To Serve as a history of the February Revolution
October 1849
Translator: James Bar Bowen (Chapters III and XXI), Martin Walker (Chapters VI and XVIII), Ian Harvey (Chapter X) and Paul Sharkey (Chapter XVII)
CHAPTER III - NATURE AND GOAL OF GOVERNMENT
CHAPTER VI - 24TH FEBRUARY: PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
CHAPTER X - JUNE 23-26: THE CAVAIGNAC REACTION
CHAPTER XIV - 4TH NOVEMBER: THE CONSTITUTION
CHAPTER XVII - 1849, 29th JANUARY: BARROT-FALLOUX REACTION. DESTRUCTION OF THE GOVERNMENT
CHAPTER XVIII - 21ST MARCH: THE LAW ON THE CLUBS; LEGAL RESISTANCE
CHAPTER XXI - 8TH JULY 1849: CONCLUSION
Holy Scripture says that division into factions or parties is inevitable, oportet enim hœreses esse![1] “How terrible is this concept of the ‘inevitable’!” exclaimed Bossuet in a profound moment of clarity, without actually daring to seek out a reason for this inevitability.
A small amount of reflection soon shows us the principle and the significance of the division into parties: but more important is to understand their means and their ends.
All men are equal and free: society, by nature and design, is thus autonomous and, in other words, ungovernable. The sphere of activity of each citizen being determined by the natural division of labour and by the choice that he makes as to the work he will do, the said functions combine in such a way as to produce a harmonious effect, order resulting from the free actions of everyone: there is no need for government. Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant: I declare him my enemy.
However, the physiology of society does not immediately conform to this egalitarian organisation: the idea of Providence, one of the first to appear in society, rejects it. Equality among us comes through a succession of tyrannies and governments under which Liberty continually battles with absolutism, as Israël with Jehovah. Equality is therefore repeatedly born out of inequality; Liberty takes government as its point of departure.
When the first men gathered at the edge of the forests in order to found society, they did not say (like shareholders in a limited partnership): “Let us organise our rights and our responsibilities so as to produce for each and every person the greatest amount of well-being, thus bringing into existence both equality and independence.” Such reasoning was beyond the capabilities of the first men, and contradicts what scholars have been able to discover. Indeed, theirs was a completely different concept: “Let us constitute among ourselves an authority to watch over and govern us!” Constituamos super nos regem! And that was exactly what was meant by our compatriots when they gave their votes to Louis Bonaparte on 10th December 1848. The voice of the people is the voice of power, with the expectation that it will become the voice of Liberty. Additionally, all authority is divine right: omnis potestas a deo, as St. Paul said.[2]
Authority is therefore the first social idea to have been devised by humanity.
And the second was to work immediately for the abolition of authority, each person wanting it to serve as the guarantor of their own liberty against the liberty of others: this was the inevitable result and is the inevitable function of a division into Parties.
Authority was scarcely inaugurated in the world when it became the object of universal conflict. Authority, Government, Power, State — these words all signify the same thing; each one of these embodies the means to exploit and oppress others. Absolutists, Doctrinaires, Demagogues and Socialists always turn their gaze towards authority like a magnet to a pole.
As a result of this, there rises the aphorism from the Radical Party[3] that the Doctrinaires and Absolutists of course do not disavow: The social revolution is the end; the political revolution (i.e. the transfer of authority) is the means. What this means is: “Give us the power of life and death over you, the people, and your possessions, and we will give you liberty.” Kings and priests have been repeating this for the last six thousand years.
And thus government and the Parties are reciprocally, one to the other, Cause, End and Means. They exist for one another; their destiny is shared: it is to call daily on the people to emancipate themselves; it is to energetically solicit their support by suppressing their powers of discrimination; it is to shape their minds and push them in the direction of progress by prejudice, by restrictions, by a calculated resistance to all their ideas, to all their needs. You will not do this; you will abstain from that: the government, irrespective of which party happens to hold power, has never known how to say anything else. Prohibition, since Eden, has been the school of the human race. However, once Man has reached the age of majority, government and parties must disappear. This conclusion is reached by the same rigorous logic, using the same sense of inevitability by which socialism has emerged out of absolutism, philosophy out of religion, and even by which equality emerges out of inequality.
If one seeks, by means of philosophical analysis, to understand authority, its principles, its forms, its effects, one soon recognises that the constitution of authority, both spiritual and temporal, is nothing other than a preparatory organism, essentially parasitic and corruptible, incapable of itself of creating anything else, such is its form, such is the idea that it represents, namely tyranny and misery. Philosophy affirms, in consequence, and contrary to faith, that the constitution of an authority over the people is only a transitional establishment; that power is not in any way a conclusion of science but a product of spontaneity, itself disappearing as soon as it develops a sense of itself; that, far from growing and strengthening in time, as the rival parties who besiege it assume, it has to reduce itself indefinitely and become absorbed into the industrial organisation; that, in consequence, it should not be placed above but under society; and in turning the aphorism of the Radicals around, it concludes: The political revolution, (i.e., the abolition of authority among men) is the end; the social revolution is the means.
And this is why, adds the philosopher, that all the Parties, without exception, and to the extent that they affect power, are all varieties of absolutism, and this is, therefore, why there will no be liberty for citizens, no order in society, no union among workers until the renunciation of authority has replaced the current faith in authority within the political catechism.
No more parties;
No more authority;
Absolute liberty for man and citizen.
In three short phrases, I have summed up my expression of political faith.
It is in this spirit of governmental negation that I once said to a man of rare intelligence, but who had the weakness to want to become a minister:
“Work with us for the demolition of government! Become a revolutionary for the transformation of Europe and the world, and remain a journalist.” (Représentant du Peuple, June 5th, 1848)
The response I received was:
“There are two ways to be a revolutionary: from above, which is revolution by initiative, by intelligence, by progress, by ideas; and from below, which is revolution by insurrection, by force, by despair, on the streets.
“I am and always have been a revolutionary from above; I am not and never have been a revolutionary from below.
“So don’t ever expect me to work together with anyone for the demolition of any government; my spirit refuses to act thus. I follow a single political thought and idea: to improve the government.” (La Presse, June 6th, 1848)
In this distinction of from above and from below, there is a great deal of bluster but little truth. M. de Girardin, explaining his thoughts in this way, believes himself to have expressed an idea which is as new as it is profound; but he has simply reproduced the eternal illusion of the Demagogues who, believing, with the help of power, that they are advancing their revolutions, are in fact merely serving to undermine them. Let us have a closer look at the thoughts of M. de Girardin.
This ingenious publicist has decided to call revolution by initiative, by intelligence, by progress and ideas the revolution from above; he has decided to call revolution by means of insurrection and despair the revolution from below. However, exactly the opposite is true.
From above, in the thinking of the writer I am quoting, evidently signifies power; from below signifies the people. On the one hand we have the actions of government; on the other, the initiative of the masses.
It is a question then of identifying which of these initiatives, that of the government or that of the people, is the most intelligent, the most progressive, the most peaceful.
Nevertheless, revolution from above is (and I will explain why later) inevitably revolution according to the whims of the Prince, the arbitrary judgement of a minister, the fumblings of an Assembly or the violence of a club: it is a revolution of dictatorship and despotism.
And that is revolution as practised by Louis XIV, Napoléon, Charles X; and it was thus that Messrs. Guizot, Louis Blanc and Léon Faucher sought to act. The Whites, The Blues, The Reds are all in agreement on this!
Revolution on the initiative of the masses is a revolution by the concerted action of the citizens, by the experience of the workers, by the progress and diffusion of enlightenment, revolution by the means of liberty. Condorcet, Tugot, Robespierre all sought a revolution from below, from true democracy. One of the men who created revolution the most and governed the least was Saint Louis.[4] France at the time of Saint Louis ran itself; it produced, as a vine produces buds, its lords and its vassals; when the king published his famous resolution, it was simply a formalisation of the public will.
Socialism gave in fully to the illusion of radicalism; the saintly Plato, more than 2000 years ago was a tragic example of this. Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Cabet, Louis Blanc, all believers in the organisation of labour by the State, by Capital, by whatever authority, appealed, like M. de Girardin to revolution from above. Instead of teaching the people how to organise themselves, by calling on their experience and their reasoning, they demanded Power. In what way, then, do they differentiate themselves from despots? They are also utopians, like all despots: as one despot steps down, another fills his shoes!
The conclusion is that government can never be revolutionary quite simply because it is government. Society alone, the masses armed with their intelligence, can create revolution; society alone is able to deploy all its spontaneity, to analyse and explain the mystery of its destiny and its origin, to change its faith and its philosophy, because it alone is capable of fighting against its originator and to bear its fruit. Governments are God’s scourge, established to discipline the world: do you really expect them to destroy themselves, to create freedom, to make revolution?
They cannot act otherwise. All revolutions since the coronation of the first king up until the Declaration of the Rights of Man were achieved by the spontaneity of the people: governments have always hindered, always suppressed, always beaten back; they have never created revolution. Their role is not to create change but to control it. And anyway, what is repugnant is that even if they possessed revolutionary science, social science, they could not apply it because they would have been unable to do so, they would not have the right. It would be necessary for them first of all to lay out their science before the people in order to obtain the consent of the citizens: which is to ignore the nature of authority and of power.
The facts here confirm the theory. The nations which have the most freedom are those where power holds the least sway, where its role is most restrained: one only needs to cite the United States of America, Switzerland, England and Holland. On the other hand, witness that the most subservient nations are those where power is best organised and strongest. And yet we continue to complain that we are not governed enough, and we demand strong government, always stronger government!
The Church said in times past, speaking like a tender mother: “All for the people, but all by the priests.”
The Monarchy came after the Church: “All for the people, but all by the Prince.”
The Doctrinaires: “All for the people, but all by the Bourgeoisie.”
The Radicals changed the formula, but failed to change the principle: “All for the people, but all by the State.”
It is always the same governmentalism, the same communism.
Who then is going to finally conclude; “All for the people, all by the people, including the government”? All for the people: agriculture, commerce, industry, philosophy, religion, police, etc. All by the people: government and religion, as well as agriculture and commerce.
Democracy is the abolition of all means to power, both spiritual and temporal, legislative, executive, judicial, and proprietary. It is not the Bible, without doubt, that reveals this to us: it is the logic of societies; it is the inevitable outcome of revolutionary acts; it is all of modern philosophy.
Following M. de Lamartine, and in accordance with M. de Genoude, it is government’s responsibility to say: I want. The country has only to reply: I consent.
And the experience of centuries tells the people that the best government is that which manages best to render itself powerless. Do we need parasites in order to work or priests in order to speak to God? We do not need elected persons to govern us either.
The exploitation of man by man, someone once said, is theft. Well, government of man by man is slavery; and all positive religion, right up to the dogma of papal infallibility, is surely nothing other than the adoration of man by man, in other words, idolatry.
