The king is the born head, the supreme commander-in-chief of the armies of the land, sea and air. Because the security, independence, power and peace of the kingdom constitute the liberty of all liberties and are essential to the permanence of the nation with all its goods, individual and collective, material and spiritual, the military function is therefore the first of the king’s functions.
1. War is the natural state of peoples. Cold war is pursued in the shadows of espionage, in economic competition and in the extension of zones of influence. As for open war, it is necessary to prepare long for it, to unleash it suddenly, to conduct it with strength and heroism, and also to know how to bring it to a happy end through wise and difficult treaties, or else to suspend it at the least cost. It is a sovereign art to be practised at all times.
Only a king, the King, can decide on and get his peoples to accept the necessary military effort needed for the future common good, whose heavy demands are often in opposition to the particular and immediate interests that democratic powers focus on and seek to gratify to the exclusion of everything else. A democratic army is a contradiction in terms.
2. Only a king, the King, can exalt military glory, the taste for battle and adventure, and the passion for victory, whilst firmly controlling such sentiments with political prudence, an understanding of the benefits of peace, and the need to be sparing of bloodshed and ruin. Only an hereditary king, the father of his peoples and the first soldier of France, the first in the line of battle, can be as enterprising, strong and daring as any Caesar, and yet at the same time be the friend of peace with the foresight to favour happy conciliations like any wise politician.
3. The king loves his army; he is its undisputed and permanent head, and is close to the troops. He gives the army glory, because it is the virile image – an image that is heroic, powerful, organised, and disciplined – in which the people recognise their historical greatness. What no politician would be able to do, the king can do. Being both civil and military head, he reconciles these two functions in both his own person and the life of the nation.
And so the French army will be freed from this dishonourable control, from this shameful suspicion and degradation imposed on it by democratic powers, who regard it as the "great dumb mute" to be kept out of politics and the profound life of the French people through fear of a coup d’état… which might be liberating! The king, however, has no need to fear the army. On the contrary, he makes the army the primary guardian, in peace as in war, of the honour, traditions and grand designs of the nation.
4. The army is the king’s ultimate recourse against foreign aggression and against any internal subversion paid for and armed by the enemy. The army is the rampart of monarchy, and it remains faithful to the monarchy, because it knows that the monarchy is faithful to France.
The King is the one and only master of the diplomacy, both public and secret, that regulates the State’s relationships with other nations on earth as power to power, whether it be to guarantee national security and maintain peace, to safeguard and increase the nation’s vital economic exchanges, to maintain its prestige abroad, its civilising and religious influence, or ultimately to protect its subjects and its allies throughout the world.
1. In times of peace diplomacy is an instrument of war, both defensive and offensive, of cold war – that very war which is the natural, continuous and universal state of nations. Its function and its benefit are to avoid recourse to open war and limitless armed confrontation. Diplomacy therefore seeks out, stimulates and maintains every instrument of secret strife and declared equilibrium used in international dealings and in the maintenance of peace.
Diplomacy, like the military art, is a royal art. Indeed, it is the very foremost art, if wisdom take precedence over force and the conservation of peace be of a higher value than the conduct of war. But it is enveloped in silence, not brilliance, in prudence rather than glory. It is the velvet glove over the mailed fist, the work of aristocrats and of anonymous high officials. Hence diplomacy takes second place, because it is a work of calculation rather than of heroism and is of a less exemplary perfection.
2. Diplomacy not only demands talent but – at least as much and even more – family tradition, great commonsense, moral candour – contrary to the legend which portrays it as underhand and machiavellian –, patience, a depth and breadth of viewpoint, discretion, the deliberate trust of the people, Christian goodness, international family relations... all eminently dynastic virtues, of which regimes based on opinion, parties and parliaments – therefore inconsequential, talkative and contentious – are absolutely incapable.
3. Diplomacy is also an open way of maintaining relationships and friendships between nations; it is extremely civilised, prestigious, and civilising. An institution of the Ancien Regime – of which only the veneer remains, a lamentable caricature made wholly for the ostentatious pride of the tyrants of our democracies, now masters of the world – it was, and will be once again under the most Christian Kings resuming our aristocratic traditions, a display of French beauty, reason and virtue. The king alone can educate his good servants to be ambassadors of French glory in his own image
Diplomacy is something eminently French and royal.
