Democracy has corrupted politics so as to make of it a party struggle for power; it has corrupted public education so as to make of it an instrument of religious war in support of the secular and republican indoctrination of our youth; and it has corrupted men’s work so that it has become an inexpiable class war. This class warfare, spilling over from the workshop and the factory, has finally poisoned all social relationships, mobilising religion, politics and violence on either side, inviting foreign aid, unleashing civil wars, and provoking immense world conflicts.
1. The first function of a new corporative order will be to restore work to its true end, which is family prosperity, and to its primary reality, that of the free association of heads of families for the safeguarding of their material life and their best advantage through a prudent co-operative of their goods and of their work.
2. It is by bringing the social problem down to its strictest and most human proportions, by putting it in the context of local and regional communities, trading, industrial and professional activities, instead of imprudently extending it to the national level, or even the multinational and international level, that collaboration and mutual service between the various members of the world of work will prevail in men’s minds, as they do in daily reality, over the antagonism of private interests and systematic class warfare.
To rent land or to cultivate it, to lend money or invest it in an undertaking, to employ workmen or to apply for work, are all fraternal human acts, mutual agreements establishing a common interest, the success, stability and better development of which has to be ensured by the prudence of the beneficiaries. It is amazing that in our Christian political society, these myriads of human relationships in the material order have become as many sparks in one great blaze of hatred, firebrands of discord between faceless and soulless collective powers in a world suddenly struck by destructive madness.
3. The immense complexity of modern economic life must not discourage those who invoke fraternity from proposing clear ecological principles, simple corporatist solutions to the social problem, drawn from reflection on nature and on history. Such principles will in any case be truer, more just, and more likely to succeed than any of the inhuman and irrational theories of those who, in the name of liberty and equality, have piled ruin upon ruin and have led the modern world to unavoidable catastrophe.
"All have sinned", that is all the social classes, who have been left to their instincts by the proclamation of unbridled freedom and the abolition of all moral and legitimate political order, resulting in a return to the law of the strongest. "The System" is the cause of this permanent "collective sin". Everyone shares in it, partly through necessity, partly through cowardice, selfishness or hatred. It is a matter between each person and his neighbour, between himself and the Church, between himself and God. It is not our system. Our task is to organise fraternity where hatred has been established, and peace where anarchical conflict reigns.
1. The industrialists, prompted by capitalist interest and pursuit of the greatest profit, unleashed this conflict. Competition, the first law of the market, obliged them to keep down cost prices, salaries and working conditions, which are easier to squeeze than the other costs of production. Thus was born the proletariat, plunged into a state of dereliction worse than that of ancient slavery, worse than that of beasts of burden and machines. The shame was that of the aggressive employers, of the system, rather than that of the men themselves.
2. The workers entered the conflict very belatedly, after they had succeeded in grouping themselves in defence of their daily bread and that of their children. Their revolts, their strikes, their coalitions were all just! But lacking any recognised social authority, their unions failed to moderate their claims and thus launched the working masses against religion, the country, the army, bourgeois society, and even against their own livelihoods! The shame is that of revolutionary unionism, rather than that of the workers.
3. The politicians took advantage of the misery of class warfare to establish their own position and fortune. They gave scandalous facilities to the "great bourgeois dynasties", so that they might appropriate the nation’s principal sources of wealth, reducing the State to an employee of plutocracy. Then, deceiving the working people, they politicised the workers’ movement, making the trade union organisations mere stepping stones to the conquest of power, to all the fine positions in political life, to be shared discreetly with the agents of high finance. Shame on the parasitical politicians, and, even more, shame on democracy!
4. The big banks – at first in ever closer symbiosis with the republican State and then devoured by the socialist State, which became the biggest capitalist and greatest usurer of the country – and the great banking organisations – whether of private or public status, holding money, lending it to whom they like, how and when they like and on the conditions of their choosing – have been and still are the only winners in this social war. When the banks are nationalised, the technocratic financiers take over from the private financiers, playing the same game in their own interests and for their own political views. State nationalisation aggravates the evil of capitalism, and the loser is always the country. It is the country that must be freed from these controls, and in the first place from control by the banks, by restoring the country’s own institutions.