Absolutism, founded simultaneously on the power of the Church, the State and their collective stored wealth, has multiplied, like a web, the chains on humanity. As a result of the exploitation of man by man, as a result of government of man by man, we now have:
The judgement of man by man,
The condemnation of man by man
And, to finish the sequence, the punishment of man by man!
These religious, political and judicial institutions, of which we are so proud, which we have come to respect, which we are obliged to obey, right up until they wither and fall like fruit falling in its season, are the instruments of our apprenticeship, visible signs of the government of Instinct over humanity, the weakened but not disfigured remains of the bloody customs that bear witness to our darkest human age. Cannibalism disappeared a long time ago, not without constant resistance from those who held power, in conjunction with their atrocious practices: it still exists within the spirit of our institutions, and, by way of example, I point to the Eucharistic Sacrament[5] and to the Penal Code.
Philosophical reason rejects this barbaric symbolism; it proscribes these exaggerated forms of human respect. And it did not intend, [as] with the Radicals and the Doctrinaires, that one can proceed to this reform by means of legislative authority; it does not admit that anyone has the right to attempt to work for the best interests of the people in spite of the people, that it is acceptable to set a nation free even if it wants to be governed. Philosophy only puts its faith in reforms which have come out of the free will of societies: the only revolutions that it admits are those which proceed on the initiative of the masses; it denies, in the most absolute manner, the revolutionary competence of governments.
To sum up:
If you do not question faith, the fragmentation of society looks like the terrible result of the original fall of man. It is what Greek mythology explained through the fable of the warriors born from the teeth of serpents that went on to kill one another after their birth. God, according to the myth, left the government of humanity in the hands of warring parties, such that discord established its reign on Earth, and that Man learned, under perpetual tyranny, to look constantly back to a bygone age.
According to this reasoning, governments and parties are merely the inevitable implementers of the fundamental concepts of society, a realisation of the abstractions, a metaphysical pantomime whose meaning is liberty.
I have made my profession of faith. You are familiar with the personalities who, in this summing up of my political life, are obliged to play the principal parts; you know what the subject of my presentation is going to be: please consider well what I am now going to describe to you.
Somewhere I said that society is a metaphysics in action, a sort of logic that plays itself out on a grand scale.[6] What the general study of history and the profounder study of political economy had revealed to me was rendered palpable by the experience of the events that took place in the course of two years.
Every government establishes itself in contradiction of the one that preceded it: that is its reason for evolving as it does and the justification for its existence. The July government was in opposition to the claims of legitimacy; legitimacy was in opposition to the Empire; the latter was in opposition to the Directory, which was established by the hate directed against the Convention, which was itself convoked to do away with the badly reformed monarchy of Louis XVI.
According to this law of evolution Louis Philippe’s government, unexpectedly overthrown, in turn required its contrary. On the 24th of February the failure of capital took place; on the 25th the government of labour was inaugurated.[7] The provisional government’s decree guaranteeing the right to work was in effect the birth of February’s republic. Good God! Were six thousand years of revolutionary arguments necessary to lead us to this conclusion?...
Again the theory of antinomies was confirmed by experience: perhaps those who deny that any role is played by philosophy in the vicissitudes of human affairs and ascribe everything to an invisible power will finally tell us why reason explains all, even error and crime, while faith alone explains nothing?
The fact that the government of workers succeeded that of capitalists was not only logical but just. Capital, which had set itself up as the principle and goal of social institutions had not been able to sustain itself; the proof was supplied that far from being the principle, it is the product, and that property is no more the driving and shaping force of society than divine right or the sword. After having corrupted everything capitalist theory had even put capital itself at risk.
In this respect the facts were flagrantly obvious; their witness spoke loud and clear. At the time of the February revolution commerce and industry, which had been suffering for some years, were in a sad state of stagnation, agriculture was deeply in debt, workshops were out of work, the shops had a superfluity of goods but no turnover, the finances of the State were in just as desperate a condition as those of private individuals. In spite of the periodic growth of the budget, which from 1830 to 1848 had risen progressively from one hundred thousand to one and a half million, the upper and lower houses of parliament had discerned a deficit amounting to 800 million according to some and to others 1000 million; in this general increase of costs the pay of the officials alone represented an annual sum of 65 million. The bankocrats, who in 1830 had made a revolution in the name of interest and promised a cheap government while affecting the title of economists much more than that of politicians, these philosophers of debit and credit spent half as much again as the government of legitimacy and once as much again as the imperial government, without being able to balance receipts and expenses.
So the proof was definite: it wasn’t capital, interest, usury, parasitism and monopoly which the legislator of 1830 had meant to say, it was labour. Certainly the pretended principle of the July revolution was just as incapable of producing Order as it was of producing Liberty; it was necessary to go higher up, i.e. lower down, it was necessary to go down to the proletariat, down to nothingness. The February revolution was therefore logically and justly termed the revolution of the workers. How could the bourgeoisie of ’89, of ’99, of 1814 and 1830, this bourgeoisie that had passed through the descending chain of governmental forms from catholicism and feudalism down to capital, which only desired to produce and exchange goods, which only attained power through work and the economy, how could it see any danger to its own interests in the republic of labour?
In this way the February revolution imposed itself on people’s minds with both de facto and legal authority. The bourgeoisie, vanquished as it was, I do not say by the people — thank the Lord, there had been no conflict between the bourgeoisie and the people in February — but conquered by itself, confessed its defeat. Though taken aback by the unexpected turn of events and disquieted by the spirit and tendencies of the Republic, it did agree that certainly constitutional monarchy had had its day and that it was necessary to reform the government from top to bottom. Thus it resigned itself to supporting the new establishment with its approval and even its capital resources. Had it not, by its opposition and impatience, in fact stimulated the emergence of the very regime that became a material obstacle to its commerce, its industry and its well-being?... It is also true that the emergence of the Republic experienced even fewer contradictions than that of Louis-Philippe, since everyone had begun to grasp the meaning of the times and revolutions!
At this point I would like to claim my readers’ full attention, for if we do not learn a lesson from all this it is useless to continue bothering ourselves with public affairs. Let the nations blunder on: each of us should buy a rifle, a dagger, pistols — and barricade his door. Society is but a vain utopia: man’s natural state, the legal state, is war.
The government of work!... Ah! that would be a government with initiative, no doubt, a government of progress and intelligence!... But what is the government of work? Can labour turn into government? Can labour govern or be governed? What do labour and power have in common?
Nobody had foreseen such a question; no matter. Seduced by their prejudice in favour of government, the people had nothing more urgent to do but straight away form a new government. Power having fallen into their labouring hands, they made haste to pass it over to a certain number of men of their choice, whom they charged with founding the Republic and resolving the social problem, that of the proletariat, at the same time as the political problem. — We give you three months, they told them, and still sublimely naive, still tenderly heroic, they added: We have to endure three months of misery in the service of the Republic! Neither classical antiquity nor the revolution of ’92 had anything comparable to this cry from the very innards of the people of February.
The men chosen by the people and installed at the Town Hall were called the Provisional Government, which one must translate as the government without any idea or goal. Those who had been impatiently observing the development of socialist ideas for 18 years and repeating in every possible register: The social revolution is the end, the political revolution is the means, were, God knows, embarrassed when, once in the possession of the means, they had to achieve the goal and get down to the task at hand. They thought about it, I do not doubt, and soon they had to recognise what M. Thiers revealed somewhat later, what President Sauzet had said before him, namely that the government was not made in order to give the worker work and that the surest way for them was to continue the status quo of Louis-Philippe and resist any innovation, as long as the people would not impose it on authority.
Yet they did not lack intelligence, these conspirators for thirty years who had combated every despotism, criticised every minister and written the history of every revolution; every one of them had a socio-political theory in his briefcase. They asked for nothing better than to take the initiative, any initiative, these adventurers of progress; their advisors did not fail them either. How then did they remain for three months without producing the tiniest act of reform, without advancing the revolution by a single step forward? How, after having guaranteed the right to work by decree, did they seem, during all the time they were on the job, to be occupied solely with the means of not fulfilling their promise? Why not the tiniest attempt at effecting agricultural or industrial organisation? Why did they deprive themselves of the one decisive argument against utopia, i.e. experience?...
How? Why? Do I have to say it? Do I, a socialist, have to justify the Provisional Government? It is, you see, because they were the government; it is because in the question of revolution any initiative conflicts with the State, just as labour conflicts with capital; it is because the government and labour are incompatible like reason and faith.[8] That is the key to all the things that have taken place in France and Europe since February and which might well go on taking place for a long time yet.
Here is the place to expose the juridical reason for the revolutionary incapacity of all governments.
What makes the government immobilistic, conservative, resistant to any initiative, let us even say counter-revolutionary, is that a revolution is an organic thing, a matter of creation, while governmental power is mechanical, a matter of enforcement [d’exécution]. I will explain.
I do not call the laws organic, since they are purely conventional things touching the most general elements of administration and power like municipal and departmental laws, the law concerning recruitment, the law concerning public education, etc. The word organic used in this sense is an abuse of language and Mr Odilon Barrot was quite right to say that such laws have nothing at all organic about them. This supposed organism, invented by Bonaparte, is nothing but governmental machinery. By organic I understand what goes to make up the inmost and secular constitution of society, above any political system or constitution of the state.
We say, for example, that marriage is an organic thing. It is up to the legislative power to take the initiative in any law governing the relations of public or domestic interest and order which are occasioned by conjugal society: it does not have a brief to modify the essence of that society. Is marriage an institution of absolute or doubtful morality, a progressive or decadent institution? One may dispute this point as much as one will: no government or assembly of legislators will ever have the right to take the initiative in this. It is for the spontaneous development of customs and morals, for general civilisation, for what I call human Providence to modify what can be modified, to introduce reforms which time alone can reveal. And that is, to mention it in passing, what has prevented the establishment of divorce in France. After long and serious discussions and after the experience of several years the legislator had to recognise that a question of such delicacy and gravity was not within his remit, that the time had passed when divorce could have become part of our institutions without any danger for the family and without offending public morals, and that in wishing to cut this knot the government risked degrading precisely what it wanted to ennoble.[9]
Nobody will suspect me of superstitious weakness and religious prejudices of any sort, yet I will say that religion, like marriage, is not a matter of statutory procedure [réglementaire] and pure discipline but an organic affair and consequently immune to the direct action of State power. Part of the function of the ancient legislative, at least that is my opinion, by virtue of the distinction of the spiritual and the temporal customary for a long time in the Gallican Church, was to regulate the temporal affairs of the clergy and redefine episcopal districts, but I deny that the National Assembly had the right to close the churches. I recognise the power of the communal authority and the Jacobin society to establish a new cult even less when I consider that the steps taken in this direction could only end in strengthening the old one. Religion was an organic thing in France when the Revolution burst on the scene; it is true that by means of the progress of philosophy it was then possible to proclaim the right to abstain from it, and that one may now in fact predict the imminent extinction or transformation of Catholicism, but there was no authority at that time to abolish it. The Concordat of 1802[10] was not at all, whatever some may have said, simply a matter of consular reaction; it was a simple reparation demanded by the vast majority of the people following the vain parades of Hébert and Robespierre. — I still believe, correspondingly, that it was right for the parliament of 1830 to assure all faiths of their right to freedom, respect and incomes, but I would not agree that it was permissible, in maintaining the monarchical principle, for it to state that the Catholic religion was nothing but a majority religion. Certainly I would not today give my support to a revision, in the sense that I have suggested, of Article 7 of the Constitution of 1848: what has been done, whatever it may have cost, is done, and I consider it irrevocable. One could do better and more for the emancipation of human consciousness; but I would not have voted for article 6 of the Charter of 1830.
