The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c12.18

c12.18

Such being the facts, it may not be quite fanciful to guess that if in August 1914 the Germans had succeeded in capturing Paris, as they had planned to do, probably the first thing that the French mob would have done after the defeat would have been to raise the cry, "Down with the republic", "Back to the Crown". That, however, is an open question. But it is a most undisputed phenomenon that none of the greatest thinkers and writers of France were advocates of a republic. Voltaire, the great intellectual protagonist of the eighteenth century was not decidedly anti-monarchical. Montesquieu was not an advocate of the kingless polity. His idealization of the English limited monarchy, as the system in which the alleged separation of the legislative, executive and judicial powers is wrongly believed to ensure the freedom of the people, is perhaps the most widely known fact in the literature of political science. Among the post-Revolutionary men of letters Thiers, though a critic of Napoleon III's absolutism, was a staunch believer in the principles of constitutional monarchy. And his rival and colleague, Guizot, the philosopher and historian, was the right hand man of Napoleon III in his almost Pisistratean "tyranny". And about the same time (1834) Victor Hugo was in a mood to idolize the first Napoleon. The cult found expression in lines like the following: