IV. Motives for suppressing the election of local powers.

Motives for suppressing the election of local powers.—The Electors.—Their egoism and partiality.—The Elected.—Their inertia, corruption, and disobedience.

All were agreed on the first point. If any still doubted, they had only to open their eyes, fix them on the local authorities, watch them as soon as born, and follow them throughout the exercise of their functions.—Naturally, in filling each office, the electors had chosen a man of their own species and caliber; their fixed and dominant disposition was accordingly well known; they were indifferent to public matters and therefore their candidate was as indifferent as themselves. Had they shown too great a concern for the nation this would have prevented their election; the State to them was a troublesome moralist and remote creditor. Their candidate must choose between them and this intruder, side with them against it, and not act as a pedagogue in its name or as bailiff on its behalf. When power is born on the spot and conferred to-day by constituents who are to submit to it to-morrow as subordinates, they do not put the whip in the hands of one who will flog them; they demand sentiments of him in conformity with their inclinations; in any event they will not tolerate in him the opposite ones. From the beginning, this resemblance between them and him is great, and it goes on increasing from day to day because the creature is always in the hands of his creators; subject to their daily pressure, he at last becomes as they are; after a certain period they have shaped him in their image.—Thus the candidate-elect, from the start or very soon after, became a confederate with his electors. At one time, and this occurred frequently, especially in the towns, he had been elected by a violent sectarian minority; he then subordinated general interests to the interests of a clique. At another, and especially in the rural districts, he had been elected by an ignorant and brutal majority, when he accordingly subordinated general interests to those of a village.—If he chanced to be conscientious and somewhat intelligent and was anxious to do his duty, he could not; he felt himself weak and was felt to be weak;[2105] both authority and the means for exercising it were wanting in him. He had not the force which a power above communicates to its delegates below; nobody saw behind him the government and the army; his only resource was a national-guard, which either shirked or refused to do its duty, and which often did not exist at all.—On the contrary, he could prevaricate, pillage, and persecute for his own advantage and that of his clique with impunity; for there was no restraint on him from above; the Paris Jacobins would not be disposed to alienate the Jacobins of the province; they were partisans and allies, and the government had few others; it was bound to retain them, to let them intrigue and embezzle at will.

Suppose an extensive domain of which the steward is appointed, not by the absent owner, but by his tenants, debtors, farmers, and dependents: the reader may imagine whether rents will be paid and debts collected, whether road-taxes will be worked out, what care will be taken of the property, what its annual income will be to the owner, how abuses of commission and omission will be multiplied indefinitely, how great the disorder will be, the neglect, the waste, the fraud, the injustice, and the license.—The same in France,[2106] and for the same reason:

* every public service disorganized, destroyed, or perverted;

* no justice, no police;

* authorities abstaining from prosecution, magistrates not daring to condemn, a gendarmerie which receives no orders or which stands still;

* rural marauding become a habit;

* roving bands of brigands in forty-five departments;

* mail wagons and coaches stopped and pillaged even up to the environs of Paris;

* highways broken up and rendered impassable;

* open smuggling, customs yielding nothing, national forests devastated, the public treasury empty,[2107] its revenues intercepted and expended before being deposited, taxes decreed and not collected;

* everywhere arbitrary assessments of real and personal estate, no less wicked exemptions than overcharges;

* in many places no list prepared for tax assessments,

* communes which here and there, under pretext of defending the republic against neighboring consumers, exempt themselves from both tax and conscription;

* conscripts to whom their mayor gives false certificates of infirmity and marriage, who do not turn out when ordered out, who desert by hundreds on the way to headquarters, who form mobs and use guns in defending themselves against the troops,—such were the fruits of the system.

The government could not constrain rural majorities with the officials chosen by the selfish and inept rural majorities. Neither could it repress the urban minorities with agents elected by the same partial and corrupt urban minorities. Hands are necessary, and hands as firm as tenacious, to seize conscripts by the collar, to rummage the pockets of taxpayers, and the State did not have such hands. They were required right away, if only to prepare and provide for urgent needs. If the western departments had to be subdued and tranquilized, relief furnished to Massena besieged in Genoa, Melas prevented from invading Provence, Moreau's army transported over the Rhine, the first thing was to restore to the central government the appointment of local authorities.



V. Reasons for centralization.

Reasons for placing the executive central power in one hand.—Sieyes' chimerical combinations.—Bonaparte's objections.

On this second point, the evidence was scarcely less.—And clearly, the moment the local powers owed their appointment to the central powers, it is plain that the central executive power, on which they depend, should be unique. For, this great team of functionaries, driven from aloft, could not have aloft several distinct drivers; being several and distinct, the drivers would each pull his own way, while the horses, pulling in opposite directions, would do nothing but prance. In this respect the combinations of Sieyes do not bear examination. A mere theorist and charged with preparing the plan of a new constitution, he had reasoned as if the drivers on the box were not men, but robots: perched above all, a grand-elector, a show sovereign, with two places to dispose of and always passive, except to appoint or revoke two active sovereigns, the two governing consuls. One, a peace-consul, appointing all civil officers, and the other a war-consul, making all military and diplomatic appointments; each with his own ministers, his own council of state, his own court of judicature. All these functionaries, ministers, consuls, and the grand-elector himself, were revocable at the will of a senate which from day to day could absorb them, that is to say, make them senators with a salary of 30,000 francs and an embroidered dress-coat.[2108] Sieyes evidently had not taken into account either the work to be done or the men who would have to do it, while Bonaparte, who was doing the work at this very time, who understood men and who understood himself, at once put his finger on the weak spot of this complex mechanism, so badly adjusted and so frail. Two consuls,[2109] "one controlling the ministers of justice, of the interior, of the police, of the treasury, and the other the ministers of war, of the navy, and of foreign affairs." The conflict between them is certain; look at them facing each other, subject to contrary influences and suggestions: around the former "only judges, administrators, financiers, and men in long robes," and round the latter "only epaulets and men of the sword." Certainly "one will need money and recruits for his army which the other will not grant."—And it is not your grand-elector who will make them agree. "If he conforms strictly to the functions which you assign to him he will be the mere ghost, the fleshless phantom of a roi faineant. Do you know any man vile enough to take part in such contrivances? How can you imagine any man of talent or at all honorable contentedly playing the part of a hog fattening himself on a few millions?"—And all the more because if he wants to abandon his part the door stands open. "Were I the grand-elector I would say to the war-consul and to the peace-consul on appointing them, If you put in a minister or sign a bill I don't like I'll put you out." Thus does the grand-elector become an active, absolute monarch.

"But," you may say, "the senate in its turn will absorb the grand-elector."—"The remedy is worse than the disease; nobody, according to this plan, has any guarantees," and each, therefore, will try to secure them to himself, the grand-elector against the senate, the consuls against the grand-elector, and the senate against the grand-elector and consuls combined, each uneasy, alarmed, threatened, threatening, and usurping to protect himself; these are the wheels which work the wrong way, in a machine constantly getting out of order, stopping, and finally breaking down entirely.

Thereupon, and as Bonaparte, moreover, was already master, all the executive powers were reduced to one, and this power was vested in him.[2110] In reality, "to humor republican opinion"[2111] they gave him two associates with the same title as his own; but they were appointed only for show, simply as consulting, inferior, and docile registrars, with no rights save that of signing their names after his and putting their signatures to the proces verbal declaring his orders; he alone commanded, "he alone had the say, he alone appointed to all offices," so that they were already subjects as he alone was already the sovereign.



VI. Irreconcilable divisions.

Difficulty of organizing a legislative power.—Fraudulent and violent elections for ten years.—Spirit and diffusion of hatred against the men and dogmas of the Revolution. —Probable composition of a freely elected Assembly.—Its two irreconcilable divisions.—Sentiments of the army. —Proximity and probable meaning of a new coup d'Etat.

