From the centralised Republic to an organic order: a transition in stages
This article closes a series. The first three texts described a power that concentrates itself,1 decisions taken without the people2 and an anger that everyone seizes without answering it.3 The fourth proposed five reforms to give the people back the last word, announcing that they were only the first step of a refoundation.4 It remains to say which refoundation, and above all how to get there. For one does not move from a State centralised for more than two centuries to an organic order by decree or by revolution overnight.
A refoundation that sought to change everything at once would repeat the very fault it claims to correct: imposing an order from above on a society that has not been consulted. This article therefore sets out a horizon, the organic State, and a path to reach it, the transition in stages.
The problem: the individual alone before power
The French no longer believe in politics. In January 2026, 78 per cent of them said they did not trust it; only 17 per cent trusted the government and 20 per cent the National Assembly. Mayors, by contrast, enjoyed the trust of 60 per cent of the French.5 That single figure sums up what this article seeks to show: trust is born of proximity, and mistrust of distance.
Yet France is one of the countries in Europe where power is most distant. Local authorities account for only about 20 per cent of public spending, against an average of 31 per cent in the European Union.6 Their fiscal autonomy has been further reduced by the abolition of the housing tax on main residences, largely offset by shares of national taxes whose rate they do not set.7 Municipalities administer, but they hardly decide any more.
Mistrust also has its architects. For decades, part of the ruling class has made repentance a method of government and the disparagement of the French a reflex. In February 2017, in Algiers, Emmanuel Macron, then a presidential candidate, described colonisation as a ‘crime against humanity’.8 History is less one-sided. Without erasing the violence of the conquest, France left roads, hospitals and schools in Algeria. Likewise, slavery was not the crime of the West alone: the Eastern and intra-African slave trades took more captives than the Atlantic trade.9 A people whose leaders teach it nothing but its faults ends up losing its self-esteem, and with it the sense of order, respect and honour. Add to this the collapse of educational standards, French pupils having lost 21 points in mathematics between 2018 and 2022,10 the loss of meaning and the forgetting of true history, and one understands why a youth deprived of both pride and knowledge identifies more with the branded object than with the nation.
The result is what the philosopher Claude Polin analysed: the individual cut off from every natural community is not freer but more exposed, and the atomised society calls for a power that claims to organise everything. The uniformity of minds is not the opposite of individualism; it is often its outcome.11 The individual stands alone before power. He no longer has a body to protect, represent or defend him.
The rupture: from the representation of bodies to that of the individual
This solitude has a history. The France of before 1789 did not present itself to the king as a dust of individuals, but as a set of bodies: towns, communities of inhabitants, chapters, universities, trades. Each had its liberties, its ‘franchises’, and often its own way of designating those who represented it. One was represented by what one was and by those one knew. Admittedly, Tocqueville showed that administrative centralisation was already ‘an institution of the old regime’: intendants administered the provinces in the king’s name, municipal liberties were withering, and the Estates General had not met since 1614.12 Absolutism had begun to drain the bodies of their substance. The Revolution completed the work, by striking down those that still resisted it.
The stages are well known. The doubling of the Third Estate, granted on 27 December 1788, paved the way for voting by head: once individuals rather than orders are counted, the organic logic is condemned.13 The decree of 22 December 1789 divided the kingdom into departments, which replaced the provinces. The Constitution of 3 September 1791 laid down that representatives ‘shall not be representatives of a particular department, but of the whole nation, and no mandate may be given to them’.14 The same year, the Le Chapelier law prohibited the re-establishment of corporations ‘under any pretext or in any form whatsoever’. Its rapporteur gave the reason: ‘There are no longer any corporations in the State; there is only the particular interest of each individual, and the general interest. No one is permitted to inspire in citizens an intermediate interest.’15
Between the individual and the State, nothing was to remain. The nation ceased to be a living body and became an association of individuals. For Georges Burdeau, the electorate is not the reality of the people but an intellectual construction of the notion of people. Bernard Chantebout defines the representative system as one in which the will of the representative body is deemed to be the will of the nation, without any concern as to whether it coincides with that of the real people.16 Our Constitution still bears the trace: ‘Any binding mandate shall be null and void’.17 The general interest, defined by the body that proclaims it, has taken the place of the common good, which is the real good of real people.
