POWER
believe that unlimited and uncriticized power, in command of the
unprccedcntedly effective coercive machinery of the modern state,
is no danger to human well-being and dignity if it is in the right
hands, the Tightness being proven by doctrinal or national or class
tests. And in any society where there is no power independent of
the current rulers of the state, human freedom, dignity and, since
August 1945, mere human survival are goods whose security is
lessened day by day.
Central to M. de Jouvenel's theme is the failure of the French
noblesse to become or to remain an aristocracy and so an effective
restraint on power. In their long war with the crown, the French
nobles never developed the institutions or the esprit de corps that
would have enabled them effectually to combat the King, his tireless
lawyers and commis, the jealous and rising bourgeois, even the
permanent resentment of the peasants. Each moment of weakness
in the long history of the House of France was exploited but for
individual ends, or oven if they were class ends, the class was too
limited, too ill-disciplined, too idle to rule. It may be, of course,
that the alternative before France was not the creation of a ruling
aristocracy allied to the bourgeoisie as in England, but the descent
of France to the level of the Polish Republic, with the noblesse as a
western Szlachta.
The failure was not so much the failure to come to terms, in
time, with the King, but the failure to come to terms at all with the
middle classes. There is a revealing passage in Sainte-Beuve where
he discusses the possibility that Henri IV, had he lived, could have
developed a fruitful partnership with the noblesse. His murder left
only the absolutism of Richelieu as a solution. And Sainte-Beuve
with all his interest in the old order and his pleasure in its aristo-
cratic aspects had no doubt that it was well for him, the roturier,
that the experiment was not tried, that the noblesse was put down,
that the grand reign came and Versailles—and the Revolution.
M- de Jouvenel sees it very differently (after all he is not a
roturier). In the destruction of the noblesse, he sees, rightly, a cause
of that dislike of independent authorities which still marks the
politics of the average Frenchman and its inevitable corollary, the
reliance on the State to do all things, including the things which it
is not the interest of the State, of any State, to do, the creation of
independent sources of power* For him, the fin des notables began