Читать книгу Encyclopedic Liberty - Jean Le Rond d'Alembert - Страница 18
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This important article by Diderot, which was at first attributed to Toussaint, stirred up perhaps as much controversy as any single political article throughout the entire publishing history of the Encyclopédie. Attacks on it continued for more than a decade. In 1752, publication of the dictionary was suspended temporarily, partly because of the storm surrounding this particular essay. Singled out for criticism in the article was the author’s general argument for popular sovereignty, and the specific ideas that liberty is a gift from heaven, and that Paul’s letter to the Romans should be viewed as legitimating limited government. With the resumption of publication (volume 3, in 1753), the editors defended and explained this article by echoing arguments for limited government that the Parlement of Paris had recently made in its controversy with the Crown concerning the church’s withholding of sacraments from the Jansenists.1
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POLITICAL AUTHORITY. No man has received from nature the right to command others. Liberty is a gift from heaven, and each individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he enjoys the use of reason. If nature has established any authority, it is paternal control; but paternal control has its limits, and in the state of nature, it would terminate when the children could take care of themselves. Any other authority comes from another origin than nature. If one seriously considers this matter, one will always go back to one of these two sources: either the force and violence of an individual who has seized it, or the consent of those who have submitted to it by a contract made or assumed between them and the individual on whom they have bestowed authority.
Power that is acquired by violence is only usurpation and only lasts as long as the force of the individual who commands can prevail over the force of those who obey; in such a way that if the latter become in their turn the strongest party and then shake off the yoke, they do it with as much right and justice as the other who had imposed it upon them. The same law that made authority can then destroy it; for this is the law of might. Sometimes authority that is established by violence changes its nature; this occurs when it continues and is maintained with the express consent of those who have been brought into subjection, but in this case it reverts to the second case about which I am going to speak; and the individual who had arrogated it then becomes a prince, ceasing to be a tyrant.
Power that comes from the consent of the people2 necessarily presupposes certain conditions that make its use legitimate, useful to society, advantageous to the republic, and that set and restrict it between limits: for man must not and cannot give himself entirely and without reserve to another man, because he has a master superior to everything, to whom he alone belongs in his entire being. It is God, whose power always has a direct bearing on each creature, a master as jealous as absolute, who never loses
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his rights and does not transfer them.3 He permits for the common good and for the maintenance of society that men establish among themselves an order of subordination, that they obey one of them, but he wishes that it be done with reason and proportion and not by blindness and without reservation, so that the creature does not arrogate the rights of the creator. Any other submission is the veritable crime of idolatry. To bend one’s knee before a man or an image is merely an external ceremony about which the true God, who demands the heart and the mind, hardly cares and which he leaves to the institution of men to do with as they please the tokens of civil and political devotion or of religious worship. Thus it is not these ceremonies in themselves, but the spirit of their establishment that makes their observance innocent or criminal. An Englishman has no scruples about serving the king on one knee; the ceremonial only signifies what people wanted it to signify. But to deliver one’s heart, spirit, and conduct without any reservation to the will and caprice of a mere creature, making him the unique and final reason for one’s actions, is assuredly a crime of divine lèse-majesté of the highest degree. Otherwise this power of God about which one speaks so much would only be empty noise that human politics would use out of pure fantasy and which the spirit of irreligion could play with in its turn; so that all ideas concerning power and subordination coming to the point of merging, the prince would trifle with God, and the subject with the prince.
[True and legitimate power, then, necessarily has limits. Thus, Scripture tells us: “let your submission be reasonable (sit rationabile obsequium vestrum).” “All power that comes from God is an orderly power (omnis potestas à Deo ordinata est).”4 For this is how these words must be understood, consistent with right reason and with the literal sense, not with the sort of interpretation prompted by servility and flattery that claims that any power of whatever kind comes from God. After all, aren’t there unjust powers? Aren’t there authorities which, far from coming from God, establish themselves
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against his orders and against his will? Do usurpers have God for themselves? Do we have to obey the persecutors of the true religion in everything? Will silencing idiocy legitimize the power of the Antichrist? It will still be great power. In resisting this power, are Enoch and Elie seditious rebels who have forgotten that all power comes from God? Or are they reasonable men, firm and pious, who know that all power ceases to exist as soon as it goes beyond the boundaries that reason has prescribed for it and strays from the rules that the sovereign of princes and subjects has established—men, in short, who think as St. Paul does that all power is from God only insofar as it is just and orderly?]
