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From the moment in which the government is empowered to arrange the fate of citizens without submission to any rule, all of them are its slaves. The citizen’s state is that of governed, the slave’s that of possessed, and the distance that separates such different conditions is immense. What is it, then, to be possessed? It is to be entirely and absolutely at the disposition of another and dependent on his will. And what is it to
[print edition page 46]
be governed? It is to be protected against all forms of aggression, reprimanded oneself when one commits them, and obliged to concur on the means of preventing them. Any other sacrifice that might be called for on the part of the citizen, and any other influence the government claims to have over his person, is an act of oppression and tyranny. A citizen, then, has no reason to complain when his imprisonment has been provoked by an act committed by him, an act declared criminal by an existing law that assigns a fixed penalty and when the trial directly follows the arrest. These methods can in no way be called undermining of individual security; on the contrary, they contribute to maintaining this precious right and are indispensably necessary to secure it. Such a procedure does not cause alarm or lack of confidence except for malefactors, and this, far from being an evil against which one should guard, is for a society a good for which legislators should always strive.
Those acts of the authority of which citizens complain, and with such justice call oppressive and tyrannical, are not of this class. They are those that spread mourning and consternation in the family of the peaceful citizen, of whose innocence the authority pretends ignorance; t hey are judicial persecutions without regular judgments, when the public power arrests and imprisons anyone it pleases, prolongs detentions indefinitely, exiles, and, finally, disposes of persons according to its whim, like a master over slaves he possesses and not like a leader over citizens he governs; they are, finally, those acts by which the authority itself commits an outrage against the security it has promised and is obliged to maintain, and by which it perpetrates the disorders it was supposed to curb.
The public authority in a nation that has changed institutions for the first time, passing from absolutism to liberty, is constantly reactionary; it has no other idea of government than what it could receive from the previous regime, nor is it persuaded that curbing crimes and taking precautions against the destruction of the state are possible by any means other than those that have been learned in the school of despotism. As the principles of this latter school are openly contrary to the new institutions, the complaints are not only frequent and repeated, but also just, well founded, and incontestable. The agents of the power, not finding a way to avoid the complaints, appeal to the preservation of the Republic, to this protective god of tyrants and oppressors, by which they try to persuade of the risk the government runs if it does not disregard individual security.
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It is certain that the first necessity of a people is the existence of its government, but it is not equally so that this be incompatible with supporting such a sacred right as individual security.
It is not the interests of the authority, but rather those of the officials they are trying to secure; because what is it they understand as the interests of the government? Things not capable of feeling cannot have interests in anything. It is then clear that, when this expression is used, it signifies only the impotence of the agents of the power to give free rein to despicable and thieving passions, oppressing those who overshadow them or make evident their evil acts. Certainly, it would be as rare as it would be difficult to persuade those who neither occupy public posts nor can get any use of them that the arbitrary regime has been established precisely for their benefit, to have their persons at their disposal without submission to any rule. The truth is that it greatly pleases those who rule, whatever certain people may want to say, to constitute themselves into masters of the people who have been entrusted to its direction and to have the power to dispose of the members that make it up without the obligation of accounting to anybody or the fear of answering to anybody. All the unhappiness of which they complain is thus reduced to the fact that some do not rule everything they would like; but what is unhappiness for them is a great benefit to the other citizens who make up the society.
Let us openly confess, then, that illegal and arbitrary prisons push man down into slavery, and, at the same time, they prepare an interminable series of misfortunes for a people that, because of these acts, is in a permanent state of revolution.
The history of all times, both ancient and modern, shows with absolute certainty that the crimes of the arbitrary power inevitably end in public disorders. It will be useless to seek in these political oscillations the reestablishment of individual security; they will have had this as their aim, but it will not be achieved while they last. Sometimes ambition, other times hatred and vengeance, always the most violent passions take possession of and empower such movements, and in this violent whirlwind they are surrounded and stifled and successively become victors and vanquished. Then principles are abandoned and a throne is erected to the empire of circumstance. These necessities give the common pretext for destroying regular laws that could have stopped them, and in this way injustice and irregularity, which will be constantly demanded
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as a pledge of public security, will periodically renew themselves. See here, says a famous writer, how the generations contemporary to these catastrophes never gather anything but bitter fruit and how rare it is that the following generations inherit happier ones. Looking for security in the midst of convulsions is the grossest of errors, but an active and sensitive people is invincibly impelled toward it when oppression has drained its patience.
Any political system that allows arrest and exile without due process carries within itself the germ of disturbances that sooner or later will explode with a deafening noise.
So governments that try to argue that the means of containing the disturbances is to disregard individual security with protective methods deceive themselves and deceive others. Public indignation, which is the precursor of all disturbances, becomes stirred up in so indisputable a way that it can be hidden from no one. Among a moderately refined people, when it is suspected that an innocent person suffers, the liveliest interest is taken in this victim of arbitrariness, and the particular iniquities of the power are publicly and vigorously censured. When this happens, discontent and alarm spread rapidly through all members of society, who from this moment place themselves in open war with the government; very just war, but at the same time the most dangerous and harmful that can be undertaken, because through it the social bonds are completely destroyed and men are in the barbarian state of nature.
We never advise peoples to take such a step, but they move to adopt it, as if through instinct and without deliberation, when the crimes of the power have been multiplied to such a point that they have destroyed in the heart of men all hope of an alternative. Then hatred and revenge, driven strongly by the furor that oppression causes, inspire the most cowardly and place a dagger even in the hands of the weakest. The irresistible wrath of a rebellious people causes the most dreadful damage. It expresses itself in the sanctuary of the laws, hurling from it, as violently as