In both cases, which are common among recently constituted peoples, in which the public spirit has neither progressed nor formed customs, the government, not finding in itself means to triumph or resources not to die, casts its covetous eyes on the various classes that make up the nation; but the virtuous citizens are not capable of helping injustice triumph, and they are also very open in telling those imbeciles who govern that the only thing they have to do is entrust the post to whomever knows how to execute it. It is, then, a certain consequence that an evil or weak government will depend on factions composed of corrupt characters, those who, in exchange for commanding the government itself, lend themselves to the most iniquitous goals, and as a reward they immediately request and obtain jobs, pensions, wealth (all spoils of a sacrificed nation); as collaborators, they set themselves up as essential, they identify themselves with the government, one is their interest, the other their goal; disorder, injustice, oppression. In this case the agitators believe and consider themselves to be the government itself, and when the public voice cries out against their lies, they respond with insolence that doing so is to discredit the government, that to attack them is to attack it, as if the name of government could justify iniquities, or as if a government that has made itself factious would still merit respect and esteem, which in a republic is the reward for virtues. Meanwhile dull or perverse rulers degrade themselves, making themselves blind and passive instruments of their own and the general ruin. And here is the first and most terrible characteristic of a devastating faction.
The majority of a nation is always just and reasonable, for men, although
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they might individually be bad, gathered together or collectively are virtuous, according to Montesquieu’s observation. Men gathered together inevitably identify themselves with what is useful to all, a clear instinct makes them sense that any injustice whatsoever redounds against them, and if they do the evil deed thinking they can escape its consequences, they never put into practice the evil deed that hangs over their heads.
Never, then, can disastrous projects be the work of any but a small group that, tenaciously pursuing its own prosperity, will impudently tread on the laws, do away with all barriers that oppose virtue, the most wicked methods costing it nothing so long as they lead to the venting of its revenge or the insatiable yearning of its ambition or avarice, it will defy public opinion and will abjure all decency. The agitators themselves will be amazed at having arrived where they did not foresee, for, drunken with their first triumphs, they will have embarked upon and achieved excesses that cannot have happened to anyone, except when that one is involved in enormous crimes that it is necessary to cover over with other, even more atrocious crimes. For them, morality (the only true politics) is an impediment that they have removed from their course, growing deaf to its clamors, and by force of combating it, they have managed to harden themselves against remorse and honor. What must be the fate of the unhappy nation whose destiny is in such hands? What fortunes will be enough to gratify the ravenous swarm of catilinarians? What laws, what equity, what rights will be respected by those who forsake order?
The difference between the methods of a faction and those of a sound part or majority of a people is palpable. This latter knows no other methods than guarantees, laws, justice, because these methods can never ever be contrary by their nature to the end to which they aspire; there are between them intimate relations that can hardly exist between injustice and benevolence, which is universal justice. How can those who violate the principles of justice, then, argue that they love the nation, that they promote the general good, the only foundation for justice? Are people so stupid that they come to believe that they can be saved only by trampling on the venerable principles of virtue? Will those who offend this essential principle and soul of the republic be republicans? Will the nation ever think that its situation is such that the political dogmas to which it has consecrated reason and experience of all the centuries have
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nothing to do with it? Has the nature of things changed? And so, if it suits a faction, must we abjure the most evident and holy truths and violate reason, this support and asylum of man? You who make a show of saving us by crushing the rights of humanity, know that if it were possible that our existence and honor were incompatible with justice, we would rather choose to die in disgrace. But it does not depend on you to change what is disinterested and eternal, and it is much easier to believe and even feel that your tricks and processes are what is incompatible with the good and honor of men; their future will depend on and be secured forever by justice. If you were fair you would say that ambition, vengeance, avarice . . . are the true motives for your conduct; give up fraud and histrionics that no one believes and everyone detests.
But despite everything, haughty with the experiment they have made of their power, they try to make good use of the moments, knowing that their fatal influence will last only until the nation, terrified by upheaval, deploys its irresistible resources against this handful of vipers that eat away at its core; so they try to lull the nation with deceitful snares and to intimidate and persecute those men who, with wisdom and character, can unmask them and make their crimes evident to the people, lead a reaction in support of the constitution and the laws, and oust them. From here emanates the spirit of intolerance and persecution, another innate characteristic of factions.
“Of all the proscriptions,” says the famous Bignon,1 “the most terrible are those stirred up by a minority. The majority, which knows its strengths, can be momentarily cruel; but neither is it for a long time, nor is it always. The minority, on the contrary, believes that it increases its number by multiplying its harsh acts. . . . Proscription has a frightening character when it attempts to repress the dominant spirit of nations, for inasmuch as it then originates from a fragment that wishes to subjugate the majority, it is inevitable that it be more violent and expansive. The nation as a whole needs fixed and constant laws, the minority has need of laws of exception.”
In a free and civilized nation, it is not the same to seize power as to capture opinion; on the contrary, the seizing of power is always guarded against and opposed by those who fear (and that is everyone) the diminishment of their rights. A just government respects this guarding
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and opposition for the advantages that redound to it; but a faction or a factious government that cannot bear the inspection of the public becomes irritated and enraged by its own conscience, for it knows that its errors and crimes are obvious to everyone, and in the inability to stifle the truth it furiously pronounces the maxim of tyrants: Let them hate me, so long as they fear me. Much better would be the love and respect of the people if they changed course. But what about the responsibility of the ministers? How is it possible that they resign themselves to giving up their posts and become objects of contempt and cursing? How to acknowledge themselves defeated in a struggle in which they have prostituted their consciences, sold their honor, assaulted what is most sacred? Will they not then reveal their dreadful secrets, and will there not come to light so many machinations, treacheries, depravities, atrocities . . .?
Thus, they see themselves committed to continuing their maneuvers at any price, to trampling whatever crosses their path, to aiming their guns at whomever might have the courage and ability to oppose them. The first shots hit persons they carefully make loathsome beforehand, suggesting to people that they are their enemies, as the sans-culottes did in France with those they called aristocrats. Distorted equality was the popular idol, and as many as calumny had designated were sacrificed to it. With that name emphatically pronounced, several thousand were dragged to the scaffold, crushing the forms and all rights. It would be easy to cite other examples, but unfortunately we have among ourselves practiced worse trampling underfoot, for there is no proscription more barbarously