The prince owes to his very subjects the authority that he has over them; and this authority is limited by the laws of nature and the state. The laws of nature and the state are the conditions under which they have submitted or are supposed to have submitted to its government. One of these conditions is that, not having any power or authority over them but by their choice and consent, he can never employ this authority to break the act or the contract by which it was transferred to him. From that time on he would work against himself, since his authority could only subsist by virtue of the right that established it. Whoever annuls one, destroys the other. The prince cannot therefore dispose of his power and his subjects without the consent of the nation and independent of the option indicated in the contract of allegiance. If he proceeded otherwise, everything would be nullified, and the laws would relieve him of the promises and the oaths that he would have been able to make, as a minor who would have acted without full knowledge of the facts, since he would have claimed to have at his disposal that which he only had in trust and with a clause of entail, in the same way as if he had had it in full ownership and without any condition.
Moreover the government, although hereditary in a family and placed in the hands of one person, is not private property, but public property that consequently can never be taken from the people, to whom it belongs exclusively, fundamentally, and as a freehold. Consequently it is always the people who make the lease or the agreement: they always intervene in the contract that adjudges its exercise. It is not the state that belongs to the prince, it is the prince who belongs to the state: but it does rest with the prince to govern in the state, because the state has chosen him for that purpose: he has bound
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himself to the people and the administration of affairs, and they in their turn are bound to obey him according to the laws. The person who wears the crown can certainly discharge himself of it completely if he wishes, but he cannot replace it on the head of another without the consent of the nation who has placed it on his. In a word, the crown, the government, and the public authority are possessions owned by the body of the nation, held as a usufruct by princes and as a trust by ministers. Although heads of state, they are nonetheless members of it; as a matter of fact the first, the most venerable, and the most powerful allowed everything in order to govern, allowed nothing legitimately to change the established government or to place another head in their place. The sceptre of Louis XV necessarily passes to his eldest son, and there is no power that can oppose this; nor any nation because it is the condition of the contract; nor his father for the same reason.
The depository of authority is sometimes only for a limited time, as in the Roman republic. It is sometimes for the life of only one man, as in Poland; sometimes for all the time a family exists, as in England; sometimes for the time a family exists only through its male descendants, as in France.
This depository is sometimes entrusted to a certain class in society, sometimes to several people chosen by all the classes, and sometimes to one man.
The conditions of this pact are different in different states. But everywhere the nation has a right to maintain against all forces the contract that they have made; no power can change it; and when it is no longer valid, the nation recovers its rights and full freedom to enter into a new one with whomever and however it pleases them. This is what would happen in France if by the greatest of misfortunes the entire reigning family happened to die out, including the most remote descendants; then the scepter and the crown would return to the nation.
It seems that only slaves whose minds are as limited as their hearts are debased could think otherwise. Such men are born neither for the glory of the prince nor for the benefit of society; they have neither virtue nor greatness of soul. Fear and self-interest are the motives of their conduct. Nature only produces them to improve by contrast the worth of virtuous men; and Providence uses them to make tyrannical powers, with which it
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chastises as a rule the people and the sovereigns who offend God; the latter for usurping, the former for granting too much to man of supreme power, that the Creator reserved for Himself over the created being.
The observation of laws, the conservation of liberty, and the love of country are the prolific sources of all great things and of all beautiful actions. Here we can find the happiness of people, and the true luster of princes who govern them. Here obedience is glorious, and command august. On the contrary, flattery, self-interest, and the spirit of slavery are at the root of all the evils that overpower a state and of all the cowardice that dishonor it. There the subjects are miserable, and the princes hated; there the monarch has never heard himself proclaimed the beloved; submission is hateful there, and domination cruel. If I view France and Turkey from the same perspective, I perceive on the one hand a society of men united by reason, activated by virtue, and governed by a head of state equally wise and glorious according to the laws of justice; on the other, a herd of animals assembled by habit, driven by the law of the rod, and led by an absolute master according to his caprice.
