While the aristocrats talk of their honor and attend to their interests,
the Third Estate—namely, the Nation—will develop its virtue, since
virtue is to the national interest what egoism is to the interest of a corporate
institution. Nobles may be left to find some consolation for their
dying vanity by taking pleasure in insulting the Third Estate with the
most insolent terminology of the feudal language. But the more they repeat
terms like commoner, boor, or villein the more they forget that, what-
146 Political Writings
33NO ARISTOCRACY ought to be the rallying cry of all the Friends of the Nation
and good order. The aristocrats might imagine that they can reply by calling for NO
DEMOCRACY. But we too can call for no democracy against them. These gentlemen
seem to be ignorant of the fact that representatives are not democrats and that since a genuine
democracy is impossible among a numerous people, it is mad either to believe in it or
appear to fear it. But a false democracy is, alas, only too real a possibility. It can be found
among a caste that imagines that by right of birth or any other ridiculous title independent
of the peoples’ proxy it is entitled to all the powers exercised by the body of citizens in a genuine
democracy. This false democracy and all the evils it brings in its wake are to be found
in a country which is said and held to be a monarchy, but one in which a privileged caste
has usurped the monopoly of government, place, and position. It is this feudal democracy
that is the one to be feared, which never ceases to provoke vain terrors to preserve its great
importance and which hides both its incapacity for the good under the guise of being an intermediary
body and its power for harm under the imposing authority of the aristocrat Montesquieu.
It will be obvious to anyone who can think that a caste of aristocrats, however
much the most stupid of prejudices might decorate it, is as opposed to the authority of
monarchy as it is to the interests of the people.
ever they mean now, they are either foreign to the Third Estate as it is
today or are common to all three orders,
that cannot now be conceived, presupposing as it does the most vile
baseness among twenty-five million men.