6. What Remains to Be Done: Development of Some Principles

The time is past when the three orders, thinking only of defending themselves against ministerial despotism, were ready to unite against the common enemy. Although it is impossible for the nation to turn the present circumstances to any useful account, to take a single step towards social order, without the Third Estate also gathering the fruits of it, the pride of the first two orders has nonetheless been provoked at seeing the great municipalities of the kingdom claim the smallest part of the political rights that belong to the people. What, then, did they want, these privileged men so ardent in defending their superfluity, so quick to prevent the Third Estate from obtaining the barest necessities in this respect? Did they mean that the regeneration on which we pride ourselves should be for them alone? And did they want to use the people, ever unhappy, only as a blind instrument for extending and consecrating their aristocracy?

What will future generations say on learning of the kind of fury with which the second order of the state, and the first order of the clergy, have pursued all the demands of the towns? Will they be able to believe in the secret and public leagues, the feigned alarms and the perfidy of the manoeuvres in which the defenders of the people were enveloped? Nothing will be forgotten in the faithful accounts that patriotic writers are preparing for posterity. They will make known the noble conduct of the magnates of France in circumstances so fitted, nevertheless, to inspire some feelings of patriotism even in the men most absorbed in their egoism. How could princes of the reigning house bring themselves to take sides in a quarrel between the orders of the state? How could they let contemptible hacks spew out the calumnies, as atrocious as they are ridiculous, that fill the incredible memorandum published under their name?

Complaints are made of the violence of some writers of the Third Estate. What is the way of thinking of an isolated individual? Nothing. The true acts of the Third Estate, the authentic ones, are confined to the petitions of the municipalities and of part of the pays d’états. Let them be compared with the equally authentic act of the princes against the people, who took good care not to attack them. What modesty, what moderation in the former! What violence, what profound iniquity in the latter!

In vain would the Third Estate expect from the concurrence of the orders the restitution of its political rights and the fullness of its civil rights; the fear of seeing abuses reformed inspires more alarm in the aristocrats than they feel desire for liberty. Between liberty and a few odious privileges they have chosen the latter. The soul of the privileged has become identified with the favours of servitude. Today they dread those Estates-General which they invoked so eagerly not long ago. All is well for them; they no longer complain of anything but the spirit of innovation; they lack nothing any more; fear has given them a constitution.

The Third Estate must perceive, from the movement of minds and of affairs, that it can no longer hope for anything except from its own enlightenment and its own courage. Reason and justice are on its side; it must at least secure their full strength for itself. No, it is no longer time to work for the reconciliation of the parties. What agreement can be hoped for between the energy of the oppressed and the rage of the oppressors? They have dared to utter the word secession. They have threatened the King and the people with it. Ah, great God! how happy it would be for the nation if it were accomplished for ever, this so desirable secession! How easy it would be to do without the privileged! How difficult it will be to bring them to be citizens!

The aristocrats who attacked first did not consider that they were committing the greatest blunder in causing certain questions to be raised. Among a people accustomed to servitude, truths may be left asleep; but if you arouse attention, if you call on people to choose between them and error, the mind attaches itself to truth as healthy eyes turn naturally towards the light. Now light, in morals, cannot spread to a certain point without leading to equity, willingly or by force; this is because in morals truths are bound up with rights; because knowledge of rights awakens the feeling of them; because the feeling of one’s rights winds up again, in the depths of the soul, the spring of liberty, which is never wholly broken among Europeans. One would have to be blind not to perceive that our nation has happily seized on some of those fruitful principles that lead to everything good, just and useful. It is no longer possible either to forget them or to contemplate them with sterile indifference. In this new state of things it is natural that the oppressed classes should feel more keenly the need for a return to good order; they have more interest in recalling among men justice, that first of the virtues, so long exiled from the earth. It is therefore for the Third Estate to make the greatest efforts, and almost all the advances, towards national restoration. It must, moreover, be warned that if it does not succeed in becoming better off, there is no question of its at least remaining as it was. Circumstances do not permit that cowardly calculation. It is a question of going forward or going back. If you do not want to proscribe this host of iniquitous and anti-social privileges, then make up your minds to recognise and legitimise them. Now the blood boils at the mere idea that it might be possible to consecrate legally, at the end of the eighteenth century, the abominable fruits of abominable feudalism. There was a time — alas, a very long one! — when the impotence of the Third Estate earned its sad condition the sympathy and the tears of patriots. But if it were itself to weave its own misfortune; if, at the moment when it can do something, it voluntarily devoted itself to abjection and opprobrium, with what feelings, with what names should it be branded? The weak were pitied; the coward would have to be despised. Let us put aside the image of the last degree of misfortune, which is certainly impossible, since it would suppose in twenty-five million men the last degree of baseness.