These examples suffice to explain my thought. A revolution is an explosion of organic force, an evolution of society expressing what was already within it; it is only legitimate if it is spontaneous, peaceful and traditional. There is equal tyranny in repressing it as in doing violence to it.
The organisation of labour which the provisional government was instructed to take steps to carry out after the events of February affected property first of all, and then the institution of marriage and the family; the terms it was expressed in even implied an abolition (or redemption, if that term is preferred) of property. The socialists who opinionatedly insist on denying it after all the study devoted to the matter, or who deplore that other socialists have said this, have not even the sad excuse of ignorance; they are quite simply speaking in bad faith.
Before acting or deliberating on the matter the provisional government should have made a preliminary distinction of the organic question from the executive question, in other words, what was the field of competence of governmental power and what was not. Then, having made this distinction, its sole duty and its sole right was to invite the citizens themselves to produce, by the full exercise of their liberty, the new facts which it, the government, would then later be called upon either to exercise some control over or give a direction to in case of need.
It is probable that the provisional government was not led by such lofty considerations; it is even to be supposed that such scruples would never had held it back. It only desired to revolutionise, but it did not know how to go about it. It was a mixture of conservatives, doctrinaire thinkers, Jacobins, socialists, each talking a different language. It would have been a miracle, considering what trouble they had agreeing on the slightest point regarding policy, if they had succeeded in reaching an understanding about something like a revolution. It was the discord reigning in the government camp, much more than the prudence of the generals, that preserved the country from the utopias of the provisional government: the disagreements that agitated it were its substitute for philosophy.
The mistake of the provisional government, its great mistake, was not to have been unable to build; it was to have been unable to demolish.
For instance, it would have been necessary to abolish the oppressive laws concerning individual freedom, put a stop to the scandal of arbitrary arrests, fix the limits of prevention... All they thought of was to defend the prerogatives of the magistracy, and the citizens’ liberty was more than ever at the arbitrary mercy of the public prosecutor. It pleases the high police to convert a restaurant into a mousetrap; two hundred citizens gathered for a dinner are torn from their wives and children, beaten, thrown in prison, accused of conspiracy and then released after the investigative magistrate, who does not know himself what the police is accusing them of, has convinced himself at length that there is no charge to press against them.
It would have been necessary to disarm the powers that be, discharge half of the army, abolish military conscription, organise a citizens’ army, remove the troops from the capital, declare that the executive power could never under any circumstance and under any pretext dissolve and disarm the national guard. — Instead of that, the government busied itself with the formation of those twenty-four mobile battalions concerning whose utility and patriotism we were later, in June, instructed. As they were suspicious of the national guard they were far from declaring it inviolable: the successors to the provisional government have also not neglected to dissolve it.
It would have been necessary to guarantee the freedom of assembly, first by abolishing the law of 1790 and all such laws which might carry ambiguous implications, then by organising the political clubs around the representatives of the people, giving them entrance into parliamentary life. The organisation of popular societies was the pivot of democracy, the cornerstone of republican order. In place of organisation the provisional government had nothing to offer the clubs but tolerance and espionage, in the expectation that public indifference and the forces of reaction would cause them to vanish.
It would have been necessary to rip the nails and teeth off state power and hand over the government’s public force to the citizens, not only in order to prevent the government from taking steps against liberty but to deprive governmental utopias of their last hope. Did they not prove the power of the State against the enterprises of minorities on the 16th of April and the 15th of May? Well, there would have been neither a 16th of April nor a 15th of May if the government, with its power of irresistible force, had not been an irresistible temptation to the impatience of democrats.
Everything was done in a topsy-turvy manner on the day after the February revolution. The government wanted to do what was not within its rights to do, and for that purpose it preserved and indeed even augmented the power which it had taken from the July monarchy. It failed to do what it should have done, and for that purpose the revolution was repressed on the 17th of March, in the name of power, by those very persons who appeared to be the most energetic representatives of that revolution. Instead of rendering to the people its fecundity of initiative by subordinating power to its will, they attempted by means of power to resolve those problems on the subject of which time had not yet illuminated the masses; in order to ensure the so-called revolution, they performed a vanishing trick on liberty! Nothing appeared to be an option to these reformers in the way of what had been seen in the great revolutionary epochs: no impulses from below, no indication of popular opinion, not a single principle or discovery which might have received the people’s sanction. And they alarmed the rational attitude of this same people by decrees which they themselves condemned. Being unable to justify them by any principles they pretended to excuse these decrees in the name of necessity! It was no longer, as it had been only recently, the antagonism of liberty and power, it was the infernal mock-marriage of the two.
Reread history, then, and you will see how revolutions emerge and are effected.
Before Luther, Descartes and the Encyclopédists, the State, that faithful expression of society, hands over heretics and philosophers to the executioners. Jan Hus, the precursor of Protestantism, is burned at Constance by the secular arm of the state after being condemned by the Council. But little by little rational thought insinuates itself into the hearts of the masses: soon the State pardons the innovators, it takes them as guides and consecrates their right. The Revolution of ’89 derives from the same source: it was already formed in public opinion when it was declared by State power. In a totally different context of ideas, when has the State ever bothered about canals and railways? when has it wanted to have a steam-powered navy? Only after a multitude of experimental attempts and the publicly recognised success of the first entrepreneurs.
It has been the privilege of our epoch to attempt a revolution by the means of State power, something never seen heretofore, and then to have it rejected by the nation. Socialism existed and had been propagating itself for 18 years under the protection of the Charter, which recognised the right of all French people to publish their opinions and have them printed. When they dragged socialism to power the demagogues of February possessed the secret of stirring up intolerance of it and of causing it and even its ideas to be suppressed. It was they who by their fatal reversal of principles caused the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the people to break out, an antagonism which had not manifested itself at all during the three days of 1848 or those of 1830, an antagonism which did not derive from the revolutionary idea and which was to result in the bloodiest catastrophe and the most ridiculous debacle.
While the provisional government, bereft of the genius of revolutions, separating itself both from the bourgeoisie and from the people at the same time, lost days and weeks in sterile and tentative actions, in agitations and circulars, a governmental socialism of God knows what sort caused heated public debate, put on dictatorial airs and, — something that amazes anybody who has not studied the mechanics of these contradictions, — itself gave the signal for resistance, in contravention of its own theory.
If, however, you persist in telling me, the provisional government had been comprised of more homogenous elements and more energetic men, if Barbès and Blanqui had been able to agree instead of opposing each other, if the elections had taken place a month sooner, if the socialists had hidden their theories for a while, if, if, if, etc.: you assert that things would have happened in a completely different way. The provisional government would have achieved the revolution in fifteen days. The national assembly, completely comprised of republicans, would have united and developed its work. We would not have had a March 17th, April 16th or May 15th, and you, clever historian, would not be so clever for theorising power’s impotence and the government’s revolutionary incapacity.
Let us think about this then, and since facts abound, let us cite them. March 17th, April 16th and May 15th have not convinced you, so I am going to tell you a story that will cause you to reflect, but before that, let us learn a little about what history is.
There are two ways of studying history: one I will call the providential method and the other one the philosophical method.
The first method is related to the cause of events, in which a superior will, God, that is, directs the course of things from on high, or a human will momentarily placed in a way to act on events through its free will, like God. This method does not exclude absolutely any design or systematic premeditation in history, but it has nothing of the necessary and could be revoked any time its author wants; it depends entirely on the determination of dignitaries and God’s sovereign will. Furthermore, according to the theologians, God could have created an infinite number of worlds that are different from the current one, and providence could have directed the course of events of infinity in other ways. If, for example, Alexander the Great, instead of dying at the age of 32, had lived until he was 60, if Caesar had been defeated at Pharsala, if Constantine had not gone to establish himself in Byzantium, if Charlemagne had not founded and consolidated the temporal power of the popes, if the Bastille had not been taken on July 14th or a detachment of grenadiers had chased the people’s representatives away from the Jeu de Paume[11] as Bonaparte’s did in St. Cloud,[12] isn’t it true, the providential historian asks, that civilisation could have gone in another direction, that Catholicism would not have the same character and that Henry V or Louis XVII would be king?
We see that the basis of this theory is nothing other than chance. What the believer calls providence the sceptic calls luck: it is one and the same. Fieschi and Alibaud, believing that regicide hastened the triumph of democracy, and Bossuet, relating universal history to the establishment of the Roman apostolic Catholic Church, were from the same school. Based on historical science, there is no difference between absolute Pyrrhonism[13] and the deepest superstition. This policy of the last reign, without a system despite its pompous verbiage and unstable expedient politics, is really worth no more than Gregory the Seventh’s, a routine followed like Catholicism, its development profoundly blind, not knowing where it is going.
The philosophical method, while recognising that particular facts have nothing to do with fate, that they may vary infinitely, depending on whose wills produce them, consider them, however, as dependent on general laws inherent in nature and humanity. Those laws are the eternal and invariable idea of history: as for the facts they reveal, they are the arbitrary side of history, like the written characters that describe speech and the terms that express ideas. They could be changed indefinitely without the immanent thought they contain suffering as a result.
Therefore, to respond to the objection made to me, the provisional government could have been comprised of other men, Louis Blanc could have stayed, Barbès and Blanqui could have avoided complicating such an already complex situation with their rival influence and the majority of the national assembly could have been more democratic: all this, I say, and many more things as well could have been possible, and events would have been completely different from those we have seen: this is the accidental, the contingent side of history.
But given the series of revolutions in which the modern world is engaged, a series that itself results from the conditions of the human mind, as well as a prejudice everyone simultaneously accepts and opposes, according to which it is the constituted authority of the nation [that is] to take the initiative of reform and direct the movement, I say that the events that had to be deduced from it, whatever they were, fortunate or unfortunate, could only have been the expression of the fatal struggle between tradition and the Revolution.
All the incidents we have seen since February take their meaning from this double fact: on one hand, an economic and social revolution that, I dare say is urgently is called for following the twenty previous political, philosophical and religious revolutions, and on the other hand, faith in power that instantly falsifies the Revolution by giving it an absurd and anti-liberal face. Once again, the February revolution could have had a different plot, different actors, roles or themes. The show, instead of being a tragedy, could have been merely a melodrama, but the meaning and morality of the play would have remained the same.
