[What is Property? by P. J. Proudhon]@TWC D-Link bookWhat is Property? CHAPTER I 25/39
The people commenced to reason thus:-- If the king is our servant, he ought to report to us; If he ought to report to us, he is subject to control; If he can be controlled, he is responsible; If he is responsible, he is punishable; If he is punishable, he ought to be punished according to his merits; If he ought to be punished according to his merits, he can be punished with death. Five years after the publication of the brochure of Sieyes, the third estate was every thing; the king, the nobility, the clergy, were no more.
In 1793, the nation, without stopping at the constitutional fiction of the inviolability of the sovereign, conducted Louis XVI.
to the scaffold; in 1830, it accompanied Charles X.to Cherbourg.
In each case, it may have erred, in fact, in its judgment of the offence; but, in right, the logic which led to its action was irreproachable.
The people, in punishing their sovereign, did precisely that which the government of July was so severely censured for failing to do when it refused to execute Louis Bonaparte after the affair of Strasburg: they struck the true culprit.
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