While the aristocrats talk of their honour and watch over their interest, the Third Estate, that is to say the nation, will develop its virtue; for if corporate interest is egoism, the national interest is virtue. The nobles will be left to feed their dying vanity on the pleasure of insulting the Third Estate with the most insolent terms of the feudal language. They will repeat the words commoners, churls, villeins, forgetting that these expressions, whatever meaning one wishes to give them, are today either foreign to the Third Estate or common to all three orders; forgetting too that when they were accurate, ninety-nine hundredths of the nobles were unquestionably commoners, churls and villeins, and the rest necessarily brigands. In vain would the privileged close their eyes to the revolution that time and the force of things have brought about; it is none the less real. Formerly the Third Estate was serf, and the noble order was everything. Today the Third Estate is everything, and nobility is a word; but under this word a new and intolerable aristocracy has slipped in illegally, through the sole influence of a false opinion; and the people has every reason not to want aristocrats.

In this state of things, what remains for the Third Estate to do if it wishes to take possession of its political rights in a manner useful to the nation? Two means present themselves for reaching that end.

Following the first, the Third Estate must assemble apart; it will not join with the nobility and the clergy; it will vote with them neither by order nor by heads. I beg attention to the enormous difference between the assembly of the Third Estate and those of the other two orders. The first represents twenty-five million men, and deliberates on the interests of the nation. The other two, even were they to unite, have powers only from about two hundred thousand individuals, and think only of their privileges. The Third Estate alone, it will be said, cannot form the Estates-General. Well, so much the better! It will form a National Assembly. Advice of this importance needs to be justified by everything clearest and most certain that sound principles offer.

I say that the deputies of the clergy and the nobility have nothing in common with the national representation; that no alliance is possible between the three orders in the Estates-General; and that, being unable to vote in common, they can do so neither by orders nor by heads. At the end of the third chapter we promised to prove this truth here, which sound minds should hasten to spread among the public.

There is no greater defect, says a maxim of universal law, than defect of power. As is well known, the nobility is not deputed by the clergy and the Third Estate. The clergy does not hold the mandate of the nobles and the Commons. Therefore each order is a distinct nation, no more competent to meddle in the affairs of the other orders than the States-General of Holland or the Council of Venice, for example, are qualified to vote in the deliberations of the Parliament of England. An attorney can bind only his principals; a representative has the right to speak only for those he represents. If this truth is disregarded, all principles must be annihilated, and one must give up reasoning.

It can be seen from this that it is, by right, perfectly useless to look for the ratio or proportion in which each order should contribute to forming the general will. This will cannot be one so long as you keep three orders and three representations. At most, these three assemblies might unite in the same wish, as three allied nations may form the same desire. But you will never make of them one nation, one representation and one common will.

I am aware that these truths, certain as they are, become awkward in a state that was not formed under the auspices of reason and of political equity. What would you have? Your house stands only by artifice, with the help of a forest of shapeless props placed without taste or design, except that of shoring up the parts as they threatened to collapse; it must be rebuilt, or else you must resign yourselves to living, as the saying goes, from day to day, in discomfort and in fear of being crushed in the end beneath its ruins. Everything holds together in the social order. If you neglect one part, it will not be with impunity for the others. If you begin with disorder, you will necessarily feel it in its consequences. This chain is necessary. Ah! if the same fruits could be drawn from injustice and absurdity as from reason and equity, where would be the advantages of the latter?