It remained to frame a legislative power as a counterpoise to this executive power, so concentrated and so strong.—In organized and tolerably sound communities this point is reached through an elective parliament which represents the public will; it represents this because it is a copy, a faithful reduction of that will on a small scale; it is so organized as to present a loyal and proportionate expression of diverse controlling opinions. In this case, the electoral selection has worked well; one superior right, that of election, has been respected, or, in other words, the passions excited have not proved too strong, which is owing to the most important interests not having proved too divergent.—Unfortunately, in France, rent asunder and discordant, all the most important interests were in sharp antagonism; the passions brought into play, consequently, were furious; no right was respected, and least of all that of election; hence the electoral test worked badly, and no elected parliament was or could be a veritable expression of the public will. Since 1791, the elections, violated and deserted, had brought intruders only to the legislative benches, under the name of mandatories. These were endured for lack of better; but nobody had any confidence in them, and nobody showed them any deference. People knew how they had been elected and how little their title was worth. Through inertness, fear, or disgust, the great majority of electors had not voted, while the voters at the polls fought among themselves, the strongest or least scrupulous expelling or constraining the rest. During the last three years of the Directory the electoral assembly was often divided; each faction elected its own deputy and protested against the election of the other. The government then chose between the two candidates elected, arbitrarily and always with barefaced partiality; and again, if but one candidate was elected, and that one an adversary, his election was invalidated. In sum, for nine years, the legislative body, imposed on the nation by a faction, was scarcely more legitimate than the executive power, another usurper, and which, later on, filled up or purged its ranks. Any remedy for this defect in the electoral machine was impossible; it was due to its internal structure, to the very quality of its materials. At this date, even under an impartial and strong government, the machine could not have answered its purpose, that of deriving from the nation a body of sober-minded and respected delegates, providing France with a parliament capable of playing its own part, or any part whatever, in the conduct of public business.

For, suppose

* that the new governors show uncommon loyalty, energy, and vigilance, remarkable political abnegation and administrative omnipresence,

* that the factions are contained without suppression of free speech,

* the central powers neutral yet active,

* no official candidature,

* no pressure from above,

* no constraint from below,

* the police-commissioners respectful and gendarmes protecting the entrance to every electoral assembly,

* all proceedings regular, no disturbance inside, voting perfectly free, the electors numerous, five or six millions of Frenchmen gathered at the polls,

and guess what choice they will make.

After Fructidor, there is a renewal of religious persecution and of excessive civil oppression; the brutality and unworthiness of the rulers have doubled and diffused hatred against the men and the ideas of the Revolution.—In Belgium, recently annexed, the regular and secular clergy had just been proscribed in a mass,[2112] and a great rural insurrection had broken out. The uprising had spread from the Waes country and the ancient seignory of Malines, around Louvain as far as Tirlemont, and afterward to Brussels, to Campine, to South Brabant, to Flanders, to Luxembourg, in the Ardennes, and even to the frontiers of Liege; many villages had to be burned, and many of their inhabitants killed, and the survivors keep this in mind. In the twelve western departments,[2113] at the beginning of the year 1800, the royalists were masters of nearly the whole country and had control of forty thousand armed men in regimental order; undoubtedly these were to be overcome and disarmed, but they were not to be deprived of their opinions, as of their guns.—In the month of August, 1799,[2114] sixteen thousand insurgents in Haute Garonne and the six neighboring departments, led by Count de Paulo, had unfurled the royal white flag; one of the cantons, Cadours, "had risen almost entirely;" a certain town, Muret, sent all its able-bodied men. They had penetrated even to the outskirts of Toulouse, and several engagements, including a pitched battle, were necessary to subdue them. On one occasion, at Montrejean, 2000 were slain or drowned. The peasants fought with fury, "a fury that bordered on frenzy;" "some were heard to exclaim with their last breath, 'Vive le Roi!' and others were cut to pieces rather than shout, 'Vive la Republique!'"—From Marseilles to Lyons the revolt lasted five years on both banks of the Rhone, under the form of brigandage; the royalist bands, increased by refractory conscripts and favored by the inhabitants whom they spared, killed or pillaged the agents of the republic and the buyers of national possessions.[2115] There were thus, in more than thirty departments, intermittent and scattered Vendees. In all the Catholic departments there was a latent Vendee. Had the elections been free during this state of exasperation it is probable that one-half of France would have voted for men of the ancient regime—Catholics, Royalists, or, at least, the Monarchists of 1790.

Let the reader imagine facing this party, in the same chamber, about an equal number of representatives elected by the other party; the only ones it could select, its notables, that is to say, the survivors of preceding assemblies, probably Constitutionalists of the year IV and the year V, Conventionalists of the Plain and of the Feuillants of 1792, from Lafayette and Dumolard to Daunou, Thibaudeau and Gregoire, among them Girondists and a few Montagnards, Barere,[2116] with others, all of them wedded to the theory the same as their adversaries to traditions. To one who is familiar with the two groups, behold two inimical doctrines confronting each other; two irreconcilable systems of opinions and passions, two contradictory modes of conceiving sovereignty, law, society, the State, property, religion, the Church, the ancient regime, the Revolution, the present and the past; it is civil war transferred from the nation to the parliament. Certainly the Right would like to see the First Consul a Monck, which would lead to his becoming a Cromwell; for his power depends entirely on his credit with the army, then the sovereign force; at this date the army is still republican, at least in feeling if not intelligently, imbued with Jacobin prejudices, attached to revolutionary interests, and hence blindly hostile to aristocrats, kings, and priests.[2117] At the first threat of a monarchical and Catholic restoration it will demand of him an eighteenth Fructidor[2118]; otherwise, some Jacobin general, Jourdan, Bernadotte, or Augereau, will make one without him, against him, and they fall back into the rut from which they wished to escape, into the fatal circle of revolutions and coups d'etat.



VII. Establishment of a new Dictatorship.

The electoral and legislative combinations of Sieyes. —Bonaparte's use of them.—Paralysis and submission of the three legislative bodies.—The Senate as the ruler's tool. —Senatus-consultes and Plebiscites.—Final establishment of the Dictatorship.—Its dangers and necessity.—Public power now able to do its work.

Sieyes comprehended this: he detects on the horizon the two specters which, for ten years, have haunted all the governments of France, legal anarchy and unstable despotism; he has found a magic formula with which to exorcise these two phantoms; henceforth "power is to come from above and confidence from below."[2119]—Consequently, the new constitutional act withdraws from the nation the right to elect its deputies; it will simply elect candidates to the deputation and through three degrees of election, one above the other; thus, it is to take part in the choice of its candidates only through "an illusory and metaphysical participation."[2120] The right of the electors of the first degree is wholly reduced to designating one-tenth among themselves; the right of those of the second degree is also reduced to designating one-tenth among themselves; the right of those of the third degree is finally reduced to designating one-tenth of their number, about six thousand candidates. On this list, the government itself, by right and by way of increasing the number, inscribes its own high functionaries; evidently, on such a long list, it will have no difficulty in finding men who, as simple tools, will be devoted to it. Through another excess of precaution, the government, on its sole authority, in the absence of any list, alone names the first legislature. Last of all, it is careful to attach handsome salaries to these legislative offices, 10,000 f., 15,000 f., and 30,000 f. a year; parties canvass with it for these places the very first day, the future depositaries of legislative power being, to begin with, solicitors of the antechamber.—To render their docility complete, there is a dismemberment of this legislative power in advance; it is divided among three bodies, born feeble and passive by institution. Neither of these has any initiative; their deliberations are confined to laws proposed by the government. Each possesses only a fragment of function; the "Tribunat" discusses without passing laws, the "Corps Legislatif" decrees without discussion, the conservative" Senat" is to maintain this general paralysis. "What do you want?" said Bonaparte to Lafayette.[2121] "Sieyes everywhere put nothing but ghosts, the ghost of a legislative power, the ghost of a judiciary, the ghost of a government. Something substantial had to be put in their place. Ma foi, I put it there," in the executive power.

There it is, completely in his hands; other authorities to him are merely for show or as instruments.[2122] The mutes of the Corps Legislatif come annually to Paris to keep silent for four months; one day he will forget to convoke them, and nobody will remark their absence.—As to the Tribunat, which talks too much, he will at first reduce its words to a minimum "by putting it on the diet of laws;" afterward, through the interposition of the senate, which designates retiring members, he gets rid of troublesome babblers; finally, and always through the interposition of the senate, titular interpreter, guardian, and reformer of the constitution, he ventilates and then suppresses the Tribunat itself.—The senate is the grand instrument by which he reigns; he commands it to furnish the senatus-consultes of which he has need. Through this comedy played by him above, and through another complementary comedy which he plays below, the plebiscite, he transforms his ten-year consulate into a consulate for life, and then into an empire, that is to say, into a permanent, legal, full, and perfect dictatorship. In this way the nation is handed over to the absolutism of a man who, being a man, cannot fail to think of his own interest before all others. It remains to be seen how far and for how long a time this interest, as he comprehends it, or imagines it, will accord with the interest of the public. All the better for France should this accord prove complete and permanent; all the worse for France should it prove partial and temporary. It is a terrible risk, but inevitable. There is no escape from anarchy except through despotism, with the chance of encountering in one man, at first a savior and then a destroyer, with the certainty of henceforth belonging to an unknown will fashioned by genius and good sense, or by imagination and egoism, in a soul fiery and disturbed by the temptations of absolute power, by success and universal adulation, in a despot responsible to no one but himself, in a conqueror condemned by the impulses of conquest to regard himself and the world under a light growing falser and falser.