We must have the courage to say it: more than two centuries after the revolutionary rupture, the verdict is one of failure. The postulates inherited from the Enlightenment, on which we have organised the country, an individual without ties, an abstract general will, a State alone before isolated citizens, have not kept their promises. They have produced the mistrust, centralisation and solitude described above. It is not by adjusting these postulates that we will find a way out, but by returning to a truer conception of man and of society.
A shared diagnosis
This diagnosis does not belong to a single school. Tocqueville saw associations as the bulwark of democratic peoples against the soft despotism of an ‘immense and tutelary’ power.18 Proudhon set against centralism the federalism of municipalities and trades.19 Elinor Ostrom, Nobel laureate in economics in 2009, showed that local communities can manage their common resources sustainably without being administered from above.20 A liberal, a federalist socialist and an American economist: thinkers who have nothing in common agree on one point. A society without intermediate bodies is a sick society.
The legal philosopher Michel Villey brought to light the intellectual roots of this sickness. With Hobbes, there is no longer a natural order to discover, but isolated individuals, driven by fear and interest, who surrender their rights to a sovereign whose will makes the law: auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem.21 With Locke, society becomes a voluntary association of rights-holders, and the question of the true good is relegated to the private conscience of each. The legal historian Xavier Martin has shown, texts in hand, the poverty of the Enlightenment’s anthropology, which reduced man to a mechanism of sensations and interests to be ‘regenerated’ by law.22 If there is no longer an objective common good, all that remains are preferences and power relations.
The principles: subsidiarity, finality, the common good
Against this mechanical conception of society, the tradition running from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas sets an organic conception. An organism is not a machine. A machine is made of parts assembled from outside and driven by a central motor. An organism is made of living cells, each of which has its own life and contributes to the life of the whole. The family is its first cell, followed by the municipality, the trade, the province. In this conception, the State is not a head separated from the body. It is, in the words of Father Louis Lachance, ‘inherent in the community to which it provides a backbone, and forms with it one and the same social entity’.23
Marie-Pauline Deswarte has identified, in La République organique en France, the two principles that govern this organic life.24 The first is subsidiarity: what persons and communities can accomplish by themselves must not be taken from them by a higher level. Pius XI formulated it in 1931: it would be ‘an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do’.25 The second is finality: each body exists for an end, the family for the life and education of children, the trade for work well done, the municipality for neighbourly life, the State for the common good of the whole. Subsidiarity says who must act and finality says what for. Without finality, subsidiarity is no more than an administrative division. Without subsidiarity, finality becomes the pretext for everything to be absorbed by the top.
The word comes from the Latin subsidium, meaning ‘help’. Subsidiarity therefore means not abandonment but a requirement: the higher level must help the lower level to do what falls to it, never do it in its place. The principle is not foreign to our law. Since 2003, the Constitution has provided that local authorities ‘may take decisions in all matters arising under powers that can best be exercised at their level’.26 The Swiss Constitution has made it the basis for the allocation and performance of all State tasks.27 In France, however, subsidiarity remains top down: it is the State that grants powers, and the State that takes them back. An organic order presupposes a bottom-up subsidiarity, in which communities delegate upwards what they cannot accomplish alone.
What an organic order would be
Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, taught that the best regime is not a pure regime but a well-proportioned mixture: one man presides according to virtue, a few govern according to virtue, and yet this power belongs to all, ‘because the rulers can be chosen from all and are chosen by all’.28 It is not a matter of restoring a historical form but of recovering what each of these elements protects: the unity of a leadership that carries a vision and answers for it. The competence and virtue of those who advise and govern. The participation of the whole people. What Thomas Aquinas called aristocracy, in the proper sense of ‘government by the best’, does not mean a caste, but elites of service, chosen from all and by all.