You exclaim that if the Third Estate assembles separately to form, not the three estates called General, but the National Assembly, it will be no more competent to vote for the clergy and the nobility than these two orders are to deliberate for the people. First, I beg you to note, as we have just said, that the representatives of the Third Estate will incontestably hold the mandate of the twenty-five or twenty-six million individuals who make up the nation, with the exception of some two hundred thousand nobles or priests. That is quite enough for them to assume the title of National Assembly. They will therefore deliberate without any difficulty for the whole nation, with the exception only of two hundred thousand heads.

On this temporary supposition, the clergy could continue to hold its assemblies for the free gift, and the nobility would adopt some means or other of offering its subsidy to the King; and so that the arrangements peculiar to these two orders could never become burdensome to the Third Estate, the latter would begin by declaring firmly that it does not intend to pay any tax that is not borne by the other two orders. It would vote the subsidy only on this condition; and even when the tribute had been fixed, it would not be levied on the people if it were found that the clergy and the nobility were exempting themselves from it on any pretext whatever.

This arrangement would perhaps be, despite appearances, as good as any other for bringing the nation back little by little to social unity. But at least it would remedy at once the danger that threatens this country. How, indeed, could the people not be seized with terror at seeing two privileged bodies, and perhaps a third of mixed composition, prepare, under the name of Estates-General, to decide its fate, and to impose on it a destiny as unchangeable as it would be unhappy? It is only just to dispel the alarms of twenty-five million men; and when one goes so far as to talk of a constitution, one must prove by one’s principles and one’s conduct that one knows and respects its first elements.

It is certain that the deputies of the clergy and the nobility are not representatives of the nation; they are therefore incompetent to vote for it.

If you let them deliberate on matters of general interest, what will result? 1. If votes are taken by orders, it will follow that twenty-five million citizens can decide nothing for the general interest because it does not please a hundred or two hundred thousand privileged individuals; or, in other words, that the wills of more than a hundred persons will be placed under interdict and annihilated by the will of a single one.

2. If votes are taken by heads, with equal numbers between the privileged and the non-privileged, it will still follow that the wills of two hundred thousand persons can balance those of twenty-five million, since they will have an equal number of representatives. Now is it not monstrous to compose an assembly in such a way that it can vote in the interest of the minority? Is that not an assembly turned upside down?

We have demonstrated in the preceding chapter the necessity of recognising the common will only in the opinion of the majority. This maxim is incontestable. It follows that in France the representatives of the Third Estate are the true depositaries of the national will. They can therefore, without error, speak in the name of the whole nation. For, even supposing the privileged always unanimous against the voice of the Third Estate, they would still be incapable of balancing the majority in the deliberations of that order. Each deputy of the Third Estate, according to the number fixed, votes in place of about fifty thousand persons; so it would be enough to rule that the majority should be five votes above half in the Chamber of Commons for the unanimous voices of the two hundred thousand nobles or priests to be outweighed by those five votes, and thus to be regarded as of no consequence to know; and note that on this supposition I forget for a moment that the deputies of the first two orders are not representatives of the nation, and I am willing to admit, moreover, that, sitting in the true National Assembly with only the influence that belongs to them, they would vote unceasingly against the wish of the majority. Even then, it is plain that their opinion would be lost in the minority.

That is more than enough to demonstrate the obligation that will lie on the Third Estate to form a national assembly by itself alone, and to justify, before reason and equity, the claim this order might make to deliberate and vote for the whole nation without any exception. I know that such principles will not be to the taste even of those members of the Third Estate most able in defending its interests. So be it, provided it is granted that I have started from true principles, and that I advance only with the support of sound logic. Let us add that the Third Estate, in separating itself from the first two orders, cannot be accused of making a secession; that imprudent expression, and the meaning it contains, must be left to those who first used it. For the majority does not separate itself from the whole; that would be a contradiction in terms, since it would have to separate itself from itself. It belongs only to the minority to refuse to submit to the wish of the greater number, and consequently to make a secession.

However, our intention in showing the Third Estate the full extent of its resources, or rather of its rights, is not to urge it to use them in all their rigour.

