The Same Subject Continued.
I shall say but one word of external matters. The Restoration
found war in France, and France, like Europe, weary of war. This
was both for France and Europe a pledge of peace. Peace was then
the general law of our destiny; and in it should France have
sought its power, and likewise its dignity, for the one is not
separated from the other, at least for long.
Within, the Restoration found neither anarchy, impiety, contempt
for the laws, struggles between classes, nor any of those
revolutionary scourges of which they now speak, as if they had
possessed France for twenty-five years without interruption. This
is not true. The old nobility lived at peace with the new, and
both with the nation. Vanity had its folly as well as its
pleasures, and the country thought little about the matter.
Unluckily for our prospects and our rights--I thought so then,
and do so still--power was at least strongly constituted, and in
such a manner that disorder was not to be feared either for us or
itself. Moral disorder, that internal shamelessness which
incredulity produces, that domestic license, contempt for all
existing forms of things, and aversion to every rule and
restraint, had disappeared. Order, an imperious and blind
necessity in 1799, was in 1814 a habit and a general taste, and
the Restoration found it so.
It is true that order, not only politically, but morally, was
without guarantees. In political respects, no real and
independent institutions subsisted by their own strength, capable
of protecting either the general interests against individual
pretensions, or individual interests against the tyranny of
general interests and the natural vices or errors of power. One
man had sufficed for many, and had pretended to suffice for all.
In falling, he left power entirely naked and defenceless: for it
had rights, and no means of exercising them; strength, and no
means of displaying it; wants, and no means of providing for them
by its own efforts.
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In moral respects the evil was less apparent, but still real and
profound. Order reigned in social facts, and even in manners; but
the principles of order were not in the soul. These principles I
may sum up in two words: the firm sentiment of right and true
belief. These were almost alike wanting. I will not say that in
the respect for religion and morals which replaced the
revolutionary cynicism there was hypocrisy, but still there was
not sincerity: it was an external respect, founded upon
necessities and conveniences, not upon convictions and
sentiments. People considered it good, and observed it, but
without having in themselves that which occasions it, and without
troubling themselves as to its legitimate nature. The head of the
government set the example; but if he desired its habits, he
feared its principles; for while ridiculing ideas, he
acknowledged their empire. Discipline without moral rule,
obedience with indifference, this is all he sought, and society
gradually took the character under his hand. Never had order been
at once so exact, and yet so foreign, to the inner life of man;
and never had there been so much regularity united with so little
faith.
As for the idea of right, it was raised little above civil
relations; beyond which force reigned so supreme, that it seemed
as if right belonged to it alone. When there exists in a nation a
will before which everything disappears, or is reduced to
silence, the sentiment of right perishes; and if this will is at
the same time very active, and is possessed with the passion for
displaying itself on every side, in war, in peace, manifesting
itself everywhere, and considering every obstacle as
illegitimate, it exercises over men the most formidable
corruption they can be subject to, for it deprives them of the
power and even thought of resisting--that is to say, takes from
them their moral existence. Right is the right of resistance:
there is no other; for take that away, and every other
disappears. Bonaparte struck them all to the heart, at least in
their relations with his power; and thus repulsing beliefs on the
one hand, and rights on the other, he carried away from the order
which he maintained, without having founded it, every guarantee
but habit and his own will.
What Bonaparte did not give, the Restoration could give us: this
was at once its mission and its nature. It was its mission, for a
government has no other than that of satisfying the wants of the
society in which it is established; not only the permanent and
universal wants of society, but likewise, and above all perhaps,
the special wants of its epoch. But even as Bonaparte had had to
bring back external order, and to cause the cessation, by the
despotism of a single will, of the anarchy of individual wills,
so the Restoration, taking things where Bonaparte left them, had
to infuse into external order the belief which constitutes moral
order, and to replace the empire of will by the empire of right.
Though less visible, these wants are not the less real; they are
found at the bottom of every legitimate aspiration of every
party.
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It was also in the nature of the Restoration to respond to them.
And from the first it was constrained to the institutions of
liberty. I make use of this word, for it appears to me the only
one by which the imperious necessity for the Charter can be
expressed. Such constraints are not offensive to the power to
which they apply, for it is Providence which directs them. The
mistrust which the Restoration could not fail to excite exacted
guarantees which liberty alone could offer. Thus liberty was
perhaps still more necessary to the Restoration than power to the
Consulate: but it is in the bosom of liberty that public beliefs
are developed; it is under its shadow that general ideas
germinate and grow, ideas adapted to the time and to the instinct
of minds, and called forth and gathered by the secret wants of an
entire people. Despotism never produces them; and the great
convictions which have governed the world are never formed but
against power or in a free state. The idea and the sentiment of
right spring of necessity from liberty. This does not need proof,
especially in modern times, when the bloody combats of the little
Greek or Italian factions would not be, in the eyes of any one,
liberty.
And this is not all: that which was a necessity to the
Restoration was likewise analogous to its nature: it drew its
force not from force itself, but from an idea. The word
legitimacy has been, and will still be, much abused. One loses
much by this abuse; for in trying to make it mean what it does
not, we run the risk of depriving it of what it really contains
of truth and strength. It expresses a right, real and obvious,
though limited as rights always are, when existing simultaneously
with other rights. This right has made the strength of the
Restoration, and even the Restoration itself. The Restoration was
the result of the influence which recollections of long
possession and certain moral principles and sentiments
accompanying them exercise upon the minds of men. Whatever we may
think of right--its origin, conditions, limits--we should know
that it is a fact, a powerful fact, and one which was felt as
such by Cromwell and William III., as well as in the reign of
Charles II.
