Commentary on Filangieri’s Work. Benjamin de Constant
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present Charte2 decides. That in emergencies the constitutional monarch should have the prerogative of declaring war at the right time is a pure formality, provided that the funds necessary to sustain it can be denied to his ministers, and that these ministers are responsible for the declaration which they have suggested to the king.
We already see in this question (and it will be the same for many others) that the solution to the difficulty depends on the establishment of constitutional guaranties. Filangieri only obscures the question by a misplaced epigram. If war is necessary, the government is right to “want to kill the greatest number of men in the shortest possible time.” As soon as war is unnecessary, it is criminal to undertake it. The number of dead and the instruments of destruction are irrelevant.
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CHAPTER THREE
We have not thought about rewarding the intelligent farmer.
INTRODUCTION, P. 1.
Here already we perceive a symptom of Filangieri’s mistaken system with regard to the influence of government protection. As he constantly comes back to it in his work, I am going to take the first opportunity to refute him here. But I must go back to the origin of his mistake, which was that of many enlightened men of the eighteenth century.
When the philosophers of that period began to concern themselves with the chief questions of social organization, they were struck by the evils produced by government’s harmful interference and inept measures. But being novices in this science, they thought that a different use of that same authority would do as much good as its misuse had done harm. They did not recognize that the vice was in government intervention itself, and that rather than asking the government to act differently, one ought to have begged the government not to act at all. Thus you see them call the government to the aid of all the reforms they propose: agriculture, industry, commerce, education, religion, education, morality. They subject them all to the government, on condition that it act according to their views.
The last century counts very few writers who did not succumb to this mistake. Turgot, Mirabeau, and Condorcet in France, Dohm and Mauvillon in Germany, Thomas Paine and Bentham in England, Franklin in America—this is just about the list of those who recognized that, for all kinds of progress as for all kinds of needs, for the prosperity of all classes as for the success of all speculations, for the quantity of production as for its balance, one needs
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to trust to freedom and individual interest. One needs to trust the energy which inspires man to exercise his own faculties, and to the absence of all hindrances to it. The others preferred protection to independence, encouragements to guaranties, advantages to neutrality.
For the most part, the economists themselves made this error.1 However, this was all the more inexcusable since their fundamental principle seems as if it ought to have preserved them from it. Laisser-faire et laisser-passer was their motto, but they applied it to hardly anything except prohibitions. Encouragements seduced them. They did not see that prohibitions and encouragements are but two branches of the same system, and that as long as you accept one, you are threatened by the other.
Of all the professions, agriculture was the one the economists most wanted to raise up from the degraded state into which it had fallen. Their favorite axiom, that land is the sole source of wealth, made them attach extreme importance to the work which made it productive. They became justly and legitimately indignant when they saw the oppression of the class which, in their eyes, was the most indispensable and hardest working. Thus arose their chimerical projects to raise up this class, to give it prestige and even fame.
The idea of giving rewards to the “intelligent farmer who, by his work or by new methods, had found means of increasing the public wealth” is therefore not Filangieri’s at all. He could borrow it from the economists, for example from the marquis de Mirabeau,2 author of L’Ami des hommes, but he seems to have been particularly attached to this idea. He comes back to it, more insistently and in more detail, in another part of his work (bk. 2, chap. 15). Trumping his original proposition, independent of monetary rewards, he wants to create a medal which would be worn by the sovereign himself, and with which the best farmers would be decorated.
If one considers the period when Filangieri proposed these childish and bizarre expedients, one will understand their absurdity. It was a time when the agricultural class was subject to laws and paid taxes which no representative they had chosen discussed or consented to. A time when, without a voice with which to make requests, or means to defend themselves, they submitted
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in silence to these biased laws and unequal taxes. A time when servitudes of all kinds weighed on them, interrupted their work, troubled their rest. A time when, finally, placed on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy, they bore all social burdens without appeal, for all the other classes pushed the burden lower down in order to exempt themselves.
To these misfortunes which were, so to speak, legal, let us add the occasional oppressions which resulted from this agricultural class’s isolation, poverty, and defenseless position. These oppressions derived from the immense distance which separated the agricultural class from the supreme power, and which condemned its groans to vanish in the air; from the insolence of the intermediary powers which cut off its complaints; from the ease of oppressing, with or without the law, men equally ignorant of the laws’ threats or their protections; from the rapacity of the treasury which spared the rich, and which had to compensate itself at the expense of the poor. This arbitrariness was all the more unchecked because it was exercised individually on obscure victims, and spread among a crowd of lesser agents, viziers of the village, pursuing their evil in the shadows. It was in such a situation, and as a remedy for such a situation, that Filangieri proposed encouragements for agriculture and honors for farmers. But agriculture had been struck at the root. The means of reproduction had been taken from it. Farmers were little islets, stripped of all their rights, burdened with all the work, condemned to all manner of privation. Even with good intentions, the government could not heal this incurable wound. Nature is stronger than the government, and nature wills that every cause have its effect, that every tree produce its fruit. All philanthropical projects are chimeras when they are not founded on constitutional freedom. They can serve as a text for the oratorical flights of well-intentioned rhetoricians; they can offer clever ministers the means of occupying their master’s leisure in a new and amusing manner; they can, by fooling that master, assuage his guilt, should the spectacle of public misery create some remorse in him. But neither the agricultural class nor agriculture will profit at all from any of these impotent palliatives.
The situation of the agricultural class will be deplorable everywhere that class does not have, through agents of its own choice, certainty of legal and public redress. The situation of the agricultural class in France was deplorable before the Revolution. I call to witness the taille, the corvée, the militia, the vingtièmes, the head-taxes, the aides, the tithe, the perpetual mortgages, the
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transfer taxes, the alcohol taxes, and all those innumerable burdens, both monetary and personal, whose many and bizarre names would uselessly fill entire pages.3 I attest to the not less numerous exemptions, so scandalously demanded and so easily obtained by the upper classes, as if their duties toward society were in inverse proportion to the advantages which society guarantied them. I attest to the impoverished and badly cultivated lands, bordered by sumptuous parks, and the huts, covered in thatch, which surrounded superb chateaus—silent protests, but which ended up acting only too energetically against such a social order.
Filangieri and the writers who followed him should have immersed themselves in these truths. Instead of dreaming about special encouragements, of vain distinctions tossed from the height of the throne—inevitably at random—and distributed according to the caprices of untrustworthy agents, they should have demanded the guaranties that every country owes the citizen who inhabits it, the guaranties without which all governments