A political society can never be anything other than the totality of its
associate members. A nation cannot decide not to be the nation it is or
choose to be itself in only one particular way, simply because this would
amount to saying that it could not be a nation in any other way. In the same sense, a nation cannot stipulate that its common will should cease to
be its common will. It is sad to have to spell out propositions like these,
because they look so elementary until some thought is given to their
consequences. Thus a nation could never have stipulated that the rights
inherent in the common will, namely, the majority, could ever be transferred
to the minority. The common will can never destroy itself. It cannot
change the nature of things by making the opinion of the minority
the opinion of the majority. It is obvious that instead of being a legal or
moral act a stipulation like this would be an act of madness.
If it is claimed, therefore, that one of the properties of the French constitution
is that two hundred thousand individuals out of a total number
of twenty million citizens amounts to two-thirds of the common will; the
only answer is that this amounts to claiming that two and two makes five.
Individual wills are the only elements of the common will. It is not
possible to deprive the greatest number of individual wills of their right
to contribute to its formation or decree that ten wills should have a value
of one or that ten others should be worth thirty. To do so is a contradiction
in terms and a manifest absurdity.
Reasoned argument is pointless if for a single moment one abandons
the self-evident principle that the common will is the opinion of the majority,
not the minority. By the latter token, one might just as well take
the will of a single person to be the will of the majority, and then there
would be no need for an Estates-General or a national will, etc. . . . If the
will of a noble is worth ten, why not make the will of a minister worth a
hundred, or a million, or twenty six million? With reasoning like that,
one might as well send all the Nation’s deputies home and impose silence
on all popular protestation.
Is it still necessary to insist upon the natural consequences of such
principles? It is patently obvious that in any national representation, either
ordinary or extraordinary, influence should be in proportion to the
number of individual heads that have a right to be represented. To do
what it has to do, a representative body always has to stand in for the Nation
itself. Influence within it ought to have the same nature, the same proportions,
and the same rules.
The conclusion that must follow is that there is perfect agreement between
all these principles and that they prove (1) that only an extraordinary
representation can alter, or give us, a constitution, and (2) that this
constituent representation should be formed without paying any attention
to the distinction of orders