According to this philosophical conception of history, the general facts are classified and produced in succession with a deductive rigour that nothing in the positive sciences surpasses, and as it is possible for reason to articulate their philosophy, so is it possible for human prudence to direct their course. In the providential theory, on the contrary, history is no more than a fictional imbroglio without principle, reason or purpose, an argument for superstition as it is for atheism and an outrage against the mind and conscience.
What maintains faith in providence is the involuntary confusion of the laws of society with the accidents that comprise its staging. The vulgar perceive a certain logic in the general facts and relate the detailing facts to the same source, neither the purpose nor necessity of which they discover, because, in fact, that necessity does not exist, and they conclude that a providential will completely settles the smallest and greatest matters, the contingent and the necessary alike, and as the Schoolmen say,[14] all that is simply a contradiction. For us, providence in history is the same thing as supernatural revelation in philosophy, arbitrariness in government and abuse in property.
We are going to see in the event that I have to describe that, while democracy, on the one hand, and the conservative party, on the other, obey the same passions, striving with equal ardour to exert pressure favourable to their ideas on events, history unfolds following its own laws with syllogistic precision.
The provisional government had guaranteed the right to work in the most formal manner. It had made that guarantee in accordance with its claimed initiative, and the people accepted it as such. Both parties had made the commitment in good faith: how many people in France on February 24th, even among the most virulent adversaries of socialism, would have believed it impossible that a state as highly organised as ours, as abundantly equipped with resources, could ensure work for a few hundred thousand workers? The matter seemed so easy, so simple; conviction in this regard was so general that the most resistant to the new order of things were happy to end the revolution on that note. Furthermore, there was nothing to haggle over: the people were master, and when, after toiling all day in the heat, they only demanded more work as payment for their sovereignty, the people could rightly pass for the most just of kings and the most moderate of conquerors.
Three months had been given to the provisional government to honour its obligation. The three months elapsed, and the work did not come. The demonstration of May 15th created some disorder in relations, so the bill the people had issued to the government was renewed, but the deadline approached, and nothing led the people to believe it would be paid.
— “Give us work yourselves,” the workers told the government, “if the entrepreneurs cannot restart their production.”
To this proposal from the workers, the government responded with a triple estoppel:
— “We do not have any money and therefore cannot guarantee wages for you;”
“We only make your products for ourselves and would not know to whom we could sell them. ”
“And even if we could sell them, that would not help us at all because, due to our competition, free industry would be stopped and would send us back its workers.”
— “In that case, take over all industry, transportation and even agriculture, and take the workers back.”
— “We cannot do it,” replied the government. “Such a plan would be community and universal, absolute servitude against which the vast majority of the citizens protest. They proved it on March 17th, April 16th and May 15th and by sending us an assembly comprised of nine-tenths of the partisans of free competition, free trade and free and independent property. What do you want us to do against the will of 35 million citizens opposed to your will, oh unfortunate workers, you who saved us from dictatorship on March 17th?”
— “Give us credit then; advance us capital, and organise state sponsorship.”
— “You have no security to offer us,” observed the government. “And as we have told you, everyone knows that we do not have any money.”
— “You told us, ‘It is up to the state to give credit, not to receive it!’ and we have not forgotten it. Create paper money; we accept it in advance and will pass it onto others.”
“Fiat money! Assignats!” the government responded despondently. “We can force payment, but we cannot force sales. Your paper money will fall after three months of depreciation, and your misery will be worse.”
“Then the February revolution means nothing!” the workers told each other with concern. “Do we have to die again for having made it?”
The provisional government, not being able to organise work, give credit or conduct the rest of the routine business of all governments, had hoped that, with time and order, it would bring back confidence, that work would re-establish itself, that in the meantime it would suffice to offer the working masses, who could not be abandoned to their distress, a food subsidy.
Such was the thought behind the national workshops, a humane and well-intended but amazingly impotent idea. It was painful, perhaps dangerous, to rudely tell these men who had believed for a moment in their coming emancipation to return to their worksites and solicit their bosses’ benevolence again: this was seen as treason toward the people, and until May 15th, although they were not the government, the people were king. But on the other hand, the provisional government soon perceived that the economic renovation necessary to satisfy the people was not the business of the state; it had sensed that the nation detested this revolutionary method. It increasingly felt that what had been proposed to it in the name of the organisation of work and that had been believed to be so easy was forbidden to it. Not seeing any way out of this labyrinth, it waited while doing its best to restart business and feed unemployed workers, for which no one could surely accuse it of committing a crime.
But here again, the government deluded itself with the most fatal illusion.
The doctrinaire party, rallying to the absolutist party, spoke aloud after the May 15th debacle. It ruled the government and the assembly and, from the podium and through its newspapers, gave France its slogan, republican if you like, but conservative above all. Meanwhile, the democrats, because they were tightening [government] power, were in the process of losing it themselves, and the doctrinaires, pushed on by the Jesuits, were preparing to snatch it back. They could not allow the favourable opportunity to escape them.
The government’s opponents then claimed that the re-establishment of order and, consequently, the return of confidence, were incompatible with the existence of the national workshops, that if we seriously wanted to revive labour, it was necessary to start by dissolving those workshops. Therefore, the government found itself doubly trapped within a circle, cornered by the impossibilities that had sprung up, whether they wanted to procure work for the workers or only give them credit, whether they wanted to send them home or to feed them for a time.
The reaction proved to be especially intractable because it thought, not without reason, that the national workshops, then including more than 100,000 men, were the road to Socialism, and that once this army was dispersed, we would have a healthy market and democracy, while the executive commission perhaps thought that it could put an end to the republic before discussing the constitution. They were in a strong position: they decided to follow their luck and profit from it. These men, so sensitive towards the bankrupt with regard to their annuities, were ready to violate the promise the provisional government made in the country’s name, to make the workers with guaranteed work bankrupt, and, as needed, to impose that bankruptcy by force.
The situation was as follows:
As the price of the February revolution and in view of their opinion on the quality of [those in] power, the provisional government and the people had agreed that the people would waive their sovereignty and that the Government, in taking power, would commit to guaranteeing work in less than three months.
Because the execution of the agreement was impossible, the national assembly refused to agree to it.
Either a transaction would take place or, if the two parties were stubborn, there would be a catastrophe.
To one party, humanity, respect for sworn belief and concern for peace, and to the other party, the republic’s financial trouble, the difficulties of the issue, and the demonstrated incompetence of power, demanded that they reach a compromise. This is what was understood by the partisans of the national workshops, represented by their delegates, but above all, by their new director, Lalanne, and by the minister of public works, Trélat, who, in these deplorable days, conducted himself as a man of courage and did his duty.
Because this part of the facts on the June insurrection has remained highly obscure up until now, the Report of the Inquest[15] on the June events not bothering to mention it although it reveals the cause of those bloody days, I will go into a few details. The people have to know what enemies they had to make and how revolutions are evaded; the bourgeoisie also have to know how their terrors are exploited and what schemers use their feelings of loyal moderation in their detestable politics. M. Lalanne himself provided me with the main information. On this occasion, he displayed a kindness for which I cannot thank him enough here.
The executive commission had just formed a ministry. On May 12th, Trélat was called to public works, the department responsible for the national workshops. He immediately saw the dangers of the situation and started looking for the means to ward it off. On the 17th, despite the problems of the 15th, he instituted a commission that he charged with reporting on the national workshops and proposing a solution. The next day, the 18th, this commission met and deliberated for the entire day without stopping. The report was drafted the following night, read to the commission on the morning of the 19th, discussed and decreed in this second session, copied and immediately delivered to the minister. After hearing it read, Trélat declared that he adopted all its conclusions and ordered that it be printed, and by the 20th at two o’clock, the national treasury had produced 1,200 copies intended for the national assembly and the main administrations. Distribution had to take place that same day.
Suddenly, the order was given to stop distribution: the executive commission had decided that not one copy must leave the minister’s office, fearing that the conclusions of the Report, in which certain principles were expressed, including the right to work, would face violent opposition in the national assembly. Since May 15th, hostile emotions had started to arise: there was no reason to provide a pretext for them to explode. While only daring could have saved it, the executive commission gave in to fear: the time for its withdrawal had come.
Impeded right from the start on the prudent yet radical path of reform to which he was committed, the minister was not disheartened. At least he tried to eradicate the most glaring abuses among those that the commission had indicated to him, but he only received unfulfilled promises from the young director who had presided over the creation of the national workshops from the start. It was said that an evil spirit fought to simultaneously aggravate the illness and hinder the cure. A few days were lost in useless efforts. Trélat wanted to overcome the inertia that he encountered, give more authority to his orders and surround himself with more intelligence in order to reconstitute the commission with experienced administrators who represented various ministerial departments. That commission met on May 26th, presided over by the minister. It called the director and soon recognised that it could expect nothing from him. He was replaced the same day.
From this time on, the National Workshops Commission modified, extended or restricted each proposal of the first report. It was first concerned with reforming abuses. It reduced the offices that had grown excessively, replaced day labour with work by the job, organised, with the help of the municipal authorities, some control, and, from the start, recognised that out of 120,000 registered names 25,000 had to be deleted for double or triple entries. But all of these measures were pure repression. It was not enough to gradually reduce the cadres of this large army but to provide work for those it had dismissed. The commission sensed this, and it was its unending preoccupation.
It successively presented to the minister special proposals designed to reassure workers about the intentions of power. Encouragement to workers associations, Algerian colonisation on a grand scale, a law on industrial tribunals [prud’hommes] and the organisation of a pension and assistance system: this is what it proposed to do in response to the working classes’ legitimate demands. Export premiums, wage advances, direct orders and a guarantee on certain manufactured objects were the measures that it indicated in favour of merchants and industrialists. The bourgeoisie and the workers shared the commission’s solicitude equally as if the commission considered their interests as one. It did not separate them in its encouragement or credit projects. It valued the total expenditure to be distributed among the various ministerial departments at 200 million francs but was convinced that this was a productive expense, an apparent cost, not an actual one, much less burdensome for the country than the consequences of more unemployment.
Trélat completely adopted these views. In fact, it was no longer an issue of communism, egalitarian organisation or the state’s universal grip on work and property. It was simply returning to the status quo, of re-entering the rut out of which the February shake-up had pushed us. Trélat vainly tried to introduce these ideas into national assembly commissions. They objected to the poverty of the treasury but did not want to see that it was a question of saving the treasury itself by returning its exhausted receipts to it through a large distribution of credit. They feigned not to understand that the sacrifices made to labour benefited the workers even less than the employers and that, after all, the bourgeoisie was still the party most interested in this tutelary resumption of work. — “200 million to hire an army of 100,000 men?!” cried the calculating Baron Charles Dupin, as if 100,000 men in the national workshops were not a minimal fraction of the then-unemployed working class. Ah! If, instead of workers, it were an issue of a railroad company! — “200 million! Is that expensive? It would be a shame to admit that, to keep the public peace, it was necessary to pay each of our 100,000 workers a bonus of 2,000 francs, to which we never would agreed. At most, we could, by pronouncing immediate dissolution, give each worker three months salary (100 francs), 10 million in all, which is far from 200. With this advance, the workers would no doubt withdraw in satisfaction.”