In such an order, democracy is not reduced to the national election. A people’s real power over its own affairs is exercised first in the family that educates, the municipality that administers itself, the trade that sets its rules of the art, the association that organises itself. It is there, in the bodies where everyone knows everyone, that a people concretely exercises its freedom.29
The vote does not disappear in it: it recovers its truth. For centuries, each cell of society designated those who represented it. Communities of inhabitants elected their syndics or consuls, trades their wardens, monks their abbot. Up to the last Estates General, deputies were chosen by the bodies and the bailiwicks, bearing the books of grievances of those who had designated them. The revolutionaries hastened, as early as July 1789, to release them from these instructions.30 One chose someone one knew, for a specific office, and held them to account. The aim is not to restore the exclusions of that time, but to recover its spirit. The modern vote is too often no more than an abstract delegation: the citizen hands over his share of sovereignty to an elected official who owes him nothing. Restoring the vote’s roots means restoring to each person both consent and responsibility, rights and duties.
Representation would become twofold: that of citizens, which remains, and that of communities and trades, which is reborn. This is no utopia. Since 1937, Ireland has elected forty-three of its sixty senators from five vocational panels: administration, agriculture, culture and education, industry and commerce, labour.31 Slovenia has a National Council of forty members, representing local interests, employers, employees, farmers, craftsmen and the professions, as well as education, research, health and social protection. It can suspend a law passed by the Assembly, which must then confirm it by an absolute majority of its members.32
From 1946 to 1999, Bavaria had a Senate made up of representatives of agriculture, trade unions, municipalities, industry, crafts, cooperatives, religious communities, social welfare bodies, the professions and universities.33
France itself already has the seeds of this. The Senate is elected by local elected officials. The Economic, Social and Environmental Council brings together representatives of employees, businesses, farmers and associations, but it is merely advisory.34 The professional orders, such as those of lawyers or doctors, are genuine bodies: they elect their leaders from among their peers, set their own ethical rules and themselves judge their members’ misconduct. The elements of an organic order exist; they are waiting to be recognised and connected.
Such an order finally calls for another idea of the constitution. In its first sense, a people’s constitution is the way it is constituted, its families, its municipalities, its trades, before it is a text. The old France had no written constitution, but customary fundamental laws that the king himself could not change, such as the inalienability of the royal domain, confirmed by the Edict of Moulins in 1566.35 The United Kingdom still lives today without a codified constitution: its rules have built up layer by layer over the centuries, from Magna Carta in 1215 to the Bill of Rights in 1689. Edmund Burke saw in it an inheritance passed down between the dead, the living and those yet to be born, and Joseph de Maistre held that no true constitution is born of deliberation, an institution being all the weaker the more it is written down.36 This path nevertheless has a limit. Without a higher text, nothing stops ordinary law: in the United Kingdom, it is Parliament, not the people, that is sovereign, and liberties hold only through long-established counterweights. In a country whose intermediate bodies have been destroyed, abolishing the written constitution would hand all power to the majority of the day. The soundest horizon would therefore be a short constitution, reduced to a few inviolable principles, the sovereignty of the people, the common good, subsidiarity, the protection of the most vulnerable, and which, for the rest, would recognise rather than regulate: the charters of municipalities, the statutes of trades and the customs of bodies would then form the living constitution of the country.
The same requirement applies to laws. Montesquieu warned that ‘useless laws weaken necessary laws’, and Portalis remembered it when presenting the Civil Code.37 We are far from that: in twenty years, the Environment Code has grown from about 1,000 to nearly 7,000 articles, and the Labour Code from about 5,000 to more than 11,000.38 ‘When the law babbles, the citizen lends it only a distracted ear’, the Conseil d’État warned as early as 1991.39 A law that no one can know is a law of which the people are dispossessed. Refounding the State therefore also means recasting the laws, so that they once again become few, clear and known to all.