Contrary to an impression too widely diffused amongst public opinion by politicians, most Frenchmen – and most other men too! – earn their living in companies and enterprises of small or medium importance. It is these that we should first be concerned to free from capitalist, trade unionist and state control, and so restore them to their spontaneous ecological balance, to their fraternity. Large scale industry will have to follow. On the other hand, regulating everything on the model of large scale industry necessarily leads to the systematic destruction of the smaller enterprises.
1. The solution to the social problem begins with the restoration of the basic economic community, the enterprise, and the rehabilitation of its responsible head, the entrepreneur. The enterprise must be solid, so that the entrepreneur may have the freedom to be a true manager, enterprising, honest and human. At the present time, small and medium sized enterprises are crushed by so many burdens and have become such a battleground, that no stability, prudence or justice is possible for them.
The banks absorb the principal part of their profits and decide on their survival or their death by releasing or blocking credit. Bureaucracy, with its excessive rules and regulations, its fiscal pressure, its extravagant social charges, work inspections, social assessments, factory politics, etc., has made life intolerable for them, damping all initiative, effort and progress. The trade unions add to the insecurity and deterioration of the social climate with their political strikes, inopportune demands, and working to rule, the goal of which is alien to the interests of their own members, aiming as it does at the ruin of the enterprise and the ruin of the national economy itself, to the benefit of the foreigner and of subversion.
2. All these intruders must be chased out of enterprise; and to whom should enterprise be given if not to the entrepreneur, to its patron and its own master, its very best manager, the one best placed to defend its common interests and to do justice to the reasonable demands of all its members. And so much the better if this patron is the owner, for he is then the most reliable person to take charge. If he is not the owner, then social and corporative law will tie his fate closely to that of the enterprise or company whose director or manager he is constitutedby law.
The rules of the corporation, on the other hand, will oblige this patron, freed from all aberrant controls and restored to his full personal authority, to establish organs for mutual dialogue amongst all the members of the economic community he directs, between themselves and with him, whatever be the situation.
The "enterprise committees" will be the basic cell of the corporative organisation, gathering around the patron the various partners of the enterprise: the senior personnel, the workers, the workers' representatives in the larger companies – who are elected by separate trade unions that removed from all ideological association, their competence and seniority being taken into account, and – why not? – the shareholders, if there are any, or their elected representatives, without any intervention from the banking organisations. Capitalist society was careful to keep "capital" and "labour" apart, assigning them almost opposing rather than common goals, the shareholders taking no interest in the enterprise other than making an investment, and the workers demanding their rights in opposition to the enterprise and its management. By gathering them together into one and the same institution, representing the enterprise’s community of destiny, an end will be put to this artificial opposition.
These elected committees can meet either in small groups of those interested in discussing a particular question, such as the organisation of work, suggestions for improving a workshop, etc., or in a general meeting for questions of common interest. The corporative rules of enterprise, once wisely settled, will indicate how frequently these meetings should be called and the powers of the various bureaux and assemblies, taking into account the different elements of the enterprises: size, character, type of production or service, etc. Small firms of a craft or family character are not to be weighed down by regulations proper to large industrial complexes.
Under the effective lead of the patron or director who, by virtue of his situation, can and must have the preponderant voice, the enterprise committees will discuss everything that concerns workers’ conditions: their salary demands, questions of security, employment, promotion, holidays, leave, etc., They will naturally be led to examine the running of the enterprise, good or bad, on which the fate of all its members depends, and consequently they will be led to examine, to a greater or lesser extent as the case requires, the management of the enterprise, although the power of decision will at all times remain in the hands of the head of the enterprise since, after he has taken counsel, this is still his personal responsibility. The enterprise committees, hierarchically organised, should finally be able to replace the shareholders’ meetings and even the boards of directors of liberal capitalism. As social and corporative organs, in firms of any importance, they should create the common "affectio societatis" of the different groups making up the company, gradually transforming the work contract into a social contract, and giving staff easy access, under one form or another, to more than just personal ownership of their craft, but to ownership in the company itself. They should establish for the staff, over and above a possible individual share in the profits, a collective corporative patrimony based on a percentage of one or more financial elements of the company: turnover, benefits, salaries, and self-finance. They should determine, when the occasion arises, the common benefits, financial or otherwise, that the company might grant the employees and the shareholders. Finally, they should be considered, depending on the importance of the company, as the first court of social law, taking care of social insurance, leisure, family and charitable works, but also organising apprenticeships, promotions, etc. Naturally, small companies will be immediately included in the craft and trade corporations or professional unions, where they too will find a corporative patrimony and social advantages. Whatever the technical means and the institutions adopted, which can vary according to needs and circumstances, the aim is always to ensure the personalisation of the various functions of management, investment in capital, and labour, and the cohesion of all around the head of the company in order to face external difficulties and in a completely natural way to maintain human relationships, mutual respect and justice, within the work community.