“And in three months?” asked Director Lalanne.
But it was really an issue of reasoning! Cries were raised against any project intended to manage transitions. They wanted NONE OF THAT. They said it very quietly at first, and then they cautiously contented themselves with raising deaf opposition to the government’s acts. Soon afterwards, they got braver and decided to run the risk of a terrible struggle. The voice incessantly repeating that they would have none of it, which could be heard behind the doors of national assembly offices, troubled and exasperated the masses. However, the workers, already far enough past the time when they were assigned to a three month term with the agricultural-industrial organisation, all agreed to return to their employers, the only guarantee given to them being the new law on industrial tribunals [prud’hommes], voted in on then-minister of commerce Flocon’s initiative.
Some work! Some useful work! Such were the cries of the united and unanimous voice of 800 workers raised throughout the month of June.
“Yes!” cried Trélat, in one of the finest inspirations the French podium has had: “the national assembly must decree work just as the convention decreed victory before!” This noble language brought a smile to the Malthusians’ lips. In agreement with the minister, Director Lalanne vainly tried to announce that we were reaching a catastrophic point to a national assembly commission on June 18 and a labour committee on the 20th. Their ears remained closed to the truth, their eyes shut to the light. The spell was cast! Dissolution was decided and would be carried out at all costs. At the June 23rd session, citizen de Falloux came to read the report, which concluded with the immediate dismissal of the workers, in return for an unemployment benefit of three million francs, or about 30 francs per worker! Thirty francs for trampling on the revolution! Thirty francs for monopoly’s ransom! Thirty francs in exchange for an eternity of misery! It was like the 30 pieces of silver Judas was paid for the blood of Jesus Christ! In response to the offer, the workers took to the barricades.
I said that it was up to the partisans of the national workshops to reach a peaceful conclusion. As a loyal historian, I am going to give the other side of the story so that the reader knows what each side’s intentions and responsibility were in this dismal drama.
All my documents are taken from Le Moniteur.
In a hurry to terminate [the matter], the government, through a ministerial decision, at first offered workers between the ages of 17 and 25 the alternative of joining the army or, if they refused, of being excluded from the national workshops — starvation or slavery: that is how the doctrinaires intended to proceed with dissolving the national workshops.
On June 21st, the executive commission gave orders for the enlistment to begin right away. Le Moniteur reported:
“The public and the workers themselves will see with pleasure that, through this measure, we are finally approaching a solution to this serious question. The national workshops were an unavoidable necessity for some time: now they are an obstacle to the re-establishment of industry and work. Therefore, it is important, in the most urgent interest of the workers themselves, that the workshops are dissolved, and we are convinced that the workers will understand this painlessly, thanks to the common sense and intelligent patriotism that they have often so often demonstrated.”
On June 22nd, the government informed the workers that, according to the legislation, enlistment could only be contracted at age 18 but that, to facilitate the dissolution of the national workshops, a draft decree before the national assembly at that time lowered the minimum age for voluntary enlistment to 17.
The age of apprenticeship became the age of conscription! What touching concern! What a commentary on Malthus’ theory!
While the executive commission attended to this urgent concern and the workers committee buried itself in investigations, reports, discussions and projects, the Jesuitical reaction harassed the minister of public works and terrified the national assembly on the communist consequences of the repurchase of the railroads, that it was clear that the hand of the state prepared to seize free labour and property. M. de Montalembert, with the most treacherous opportunism, quoted the following passage from the newspaper La République written under the influence of the prevailing theory of governmental initiative:
“We will not try to avoid the problem; nothing is gained by trickery with businessmen... Yes, it is an issue of your property and of your society in which it acts. Yes, it is about substituting legitimate property for usurped property, the association of all members of the human family in the political city, for the city of wolves against wolves which is the cause of your sorrows. Yes, the return of the public domain of transportation to the State, which you have dispossessed, is the first link in the chain of social questions that the Revolution of 1848 holds within the folds of its virile robe.”[16]
But, honest Jesuit, take for the execution and exploitation of the railroads any system you like, provided that the country is not robbed, that transportation is conducted at a low price, that the workers work; and leave the République behind with the Gazette and the Constitutionnel!
But it was in the June 23rd session, where each speech, each sentence arising from the podium made you hear the boom of the cannons and rumble of the gunfire and where it was necessary to follow the plot of the Jesuitical coalition.
The session began with a military bulletin. The speaker informed the National Assembly that the republican guard, marching with the national guard, had just removed two Rue Planche-Mibray barricades and that line troops had fired several volleys on the boulevards.
After that communiqué, citizen Bineau asked for the floor for a motion of procedure. The day before, after the session, the minister of public works had presented a six million franc request for credit for work to be performed on the railroad between Châlon and Lyon around Collongé. In both Lyons and Paris, there were many workers demanding work, and the best the minister could do was use them on that line, the production of which was permanently stopped. However, citizen Bineau objected that the credit could not be granted because the repurchase law had not been voted in yet, and it would not be acceptable to start the work before allocating the credit.
Trélat exclaimed that he could not understand such an opposition because, if repurchase were not voted in, then the company would have to reimburse the amount for the work, and therefore nothing prevented the workers from doing it. However, the discussion of the credit proposal was postponed upon finance minister Duclerc’s motion.
The incident then dropped, minister of commerce and agriculture Flocon went to the podium. He spoke about the seriousness of the events and said that the government was ready. Flocon, no doubt believing that the insurgent masses could be held back by casting the insurrection in a dishonourable light, loudly declared, he said, so that he could be heard outside, that the agitators’ only flag was disorder and that there was more than one hidden pretender behind them, supported by foreign interests. Therefore, he begged all good republicans to distance themselves from the cause of despotism.
This unfortunate ploy only managed to inflame the national guards without appeasing the workers and made the repression more merciless.
Once the struggle began, there was no retreating. M. de Falloux chose this moment to deposit the national workshop dissolution report on the podium, the workers being aware of that report’s conclusions for two days, as we have seen. We can say that in this way he lit the fuse setting off the June explosion. Citizen Raynal vainly opposed the reading of the report: “I do not believe,” he cried, “that this is the right time to read it,” but shouts of “Read it! Read it!” arose on all sides.
So M. de Falloux read the report.
Corbon observed that the workers committee, while agreeing with the dissolution, had recognised that it must only be started after the workers were given the guarantees to which they were entitled and that the committee had prepared a decree for that purpose, the provisions of which the committee announced. The decree was retracted.
Here, the discussion was interrupted by a new communiqué from the president on the battle exploits going on outside. It announced that gunfire had started on the boulevards, that barricades were going up in the city and that a working-class woman was wounded in the shoulder. All of Paris was up in arms!
Upon these words, the irrepressible Créton asked for the floor to declare the urgency of the following proposal:
“As soon as possible, the executive commission will file a detailed report of all the receipts and expenses occurring in the 127 days between February 24th and June 1st, 1848.”
This was the process conducted in the provisional government and the executive commission. While it was forced to dissolve the national workshops, the only support it still had, and to please its enemies, shot its own soldiers in the streets, and all of its members risked their lives on the barricades, it was betrayed at the witness box, and its accounts were demanded. The men of God did not waste any time: providence protected them. Urgency was deemed appropriate.
Then the discussion of the railroad repurchase was taken back up. Citizen Jobez had the floor:
“Whatever the seriousness of the circumstances, I believe that this discussion must go through the phases that it would have followed at a calm and peaceful time. A committed partisan of state execution of major public works, I am here to oppose the repurchase plan presented to you and to support the conclusions of your finance commission.”
Now why would this young representative, the most decent and moderate of all the republicans of the future, change his opinion so dramatically?
Ah! Because the government had made it known that it was counting on the adoption of the railroad repurchase plan to give the workers useful work and, by taking that resource from the government, they trapped the revolution between a rock and a hard place. The workers demanded work, but Jobez, who agreed with Bineau, said that there was none. Jobez continued:
“Since the national assembly meeting, every time we talk about the national workshops, you answer us with the railroad repurchase. And when we say that without that purchase, you have 311 million worth of work to be performed, all or part of which the national workshops could conduct, you tell us to give you the repurchase law. The arguments are always the same, and by a singular coincidence, it turns out that the national workshop inventory requested since the national assembly meeting has not yet been accomplished and that all the work that was selected is on Paris’ doorstep.”
Pure distraction. It was not an issue of work that the government had to perform (it has work for several billion) but the sums that it could apply to it. However, it believed that the railroad repurchase law before it could procure more money and, above all, more credit, and so that law was eminently favourable to the occupation the workers.
On March 17th, the people requested that the provisional government pull back the troops, but that could not be obtained. On June 23rd, the reaction imposed the dispersion of the national workshops on the executive commission: that is, the dispersion of the people, which was granted right away. That rapprochement is revealing.
Citizen Jobez had barely come down from the podium when the minister of war, General Cavaignac, took it to provide new information on the insurrection. The rioters were chased away from the Saint Denis and Saint Martin suburbs and no longer occupied the Saint Jacques and Saint Antoine neighbourhoods. The national guard, the roving guard, the republican guard and finally the line troops (because all the forces at power’s disposal were united against the people) were enlivened with the finest spirit.
Thus, the National Assembly paid the provisional government’s debt with gunfire! Well! I wonder who were guiltier, the insurgents of March, April and May or the June provocateurs, those who solicited the government for work or those who made it expend 2,500,000 cartridges to refuse that work.
But could there have been the cannons against the innocent if there had not been the reinforcement of slander? At the same time that General Cavaignac explained his strategic provisions to the national assembly, the mayor of Paris, A. Marrast, wrote the following circular to the municipalities of 12 wards. You could call it an edict of Diocletian:[17]
“Paris, June 23, 1848, 3 p.m.
“Citizen Mayor
“Since this morning, you have witnessed the attempted efforts of a small number of troublemakers to alarm the public as much as possible.
“The enemies of the republic wear many masks. They exploit all misfortune and all difficulties produced by events.” — (Who then exploited the difficulty if it were not the same people who pretended to complain about it the most?) — “Foreign agents join with them, provoke them and pay them. It is not only civil war that they would like to foment among us, but looting and social disorder. They are preparing the very ruin of France, and we can guess for what purpose.
“Paris is the main seat of these infamous intrigues, but it will not become the capital of disorder. The national guard, which is the chief guardian of the public peace and property, indeed understands that it must, above all, act in its own interests, to its own credit and honour. If it gives way, it would be giving up the entire country to all dangers, exposing families and property to the most terrifying calamities.
“Garrison troops are armed, numerous and perfectly disposed. The national guard is in its quarters along the streets. Authority and the national guard will each do its duty.”
The Senate’s proclamation was even more furious. I will quote only a few of their words:
“They are not demanding the republic! It has already been proclaimed.”
“Universal suffrage? It is completely accepted and practiced!”
“What do they want then? We already know: they want anarchy, arson and looting!”
