The nature of things denies that nine hundred people can govern with a firm, logical and fast willpower.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 237 to 238 (in French)
Jacques Bonhomme, June 11th, 1848

Here is another extremely short article published in this first issue of Jacques Bonhomme, which delves into the issues facing the parliament. Today’s quote highlights a major issue that democracies need to solve. Indeed, the “will of the people” is regularly asserted in order to justify the works of a democratically elected government. Unfortunately, such a willpower does not exist and democracy cannot solve everything.

Nowadays still, and at least in France, children are taught that democracy is the best system available. This is true to the extent that the alternative, autocracy, does not allow to guarantee individual freedoms on the one hand and makes it even more difficult to correct government mistakes on the other. However, fearing to be taken for a bad democrat, we omit to highlight the weaknesses of democracy, of which there are many. Here, Frédéric Bastiat looks into the particular case of the French parliament four months after the 1948 revolution and asserts that he would like to see a constituent assembly that would restrain its works to the prerogatives of such an assembly. He does not say anything about what should a parliament look like once democratic institutions have been implemented, but what is certain is that he would like to see a parliament with well defined authority in order to avoid falling into the trap of the dictatorship of the majority, which can be observed about anywhere in the “liberal democracies” of the western world in the 21st century.