Such are the bitter fruits of social dissolution: the authority of the state will either perish or become perverted; each uses it for his own purposes, and nobody is disposed to entrust it to an external arbitrator, and the usurpers who seize it only remain trustee on condition that they abuse it; when it works in their hands it is only to work against its office. It must be accepted when, for want of better or fear of worse, through a final usurpation, it falls into the only hands able to restore it, organize it, and apply it at last to the service of the public.

*****

[Footnote 2101: "The Revolution," P.193 and following pages, also p.224 and following pages. The provisions of the constitution of the year III, somewhat less anarchical, are analogous; those of the "Mountain" constitution (year II) are so anarchical that nobody thought of enforcing them.]

[Footnote 2102: "The Revolution," vol. III., pp.446, 450, 476.]

[Footnote 2103: Sauzay, "Histoire de la persecution revolutionnaire dans le departement du Doubs," X., 472 (Speech of Briot to the five-hundred, Aug.29, 1799): "The country seeks in vain for its children; it finds the chouans, the Jacobins, the moderates, and the constitutionalists of '91 and '93, clubbists, the amnestied, fanatics, scissionists and antiscissionists; in vain does it call for republicans."]

[Footnote 2104: "The Revolution," III., 427, 474.—Rocquain, "L'etat de la France au 18 Brumaire," 360, 362: "Inertia or absence of the national agents. .. It would be painful to think that a lack of salary was one of the causes of the difficulty in establishing municipal administrations. In 1790, 1791, and 1792, we found our fellow-citizens emulously striving after these gratuitous offices and even proud of the disinterestedness which the law prescribed." (Report of the Directory, end of 1795.) After this date public spirit is extinguished, stifled by the Reign of Terror.—Ibid., 368, 369: "Deplorable indifference for public offices.... Out of seven town officials appointed in the commune of Laval, only one accepted, and that one the least capable. It is the same in the other communes."—Ibid., 380 (Report of the year VII): "General decline of public spirit."—Ibid., 287 (Report by Lacuee, on the 1st military division, Aisne, Eure-et-Loire, Loiret, Oise, Seine, Seine-et-Marne, (year IX): "Public spirit is dying out and is even gone."]

[Footnote 2105: Rocquain, Ibid., p.27 (Report of Francois de Nantes, on the 8th military division,Vaucluse, Bouches-du-Rhone, Var, Basses-Alpes, and Alpes-Maratimes, year IX): "Witnesses, in some communes, did not dare furnish testimony, and, in all, the justices of the peace were afraid of making enemies and of not being re-elected. It was the same with the town officials charged with prosecutions and whom their quality as elected and temporary officials always rendered timid."—Ibid., 48: "All the customs-directors complained of the partiality of the courts. I have myself examined several cases in which the courts of Marseilles and Toulon decided against the plain text the law and with criminal partiality.—Archives nationales, series F7, Reports "on the situation, on the spirit of the public," in many hundreds of towns, cantons, and departments, from the year III to the year VIII and after.]

[Footnote 2106: Cf. "The Revolution," III., book IX., ch. I.—Rocquain, passim.—Schmidt, "Tableaux de la Revolution francaise," III., parts 9 and 10.—Archives nationales, F7, 3250 (Letter of the commissioner of the executive directory, Fructidor 23, year VII): "Armed mobs on the road between Saint-Omer and Arras have dared fire on the diligences and rescue from the gendarmerie the drawn conscripts."—Ibid., F7, 6565. Only on Seine-inferiure, of which the following are some of the reports of the gendarmerie for one year.—Messidor, year VII, seditious mobs of conscripts and others in the cantons of Motteville and Doudeville. "What shows the perverted spirit of the communes of Gremonville and of Heronville is that none of the inhabitants will make any declaration, while it is impossible that they should not have been in the rebels' secrets."—Similar mobs in the communes of Guerville, Millebose,and in the forest of Eu: "It is stated that they have leaders, and that drilling goes on under their orders.—Vendemiarie 27, year VIII.) "Twenty-five armed brigands or drafted men in the cantons of Reaute and Bolbec have put farmers to ransom."—(Nivose 12~ year VIII.) In the canton of Cuny another band of brigands do the same thing.—(Germinal 14, year VIII.) Twelve brigands stop the diligence between Neufchatel and Rouen; a few days after, the diligence between Rouen and Paris is stopped and three of the escort are killed.—Analogous scenes and mobs in the other departments.]

[Footnote 2107: "Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis, duc), Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. I., 260. Under the Directory," one day, in order to dispatch a special courier, the receipts of the Opera had to be taken because they were in coin. Another day, it was on the point of sending every gold piece in the musee of medals to be melted down (worth in the crucible from 5000 to 6000 francs)."]

[Footnote 2108: "Theorie constitutionnelle de Sieyes." (Extract from unpublished memoirs by Boulay de la Meurthe.) Paris, 1866, Renouard.]

[Footnote 2109: "Correspondance de Napoleon 1er," XXX.. 345. ("Memoires.")—"Memorial de Sainte-Helene"]

[Footnote 2110: "Extrait des Memoires" de Boulay de la Meurthe, p.50. (Words of Bonaparte to Roederer about Sieyes, who raised objections and wanted to retire.) "If Sieyes goes into the country, draw up for me at once the plan of a constitution. I will summon the primary assemblies in a week and make them accept it after discharging the (Constituant) committees."]

[Footnote 2111: "Correspondance de Napoleon ler" XXX., 345, 346. ("Memoires.") "Circumstances were such as to still make it necessary to disguise the unique magistracy of the president."]

[Footnote 2112: The Revolution," III., 458, 417.—"Mercure britannique," nos. for November 1798 and January 1799. (Letters from Belgium.)—"More than 300 millions have been seized by force in these desolated provinces; there is not a landowner whose fortune has not been ruined, or sequestrated, or fatally sapped by forced levies and the flood of taxes which followed these, by robberies of movable property and the bankruptcy due to France having discredited claims on the emperor and on the governments, in short through confiscation."—The insurrection breaks out, as in Vendee, on account of the conscription; the war-cry of the insurgents is, "Better die here than elsewhere."]

[Footnote 2113: De Martel, "Les Historiens fantaisistes," part 2 (on the Pacification of the West, according to reports of the royalist leaders and of the republican generals).]

[Footnote 2114: Archives nationales, F7, 3218. (Summary of dispatches arranged according to dates.-Letters of Adjutant-General Vicose, Fructidor 3, year VII.—Letters of Lamagdelaine, commissioner of the executive Directory, Thermidor 26 and Fructidor 3, year VII.)—"The rascals who led the people astray had promised them, in the King's name, that they should not be called on for further taxes, that the conscripts and requisitionnaires should not leave, and, finally, that they should have the priests they wanted."—Near Montrejean "the carnage was frightful, nearly 2000 men slain or drowned and 1000 prisoners."—(Letter of M. Alquier to the first consul, Pluviose 18, year VIII.) "The insurrection of Thermidor caused the loss of 3000 cultivators.—(Letters of the department administrators and of the government commissioners, Nivose 25 and 27, Pluviose 13, 15, 25, 27, and 30, year VIII.)—The insurrection is prolonged through a vast number of isolated outrages, with sabers or guns, against republican functionaries and partisans, justices of the peace, mayors, etc. In the commune of Balbeze, fifty conscripts, armed deserters with their knapsacks, impose requisitions,give balls on Sunday, and make patriots give up their arms. Elsewhere, this or that known patriot is assaulted in his house by a band of ten or a dozen young folks who make him pay a ransom, shout "Vive le Roi!" etc.—Cf. "Histoire de I' insurrection royaliste de l'an VII," by B. Lavigne, 1887.]

[Footnote 2115: Archives nationales, F7, 3273 (Letter of the commissioner of the executive Directory, Vaucluse, Fructidor 6, year VII.): "Eighty armed royalists have carried off, near the forest of Suze, the cash-box of the collector, Bouchet, in the name of Louis XVIII. These rascals, it must be noted, did not take any of the money belonging to the collector himself."—(Ibid., Thermidor 3, year VII.) "On looking around among our communes I find all of them under the control of royalist or town-councillors. That is the spirit of the peasants generally.... Public spirit it so perverted, so opposed to the constitutional regime, that a miracle only will bring them within the pale of freedom."—Ibid., F7, 3199. (Similar documents on the department of Bouches-du-Rhone.) Outrages continue here far down into the consulate, in spite of the vigor and multitude of military executions.—(Letter of the sub-prefect of Tarascon, Germinal 15, year IX.) "In the commune of Eyragues, yesterday, at eight o'clock, a band of masked brigands surrounded the mayor's house, while some of them entered it and shot this public functionary without anybody daring to render him any assistance.... Three-quarters of the inhabitants of Eyragues are royalists."—In series F7, 7152 and those following may be found an enumeration of political crimes classified by department and by the month, especially for Messidor, year VII.]

