As the Provisional Government of 1848 proclaimed the Republic, it was careful, after proper deliberation, to proclaim at the same time “universal suffrage,” which Lamartine, standing on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, and speaking in the name of the Government, said was “the first truth and only basis of every National Republic.”[171] This proclamation was itself submitted to the vote of “all the citizens”; and on the terms of this submission another member of the Government, of solid sense and perfect fidelity, thus expresses himself:--
“By these words--_all the citizens_--the Provisional Government intended to consecrate definitively the fundamental principle of democracy; it intended to proclaim boldly and forever the inalienable, imprescriptible right inherent in each member of society to participate directly in the government of his country; it intended to put in practice really and loyally the great principles hitherto shut up in the domain of the abstract theories of philosophy.”[172]
The same person, M. Garnier-Pagès, who was at once an eminent actor in these scenes and their most authentic historian, thus again dwells on the true idea of a Republic:--
“The Republic, that government of _all by all_, where each has his place, his duty, and his right; the Republic, that is to say, Liberty itself, the liberty to do every act and to give utterance to every thought not prejudicial to others; the Republic, that fraternal ground where are admitted all parties, the representatives of the past as well as of the future, where all minds, all associations, can have free scope.”[173]
This precise definition is fitly crowned by the remarkable words revealing the soul of De Tocqueville:--
“I should, I think, have loved Liberty at all times, but in the times in which we live I feel inclined to adore it.… There is no legislator sufficiently wise and sufficiently powerful to maintain free institutions, _if he does not take Equality for first principle and symbol_. All our contemporaries, then, who would create or assure the independence and dignity of their fellow-men, must show themselves the friends of Equality; and the only worthy way of showing themselves such is to be so. Upon this depends the success of their holy enterprise.”[174]