I announced above two means for the Third Estate to take possession of the place due to it in the political order. If the first, which I have just presented, seems a little too abrupt; if it is judged that the public must be given time to grow accustomed to liberty; if it is thought that national rights, however evident they may be, still need, as soon as they are disputed even by the smallest number, a sort of legal judgement to fix them, so to speak, and consecrate them by a final sanction — I am willing: let us appeal to the tribunal of the nation, the only competent judge in all disputes touching the constitution. Such is the second means open to the Third Estate.

Here we need to recall everything said in the preceding chapter, both on the need to constitute the body of ordinary representatives and on the need to entrust this great work only to an extraordinary deputation having a special power ad hoc.

It will not be denied that the chamber of the Third Estate in the coming Estates-General is fully competent to convoke the kingdom in extraordinary representation. It is therefore for it, above all, to warn the generality of citizens of the false constitution of France. It is for it to complain loudly that Estates-General composed of several orders can only be an ill-organised body, incapable of fulfilling its national functions; it is for it, at the same time, to demonstrate the necessity of giving an extraordinary deputation a special power to settle, by definite laws, the constitutive forms of its legislature.

Until then the order of the Third Estate will suspend, not its preparatory work, but the exercise of its power; it will decide nothing definitively; it will wait for the nation to judge the great lawsuit that divides the three orders. Such, I admit, is the frankest, the most generous course, and consequently the one most befitting the dignity of the Third Estate.

The Third Estate can therefore regard itself in two lights. In the first, it regards itself only as an order; it is then willing not to shake off entirely the prejudices of the old barbarism; it recognises two other orders in the state, without however attributing to them any influence but that which can be reconciled with the nature of things; and it shows them every possible consideration by consenting to doubt its own rights until the decision of the supreme judge.

In the second light, it is the nation. In this capacity its representatives form the whole National Assembly; they hold all its powers. Since they alone are the depositaries of the general will, they have no need to consult their constituents about a dissension that does not exist. If they have to ask for a constitution, it is by common accord; they are always ready to submit to the laws it pleases the nation to give them; but they have no need to call on it about any of the questions that have arisen from the plurality of orders. For them there is only one order, that is to say there is none, since for the nation there can only be the nation.

The sending of an extraordinary deputation, or at least the grant of a new special power, as explained above, to settle before anything else the great business of the constitution, is therefore the true means of putting an end to the present dissension and to possible troubles in the nation. Even if there were nothing to fear from such troubles, it would still be a necessary measure to take, because, quiet or not, we cannot do without knowing our political rights and putting ourselves in possession of them. This necessity will seem still more pressing if we consider that political rights are the only guarantee of civil rights and of individual liberty. I invite the reader to reflect on this proposition.

I should end my memoir on the Third Estate here if I had undertaken only to offer means of conduct…. But I have also set out to develop principles. Let me therefore be permitted to follow the interests of the Third Estate into the public debate that may arise over the true composition of a national assembly. Will the extraordinary representatives, in fixing the legislative constitution, have regard to the odious and impolitic distinction of orders? It is not of business or of power that I am going to speak, but of the laws that must determine the personal composition of the deputations. Will they include, besides citizens, priests and nobles in some capacity other than that of citizen; and, above all, will they be allowed to exercise separate and superior rights in this respect? Great questions, of which at least the true principles must be set out.

Let us first apply ourselves to understanding clearly what is the object or aim of the representative assembly of a nation; this object cannot be different from the one the nation itself would propose if it could assemble and confer in one place.

What is the will of a nation? It is the result of individual wills, as the nation is the assemblage of individuals. It is impossible to conceive a legitimate association that does not have as its object common security, common liberty, in short the commonwealth. No doubt each individual also proposes particular ends of his own; he says to himself: “Under the shelter of the common security I shall pursue my personal projects in peace; I shall seek my happiness as I understand it, assured of meeting no legal limits to my desires except those that society will prescribe for me in the common interest, in which I have a share, and with which my particular interest has made so useful an alliance.”

