Take note, for the rest, that those who talk in this way are men who believe that the King and the Executive Power are only one and the same thing: readers of La Feuille Villageoise are more advanced.(*)
* See No. 50.—Author
Others use this bad reasoning: "Were there no hereditary chief there would be an elective chief: the citizens would side with this man or that, and there would be a civil war at every election." In the first place, it is certain that hereditary succession alone has produced the civil wars of France and England; and that beyond this are the pre-tended rights, of royal families which have twenty times drawn on these nations the scourge of foreign wars. It is, in fine, the heredity of crowns that has caused the troubles of Regency, which Thomas Paine calls Monarchy at nurse.
But above all it must be said, that if there be an elective chief, that chief will not be a king surrounded by courtiers, burdened with pomp, inflated by idolatries, and endowed with thirty millions of money; also, that no citizen will be tempted to injure himself by placing another citizen, his equal, for some years in an office without limited income and circumscribed power.
In a word, whoever demands a king demands an aristocracy, and thirty millions of taxes. See why Franklin described Royalism as a crime like poisoning.
Royalty, its fanatical eclat, its superstitious idolatry, the delusive assumption of its necessity, all these fictions have been invented only to obtain from men excessive taxes and voluntary servitude. Royalty and Popery have had the same aim, have sustained themselves by the same artifices, and crumble under the same Light.
XII. TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, ON THE PROSECUTION AGAINST THE SECOND PART
OF RIGHTS OF MAN.(1)
Paris, 11th of November, 1st Year of the Republic. [1792.]