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DEMOCRACY IN FRANCE.
_FOURTH EDITION._
DEMOCRACY IN FRANCE.
JANUARY, 1849.
BY MONSIEUR GUIZOT.
_FOURTH EDITION._
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1849.
LONDON: PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET.
I venture to believe that nothing will be found in the following pages
which bears the impress of my personal situation. While events of such
magnitude are passing before his eyes, a man who did not forget himself
would deserve to be for ever forgotten. I have thought of nothing but
the situation of my country. The more I reflect upon that, the more I am
convinced that the evil which lies at the root of all her evils, which
undermines and destroys her governments and her liberties, her dignity
and her happiness, is the evil which I attack;--the idolatry of
Democracy.
Whether the accession of M. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte to the Presidency
of the Republic will be found an efficacious remedy for this disease,
the future will show. What I have said here after the election of M.
Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, I should have equally said, without the
slightest alteration, if General Cavaignac had been elected. It is not
to individuals, but to society itself, that great social truths are
addressed.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
WHAT IS THE SOURCE OF THE PREVALENT EVIL? 1
CHAPTER II.
WHAT IS THE DUTY OF GOVERNMENT WITH RESPECT
TO DEMOCRACY? 7
CHAPTER III.
OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC 15
CHAPTER IV.
OF THE SOCIAL REPUBLIC 25
CHAPTER V.
WHAT ARE THE REAL AND ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF
SOCIETY IN FRANCE? 36
CHAPTER VI.
POLITICAL CONDITIONS OF SOCIAL PEACE IN FRANCE 56
CHAPTER VII.
MORAL CONDITIONS OF SOCIAL PEACE IN FRANCE 70
CHAPTER VIII.
CONCLUSION 84
DEMOCRACY IN FRANCE.
CHAPTER I.
WHAT IS THE SOURCE OF THE PREVALENT EVIL?
Mirabeau, Barnave, Napoleon, and Lafayette, who died at distant and very
dissimilar periods, in bed or on the scaffold, in their own country or
in exile, all died under the influence of one sentiment--a sentiment of
profound melancholy. They thought their hopes deceived, their labours
abortive. They were assailed by doubts of the success of their cause,
and by misgivings as to the future.
King Louis-Philippe reigned above seventeen years, for more than eleven
of which I had the honour to be his minister. If to-morrow it pleased
God to summon us into his presence, should we quit this earth very
confident in the future destiny and the constitutional order of our
country?
Is then the French Revolution destined to give birth only to doubt and
deception?--to bury all its triumphs under ruins?
Yes: so long as France shall suffer the true and the false, the upright
and the perverse, the practicable and the chimerical, the salutary and
the pestilent to be constantly mingled and confounded in her opinions,
her institutions, and the government of her affairs, such will be the
unfailing and inevitable result.
Until a people which has gone through a great revolution has passed on
the principles, the passions, and the doctrines which have led to this
revolution, a sentence like that which shall be passed on all human
things at the Last Day, “severing the wheat from the tares, and the corn
from the straw that shall be cast into the fire,” it can never surmount
the perils, nor reap the advantages, of the struggle in which it has
been engaged.
So long as this judgment is deferred, chaos reigns; and chaos, if
prolonged in the midst of a people, would be death.
Chaos is now concealed under one word--Democracy.
This is now the sovereign and universal word which all parties invoke,
all seek to appropriate as a talisman.
The Monarchists say, “Our Monarchy is a Democratic Monarchy: therefore
it differs essentially from the ancient Monarchy, and is adapted to the
modern condition of society.”
The Republicans say, “The Republic is Democracy governing itself. This
is the only form of government in harmony with a democratic society, its
principles, its sentiments, and its interests.”
Socialists, Communists, and Montagnards require that the republic should
be a pure and absolute democracy. This, in their estimation, is the
condition of its legitimacy.
Such is the power of the word Democracy, that no government or party
dares to raise its head, or believes its own existence possible, if it
does not bear that word inscribed on its banner; and those who carry
that banner aloft with the greatest ostentation and to the extremest
limits, believe themselves to be stronger than all the rest of the
world.
Fatal idea, which incessantly excites and foments social war amongst us!
This idea must be extirpated; for on its extirpation depends social
peace, and, in her train, liberty, security, prosperity, dignity, all
the benefits, material or moral, which social peace alone can ensure.
The following are the causes to which the word _democracy_ owes its
power.
It is the banner of all the social hopes and ambitions of man,--pure or
impure, noble or base, rational or irrational, possible or chimerical.
Now it is the glory of man to be ambitious. He alone, of all created
beings, does not passively resign himself to evil; he alone incessantly
aspires after good; not only for himself, but for his fellow-creatures.
He respects and loves the race to which he belongs; he wishes to find a
remedy for their miseries, and redress for their wrongs.
But man is no less imperfect than he is ambitious. Amidst his ardent and
unceasing struggles to eradicate evil and to achieve good, every one of
his virtuous inclinations is accompanied by an evil inclination which
treads closely on its heels, or strives with it for precedence. The
desire for justice and the desire for vengeance--the spirit of liberty
and the spirit of tyranny--the wish to rise and the wish to abase what
has risen--the ardent love of truth and the presumptuous temerity of
fancied knowledge;--we may fathom all the depths of human nature; we
shall find throughout, the same mingled yet conflicting qualities, the
same danger from their close and easy approximation.
To all these instincts, at once contrary and parallel,--to all
indiscriminately, the bad as well as the good,--the word _Democracy_
holds out an interminable vista and infinite promises. It fosters every
propensity, it speaks to every passion, of the heart of man; to the most
generous and the most shameful, the most moral and the most immoral, the
gentlest and the harshest, the most beneficent and the most
destructive: to the former it loudly offers, to the latter it secretly
and dimly promises, satisfaction.
Such is the secret of its power.
I am wrong in saying, the secret. The word _Democracy_ is not new, and
in all ages it has signified what it signifies now. But what is new and
proper to our times is this: the word _Democracy_ is now pronounced
every day, every hour, and in every place; and at every time and place
it is heard by all men. This formidable appeal to all that is most
potent, for good and for evil, in man and in society, was formerly heard
only transiently, locally, and among certain classes, which, though
bound to other classes by the ties of a common country, were distinct
and profoundly different from them. They lived at a distance from each
other; each obscurely known to the other. Now there is but one society;
and in this society there are no more lofty barriers, no more great
distances, no more mutual obscurities. Whether it be false or true,
noxious or salutary, when once a social idea arises, it penetrates
everywhere, and its action is universal and constant. It is a torch that
is never extinguished; a voice that is never wearied or hushed.
Universality and publicity are from henceforth the conditions of all the
great provocations addressed to men,--of all the great impulses given to
society.
This is doubtless one of those absolute and sovereign facts which enter
into the designs of God with regard to mankind.
Such being the fact, the empire of the word _Democracy_ is not
to be regarded as a transitory or local accident. It is the
development--others would say the explosion--of all the elements of
human nature throughout all the ranks and all the depths of society; and
consequently the open, general, continuous, inevitable struggle of its
good and evil instincts; of its virtues and its vices; of all its powers
and faculties, whether to improve or to corrupt, to raise or to abase,
to create or to destroy. Such is, from henceforth, the social state, the
permanent condition of our nation.