Social Catholicism has given rise to admirable realisations of enterprises of this type, boldly patronal and communitarian. If they were unable to stand up to the coalition of synarchies, it is because this social doctrine was codified and protected by law, the law of a State, which itself is both patronal and communitarian, in other words monarchic. But the way remains open…
3. All this presupposes an overhaul, within the corporative system, of the laws of Labour, commercial and company laws, particularly the laws of the anonymous company of protestant capitalist origin, a type of democracy rigged by money which allows every kind of abuse, and which royalist social Catholics – and they only – have stood up against. Consequently, investment, the money market and the organisation of the stock exchange will be cleansed, so as to fix and stabilise capital and put an end to anonymous financial dealings involving transfers of ownership, changes of management or even of the company itself, unscrupulous speculation, secret agreements, fraudulent trusts, and life-and-death struggles, all of which wound the workforce and fleece the shareholders, dominating and crushing the markets in the interests of money without laws or frontiers. "Freedom to start a business", "business results", and "production and sales strategies" will have to be adjusted according to the new regional and national corporative framework, a salutary setting where business can flourish, the normal terrain for honest and fruitful agreements.
Families need the communal life for the organisation of their security, their prosperity and their stability. Left to themselves, enterprises would have no system of reference to control their expansion. They must lend each other mutual aid and organise themselves together, otherwise they will compete against one another ruthlessly and find themselves at the mercy of the most powerful and of the most inhuman among them or in the hands of the big bank and of the State.
A Charter of corporations authorises this awareness and prudent realisation of an economic and social mutual aid organisation. It should be conceived by the interested persons themselves, with the blessing of the Church, and with the trust, help and arbitration of the monarchical State. Such is corporatism after the French model, "the Christian social order", formulated by La Tour du Pin in an admirable synthesis of freedom and organisation, of initiative and planning, of profit and social justice. Such were the beginnings of the promising Charter of Work, the Trade Corporations and the Agricultural Corporation promulgated by Marshal Pétain, head of the French State, the major work of the national revolution (1940-1944). Numerous institutions still survive from that work, but unfortunately they have been distorted through the return in full force of the triple democratic system of control, the capitalo-socialo-state system.
1. Trade Corporations – easily realisable in many professions and, moreover, spontaneously created or reclaimed – organise themselves for the purpose of better fulfilling their specific service in society and, to that end, they seek to maintain their internal solidarity and to defend their rights and privileges. Their members, as co-proprietors of their trade, necessarily share in its ups and downs. Through their representatives, they come together in joint councils of equal representation at the local, regional and national level. They express the views of the business personnel and are elected by their respective unions of employers and workers, and by the proprietary shareholders, if there are any.
These corporations, recognised by the public authorities, are endowed with publicly recognised legal rights and prerogatives and with internal regulations and legislation (Charter of Work, art. 39). They organise their profession themselves, establishing their own rules for master craftsman, journeyman and apprentice, laying down the conditions of practice and of aptitude and everything that concerns the life and prosperity of the profession.
2. The fundamental principle of this strictly revolutionary organisation, halfway between liberalism and collectivism, is that of personal property and of professional solidarity, whereby the centre of interest in economic life is transferred away from the sphere of things to the sphere of persons, away from the products and profits of work, the object manufactured, and the dividend, to the producers themselves, in accordance with the liberating formula, "The profession unites, the product divides" (Jean Paillard), and I would add, "profits bring conflict". The corporation unites and reconciles men, rather than mobilising and transforming materials, resources and money, all the while guaranteeing the quality of the product or the service.
The role of the corporations is not merely social, as the interventionists and synarchic planners claim and would have liked it so much to be, even at Vichy, against the will of the Marshal! It is principally economic, because it is first and foremost human and Christian.
