industry, destroy the fiscal laws that hinder its development, not overburden it with taxation but leave it to exercise its activity freely and austerely.
It should spread enlightenment throughout society and hold out a beneficent hand to the poor and the destitute. It should seek to raise the proletarian class to the level of the other classes, emancipating first its body in order to then emancipate its reason.
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To emancipate the ignorant masses and open for them the road to sovereignty it is necessary to educate them. The masses have only their instincts; they are more sensitive than rational; they want the good, but they do not know where to find it; they wish to be free, but they do not know the path to freedom.
Education for the masses must be systematized.
By giving them morals, religion will make fertile in their hearts the seeds of good habits. Elementary education will put them in a position to attain greater enlightenment and one day grasp the rights and duties imposed on them by citizenship.14
The ignorant masses, however, while temporarily deprived of the exercise of the rights of sovereignty or political liberty, fully enjoy their individual liberty; like all members of society, their natural rights are inviolable; in addition, civil liberty protects them, as it does everyone; the same civil, penal, and constitutional law, dictated by the sovereign, protects their lives, their property, their conscience, and their liberty; it brings them to court when they commit a crime, condemning them or absolving them.
They cannot participate in the creation of the law that forms the rights and duties of the associate members as long as they remain under tutelage or in minority of age, but that same law gives them the means to emancipate themselves and keeps them in the meantime under its protection and defense.
Democracy works to even out conditions and make the classes equal.
Class equality includes individual liberty, civil liberty, and political liberty. When all members of the association are in full and absolute possession of these liberties and jointly exercise sovereignty, democracy shall have been definitively constituted on the indestructible basis of class equality; this is the third principle.
We have unraveled the spirit of democracy and set out the limits of the sovereignty of the people. Let us now examine how the sovereign acts, or in other words, what apparent or visible form it imposes on its decisions, and how it organizes the government of democracy.
For the creation of a law, the sovereign delegates its powers, reserving
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the power to enact the law. The delegate represents the sovereign’s interests and reason.
The legislator exercises a limited and temporary sovereignty; his norm is reason.
The legislator issues the organic law and formulates therein the rights and duties of the citizen and the conditions of the pact of association.
It divides social authority into three great powers, of whom it draws the limits and attributes that constitute the symbolic unity of democratic sovereignty.
The legislative power represents the reason of the people, the judiciary its justice, and the executive its action and will; the first creates the law, the second applies it, and the third executes it; the first votes on expenditure and taxation and the immediate organ of the desires and needs of the people; the second is the organ of social justice, manifested in the laws; the third is the tireless administrator and agent of social interests.
These three powers are truly independent; but far from isolating themselves and condemning themselves to immobility, offering mutual resistance to maintain a certain illusory balance, they will proceed harmoniously, via different routes, to the single goal of social progress. Their strength shall be the sum of the three joint forces, their wills shall unite in a single will; just as reason, sentiment, and will constitute the moral unit of the individual, the three powers shall form the unity that shall lead to democracy, or the legitimate organ of sovereignty, intended to pass judgment without appeal on all matters that interest society.
The conditions of the pact are written; the cornerstone of the social edifice has been laid; the government is organized and driven by the spirit of the fundamental law. The legislator presents it to the people; the people approve it, if it is the living symbol of their reason.
The work of the constituent legislator is done.
If the organic law is not the expression of public reason proclaimed by its legitimate representatives, if they have not spoken in this law of the interests and opinions of their constituents, if they have not succeeded in interpreting their thoughts; or in other words, if the legislators, ignoring their mission and the vital demands of the people they represent, have become miserable plagiarists and copied, from here and there, articles from other countries’ constitutions, instead of writing one with living roots in the popular conscience, their work shall be an
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aborted monster, a lifeless body, an ephemeral law without action that could never be sanctioned by public judgment.
The legislator will have betrayed the trust of his constituents; he will be an imbecile.
If on the contrary the work of the legislator fully satisfies public reason, his work is great, his creation sublime, and resembles the work of God.
Then neither the people, nor the legislator, nor any social authority whatsoever will be able to raise its sacrilegious hand in that sanctuary where the supreme and inviolable law is written in divine letters; the law of laws, which each and every man has acknowledged, proclaimed, and sworn before God and man to respect.
Sovereignty, it can be said, has been embodied in that law, the reason and consent of the people is there; order, justice, and liberty are there; therein lies the safeguard of democracy.
This law could be revised, improved in time, and adapted to the progress of public reason by an assembly elected ad hoc by the sovereign; but until such time comes which the law itself indicates, its power is omnipotent; its will dominates all wills; its reason rules over all reason.
No majority, no party, no assembly may break this law, on pain of being usurpatory and tyrannical.
That law is the touchstone for all other laws; its light illuminates them, and all thoughts and actions of the social body and of the constituted powers are born from it and converge at its center. It is their driving force and around it gravitate, like heavenly bodies around the sun, all the partial forces that make up the world of democracy.
With democracy thus constituted, the sovereignty of the people arises from that point and starts to exercise its unceasing and unlimited action, but always circling in the orbit that the organic law traces; its right does not go beyond this.
Through its representatives, it makes and reverses laws, innovating every day, taking its activity everywhere and imposing an incessant movement, a progressive transformation to the social machine.
Each act of its will is a new creation; each decision of its reason is progress.
Politics, religion, philosophy, art, industry; it examines everything, develops it, puts it to the supreme vote, and enacts it; the voice of the people is the voice of God.
From this we can deduce that if the people have no enlightenment or
