Heaven be pleased that all the peoples manage to avoid the sad necessity to throw themselves at each other upon the call of aristocracies and kings.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 210 to 212 (in French)
La République française, February 27th, 1848

This article was written on February 26th, that is, two days after the proclamation of the Second French Republic. Frédéric Bastiat will write in the following days a number of articles in which he highlights a number of issues that the new republic will have to confront and tackle if it is to meet success.

In this first article, he highlights the issue with the cost of the standing army, that then seemed to constitute the most important costs to be dealt with, in order to improve the treasury and reduce the weight of taxes. According to him, maintaining a standing army was made necessary because of the belligerent attitude of the European neighbours (England, Prussia, Austria or even Russia). In order to reduce the weight of the French army, it seems essential that the potential ennemies reduce theirs first – they were the ones who were not threatened by the upcoming republic, which had other fish to fry. Today’s quote shows that war is a matter of governments rather than peoples, which will be confirmed subsequently. Unfortunately, his injunction made to the heavens will not be heard and three Franco-german wars (the last two being world wars) will be necessary before governments eventually take the motto “Never again” seriously, which will translate into what we now call the European construction.