From the journal of M. Duval
In my life I have been the premiere of France, overthrown a King, and survived assassination attempts by the Ministry of Justice and anti-semite street bravos. In all this time I have learned a few things about human nature. The most recent lesson to have accumulated into fullness in my mind is this: Men are not fit to govern themselves. Each successive government of France in my lifetime has failed, not due to some particular error or mistake that could have been corrected, but by the very mechanism of the state itself. By maintaining or establishing popular institutions and then attempting to impose some constitutional order upon the people, regimes enter a slow death spiral. Either the popular institutions are left free to alter the constitution at will, creating anarchy and chaos; or the popular institutions are subverted and made stagnant by agents of a constitutional establishment.
Any regime which attempts to offer reforms only hastens its own death, conceding to the mob is a death sentence. Ironically the new regime has hit upon a piece of the formula, incomplete but still intriguing. They have spurned popular institutions, which were so eagerly foisted in the early days of Revolution or Restoration by the previous revolutionaries of our era, and they govern by a committee. Their mistake I think was popularizing the names of that committee. Had they maintained some secrecy they would not be so easily influenced by the popular will. But doing away with popular institutions is not the only element necessary for good order and sound government, in my opinion. I have come to believe that constitutionalism itself is also a dire threat to peace and prosperity. The very order which an establishment encircles around like a serpent constrains their hand, at the very onset of their regimes they have signed their own death warrants by forbidding any sort of rapid action. Even a Bonaparte could not lead an army to victory if he had to stick to the original battle plan on pain of desertion by his men.
Therefore it can only be deduced by rational men that liberty, the state of self-possession and freedom of action that man is born into, is at fundamental odds with democracy and constitutions. That goal of constitutional democracy, ordered liberty, cannot be obtained by those means. The state exists only to secure liberty, that is the duty of civilization and therefore order, to protect that which we are provided by nature. This sole function of government cannot be achieved through popular institutions or constitutional limitations on state power. How then can man govern? How can he be governed? These are the questions men of reason must put themselves to. All moral and material progress of civilization has been for the end of enabling a Platonic society. The rapid increase of wealth and knowledge in these past few centuries are the sign Mankind is waiting for. It has finally become possible that Man, ungovernable and unable to govern, has reached the point that he is capable of creating a state that goes beyond these mortal limitations.