with a tripartite classification—legislature (which represents the people, who are sovereign), executive, and judiciary. Since modern English terminology tends to draw a clear distinction between the executive and the judiciary, there is no convenient term in English that covers the range of the French term.]
44 [Rousseau explains the meaning he gives to the word “prince” in Book III, Chapter 1.]
45 [Rousseau’s term is personne morale, which we consistently translate as “moral person.” But in normal usage the claim that a corporate entity is a moral person means that a corporate entity is like an individual human being (who is also a moral person) in that it can be held responsible for its actions. Here Rousseau uses personne morale to refer to a corporate entity as opposed to an individual human being. He is thus using personne morale as a technical term to refer to a corporate entity or an artificial being.]
46 [This is hard, even impossible, to reconcile with Rousseau’s argument in Book I, Chapter 4.]
47 [Rousseau’s term is supplices, which means corporal punishment. In ancien régime France, the standard punishments for crime were corporal—whipping, branding, breaking on the wheel, etc.—and so Rousseau does not intend to distinguish between corporal punishment and non-corporal punishment (prison, for example) but to refer to judicial punishments in general.]
48 [Rousseau is attacking Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 1, ch. 1.]
49 [As Rousseau goes on to explain, by his definition a monarchy can be a republic. Rousseau’s definition of “republic” as any legitimate government was becoming unusual (in Montesquieu, for example, republic is an antonym of monarchy), but it had been until recently the standard definition—thus Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic is about legitimate government in general and not about “republics” in the modern, Montesquieuean sense—and it corresponds to classical usage.]
50 By this word I do not have in mind merely an aristocracy or a democracy, but in general every government guided by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the government need not be made indistinguishable from the sovereign, but it must be its servant. Then the monarchy itself is a republic. This will become clear in the next Book.
51 A people never becomes famous except when its legislation begins to decline. It is not known for how many centuries the constitution established by Lycurgus caused the happiness of the Spartans before the rest of Greece took note of it.
52 [That kings are gods.]
53 [Rousseau is using civil here to mean “fit to be a citizen.” In Latin civilis is the adjective from civis, “citizen.”]
54 [The quotation comes from Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, ch. 1.]
55 [See Machiavelli, Discourses, bk. 1, chs. 9–10.]
56 Those who view Calvin simply as a theologian fail to grasp the extent of his genius. The codification of our wise edicts, in which he had a large role, does him as much honor as his Institutes. Whatever revolution time may bring out in our religious worship, as long as the love of homeland and of liberty is not extinguished among us, the memory of this great man will never cease to be held sacred.
57 [A committee of ten established in the Roman Republic for the first time in 451 BC to reform the laws.]
58 “And in truth,” says Machiavelli, “there has never been among a people a single legislator who, in proposing extraordinary laws, did not have recourse to God, for otherwise they would not be accepted, since there are many benefits known to a prudent man that do not have in themselves evident reasons enabling them to persuade others.” Discourses on Titus Livy, Book I, Ch. XI. [Rousseau here quotes the Italian.]
59 [Bishop William Warburton (1698–1779), author of The Alliance between Church and State (1736, translated into French in 1742) and The Divine Legation of Moses (1737–1741).]
60 [In the 1782 edition, this sentence was revised to read, “Most peoples, like men.…”]
61 [In the 1782 edition, this sentence was revised to read, “Youth is not childhood. For nations, as for men, maturity must be awaited….”]
62 [Peter the Great (1672–1725), who had been praised by Voltaire in his History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great (1759–1763).]
63 If there were two neighboring peoples, one being unable to get along without the other, it would be a very tough situation for the former and very dangerous for the latter. In such a case, every wise nation will work very quickly to free the other of its dependency. The Republic of Tlaxcala, enclosed within the Mexican Empire, preferred to do without salt rather than buy it from the Mexicans or even be given it by them without charge. The wise Tlaxcalans saw the trap hidden beneath this generosity. They kept themselves free, and this small state, enclosed within this great empire, was finally the instrument of its ruin.
64 Do you therefore want to give stability to the state? Bring the extremes as close together as possible. Tolerate neither rich men nor beggars. These two estates, which are naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the common good. From one come the supporters of tyranny, and from the other the tyrants. It is always between them that public liberty becomes a matter of commerce. The one buys it and the other sells it.
