there is, for the people, no other right than to serve
and obey? The mere doubt is an act of impiety toward the people."

So far the political philosophy of Lamartine, the legal argument
against the king, strikes us as less logical and just. We may agree
with him in principle, but we cannot assent to the abstract justice of
his conclusions.

"The nation," says the head of the present provisional government of
France, "possessing within itself the inalienable sovereignty which
rests in reason, in the right and the will of each citizen, the
aggregate of which constitutes the people, possesses certainly the
faculty of modifying the exterior form of its sovereignty, to level
its aristocracy, to dispossess its church of its property, to lower or
even to suppress the throne, and to govern themselves through their
proper magistrates. But as the nation had a right to combat and
emancipate itself, she also had a right to watch over and consolidate
the fruits of its victories. If, then, Louis XVI., a king too recently
dispossessed of sovereign power--a king in whose eyes all restitution
of power to the people was tantamount to a forfeiture--a king ill
satisfied with what little of government remained in his hands,
aspiring to reconquer the part he had lost--torn in one direction by a
usurping assembly, and in another by a restless queen or humble
nobility, and a clergy which made Heaven to intervene in his cause, by
implacable emigrants, by his brothers running all over Europe to drum
up enemies to the Revolution; if, in one word, Louis XVI., KING,
appeared to the nation a living conspiracy against her liberty; if the
nation suspected him of regretting in his soul too much the loss of
supreme power--of causing the new constitution to stumble, in order to
profit by its fall--of conducting liberty into snares to rejoice in
anarchy--of disarming the country because he secretly wished it to be
defeated--then the nation had a right to make him descend from the
throne, and to call him to her bar, and to depose him in the name of
her own dictatorship, and for her own safety. If the nation had not
possessed this right, the right to betray the people with impunity,
would, in the new constitution, have been one of the prerogatives of
the crown."

This is a pretty fair specimen of revolutionary reasoning; but it is
rather a definition of Democracy, as Lamartine understands it, than a
constitutional argument in favor of the decapitation o