But can one conceive that there could be in the general assembly a member mad enough to dare to use this language: “You are gathered here, not to deliberate on our common affairs, but to occupy yourselves with mine in particular, and with those of a little clique I have formed with some of you”?

To say that associates assemble to regulate the matters that concern them in common is to explain the only motive that could have led the members to enter the association; it is to state one of those first truths so simple that one weakens them by trying to prove them. Here, then, is the object of the assembly: common affairs.

Now it is of interest to explain how all the members of a national assembly are going to contribute, by their individual wills, to forming that common will which must aim only at the public interest.

Let us first present this play, or this political mechanism, on the most favourable supposition: that would be one in which public spirit, at its greatest strength, allowed only the activity of the common interest to show itself in the assembly. Such prodigies have been rare on earth, and none has lasted long. It would be to know men very badly to tie the destiny of societies to efforts of virtue. Even in the decline of public morals, when egoism seems to govern every soul, it is necessary, I say, that even in these long intervals the assembly of a nation be so constituted that particular interests remain isolated there, and that the wish of the majority always conforms to the general good. This effect is assured if the constitution is tolerable.

Let us note three kinds of interest in the hearts of men: 1. that by which citizens resemble one another; it presents the exact extent of the common interest; 2. that by which an individual allies himself with a few others only; this is corporate interest; and finally, 3. that by which each one isolates himself, thinking only of himself; this is personal interest.

The interest by which a man agrees with all his fellow associates is evidently the object of the will of all, and that of the common assembly.

Each voter may bring his two other interests to the assembly; so be it. But first, personal interest is not to be feared; it is isolated. Each has his own. Its diversity is its true remedy.

The great difficulty, then, comes from the interest by which a citizen agrees with a few others only. This allows them to concert together, to league; through it are hatched projects dangerous to the community; through it are formed the most formidable public enemies. History is full of this sad truth.

Let no one be surprised, then, if the social order requires so rigorously that simple citizens not be allowed to arrange themselves into corporations; if it even requires that the mandatories of public power, who alone, by the necessity of things, must form real bodies, should renounce, for as long as their employment lasts, being elected to the legislative representation.

Thus, and not otherwise, is the common interest assured of dominating particular interests.

On these conditions alone can we account for the possibility of founding human associations on the general advantage of the associates, and consequently explain to ourselves the legitimacy of political societies.

Thus, and not otherwise, do we arrive at the solution of our problem, and understand how, in a national assembly, particular interests must remain isolated, and the wish of the majority must always conform to the general good.

In meditating on these principles, one feels forcibly the need to constitute the representative assembly on a plan that does not allow it to form a corporate spirit and degenerate into aristocracy. Hence these fundamental maxims, sufficiently developed elsewhere: that the body of representatives should be renewed by a third every year; that deputies whose term is ending should not be eligible again until after an interval sufficient to give the greatest possible number of citizens the opportunity of taking part in the commonwealth, which would no longer be one if it could be regarded as the property of a certain number of families, etc., etc.

But when, instead of paying homage to these first notions, to these principles so clear and so certain, the legislator himself on the contrary creates corporations in the state, acknowledges all those that form, consecrates them by his power; when, finally, he dares to call the greatest, the most privileged and consequently the most baneful of them to form part of the national representation under the name of orders, one seems to see the evil principle striving to spoil everything, to ruin everything, to overturn everything among men. To crown and consolidate the social disorder, it only remained to give these terrible guilds a real preponderance over the great body of the nation; and that is what the legislator might be accused of having done in France, if it were not more natural to impute most of the evils that afflict this superb kingdom to the blind course of events, or to the ignorance and ferocity of our forerunners.

We know the true object of a national assembly; it is not made to occupy itself with the private affairs of citizens; it considers them only in the mass, and from the point of view of the common interest. Let us draw from this the natural consequence that the right to be represented belongs to citizens only because of the qualities they have in common, and not because of those that differentiate them.

