* a Church without believers, * schools without pupils, * hospitals without incomes, * a geometrical hierarchy of improvised powers in the commune, district, and department,all badly organized, badly adjusted, out of gear at the start, overwhelmed with political functions, as incapable of performing their proper duties as their supplementary duties, and, from the very beginning, either powerless or mischievous.[8] Changes repeatedly marred by arbitrariness from above or from below, set aside or perverted now by the mob and again by the government, inert in the country, oppressive in the towns, we have seen the state into which they had fallen at the end of the Directory; how, instead of a refuge for liberty, they had become haunts of tyranny or sinks of egoism;why, in 1800, they were as much decried as their predecessors in 1788, why their two successive props, the old one and the most recent, historic custom and popular election, were now discredited and no longer resorted to. - After the disastrous experience of the monarchy and the still worse experience of the republic, another prop had to be sought for; but only one remained, that of the central power, the only one visible and which seemed substantial; in default of others they had recourse to this.[9] In any event, no protestation, even secret and moral, any longer prevented the State from attaching other corporate bodies to itself, in order to use them for its own purposes as instruments or appendages.
II. Doctrines of Government.
The theory. - Agreement of speculative ideas with practical necessities. - Public rights under the Ancient Regime. - The King's three original rights. - Labors of the jurists in extending royal prerogatives. - Historical impediments. - The primitive or ulterior limits of royal power. - The philosophic and revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty. - Unlimited extension of State power. -Application to spontaneous bodies. - Convergence of ancient and new doctrines. - Corporations considered as creations of the public power.
- Centralization through the universal intervention of the State.
The theory here agreed with the need, and not alone the recent theory, but again the ancient theory. Long before 1789, public right had elevated the prerogative of centralized power into a dogma and exaggerated it beyond measure.
There are three titles under which this power was conferred. - Feudal seignior, and suzerain, that is to say, commander-in-chief of the great resident army whose willing forces had served to reconstruct society in the ninth century, the King, through the remotest of his origins - that is to say, through the immemorial confusion of sovereignty with property - was the owner of France, the same as an individual owns his private domain.[10] - Married, moreover, to the Church since the first Capets, consecrated and crowned at Rheims, anointed by God like a second David,[11] not only was he believed to be authorized from on high, like other monarchs, but, from Louis le Gros, and especially after the time of saint Louis, he appeared as the delegate from on high, invested with a laic sacerdotalism, clothed with moral power, minister of eternal justice, redresser of wrongs, protector of the weak, benefactor of the humble - in short, "His Most Christian Majesty." - At length, after the thirteenth century, the recent discovery and diligent study of the ancient codes of Justinian had shown in his person the successor of the Caesars of Rome and of the Emperors of Constantinople. According to these codes the people in a body had transferred its rights to the prince; now, in antique cities, all rights were vested in the community, and the individual had none;[12] accordingly, through this transfer, all rights, public or private, passed into the hands of the prince; henceforth he could exercise them as he pleased, under no restriction and no control. He was above the law, since he made it; his powers were illimitable and his decision absolute.[13]
On this triple frame the jurists, like State spiders, had, from Philippe le Bel down, spun their web, and the instinctive concordance of their hereditary efforts had attached all its threads to the omnipotence of the King. - Being jurisconsults - that is to say, logicians - they were obliged to deduce, and their minds naturally recurred to the unique and rigid principle to which they might attach their arguments. - As advocates and councilors of the crown they espoused the case of their client and, through professional zeal, derived or forced precedents and texts to his advantage. - By virtue of being administrators and judges the grandeur of their master constituted their grandeur, and personal interest counseled them to expand a prerogative in which, through delegation, they took part. -Hence, during four centuries, they had spun the tissue of "regalian rights," the great net in the meshes of which, since Louis XIV., all lives found themselves caught.[14]
Nevertheless, however tightly spun was the web, there were openings in it, or, at least, very weak spots. - And first, of the consequences flowing from these three principles in their hands, two of them had hindered the third from unwinding its skein to the end: owing to the fact that the King was formerly Count de Paris and Abbot of St. Denis, he could not become a veritable Augustus, an authentic Diocletian: his two French titles limited his Roman title. Without regard to the laws, so-called fundamental, which imposed his heir on him beforehand, also the entire line of his successive heirs, the tutor, male or female, of his minor heir, and which, if he derogated from immemorial usage, annulled his will like that of a private individual, his quality of suzerain and that of Most Christian, were for him a double impediment.
