ABSTRACT
The Institut National, in year 5, proposed as a subject for a prize competition this question: ‘What are the means upon which to found the morality of a people?’ This is one of the best questions that a learned society has ever proposed. It had a degree of utility, especially for France, which has no one to run the Republic except for men raised under the monarchy. Unfortunately, this question did not produce a single response that the Institute judged worthy of the prize. Subsequently, the Institute rephrased the question with a restriction that
made it even more difficult to deal with. It asked, not ‘what are the means’, but ‘what are the institutions,’ etc. If it was not possible to deal with the assigned problem when all means are at one’s disposition, one must be even less successful when forbidden to consider ‘means’ which are not ‘institutions’. Finally, another revision once again reduced the resources left to the
contestants, and went so far as to trace out a scheme from which they were not permitted to stray. Consequently, the Institute, on the report of a panel of adjudicators, judged that none of the submissions fulfilled the requirements of the competition, and retired the question. Even though the essay that you are about to read was entered in this last
competition, I am one of the first to applaud the decision taken by the Institute, which conformed fully with the rules they adopted. But I will take the liberty of articulating a motivation that I do not believe they considered. This, in fact, will respond to the sole criticism that the panel addressed to my submission which would otherwise, without any doubt, have been treated far more favourably in their report. According to the panel, my method ‘presents, instead of an analysis,
tableaux which show in action what others addressed by means of theory and system: but it was precisely theory and system that the competition required’. In the first place, I believe that I accompanied my tableaux with enough
analysis for one to understand the argument; let the reader judge. In the second place, I believed that a work submitted to an open competition set by a learned body was not destined solely for that institution; that its members
did not set the question merely to enlighten themselves, but rather to encourage work which could influence general opinion, produce useful truths, and destroy dangerous errors. One cannot attain this goal with abstractions, but rather, if I am not mistaken, by clothing reason in the grace of elocution and the charm of sentiment. Without doubt, I am far from having achieved this goal, but should the panel blame me for trying? As my principal desire, in composing this work, was to be useful, I had no
choice but to publish it. What could be a more favourable time for the publication of a work on the morals of a nation than this, when two men, of eminent talent and morality unquestioned even by their greatest enemies, conceived of the project of founding a stable Republic on the observation of rules of morality, and were acclaimed by their fellow citizens as First Consuls? Certainly, it is in such a period that one is permitted to engage in dreams of a philanthropic imagination. My only regret is that I have reduced to the length of an academic discourse, a work that, based upon the importance of its subject and the extensions to which it is susceptible, deserves a book. Notes which are too long to go at the bottom of the page, are placed at
the end. The places in the text where they belong are marked with an uppercase letter. Most involve digressions and citations that, while related to the subject, would interrupt the flow of ideas.