This permanent combination of both social and economic roles, far from injuring anyone’s acquired rights or their situation and authority – be they employers, shareholders or workers – will on the contrary liberate them. The employers will be liberated from the crushing employers’ federation, the shareholders from the monopolising financial intermediaries, and the workers from the agitation of the trade unions. The socio-economic pyramid will not change, but it will be freed from its oppressive divisive, destructive and ever parasitical superstructures. Professionals will find themselves together and discover that they are free.
1. The first activity of corporative life is of a religious, moral and human order. The personalisation of professional life restores honesty to relationships among members of the same professional community. It encourages mutual aid and disinterested service and, consequently, honest external relationships in buying and selling, for which the corporation stands guarantee. The policing of the profession is ensured by the corporation itself and its industrial tribunals, with simplicity, rapidity, discretion, moderation and justice. It prevents disorders more often than it cures or sanctions them, as is the benefit with any personalist and communitarian authority.
Now, it is a great moral virtue and a capital value for economic life to be governed by honesty of service, work and product (solidity, finish, quality), which leads in turn to honesty in allocating salaries and distributing profit.
2. The second corporative activity is of an economic order. Through the corporations, the economic life is "self-directed" (Salazar). The elected corporative councils – made up of people from every level, aided if necessary by economic advisers, and at the highest level always in the presence of a representative from public authority – discuss production plans and programmes, their time scale and placement. They discuss the creation, ordering, restructuring and restoration of business, their number and diversification; their mode of finance and capital investment; their conditions of service, salaries and profit-sharing; the constitution and running of the communitarian bank and of the corporative patrimony.
They are all things that employers wrongly thought were their reserved domain and which, for that reason, were totally lost on them to the advantage of higher powers who trifled with their interests and their persons, as yesterday they trifled with their salaried personnel, and even with their most eminent collaborators. Standing halfway between utopian, democratic self-management and state control, corporative self-regulation is a marvel of freedom, dialogue and ordered flexibility. And of effectiveness.
Advertising, for example, a necessary means of information and of regularising economic exchange, becomes reintegrated within the corporative organisation, whether it be in the sales and after sales services of industries, whose technico-commercial functions are highly qualified and irreplaceable, or whether it be in retail businesses or sales representation, whose work, competence and responsibility is advertising. It will be the end of crazy and irresponsible "mass media" competition, whose advertising bombardment is degrading and monopolistic. And then we will behold the press, the radio, the walls of our cities and the whole of our cultural life freed from this strangely polluting advertising, the mark of a civilisation invaded by the powers of money. Information for clients concerning the best products and for manufacturers concerning the real needs of the market will be restored to the control of the corporations concerned, for whom honesty is the rule.
Another example: the utilisation of savings will easily and normally be carried out by regional or national banks and stock exchanges, which will be truly corporative organisations. It is not right that savings should be systematically drained away under the pretext of concentration and investment by enormous financial organs, companies, banks or public funds, such as the fund for Deposits and Savings, which manage the millions – one can easily see why! – put into national savings and social security. All that money is the property of the French people, but it has become a means of domination for State technocrats, politicians and financiers, because it serves to finance their grandiose schemes, which they dare to describe as social : those post-war urban monstrosities, for example, whereby soulless populations are enclosed in inhuman towns. Let the French people have back their savings! Let them invest it in their own regions in human and local projects through the intermediary of regional corporative banks, away from socialo-capitalism’s mad financial circles. And similarly with many other rectifications, which all together constitute a veritable economic revolution. It will be the advent of a general ecological prudence whose extraordinary value for the spontaneous regulation of all economic activity will outclass every other system.
3. The third corporative activity is of a social and charitable order. It is by enterprise committees, regional and national corporative councils, that all those services will be guaranteed – services that the monstrous, irresponsible, anonymous and bureaucratic social security of our modern democratic States now claims to undertake, but with the lamentable results we all know too well: punitive deductions, muddle and waste, surfeits and shortages, and a prodigious increase in expenditure.
Whatever families are unable to provide for out of their own savings and through their mutual insurance and credit organisations, the corporations will provide: sickness, accidents, unemployment, retirement, apprenticeship bursaries, credit for starting a business, buying a home, leisure… Everything will be organised as fast, as simply and as suitably as possible, firstly at the level of the social fund of the enterprise and then at the highest level by drawing on the corporative patrimony at national and regional council level.