The advantages by which citizens differ lie beyond the character of citizen. Inequalities of property and of industry are like inequalities of age, sex, height, colour, etc. They in no way alter civic equality; the rights of citizenship cannot attach to differences. No doubt these particular advantages are under the safeguard of the law; but it is not for the legislator to create any of this kind, to give privileges to some and refuse them to others. The law grants nothing; it protects what is, until the moment when what is begins to harm the common interest. There alone are placed the limits of individual liberty. I picture the law at the centre of an immense globe; all citizens without exception are at the same distance from it on the circumference, and occupy only equal places there; all depend equally on the law, all offer it their liberty and their property to protect; and that is what I call the common rights of citizens, by which they all resemble one another. All these individuals have dealings with one another, they negotiate, they enter into engagements with one another, always under the common guarantee of the law. If in this general movement someone wishes to dominate his neighbour’s person or usurp his property, the common law represses the attempt; but it does not prevent each person, according to his natural and acquired faculties and according to more or less favourable chances, from swelling his property with all that prosperous fortune or more fruitful labour can add to it, and from being able, without overflowing his legal place, to raise himself, or to compose for himself in his private sphere, the happiness most in keeping with his tastes and most worthy of envy. The law, in protecting the common rights of every citizen, protects each citizen in all that he can be, up to the moment when his attempts would injure the rights of others.

Perhaps I keep returning a little too much to the same ideas; but I do not have the time to reduce them to their most perfect simplicity; and besides, when one is presenting notions that are too much misunderstood, it is not good to be too concise.

The interests by which citizens resemble one another are therefore the only ones they can treat in common, the only ones by which, and in the name of which, they can claim political rights, that is to say an active part in the formation of the social law; the only ones, consequently, that impress on the citizen the representable quality.

It is not, then, because one is privileged, but because one is a citizen, that one has the right to elect deputies and to be eligible. Everything that belongs to citizens, I repeat — common advantages, particular advantages, provided the latter do not injure the law — has a right to protection; but since the social union could be made only through points held in common, only the common quality has a right to legislation. It follows that corporate interest, far from having influence in the legislature, can only put it on its guard; it will always be as opposed to the object, as it is foreign to the mission, of a body of representatives.

These principles become more rigorous still when it is a question of the privileged orders. By a privileged man I mean any man who departs from the common right, either because he claims not to be subject in everything to the common law, or because he claims exclusive rights. We have proved sufficiently elsewhere that every privilege is by its nature unjust, odious and contrary to the social pact. A privileged class is to the nation what particular advantages are to the citizen; like them, it is not representable. I have not said enough: a privileged class is to the nation what harmful particular advantages are to the citizen; the legislator does his duty in suppressing them. This parallel presents one last difference: that a particular advantage harmful to others is at least useful to the one who possesses it, whereas a privileged class is a scourge for the nation that endures it; so that, to arrive at an exact comparison, one is forced to regard the privileged class in a nation as one would regard, on the body of an unhappy man, a dreadful disease devouring his living flesh. Cover it, as you need to, with all the honorific distinctions you can think of.

A privileged class is therefore harmful not only through its corporate spirit, but through its very existence. The more it has obtained of those favours necessarily contrary to common liberty, the more essential it is to keep it away from the National Assembly. The privileged man would be representable only by his quality of citizen; but in him this quality is destroyed; he is outside citizenship; he is the enemy of the common rights. To give him a right to representation would be a manifest contradiction in the law; the nation could have submitted to it only by an act of servitude; and that is something one cannot suppose.

When we proved that the mandatory of the active power must be neither elector nor eligible for the legislative representation, we did not for that reason cease to regard him as a true citizen; he is one, like all the others, by his individual rights; and the necessary and honourable functions that distinguish him, far from destroying citizenship in him or offending it in others, are on the contrary established to serve its rights. If it is nonetheless necessary to suspend the exercise of his political rights, what must be done with those who, despising the common rights, have made themselves rights of a kind to which the nation is a stranger — with those men whose very existence is a continual hostility against the great body of the people? Certainly these have renounced the character of citizen, and they must be excluded from the rights of electors and of eligibility even more surely than you would keep out a foreigner, whose avowed interest, at least, might well not be opposed to your own.

