charter of 1814 had definitely incorporated in the national tradition, the Parliamentary system, Napoleonic legislation, and the Church established by the Concordat; war had given an irrevocable judgment whose preambles, as Proudhon said, had been dated from Valmy, from Jemmapes, and from fifty other battlefields, and whose conclusions[1] had been received at Saint-Ouen by Louis XVIII.[2] Protected by the prestige of the wars of liberty, the new institutions had become inviolable, and the ideology which was built up to explain them became a faith which seemed for a long time to have for the French the value which the revelation of Jesus has for the Catholics.
From time to time eloquent writers have thought that they could set up a current of reaction against these doctrines, and the Church had hopes that it might get the better of what it called the error of liberalism. A long period of admiration for medieval art and of contempt for the period of Voltaire seemed to threaten the new ideology with ruin; but all these attempts to return to the past left no trace except in literary history. There were times when those in power governed in the least liberal manner, but the principles of the modern régime were never seriously threatened. This fact could not be explained by the power of reason and by some law of progress; its cause lies simply in the epic of the wars
- ↑ [The word "conclusions" is employed in two senses in civil proceedings. Each counsel presents his claims and arguments to the court in writing in a document which is called "conclusion." On the other hand, at the end of the case the ministre public states what, in his opinion, is the decision the court ought to make for the best administration of Justice; these are the "conclusions" of the ministre public. The judgment always declares that the ministre public has been heard in his "conclusion." Proudhon uses the word in the second sense. On the return of the Bourbons, Louis XVIII. issued a proclamation in which he stated the principles on which it seemed to him the government of the country must henceforth rest.—Trans. Note.]
- ↑ Proudhon, La Guerre et la paix, livre v. chap. iii.