[Footnote 2116: Barere, representative of Hautes Pyrenees, had preserved a good deal of credit in this remote department, especially in the district of Argeles, with populations which knew nothing about the "Mountain." In 1805, the electors presented him as a candidate for the legislative body and the senate; in 1815, they elected him deputy.]

[Footnote 2117: "Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis, duc), chancelier de France. in VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. I., 158. At the time the concordat was under consideration the aversion to "priest rule" was very great in the army; there were secret meetings held against it. Many of the superior officers took part in them, and even some of the leading generals. Moreau was aware of them although he did not attend them. In one of these gatherings, things were carried far enough to resolve upon the assassination of the first consul. A certain Donnadieu, then of a low rank in the army, offered to strike the blow. General Oudinot, who was present, informed Davoust, and Donnadieu, imprisoned in the Temple, made revelations. Measures were at once taken to scatter the conspirators, who were all sent away more or less farther off; some were arrested and others exiled, among them General Mounier, who had commanded one of Desaix's brigades at Marengo. General Lecourbe was also one of the conspirators.]

[Footnote 2118: On the 18th Fructidor Napoleon used grape-shot and artillery to sweep the royalists off the streets of Paris. (SR.)]

[Footnote 2119: "Extrait des Memoires de Boulay de la Meurthe," p.10.]

[Footnote 2120: Napoleon's words. ("Correspondance," XXX., 343, memoirs dictated at Saint Helena.)]

[Footnote 2121: Lafayette, "Memoires," II., 192.]

[Footnote 2122: Pelet de la Lozere, "Opinions de Napoleon au conseil d'etat," p. 63 "The senate is mistaken if it thinks it possesses a national and representative chamber. It is merely a constituted authority emanating from the government like the others."—Ibid., P.147: "It must not be in the power of a legislative body to impede government by refusing taxes; once the taxes are established they should be levied by simple decrees. The court of cassation regards my decrees as laws; otherwise, there would be no government." (January 9, 1808.)—Ibid., p. 147:" If I ever had any fear of the senate I had only to put fifty young state-councillors into it." (December 1, 1803.)—Ibid., p.150: "If an opposition should spring up in the legislative corps I would fall back on the senate to prorogue, change it, or break it up." (March 29, 1806.)—Ibid., p.151: "Sixty legislators go out every year which one does not know what to do with; those who do not get places go and grumble in the departments. I should like to have old land-owners married, in a certain sense, to the state through their family or profession, attached by some tie to the commonwealth. Such men would come to Paris annually, converse with the emperor in his own circle, and be contented with this little bit of vanity relieving the monotony of their existence." (Same date.)—Cf. Thibaudeau, "Memoires sur le Consulat," ch. XIII., and M. de Metternich, "Memoires," I., 120 (Words of Napoleon at Dresden, in the spring of 1812): "I shall give the senate and the council of state a new organization. The former will take the place of the upper chamber, the latter that of the chamber of deputies. I shall continue to appoint the senators; I shall have the state councillors elected one-third at a time on triple lists; the rest I will appoint. Here will the budget be prepared and the laws elaborated."—We see the corps legislatif, docile as it is, still worrying him, and very justly; he foresaw the session of 1813.]



CHAPTER II. PUBLIC POWER



I. Principal service rendered by the public power.

Principal service rendered by the public power.—It is an instrumentality.—A common law for every instrumentality. —Mechanical instruments.—Physiological instruments.—Social instruments.—The perfection of an instrument increases with the convergence of its effects.

What is the service which the public power renders to the public?—The principal one is the protection of the community against the foreigner, and of private individuals against each other.—Evidently, to do this, it must in all cases be provided with indispensable means, namely: diplomats, an army, a fleet, arsenals, civil and criminal courts, prisons, a police, taxation and tax-collectors, a hierarchy of agents and local supervisors, who, each in his place and attending to his special duty, will co-operate in securing the desired effect.—Evidently, again, to apply all these instruments, the public power must have, according to the case, this or that form or constitution, this or that degree of impulse and energy: according to the nature and gravity of external or internal danger, it is proper that it should be concentrated or divided, emancipated from control or under control, authoritative or liberal. No indignation need be cherished beforehand against its mechanism. Strictly speaking, it is a vast piece appliance in the human community, such as a machine in a factory or such as organ in the human body. If this organ is the only on that can carry out the task, let us accept it and its structure: whoever wants the end wants the means. All we can ask is that the means shall be adapted to the end; in other terms, that the myriad of large or small local or central pieces shall be determined, adjusted, and coordinated in view of the final and total effect to which they co-operate nearly or remotely.

But, whether simple or compound, every engine which does any work is subject to one condition; the better it is suited to any distinct purpose the less it is suited to other purposes; as its perfection increases, so does its application become limited.—Accordingly, if there are two distinct instruments applied to two distinct objects, the more perfect they are, each of its kind, the more do their domains become circumscribed and opposed to each other; as one of them becomes more capable of doing its own work it becomes more incapable of doing the work of the other; finally, neither can take the place of the other, and this is true whatever the instrument may be, mechanical, physiological, or social.

At the very lowest grade of human industry the savage possesses but one tool; with his cutting or pointed bit of stone he kills, breaks, splits, bores, saws, and carves; the instrument suffices, in the main, for all sorts of services. After this come the lance, the hatchet, the hammer, the punch, the saw, the knife, each adapted to a distinct purpose and less efficacious outside of that purpose: one cannot saw well with a knife, and one cuts badly with a saw. Later, highly-perfected engines appear, and, wholly special, the sewing-machine and the typewriter: it is impossible to sew with the typewriter or write with the sewing-machine.—In like manner, when at the lowest round of the organic ladder the animal is simply a shapeless jelly, homogeneous and viscous, all parts of it are equally suited to all functions; the amoebae, indifferently and by all the cells of its body, can walk, seize, swallow, digest, breathe, and circulate all its fluids, expel its waste, and propagate its species. A little higher up, in fresh-water polyp, the internal sac which digests and the outer skin which serves to envelop it can, if absolutely necessary, change their functions; if you turn the animal inside out like a glove it continues to live; its skin, become internal, fulfills the office of a stomach; its stomach, become external, fulfills the office of an envelope. But, the higher we ascend, the more do the organs, complicated by the division and subdivision of labor, diverge, each to its own side, and refuse to take each other's place. The heart, with the mammal, is only good for impelling the blood, while the lungs only furnish the blood with oxygen; one cannot possibly do the work of the other; between the two domains the special structure of the former and the special structure of the latter interpose an impassable barrier.—In like manner, finally, at the very bottom of the social scale—lower down than the Andamans and the Fuegians—we find a primitive stage of humanity in which society consists wholly of a herd. In this herd there is no distinct association in view of a distinct purpose; there is not even a family—no permanent tie between male and female; there is simply a contact of the sexes. Gradually, in this herd of individuals, all equal and all alike, particular groups define themselves, take shape, and separate: we see appearing more and more precise relationships, more and more distinct habitations, more and more hereditary homesteads, fishing, hunting, and war groups, and small workshops; if the people is a conquering people, castes establish themselves. At length, we find in this expanded and solidly-organized social body provinces, communes, churches, hospitals, schools, corporate bodies and associations of every species and dimension, temporary or permanent, voluntary or involuntary, in brief, a multitude of social engines constructed out of human beings who, on account of personal interest, habit, and constraint, or through inclination, conscience, and generosity, co-operate according to a public or tacit statute in effecting in the material or spiritual order of things this or that determinate undertaking. In France, to-day, there are, besides the State, eighty-six departments, thirty-six thousand communes, four church bodies, forty thousand parishes, seven or eight millions of families, millions of agricultural, industrial, and commercial establishments, hundreds of institutions of science and art, thousands of educational and charitable institutions, benevolent and mutual-aid societies, and others for business or for pleasure by tens and hundreds and thousands, in short, innumerable associations of every kind, each with a purpose of its own, and, like a tool or a special organ, carrying out a distinct work.

