SOVEIŒIGNTY. 51 



reform emanated from tlic power itself; and lliis frciior- 

 ous initiative, sustained as it was by tlic vast majority 

 of the country, made wliat I would call the ITSO of the 

 honest king and the true French nation. Unhappily 

 there was another 1789. The whole guilt does not rest 

 on 1793; 1789 must hear its share of it. It is guilty 

 of that contempt of authority, at once instinctive and 

 systematic, which shows in its acts as well as in its 

 ideas, which expressed itself sometimes in the wordy 

 insurrection of the tribune, sometimes in the violent 

 insurrection of the street, and which from the begin- 

 ning opened the way for those who, having humbled 

 the throne of the monarch before the National Assem- 

 bly, finally erected his scaffold in front of his palace. 



The French Revolution is noAV eighty years old, and 

 it has come to be the European revolution. It has done 

 enough in the way of destruction, it seems to me, and it 

 is high time now to build up. Let us have done, then, 

 with the shameful and perilous instability of our insti- 

 tutions, and to that end let us restore to its place in 

 men's thoughts and consciences the Christian dogma of 

 the inviolable sacredness of power. 



[XL Sovereignty is liinited in its exercise. If power is neces- 

 sarily inviolable in its principle, wliicli is divine, it is essentially 

 limited in its exercise, which is hiinian. All authority exercised 

 by men has its limits, and those of civil authority are found in 

 the modality of riffhfs v>'h.ich it is its mission, as I have already 

 explained, to regulate and defend. Political sovereignty no more 

 extends to the substance of human rights when it is vested in the 

 people than when it is vested in a prince ; neither can it legiti- 

 mately tamper v*'ith them, whether they be rights of the individ- 

 ual, rights of the family, the primitive society, rights of the- 

 Church, the superior society, or rights of voluntary associations. 

 Every man has, by his own natural right, Uie power of associating 

 himself with his fellows, so long as he does it openly and for ob- 



