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Principles of Politics Applicable to a all Governments, trans. Dennis O’Keeffe, ed. Etienne Hofmann, Introduction by Nicholas Capaldi (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).

Author: Benjamin Constant
Editor: Etienne Hofmann
Translator: Dennis O’Keeffe
Introduction: Nicholas Capaldi

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BOOK VIII

On Religious Freedom

Ch. 1. Why religion was so often attacked by the men of the Enlightenment. 131
Ch. 2. On civil intolerance. 135
Ch. 3. On the proliferation of sects. 137
Ch. 4. On the maintenance of religion by government against the spirit of inquiry. 139
Ch. 5. On the reestablishment of religion by government. 140
Ch. 6. On the axiom that the people must have a religion. 141
Ch. 7. On the utilitarian case for religion. 142
Ch. 8. Another effect of the axiom that the people must have a religion. 143
Ch. 9. On tolerance when government gets involved. 144
Ch. 10. On the persecution of a religious belief. 144

chapter one

Why Religion Was So Often Attacked by the Men of the Enlightenment

In examining the proper role of the government with regard to religion, we are not at all questioning the benefits deriving from religious ideas. The more one loves freedom, the more one cherishes moral ideas, the more high-mindedness, courage, and independence are needed, the more it is necessary to have some respite from men, to take refuge in belief in a God.

If religion had always been perfectly free, it would never, in my view, have been other than an object of respect and love. One could hardly conceive the bizarre fanaticism rendering religion in itself an object of hatred or animosity. This recourse of an unhappy being to a just one, of a weak to a good one, should excite, it seems to me, even among those who consider it chimerical, only interest and sympathy. He who regards all religious hopes as erroneous ought to be more profoundly moved than anyone else by this universal chorus of suffering humanity, these requests of the grieving, cast from all corners of the earth at a stony heaven, to wait unanswered, or by the soothing illusion which takes for an answer the confused sound of so many repeated prayers far away on the wind.

The causes of our pains are numerous. Government can [158] banish us and lies calumniate us. We can be wounded by the bonds of a totally false society. A merciless nature punishes us in what we most cherish. The somber and solemn period of old age moves toward us, when things grow dark and seem to retreat, and a kind of coldness and lifelessness spreads on everything around us.

Faced with so much sorrow, we search everywhere for consolations and all our lasting ones are religious. When the world abandons us, we form some kind of alliance beyond it. When men persecute us, we create for ourselves some refuge beyond them. When we see our most cherished chimeras—justice, freedom, and native land—vanish, we flatter ourselves that there exists somewhere a being who will be grateful that we were true, despite our times, to justice, freedom, and fatherland. When we grieve something we love, we throw a bridge across the abyss, and in our thoughts we cross it. Finally, when life escapes us, we wing our way toward another one. Thus, it is the very essence of religion to be a faithful companion, the ingenious and tireless friend of unhappy souls.

Nor is this all. The consoler of those in misfortune, religion is at the same time the most natural of all our emotions. All our physical sensations, all our moral feelings, make it live again in our hearts, without our knowing. Everything which seems boundless to us, which produces in us the idea of immensity, the sight of the sky, the silence of the night, the vast stretches of ocean, everything which leads us to pity or enthusiasm, awareness of a virtuous action, a generous sacrifice, a danger bravely faced, the grief of another given succor and relief, everything which raises in the depths of our souls the primal elements of our nature, the contempt for vice, the hatred of tyranny, nourishes our religious sentiment.

This feeling relates closely to all noble, delicate, and profound passions. Like all of them it has something mysterious about it. For common reasoning cannot explain any of these passions in a satisfactory manner. Love, that exclusive preference for an object we had been able to manage without for a long time and which so many others resemble, the need for glory, that thirst for a fame which must outlast us, the enjoyment [159] we find in devotion, an enjoyment contrary to the habitual instinct of our egotism, melancholy, that sadness without cause, in the depths of which there is a pleasure we could not begin to analyze, a thousand other sensations we cannot describe, which fill us with vague impressions and confused emotions: these are inexplicable in terms of rigorous reasoning. They all have some affinity with religious feeling. All these things aid the development of morality. They make man break out of the narrow circle of his interests, they give the soul that flexibility, that delicacy, that exaltation smothered by habituation to life in the community and the calculations it necessitates.

Love is the most mixed of these intense emotions, because its purpose is a specific pleasure, this purpose being close to us, and ending up in egoism. Religious feeling, for the opposite reason, is the purest of all emotions. It does not flee with youth. It strengthens sometimes in old age, as if heaven had given it to us to console us in the most deprived period of our lives.