65 [Rousseau’s word arts means “crafts” here but is translated as “arts” throughout for consistency.]
66 Any branch of foreign trade, says the Marquis d’Argenson, creates hardly anything more than a false utility for a kingdom in general. It can enrich some private individuals, even some towns, but the nation as a whole gains nothing and the populace is none the better for it.
67 [Montesquieu, in Spirit of the Laws, bk. 11, ch. 5.]
68 [The word translated here as “statesmen” is politiques, which refers ambiguously to political leaders and political theorists. Among political theorists, Pierre Bayle had been the first to stress the importance of the law of opinion in maintaining social order in his Diverse Thoughts on the Comet (1682).]
69 Thus in Venice the college is given the name Most Serene Prince even when the doge is not present.
70 [In the language of eighteenth-century mathematics, a continuous proportion is one in which there are two ratios, but the second term of the first is identical to the first term of the second. Thus, if we have sovereign government and government state, we have a continuous proportion whose proportional mean is the government and whose extremes are sovereign and state.]
71 [The quotient here is the second term of a ratio divided by the first. Thus in the ratio 2 : 8, the quotient is 4.]
72 [Take the continuous proportion 8 : 2 and 2 : 4. The doubled ratio, in the language of the time, is (8 × 2) divided by (2 × 4). If the ratios were 4 : 2 and 2 : 1, the doubled ratio would be (4 × 2) divided by 2, i.e., 4; that is, it would be the same as the first term. Moreover, the first term would be the square of the middle terms.]
73 [Following most modern editions in assuming that Rousseau’s les donner is a mistake for la donner.]
74 [Montesquieu, in Spirit of the Laws, bk. 3, ch. 3.]
75 The Palatine of Posen, father of the King of Poland, Duke of Lorraine. [Rousseau quotes in Latin the maxim that follows.]
76 It is clear that among the ancients the word optimates does not mean the best but the most powerful.
77 It is of great importance that laws should regulate the form of the election of magistrates, for if it is left to the will of the prince, it is impossible to avoid falling into a hereditary aristocracy, as has taken place in the republics of Venice and Berne. Thus the former has long been a state in dissolution, while the latter maintains itself through the extreme wisdom of its senate. It is a very honorable and very dangerous exception.
78 [This is a misrepresentation of Aristotle, who holds that the rich are given preference in an oligarchy.]
79 [Although Rousseau recognized monarchy as being, in principle, a legitimate form of government, this and the next paragraph make clear his profound opposition to it. One may conclude that Rousseau was, in some measure, following Machiavelli’s example and hiding his love of liberty.]
80 [The following was inserted in the 1782 edition: “Machiavelli was a decent man and a good citizen. But since he was attached to the house of Medici, he was forced during the oppression of his homeland to disguise his love of liberty. The very choice of his execrable hero makes clear enough his hidden intention. And the contrast between the maxims of his book The Prince and those of his Discourses on Titus Livy and of his History of Florence shows that this profound political theorist has until now had only superficial or corrupt readers. The court of Rome has sternly prohibited his book. I can well believe it; it is the court he most clearly depicts.”]
81 [Cf. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 2, ch. 4.]
82 [Cf. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 2, ch. 2; the same point is made by Machiavelli.]
83 [This sentence was added as the book went through the press (letter to Rey, January 6, 1762) and was intended as praise of the leading minister of the day, Choiseul. Rousseau (mistakenly) hoped it would encourage him to oppose any move to ban the Social Contract in France.]
84 Tacitus, Histories, Book I. [Rousseau here quotes the Latin.]
85 The Statesman.
86 [Rousseau has in mind Montesquieu’s account of the English constitution; in Poland (or at least so Rousseau believed) ministers were in effect unaccountable and could do as they pleased.]
87 [Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, especially bk. 17.]
88 [Rousseau’s word is politie, which does not appear in eighteenth-century French dictionaries and would therefore have been more unusual than “polity.” He means “political community.”]
89 [Jean Chardin (1643–1713), Voyages en Perse (4 vols., Amsterdam, 1735), vol. 3, 76, 83–84. The first edition is 1711.]