In this way, at the least expense, the protection of French workers and their families will be suitably, justly and generously ensured against the hazards of life. They will be helped to rise to their deserved social level, without the enslaving and corrupting influence of state control, plutocracy or trade unionism.
"Corporatism" is not an inconceivable utopia; nor is it something either excessively free or excessively regulated. It is simply the recognition by the monarchic State and the legislative organisation of the thousands of professional, insurance and union associations that already exist in abundance, all spontaneously created to guarantee a greater efficacy and stability for their proper activity, which is to defend the interests of their members. What they lack at present is a sense of service to society and the necessary correlations with the interest of the national community. For at present they have no general order, no precise legislative support, and no communitarian spirit. In this anarchy, it is the strongest that win: big money, finance and the State.
In a corporative national order, on the other hand:
1. It will be possible for everything to be organised on a corporative basis. Professional corporations are certainly the most naturally perfect, the easiest and therefore the first to be formed. Many professions, comprising a personnel of very varied formation to ensure a precise economic service, can also be formed into corporations, whose unity derives precisely from the public utility, from the value and the specific nature of the service rendered. Other industrial or commercial companies, employing people of every trade or speciality, produce or sell all kinds of manufactured objects, yet they are more than just enterprises, they are a class of enterprises with fundamentally common economic goals and interests before being competitive. Contrary to what is supposed by contemporary liberal and socialist economists who cannot imagine business without the antagonism of profit, such enterprises can and should form themselves to their mutual advantage into a corporation. Their professionally qualified members find security through a twofold corporative membership; they not only possess their title to a profession but also their title to the economic branch where they work.
2. And the corporations will be able to organise themselves. Each family, each enterprise, each corporation cemented through its own interests, tends to isolate itself from the rest of men. And yet, if well constituted, it is to their advantage to meet and discuss their affairs, their similarities and dissimilarities, in order to reach an effective conciliation, advantageous and honourable for all concerned.
It will be at various levels – starting with the important communes but including especially the nation’s provinces – that all these professional, inter-professional and general questions will be dealt with, as they relate to those major interests of the province and of the nation which are represented by the government. This noble but difficult task will be the work of the corporations’ elected representatives at the Provincial Assemblies and at the Kingdom’s Council of Estates. Thus will the circle of the economic life be completed, embracing the world of honest men and excluding the domination and invasion of all foreign and occult interests.
1. This great country is a community before being a State, and an infinitely diversified, albeit organised, life before being an organisation. It is personified by the King, the first of family fathers, the first proprietor, the first patron and entrepreneur, who presides over all the activities of his people. But the King himself will call on the people to present themselves before him and to work with him in a representative assembly of the estates general of the Kingdom, the provinces and various nations of France and of her Empire as well as the corporations and professions. This Chamber of Estates, already the implicit wish of our most modern kings, from Louis XIV to Louis XVI, to which those privileged by blood and fortune were opposed, will be the most magnificent creation of tomorrow’s French National Revolution. It will make people forget all the sterile bickering of the "parlements" of the Ancien Regime; it will effortlessly and without regret succeed the absurd legislative Assemblies and Senate, and the useless Economic and Social Council of our democratic republics and empires.
The interests of every natural French community will be represented and defended there by their elected deputies; even minorities, immigrant workers, and foreign colonies will have a part to play in accordance with their services to the country and their corresponding rights. There will be no oligarchy plotting in the shadows against the national community, since all of them will have to show themselves in broad daylight and will have the right to take part in the life of the nation.
2. Since the Chamber of Orders will have the task of safeguarding and progressing all the spiritual values of the kingdom under the high and sovereign authority of the King, the Chamber of Estates will be empowered to draw up juridical, administrative and economic bills for every material interest, and the king will willingly give force of law to these. There can be no question of it drawing up a list of works – the majority of which will come under the specialised commissions – to which the Chamber will devote itself, since they all claim the necessary competence, responsibility and morality. In this Chamber, the whole of economic life will be constantly surveyed, controlled and organised by the qualified representatives of the interested communities themselves. All this will be done in the presence of the people, with the help and, if necessary, under the direction of the royal government. There is nothing analogous here with any democracy in the world.
