Of all the abominations in the
overthrow of a state by revolution, even the murder or assassination
of the monarch is not the worst. For that may be done by the people
out of fear, lest, if he is allowed to live, he may again acquire
power and inflict punishment upon them; and so it may be done, not
as an act of punitive justice, but merely from regard to
self-preservation. It is the formal execution of a monarch that
horrifies a soul filled with ideas of human right; and this feeling
occurs again and again as of as the mind realizes the scenes that
terminated the fate of Charles I or Louis XVI. Now how is this feeling
to be explained? It is not a mere aesthetic feeling, arising from
the working of the imagination, nor from sympathy, produced by
fancying ourselves in the place of the sufferer. On the contrary, it
is a moral feeling arising from the entire subversion of all our
notions of right. Regicide, in short, is regarded as a crime which
always remains such and can never be expiated (crimen immortale,
inexpiabile); and it appears to resemble that sin which the
theologians declare can neither be forgiven in this world nor in the
next. The explanation of this phenomenon in the human mind appears
to be furnished by the following reflections upon it; and they even
shed some light upon the principles of political right.
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