A man of genius said that the sight of the Apollo Belvedere or a picture by Raphael uplifted him.1 Indeed, there is in the contemplation of beauty of all kinds something which detaches us from ourselves by making us feel that perfection is of greater worth than we, and which by means of this belief, inspiring in us a brief selflessness, awakens within us the power of sacrifice, which power is the mother of all virtue. Whatever the cause of the emotion, it bears within it something which quickens the blood, arouses a kind of well-being, and heightens in us the sense of our existence and strengths. We become open to a generosity, a courage, and a sympathy above our everyday disposition. Even the corrupted man is better, when he is moved and as long as he stays moved.

I do not at all wish to say that absence of religious feeling proves that any individual lacks morals. There are men [160] in whom the mind is the dominant thing and can give way only to something absolutely clear. These men are routinely given to deep meditation and preserved from most corrupting temptations by the enjoyment of study and the habit of thought. As a result they are capable of scrupulous moral behavior. In the mass of common folk, however, the absence of religious feeling, not deriving from such causes, most commonly indicates, I believe, aridity and frivolity of outlook, a mind absorbed in petty and ignoble interests, a marked sterility in imagination. I make an exception of the case in which these men have been plagued by persecution, which has the effect of causing revolt against its commands. Then it can happen that sensitive but proud men, indignant against a religion imposed on them, blindly reject everything connected to religion. This circumstantial objection, however, in no way affects the general thesis.

I would not have a poor opinion of an educated man, if he were presented to me as a stranger to religious feeling, but a whole people incapable of this feeling would seem to me deprived of a precious faculty and disinherited by nature.

If I were accused here of not defining religious sentiment in a sufficiently precise way, I would ask how one defines with precision that vague and profound part of our moral sensations which by its very nature defies all the efforts of language. How will you define the impression of a deep night, of an ancient forest, of the wind which moans across ruins or above tombs, of the sea which stretches away out of sight? How will you define the emotion caused in you by the songs of Ossian, the church of Saint Peter, the meditation of death, the harmony of sounds or forms? How will you define dreaming, that inner quivering of the soul, where all the powers of the senses and of thought come to gather as though to lose themselves in a mysterious confusion? There is religion at the bottom of all these things. Everything fine, intimate, and profound is religious.

Idea of God, the common center where, above the action of time and the reach of wickedness, there come together all the ideas of justice, love, freedom, and pity which in this brief world [161] constitute the dignity of the human race, permanent seat of everything beautiful, great, and good across the degradation and iniquity of the ages, eternal voice which replies to virtue in its own tongue, when the language of everything around it is low and criminal, call from the present to the future, from earth to heaven, solemn recourse of all the oppressed in all situations, last hope of weakness trampled underfoot, of innocence slain, thought both consoling and noble, no, whatever is done, the human race can never manage without you.

But how does it happen, therefore, that religion, this constant ally, this necessary support, this unique glimmer amid the shadows which surround us, has in all ages been exposed to frequent and bitter attacks? How comes it that the class which has declared itself its enemy has almost always been the most enlightened, the most independent, and the most educated? It is because religion has been distorted. Man has been pursued into this last refuge, this intimate sanctuary of his existence. In the hands of government, religion has been transformed into a menacing institution. Having created most—and the most harrowing—of our sorrows, government has laid claim to the control of man even in his means of consolation. Dogmatic religion, an aggressive and persecuting force, has wished to submit to its yoke both the imagination in its conjecturing and the heart in its needs. It has become a scourge more terrible than those it was intended to enable us to forget.

Hence, in all those eras when men have demanded their moral independence, there is this resistance to religion, seemingly directed against the sweetest of the feelings, and really against only the most oppressive of tyrannies. Intolerance, in putting force on the side of faith, put courage alongside doubt. The fury of the believers has heightened the vanity of the skeptics, and man has in this way managed to turn for himself into a merit what, left to himself, he would have regarded as a misfortune. Persecution provokes resistance. The government, menacing a point of view, whatever it may be, excites all minds of any worth to declare for it. There is in man that which revolts on principle against all intellectual constraint. This spirit [162] is even capable at times of being infuriated. It can cause many crimes. But it springs from everything noble deep in our being.