It will be in this chamber that expression will be given to the permanent confrontation of interests, uses, customs, and desires among the kingdom’s people themselves, but also, and more seriously, between the people and the general interest as represented by the government, the authorised interpreter of all the nation’s primordial needs: defence, policing, continuity and prosperity. The Chamber must always be aware of the absolute priority of the needs of the State, and the State must remain responsive to the fundamental primacy of the people’s common good, whose servant it is.
3. Most of the powers of our democratic republican ministries will be devolved either to the Chamber of Estates, for matters of agriculture, industrial production, commerce, social security, land development, or to the Chamber of Orders, for matters of culture, education, health, and information. All these questions will be dealt with in conjunction with the King’s qualified representatives, members of the government and appointed officials. Unlike our republican legislative assemblies where chicanery, incompetence, neglect and remunerated absenteeism are all too sadly evident, and where intrigue, misappropriation of public funds, and the all-powerfulness of occult, partisan, financial and foreign powers are the shameful reality, the Chamber of Estates, assembled from representatives of the local and professional communities, will be responsible for the natural and legitimate (!) defence of their own particular interests, but with the supreme goal of reconciling these particular interests among themselves and according to the nation’s common good.
As a deliberative assembly, the Chamber of Estates will remain subject to the king, its born president, without whom no decision will have force of law. Thus when the State’s budget is presented with a view to its being accepted and taken on board by the states of the kingdom, it may give rise to a sharp confrontation between the government’s demand for credit, ordinary and sometimes extraordinary subsidies – which are judged necessary for the nation’s defence and the smooth running of the State’s services – and on the other side the complaints and protests of the states who will judge these demands to be too heavy and disproportionate to their resources and means. It will be remembered that our kings were perpetually held back in their grand political plans and were often forced to lose the advantage gained by military victories for want of credit, which the kingdom’s estates and orders, rich as they were, refused to grant, until the country was swept into the abyss of 1789!
The solution lies in the sovereignty of the absolute monarch, who, after so many national calamities, will be resplendent. It belongs to him, as head of State as well as father of his peoples, to hold the balance between the two sides and to decide in the last resort. He alone can reconcile the primacy of his people’s good with the priority of their defence. And if the Chamber of Orders delays its consent to the budget, and if the Chamber of Estates systematically refuses to give its consent, the king will hold – as happened with the "layers of Justice" in the former monarchy – an extraordinary session of the National Assembly, both chambers united, in order to have his designs prevail and to impose his sovereign will, thus saving order and peace and manifesting his glory.
Such, when recovered and adapted to modern economic and ecological needs, will be "the king in his councils and the people in their estates." The problem of the nation’s representation and of its government, so badly formulated by the Revolution, will be resolved by the separation of these two connected but distinct functions, which the Revolution had confused by basing its constitutional structure on the juridico-political fictions of the people’s sovereignty, the social contract and the general will. To the king belongs sovereignty by definition and representation of the general interest by function; the nation is not politically separate from him; he is the head and the nation is the body. All the legitimate interests of the nation, both moral and economic, will be brought before the king, taken into account and defended by him directly in their own right, and not through the medium of some fallacious political mandate. It is then that it will be necessary to put into application the programme of the Comte de Chambord who, whilst addressing the French people, told them: "Together, and when you are willing, we shall take up the great movement of 89."
Breaking with the detestable habits of a State that has its fingers in everything – as universal banker, entrepreneur and consumer, incompetent and dishonest – the royal administration will apply itself only to those economic tasks which an authoritarian and decentralised state can and should fulfil in the nation’s service.
1. Regulatory function of the economy.
Its first application will be to create and to conserve a healthy currency, strong on the international market and stable on the home market, as befits the franc, the money of a country with secure natural resources. It will defend the currency against speculation and will set an example itself by refraining from all credit of an inflationary nature.
Its budgetary prudence will aim at devoting the greater part of its ordinary subsidies to the small number of royal functions vital for the country, all relating to the nation’s security and order. It can do this by foregoing all the economic activities for which it has no vocation or competence, by decentralising, by privatising state-controlled services and industrial companies. It will keep only those services of an indisputably public character and will only exceptionally create banks, manufacturing or commercial companies, by way of stimulating development in inert and disadvantaged economic sectors.