Neither populism nor technocracy
The organic order is not a populism. Populism sets an undifferentiated mass against all elites and all intermediate bodies. It claims to give the people a voice while leaving them alone, without structure or mediation, before a leader who speaks in their name. Technocracy makes the opposite mistake: it entrusts decisions to elites without a people, chosen by no one and accountable to no one. The organic order rejects both. It presupposes a people structured in communities and elites of service, chosen from all, who answer for their office.
Here two things must be distinguished, as Thomas Aquinas already did. The last word, that is, consent to institutions and the choice of those who govern, belongs to all: that was the subject of the previous article. The conduct of affairs, for its part, requires competence and virtue, and falls to those who have acquired them. The people do not need to be learned to say yes or no to a Constitution. They need to be trained and responsible to take part in governing their affairs. For Aristotle as for Thomas Aquinas, the virtue of citizens is the condition of wider participation, and the very purpose of law is to make men good.40 Political freedom is cultivated. It cannot be decreed.
Yet there must be men and women to serve. We urgently need disinterested people, devoted to the common good, who understand that serving is a hard task, almost a sacrifice, and that this is precisely what makes it great: one serves an end beyond oneself. For centuries, faith gave this service its reason for being. One served to please God, and not for any private interest. It is this selflessness that we so sorely lack today. No institution can create it. It can only call it forth and recognise it.
For we have been dispossessed: of our culture, of our skills, of the taste for knowledge and for deep reflection, and often of our self-confidence, through a weakened school system and a politics of fear that has left many of us stunned. It is therefore not a matter of educating ‘others’, but of rising up again together. That is why the mission of elites of service is first and foremost educational. Plato saw it: the man who has received a right education becomes the gentlest of living beings, and, badly brought up, the most savage of all that the earth produces. In the past, this transmission was the work of monks, nuns and schoolmasters, and princes themselves learned the art of government from treatises written for them, among them Thomas Aquinas’s De regno.41 Today, it can be that of teachers, representatives of trades, families, representatives of municipalities and associations.
Responsibility is learned by exercising it at one’s own level. Tocqueville wrote that the strength of free peoples lies in the township: ‘Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.’42 Subsidiarity is a school: each community that takes back what belongs to it forms citizens capable of taking on more. Education is therefore not a precondition of the right to vote, which everyone keeps. It is the fruit of an order that entrusts each person with responsibilities to their measure.
The transition: five stages
All that precedes leads to a simple conclusion: an organic order will not be rebuilt from the top. One does not return to the centre before rebuilding the base. The transition must therefore proceed in stages, each legitimate in itself, each preparing the next, and each submitted to the judgement of the people.
First stage: rebuild the base and train. It requires no law and can begin today. Families, associations, parishes, craftsmen, farmers, carers and local shops still form a living fabric. The task is to map it, connect it and strengthen it: short supply chains, mutual aid, the transmission of skills, local places of deliberation. That is the purpose of the Ethics and Equity Committees launched by the Organisation nationale éthique santé et transparence (ONEST): autonomous citizens’ assemblies, rooted in their territory, which deliberate before acting.43 The monks built Europe no other way, through a network of rooted communities, autonomous and yet united by a single rule. Rebuilding also means training: reading circles, transmission between generations, the training of those who will agree to serve. Elites of service are discovered, trained and recognised by their works.
Second stage: give the people back the last word. These are the five reforms proposed in the previous article: a referendum lock, a citizens’ initiative referendum, a budget that is always voted, debt by consent and an open presidential election.44 They do not create the organic order, but they give the people back the power to choose it. National suffrage is therefore not the enemy of refoundation: during the transition, it is the only lawful instrument available.
Third stage: give communities real powers. Bottom-up subsidiarity begins with money and initiative. Municipalities should regain a tax of their own whose rate they set, and guaranteed powers that no ordinary law could take from them without their consent. The right to experiment, relaxed in 2021, and the principle of differentiation, enshrined in 2022, already allow rules to be adapted to territories.45 They should become the rule rather than the exception. Families should have their educational freedom guaranteed, whereas home education has required prior authorisation since 202146 and the place of parents in the most sensitive teaching, such as sex education, remains contested by the public authorities.47 Trades, finally, should be able to set their own rules of the art, on the model of the professional orders.