Now, each of these associations so far as it is a tool or an organ is subject to the same law; the better it is in one direction, the more mediocre it is in other directions; its special competency constitutes its general incompetence. This is why, among developed nations, no specialized organization can replace another in a satisfactory manner. "An academy of painting which should also be a bank would, in all probability, exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas company which should also be a kindergarten would, we expect, light the streets poorly and teach the children badly." [2201] And the reason is that an instrument, whatever it may be, a mechanical tool, or physiological organ, or human association, is always a system of pieces whose effects converge to a given end; it matters little whether the pieces are bits of wood and metal, as in the tool, cells and fibers, as in the organ, souls and understandings, as in the association; the essential thing is the convergence of their effects; for the more convergent these effects, the more efficient is the instrument in the realization of its end. But, through this convergence, it takes one direction exclusively and cannot take any other; it cannot operate at once in two different senses; it cannot possibly turn to the right and at the same time turn to the left. If any social instrument devised for a special service is made to act additionally for another, it will perform its own office badly as well the one it usurps. Of the two works executed by it, the first injures the second and the second injures the first one. The end, ordinarily, is the sacrifice of one to the other, and, most frequently, the failure of both.



II. Abusive Government Intervention.

Application of this law to the public power.—General effect of its intervention.

Let us follow out the effects of this law when it is the public power which, beyond its principal and peculiar task, undertakes a different task and puts itself in the place of corporate bodies to do their work; when the State, not content with protecting the community and individuals against external or internal oppression, takes upon itself additionally the government of churches, education, or charity, the direction of art, science, and of commercial, agricultural, municipal, or domestic affairs.—Undoubtedly, it can intervene in all corporate bodies other than itself; it has both the right and the duty to interfere; it is bound to do this through its very office as defender of persons and property, to repress in these bodies spoliation and oppression, to compel in them the observance of the primordial statute, charter, or contract, to maintain in the them rights of each member fixed by this statute, to decide according to this statute all conflicts which may arise between administrators and the administrated, between directors and stockholders, between pastors and parishioners, between deceased founders and their living successors. In doing this, it affords them its tribunals, its constables, and its gendarmes, and it affords these to them only with full consent after having looking into and accepted the statute. This, too, is one of the obligations of its office: its mandate hinders it from placing the public power at the service of despoiling and oppressive enterprises; it is interdicted from authorizing a contract for prostitution or slavery, and above all, for the best of reasons, a society for brigandage and insurrections, an armed league, or ready to arm itself, against the community, or a part of the community, or against itself.—But, between this legitimate intervention which enables it to maintain rights, and the abusive interference by which it usurps rights, the limit is visible and it oversteps this limit when, to its function of justiciary, it adds a second, that of governing or supporting another corporation. In this case two series of abuses unfold themselves; on the one side, the State acts contrary to its primary office, and, on the other, it discharges the duties of its superadded office badly.[2202]



III. The State attacks persons and property.

It acts against its function. Its encroachments are attacks on persons and property.

For, in the first place, to govern another corporate body, for example the Church, the State at one time appoints its ecclesiastical heads, as under the old monarchy after the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction by the Concordat of 1516; at another, as with the Constituent Assembly in 1791, without appointing its heads, it invents a new mode of appointment by imposing on the Church a discipline contrary to its spirit and even to its dogmas. Sometimes it goes further still and reduces a special body into a mere administrative branch, transforming its heads into revocable functionaries whose acts it orders and directs; such under the Empire as well as under the Restoration, were the mayor and common-councilors in a commune, and the professors and head-masters of the University. One step more and the invasion is complete: naturally, either through ambition or precaution, or through theory or prejudice, on undertaking a new service it is tempted to reserve to itself or delegate its monopoly. Before 1789 there existed one of these monopolies to the advantage of the Catholic Church, through the interdiction of other cults, also another to the advantage of each corporation of "Arts et Metiers," through the interdiction of free labor; after 1800, there existed one for the benefit of the University through all sorts of shackles and constraints imposed on the establishment and maintenance of private schools.—Now, through each of these constraints the State encroaches on the domain of the individual; the more extended its encroachments the more does it prey upon and reduce the circle of spontaneous initiation and of independent action, which constitute the true life of the individual; if, in conformity with the Jacobin program, it pushes its interference to the end, it absorbs in itself all other lives;[2203] henceforth, the community consists only of automata maneuvered from above, infinitely small residues of men, passive, mutilated, and, so to say, dead souls; the State, instituted to preserve persons, has reduced them to nonentities.

The effect is the same with property when the State supports other organizations than its own. For, to maintain these, it has no other funds than those of the taxpayers; consequently, using its collectors, it takes the money out of their pockets; all, indiscriminately, willingly or not, pay supplementary taxes for supplementary services, whether this service benefits them or is repugnant to them. If I am a Protestant in a Catholic State, or a Catholic in a Protestant State, I pay for religion which seems wrong to me and for a Church which seems to me mischievous. If I am a skeptic, a free-thinker, indifferent or hostile to positive religions in France, I pay to-day for the support of four cults which I regard as useless or pernicious. If I am a provincial or a peasant, I pay for maintaining an "Opera" which I never attend and for a "Sevres" and "Gobelins" of which I never see a vase or a piece of tapestry.—In times of tranquility the extortion is covered up, but in troubled times it is nakedly apparent. Under the revolutionary government, bands of collectors armed with pikes made raids on villages as in conquered countries;[2204] the farmer, collared and kept down by blows from the butt end of a musket, sees his grain taken from his barn and his cattle from their stable; "all scampered off on the road to the town;" while around Paris, within a radius of forty leagues, the departments fasted in order that the capital might be fed. With gentler formalities, under a regular government, a similar extortion occurs when the State, employing a respectable collector in uniform, takes from our purse a crown too much for an office outside of its competency. If, as with the Jacobin State, it claims all offices, it empties the purse entirely; instituted for the conservation of property, it confiscates the whole of it.—Thus, with property, as with persons, when the state proposes to itself another purpose than the preservation of these, not only does it overstep its mandate but it acts contrary to its mandate.



IV. Abuse of State powers.

It badly fills the office of the bodies it supplant.—Cases in which it usurps their powers and refuses to be their substitute.—Cases in which it violates or profits by their mechanism.—In all cases it is bad or mediocre substitute. —Reasons derived from its structure compared with that of other bodies.

Let us consider the other series of abuses, and the way in which the State performs the service of the corporate bodies it supplants.

In the first place there is a chance that, sooner or later, it will shirk this work, for this new service is more or less costly, and, sooner or later, it seems too costly.—Undoubtedly the State has promised to defray expenses; sometimes even, like the Constituent and Legislative assemblies, the revenues for this having been confiscated, it has to furnish an equivalent; it is bound by contract to make good the local or special sources of revenue which it has appropriated or dried up, to furnish in exchange a supply of water from the grand central reservoir, the public treasury.—But if water becomes low in this reservoir, if the taxes in arrears stop the regular supply, if a war happens to open a large breach in it, if the prodigality and incapacity of the rulers, multiply its fissures and leaks, then there is no money on hand for accessory and secondary services. The State, which has adopted this service drops it: we have seen under the Convention and the Directory how, having taken the property of all corporations, provinces, and communes, of institutions of education, art, and science, of churches, hospitals, and asylums, it performed their functions; how, after having been a despoiler and a robber, it became insolvent and bankrupt; how its usurpation and bankruptcy ruined and then destroyed all other services; how, through the double effect of its intervention and desertion, it annihilated in France education, worship, and charity; why the streets in the towns were no longer lighted nor swept; why, in the provinces, roads went to decay, and dikes crumbled; why schools and churches stood empty or were closed; why, in the asylum and in the hospital, foundlings died for lack of milk, the infirm for lack of clothing and food, and the sick for lack of broth, medicines, and beds.[2205]

In the second place, even when the State respects a service or provides the means for it, there is a chance that it will pervert this simply because it comes under its direction.—When rulers lay their hands on an institution it is almost always for the purpose of making something out of it for their own advantage and to its detriment: they render everything subordinate to their interests or theories, they put some essential piece or wheel out of shape or place; they derange its action and put the mechanism out of order; they make use of it as a fiscal, electoral, or doctrinal engine, as a reigning or sectarian instrument.—Such, in the eighteenth century, was the ecclesiastical staff with which we are familiar,[2206] court bishops, drawing-room abbes imposed from above on their diocese or their abbey, non-residents, charged with functions which they do not fulfill, largely-paid idlers, parasites of the Church, and, besides all this, worldly, gallant, often unbelievers, strange leaders of a Christian clergy and which, one would say, were expressly selected to undermine Catholic faith in the minds of their flocks, or monastic discipline in their convents.—Such, in 1791,[2207] is the new constitutional clergy, schismatic, excommunicated, interlopers, imposed on the orthodox majority to say masses which they deem sacrilegious and to administer sacraments which they refuse to accept.

