Our aim is very clear, and we hope it will be understood by our readers. We do not intend to discuss the various political opinions, still less to ask their defenders to sacrifice them; we seek the indisputable, the first principle of the political order, around which can be immediately formed that union of honest and upright men which will place them in a position to struggle against the Revolution, and will prepare for the future a more complete harmony, and the permanent restoration of France.
I.
We must, above all, distinguish clearly “the saving principle” from the opinions with which it might be confounded. It will be easier to understand what it is when we will have said what it is not.
In the first place, this principle is not that of absolute monarchy.
In the happiest period of our history, the power of the monarch was modified by institutions of various kinds: by the states-general, which, having the right to confirm or reject new taxes, afforded an opportunity of laying at the foot of the throne the complaints and the wishes of the country; by the magistrates, who, almost sovereign in the judicial order, exercised an efficacious control over the legislature; by the church above all, that energetically defended the supremacy of divine law against the caprices of princes. Whatever may be thought of the causes which, after the invasion of Protestantism, led to the destruction of these guarantees, and to the concentration of power; whatever may be said to excuse or glorify absolute monarchy in the past, it evidently cannot now be presented as the immutable principle through which we could ask our salvation.
It is not necessary to add that the inferior institutions which surrounded the monarchy at divers epochs, merit still less the name of principles. Formerly these institutions had a reason for existing, but nothing proves that they should survive the circumstances which gave them birth. Neither the warlike feudalism of the middle ages nor the nobility disarmed, but still privileged, of later times, belongs to those elements essential to all society, to which we are bound to restore their energy as soon as possible, if we would not condemn ourselves to perish.
Nor can we give the name of principle to divine right as understood by the Gallican school. According to this school, Providence, at the commencement of society, chose a man or a family to exercise the supreme power. The course of events which decided the form of government of infant societies was, in its opinion, a manifestation of the divine will sufficient to invest with the right of commanding those who had the strength to enforce it. This right is then divine, since it is held immediately from God; and, in the language of theology, the power of divine right is that which comes from God without passing through any human intermediary. The Gallican school recognized two sovereignties of divine right: that of the temporal order, which was royalty; and the papal sovereignty, which was spiritual—if it was allowable to say in this system that the pope was sovereign, since, contrary to the policy which sustained absolute political power, they wished in the spiritual order that the pope should share his sovereignty with the episcopate.
To dissimulate nothing, let us say here that lately theologians and Catholic philosophers, strangers to the Gallican school, have defended the thesis of divine right. But their adhesion, in giving new weight to this doctrine, does not take it from the category of simple opinions. It has always against it the arguments and authority of our most illustrious doctors, according to whom the right of princes is divine only in its first origin and in its abstract essence; but in its immediate origin, its concrete form, and in the appointment of the subject to be invested with it, this right is human, since it would only receive the determinations indispensable to its exercise by the expressed or tacit consent of society. The providential events of which we have before spoken were more or less indicative of the divine will, but the majority of doctors refuse to see in them a sufficient motive for investing with the right of commanding a man previously supposed to be without it.
The doctrine of the absolute inamissibility of power generally maintained by the partisans of divine right should also be ranked among the disputed opinions. It is logic that he who has received power immediately from God can only be deprived of it by God. The defenders of the opposite opinion admit, on the contrary, that, in extreme cases, power can be withdrawn from him who abuses it by only using for the destruction of society what was given to him for its preservation. And as it is difficult to distinguish in such cases, as error on such occasions could only be disastrous, as anarchy could easily spring from the most legitimate resistance to tyranny, Catholic theologians do not wish that these doubtful cases of conscience should be left to the passions of parties or to the blind fury of the mob; but they find a guarantee qualified to defend every right and to reassure every interest in the authority, ever impartial and paternal, of the Vicar of Jesus Christ.
The first basis of social order which we are now seeking, can neither be found in the monarchical principle.