I have often felt myself struck with sadness and astonishment when reading the famous System of Nature.2 This long-lasting, desperate eagerness by an old man to close off any future lying before him, this inexplicable thirst for destruction, this blind, almost ferocious hatred of an idea so gentle and consoling, seemed to me a strange delirium. I understood it nevertheless when I remembered the perils with which the government surrounded that writer. In all ages atheists have been harassed in their thinking. They have never had the time or freedom to consider their own opinions at their leisure. For them freedom has always been a property that people wanted to rob them of. They have dreamed less about deepening it than justifying or protecting it. But just leave them in peace. They will soon cast a sad glance on the world they have stripped of its gods. They will themselves be astonished at their victory. The heat of the struggle, the thirst to regain the right to free enquiry, all these reasons for exaltation will no longer sustain them. Their imagination, so recently preoccupied with success, now having nothing to do, as it were deserted, will come back on itself. They will see man alone on an earth which must engulf him. The world is lifeless. Ephemeral generations appear there, to suffer and die, isolated creatures of chance. Certain ambitious men quarrel and fight over them, hurt and destroy them. They do not even have the consolation of hoping that one day these monsters will be judged, that they will finally see the day of reparation and vengeance shine. No tie exists between these generations whose portion here is servitude, with nothingness beyond. All communication is broken between the past, [163] the present, and the future. No voice from the races which are gone lives on among the living ones, and their voice too must one day fall away into the depths of the same eternal silence. All this simply makes one feel that if atheism had not been met with intolerance, the aspects of the belief which put people off would have constrained the outlook of its disciples in such a way as to keep them in apathy and silence, in a state of indifference to everything.

I repeat. As long as government leaves religion perfectly independent, no one will have an interest in attacking it. The very idea will not arise. But if government affects to defend it, if it wishes above all to make it an ally, free thinking will not hesitate to attack it.

chapter two

On Civil Intolerance

Today, when intellectual progress is opposed to religious intolerance properly so called, that is to say, to that kind whose purpose is to enforce opinions, a number of governments take refuge behind the need for a certain civil intolerance. Rousseau, who cherished all the ideas of liberty and furnished pretexts for all the claims of tyranny, is still cited in favor of this way of thinking.

“There is,” he says, “a purely civil profession of faith, whose articles it belongs to the sovereign power to fix, not precisely, like religious dogma, but in terms of the feeling of sociability. Without being able to enforce any belief in these dogmas, it can banish from the state anyone who does not believe them, not for being impious but for being unsociable.”3 What is this business of the state deciding which feelings one should adopt? What does it matter to me that the sovereign power does not force me to believe such and such, if it punishes me for what I do not believe? What does it matter that it does not attack me for impiety, if it attacks me as unsociable? What do I care that government eschews theological niceties if it loses its way [164] in a hypothetical morality, no less nice and no less foreign to natural justice?

I know of no system of servitude which has sanctified more fatal errors than the eternal metaphysics of the Social Contract.

Civil intolerance is just as dangerous, more absurd, and above all more unjust than religious intolerance. It is just as dangerous, since it has the same results under a different pretext. It is more absurd, since it is not motivated by conviction. It is more unjust, since the evil it causes is not from duty but a mere calculation.

Civil intolerance borrows a thousand forms and takes refuge behind one administrative pretext after another as it hides away from reason. Defeated on the principle, it disputes the application. We have seen men persecuted for close to thirty centuries, telling the government which released them from their long proscription that if it were necessary for there to be several religions accepted in a State, it was no less necessary for the tolerated sects to be prevented from producing new ones, by way of subdivision.4 But is not each tolerated sect itself a subdivision of some former one? On what grounds can it refuse future generations the same rights claimed by itself from past generations?

It has been proposed, in a country which prides itself on freedom of religion, that none of the recognized churches be able to change its dogmas without government permission. If by chance, however, these dogmas came to be rejected by most of the religious community, could government enforce that majority to profess them? Now, in matters of opinion, the rights of the majority and minority are the same.

One understands intolerance when it imposes on everybody one and the same profession of faith. It is at least consistent. Maybe it thinks it holds men in the sanctuary of truth. But when just two opinions are allowed, since one of the two must necessarily be false, to authorize government to force individuals in one or the other to stay attached to the opinions of their sect, or the sects never to change their opinions, is to authorize government, formally, to lend assistance to error. [165]

chapter three

On the Proliferation of Sects5

This proliferation of sects, which causes such panic, is the most salutary thing for religion. It ensures that religion does not lose its sensibility, to become a mere form, an almost mechanical habit, which combines with all the vices and sometimes with all the crimes.