In the last place, even when the rulers do not subordinate the interests of the institution to their passions, to their theories, or to their own interests, even when they avoid mutilating it and changing its nature, even when they loyally fulfill, as well as they know how, the supererogatory (distributive) mandate which they have adjudged to themselves, they infallibly fulfill it badly, at least worse than the special and spontaneous bodies for which they substitute themselves, for the structure of these bodies and the structure of the state are different.—Unique of its kind, alone wielding the sword, acting from above and afar by authority and constraints, the State acts over the entire territory through uniform laws, through imperative and minute regulations, by a hierarchy of obedient functionaries, which it maintains under strict instructions. Hence, it is not adapted to business which, to be well done, needs springs and processes of another species. Its springs, wholly exterior, are insufficient, too weak to support and push undertakings which require an internal motor like private interest, local patriotism, family affections, scientific curiosity, charitable instincts, and religious faith. Its wholly mechanical processes, too rigid and too limited, cannot urge on enterprises which demand of whoever undertakes them delicate and safe handling, supple manipulation, appreciation of circumstances, ready adaptation of means to ends, constant contrivance, the initiative, and perfect independence. On this account the State is a poor head of a family, a poor commercial or agricultural leader, a bad distributor of labor and of subsistence, a bad regulator of production, exchanges, and consumption, a mediocre administrator of the province and the commune, an undiscerning philanthropist, an incompetent director of the fine arts, of science, of instruction, and of worship.[2208] In all these offices its action is either dilatory or bungling, according to routine or oppressive, always expensive, of little effect and feeble in returns, and always beyond or apart from the real wants it pretends to satisfy. The reason is that it starts from too high a point therefore extending over too vast a field. Transmitted by hierarchical procedures, it lags along in formalism, and loses itself in "red-tape." On attaining its end and object it applies the same program to all territories alike a program devised beforehand in the Cabinet, all of a piece, without experimental groping and the necessary corrections;

* a program which, calculated approximately according to the average and the customary, is not exactly suited to any particular case;

* a program which imposes its fixed uniformity on things instead of adjusting itself to its diversity and change;

* a sort of model coat, obligatory in pattern and stuff, which the government dispatches by thousands from the center to the provinces, to be worn, willingly or not, by figures of all sizes and at all seasons.



V. Final Results of Abusive Government Intervention

Other consequences.—Suppressed or stunted bodies cease to grow.—Individuals become socially and politically incapable.—The hands into which public power then falls. —Impoverishment and degradation of the social body.

And much worse. Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, roughly, at greater cost, and with smaller yield than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through its unfair competition, it kills and paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, curbed or abandoned, are lost to the great social body.—And still worse, if this system lasts, and continues to crush them out, the human community loses the faculty of reproducing them; entirely extirpated, they do not grow again; even their germ has perished. Individuals no longer know how to form associations, how to co-operate under their own impulses, through their own initiative, free of outside and superior constraint, all together and for a long time in view of a definite purpose, according to regular forms under freely-chosen chiefs, frankly accepted and faithfully followed. Mutual confidence, respect for the law, loyalty, voluntary subordination, foresight, moderation, patience, perseverance, practical good sense, every disposition of head and heart, with which no association of any kind is efficacious or even viable, have died out for lack of exercise. Henceforth spontaneous, pacific, and fruitful co-operation, as practiced by a free people, is unattainable; men have arrived at social incapacity and, consequently, at political incapacity.—In fact they no longer choose their own constitution or their own rulers; they put with these, willingly or not, according as accident or usurpation furnishes them: now the public power belongs to the man, the faction, or the party sufficiently unscrupulous, sufficiently daring, sufficiently violent, to seize and hold on to it by force, to make the most of it as an egotist or charlatan, aided by parades and prestige, along with bravura songs and the usual din of ready-made phrases on the rights of Man and the public salvation.—This central power itself has in its hands no body who might give it an impetus and inspiration, it rules only over an impoverished, inert, or languid social body, solely capable of intermittent spasms or of artificial rigidity according to order, an organism deprived of its secondary organs, simplified to excess, of an inferior or degraded kind, a people no longer anything but an arithmetical sum of separate, unconnected units, in brief, human dust or mud.—This is what the interference of the State leads to.

There are laws in the social and moral world as in the physiological and physical world; we may misunderstand them, but we cannot elude them; they operate now against us, now for us, as we please, but always alike and without heeding us; it is for us to heed them; for the two conditions they couple together are inseparable; the moment the first appears the second inevitably follows.

*****

[Footnote 2201: Macaulay, "Essays: Gladstone on Church and State."—This principle, of capital importance and of remarkable fecundity, may be called the principle of specialties. Adam Smith fist applied it to machines and to workmen. Macaulay extended it to human associations. Milne-Edwards applied it to the entire series of animal organs. Herbert Spencer largely develops it in connection with physiological organs and human societies in his "Principles of Biology" and "Principles of Sociology." I have attempted here to show the three parallel branches of its consequences, and, again, their common root, a constitutive and primordial property inherent in every instrumentality.]

[Footnote 2202: Cf. "The Revolution," III., book VI., ch. 2 The encroachments of the State and their effect on individuals is there treated. Here, the question is their effects on corporations. Read, on the same subject, "Gladstone on Church and State," by Macaulay, and "The Man versus the State," by Herbert Spencer, two essays in which the close reasoning and abundance of illustrations are admirable.]

[Footnote 2203: "The Revolution," III, 346. (Laffont II. p 258.)]

[Footnote 2204: Ibid., III. 284 Laff. 213.]

[Footnote 2205: "The Revolution," III., 353, 416. (Laffont II. notes pp 262 and 305 to 308.)]

[Footnote 2206: "The Ancient Regime," 64, 65, 76, 77, 120, 121, 292. (Laffont I. pp. 52-53, 60-61, 92 to 94, 218 to 219.)]

[Footnote 2207: "The Revolution," I., 177 and following pages. (Laffont I, pp. 438 to 445.)]

[Footnote 2208: The essays of Herbert Spencer furnish examples for England under the title of "Over-legislation and Representative government." Examples for France may be found in "Liberte du Travail," by Charles Dunoyer (1845). This work anticipates most of the ideas of Herbert Spencer, lacking only the physiological "illustrations."]



CHAPTER III. THE NEW GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION.



I. Precedents of the new organization.

Precedents of the new organization.—In practical operation.—Anterior usurpations of the public power. —Spontaneous bodies under the Ancient Regime and during the Revolution.—Ruin and discredit of their supports.—The central power their sole surviving dependence.

Unfortunately, in France at the end of the eighteenth century the bent was taken and the wrong bent. For three centuries and more the public power had increasingly violated and discredited spontaneous bodies:

Sometimes it had mutilated them and decapitated them; for example, it had suppressed provincial governments (etats) over three-quarters of the territory, in all the electoral districts; nothing remained of the old province but its name and an administrative circumscription.

Sometimes, without mutilating the corporate body it had upset and deformed it, or dislocated and disjointed it.—So that in the towns, through changes made in old democratic constitutions, through restrictions put upon electoral rights and repeated sales of municipal offices,[2301] it had handed over municipal authority to a narrow oligarchy of bourgeois families, privileged at the expense of the taxpayer, half separated from the main body of the public, disliked by the lower classes, and no longer supported by the confidence or deference of the community. And in the parish and in the rural canton, it had taken away from the noble his office of resident protector and hereditary patron, reducing him to the odious position of a mere creditor, and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse position of an absentee creditor.[2302]—So that in the parish and in the rural canton, it had taken away from the noble his office of resident protector and hereditary patron, reducing him to the odious position of a mere creditor, and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse position of an absentee creditor.[2303] Thus, as to the clergy, it had almost separated the head from the trunk by superposing (through the concordat) a staff of gentleman prelates, rich, ostentatious, unemployed, and skeptical, upon an army of plain, poor, laborious, and believing curates.[2304]

Finally, it had, through a protection as untimely as it was aggressive, sometimes conferred on the corporation oppressive privileges which rendered it offensive and mischievous, or else fossilized in an obsolete form which paralyzed its action or corrupted its service. Such was the case with the corporations of crafts and industries to which, in consideration of financial aid, it had conceded monopolies onerous to the consumer and a clog on industrial enterprises. Such was the case with the Catholic Church to which, every five years, it granted, in exchange for its voluntary gift (of money), cruel favors or obnoxious prerogatives, the prolonged persecution of Protestants, the censorship of intellectual speculation, and the right of controlling schools and education.[2305] Such was the case with the universities benumbed by routine; with latest provincial "Etats," constituted in 1789, as in 1489. Such was the case with noble families subjected by law to the antique system of substitutions and of primogeniture, that is to say, to social constraint which, devised long ago for private as well as for public interest in order to secure the transmission of local patronage and political power. This system, however, became useless and corrupting, fecund in pernicious vanities,[2306] in detestable calculations, domestic tyrannies, forced vocations, and private bickering, from the time when the nobles, become frequenters of the court, had lost political power and renounced local patronage.