Fourth stage: give communities a representation of their own. The Economic, Social and Environmental Council could become a chamber of trades and territories, whose members would be elected by the bodies they represent, in the territories, and which would have a suspensive veto on the Slovenian model. The Senate could strengthen its character as the representative of municipalities. This stage requires a revision of the Constitution, and therefore the agreement of the people, through Article 11 or Article 89.
Fifth stage: the horizon. Once the base has been rebuilt and elites of service have emerged, the people will be able to decide, by referendum, the definitive form of their institutions. It will be an organic order if the people so wish.
Conclusion
The monks did not build Europe in a day. They laid one stone, then another. Cleared one field, then another. The organic order will be built no other way. It is not a matter of tearing down what exists, but of rebuilding what 1791 tore down: the living bodies that stood between the individual and the State.
The series now ending has followed a thread: a power that concentrates itself, decisions taken without the people, an anger without an answer, then the means of giving the people back the last word. It arrives here at a conviction. A people’s sovereignty is measured not only by what it votes once every five years, but by what it can decide, every day, in the communities where it lives
Sources:
1 Virginie de Araújo-Recchia, ‘After Macron: What Will Survive Beyond 2027’, 17 September 2026.
2 Virginie de Araújo-Recchia, ‘France: A Debt Crisis, or a Crisis of Sovereignty?’, Sovereignty, 12 October 2026.
3 Virginie de Araújo-Recchia, ‘Who Is Harnessing France’s Anger?’, October 2026.
4 Virginie de Araújo-Recchia, ‘Giving the People the Last Word’, October 2026.
5 Cevipof, Baromètre de la confiance politique, wave 17, OpinionWay survey conducted from 12 to 28 January 2026 among 3,166 people, reported by Public Sénat, 10 February 2026.
6 France Stratégie, note on the autonomy of local authorities in Europe, summer 2019 (2018 data), reported by the Association des maires de France, 16 September 2019.
7 Law no. 2019-1479 of 28 December 2019, Finance Act for 2020, Article 16. 8 Interview with Emmanuel Macron on the Algerian channel Echorouk News, 14 February 2017.
9 Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les Traites négrières. Essai d’histoire globale, Paris, Gallimard, 2004 (some 17 million captives in the Eastern trade, 14 million in the intra-African trade, 11 million in the Atlantic trade).
10 OECD, PISA 2022 Results; DEPP, Note d’information no. 23.48, December 2023 (474 points in mathematics, against 495 in 2018)
11 Claude Polin (1937–2018), professor of political and social philosophy at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, L’Esprit totalitaire, Paris, Sirey, 1977; La Cité dénaturée, 1997; Le Totalitarisme, Paris, PUF, coll. ‘Que sais-je ?’.
12 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, 1856, Book II, chap. 2: ‘That administrative centralisation is an institution of the old regime, and not the work of the Revolution or of the Empire, as is commonly said’.
13 Order of the Council of 5 July 1788; Result of the King’s Council of State held at Versailles on 27 December 1788.
14 Constitution of 3 September 1791, Title III, chap. I, sect. III, Article 7.
15 Law of 14 and 17 June 1791 on assemblies of workers and artisans of the same trade and profession, known as the Le Chapelier law, Article 1; Isaac Le Chapelier, report to the National Constituent Assembly, sitting of 14 June 1791.
16 Georges Burdeau, Traité de science politique; Bernard Chantebout, Droit constitutionnel.
17 Constitution of 4 October 1958, Article 27, paragraph 1. —3
18 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, 1840, Part 2, chap. 5, and Part 4, chap. 6.
19 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du principe fédératif, 1863.
20 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
21 Michel Villey, Le Droit et les droits de l’homme, Paris, PUF, 1983; La Formation de la pensée juridique moderne, Paris, PUF, coll. ‘Quadrige’; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Latin edition 1668, chap. 26; John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689; Second Treatise of Government, 1690.