When religion degenerates thus, it loses all its influence on morality. It makes its abode, so to speak, in a recess of the human mind, where it remains isolated from the rest of existence. In Italy we see mass happen before murder, confession follow it, penance absolve it, and the man, thus freed from guilt, meditating on new murders.

Nothing is simpler. To stop sects subdividing, man must be prevented from reflecting on religion. It is necessary then to prevent his taking any interest in it. It must be reduced to repeated symbols and practices observed. Everything becomes outer show, done unreflectingly, and soon, as a result, without interest or care. In all moral things reflection is the source of life; and freedom is the first and indispensable condition of all reflection.

Some Mongol peoples, whose religion enjoins frequent prayers, persuaded themselves that what pleased the gods in these prayers was that the air struck by the movement of the lips proved to them continuously that man was concerned with them. Consequently these people have invented little prayer wheels which, moving the air in a certain way, endlessly maintain the desired movement, and, while these wheels turn, each person, convinced the gods are satisfied, attends to his business or his pleasures without concern.6 Religion, in more than one European country, has often reminded me of the little wheels of the Mongol peoples.

[166] The proliferation of sects is advantageous to morality in a way which seems not to have been noted yet. All new sects tend to mark themselves off from those they are breaking with by a more scrupulous morality. Often, too, the sect which sees a new breakaway developing within itself, moved to praiseworthy imitation, does not wish to be stuck in this way behind the innovators. The advent of Protestantism undeniably reformed the morals of the Catholic clergy. If the government did not meddle with religion, the sects would proliferate forever. Each new congregation would seek to prove the goodness of its doctrines by the purity of its morals. Each abandoned one would want to defend itself with the same weapons. A blessed struggle would result in which success would be judged by a more austere morality. Morals would improve effortlessly out of a natural impulsion and honorable rivalry. This can be seen in America or even in Scotland, where tolerance is far from complete but where, nevertheless, Presbyterianism has split into numerous branches. Up until now, no doubt, the springing up of sects, far from being accompanied by these salutary effects, has mostly been marked by strife and misfortune. This is because government has got involved. Nature, like Ormuzd, had infused all things with the principle of good. Government, like Ahriman, came to place the principle of evil alongside.7

[167] In opposing the proliferation of sects, governments fail to recognize their own interests. When sects are very numerous in a country, they put mutual checks upon one another and free the government from having to bargain with any one of them in order to contain them. When there is a single dominant sect, the government needs to take countless steps in order to have nothing to fear from it. When there are only two or three, each large enough to threaten the others, there has to be surveillance, nonstop repression. A singular policy indeed! You say you want to keep the peace! So to that effect you prevent opinions from dividing in such a way as to split these fellows up into weak little groups, hardly noticeable, and you set up three or four large, hostile bodies face to face which, thanks to the care you take to keep them large and powerful, are ready to go on the attack at the first signal.

chapter four

On the Maintenance of Religion by Government against the Spirit of Inquiry

However government intervenes in matters pertaining to religion, it does harm.

It does harm when it wants to shore up religion against the spirit of inquiry. For government cannot act on conviction; it does so only on the basis of interest. In granting its favors only to men with the approved opinions, what does it gain? It alienates those who own up to what they think, and are therefore at least frank. The others know how to use facile lies to elude its restrictions, which strike at the scrupulous and are powerless against those who are or become corrupt.

In any case, let me ask the people in government, [168] since this is always the problem requiring resolution when all is said and done: what are your ways of favoring an opinion? Do you entrust the important functions of the State solely to those holding it? If you do, those rebuffed will be angry about the favoritism. Will you have people write and speak for the opinion you are protecting? Others will write or speak in an opposite vein. Will you restrain freedom of writing, speech, eloquence, reason, even irony, or ranting? That will see you involved in new activities, no longer a matter of favoring or convincing, but of stifling and punishing. Do you think your laws can grasp all the nuances and adjust themselves proportionately? Will your repressive measures be light? People will defy them. They will merely embitter without intimidating people. Will they be severe? You will be seen as persecutors. Once you are on that fast and slippery slope, you will seek to stop in vain.

