The French Revolution, vol 3 | Page 6

to extremes; on the
contrary, he proclaims them with renewed vigor, through which move
the ignorant crowd, seeing the same flask always presented to it,
imagines that it is always served with the same liquor, and is thus
forced to drink tyranny under the label of freedom. Whatever the
charlatan can do with his labels, signboards, shouting and lies for the
next six months, will be done to disguise the new nostrum; so much the
worse for the public if, later on, it discovers that the draught is bitter;
sooner or later it must swallow it, willingly or by compulsion: for, in
the interval, the instruments are being got ready to force it down the

public throat.[3]
As a beginning, the Constitution, so long anticipated and so often
promised, is hastily fabricated:[4] declarations of rights in thirty- five
articles, the Constitutional bill in one hundred and twenty-four articles,
political principles and institutions of every sort, electoral, legislative,
executive, administrative, judicial, financial and military;[5] in three
weeks all is drawn up and passed on the double. -- Of course, the new
Constitutionalists do not propose to produce an effective and
serviceable instrument; that is the least of their worries. Hérault
Séchelles, the reporter of the bill, writes on the 7th of June, "to have
procured for him at once the laws of Minos, of which he has urgent
need;" very urgent need, as he must hand in the Constitution that
week.[6] Such circumstance is sufficiently characteristic of both the
workmen and the work. All is mere show and pretense. Some of the
workmen are shrewd politicians whose sole object is to furnish the
public with words instead of realities; others, ordinary scribblers of
abstractions, or even ignoramuses, and unable to distinguish words
from reality, imagine that they are framing laws by stringing together a
lot of phrases. -- It is not a difficult job; the phrases are ready-made to
hand. "Let the plotters of anti-popular systems," says the reporter,
"painfully elaborate their projects! Frenchmen . . . . have only to
consult their hearts to read the Republic there!"[7] Drafted in
accordance with the "Contrat-Social," filled with Greek and Latin
reminiscences, it is a summary "in pithy style" of the manual of current
aphorisms then in vogue, Rousseau's mathematical formulas and
prescriptions, "the axioms of truth and the consequences flowing from
these axioms," in short, a rectilinear constitution which any school-boy
may spout on leaving college. Like a handbill posted on the door of a
new shop, it promises to customers every imaginable article that is
handsome and desirable. Would you have rights and liberties? You will
find them all here. Never has the statement been so clearly made, that
the government is the servant, creature and tool of the governed; it is
instituted solely "to guarantee to them their natural, imprescriptible
rights." [8] Never has a mandate been more strictly limited: "The right
of expressing one's thoughts and opinions, either through the press or in
any other way; the right of peaceful assembly, the free exercise of

worship, cannot be interdicted." Never have citizens been more
carefully guarded against the encroachments and excesses of public
authority: "The law should protect public and private liberties against
the oppression of those who govern . . . offenses committed by the
people's mandatories and agents must never go unpunished. Let free
men instantly put to death every individual usurping sovereignty. . .
Every act against a man outside of the cases and forms which the law
determines is arbitrary and tyrannical; whosoever is subjected to
violence in the execution of this act has the right to repel it by force. . .
When the government violates the people's rights insurrection is, for
the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights
and the most indispensable of duties."
To civil rights the generous legislator has added political rights, and
multiplied every precaution for maintaining the dependence of rulers on
the people. -- In the first place, rulers are appointed by the people and
through direct choice or nearly direct choice: in primary meetings the
people elect deputies, city officers, justices of the peace, and electors of
the second degree; the latter, in their turn, elect in the secondary
meetings, district and department administrators, civil arbitrators,
criminal judges, judges of appeal and the eighty candidates from
amongst which the legislative body is to select its executive council. --
In the second place, all powers of whatever kind are never conferred
except for a very limited term: one year for deputies, for electors of the
second degree, for civil arbitrators, and for judges of every kind and
class. As to municipalities and also department and district
administrations, these are one-half renewable annually. Every first of
May the fountain-head of authority flows afresh, the