To sum up: it is a principle that whatever departs from the common quality of citizen cannot share in political rights. The legislature of a people can be charged only with providing for the general interest. But if, instead of a simple distinction almost indifferent to the law, there exist privileged persons who are enemies of the common order by their very condition, they must be positively excluded. They can be neither electors nor eligible so long as their odious privileges last.

I know that such principles will seem extravagant to most readers. Truth must seem as strange to prejudice as prejudice can seem to truth. Everything is relative. Let my principles be certain, let my conclusions be well drawn: that is enough for me.

At least, it will be said, these are things absolutely impracticable in the times we live in. Therefore I do not undertake to practise them. My own role is that of all patriotic writers; it consists in publishing the truth. Others will come nearer to it, more or less, according to their strength and to circumstances, or else will depart from it through bad faith; and then we shall suffer what we cannot prevent. If everyone thought truly, the greatest changes, as soon as they offered an object of public utility, would have nothing difficult about them. What better can I do than help with all my strength to spread the truth that prepares the way? People begin by receiving it badly; little by little minds grow used to it, public opinion forms, and at last principles that had at first been treated as mad chimeras are seen being put into execution. In almost every kind of prejudice, if writers had not consented to pass for mad, the world would today be less wise.

Everywhere I meet people who, out of moderation, would like to retail the truth piecemeal, or present only slight fragments of it at a time. I doubt whether they understand themselves when they speak in this way. Certainly they do not consider enough the difference between the obligations imposed on the administrator and on the philosopher. The former advances as he can; provided he does not leave the right road, one can only praise him. But this road must have been cut right through to the end by the philosopher. He must have reached the goal; otherwise he could not guarantee that it is truly the road that leads there.

If he claims to stop me when he pleases and as he pleases, on the pretext of prudence, how shall I know that he is leading me well? Must I take his word for it? It is not in the order of reason to allow oneself a blind confidence.

It really seems as if people want and hope, by saying only one word after another, to take an enemy by surprise, to lure him into a trap. I do not wish to discuss whether, even between private persons, frank conduct is not also the cleverest; but certainly the art of reticence, and all those subtleties of conduct that are believed to be the fruit of experience of men, are sheer folly in national affairs dealt with publicly by so many real and enlightened interests. Here the true way to advance one’s affairs is not to hide from one’s enemy what he knows as well as we do, but to imbue the majority of citizens with the justice of their cause.

It is wrongly imagined that truth can be divided, isolated, and so enter the mind more easily in small portions. No: most often good shocks are needed; truth has not too much of all its light to produce those strong impressions that engrave it for ever in the depths of the soul, those impressions from which a passionate interest is born in what one has recognised to be true, beautiful and useful.

Take note: in the physical world it is not from the direct ray but from its reflections that light comes; in the moral world it comes from the relation and the whole of all the truths that belong to a subject. Without this whole one never feels sufficiently enlightened, and one often believes one holds a truth that will have to be abandoned as one reflects further.

What a poor idea people have of the progress of reason when they think that a whole people can remain blind to its true interests, and that the most useful truths, concentrated in a few heads only, should appear only as a skilful administrator needs them for the success of his operations! First, this view is false, because it is impossible to follow. Moreover, it is bad: is it not known that truth makes its way only slowly into a mass as enormous as a nation? There will always be only too much time lost. Must we not leave to the men whom truth discomforts the time to grow used to it; to the young, who receive it eagerly, the time to become something; and to the old the time to be nothing any more? In a word, do people want to wait for harvest-time before they sow?

Reason, moreover, does not like mystery; it is powerful in its works only through great expansion; only by striking everywhere does it strike true, because that is how public opinion is formed, to which perhaps most of the changes truly advantageous to peoples must be attributed, and to which alone it belongs to be useful to free peoples.

Minds, you say, are not yet disposed to hear you; you are going to shock a great many people. It must be so: the truth most useful to publish is not the one people were already close to, not the one they were already ready to welcome. No: it is precisely because it will irritate more prejudices and more personal interests that it is more necessary to spread it.