Thus deprived of, or diverted from, their purpose, the corporate bodies had become unrecognizable under the crust of the abuses which disfigured them. Nobody, except a Montesquieu, could comprehend why they should exist; on the approach of the Revolution, they seemed, not organs, but outgrowths, deformities, and, so to say, superannuated monstrosities. Their historical and natural roots, their living germs far below the surface, their social necessity, their fundamental utility, their possible usefulness, were no longer visible. Only their present inconvenience was felt; people suffered by their friction and burden; their lack of harmony and incoherence created dissatisfaction; annoyance due to their degeneracy were attributed to radical defects; they were judged to be naturally unsound and were condemned, in principle, because of the deviations and laws which the public power had imposed on their development.

Suddenly, the public power, which had produced the evil by its intervention, pretended to remove it by a still greater intervention: in 1789 it again intruded itself on corporate bodies, not to reform them, not restore each to its proper channel, not to confine each with proper limits, but to destroy them outright. Through a radical, universal, and extraordinary amputation, the like of which is not mentioned in history, with the rashness of the theorist and the brutality of the butcher, the legislator extirpated them all, as far as he could, even including the family, while his fury extended beyond the present into the future. To legal abolition and total confiscation, he added the systematic hostility of his preventive laws, together with a fresh obstacle in the shape of his new constructions; during three successive legislatures[2307] he provided against their future regeneration, against the permanent instincts and necessities which might one day resuscitate stable families, distinct provinces, and an orthodox church, against artistic, industrial, financial, charitable, and educational corporations, against every spontaneous and organized group, and against every collective, local, or special enterprise. In place of these he installed synthetic bodies or institutions:

* a Church without believers,

* schools without pupils,

* hospitals without incomes,

* a geometrical hierarchy of improvised powers in the commune, district, and department,

all badly organized, badly adjusted, out of gear at the start, overwhelmed with political functions, as incapable of performing their proper duties as their supplementary duties, and, from the very beginning, either powerless or mischievous.[2308] Changes repeatedly marred by arbitrariness from above or from below, set aside or perverted now by the mob and again by the government, inert in the country, oppressive in the towns, we have seen the state into which they had fallen at the end of the Directory; how, instead of a refuge for liberty, they had become haunts of tyranny or sinks of egoism; why, in 1800, they were as much decried as their predecessors in 1788, why their two successive props, the old one and the most recent, historic custom and popular election, were now discredited and no longer resorted to.—After the disastrous experience of the monarchy and the still worse experience of the republic, another prop had to be sought for; but only one remained, that of the central power, the only one visible and which seemed substantial; in default of others they had recourse to this.[2309] In any event, no protestation, even secret and moral, any longer prevented the State from attaching other corporate bodies to itself, in order to use them for its own purposes as instruments or appendages.



II. Doctrines of Government.

The theory.—Agreement of speculative ideas with practical necessities.—Public rights under the Ancient Regime.—The King's three original rights.—Labors of the jurists in extending royal prerogatives.—Historical impediments.—The primitive or ulterior limits of royal power.—The philosophic and revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty.—Unlimited extension of State power. —Application to spontaneous bodies.—Convergence of ancient and new doctrines.—Corporations considered as creations of the public power.—Centralization through the universal intervention of the State.

The theory here agreed with the need, and not alone the recent theory, but again the ancient theory. Long before 1789, public right had elevated the prerogative of centralized power into a dogma and exaggerated it beyond measure.

There are three titles under which this power was conferred.—Feudal seignior, and suzerain, that is to say, commander-in-chief of the great resident army whose willing forces had served to reconstruct society in the ninth century, the King, through the remotest of his origins—that is to say, through the immemorial confusion of sovereignty with property—was the owner of France, the same as an individual owns his private domain.[2310]—Married, moreover, to the Church since the first Capets, consecrated and crowned at Rheims, anointed by God like a second David,[2311] not only was he believed to be authorized from on high, like other monarchs, but, from Louis le Gros, and especially after the time of saint Louis, he appeared as the delegate from on high, invested with a laic sacerdotalism, clothed with moral power, minister of eternal justice, redresser of wrongs, protector of the weak, benefactor of the humble—in short, "His Most Christian Majesty."—At length, after the thirteenth century, the recent discovery and diligent study of the ancient codes of Justinian had shown in his person the successor of the Caesars of Rome and of the Emperors of Constantinople. According to these codes the people in a body had transferred its rights to the prince; now, in antique cities, all rights were vested in the community, and the individual had none;[2312] accordingly, through this transfer, all rights, public or private, passed into the hands of the prince; henceforth he could exercise them as he pleased, under no restriction and no control. He was above the law, since he made it; his powers were illimitable and his decision absolute.[2313]

On this triple frame the jurists, like State spiders, had, from Philippe le Bel down, spun their web, and the instinctive concordance of their hereditary efforts had attached all its threads to the omnipotence of the King.—Being jurisconsults—that is to say, logicians—they were obliged to deduce, and their minds naturally recurred to the unique and rigid principle to which they might attach their arguments.—As advocates and councilors of the crown they espoused the case of their client and, through professional zeal, derived or forced precedents and texts to his advantage.—By virtue of being administrators and judges the grandeur of their master constituted their grandeur, and personal interest counseled them to expand a prerogative in which, through delegation, they took part.—Hence, during four centuries, they had spun the tissue of "regalian rights," the great net in the meshes of which, since Louis XIV., all lives found themselves caught.[2314]

Nevertheless, however tightly spun was the web, there were openings in it, or, at least, very weak spots.—And first, of the consequences flowing from these three principles in their hands, two of them had hindered the third from unwinding its skein to the end: owing to the fact that the King was formerly Count de Paris and Abbot of St. Denis, he could not become a veritable Augustus, an authentic Diocletian: his two French titles limited his Roman title. Without regard to the laws, so-called fundamental, which imposed his heir on him beforehand, also the entire line of his successive heirs, the tutor, male or female, of his minor heir, and which, if he derogated from immemorial usage, annulled his will like that of a private individual, his quality of suzerain and that of Most Christian, were for him a double impediment. As hereditary general of the feudal army he was bound to consider and respect the hereditary officers of the same army, his old peers and companions in arms—that is to say, the nobles. As outside bishop, he owed to the Church not alone his spiritual orthodoxy, but, again, his temporal esteem, his active zeal, and the aid furnished him by his secular arm. Hence, in applied right, the numerous privileges of the nobles and the Church, so many immunities and even liberties, so many remains of antique local independence, and even of antique local sovereignty,[2315] so many prerogatives, honorific or serviceable, maintained by the law and by the tribunals. On this side, the meshes of the monarchical netting had not been well knit or remained loose; and the same elsewhere, with openings more or less wide, in the five provincial governments (etats), in the Pyrenees districts, in Alsace, at Strasbourg, but especially in Languedoc and in Brittany, where the pact of incorporation, through a sort of bilateral contract, associated together on the same parchment and under the same seal the franchises of the province and the sovereignty of the King.

Add to these original lacunae the hole made by the Prince himself in his net already woven: he had with his own hand torn away its meshes, and by thousands. Extravagant to excess and always needy, he converted everything into money, even his own rights, and, in the military order, in the civil order, in commerce and in industry, in the administration, in the judicature, and in the finances. From one end of the territory to the other, he had sold innumerable offices, imposts, dignities, honors, monopolies, exemptions, survivorships, expectancies—in brief, privileges which, once conferred for a money consideration, became legal property,[2316] often hereditary and transmissible by the individual or the corporation which had paid for them. In this way the King alienated a portion of his royalty for the benefit of the buyer. Now, in 1789, he had alienated a great many of these portions; accordingly, his present authority was everywhere restricted by the use he had previously made of it.—Sovereignty, thus, in his hands had suffered from the double effect of its historic origins and its historic exercise; the public power had not become, or had ceased to be, omnipotence. On the one hand it had not reached its plenitude, and on the other hand it had deprived itself of a portion of its own completeness.

