widening development, seemed created in former days to secure the greatness of the monarchy: its essential aim was not justice, hut the welfare of the State.
It was very difficult to establish strict discipline in the services set up by royalty for war and administration. Enquiries had continually to be made in order to punish unfaithful or disobedient employees; kings employed, for this purpose, men taken from their courts of law; thus they came to confuse acts of disciplinary surveillance with the repression of crimes. Lawyers must transform everything according to their habits of mind; in this way negligence, ill-will, or carelessness became revolt against authority, crime, or treason.
The Revolution piously gathered up this tradition, gave an importance to imaginary crimes which was all the greater because its political courts of law carried on their operations in the midst of a populace maddened by the seriousness of the peril; it seemed quite natural to explain the defeats of generals by criminal intentions, and to guillotine people who had not been able to realise hopes fostered by a public opinion, that had returned to the superstitions of childhood. Our penal code contains not a few paradoxical articles dating from this time; nowadays it is not easy to understand how a citizen can be seriously accused of plotting or of keeping up a correspondence with foreign powers or their agents in order to induce them to begin hostilities, or to enter into war with France, or to furnish them with the means therefor. Such a crime supposes that the State can be imperilled by the act of one person; this appears scarcely credible to us.[1]
Actions against enemies of the king were always conducted in an exceptional manner; the procedure was
- ↑ Yet this was the article which was applied to Dreyfus, without anybody, moreover, having attempted to prove that France had been in danger.