People do not notice that the prejudice that deserves most consideration is the one joined to good faith; that the personal interest most dangerous to irritate is the one to which good faith lends all the energy of the feeling that one has justice on one’s side. The enemies of the nation must be deprived of this borrowed strength; by enlightening them, they must be condemned to the enfeebling consciousness of bad faith.

The moderate persons to whom I address these reflections will cease to fear for the fate of the truths they call premature when they cease to confuse the measured and prudent conduct of the administrator, who would indeed spoil everything by not reckoning with resistances, with the free impulse of the philosopher, whom the sight of difficulties can only spur on further, who has no business even to negotiate with them, and who is all the more called upon to present sound social principles the more minds are encrusted with feudal barbarism.

When the philosopher cuts a road, he has to deal only with errors; if he wants to advance, he must cut them down without mercy. The administrator comes after; he meets interests, harder to approach, I grant; here a new talent is needed, a rarer science, different from the mere meditations of the man of the study; but let no one be mistaken: one still more foreign to the art of certain ministers, who have believed themselves administrators because they were not philosophers.

In turn, it will be acknowledged, if one is fair, that the speculations of philosophers do not always deserve to be disdainfully relegated to the class of pure chimeras. If opinion ends by dictating laws even to legislators, then surely he who can influence the formation of that opinion is not as useless, as inactive, as so many people claim who have never influenced anything.

Talkers without ideas — and there are a few of this kind — drone on endlessly with wretched remarks about what they call the importance of practice and the uselessness or danger of theory. I have only one word to say: suppose whatever series you please of the wisest, most useful, most excellent facts possible; well, do you believe there does not exist in the theoretical order a series of ideas, or of truths, exactly corresponding to your practical chain? If you have not taken leave of reason, it follows you; let us say rather, it precedes you. What is theory, if you please, if not that corresponding series of truths which you are unable to perceive before they are realised, and which someone must nevertheless have perceived, unless everyone acted without knowing what they were doing? The people who usually weary conversation with the nonsense I have just pointed out are, in truth, no more at home in practice than in theory. Why do they not take the wiser, more practical course of learning from the one, if they have the capacity, or at least of profiting from the other, while keeping quiet about questions which at bottom they can console themselves for not understanding? Let us return to our subject.

Finally, it will be said, if the privileged have no right to engage the common will on behalf of their privileges, at least they must, in their capacity as citizens, enjoy their political rights to representation, along with the rest of society.

I have already said that, in assuming the character of privileged persons, they have become the real enemies of the common interest; they cannot, therefore, be charged with providing for it.

I add that they are free to re-enter the true nation whenever they wish, by purging themselves of their unjust privileges; so it is quite voluntarily that they exclude themselves from the exercise of political rights. Finally, since their true rights, those that can be the object of the National Assembly, are common to them and to the deputies who compose it, they may reassure themselves by thinking that these deputies would injure themselves if they tried to harm those rights.

It is therefore certain that only the non-privileged members are fit to be electors and deputies to the National Assembly. The wish of the Third Estate will always be good for the generality of citizens; that of the privileged would always be bad, unless, neglecting their particular interest, they were willing to vote as simple citizens, that is to say as the Third Estate itself; therefore the Third Estate suffices for everything that can be hoped from a national assembly; therefore it alone is capable of procuring all the advantages that may be expected from the Estates-General.

It may perhaps be thought that, as a last resort, the privileged can still regard themselves as a nation apart and ask for a distinct and independent representation. I myself made this supposition for a moment. But it is inadmissible. It was shown in advance, in the first chapter of this work, that the privileged orders were not, and could not be, a people apart. They exist, and can exist, only at the expense of a true nation. What nation will voluntarily consent to such a burden?

Justice and reason cannot bend to your convenience. Do not ask what place, after all, the privileged classes ought to occupy in the social order: that is to ask what place one wishes to assign, in the body of a sick man, to the malignant humour that undermines and torments him. It must be neutralised; the health and the play of all the organs must be restored well enough for those morbid combinations to form no more, which are apt to vitiate the most essential principles of vitality. But you are told that you are not yet capable of bearing health; and you listen to this aphorism of aristocratic wisdom as the peoples of the East receive the consolations of fatalism! Remain sick, then.