But what successes do you hope for from your persecutions themselves? No king, I think, was surrounded with more prestige than Louis XIV. Honor, vanity, fashion, that all-powerful thing, had assumed positions of obedience under his reign. He lent religion the support of his throne as well as of his example. He had dignity of manner and propriety of speech. His will, constant rather than brusque, steady rather than violent, and never appearing capricious, seemed to honor whatever was in his protection. He believed his soul’s salvation required the maintenance of religion in its most rigid practices, and he had persuaded his courtiers that the salvation of the king’s soul was of especial importance. Despite ever growing solicitude, however, plus the austerity of a long-established court and the recollection of fifty years of glory, even before his death, doubt slipped into people’s minds. We see among the records of the period intercepted letters, written by assiduous flatterers of Louis XIV, which according to Mme. de Maintenon were offensive both to God and the King. The King died. The philosophic current then swept away all the dikes. Intellectual activity made up for the constraint it had impatiently borne, and the result of long suppression was lack of belief pushed to excess. [169]

chapter five

On the Reestablishment of Religion by Government

Government does no less harm and is no less impotent when, in the context of a skeptical age, it wants to reestablish religion. Religion must be restored on its own according to man’s need for it. When you disturb him with alien considerations, you prevent him from feeling the full force of this need. You may say, and rightly, that religion is part of nature: so do not cover up its voice with your own.

Government intervention in defense of religion, when public opinion is unfavorable, has this particular drawback: that religion is then defended by those who do not believe in it. Those who govern, like the governed themselves, are subject to the march of human ideas. When skepticism has penetrated the educated part of a nation, it will come out in the government too. Now, in all eras opinion or vanity is stronger than interests. Those in government can tell themselves in vain that it is to their advantage to favor religion. They can deploy their power on behalf of religion; but they can never bring themselves to show a regard for it. It pleases them to take the public into their confidence as to their mental reservations. They would be scared to seem convinced, lest they be taken for fools. If their first words sanctify the order for belief, their next ones are aimed at winning back for themselves the honors of skepticism. Bad missionaries these, who want to put themselves above their own profession of faith.

chapter six

On the Axiom That the People Must Have a Religion

Thus is established this axiom that the people must have a religion, an axiom which flatters the vanity of those who repeat it, because in repeating it, they separate themselves from this people for whom a religion is necessary.

[170] This axiom is false in itself, insofar as it implies that religion is more necessary for the working-class part of society than for the leisured and opulent classes. If religion is necessary, it is equally so for all men and for all levels of education. The crimes of the poor and uneducated are of a more violent and terrible character, but at the same time they are easier to detect and curb. The law encompasses them, recognizes them, and represses them, easily, because these crimes offend it in a direct way. The corruption of the upper classes is more nuanced and diversified. It slips away from positive laws, mocking their spirit as it eludes their letter, opposing them moreover with wealth, influence, and power. What bizarre reasoning! The poor man can do nothing. He is surrounded by obstacles, tied down by all manner of bonds. He has neither protectors nor supports. He can commit an isolated crime, but everything takes up arms against him as soon as he is in the wrong. He does not find in his judges, drawn always from a hostile class, any consideration for him, nor any chance of impunity in his connections, which are as powerless as he. His conduct never influences the general lot of the society he belongs to. And you want the mysterious protection of religion against him alone. The rich man, on the contrary, is judged by his peers and allies. The punishments they inflict on him always more or less rebound on them. Society lavishes support on him. All material and moral opportunities are his solely as a result of wealth. He can influence things far off. He can overthrow or corrupt. And this is the powerful and fortunate being you want to set free from the yoke which it seems to you indispensable to bring to bear heavily on a weak and helpless one.

I say all this within the standard hypothesis that religion is valuable above all in its reinforcing the penal laws. This is not my opinion, however. I place religion higher. I do not see it at all as a supplement to the gallows or the wheel. There is a common morality, based on calculation, interest, and security, which can, I think, at a pinch do without religion. It can do without it in the case of the rich man because he thinks, and in the case of the poor man because the law terrifies him, and besides, all his activities being laid out in advance, the habit of constant work produces the same result as reflection in his life. But woe betide the people who have only this common morality! It is for the creation of a more elevated [171] morality that religion seems desirable to me. I do not invoke it to repress gross crimes but to ennoble all the virtues.

chapter seven

On the Utilitarian Case for Religion

The defenders of religion often believe they can work wonders representing it as above all useful. What would they say if it were demonstrated to them that they are rendering religion the worst service?

Just as in seeking in all nature’s beauties a positive purpose, an immediate use and application to everyday life, one causes all the charm of this magnificent whole to fade, so in constantly endowing religion with a vulgar utility, one makes it dependent on that utility. It now has only a secondary status, now seeming only a means, and it is consequently degraded.

The word “utilize” [utiliser] has rightly been banned from the French language.8 I do not know if I am wrong, but it seems to me that in everything relating to the soul’s affections and to noble ideas, one should reject the thing, just as in language the word has been rejected.