The king of France himself renders justice in person, or rather it is rendered throughout the kingdom in his name. This is his oldest and most glorious vocation – among all the kings of the earth and above his most powerful vassals – the vocation of sovereign dispenser of justice, which Saint Louis carried to its highest degree of perfection. In this resides the secret of the humble people’s attachment to the monarchy. However, since the Revolution, justice has ceased to be a sacred institution, something that is honoured, independent, and sure. Because the Empire, the Republic or the constitutional Monarchy are governments of opinion and enslaved to the plutocracy, the Hand of royal justice has ceased to be lifted, Justice has become an administrative matter, and its personnel mere salaried, dependent and discredited officials. The profession of the lawyer has gained over that of the magistrate, which is the sure sign of a people’s decadence.
1. The king is the first magistrate of France. Contrary to the modern principle of the independence of Justice – a purely nominal independence – in contrast with the necessarily corrupting power of government – which is only too true of our modern democratic powers – it must be stated that it is the royal power, upheld in its independence and sacral sovereignty by the Church, which alone can give force to and guarantee the freedom of the national magistrature with its particular and avowed dependence on the royal person.
2. For in order to render justice, one must owe nothing to any man, one must fear no one, and one must make oneself, by supernatural vocation and hereditary predilection, the defender of the humble against the great, of the poor rather than the rich, and of the people even against their own officials. One must be unconditionally opposed to the sharks of finance, industry and commerce and all allegiances or occult powers tending to constitute states within the State. The king, himself the son of kings, anointed at Rheims, is the only one who has this power.
3. But even more, in order to have the spirit of justice, it is necessary for oneself to live above all ideologies, utopias, family or class ambitions, the handling of money or the pressure of powerful interests. The king alone breathes justice. He will submit himself to it before his Council of the Kingdom; he will mete it out in his Chambers of State; he will have it carried out in his courts and tribunals; and he will protect it in the customary industrial tribunals and other local and professional courts.
The right of granting pardon will remain the sign of his high vocation of Justice, and the lettre de cachet his personal privilege as the first of the fathers of the kingdom.
The king reigns, and that in itself, through the example of his life and the profound emotional union resulting for the nation from his very existence, is an eminent and efficacious service for the peace of families and the spiritual ennoblement of his peoples. But he also governs. For this reason he condescends to engage his authority, to use his powers of coercion, to give weight to his supreme will and long term plans in the most concrete affairs of the national life, and to bring about the triumph of his "good pleasure", that which seems good to him, the greatest good of his kingdom and his peoples.
1. As direct and personal head of his ministers and of the governors of both metropolitan provinces and overseas territories, he ensures that his authority is respected and his laws applied. He allows these laws to be adapted to particular legitimate rights, customs and interests, but he never tolerates rebellion, dissidence or subversion.
As direct and personal head of the great corporations of State and the central administrations, he restores to public service – so poorly understood and ill-defined today – its true limits as well as its strength and scope. State officials will thereby have all the more credit, authority and legitimate pride.
2. Through his regal power as head of the treasury, he sovereignly maintains order and honesty in the nation’s finances. That is to say, he keeps under his supreme control the central organisation that creates money, and he supervises all the methods of payment, the issue of currency, and especially bank credits, all elements which have an effect on the volume and the value of money. He regards it as a moral duty to guarantee the stability and circulation of money and to defend it against speculation, against excessive lending and banking abuses either at home or abroad. Finally he prevents dangerous wastage by the State itself by imposing on the State a strong budgetary and financial discipline.
In order to control the accounts of the State and the nation, the King has at his disposal the Court of Accounts, an ancient royal jurisdiction, which will effectively and relentlessly pursue all cases of embezzlement and squandering of public money. For, as history proves, the king’s justice is terrible where there is question of the public purse and the burdens borne by his people.
3. The kingdom’s police will be firm, thorough and prompt, because in this domain any weakness on their part is paid for by the ordinary people in terms of unjust oppression and the worst violence. All the police and information services will depend directly on the royal power to put an end to the intrigues of the occult powers, the successors of the ancient feudal systems. "That the wicked may tremble and the good feel secure" is the royal motto.
Few in number, well armed and well paid, police, customs, fraud repression and prison services will all recover their honour, and the army will not disdain to lend them its aid when necessary.
4. The king will draw up his budget and present it for the assent of the Chamber of Orders, thence to be taken in hand by the Chamber of States. The collection of taxes, their thresholds and rates, will be organised in agreement with the regional and national States. In case of unjustified opposition, the king will appear before the united Chambers to impose his will by virtue of the royal good pleasure.