Such a budget, considerably lightened and conforming to the will of today’s "anarcho-capitalism", will no longer be an unjust and crushing burden on the nation, but it will be sufficient to satisfy the real needs of the common good.
2. Legislative, justiciary and protective function.
The king makes the law: he promulgates it, but in the economic and ecological sphere he shares initiative for and elaboration of it with the organised nation’s representatives. Thus once the nation’s general needs have been recognised and studied together, they will take legislative form, the royal administration on the one hand and the corporative administration on the other possessing a statutory power within the limits of their competence.
The royal State will assure justice above the economic structure, protecting legitimate rights and freedoms against all oppressive take-overs and domination. It will keep rigorous watch over the manoeuvres of international finance and will not hesitate to take dictatorial measures to check and oppose "anonymous and vagabond fortune" and its threat to dispossess families, communes, corporations, the great religious orders and the French institutions of their patrimonies, for on these bodies is based the nation’s profoundest life and continuity, the inviolable guarantees of the French people’s work.
3. General ecological function.
The royal State studies the long-term needs of France’s ecological balance and applies itself to protecting this balance by major ordinances regarding questions as diverse as the preservation of the race and the assimilation of immigrants, the diversified settlement of the population in French territory, the conservation of natural sites, and the creation and utilisation of new energies. It will also apply itself to establishing privileged economic relations with friendly countries of a complementary economy, to tariff protection of the home market, and to balancing the imperial functions of colonisation, exploitation and settlement, etc.
The Monarchy alone "which never dies" possesses this universal and age-long concern which enables it to have such long term views and such vast plans to be realised in the future.
The national Revolution will be sudden, brutal in its change, and radical in its projects. But it will begin a long period of transition, leaving the people to go, rather than forcing them, from a democratic, secular, republican state, but in reality plutocratic and despotic, to the French Catholic monarchy, an organ for the spontaneous rebirth of the people’s liberty, property and fraternity. Then there will be a devolution of power, knowledge and possessions, or rather a restitution of all that makes up temporal life, from the monopolising State to the restored and reorganised national community. Then we shall feel that we have come to life again, under a regime that is eminently paternal.
1. Knowledge had been taken control of by the State, the protector-protégé of Money, "rationalist and anti-heroic" (Schumpeter). Monopolised firstly by a protestant and masonic Ministry of National Education and today by one that is socialo-communist, education was diverted from its true ends, which are religion, culture, science, research and information, and used as an instrument for secularising and collectivising the masses.
Education will be returned to the great bodies of the nation, under the benevolent control of the Church and of the State. Organised and remunerated by the provinces and communes, the corporations and private foundations will have every freedom to create academies, research laboratories, cultural centres, etc.
2. Power, jealously monopolised by the possessing and ruling class, will be devolved – in all that does not strictly pertain to regal powers – upon the new elites who will naturally assume them, to fathers of families, to local magistrates, to mayors of communes, to heads of firms and enterprises, to corporatist councillors, and to that countless aristocracy of heads of the armed forces, diplomats, magistrates, rectors of universities and directors of the social communication media.
These authorities, spontaneously restored and recognised, will immediately share in this paternal prestige, "paternalistic" as it was called with such contempt in the times of democracy. This paternal authority is both gentle and firm, like an admirable ray of our Heavenly Father’s wise and gracious authority.
3. Possessions, now drained by the big financial organisations on the one hand and by the State on the other, in their various capacities of tax department, national banker, and financial redistribution and allocation, will no longer be eroded, losing all their value and causing galloping inflation, in the rush of savings to the big financial centres, from families to the State, from the provinces to Paris, where they are lost in grand but aberrant projects.
Possessions will remain within the confines of the family, retaining their exchange value, and acting as a means of investment between houses of good reputation, assuring for those who are the true creators of wealth all the deserved profit of their salary, their savings and their patrimony.
Thus, the nation will no longer be a people of regimented know-nothings, of irresponsible pawns of the administration, of assisted salary-earners, but, "bristling with freedoms" as was the France of old (Funck-Brentano), restored in a day, and rid of their irresponsible controllers, parasites and highway thieves, the people will bloom, become ennobled, and slowly raise themselves towards the light.