Was a plot ever carried out with more implacable perseverance? Were famine and civil war ever exploited with more villainous skill? But they would be mistaken if they believed that I accuse all these men of wanting the misery and massacre of 100,000 of their brothers for the interests of a clique. In all of this, there is only one collective thought that develops with all the more furious energy the less the awareness that each of them who expresses it has of his fateful role, and insofar as, while exercising his right of initiative, he cannot take responsibility for his words. Individuals are capable of clemency, but parties are merciless. There was a great spirit of conciliation among the partisans of the national workshops: they were organised and had men speaking in their name and answering for them, Trélat and Lalanne. The reactionary party, left to its own fanatical instincts, did not want to listen to anything, since it was not represented and acted without answering for its actions. In a political struggle, do you want to murder your adversary without incurring the ignominy of the crime? No deliberation and the secret ballot.
After Cavaignac, Garnier-Pagès, lost soul, his voice full of sobs, took the reactionary elation to its height. “We have to finish them!” he shouted (Yes! Yes!): “We have to finish with the agitators!” (Yes! Yes! Bravo! Bravo!)
Citizen Bonjean proposed that a commission be named to march with the national guard and troops “and die if necessary leading them for the defence of order!” The motion was greeted with delight.
Mauguin asked that the Assembly be permanently constituted. That was adopted. Reports circulated, and news from the battlefield became increasingly serious. Considérant proposed writing a proclamation to the workers to reassure them about their fate and end the fratricidal war, but the parties were merciless. They wanted no reconciliation and did not even allow the author of the proposal to read it. It was withdrawn by the preliminary question. that — “Our duty is to remain unshaken in our position,” the stoic Baze responded, “without deliberating with the mob, without coming to any terms with them whatsoever by discussing a proclamation.”
Caussidières’ blood was boiling. He was incensed. — “I demand,” he shouted, “that some of the deputies, accompanied by a member of the executive commission, go into the heart of the insurrection and make a proclamation by torchlight.” The Montagnard’s words were greeted with cries: — “Order! You are talking like one of the rioters! M. President, suspend the session!” Minister Duclerc, who would soon fall to the blows of the reaction, called the proposal foolish.
Baune agreed with Caussidière. There were more cries of “Suspend the session!”
Upon the new details General Cavaignac provided, Lagrange tried bringing it up again, but there were cries of “Suspend the session!” from every direction. Finally, the outcome approached, and the word of the intrigue was revealed. Pascal Duprat proposed that Paris be declared under a state of siege and all powers granted to General Cavaignac.
— “I am opposed to dictatorship!” shouted Larabit.
Tréveneuc: “All of the national guard is asking for a state of siege.”
Langlois: “It is what the people want.”
Bastide: “Hurry up. In an hour, the Hôtel-de-Ville will be taken.”
Germain Sarrut: “In the name of memories of 1832,[18] we protest against the state of siege” (Cries of “Order!”)
Quentin Bauchart and others wanted to add an additional article to Pascal Duprat’s proposal as follows: “The executive commission is ceasing its functions immediately.”
Quentin Bauchart and others wanted to add an additional article to Pascal Duprat’s proposal as follows: “The executive commission is ceasing its functions immediately.” — “This is a grievance,” finance minister Duclerc responded disdainfully.
Finally, they announced that the executive commission, which for twenty-four hours had been running from barricade to barricade on behalf of the “decent” and “moderate” and making them fire on their own troops, not waiting for them to depose it, resigned its duties. Now it was up to the sabre to do the rest: the curtain fell on the fourth act of the February revolution.
“Oh, toiling people! Disinherited, harassed and outcast people! People whom they imprison, judge and kill! Scorned and dishonoured people! Will you not stop lending an ear to these orators of mysticism who, instead of calling upon your initiative, ceaselessly talk to you about heaven and the state, promising salvation soon through religion and government, and whose vehement and hollow words captivate you?
“Power, the instrument of collective might, created in society as a mediator between labour and capital, finds itself inevitably chained to capital and directed against the proletariat. No political reform can solve this contradiction because, according to the confession of the politicians themselves, such a reform would only result in increasing power’s energy and scope, and, without overturning hierarchy and dissolving society, power could not affect the prerogatives of monopoly. The problem before the working classes then is not to conquer but to overcome at the same time power and monopoly, which means creating, out of the people’s guts and labour’s profundity, a greater authority, a more powerful fact, that surrounds and subjugates capital and the state. Every proposed reform that does not satisfy this condition is simply one more scourge, a rod on sentry duty, virgam vigilantem, as a prophet said, which threatens the proletariat.”[19]
These lines, written in 1845, are the prophecy of the events that we have seen take place in 1848 and 1849. It is by stubbornly wanting revolution through power and social reform through political reform that the February revolution was postponed, and the cause of the proletariat and nationalities was lost by all of Europe.[20]
Combatants of June, the principle of your defeat is in the February 25th decree! They abused you, those who made, in the name of power, a promise that power could not keep. The defeat of power, that is to say, the reabsorption of power by the people through the separate centralisation of political and social functions; the defeat of capital through the mutual guarantee of circulation and credit: that is what the politics of democracy had to be. Is that so difficult to understand?
In March, April and May, instead of organising yourselves for work and freedom by benefiting from the political advantages the February victory gave you, you ran to the government and asked from it what you alone could give yourselves and set the revolution back three steps. In June, victims of a despicable lack of faith, you had the misfortune of giving in to indignation and anger: you threw yourselves into the trap set six weeks before. Your error was in demanding that power fulfil a promise it could not keep: your mistake was fighting against the representatives of the nation and the government of the republic. Without a doubt, your enemies did not collect the fruit of their intrigue; without a doubt, your martyrdom made you grow: you are a hundred times stronger today than you were in the first stage of siege, and you can attribute your later successes to the justice of your cause. But it must be acknowledged that, because victory could not give you anything more than what you already possessed, the power of planning production and markets yourselves, your victory was lost beforehand. You were the soldiers of the republic, the soldiers of order and freedom. Never accuse the entirety of the largest portion of the people of treason; do not hold on to any resentment for your deceived brothers who fought you. Only those who seduced you with disastrous utopias should beat their breasts: as for those who, in these days of mourning, only had enough intelligence to exploit your misery, I hope that they never abuse enough of their temporary power to call down too many just reprisals on their heads.
For me, the memory of the days of June will be forever remorseful in my heart. I state it with sadness: until the 25th, I had predicted nothing, known nothing and guessed nothing. Elected fifteenth days before as a representative of the people, I entered the national assembly with the shyness of the child and the ardour of a neophyte. Always in attendance from nine o’clock in the morning at the office and committee meetings, I only left the assembly at night, exhausted with fatigue and disgust. Since I first set foot on this parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in contact with the masses: by absorbing myself in my legislative work, I had completely lost view of current affairs. I knew nothing about the national workshop situation, government policy or the intrigues going on within the assembly. One has to experience this isolation called a national assembly to understand how the men who are the most completely ignorant of the state of a country are nearly always those who represent it. I set about reading everything that the distribution office provided to representatives: proposals, reports, brochures and even Le Moniteur and the law bulletin. Most of my colleagues on the left and the extreme left were in the same state of mental perplexity and ignorance of daily reality. We only talked about the national workshops with a kind of dread: because the fear of the people is the evil of all those who belong to authority: for power, the people are the enemy. Every day, we voted on new subsidies for the national workshops while trembling before the incompetence of power and with our own powerlessness.
What a disastrous apprenticeship! The effect of this representative waste I had to experience was that I had no intelligence of anything. On the 23rd, when Flocon declared from the podium that the movement was being directed by political factions and supported from abroad, I let myself accept that baseless ministerial story, and on the 24th, I again asked if the real reason for the insurrection was the dissolution of the national workshops!!! No, M. Senard, I was not a coward in June, the insult you threw at me before the assembly. Like you and many others, I was an imbecile. I was lacking in my duties as a representative due to a parliamentary stupor. I was there to see, but I did not see. I was there to sound the alarm, but I did not cry out! I was like the dog that does not bark in the presence of the enemy. As an elected representative of working people, a journalist of the proletariat, I was not supposed to leave the masses without direction and advice: 100,000 regimented men deserved my concern. They were worth more than my dejection in your offices. Since then, I have done what I can to repair my irreparable error. I have not always been fortunate. I have often been mistaken: my conscience no longer reproaches me for anything.
On 4th November 1848 the complete Constitution was voted on. There were 769 Representatives present at the session: 739 voted for and 30 against. Of these 30 votes against the motion, 16 were democrat-socialists and 14 legitimists. M. Odilon Barrot, current head of the ministry, abstained.
On the very day of the vote I found it necessary to have a letter published in Le Moniteur explaining the motives that had determined my position. Here is that letter:
“Sir,
“The national Assembly has just proclaimed the Constitution to prolonged cries of: Long Live the Republic!
“I took part in my colleagues’ exaltation of the Republic; I put a blue ticket in the urn against the Constitution. I could not have seen my way to abstaining in such solemn circumstances, after four months of discussion; I would find it incomprehensible, after my vote, not to be permitted to explain myself.
“I did not vote against the Constitution in a vain spirit of opposition or as a form of revolutionary agitation, because the Constitution contained things I wished to eliminate or did not contain others that I wished to put in it. If reasons like that could predominate in a representative’s mind then there would never be any votes on any laws at all.
“I voted against the Constitution because it is a Constitution. The essence of a constitution — I mean a political constitution, there cannot be any question here of any other sort — is the division of sovereignty, in other words the separation into two powers, legislative and executive. That is the principle and the essence of any political constitution; outside that there is no constitution in the present sense of the word, there is only a sovereign authority, making its laws and implementing them by means of its committees and ministers.[21]
“We are not at all accustomed to such an organisation of sovereignty; in my opinion, republican government is just that and nothing else.
“I therefore find that in a republic a constitution is a perfectly useless thing; I think that the interim system we had for the previous eight months could very well have been rendered definitive with a little more regularity and a little less respect for monarchical traditions; I am convinced that the Constitution, the first act of which will be to create a presidency, with all its prerogatives, ambitions and culpable hopes, will imperil rather than guarantee liberty.
“My fraternal regards.
“P.-J. PROUDHON
“Representative for the Seine.
“Paris, 4th November 1848”
For myself as legislator this letter sufficed: the reporter owes his readers more ample explanations. We are so infatuated by power, we were so effectively monarchised, we love to be governed so much, that we cannot conceive of the possibility of living in liberty. We consider ourselves democrats because we have abolished hereditary royalty four times: some who have gone as far as rejecting elective presidency, only to invest all the powers in a Convention directed by a committee of public safety, imagine they have arrived at radicalism’s Pillars of Hercules.[22] But we do not see that in holding on so obstinately to this fixed idea of Government we are all, inasmuch as we engage in war to be able to exercise power, only a kind of absolutists!
What is a political constitution?
Can a society survive without a political constitution?