Moreover, this need for utility both close to hand and, so to speak, material is perhaps the inherent vice of the French character. We could apply to the moral character of our nation what is recounted about the physical laziness of the Turks. It is said that the secretary of a French ambassador to Constantinople took a stroll for a while every evening in a garden. The Turkish neighbors of the ambassador begged him to pardon his secretary and no longer impose on him such a severe punishment. They [172] could not conceive that one could walk for nothing. We apparently cannot conceive that one might believe for nothing. So we are of all the nations the one whose writers have almost always envisaged religion in the most imperfect and narrowest way.9

chapter eight

Another Effect of the Axiom That the People Must Have a Religion

The axiom that the people must have a religion is furthermore of all things the one most calculated to destroy all religion. The people are alerted by a rather sure instinct as to what is going on over their heads. The cause of this instinct is the same one which gives children, servants, and all the dependent classes their insight. Their interest enlightens them as to the secret thoughts of those in charge of their destiny. It is counting too much on the people’s good will to hope they will believe for long what their leaders refuse to believe. I know that atheistic governors with superstitious subjects seem to some statesmen the ideal model today. This sweet chimera cannot be realized, however. The sole result of their endeavor is that the people, seeing them to be unbelievers, break off from their religion without knowing why. What these men gain by prohibiting discussion is to stop people from being enlightened, but not from being impious. This they become by imitation. They treat religion as a foolish thing, as trickery, and each person hands it down to his social inferiors, who in their turn hasten to push it down even further. Thus it declines, more degraded, every day. It was less threatened, and above all less debased, when it was attacked from all sides. It could take refuge in the depths of sensitive souls. Vanity did not fear to seem foolish nor to be demeaning itself by respecting religion.

[173] This is still not all. When a government lends its lofty assistance to a fallen religion in this way, the recognition it demands completes the abasement. Religion is no longer that divine power, coming down from heaven to amaze and reform the world. It is a timid slave and humble dependent which prostrates itself before government, watches its gestures, asks for its orders, flatters the thing which despises it, and teaches the peoples eternal truths only at the government’s pleasure. Its priests, trembling at the foot of their servile altars, stammer in censored words. They do not dare to make the old truths ring out in the accents of courage and conscience. And far from speaking, like Bossuet, to the great of this world, in the name of a God who judges kings, in their terror, under the eye of a disdainful master, they try to work out how they should speak of their God.

chapter nine

On Tolerance When Government Gets Involved

Who would believe it? Government acts adversely, even when it wants to submit the principle of tolerance to its jurisdiction. It imposes on tolerance positive and fixed forms, which are contrary to its nature. Tolerance is nothing else than the freedom of all present and future religions. The Emperor Joseph II wished to establish tolerance. Liberal in his views, he began by ordering a vast inventory of all the religious opinions held by his subjects. Some number or other were registered for admission to the benefit of his protection. What happened? A religion which had been forgotten suddenly came to declare itself, and Joseph II, that tolerant prince, told it that it had come too late. The deists of Bohemia were persecuted in view of their lateness, and the philosopher monarch put himself at the same time at loggerheads with Brabant, which demanded the exclusive domination of Catholicism, and with the unfortunate Bohemians who were asking for freedom of opinion. This limited tolerance [174] embodies a singular error. Only the imagination can satisfy the needs of the imagination. When, in a given polity, you had aimed at tolerating twenty religions, you would still have done nothing for the believers of the twenty-first. Governments which think they are leaving a proper latitude to the governed by allowing them to choose between a fixed number of religious beliefs, are like that Frenchman who, arriving in a village in Germany whose inhabitants wanted to learn Italian, taught them Basque and low Breton.

chapter ten

On the Persecution of a Religious Belief

Finally, the government acts harmfully when it proscribes a religion because it thinks it dangerous, and the harm will not be any the less when the government’s judgment is right. When it punishes the culpable acts a religion causes to be committed, not as religious acts but as culpable ones, it will easily succeed in repressing them. If it attacked them as religious, it would turn them into duties for the fanatical, and if it wanted to reach right back to the thinking which is their source, it would become involved in a labyrinth of endless persecutions, harassments, and iniquities. The only way to weaken an opinion is to establish free discussion. Now, anyone who speaks of free enquiry speaks of distance from government of any type, the absence of any collective intervention. Such enquiry is essentially individual.