The philosophers wished to find a solution for this double weakness, innate and acquired They had therefore transported sovereignty out of history into the ideal and abstract world, with an imaginary city of mankind reduced to the minimum of a human being Here men, infinitely simplified, all alike, equal, separate from their surroundings and from their past, veritable puppets, were all lifting their hands in common rectangular motion to vote unanimously for the contrat social. In this contract "all classes are reduced to one,[2317] the complete surrender of each associate, with all his rights, to the community, each giving himself up entirely, just as he actually is, himself and all his forces, of which whatever he possesses forms a part," each becoming with respect to himself and every act of his private life a delegate of the State, a responsible clerk, in short, a functionary, a functionary of the people, henceforth the unique, the absolute, and the universal sovereign. A terrible principle, proclaimed and applied for ten years, below by the mob and above by the government! Popular opinion had adopted it; accordingly the passage from the sovereignty of the King to the sovereignty of the people was easy, smooth,[2318] and to the novice in reasoning, the old-fashioned taxable and workable subject, to whom the principle conferred a portion of the sovereignty, the temptation was too great.

At once, according to their custom, the jurists put themselves at the service of the new reign. And no dogma was better suited their to authoritative instinct; no axiom furnished them so convenient a fulcrum on which to set up and turn their logical wheel. This wheel, which they had latterly managed with care and caution under the ancient Regime, had suddenly in their hands turned with frightful speed and effect in order to convert the rigid, universal, and applied laws, the intermittent processes, the theoretical pretensions, and the worst precedents of the monarchy into practice. This meant

* the use of extraordinary commissions,

* accusations of lese majeste,

* the suppression of legal formalities,

* the persecution of religious beliefs and of personal opinions,

* the right of condemning publications and of coercing thought,

* the right of instruction and education,

* the rights of pre-emption, of requisition, of confiscation, and of proscription,

in short, pure and perfect arbitrariness. The result is visible in the deeds of Treilhard, of Berlier, of Merlin de Douai, of Cambaceres, in those of the Constituant and Legislative Assemblies, in the Convention, under the Directory, in their Jacobin zeal or hypocrisy, in their talent for combining despotic tradition with tyrannical innovation, in their professional skill in fabricating on all occasions a snare of plausible arguments with which to properly strangle the individual, their adversary, to the profit of the State, their eternal master.

In effect, not only had they almost strangled their adversary, but likewise, through an aftereffect, their master: France which, after fourteen months of suffocation, was approaching physical suicide.[2319] Such success, too great, had obliged them to stop; they had abandoned one-half of their destructive creed, retaining only the other half, the effect of which, less imminent, was less apparent. If they no longer dared paralyze individual acts in the man, they persisted in paralyzing in the individual all collective acts.—There must be no special associations in general society; no corporations within the State, especially no spontaneous bodies endowed with the initiative, proprietary and permanent: such is Article II. of the Revolutionary Creed, and the direct consequence of the previous one which posits axiomatically the sovereignty of the people and the omnipotence of the State. Rousseau,[2320] inventor of the first, had like-wise enunciated the second; the constituent assembly had solemnly decreed it and applied it on a grand scale,[2321] and successive assemblies had applied it on a still grander scale;[2322] it was a faith with the Jacobins, and, besides, in conformity with the spirit of Roman imperial right and with the leading maxim of French monarchical right. On this point the three known jurisprudential systems were in accord, while their convergence brought together around the same table the jurists of the three doctrines in a common task, ex-parliamentarians and ex-members of the Committee of Public Safety, former pro-scribers and the proscribed, the purveyors of Sinamari with Treilhard and Merlin de Douai, returned from Guiana, alongside of Simeon, Portalis, and Barbe-Marbois. There was nobody in this conclave to maintain the rights of spontaneous bodies; the theory, on all three sides, no matter from whom it proceeded, refused to recognize them for what they are originally and essentially, that is to say, distinct organisms equally natural with the State, equally indispensable in their way, and, therefore, as legitimate as itself; it allowed them only a life on trust, derived from above and from the center. But, since the State created them, it might and ought to treat them as its creatures, keep them indefinitely under its thumb, use them for its purposes, act through them as through other agencies, and transform their chiefs into functionaries of the central power.



III. Brilliant Statesman and Administrator.

The Organizer.—Influence of Napoleon's character and mind on his internal and French system.—Exigencies of his external and European role.—Suppression of all centers of combination and concord.—Extension of the public domain and what it embraces.—Reasons for maintaining the private domain.—The part of the individual.—His reserved enclosure.—Outlets for him beyond that.—His talents are enlisted in the service of public power.—Special aptitude and temporary vigor, lack of balance, and doubtful future of the social body thus formed.

A new France, not the chimerical, communistic, equalized, and Spartan France of Robespierre and Saint-Just, but a possible real, durable, and yet leveled and uniform France, logically struck out at one blow, all of a piece, according to one general principle, a France, centralized, administrative, and, save the petty egoistic play of individuals, managed in one entire body from top to bottom,—in short, the France which Richelieu and Louis XIV. had longed for, which Mirabeau after 1790 had foreseen,[2323] is now the work which the theories of the monarchy and of the Revolution had prepared, and toward which the final concurrence of events, that is to say, "the alliance of philosophy and the saber," led the sovereign hands of the First Consul.

Accordingly, considering his well-known character, the promptitude, the activity, the reach, the universality, and the cast of his intellect, he could not have proposed to himself a different work nor reduced himself to a lower standard. His need of governing and of administrating was too great; his capacity for governing and administrating was too great: his was an exacting genius.—Moreover, for the outward task that he undertook he required internally, not only undisputed possession of all executive and legislative powers, not only perfect obedience from all legal authorities, but, again, the annihilation of all moral authority but his own, that is to say, the silence of public opinion and the isolation of each individual, and therefore the abolition, preventive and systematic, of any religious, ecclesiastic, pedagogic, charitable, literary, departmental, or communal initiative that might, now or in the future gather men against him or alongside of him. Like a good general he secures his rear. At strife with all Europe, he so arranges it as not to allow in the France he drags along after him refractory souls or bodies which might form platoons in his rear. Consequently, and through precaution, he suppresses in advance all eventual rallying points or centers of combination Henceforth, every wire which can stir up and bring a company of men together for the same object terminates in his hands; he holds in his firm grasp all these combined wires, guards them with jealous care, in order to strain them to the utmost. Let no one attempt to loosen them, and, above all, let no one entertain a thought of getting hold of them; they belong to him and to him alone, and compose the public domain, which is his domain proper.

But, alongside of his proper domain, he recognizes another in which he himself assigns a limit to the complete absorption of all wills by his own; he does not admit, of course in his own interest, that the public power, at least in the civil order of things and in common practice, should be illimitable nor, especially, arbitrary.[2324]—This is due to his not being an utopian or a theorist, like his predecessors of the Convention, but a perspicacious statesman, who is in the habit of using his own eyes. He sees things directly, in themselves; he does not imagine them through book formulae or party phrases, by a process of verbal reasoning, employing the gratuitous suppositions of humanitarian optimism or the dogmatic prejudices of Jacobin nonsense. He sees Man just as he is, not Man in himself, an abstract citizen, the philosophic puppet of the Contrat Social, but the real individual, the entire living man, with his profound instincts, his tenacious necessities, which, whether tolerated or not by legislation, still subsist and operate infallibly, and which the legislator must take into consideration if he wants to turn them to account.—This individual, a civilized European and a modern Frenchman, constituted as he is by several centuries of tolerable police discipline, of respected rights and hereditary property, must have a private domain, an enclosed area, large or small, which belongs and is reserved to him personally, to which the public power interdicts access and before which it mounts guard to prevent other individuals from intruding on it. Otherwise his condition seems intolerable to him; he is no longer disposed to exert himself, to set his wits to work, or to enter upon any enterprise. Let us be careful not to snap or loosen this powerful and precious spring of action; let him continue to work, to produce, to economize, if only that he may be in a condition to pay taxes; let him continue to marry, to bring forth and raise up sons, if only to serve the conscription. Let us ease his mind with regard to his enclosure;[2325] let him exercise full proprietorship over it and enjoy it exclusively; let him feel himself at home in his own house in perpetuity, safe from any intrusion, protected by the code and by the courts, not alone against his enemies, but against the administration itself. Let him in this well-defined, circumscribed abode be free to turn round and range as he pleases, free to browse at will, and, if he chooses, to consume all his hay himself. It is not essential that his meadows should be very extensive: most men live with their nose to the ground; very few look beyond a very narrow circle; men are not much troubled by being penned up; the egoism and urgent needs of daily life are already for them ready-made limits: within these natural barriers they ask for nothing but to be allowed to graze in security. Let us give them this assurance and leave them free to consult their own welfare.—As to the rest, in very small number, more or less imaginative, energetic, and ardent, there is, outside the enclosure, an issue expressly provided for them: the new administrative and military professions offer an outlet to their ambition and to their vanity which, from the start, keeps on expanding until, suddenly, the first Consul points to an infinite perspective on the horizon.[2326] According to an expression attributed to him, henceforth,