These are the questions that I propose to resolve, perhaps in fewer words than others might need to pose them. The ideas I am going to present are as old as democracy, as simple as universal suffrage; my only merit will consist in systematising them by putting a little coherence and order into them. They will still appear to be but a vision, one more utopia, even to democrats, of whom the majority, taking their right hand for their left, have never known how to develop anything but dictatorship from the sovereignty of the people.
§I [23]
In every society I find the distinction between two kinds of constitution, one of which I call the SOCIAL constitution and the other the political constitution; the first, native to humanity, liberal, necessary, the development of which consists above all in weakening and gradually eliminating the second, [which is] essentially factitious, restrictive and transitory.
The social constitution is nothing but the equilibrium of interests founded upon free CONTRACT and the organisation of ECONOMIC FORCES, which are in general: Labour, Division of Labour, Collective Force, Competition, Commerce, Money, Machines, Credit, Property, Equality in transactions. Reciprocity of guarantees, etc.
The political constitution has AUTHORITY as its principle. Its forms are: Class Distinctions, Separation of Powers, administrative Centralisation, judicial Hierarchy, Representation of Sovereignty by Election, etc. It was first thought up and then gradually developed in the interests of order and for lack of social Constitution, the principles and rules of which were only discovered later after long experience and are still the subject of socialist controversies.
These two constitutions are, it is easy to see, of utterly different and even incompatible natures: but, as it is the destiny of the political Constitution incessantly to provoke and produce the social Constitution, there is always something of the latter slipping into and landing in the former, which very soon, rendered unsatisfactory, appearing contradictory and odious, finds itself propelled from concession to concession towards its final abolition.
It is from this point of view that we are going to take a closer look at the general theory of political Constitutions, reserving the study of the social Constitution for another time.
In the beginning the political idea is vague and undefined, reducible to the notion of Authority. In ancient times, when the legislator always speaks in the name of God, Authority is immense and constitutional regulation more or less non-existent. There is nothing in all of the Pentateuch[24] even vaguely resembling a Separation of powers, all the more such laws as are considered organic, having the purpose of defining the attribution of those powers and bringing the system into play. Moses had no idea whatsoever of a primary, so-called legislative power, or of a second, the executive, or a third, the bastard of the two others called the judicial order. The conflicts of attributions and jurisdictions had never revealed to him the necessity of a State Council; even less had political disputes, the inevitable result of the constitutional mechanism, made him feel the importance of a High Court. The constitutional idea had remained a closed book to the Prophet; not until four centuries of popular resistance to the Law had passed did this idea appear for the first time in Israel, and that was specifically to justify the election of the first king. Mosaic[25] government had been found weak and it was felt to be desirable to fortify it: this amounted to a revolution. For the first time the constitutional idea manifested itself in its true character, the separation of powers. At that time, as at the time of Philippe-le-Bel[26] and Bonifacius VIII[27], they could only know two of these, the spiritual and the temporal. The distinction is easy to grasp: at the side of the Pontiff appeared the King. This did not go without protest, or to speak the language of the period, without a menacing revelation by the priesthood.
“Here is what will be the royal statute,” the Constitution of government, Samuel said when the people’s delegates came to summon him to anoint a king for them. Take note of this: it is the preacher who is responsible for the king’s investiture; among all people, even when the priesthood is rebelled against, all power is of divine right. “He will take your sons and make them conscripts and your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. And when he has attained power he will impose taxes on persons, houses, furniture, lands, wine, salt, meat, commodities, etc, in order to maintain his soldiers and pay his servants and mistresses.”
“And you yourselves shall become his servants.”[28]
It is in these terms that Samuel, the successor to Moses, presented the future political constitution; and all our political commentators, from the Abbé Sieyès to M. de Cormenin, agree with him. But how could an anticipated criticism outweigh the necessity of the moment? The priesthood had served order badly, it was eliminated; this was justice. If the new government proved to be treacherous or incompetent it would be treated in the same way, and so on, until liberty and well-being were achieved, but one would never go backwards: that is the argument of all revolutions. In any case, far from being frightened off by the preacher’s sinister warnings, the appetites of the day, corresponding to the needs of the epoch, would rather be all the more thrillingly excited by them. Was not the political constitution, that is royalty, first of all in fact taxation, entailing honours and sinecures? Was it not monopoly, revenues, great property, leading to the exploitation of man by man, the proletariat? Wasn’t it in the last analysis liberty within order, in the words of Louis Blanc, liberty surrounded by pikes and arrows, and thus the omnipotence of the soldier? All the world wanted it: the Phoenicians, the English of the day, had enjoyed it for some time already; why should the Jewish people, which called itself the Messiah of nations, like all the rest of us, French, Polish, Hungarians or Cossacks — for it seems to be a mania — have remained behind its neighbours, we vainly cry? Truly, there is nothing new under the sun, not even constitutionalism, Christomania and Anglomania.
The great domain of political constitutions is, as I say in my letter to LeMoniteur, mainly the Separation of powers, that is to say the distinction of the two natures — no more, no less — in government, spiritual nature and temporal nature, or, which comes to the same thing, legislative nature and executive nature, as in Jesus Christ, both God and man together: it is amazing how we always find theology at the basis of our politics.
But, you will say, does the people not know how to do without this mechanism? Does not the people, which after all established both royal families and priesthoods, know how to dispense with the two of them for its government instead of maintaining them both together? And supposing that for its religious duties and the protection of its interests it actually needs a double Authority, what need is there to further subdivide the temporal one? What is the good of a constitution? What can be the use of this distinction of two powers, with their prerogatives, their conflicts, their ambitions and all their perils? Isn’t it enough to have an Assembly which as the expression of national needs makes the laws and implements them by means of the ministers which it chooses from its members?
It was M. Valette (from the Jura) who, among others, spoke in this manner at the Assembly of 1848.
It is this question that reveals the fatal logic which leads peoples and determines revolutions.
Man is destined to live in society. This society can only exist in two ways: either by the organisation of economic forces and the equilibrium of interests or by the institution of an authority which, in the absence of industrial organisation, serves as arbiter, checks and protects. This latter manner of conceiving and realising order in society is what is called the State or Government. Its essential attribute, the condition of its effectiveness, is centralisation.
The Government able to define itself as the centralisation of the nation’s forces — whatever they are — will be absolute if the centre is a single one; it will be constitutional or liberal, if there is a double centre. The separation of powers has no other meaning. While it is pointless in a small State, where the citizens’ assembly can intervene in public affairs on a day to day basis, it is indispensable in a nation of several million men who are forced by their great number to delegate their powers to representatives. It thus becomes a guarantee of public liberties.
Imagine all the powers concentrated in a single assembly: you will only have augmented the threats to liberty by taking away from it its last sureties. Government by assembly is just as dangerous as that by a despot, without even the personal responsibility of the latter. Experience even proves that the despotism of assemblies is a hundred times worse than the autocracy of a single person, for the reason that a collective is impervious to those considerations of humanity, moderation, respect for others’ opinions, etc. that govern individuals. If therefore the unity of powers, i.e. the absence of a political constitution, has no other effect but to absorb the powers of a responsible president into the powers of an irresponsible majority, the conditions of government otherwise remaining the same, what progress has been made? Would it not be better to divide authority, make one of the powers the controller of the other, giving the executive the liberty of action while the legislative controls it as a counter-weight? Thus, we either get the separation of powers or the absolutism of power: the dilemma is inevitable.
Democracy has never produced a convincing response to this argument. Without a doubt, as the critics have well observed, the division of authority into two powers is the source of all the conflicts which have been tormenting our country for the last sixty years and pushing it to revolution more than despotism itself managed to. But this does not destroy the fundamental objection that without the separation of powers there can only be absolutist government, and that suppressing that division within the Republic is in effect establishing dictatorship in perpetuity.
The democratic Republic, the Republic without distinction of powers, has also never seemed to unprejudiced minds to be anything but a contradiction in terms, a veritable retraction of liberty. And I confess that for my part — given the hypothesis of a centralisation in which all social powers converge in a single centre, the sovereign initiator and ruler — I very much prefer separate and responsible presidential government controlled by an assembly to the absolute and irresponsible government by assembly alone, and government by a constitutional royalty to government by elective presidency. Whatever the type of Government that is to be divided, monarchy or senate, the separation of powers is the first step towards a social constitution.
This is therefore the basic pattern according to which society, ignorant of the constitution that might be appropriate to it, has hitherto sought to create within itself for the purpose of maintaining order:
First of all a centralisation of all its forces, both material and moral, political and economic, in a word, royalty, a government;
Secondly, to escape the inconvenient aspects of this absolutism, a central duality or plurality, which is to say, the separation and opposition of powers.
Given this last point, for political theoreticians the problem has been to constitute the separate powers in such a way that they could never either be fused or enter into conflict, and to find a way for society to be aided and not repressed by them in the manifestation of its wishes and the development of its interests.
It is this triple problem which all ancient and modern constitutions have endeavoured to solve, and which has represented a stumbling block for them all. The Constitution of 1848 succumbed to it as did the others.
The Constitution of 1848, an imitation of the Charter of 1830, is basically socialist but has a political or see-saw form. On its socialist side it promises instruction, credit, work, assistance; it creates universal suffrage and submits to progress: these are new principles not recognised by ancient legislators and which the constitutive Assembly added to the Creed. In its political form its object is to maintain order and peace while guaranteeing the exercise of ancient rights.
Now the Constitution of 1848, just like its predecessors, is incapable of actually keeping any of its promises, whether they be political or social; and, if the people were to take it too seriously, I venture to say that the government would find itself faced daily by the choice between a 24th of February or a 26th of June.
The reason for this inability is, as we will see, partly because the socialist prescriptions introduced into the Constitution are incompatible with the political allocations; the other aspect is that the tendency of government is always, whatever happens, to take centralisation to its logical conclusion, by which I mean to say: to reconcile the constitutional powers in absolutism.
One cannot accuse the parties of these contradictions: they are the natural product of both ideas and time. Governmentalism has always existed; it was in the majority in the Assembly, it was unthinkable for anyone to wish to abolish it. As to Socialism, it had been around in people’s minds long before the Constitutive Assembly was convoked and the February Revolution took place; even without any actual representatives it just had to be officially proclaimed owing to the need of the epoch and in consequence of the revolution. And if Louis-Philippe had remained on the throne, the same movement, which came into being through his fall, would have done so under his rule.
Three elements form the socialist part of the new pact:
1. The declaration of rights and duties, including the right to assistance in place of and as compensation for the RIGHT TO WORK.
2. The idea of progress, the origin of Article 111, which established the perpetual power of improvement for the country.
3. Universal suffrage, the still unnoticed but inevitable effect of which will be to change the public law utterly by suppressing government.
It is my view that these elements, in which it is necessary to see an incomplete and disguised expression of the social Constitution, are by themselves incompatible with any form of governmentalism, and that furthermore when powers have been separated such declarations will inevitably become for them a perpetual occasion of division and conflict. The result of this is not only the fact that the powers are unable to fulfil the duties imposed on them by the Constitution but that thanks to those very duties they cannot fail to enter into conflict and, if that occurs, one or the other or both will provoke civil war.