It is the consequence of this fact that, founded as it is upon a
moral idea, and sustained by those which are joined to or derived
from it, the development of its force must be sought especially
in the moral order where its principle resides. Elicited by
convictions effected in virtue of a right, convictions and rights
were at the Restoration the natural means of government. Subject
to necessity even in the moment of triumph, obliged to yield in
returning to the Revolution, it dreaded what the Revolution
desired--it had to conciliate antagonistic principles and rights;
but even that was a moral work foreign to its direct action, and
which new sentiments and new ideas could alone accomplish.
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Bonaparte had rebuilt the altars, and restored its solemnities to
public worship; and notwithstanding revolutionary clamours, the
non-Catholics felt no alarm. After the Restoration, Catholicism
came to demand, and liberty of conscience to fear much more. What
had the Restoration to do to defend society and itself from this
peril? Could it, like the Revolution, or even like Bonaparte,
treat different communions now with severity, now with
complacency, and arbitrarily restrain or permit their action? No:
that would have been opposed to the general nature of its
institutions, and have shocked the respect it owed to faith as
well as to liberty. Another path was open to it: and that was, to
lay vigorous hold upon the principles of religious liberty, to
proclaim it in all its acts, to inculcate it in every mind, and
to make it, in fine, one of its doctrines of government, one of
its public creeds which, really adopted, are found everywhere
acting by their own virtue, and maintaining order almost of
themselves. All the wants of the new order prescribed to the
Restoration such a course; and it had, partly in the necessities
of its situation, and partly in its nature, what sufficed for
this noble task. The protection accorded to religious and moral
ideas was not, on its part, the confession of an error, for all
these ideas rallied spontaneously around it. The respect in which
rights were held was of great importance to it, for it drew its
own title from a right; and the maintenance of the public
liberties was not less its policy than their establishment, for
it could not, like Bonaparte, pretend to despotism by victory. It
was, in fine, its condition and its destiny to rule especially by
the moral influences, to aid in their development, to base on
their empire the order which it found restored, and to have
recourse to force but rarely, and then with regret, as a means
foreign to its nature, and the necessity of which rendered its
employment grievous.
If we consider the occasions when the present government has
tried this means, we shall be convinced, without difficulty, that
the natural laws which rule it have had little to do with its
use. Sometimes, as in the slightest popular agitations, we have
seen it used with a precipitation and to an extent which
exhibited less skill than inquietude; sometimes, as in the
proceedings of the Cour des Pairs, indications of severity were
observable sufficient to inspire much alarm, but which ended
merely in correctional punishments. The movement has almost
always appeared above the cause, and the effect beneath the
movement. I do not know if a neutral observer is in the right to
judge thus; but assuredly the employment of force, and the public
threats of severity, have failed both in motive and address; and
many believe that power has made use of them either wrongfully or
unskilfully. Either of these faults would prove that the means of
governing are improper.
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It is not merit to succeed by force even at the moment when it is
invoked; but what government does not come to the end of its
means? It is still necessary that, after having set it at work,
it leaves it public, convinced that this was necessary; and that
it has used the means so well as to render this need more rare.
If the first of its convictions fail, power is suspected of
timidity and malevolence; if the second, it is taxed with want of
skill, and its employment of force has weakened instead of
strengthening it.
I will not go farther; I have said enough to show in what system
of government the Restoration seemed to me born, and how, in
trying to leave it, it would lose its advantages without
acquiring those of a different system. It cannot strengthen
itself more by judicial rigour than by conquests. If fear ever
became the machinery of its power--if, in order to maintain
itself, it was necessary to terrify the interests, opinions, and
sentiments it suspected--the more pressing would be the need, the
more useless would be the weapon, and the danger would increase
with the necessity. Our government, then, can still less than
other governments rely upon the indirect efficacy of capital
punishment. Rarely simple, and often in the complication of its
effects more hurtful than profitable, this means would carry into
the present régime more trouble than security. No one in France
or in Europe will ever think that the Restoration is called upon
to crush all it may fear. It has not been able to give such
proofs of its physical force, that the minds of men submit as a
matter of course to its frequent use. When it strikes, many
people are tempted to believe it more severe than just, or more
in danger than it is in reality, and its strokes awaken less the
idea of its energy than of its danger. More than one government,
after great severities, has been considered still weak; and in
such case it finds itself in the worst of conditions--that of a
power whose weakness provokes conspiracy, and which tries
afterwards to fill up, by means of punishments, the abysses which
that weakness has opened. The reason is, that force must exist
before it pretends to inspire fear; and in the case of the
Restoration, the sources of force must be sought for elsewhere
than in the means of terror. I repeat that power itself has now
an instinct of this; for it has not, while administering
death-punishment, that confidence, that certainty of success,
which is almost its only guarantee. It causes, yet fears the
sentiments this melancholy spectacle may excite, without feeling
assured of the terror it wishes to inspire; and this instinct is
not a mistake, but the voice of nature. It is bound to moderation
in punishment, just as in its exterior relations it is bound to
peace. The Charter has abolished confiscation, and the
Restoration justly honours the Charter. I do not demand the
abolition of capital punishment; but I am convinced that, against
its enemies, government gains nothing by this agent, and would
gain much by showing itself very niggardly in its use.
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It can no longer have a physical and direct efficacy. Its moral
efficacy is not so great in political as in private offences; it
is powerless in inspiring aversion to crime; it is equivocal and
mixed with the most various results when tending to the
propagation of fear; and it is more feeble, more uncertain, and
more perilous to the present government than to powers of a
different origin and position. Is this enough? It would be well
were this all. But many other reasons, and many more dangers,
suggest themselves; and these I shall proceed to indicate.