90 This does not contradict what I said earlier in Book II, Chapter 9, regarding the disadvantages of large states, for there it was a question of the authority of the government over its members, and here it is a question of its force against the subjects. Its scattered members serve it as points of support for acting from a distance upon the people, but it has no support for acting directly on these members themselves. Thus in the one case the length of the lever causes its weakness, and in the other case its force. [This note was added as the Social Contract was on its way through the press: letter to Rey, February 18, 1762.]
91 [The word signe (sign) is used in early modern French to refer to something that is an indication of something else; thus, a high temperature indicates a fever, and the tracks left by a wolf indicate its presence nearby. Rousseau would also have had available the words symptome and indice. The French language still lacks a word equivalent to “evidence” (in the sense that we describe a legal case as being based on “evidence.” They speak of testimony, proofs, and indications [indices] where we have one word that covers all three). Rousseau’s word signe thus means something close to “evidence,” but the term “evidence” carries with it the values and procedures of modern science, and it would, arguably, be anachronistic to ascribe these to Rousseau.]
92 [This note was added while the Social Contract was on its way through the press: letter to Rey, February 18, 1762.] We should judge on this same principle the centuries that merit preference with respect to the prosperity of the human race. Those in which letters and arts are known to have flourished have been admired too much, without penetrating the secret object of their cultivation and without considering its devastating effect, “and this was called humanity by the inexperienced, when it was a part of servitude.” [Rousseau here quotes Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 21, in Latin.] Will we never see in the maxims of books the crude interest that causes the authors to speak? No. Whatever they may say, when a country is depopulated, it is not true, despite its brilliance, that all goes well; and the fact that a poet has an income of a hundred thousand livres is not sufficient to make his century the best of all. The apparent calm and the tranquility of the leader ought to be less of an object of consideration than the well-being of whole nations and especially of the most populous states. A hailstorm may devastate a few cantons, but it rarely causes famine. Riots and civil wars may greatly disturb the leaders, but they are not the true misfortunes of the people, who may even have a reprieve while people argue over who will tyrannize them. It is their permanent condition that causes real periods of prosperity or calamity. It is when everything remains crushed under the yoke that everything decays. It is then that the leaders destroy them at will, “where they bring about solitude they call it peace.” [Rousseau here quotes Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 30, in Latin.] When the quarrels of the great disturbed the kingdom of France, and the coadjutor of Paris brought with him to the parlement a dagger in his pocket, this did not keep the French people from living happily and in great numbers in a free and decent ease. Long ago, Greece flourished in the midst of the cruelest wars. Blood flowed in waves, and the whole country was covered with men. It seemed, says Machiavelli [Rousseau paraphrases a passage in Machiavelli’s History of Florence], that in the midst of murders, proscriptions, and civil wars, our republic became more powerful; the virtue of its citizens, their mores, and their independence did more to reinforce it than all its dissensions did to weaken it. A little agitation gives strength to souls, and what truly brings about prosperity for the species is not so much peace as liberty. [In “quarrels of the great disturbed the kingdom of France,” Rousseau is referring to the civil war known as the second Fronde, or the Fronde of the nobles, 1650–1653. Rousseau’s source is the Mémoires of the Cardinal de Retz. De Retz tells this story about himself—with some sense of shame because the clergy (coadjutor, assistant to a bishop) are not meant to carry weapons or shed blood.]
93 The slow formation and the progress of the Republic of Venice in its lagoons offers a notable example of this succession. And it is rather astonishing that after more than twelve hundred years the Venetians seem to be no further than the second stage, which began with the Serrar di Consiglio in 1198. As for the ancient dukes, for whom the Venetians are reproached, whatever the Squitinio della libertà veneta [an anonymous attack on Venice published in 1612] may say about them, it has been proven that they were not their sovereigns.
The Roman Republic does not fail to be brought forward as an objection against me, which, it will be said, followed a completely opposite course, passing from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy. That is not how I see it at all.
The first establishment of Romulus was a mixed government that promptly degenerated into despotism. For some particular reasons, the state perished before its time, just as one sees a newborn die before reaching manhood. The expulsion of the Tarquins was the true epoch of the birth of the republic. But it did not at first take on a constant form, because in failing to abolish the patriciate, only half the work was completed. For in this way, since hereditary aristocracy, which is the worst of all forms of legitimate administration, remained in conflict with democracy, the form of government remained uncertain and adrift and was not fixed, as Machiavelli has proven [Discourses, bk. 1, chs. 2–3], until the establishment of the tribunes. It was only then that there was a true government and a veritable democracy. In fact, the populace then was not merely sovereign but also magistrate and judge. The senate was merely a subordinate tribunal whose purpose was to temper and concentrate the government; and the consuls themselves, though they were patricians, the first magistrates, and absolute generals in war, in Rome were merely presiding officers of the people.
