“I have ever thought that a Republican Constitution, _having Equality for its basis_, was the only one in conformity with Nature, with reason, and with justice,--the only one which could preserve the liberty of the citizens and the dignity of the human race.”[167]
Belonging to the ancient system of France, and, like Lafayette, with the rank of Marquis, Condorcet, again like Lafayette, not only accepted the Republic, but declared its true basis.
Another French authority, of eminent experience in diplomacy, who wrote coldly and only according to the requirement of reason, Gérard de Rayneval, asserts the same law of Equality:--
“Political Liberty consists in the right to participate in public affairs. This participation is direct or indirect, and it is more or less extended according to the form of government. It is, then, necessarily unequal. For example, _in a Democracy all the citizens participate in the legislative power_. If they delegate it, they have only a very indirect part in it; but all can become delegates or representatives, all can arrive at administrative employments, and all have the right to protest against abuses. In aristocratic republics political liberty is exclusively concentrated in the body of Notables; they alone exercise all the power; subjects have only civil liberty.”[168]
Such, in France, is the voice of political science.
It is also the voice of the French Revolution. The one idea which that great event taught with prevailing influence was the Equal Rights of All, explained and defined by the new-born formula, that “all are equal before the Law.” Napoleon recognized the supremacy of this principle, when, in an official address to the Council of State, he said, “France loves Equality above everything”;[169] and he sought to enforce it, when, in an early proclamation, he declared, “Let there be no head which does not bend under the empire of Equality.”[170] Such is human inconsistency, that shortly afterwards his own ambition refused to bend under this empire, which none the less disowned the sceptre he assumed and the nobles he created. But the great truth, though trampled down, survived in the hearts of the French people, to rise again and resume its heritage.