Point 146. Royal economy

Breaking with the detestable habits of a State that has its fingers in everything – as universal banker, entrepreneur and consumer, incompetent and dishonest – the royal administration will apply itself only to those economic tasks that an authoritarian and decentralised State can and should fulfil in the nation’s service.

1. Regulatory function of the economy.

Its first application will be to create and to conserve a healthy currency, strong on the international market and stable on the home market. It will defend the currency against speculation and will set an example itself by refraining from all credit of an inflationary nature.

Its budgetary prudence will aim at devoting the greater part of its ordinary subsidies to the small number of royal functions vital for the country and to its international influence, which guarantees its independence. It can do this by foregoing all the economic activities for which it has no vocation or competence, by decentralising, by privatising state-controlled services and industrial companies even if it means imposing on them obligations to fulfil services. It will keep only those activities of an indisputably public character and will only exceptionally create banks, industries or commercial companies, by way of stimulating development in inert and disadvantaged economic sectors.

Such a budget, considerably lightened will no longer be an unjust and crushing burden on the nation, but it will be sufficient to satisfy the real needs of the common good.

2. Legislative, justiciary and protective function.

The sovereign authority makes the law and promulgates it, but in the economic and ecological sphere it shares initiative for and elaboration of it with the organised nation’s representatives. Thus once the nation’s general needs have been recognised and studied together, they will take legislative form, the public administration on the one hand and the recognised mutual-agreement associations on the other possessing a statutory power within the limits of their competence.

The State will assure justice above the economic structure, protecting legitimate rights and freedoms against all oppressive take-overs and domination. It will keep rigorous watch over the manoeuvres of international finance and will not hesitate to take dictatorial measures to check and oppose “ anonymous and vagabond fortune ” and its threat to dispossess families, municipalities, corporations, the great religious orders and the French institutions of their patrimonies, for on these bodies is based the nation’s profoundest life and continuity, the inviolable guarantees of the French people’s work.

3. General ecological function. The State studies the long-term needs of France’s ecological balance and applies itself to protecting this balance. Immigration, the diversified settlement of the population in French territory, the conservation of natural sites, and the creation and utilisation of new energies. It will also apply itself to establishing privileged economic relations with friendly countries of a complementary economy, to tariff protection of the home market, to bringing its aid to poor countries. All this is the product of a long-term policy, which is to be revised periodically and adapted to results and needs.

The Monarchy alone “ which never dies ” possesses this universal and age-long concern that enables it to have such long term views and such vast plans to be realised in the future.