From that point on, the government was also seen to follow its natural inclination and to tend strongly toward aristocracy. With the patriciate having abolished itself, as it were, the aristocracy was no longer in the body of patricians, as it is in Venice and Genoa, but in the body of the senate, which was composed of patricians and plebeians, and even in the body of the tribunes when they began to usurp an active power. For words do not affect things, and when the populace has leaders who govern for it, it is always an aristocracy, regardless of the name these leaders bear.
The abuse of aristocracy gave birth to civil wars and the triumvirate. Sulla, Julius Caesar, and Augustus became in fact veritable monarchs, and finally, under the despotism of Tiberius, the state was dissolved. Roman history therefore does not invalidate my principle; it confirms it.
94 “For all are considered and are called tyrants who use perpetual power in a city accustomed to liberty.” [Rousseau here quotes the Latin.] Cornelius Nepos, Life of Miltiades. It is true that Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book XVIII, Chapter 10, distinguishes between a tyrant and a king, in that the former governs for his own utility and the latter governs only for the utility of his subjects. But besides the fact that generally all the Greek authors used the word tyrant in another sense, as appears most clearly in Xenophon’s Hiero, it would follow from Aristotle’s distinction that there has not yet been a single king since the beginning of the world.
95 [In Rousseau’s view the absence of such assemblies of the general council was a major weakness of the Genevan constitution, allowing the oligarchical little council to usurp powers that properly belonged to the people as a whole.]
96 [Rousseau’s word is cité. See note 28 for his understanding of the meaning of the word as referring to any political community where there is a common citizenship. Since he took such care to define the word, this translation sticks to it, but his sense might be more easily rendered by “political community” or “polity.”]
97 In nearly the same sense as is given this word in the English Parliament. [The speaker presides over debates in the British House of Commons, as in the U.S. House of Representatives.] The similarity between these activities would have put the consuls and the tribunes in conflict, even if all jurisdiction had been suspended.
98 [Rousseau is thinking of France in particular. There in the Estates General (which did not meet between 1614 and the Revolution of 1789), the first estate was the clergy, the second the nobility, and the third the commoners. Because the estates voted separately, the clergy and nobility could outvote the commoners.]
99 To adopt in cold countries the luxury and softness of the Orientals is to desire to be given their chains; it is submitting to these with even greater necessity than they did.
100 This is what I intended to do in the rest of this work, when, in treating external relations, I would have come to confederations. An entirely new subject and its principles have yet to be established.
101 [This view was widespread in constitutionalist theory, and in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men Rousseau describes it as the generally held view. But it is not the view of Hobbes or Locke.]
102 [Rousseau’s target here is Pufendorf, who maintains that there is both a contract of association, which establishes the political community, and a contract of submission, which establishes the government.]
103 [The word “provisional” was seized on by the Genevan authorities when they condemned the Social Contract as being destructive of all stability in government.]
104 [Rousseau’s word is droit (often, as here in the subtitle to the Social Contract, “right”). In French, droit and loi (law) have meanings that overlap much more extensively than law and right in English, so that “law” is often the only possible translation of droit. Thus in France one takes a degree en droit (in law) and studies in the faculté de droit (faculty of law). The French for “the law of nature” is le droit naturel, for “the law of nations” it is le droit des gens, and for “the law of war” it is le droit de guerre.]
105 [“Odious cases” refers to the principle of Roman law odia restringenda, favores ampliandi: when someone claims a right that will have beneficial consequences, the law should be interpreted liberally; but when they claim a right that will have evil (“odious”) consequences, the law should be interpreted as narrowly as possible.]
106 [The Genevan authorities took particular offense at this. It looked to them like an invitation to periodic revolutions.]
107 [Grotius, Law of War and Peace, bk. 2, ch. 5, §24. Grotius himself limits this right as Rousseau does in his note.]
