Another French authority, of eminent experience in diplomacy, who wrote coldly and only according to the requirement of reason, Gérard de Rayneval, asserts the same law of Equality:-- “Political Liberty consists in the right to participate in public affairs. This participation is direct or indirect, and it is more or less extended according to the form of government. It is, then, necessarily unequal. For example, _in a Democracy all the citizens participate in the legislative power_. If they delegate it, they have only a very indirect part in it; but all can become delegates or representatives, all can arrive at administrative employments, and all have the right to protest against abuses. In aristocratic republics political liberty is exclusively concentrated in the body of Notables; they alone exercise all the power; subjects have only civil liberty.”[168] Such, in France, is the voice of political science. It is also the voice of the French Revolution. The one idea which that great event taught with prevailing influence was the Equal Rights of All, explained and defined by the new-born formula, that “all are equal before the Law.” Napoleon recognized the supremacy of this principle, when, in an official address to the Council of State, he said, “France loves Equality above everything”;[169] and he sought to enforce it, when, in an early proclamation, he declared, “Let there be no head which does not bend under the empire of Equality.”[170] Such is human inconsistency, that shortly afterwards his own ambition refused to bend under this empire, which none the less disowned the sceptre he assumed and the nobles he created. But the great truth, though trampled down, survived in the hearts of the French people, to rise again and resume its heritage. As the Provisional Government of 1848 proclaimed the Republic, it was careful, after proper deliberation, to proclaim at the same time “universal suffrage,” which Lamartine, standing on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, and speaking in the name of the Government, said was “the first truth and only basis of every National Republic.”[171] This proclamation was itself submitted to the vote of “all the citizens”; and on the terms of this submission another member of the Government, of solid sense and perfect fidelity, thus expresses himself:-- “By these words--_all the citizens_--the Provisional Government intended to consecrate definitively the fundamental principle of democracy; it intended to proclaim boldly and forever the inalienable, imprescriptible right inherent in each member of society to participate directly in the government of his country; it intended to put in practice really and loyally the great principles hitherto shut up in the domain of the abstract theories of philosophy.”[172]