It is also the voice of the French Revolution. The one idea which that great event taught with prevailing influence was the Equal Rights of All, explained and defined by the new-born formula, that “all are equal before the Law.” Napoleon recognized the supremacy of this principle, when, in an official address to the Council of State, he said, “France loves Equality above everything”;[169] and he sought to enforce it, when, in an early proclamation, he declared, “Let there be no head which does not bend under the empire of Equality.”[170] Such is human inconsistency, that shortly afterwards his own ambition refused to bend under this empire, which none the less disowned the sceptre he assumed and the nobles he created. But the great truth, though trampled down, survived in the hearts of the French people, to rise again and resume its heritage.
As the Provisional Government of 1848 proclaimed the Republic, it was careful, after proper deliberation, to proclaim at the same time “universal suffrage,” which Lamartine, standing on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, and speaking in the name of the Government, said was “the first truth and only basis of every National Republic.”[171] This proclamation was itself submitted to the vote of “all the citizens”; and on the terms of this submission another member of the Government, of solid sense and perfect fidelity, thus expresses himself:—
“By these words—all the citizens—the Provisional Government intended to consecrate definitively the fundamental principle of democracy; it intended to proclaim boldly and forever the inalienable, imprescriptible right inherent in each member of society to participate directly in the government of his country; it intended to put in practice really and loyally the great principles hitherto shut up in the domain of the abstract theories of philosophy.”[172]
The same person, M. Garnier-Pagès, who was at once an eminent actor in these scenes and their most authentic historian, thus again dwells on the true idea of a Republic:—
“The Republic, that government of all by all, where each has his place, his duty, and his right; the Republic, that is to say, Liberty itself, the liberty to do every act and to give utterance to every thought not prejudicial to others; the Republic, that fraternal ground where are admitted all parties, the representatives of the past as well as of the future, where all minds, all associations, can have free scope.”[173]
This precise definition is fitly crowned by the remarkable words revealing the soul of De Tocqueville:—
“I should, I think, have loved Liberty at all times, but in the times in which we live I feel inclined to adore it.… There is no legislator sufficiently wise and sufficiently powerful to maintain free institutions, if he does not take Equality for first principle and symbol. All our contemporaries, then, who would create or assure the independence and dignity of their fellow-men, must show themselves the friends of Equality; and the only worthy way of showing themselves such is to be so. Upon this depends the success of their holy enterprise.”[174]
To the authentic testimony of modern France, in harmony with our own country, I add the definition of a very recent foreign publicist, who, after dwelling on Equality as the idol sentiment of a Republic, says:—
“This shows us the nature and the end of republican government. It is a government founded on the general interest and equality.”[175]