108 On the understanding that one does not leave in order to evade one’s duty and to be exempt from serving the homeland at a time when it has need of us. In such circumstances, taking flight would be criminal and punishable; it would no longer be withdrawal, but desertion.
109 [A reference to the rural cantons of Switzerland.]
110 [The Duke of Beaufort (1594–1665) was an illegitimate son of Henry IV; he was twice accused of conspiring to assassinate Richelieu and was exiled, first to Holland and then to England.]
111 [Rousseau limits the sovereign’s right to the right to vote, giving the government a monopoly of proposing legislation and speaking in the assembly. This corresponds to the Genevan constitution, in which the little council controlled the agenda of the general council, and he approves this arrangement in his dedication to the Discourse on Inequality and (with reservations) in Letters Written from the Mountain. It also corresponds to the Venetian constitution in which the Grand Council voted but did not debate. Rousseau thus makes a major concession to the need to ensure political stability.]
112 [Histories, bk. 1, ch. 85.]
113 [Cf. Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise §95, 99.]
114 [This may be thought to follow from Locke’s argument, but Locke never explicitly states this conclusion, and Rousseau is unique among major eighteenth-century political theorists in his systematic opposition to slavery.]
115 This should always be understood in connection with a free state, for otherwise his family, his goods, the impossibility of claiming asylum, necessity, or violence can keep an inhabitant in a country in spite of himself; and then his sojourn alone no longer presupposes his consent to the contract or to the violation of the contract.
116 In Genoa, the word libertas [liberty] can be read on the front of prisons and on the chains of galley slaves. This application of the motto is fine and just. Indeed it is only malefactors of all social classes who prevent the citizen from being free. In a country where all such people were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.
117 [Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 2, ch. 2.]
118 [This was the name for the poor nobles of Venice, generally said to refer to the area around the Church of St. Barnabas, where they lived, but also presumably a reference to St. Barnabas himself, who sold all he had and gave it to the apostles.]
119 [The text of the first edition is approcha (past tense), but as the rest of the passage is in the present tense this seems likely to be a misprint for approche (present tense).]
120 [The Grand Council had, according to Rousseau in his Considerations on the Government of Poland, 1,200 members.]
121 [The citizens or cittadini of Venice, whose status was below that of the nobility (who alone exercised political rights). The citizens had a monopoly of administrative positions.]
122 [Rousseau, at the instigation of his employer Mme Dupin, wrote at length on the political theory of the Abbot of Saint-Pierre.]
123 [Rousseau’s main sources in this chapter are the Discourses of Machiavelli and De antiquo jure civium Romanorum (1560) of Sigonius, a little-known work.]
124 The name Rome, which people say comes from Romulus, is Greek, and means force. The name Numa is also Greek, and means law. What is the likelihood that the first two kings of that town would have borne in advance names so clearly related to what they did?
125 Ramnenses.
126 Tatienses.
127 Luceres.
128 I say Campus Martius because it was here that the comitia centuriata gathered. In the two other forms of assembly, the people gathered in the forum or elsewhere, and then the capite censi had as much influence and authority as the first citizens.
129 [Since, according to Rousseau’s political theory, the sovereign people always have the right to reclaim power from the government, the word “usurped” should be read as if in scare quotation marks. The word is evidently not used carelessly, however, as Rousseau repeats it in a reference to this passage in Letters Written from the Mountain. Evidently he thought it a mistake for the people to exercise too many of the functions of government.]
130 This century, having been chosen thus by lot, was called prae rogativa, on account of the fact that it was the first to be asked for its vote, and it is from this that the word prerogative is derived.
131 [Cf. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 2, ch. 2.]
132 Custodes, diribitores, rogatores suffragiorum.
133 [Rousseau’s phrase is dispenser les loix. Vaughan and the Pléiade edition interpret this as meaning administrer les loix (administer the laws), but I cannot find an equivalent usage in contemporary (or indeed any) dictionaries or elsewhere in Rousseau, and it seems likely that it is a misprint for dispenser des loix (dispense from the laws)—a reading adopted by the Hachette edition.]
134 [This account of contemporary Venice as a species of tyranny follows on a long line of previous commentators, including Montesquieu. See my “Ulysses Bound? Venice and the Idea of Liberty from Howell to Hume,” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, ed. Wootton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 341–67.]
