ABSTRACT
But, in addition to these institutions, there are moral institutions narrowly described, which are a subdivision of all the others, and are distinct from these only because civil, political and religious institutions may have as objects, besides morality, safety, prosperity, general and particular wellbeing, and moral institutions have as a special object, and often a sole object, the morality of citizens. It is obvious that the Institut National, in demanding ‘what are the
institutions upon which to base the morality of a people’, intends only these moral institutions. The question thus reduced offers yet an immense field; extended to all
social institutions, it would be manifestly disproportionate to the time given for its treatment, with the brevity that habit has prescribed for works presented to literary contests, and perhaps also with the power of a single man. Furthermore, that question has been resolved with respect to civil, political and religious institutions; it was in 1789, when liberty and property were proclaimed the objects of all duties as of all rights; it was in 1792 that liberty and property were placed under the protection of equality and under the guarantee of a republican régime. It is not the Institut National of France, it is not an association composed of members who have long shared a republic more ancient than the French republic, and which had the immortal honour of giving it birth, I speak of the republic of letters; it is not the Institut, we say, which would ever ask if there are better institutions upon which to base the morality of a people than property, liberty, equality and the republican government, each of which serves as a guarantee for the others. The system of moral institutions best for founding the morality of a people,
the sole object of the proposed research, seems to embrace three particular types of institutions: those which enlighten the mind, like public education; those which warm the soul, such as monuments and national rites; those which conduct all the faculties of a man by custom, such as domestic institutions. In effect, morality is not really established in us except insofar as it rests upon our knowledge, it enters into our needs, and it shares our habits. Public teaching comprises schools, societies of instruction, the sale of
books and newspapers, the public libraries, spectacles. Monuments comprise not only edifices dedicated to virtue and talent, but
also all the tributes to the fine arts, such as tombs, obelisks, statues, etc. National rites comprise not only public celebrations of some happy and
honourable event, but also public mourning on the occasion of general unhappiness; such was the funeral celebration of an illustrious warrior or of a peacemaker even more illustrious since la Vendée [1793: a royalist uprising in the provinces of the west]; such also could be an annual penance for some great fault from which a nation desired to preserve itself in future. The domestic institutions preoccupied the ancient legislators; the long
history of the Chinese people, that of the Jewish people, prove perhaps that a nation survives as much by its domestic habits as by its laws and magistrates.
