第40章

The supreme sovereign power, then, in proceeding by a minister who is at the same time the ruler of the state, consequently becomes despotic; and the expedient of giving the people to imagine- when they have properly only legislative influence- that they act by their deputies by way of limiting the sovereign authority, cannot so mask and disguise the actual despotism of such a government that it will not appear in the measures and means adopted by the minister to carry out his function.The people, while represented by their deputies in parliament, under such conditions, may have in these warrantors of their freedom and rights, persons who are keenly interested on their own account and their families, and who look to such a minister for the benefit of his influence in the army, navy, and public offices.And hence, instead of offering resistance to the undue pretensions of the government- whose public declarations ought to carry a prior accord on the part of the people, which, however, cannot be allowed in peace, they are rather always ready to play into the hands of the government.Hence the so-called limited political constitution, as a constitution of the internal rights of the state, is an unreality; and instead of being consistent with right, it is only a principle of expediency.And its aim is not so much to throw all possible obstacles in the way of a powerful violator of popular rights by his arbitrary influence upon the government, as rather to cloak it over under the illusion of a right of opposition conceded to the people.

Resistance on the part of the people to the supreme legislative power of the state is in no case legitimate; for it is only by submission to the universal legislative will, that a condition of law and order is possible.Hence there is no right of sedition, and still less of rebellion, belonging to the people.And least of all, when the supreme power is embodied in an individual monarch, is there any justification, under the pretext of his abuse of power, for seizing his person or taking away his life (monarchomachismus sub specie tyrannicidii).The slightest attempt of this kind is high treason (proditio eminens); and a traitor of this sort who aims at the overthrow of his country may be punished, as a political parricide, even with death.It is the duty of the people to bear any abuse of the supreme power, even then though it should be considered to be unbearable.And the reason is that any resistance of the highest legislative authority can never but be contrary to the law, and must even be regarded as tending to destroy the whole legal constitution.

In order to be entitled to offer such resistance, a public law would be required to permit it.But the supreme legislation would by such a law cease to be supreme, and the people as subjects would be made sovereign over that to which they are subject; which is a contradiction.And the contradiction becomes more apparent when the question is put: "Who is to be the judge in a controversy between the people and the sovereign?" For the people and the sovereign are to be constitutionally or juridically regarded as two different moral persons; but the question shows that the people would then have to be the judge in their own cause.

The dethronement of a monarch may be also conceived as a voluntary abdication of the crown, and a resignation of his power into the hands of the people; or it might be a deliberate surrender of these without any assault on the royal person, in order that the monarch may be relegated into private life.But, however it happen, forcible compulsion of it, on the part of the people, cannot be justified under the pretext of a right of necessity (casus necessitatis); and least of all can the slightest right be shown for punishing the sovereign on the ground of previous maladministration.For all that has been already done in the quality of a sovereign must be regarded as done outwardly by right; and, considered as the source of the laws, the sovereign himself can do no wrong.Of all the abominations in the overthrow of a state by revolution, even the murder or assassination of the monarch is not the worst.For that may be done by the people out of fear, lest, if he is allowed to live, he may again acquire power and inflict punishment upon them; and so it may be done, not as an act of punitive justice, but merely from regard to self-preservation.It is the formal execution of a monarch that horrifies a soul filled with ideas of human right; and this feeling occurs again and again as of as the mind realizes the scenes that terminated the fate of Charles I or Louis XVI.Now how is this feeling to be explained? It is not a mere aesthetic feeling, arising from the working of the imagination, nor from sympathy, produced by fancying ourselves in the place of the sufferer.On the contrary, it is a moral feeling arising from the entire subversion of all our notions of right.Regicide, in short, is regarded as a crime which always remains such and can never be expiated (crimen immortale, inexpiabile); and it appears to resemble that sin which the theologians declare can neither be forgiven in this world nor in the next.The explanation of this phenomenon in the human mind appears to be furnished by the following reflections upon it; and they even shed some light upon the principles of political right.