In order for persecution, which naturally revolts sensibilities and binds them to the persecuted belief, on the contrary to succeed in destroying this belief, minds must be debased, and not only must the religion one wishes to destroy be subjected to attack, but so must all moral and virtuous sentiments. To persuade a man to despise or abandon one of his fellow creatures whose misfortune is due to an opinion, that is to say, unjustly, to set him today to abandon the doctrine he professed yesterday, because it is suddenly threatened, you have to stifle all the justice and [175] pride in him. To restrict the harsh measures taken against a religion to its ministers, as has been done among us, is to trace an illusory limit. These measures soon attack all those who share the same doctrine, and next they attack all those who pity the misfortune of the oppressed. “Let no one tell me,” said M. de Clermont-Tonnerre in 1791, and events have doubly justified his prediction, “let no one tell me that in pursuing to the bitter end priests said to be refractory, we will extinguish all opposition. I hope the opposite precisely because of my regard for the French nation. For any nation which gives way to force in questions of conscience is a nation so vile, so corrupted, that nothing can be hoped from it, either by way of reason or freedom.”10

Superstition is deadly only when it is protected or threatened. Do not provoke it with injustices; simply take away from it any means of doing harm by its actions. First it will become an innocent obsession, and soon it will extinguish itself, for lack of the ability to appeal by way of its sufferings or command by virtue of its alliance with government. To refuse its mercy and support to persecuted men because they are persecuted thus for what seems to us an error, is to give oneself over to sentiments of inexcusable presumption and fanaticism. These men are defending their rights. Error or truth, the thought of man is his most sacred property. Error or truth, the tyrants are equally guilty when they attack it. He who proscribes superstitious speculation in the name of philosophy and he who proscribes independent thought in the name of God, are equally deserving of the execration of men of good will. [176] Allow me to finish with another quotation from M. de Clermont-Tonnerre. He will not be accused of exaggerated principles. Although he was a friend of freedom, or perhaps because he was a friend of freedom, he was almost always rebuffed by both parties in the Constituent Assembly. He died a victim of his moderation. His opinion, I think, will carry some weight. “Religion and the state,” he said, “are two quite distinct and separate things, whose bringing together can only distort both one and the other.11 Man has a relationship with his creator. He constructs for himself or is given various ideas about this relationship. This system of ideas is called religion. Each person’s religion is therefore his opinion of his relationship to God. Each man’s opinion being free, he may take up or not take up such religion.12 The opinion of the minority cannot be subordinated to that of the majority. No opinion can therefore be commanded by social consensus. What is true of religion is also true of cults. The cult is what each person professes in conjunction with those of like religious opinion. The forms of the cult are the agreed rite among those who profess the same religion. The acts of the cult are the stern duty of the man holding the religious opinions which prescribe them. Thus the cult and its acts share in the nature and the freedom of opinion of which they are the necessary consequence. Thus what is true of opinion is also true of the cult and its acts.13 Religion touches all times, all places, all governments. Its sanctuary is the consciousness of man, and consciousness is the sole faculty which man can never sacrifice to a social convention.14 Religion will not lend itself to any association, any relation of supremacy or submission with political [177] government. . . .15 The political body must not have dominion over any religion. It must not reject any of them unless the cult in question is a threat to social order.”16

CONSTANT’S NOTES

[1. ]Hofmann has not identified this man of genius. The passage is repeated in Constant’s account of Mme. de Staël’s Corinne in the Publiciste of 12 May 1807. Ephraïm Harpaz in his edition of Constant suggests Fauriel or Charles de Villers. Benjamin Constant, Recueils d’articles, 1795–1871, with introduction, notes, and commentaries by Ephraïm Harpaz, Geneva, Droz, 1978, p. 88, n. 6 bis.

[2. ]Paul Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach, Système de la nature ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moral, M. Mirabaud, London, 1770.

[3. ]See Constant’s Note A at the end of Book VIII.

[4. ]See Constant’s Note B at the end of Book VIII.

[5. ]Some of the advantages Constant observes in relation to the proliferation of sects had already been spotted by Adam Smith, Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, new translation with notes and observations by Germain Garnier, Paris, H. Agasse, 1802, t. IV, pp. 203–212.