22 Xavier Martin, emeritus professor of legal history at the University of Angers, Nature humaine et Révolution française, Bouère, Dominique Martin Morin, 2002; L’Homme rétréci par les Lumières, Dominique Martin Morin, 2020.
23 Louis Lachance, O.P., L’Humanisme politique de saint Thomas d’Aquin. Individu et État, reissued by Quentin Moreau.
24 Marie-Pauline Deswarte, emeritus professor of public law at the University of Artois, La République organique en France, foreword by Bertrand Mathieu, Paris, Via Romana, 2014.
25 Pius XI, encyclical Quadragesimo anno on the reconstruction of the social order, 15 May 1931.
26 Constitution of 4 October 1958, Article 72, paragraph 2, introduced by Constitutional Law no. 2003-276 of 28 March 2003.
27 Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation of 18 April 1999, Article 5a.
28 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 105, a. 1; Aristotle, Politics, Books III and IV.
29 On the exercise of ‘national sovereignty’, see Virginie de Araújo-Recchia, La France sacrifiée ? Réarmement et programmation militaire 2024-2030, foreword by Slobodan Despot, Bookelis, 2024.
30 Royal regulation of 24 January 1789 for the convening of the Estates General; Talleyrand’s motion on binding mandates, National Assembly, July 1789; Constitution of 3 September 1791, Title III, chap. I, sect. III, Article 7.
31 Constitution of Ireland, 1937, Article 18. 32 Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia of 23 December 1991, Articles 96 and 97.
33 Constitution of the Free State of Bavaria of 2 December 1946, Articles 34 to 42 (repealed).
34 Constitution of 4 October 1958, Articles 69 to 71; Organic Law no. 2021-27 of 15 January 2021 on the Economic, Social and Environmental Council.
35 Edict of Moulins, February 1566; on the fundamental laws of the kingdom, see also the judgment of the Parlement of Paris of 28 June 1593, known as the Lemaistre judgment.
36 Magna Carta, 1215; Bill of Rights, 1689; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790; Joseph de Maistre, Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques, 1814.
37 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748, Book XXIX, chap. 16; Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, Discours préliminaire sur le projet de Code civil, 1801.
38 Legal Affairs Directorate of the Ministries for the Economy and Finance, Lettre de la DAJ, ‘Chiffres de l’activité normative sur vingt ans’, 13 June 2024, based on Légifrance and the normative activity indicators of the General Secretariat of the Government (Environment Code: from 1,020 to 6,962 articles; Labour Code: from 5,027 to 11,301 articles).
39 Conseil d’État, Rapport public 1991. De la sécurité juridique, Études et documents no. 43, Paris, La Documentation française, 1992.
40 Aristotle, Politics, Book III, chap. 4; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 92, a. 1 (‘whether an effect of law is to make men good’) and q. 105, a. 1.
41 Plato, Laws, Book VI, 766a; Thomas Aquinas, De regno (On Kingship), addressed to the King of Cyprus.
42 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, 1835, Part 1, chap. 5
43 The author, co-founder and president of ONEST, initiated the Ethics and Equity Committees. See Organisation nationale éthique santé et transparence, Qui sommes-nous ?, onest-alternative.org.
44 Virginie de Araújo-Recchia, ‘Giving the People the Last Word’, cited above.
45 Organic Law no. 2021-467 of 19 April 2021 simplifying experiments carried out under the fourth paragraph of Article 72 of the Constitution; Law no. 2022-217 of 21 February 2022 on differentiation, decentralisation and deconcentration and simplifying local public action.
46 Law no. 2021-1109 of 24 August 2021 reinforcing respect for the principles of the Republic, Article 49.
47 See Virginie de Araújo-Recchia, Protéger les mineurs de l’idéologie totalitaire. « Éducation sexuelle » et changement de mœurs, foreword by Ariane Bilheran, Bookelis, 2023.
