Commentary on Filangieri’s Work. Benjamin de Constant
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to smother the seeds of good, eternalize hatred, and resuscitate suspicion? How did it happen that in France, tools of I don’t know what faction, ambassadors created by themselves, or missionaries of I don’t know what secret power, dared offer criminal help to the ruler they compromised, and pursued a constitutional monarch with insolent and hypocritical pity? Do they not know that it was thus that foreigners caused the fall of the unfortunate Louis XVI? Have they forgotten that their crazy threats, their alleged information, their incendiary pamphlets helped royalty’s more direct but not more dangerous enemies?2 Safely seated far from the theater of agitation and danger, it matters little to them what pits they dig beneath the feet of nations and around thrones.
Enlightened and generous Spaniards, these men have already caused you many hardships. Since 1814 they have perpetually preached to your rulers both the legitimacy of absolute power and the justice of the frightful means necessary to preserve it. Their opinion seemed disinterested. Who can determine the authority it ought to have? Their voice came from afar: one would have thought it impartial, like that of an equitable posterity. Who can know to what degree it has influenced your misfortunes?
Of all your enemies, these men are the most inexcusable, perhaps the only inexcusable ones. Without passion and without immediate interest, they coldly applauded the persecutions, the sufferings, the tortures inflicted by your defenders. Let the victims’ blood fall on them!
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Despite these contemptible and perfidious adversaries, you will peacefully follow your noble path. You know that justice is the basis of freedom, that in order to found a constitutional monarchy one must respect its first principle, the inviolability of the monarch, and that the will of the majority is only legitimate when it does not wound any of the minority’s rights. You also know, by immortal and glorious experience, that your will alone is enough against Europe united. You resisted Bonaparte: heaven will not create a second Bonaparte. Napoleon was not able to defeat Spain, and the generals he defeated will be no more fortunate against Spain than was he before whom they succumbed. If there was one who had success accompanying his flag, it was because he defended a holy cause. Abjuring this cause, he will lose his strength, and Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo will in future be only the witnesses of his shame and his defeats.3
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
If we pass from Spain to France, we will again see a nation which, after having dominated Europe … found … in the ignorance of its legislators the principle of its decline.
BOOK I, CHAPTER 3, P. 56.
With regard to France, Filangieri commits a mistake analogous to that which I have brought to light with respect to his reflections on Spain. Just as he attributed the decline of the latter kingdom to the expulsion of the Moors and to bad commercial laws, so he assigns the cause of the decline of the former to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the encouragements Colbert gave exclusively to industry, without regard for and without concessions to agriculture.
Unquestionably Colbert fell into many errors, and according to my principles concerning the neutrality governments ought to observe in everything which regards industry, commerce, and individual speculation, it would be very surprising if I were to make myself the apologist of this minister formerly so much praised. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was also a great crime and an act of delirium. But Colbert would not have been able to give in wholly to his erroneous theories about the necessity of giving manufacturing a forced and artificial activity, nor would Louis XIV have been able to banish the Protestants from a country they enriched, if France had been safeguarded by a free constitution against the despotism of kings and the fanciful ideas of ministers. Nevertheless, several differences between France and Spain deserve to be noted.
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Intellectual oppression has never weighed on us to the same extent as on our neighbors over the Pyrenees. The French were not completely deprived of all political rights until Richelieu. I already said in the previous chapter that defective institutions which nevertheless invest some powerful classes with certain privileges they are permanently interested in defending possess many disadvantages, yet they also possess the advantage of not letting the whole nation be degraded and bastardized. The beginning of Louis XIV’s reign was disturbed by the Fronde,1 in truth a childish war, but one which was the remnant of a spirit of resistance accustomed to action, and still acting almost without purpose. Despotism greatly increased around the end of that reign. Opposition still continued, however, taking refuge in religious quarrels, sometimes the Calvinists against the Catholics, sometimes the Catholics among themselves. The death of Louis XIV was the beginning of the relaxation of authority. Freedom of opinion gained ground daily.
I do not mean to say that that freedom was used in the most decent and most useful way. I mean to say only that it was exercised, and that as a result one cannot list the French of any period, down to the revolution of 1789, among the peoples condemned to complete subjection and moral lethargy. However, it is certain that when Filangieri wrote, France had fallen from its rank and forfeited its power, and that its national character had changed. But where did this decline, this change, this decadence come from?
It is easy and convenient to attribute general effects to partial causes. Freedom’s enemies amuse themselves greatly with this way of resolving problems because every time we go back to principles, the necessity of freedom suddenly appears, while if we take a given detail, a given individual, a given accident for the solution of the problem, freedom is not significant. Some will tell you that France’s weakness in the last century was because of the unsuccessful wars in which Louis XIV engaged around the end of the preceding century. Others will blame this weakness on the corruption the Regency introduced to all classes, and the weak resistance to the progress of this corruption by Louis XIV’s successors, who were voluptuous, lazy, or weak and showed themselves incapable of fully exercising royal authority.
As for the corruption for which Louis XIV’s successors are accused of
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providing the example and favoring and tolerating the progress, it was the necessary consequence of the moral oppression which Louis XIV in his senility exercised over a nation already too enlightened to bear it: the reaction was proportionate to the action. This reaction was beginning even before Louis XIV’s death. Memoirs of the time tell us of intercepted letters, “equally offensive to God and the King.”2 These letters were written by courtiers who lived under his strict authority. But the old ruler weighed on his old court, which itself imposed fraud and dissimulation on the rising generation. With the death of the king, the torrent to which his despotism had opposed dikes breached them all. By breadth and boldness, reason compensated itself for the constraints to which it had impatiently submitted. One can affirm, and this ought to be an instructive lesson for those who govern, that every time lies have ruled, the truth has avenged itself with interest. Hardly had Louis XIV disappeared than the Regency appeared. Mme de Prie replaced Mme de Maintenon, and depravity sat down on hypocrisy’s tomb.
Conversely, give France a free constitution. A monarch’s superstition will be without influence on a people with the right not to ape its master’s opinion. There will be no reaction toward license, because there will not have been pressure for false zeal and bigotry.
One can say as much of the weakness of the rulers who followed Louis XIV. The lax mores of Louis XV and Louis XVI’s indecision would have been matters of very little importance in England, because the king’s personal character means nothing in a constitutional government. I will go further. It is fortunate that Louis XIV’s successors had lax morals and were weak, for this caused the difference I have noted between France and Spain, which is all to the advantage of the former. If Louis XIV had, like Charles V, been succeeded by a severe, easily offended ruler, competent enough to oppress the nation without causing an uprising, it is probable that France would have fallen into stupor and apathy. In this respect perhaps we ought to congratulate ourselves on the orgies of the Regency and the immorality of