[6. ]Hofmann was not able to find out where Constant got his information on the prayer wheels, but his explanation is certainly wrong. M. Jean Eracle, curator of the Geneva Museum of Ethnography, has kindly furnished some information on the subject: “What is known in the West as a ‘prayer wheel’ and takes different forms and sizes belongs to Tantrist Buddhism, both in its Tibeto-Mongol and Sino-Japanese forms. The proper name of this object is ‘Wheel of the Law.’ Whoever makes it turn participates in the teaching of the Buddha who, according to the venerated expression, ‘set in motion the wheel of the law.’ The prayer wheel then has symbolic significance and is not a way of ‘praying without effort.’ Moreover, whoever works it generally recites sacred invocations at the same time. Thus one often sees pilgrims telling beads with one hand and making the wheel turn with the other. The wheel is thus like a thought condenser. Moreover, it links the body to the words of the invocations and to the devout thoughts of the person praying.” Extract from a letter from M. Jean Eracle to the editor.

[7. ][For a compendious discussion of these Persian (specifically Zoroastrian) deities, see David J. Levy, “‘The Good Religion’: Reflections on the History and Fate of Zoroastrianism,” in his The Measure of Man, Claridge, 1993, pp. 170–190. Translator’s note]

[8. ]Jacques Necker, Du pouvoir executif dans les grands Etats, s.l., 1792, t. II, p. 205. Here the economist makes himself a grammarian and criticizes the use of certain neologisms.

[9. ]See Constant’s Note C at the end of Book VIII.

[10. ]Stanislas-Marie de Clermont-Tonnerre, Réflexions sur le fanatisme, in Recueil des opinions de Stanislas-Marie de Clermont-Tonnerre, Paris, Migneret, 1791, t. IV, pp. 98–99.

[11. ]Stanislas-Marie de Clermont-Tonnerre, Opinion sur la propriété des biens du clergé, novembre 1789, in Recueil des opinions . . . , op. cit., t. II, p. 71.

[12. ]Ibid., pp. 74–75. Constant has not given us the following passage: “he can keep it or leave it. If opinions are free, no one can bind the opinions of others. No one can bind even his own, for being free, he reserves the right to abandon it if he judges it wrong.”

[13. ]Stanislas-Marie de Clermont-Tonnerre, Opinion sur la propriété . . . , op. cit, pp. 75–76.

[14. ]Ibid., p. 73.

[15. ]Ibid., pp. 73–74. The actual text has: “If religion precludes any association, any relationship of supremacy or subjection with political government, the social pact admits for its part no religious clause.”

[16. ]Ibid., p. 72. The original text is: “I maintain that the social body is by its nature a stranger to religion, such that it cannot profess any religion, and that it cannot reject any unless this religion is a menace to public order. . . .”

[A. [Refers to page 136.]]Rousseau. Contrat Social. Livre IV. Ch. 8.17 He adds: “Only if someone, after having recognized publicly these same dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death. He has committed the worst of crimes: he has lied before the law.”18 But he who has the misfortune of not believing these dogmas, cannot admit his doubts without giving himself up to banishment. And if his affections hold him back, if he has a family, a wife, children, friends he hesitates about leaving to throw himself into exile, is it not you, you alone, who are forcing him to what you call the worst of crimes, lying before the law? I will say, moreover, that in these circumstances, this lie seems to me far from being a crime. When so-called laws demand the truth from us only to banish us, we do not owe them the truth.19

[B. [Refers to page 136.]]Address by the Jews to the French government in 1808.20

[C. [Refers to page 142.]]Justice demands that I except Bossuet, Fénelon, M. Necker,21 and M. de Chateaubriand. Even so, the latter thought it necessary in order to uphold Christianity to paint it as particularly useful to poetry.22 This urge to see religion as useful has led its defenders among us to endless childish arguments. Lent has been justified as good for the navy. What a wretched point of view! Moreover, how could this justification apply to landlocked countries which cannot have a navy?

[B. [Refers to page 136.]]Address by the Jews to the French government in 1808.20

[17]The reference is correct.

[18]Ibid.

[19]This obviously recalls the controversy Constant raised against Kant in Des réactions politiques. See Hofmann’s thesis, Première Partie, Ch. 2, p. 143.

[20]The date is wrong. Constant is referring to the Réponse d’Abraham Furtado, Président de l’Assemblée des Juifs, au discours des commissaires de S.M.I. et R. le 18 septembre 1806, published in the Moniteur of 22 September 1806, pp. 1171–1172, and published as a pamphlet (BN, 4o Ld 184 225).

[21]For example, in De l’importance des opinions religieuses, London, 1788, and in the Cours de morale religieuse, Geneva, 1800.

[22]François-René de Chateaubriand, Génie du christianisme. Deuxième Partie: Poétique du christianisme. The first edition of this work appeared in 1802.