Joseph de Maistre

“ They know not what they are, nor what they can do. An invincible pride bears them on continually to overthrow every thing which they have not made; and in order to work out new creations, they separate themselves from the source of all existence. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has, however, very well said, Little, vain man, show me thy power, and I will show thee thy weakness. It might be said, with as much truth and more profit, Little, vain man, confess to me thy weakness, and I will show thee thy strength. Indeed, as soon as man has acknowledged his nothingness, he has taken a great step ”

“ If it were otherwise, it would follow, that the sovereign could not reign legitimately, except by virtue of a deliberation of all the people, that is to say, by the grace of the people; which will never happen: for there is nothing so true, as that which was said by the author of the Considérations on France,—that the people will always accept their masters, and will never choose them. It is necessary that the origin of sovereignty should manifest itself from beyond the sphere of human power; so that men, who may appear to have a direct hand in it, may be, nevertheless, only the circumstances. ”

“ It is lamentable to see excellent minds taking such immense pains, to prove by infancy that manhood is an abuse; whilst any institution whatever, adult at birth, would be the grossest of absurdities, a true logical contradiction. If the enlightened and generous enemies of this power (and there are undoubtedly many of this class) will examine the question in this point of view, as I affectionately pray them to do, I do not doubt that all these objections, drawn from antiquity, will disappear as a light mist from before their eyes. ”

“ It is but just, however, to acknowledge, that in whatever the nation was indebted merely to its own good sense, there were many things which excite our admiration at this day. Every qualification was, doubtless, united on the head of the wise and august person called to take the reins of government; the chief men interested in maintaining the ancient laws, voluntarily made a noble sacrifice to the public; and in order to fortify the supreme authority, they lent themselves to change an epithet of the sovereignty.—Alas! all human wisdom was at fault, and all ended in death. ”

“ Is there any Turkish law which expressly permits the sovereign to pass sentence of death upon a man immediately, without the decision of an intermediate tribunal? Are we acquainted with any written law, even religious, which prohibits the sovereigns of Christian Europe from doing this? [19] Yet the Turk is no more surprised at seeing his master pass sentence of immediate death upon a man, than at seeing him go to the Mosque. He believes with all Asia, and even with all antiquity, that the right to inflict death immediately, is a legitimate appendage of the sovereignty. ”

“ Do you wish that God should send angels under human guises commissioned to destroy a constitution? It will always be necessary to employ second causes; this or that, what does it signify? Every instrument is good in the hands of the great Artificer; but such is the blindness of men, that if, tomorrow, some constitution-monger should come to organize a people, and to give them a constitution made with a little black liquid, the multitude would again hasten to believe in the miracle announced. ”

“ There is nothing good, that evil does not sully or alter; there is no evil, that goodness does not repress and attack, by impelling continually all existence towards a more perfect state. These two forces are every where present: we behold them equally in the vegetation of plants, in the generation of animals, in the formation of languages, and of empires, (two things inseparable,) etc. Human power extends only perhaps to removing or combatting the evil, in order to disengage the good, and restore to it the power of developing itself according to its nature. ”

“ They show, on the contrary, that scripture is invariably a sign of weakness, ignorance, or danger; that in proportion as an institution is perfect, it writes less; so that what is truly divine, has nothing at all written for its establishment; in order to make us feel that all written law is only a necessary evil, engendered by infirmity or human malice; and that it is of no authority whatever, unless it has received a previous, unwritten sanction. ”

“ A time will come, when the Popes, against whom the most clamour has been made, such as Gregory VII, for example, will be regarded, in every country, as the friends, guardians, and saviours of the human race,—as the true constitutive genuises of Europe. ”

“ XXXV It is they, however, it is the missionaries, who have accomplished this wonder, so much above human power, or even the human will. They, alone, have traversed the vast continent of America, from one extremity to the other, in order to create there men. They, alone, have done what the civil power had not even dared to imagine. But nothing of this kind equals the missions of Paraguay: it is there we have seen, in a manner the most marked, the authority and exclusive power of religion for the civilization of man. ”

“ The more it is penetrated with the Divine principle, the more durable it will be. How strange is the blindness of men in our age! They boast of their knowledge, and are ignorant of everything, since they are ignorant of themselves. ”

“ XLV Such is the natural picture of most reforms; for, not only creation belongs not to man, hut reformation even, belongs to him only in a secondary way, and with a multitude of terrible restrictions. Starting from these incontrovertible principles, each man can judge of the institutions of his country with a perfect certainty; he can especially appreciate all those Creators, those Lawgivers, those Restorers of nations, so dear to the eighteenth century, and whom posterity will regard with pity, perhaps even with horror. Card castles have been built in Europe and out of Europe. ”

“ XXXII The most famous nations of antiquity, especially the most serious and wise, such as the Egyptians, Etruscans, Lacedaemonians, and Romans, had precisely the most religious constitutions; and the duration of empires has always been proportioned to the degree of influence which the religious principle had acquired in the political constitution : the cities and nations most addicted to Divine worship, have always been the most durable, and the most wise; as the most religious ages have also ever been most distinguished for genius. ”

“ The more is written, the weaker the constitution. [The reason is obvious. Laws are only declarations of rights, and rights are only declared when they are attacked; so that the multiplicity of written constitutional laws, only evinces the number of shocks and the dangers of destruction. The most vigorous and flourishing institution of profane antiquity was that of Lacedæmon, where nothing was written.] No nation can give liberty to itself, if it has it not. [4] [When a nation begins to reflect upon itself, its laws are already made.] ”