135 [This chapter is clearly under the influence of Machiavelli, Discourses, bk. 1, chs. 34–35.]
136 This nomination was made at night and in secret, as if it were shameful to place a man above the laws.
137 He could not have been sure of this had he proposed a dictator, since he did not dare name himself, and he could not be sure that his colleague would name him.
138 I merely call attention in this chapter to what I have treated at greater length in my Letter to d’Alembert.
139 [Rousseau added the following in the 1782 edition: “They are from another island that the delicacy of our language prohibits me from naming at this time.” The copy of the Social Contract that Rousseau gave to d’Ivernois has the following note: “They were from Chios and not from Samos, but given the subject matter here, I have never dared employ this word [Chios] in the text. Yet I think I am as bold as anyone; but it is not permitted to anyone to be dirty and coarse, no matter what the subject matter. The French have put so much decency into their language that one can no longer speak the truth while using it.” Rousseau was afraid of a pun on the island’s name.]
140 [The draft of the Social Contract that Rousseau sent his publisher in December 1760 did not contain this chapter. Rousseau described it in a letter of December 23, 1761 as an addition. An early draft is written on the back of the chapter on the legislator (Book I, Chapter 7), and the subject matter of the two is connected in, for example, the thinking of Machiavelli (e.g., Discourses, bk. 1, ch. 16). Rousseau will also have had in mind books 24–25 of the Spirit of the Laws. On polytheism he had probably read Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s De l’origine des fables (1724), the article “Fable” in the Encyclopédie (by Louis de Jaucourt, published in 1756), and perhaps Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757; French translation 1759–1760). If the text is a late addition, the thinking in it was not new; it is summarized in a letter to Voltaire of August 18, 1756. The chapter immediately provoked a storm of controversy.]
141 Nonne ea quae possidet Chamos deus tuus, tibi jure debentur? [Judges 11:24] Such is the text of the Vulgate. Father de Carrières has translated it, “Do you not believe that you have the right to possess what belongs to your god Chamos?” I do not know the force of the Hebrew text; but I see that in the Vulgate Jephthah positively acknowledges the right of the god Chamos, and that the French translator weakened this recognition by adding an “according to you,” which is not in the Latin.
142 It is quite clear that the Phocian War, called the Holy War, was not a war of religion at all. Its objective was to punish sacrileges, and not to make unbelievers submit.
143 [Rousseau’s term is droit de cité, which contemporary dictionaries define as the right to elect one’s own rulers.]
144 It should be carefully noted that it is not so much the formal assemblies, such as those of France, that bind the clergy together into a body, as it is the communion of the churches. Communion and excommunication are the social compact of the clergy, one with which it will always be the master of the peoples and the kings. All the priests who communicate together [the text reads communiquent, but the sense seems to require communient (take communion), and one is bound to suspect a slip on the part of Rousseau or his printer] are fellow citizens, even if they should be from the opposite ends of the world. This invention is a political masterpiece. There was nothing like this among the pagan priests; thus they never made up a body of clergy.
145 [See especially De Cive, chs. 6, 17.]
146 Notice, among other texts, in Grotius’ letter to his brother, dated April 11, 1643, what this learned man approves of and what he criticizes in the [Hobbes’] book De Cive. It is true that, prone to being indulgent, he appears to forgive the author for his good points for the sake of his bad ones. [Rousseau knew of this letter from Barbeyrac’s edition of Grotius’ Law of War and Peace. In it Grotius approves of what Hobbes says about monarchy and disapproves of what he says about religion—the opposite of Rousseau’s view.] But not everyone is so merciful.
147 [Bayle, Diverse Thoughts on the Comet (1682); Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses (1737–1741), or rather, presumably, the French translation of The Alliance between Church and State.]
148 [The general society is the society of all human beings; the particular society is the political community.]
149 [Rousseau’s most famous account of this true Christianity is to be found in “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” which appears within Émile.]
150 [“Let him be cursed.”]
151 [Later, Rousseau clarified that here he meant “contrary to the spirit of any particular society or political community,” not “contrary to the spirit of the general society of all human beings.”]
152 [Cf. Machiavelli, Discourses, bk 2, ch. 2.]