[But in order to give to the principles disseminated in this article all the authority they are able to accommodate, let us support them with the testimony of one of our greatest kings. His speech at the opening of the assembly of notables in 1596, full of a sincerity that is mostly unknown to sovereigns, was quite worthy of the feelings he brought there.5
“Convinced,” says M. de Sully, pag. 467, in quarto, vol. 1, “that kings have two sovereigns, God and the law; that justice must preside over the throne and mildness must be seated by its side; that since God is the true proprietor of all realms and kings merely their administrators, kings must therefore represent to their people the one whose place they are taking; that they will reign as he does only insofar as they reign as fathers; that in hereditary monarchical states, there is a delusion that one may also call hereditary, namely, that the sovereign is master of the lives and properties of all his subjects; that by means of these four words—‘such is our pleasure’—he is exempt from indicating the reasons for his conduct, or
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even from having any; that even if he were, there is nothing so imprudent as making oneself hateful to those to whom one is obliged to entrust one’s life at every moment, and that taking everything away by naked violence is a way of falling into this misfortune. Being convinced (as I say) of these principles, which all the courtier’s artifice will never banish from the hearts of those who resemble him, this great man declared that in order to avoid any hint of violence and coercion, he did not want the assembly to be made up of deputies named by the sovereign and always blindly subservient to all his wishes; but that his intention was that all sorts of persons of whatever status or condition be freely admitted there, so that knowledgeable and meritorious people would have the means to propose without fear what they think necessary for the public good; that even at that moment, he did not mean to be prescribing any limits to them; that he was merely enjoining them not to abuse this allowance for the humiliation of that royal authority which is the nerve center of the state; to restore unity among its members; to relieve the people; to discharge the royal treasury of many debts to which it was subject without having contracted them; to moderate excessive pensions with the same justice (without harming the necessities), in order to establish a clear and adequate fund for the future maintenance of military men. He added that he would have no difficulty submitting to measures that he would not have thought of himself, as soon as he sees they have been dictated by a spirit of equity and disinterestedness; that he would not be found seeking in his age, experience, and personal qualities a pretext (quite a bit less frivolous than the one princes are accustomed to use) to evade the agreements; that on the contrary, he would show by his example that these agreements concern the king (in causing them to be observed) no less than the subject (in submitting to them). If I prided myself,” he continued, “on passing for an excellent orator, I would have brought here more fine words than good will; but my ambition has something loftier about it than speaking well. I aspire to the glorious title of liberator and restorer of France. Thus, I have not summoned you, as my predecessors used to do, to oblige you to blindly approve my wishes. I have assembled you to receive your counsel, to believe it, to follow it—in a word, to place myself under your tutelage. This is a desire that rarely comes over kings, graybeards, and victors like me. But the love I bring to my subjects and the
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extreme desire I have to preserve my state cause me to find everything easy and everything honorable.”6
Having finished this speech, Henry got up and left, leaving only M. de Sully in the assembly, to share with it the accounts, papers, and memoranda that they might need.
One does not presume to propose this conduct as a model, because there are occasions when princes may show less deference, without however deviating from the sentiments that cause the sovereign to be regarded in society as the father of his family, and his subjects as his children. The great monarch we have just cited will again provide us with the example of this sort of mildness mixed with firmness (so requisite on occasion), where reason is so manifestly on the sovereign’s side that he has the right to strip his subjects of freedom of choice and leave them with obedience as the sole option. Once the Edict of Nantes had been verified, after many difficulties on the part of the Parlement, the clergy, and the University,7 Henry IV said to the bishops: “You have urged me to my duty; I urge you to yours. Let us rival each other in doing good. My predecessors have given you fine words; but as for me with my jacket,8 I will give you good results. I will look over your formal proposals and will respond to them as favorably as possible.” And he responded to the Parlement, which had come to make remonstrances to him: “You see me in my private office where I come to speak to you not in royal costume, or in cloak and dagger like my predecessors, but dressed like a father, in a doublet, to speak informally with his children. What I have to tell you is that I am asking you to verify the edict that I have granted to those of the Religion.9 What I have done is for the good of the peace. I have done it abroad; I intend to do it within my own kingdom.” After explaining to them the reasons he had for issuing the edict, he added: “Those who prevent my edict from taking effect want war. I will declare war tomorrow on those of the Protestant
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Religion, but I will not wage it. I will send them packing. I have issued the edict; I want it to be observed. My will ought to serve as reason; in an obedient state, such reasons are never demanded of the prince. I am king. I am speaking to you as king. I intend to be obeyed.” (Mém. de Sully, in-4°, p. 594. vol. I)10
There you have the proper way for a monarch to speak to his subjects when it is clear that he has justice on his side. And why couldn’t he do what any man who has equity on his side is able to do? As for the subjects, the first law that religion, reason, and nature impose upon them is for them to respect the conditions of the contract they have made, and never to lose sight of the nature of their government. In France, it means not to forget that so long as the ruling family survives by the male line, nothing will ever exempt them from obeying, honoring, and fearing their master, as the one by whom they have expected the image of God to be present and visible to them on earth.11 Nor are they exempt from being attached to these sentiments by a motive of gratitude for the tranquility and the benefits they enjoy under protection of the royal name. Nor, if they ever happen to have an unjust, ambitious, and violent king, are they exempt from opposing this misfortune by a single means: namely, by appeasing him with their submission and swaying God by their prayers. For this remedy is the only legitimate one, according to the contract of submission formerly sworn to the reigning prince and his descendants through the male line, whoever they may be. And they are to consider that all those motives that are imagined for resisting are on close inspection nothing more than subtly colored pretexts for infidelity; that by this conduct, men have never corrected princes or abolished taxes; that they have merely added a new measure of misery to the misfortunes they were already lamenting. There you have the foundations on which peoples and those who govern them could establish their mutual happiness.]
