Thereby would be gained the important advantage of no longer offering to the country and to Europe the spectacle of such continual accusations of great political crimes brought against obscure and powerless men, and which exhibit authority always ready to arm itself with all its strength against those who are obviously incapable of putting the fate of the state in jeopardy. I do not think that power can have any profit in thus revealing all its maladies, or, if we must call them so, the maladies of the society it governs. The moral effect of such a spectacle is deplorable. It is impossible not to conclude from it, either that the revolutionary fever possesses the people, or that power is unfit to govern. That party men, delivered up to the egotism of frantic passions, delight in repeating that France is full of lepers and brigands; that general disorder is ever on the point of raging; and that the parliamentary opposition is itself but the organ of the most unsocial interests and the blindest fury—all this may be conceived: but the national honour has not been committed to the keeping of these men; they are not held in respect by their country, nor do they watch over its consideration and tranquillity in Europe. But a government must think of these duties; it belongs to the state, and it is commanded to conceal, if such exist, the moral wounds of the country, expecting meanwhile that its good conduct will succeed in curing them. Surely it is not its part to disclose such deformities, that it may avail itself of them for legitimising such or such a system of administration! I wish, however, for neither illusion nor falsehood; for I do not believe that power is bound to flatter society, or to appear ignorant of the vices or danger fermenting in its bosom.
What good can it expect from exhibiting the country so often troubled and itself so often menaced with such agitations! It is always a melancholy and dangerous situation for a government to live upon the faults and errors of its people, and to seek its strength in the manifestation of the weaknesses past or present of the country. Besides, is not power aware that disorder is contagious, especially after a great crisis, and that it is of the utmost importance to stifle its symptoms in order to remove its temptation? Much is expected from example; but it is forgotten that although there is example in punishment, there is the same in crime, and often more efficacious. Who will doubt that in a country where theft is rare, the very rarity would more powerfully contend with the temptation than would elsewhere the severest chastisements of the thieves? How can so evident an analogy be mistaken? A thousand times has it been observed: we have seen murder call forth murder, incendiaries produce incendiaries: the perverse dispositions of men reveal themselves when called upon; and when once set forth on their course, the rigour of the law must long be exercised against them before they stop. This peril is greater in political crimes than in any other; for there the guilty are more liable to self-deception, and excite in the public, by whom they are surrounded, much less contempt and aversion. What madness, then, in power to hold up those continual provocations to such crimes, which spring from the parade of political prosecutions! Truly one cannot admire too much its inconsistency. The publicity of judicial debates not only incommodes, but terrifies it; and it tries to get rid of the inconvenience by concealing its incomparable advantages. Such publicity, it tells us, reveals the temptations as well as the terrors of crime; yet it takes no care to make this spectacle rare, to refrain till the last extremity from opening a school the lessons of which it holds in such dread. How does it not see that, if these were less frequent and less solemn, they would have less power? Their solemnity depends much upon the gravity of the punishments in perspective: the public cannot feel the same interest in a process which gives but a few years of imprisonment, as if the question were of a life. If power knew how to read the souls of the audience in such a debate; if every thought, every emotion which it raises were developed before its eyes, it would itself be troubled, and would assuredly doubt whether its expected profit were not an illusion. But, blind and unsteady, it is ignorant of this: it is not aware that every proceeding, every word of the politically accused whom it urges on to the scaffold, becomes the subject of the most animated conversations and the boldest commentaries, and that the slightest particular of his fate occasions the most lively and most enduring reflections, even in men who would not themselves have committed his imputed crime, and who would have felt but little interested, if the terrible destiny which weighs upon him had not stirred up from the bottom of their hearts every element of pity and sympathy. Such is the effect of political prosecutions which lead to the punishment of death: an effect mysterious in its extent, but infallible, and which baffles in this case the hopes of power, although power knows not how much what its supposed gains have cost.
I might go much farther: consequences present themselves in crowds, and all proclaim that the commonest prudence, the merest personal interest of power, counsels it to lower the rate of its political accusations, to diminish their number, and to make use of every means at its disposal to frustrate conspiracies without prosecuting them; in fine, to employ very rarely the punishment of death—as rarely as it is attended by true justice and true necessity. Observe what an employment a wise and skilful administration might make of its influence; observe how, without disarming itself, and without interference with the laws, it might introduce into government practical reforms conformable to the actual state of society, to the instinct of morals, and to the real interests of power. It is for such purposes that it is allowed, even here, that measure of the arbitrary always inseparable from the course of human affairs. In vain it would deny that it possesses and is able to use such a faculty. Power is full of contradictions. When incommoded by the laws, it claims arbitrary authority; when responsibility weighs upon it, it pretends to be merely the executive agent. But these sophisms deceive no one; truth easily compasses them; and when political processes multiply beyond measure, and capital punishment is continually invoked, it will be power, and not the laws, that will suffer. I have shown how, either before the prosecutions or by their direction, the legal domain of punishment might be restricted. Let us now see what influence might be exercised after judgment has been passed.
Chapter X.
The Privilege Of Mercy.
I meet here with prejudices of another kind, as unreasonable in my opinion, but more respectable, inasmuch as they are probably more disinterested and sincere. Some persons suppose that the privilege of mercy is a right purely royal, with the exercise of which the ministry has nothing to do, and of which the king alone disposes, with reference to nothing more than personal clemency or equity, and without any ministerial responsibility being attached to it, or making it a part of the enginery of government. This was likewise the opinion of the Constituent Assembly; and what resulted from it? That, in the constitution of 1791, the privilege of mercy was suppressed.
That this was a great error, none is more convinced than I; but the error was consequent on the idea which still dominated in the minds of men. Under the constitutional regime, where the inviolability of the monarch is founded upon the responsibility of ministers, no power of action would belong to him, and no act could emanate from him unaccompanied by this responsibility. Whence, otherwise, could the royal inviolability derive its meaning, or, in other words, its guarantee?
The Constituent Assembly was aware of this necessity; and yet, from the influence of old habits, the privilege of mercy was still considered as a right purely personal and irresponsible in its nature. And they came to the conclusion that it should not continue.