153 “In the republic,” says the Marquis d’Argenson, “each man is perfectly free with respect to what does not harm others.” [D’Argenson’s Considerations on the Government of France circulated widely in manuscript but was first published by Rey (Rousseau’s publisher) in 1764, partly, one presumes, because of Rousseau’s praise of it. This sentence does not appear in the published text, which is taken (as Rey admits) from a faulty manuscript. Of course, since the text was unpublished and d’Argenson had died in 1757, Rousseau was also free to play fast and loose with d’Argenson’s text.] This is the invariable boundary. It cannot be expressed more precisely. I have been unable to deny myself the pleasure of occasionally citing this manuscript, even though it is unknown to the public, in order to pay homage to the memory of a famous and noteworthy man, who, even as a minister, retained the heart of a true citizen, along with just and sound opinions on the government of his country.
154 Caesar, speaking in Catiline’s defense, tried to establish the dogma of the mortality of the soul. To refute him, Cato and Cicero did not waste time philosophizing. They contented themselves with showing that Caesar spoke like a bad citizen and advanced a doctrine that was injurious to the state. In fact, this was what the Roman senate had to judge, and not a question of theology.
155 [Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) had similarly denied toleration to atheists, but Rousseau goes further in making the sanctity of the social contract an article of required belief.]
156 Marriage, for example, being a civil contract, has civil effects without which it is impossible for a society even to subsist. Suppose then that a clergy reaches the point where it ascribes to itself alone the right to permit this act (a right that must necessarily be usurped in every intolerant religion). In that case, is it not clear that in establishing the authority of the church in this matter, it will render ineffectual that of the prince, who will have no more subjects than those whom the clergy wishes to give him? Is it not also clear that the clergy—if master of whether to marry or not to marry people according to whether or not they accept this or that doctrine, according to whether or not they accept or reject this or that formula, according to whether they are more or less devoted to them, if it behaves prudently and holds firm—will alone dispose of inheritance, offices, the citizens, the state itself, which could not subsist if composed solely of bastards? But, it will be said, abuses will be appealed; summonses and decrees will be issued; the church’s income will be seized. What rubbish! If it has a little—I will not say courage but—good sense, the clergy will let all this happen and carry on regardless. It will serenely allow the appeals, the summonses, the decrees, and the seizures, and it will end up master. It is not, it seems to me, a big sacrifice to abandon a part when one is sure of securing the whole. [Rousseau wrote a lengthy first version of this note in his draft of the Social Contract (Pléiade ed., 3:343–44). In it he describes the Protestants of France—who had been subjected to prolonged persecution since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and were forbidden to marry (since legal marriages required participation in the Catholic sacrament of the Mass) and thus, because children born out of wedlock could not inherit, unable to pass on their property to their children—as “reduced to the most horrible situation in which ever a people has found itself since the beginning of the world.” It seems he then wrote a second version of the note referring to the case of the Protestant clergyman Rochette and the three brothers Grenier (on which, see David D. Bien, “Imagining the Huguenot Minority in Old Regime France,” in The Construction of Minorities, ed. André Burguière and Raymond Grew [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001], 65–88, at 80–81). Then, when the four were executed in Toulouse on February 19, 1762, and when his book was in press, he substituted the present version. Finally he asked his publisher to reprint the sheet without the note, so that first editions of the Social Contract exist in two states, with and without the final version of the note (letters to Rey, March 11, 14, 18, and 25, 1762). Rousseau’s motive in attempting to withdraw the note was evidently his fear of the reaction of the French authorities. It is worth bearing in mind that this question touched him directly: once he converted back to Protestantism in 1754 it became impossible for him to marry his companion Thérèse Levasseur; they went through a “ceremony” of marriage, which had no legal force, in 1768. Voltaire’s Treatise on Toleration, which protested against the persecution of Protestants, was published in 1763.]
157 [Henry IV is supposed to have decided to become a Catholic because Protestant theologians acknowledged that he could be saved while being Catholic, while Catholic theologians denied that he could be saved while being Protestant. Catholicism was thus, Henry claimed, the safest bet. Thus he converted because the Catholics were more intolerant than the Protestants.]
158 [Rousseau’s text has a comma after “law of nations,” and commas between each item in the list; but the list that follows consists of three elements of the law of nations, so the punctuation has been revised to convey his sense.]