“ I have seen a great lover of the republic seriously lamenting that Frenchmen had not discovered in the works of Hume, the piece entitled, Plan of a perfect Republic.—O cæcas hominum mentes! If you see an ordinary man who may have good sense, but who may have never given, in any way, any outward sign of superiority, you cannot for all this be assured that he could not be a lawgiver. There is no reason for saying yes or no; but if the question be of Bacon, of Locke, of Montesquieu, etc., say no, without hesitation; for the talent that he has, proves that he has not the other. ”

“ The eighteenth century, which distrusted itself in nothing, as a matter of course, hesitated at nothing; and I do not believe that it has produced a single tyro of any talent, who has not made three things on leaving college,—a system of education for youth, a Constitution, and a World. If, then, a man in the maturity of his age and talent, profoundly versed in economical science and in the philosophy of the time, had attempted only the second of these things, I should then have regarded him as exceedingly moderate ”

“ He has believed, that it was himself who invented languages; while, again, it belongs to him only to see that every human language is learned and never invented, and that no imaginable hypothesis, within the circle of human power, can explain, with the least appearance of probability, either the formation or the diversity of languages. He has believed that he could constitute nations; that is to say, in other terms, that he could create that national unity, by virtue of which one nation is not another. ”

“ He has believed,—he who has not the power of producing a single insect or a sprig of moss,—“that he was the immediate author of Sovereignty, the most important, the most sacred, the most fundamental thing in the moral and political world; and that such a family, for example, reigns, because such a people wills it; while there are numerous and incontestable proofs, that every sovereign family reigns because it is chosen by a superior power. ”

“ Let no one, then, permit himself to be dazzled by the most splendid human appearances. Who has ever concentrated in himself more of them than the extraordinary personage whose fall still resounds throughout Europe? Has there ever been a sovereignty outwardly so well fortified, a greater consolidation of means, a man more powerful, more active, more formidable? ”

“ I say, “a rich magistracy, irremovable and independent; so that the infinite power playing in the world * makes use of corruption for creating incorruptible tribunals” (as far as human weakness permits) . There is nothing, indeed, so plausible to the eye of a true philosopher; nothing more conformable to great analogies, and to that incontestable law, which wills that the most important institutions should be the result not of deliberation, but of circumstances. ”

“ Preface Political Science, which is, perhaps, the most thorny of all sciences, by reason of the difficulty perpetually arising, of discerning what is stable or changeable in its elements, presents a very strange phenomenon, well calculated to make every wise man, called to the administration of states, to tremble; it is this, that whatever good sense perceives, at first view, in this science, as an evident truth, is almost always found, when experience has spoken, not only false, but pernicious. ”

“ Let us suppose, in effect, that a law of so much importance existed only because it was written; it is certain that any authority whatsoever which may have written it, will have the right of annulling it; the law will not then have that character of sacredness and immutability which distinguishes laws truly constitutional. The essence of a fundamental law, is, that no one has the right to abolish it: now, how can it be above all, if any one has made it? The agreement of the people is impossible ”

“ We must not wonder, he says, if the most beautiful and greatest things in the world are done by the will and providence of God; seeing that in all the greatest and principal parts of the world there is a soul: for the organ and tool of the soul is the body, and the soul is the instrument of God. And as the body has of itself many movements, and as the greater and more noble are derived from the soul, even so it is with the soul ”

“ If the basis is purely human, the edifice cannot stand; and the more men there shall be, who engage in it, the more deliberation, learning, and writing especially, they shall have employed about it, in fine, the more human means, of every kind, the more frail will the institution be. It is principally by this rule, that we must judge of whatever has been attempted by sovereigns or assemblies of men, for the civilization, institution or regeneration of nations.
LVIII On the contrary, the more divine the institution is in its basis, the more durable it will be. ”

“ Thus, this legislation lies evidently, for every intelligent conscience, beyond the circle traced around human power; and this magnificent exception to a general law, which has only yielded once, and yielded only to its Author, alone demonstrates the Divine mission of the great Hebrew Lawgiver, much better than the entire work of that English Prelate, who, with the strongest powers of mind, and an immense erudition, has nevertheless had the misfortune to support a great truth by a miserable fallacy. ”

“ When the National Assembly, which had been elected according to the rules prescribed by that Constitution, the new legislature showed so little attention to formalities, and so much less regard for a constitution which they themselves had not framed, and which was not protected by the venerable sanction of antiquity, that it had been hardly a year in existence, before, by its own acts, it had become necessary for it to invite the nation, to elect a National Convention to determine the nature of its future government. ”

“ On the contrary; one of the most general and evident laws of this power, at once secret and striking, which acts and makes itself to be felt on every side, is, that the remedy of an abuse springs from an abuse, and that the evil, having reached a certain point, destroys itself, as it ought to do; for evil, which is only a negation, has, for measure of dimension and duration, that of the being to which it is joined, and which it destroys. It exists as an ulcer, which can only terminate in self-destruction. But then a new reality will necessarily occupy the place of that which has disappeared ”

“ There never has existed a free nation which had not, in its natural constitution, germs of liberty as old as itself; and no nation has ever successfully attempted to develope, by its fundamental written laws, other rights than those which existed in its natural constitution. No assembly of men can give existence to a nation. ”

“ When Providence has decreed the more rapid formation of a political constitution, there appears a man clothed with an indefinable power; he speaks, and he makes himself to be obeyed. These lawgivers par excellence possess one distinctive characteristic: they are kings, or eminently noble; in this point, there is and can be no exception. It was on this account that the institution of Solon, the most frail of antiquity, failed. ”