As facts are the best demonstration of ideas, let us take the right to assistance as an example.
Who does not see at once that the right to assistance, guaranteed by the government as a substitute for work, it is the same thing as the right to work travestied by an appeal to selfishness? The right to assistance was granted in HATRED of the right to work; it is as if it were paying off a debt or paying ransom for a property that the Government regards itself as obliged to reorganise public charity. Now, for anybody with a sense of logic or law and who knows the way in which obligations between people are carried out, it is evident that the right to assistance, equally odious to those who receive it and those who dispense it, cannot become part of the institutions of a society, at least in this form, and therefore cannot be the object of a mandate given by the sovereign People to the government.
I am not talking of the problems of implementation, which are almost insurmountable. — Is assistance the same as charity? No. Charity cannot be organised or be the subject of a contract, it has no place in a legal system, it is animated solely by conscience. Assistance, when it is covered by the law and is the subject of an administrative or judicial action, recognised as a right by the Constitution, is something different from charity: it is unemployment compensation. But if the right to assistance is a compensation, what will be the minimum of compensation rendered as assistance? Will it be 25, 50, 75 centimes? Will it be the same as the minimum wage?...What will be the maximum? Which individuals will have a right to receive assistance? What will be the payment according to age, sex, profession, infirmities, domicile? Will conditions be set for the needy? Will they for example be obliged to live in special lodgings and prescribed localities — in the country more than in towns? We are falling into the regime of prisons [maisons de force]: assistance, or dole becomes a monstrous thing, compensation for lack of liberty. That is not all: who will bankroll the assistance — the proprietors? 200 million won’t be enough; new taxes will therefore have to be created, proprietors will have to be burdened to subsidise the proletariat. Will there be a system of making deductions from salaries? Well, then it is no longer the State or the proprietors and capitalists who render assistance but the workers who assist one another mutually: the working-man who has work pays for the one who hasn’t, the good pays for the bad, the thrifty for the wasteful and the dissolute. In all these cases assistance becomes a pension for misconduct, a give-away for laziness: it is the supporting pillar of beggary, the providence of poverty. Pauperism thus becomes a constitutional matter; it is a social function, a profession hallowed by law, paid, encouraged, multiplied. The poverty tax is an argument for disorder against savings accounts, pension funds, tontines[29] etc. While you inject moral fibre into the people by means of savings and credit institutions, you demoralise them by means of assistance. Once more: I do not wish to stir up controversy in such delicate questions, where abuse is always mixed with the good and useful, where justice is only preferential treatment. I would like to know what can be the action of power in an institution functioning on the twin principles of envy and hate? an institution that confirms, maintains and sanctifies the antagonism of the two castes and seems to figure in the Declaration of Rights and Duties as the stepping stones to a social war?
Evidently the right to assistance, as with the right to work, is not within the field of competence of the government. These two principles, affirmed by universal conscience, are part of a completely distinct order of ideas, incompatible with the political order whose base is authority and whose sanction is force. It may be, and for my part I affirm this, that the rights to work, assistance, property etc. can be realised within another Constitution; but that Constitution has nothing in common with the one that rules us at present; it is diametrically opposed to it and completely antagonistic.
I myself unintentionally contributed to the exclusion of the right to work from the Constitution — and I do not regret sparing my colleagues, as well as my country, this new lie — by a response I made to M. Thiers in the finance committee. Let me have the right to work, I said to him, and you are welcome to the right to property. By that I wished to indicate that as work incessantly modifies property and consequently the Constitution and the exercise of authority, the guarantee of work would be the signal for a complete reform of the institutions. However, my remark was not taken as such but as a menace to property, and I was not in the mood for explaining myself. The conservatives immediately vowed that work would be protected but not guaranteed, which from their point of view appeared fair just because they did not guarantee property itself any more than work. They thought they were working wonders and employing the ultimate tactical finesse by passing, in the absence of work, THE RIGHT TO ASSISTANCE, a nonsense instead of an impossibility. Could I not have said to these blind men: Oh well! Let me have the right to assistance and you are welcome to the right to work?... Then, hating the right to assistance, which had become as risky for all thinking persons as the right to work, it would have been necessary to fall back on another guarantee, or not grant anything at all, which was impossible. And as I could have reproduced the same argument every time in response to everything proposed by conservative philanthropy, on and on, ad infinitum, as social guarantees are after all nothing but the reverse of political guarantees, if I had wanted to I could have relied on making the conservatives reject everything including the very idea of the constitution, simply by pressing for those political guarantees.
It is the same with all the political and economic elements that society is founded on as with the right to work and the right to assistance: all can be replaced by one another, because they are incessantly converting and transforming themselves into one another, because they are just as correlative as they are contradictory.
Grant me education free of charge [gratuité de l’enseignement], I said on another occasion, and you are welcome to freedom of teaching [liberté de l’enseignement].[30]
In the same way I could also have said: Give me the right to credit and I’ll let you have the right to work and the right to assistance in one go.
Give me the equal treatment of all religions and I’ll let you have a State religion.
Give me the power of revision and I’ll obey the Constitution for ever and ever.
Give me the perpetual exercise of universal suffrage and I accept all the results of universal suffrage in advance.
Give me the liberty of the press and I will, being more tough-minded than you who prohibit the discussion of principles, permit you to discuss even the principle of liberty itself.
Society, which is an essentially intelligible affair, is completely based on these oppositions, synonymies or equivalencies which all interpenetrate one another, and the system of which is infinite. And the solution of the social problem consists in representing the different terms of the problem in such a way that they no longer appear to contradict one another, as they do at first in the very early epochs of social formation, but to be mutually deduced from one another: so that for instance the right to work, the right to credit, the right to assistance, all these rights, which are impossible to realise by taking the Government way, can be deduced from a primary transaction which is both outside and higher than the political system, as would be the Constitution of property, the equilibrium of values, the mutual guarantee of exchange, etc.; instead of awaiting the initiative of the public authority, it would actually make that authority subservient to itself.
It is our ignorance of these transformations, together with our republican negligence, that makes us blind to our means and make us always desire to inscribe promises into the text of our constitutions and add them to the catalogue of our laws, promises which it is not in the power of any government to fulfil, which are antipathetic to it, however it is organised, whether as an absolute government, a constitutional government, or a republican government.
To put it concisely: is it your sole wish to produce political acts in society, to organise wars against foreign nations, to assure the supremacy of an aristocracy and the subordination of the working class domestically, to maintain privilege against the proletariat’s efforts to emancipate itself? The governmental system will suffice, with or without the separation of powers. It was invented for this purpose and has never served any other end. The separation of powers, which you propose as the primary condition of a free government, is nothing but a way of allowing the favoured classes of society to participate in the government’s revenues.
But if on the contrary you wish to guarantee the following to all, together with legitimately acquired property: work, assistance, exchange, credit, education, cheap goods, the freedom of opinion, the right to publish, the equality of means? In a word, only the system of economic forces can satisfy you. But far from this system being something that may be established by way of authority and grafted on to the political constitution, so to speak, it is actually the negation of authority. Its principle is neither force nor number: it is a transaction, a contract.
To vote for the Constitution of 1848, therefore, in which social guarantees are regarded as something emanating from authority, was to place the social constitution beneath the political constitution, the producer’s rights after the rights of the citizen; it was to abjure socialism and disown the Revolution.
Neither Article 1 of the Preamble, positing the principle of progress, nor Article 13, expressing the right to assistance, nor Article 24, establishing universal suffrage, were able to compel me to support it: these three principles were subordinated by the Constitution to the political system, despite their lofty socialist and anti-governmental drift, and it was the facts no less than logic which were to prove very soon that progress, the right to assistance and universal suffrage were to fare in the same way at the hands of the new power as the right to work had at the hands of the constituent assembly.
Progress! But it is evident that in the question of economic ideas the State is essentially stationary.
To organise work, credit or assistance is to affirm the social constitution. Now, the social constitution subordinates and even disavows the political constitution: how should the Government take the initiative in such progress? Progress, for the Government, is the opposite of what it must be for the worker; it is also true, and the whole of history proves it, that far from progressing the Government tends to regress. Where would you like it to go, indeed, with its constitutive principle of the separation of powers? To an ever greater division? That would mean its downfall. From the point of view of political constitutions the four-year presidency and the unity of national representation are far from being a step forward but rather already a sign of the system’s degeneration. The true formula of the constitutional regime is the Charter of 1830, just as the perfection of government is absolute power. Do you really want to return to the July monarchy or regress to Louis XIV? — for it is only in this sense that power can progress. Let those who haven’t had enough of that speak up!
Universal suffrage! But how could I have taken that into account, given a Constitution which had arrogated to itself the prerogative of not only using it to create a lie but even of restricting it? By establishing electoral indignities the Constitution opened the door to [the law of] May 31st; and as for the veracity of universal suffrage and the authenticity of its decisions, what link can there be between the elastic product of a ballot and popular thinking, which is synthetic and indivisible? How could universal suffrage manage to manifest popular thinking — the real thought of the people — when that people is divided, by the inequality of wealth and by classes subordinated to one another, voting in servility or hate; when this same people, held on a leash by power, is not able to make its thought heard on any subject despite its sovereignty; when the exercise of its rights is confined to choosing its bosses and its charlatans every three or four years; when its reason, being fashioned according to the antagonism of ideas and interests, can only go from one contradiction to the other; when its good faith is at the mercy of a telegraphic dispatch, of an unforeseen event, of a captious question; when instead of inspecting its conscience its memories are evoked; when owing to the division of parties it can only avoid one danger by leaping into another, and is forced to lie to its conscience by the threat of losing its security? Society was immobilised by the 200 franc rule[31]: a poet personified it in the god Terminus. Since the establishment of universal suffrage it has been spinning — on the spot. Before that it was rotting away in its lethargy; now it suffers from vertigo. So, let us be more advanced, richer and more liberated when we have made a million pirouettes?...
So if now the government, as it was made by the Constitution of 1848, cannot guarantee work, credit, assistance, education, progress, the sincerity of universal suffrage, nothing of what constitutes the social state, how could it guarantee the political state? How should it guarantee order? What a singular matter! — this political reform, which was intended to give us social reform, appears to us as a perpetual anomaly, from whichever side you take it.
The government is not only in conflict with itself through the separation of its powers, it is so with society through the incompatibility of its functions. Without the distinction of legislative and executive the Government offers liberty no guarantees; without a declaration of social rights it is nothing but the force given to wealth to use as disciplinary action against poverty. But with the separation of powers you open the door to conflicts, corruption, coalitions, rifts, competitions; with the declaration of rights you create a final result of categorical refusal for all its decisions and acts: whatever you do the Constitution, which is intended to reconcile all, can only organise discord. At the bottom of your so-called social pact is civil war.
Is it possible to find a way out of this labyrinth, and to pass from the political constitution to the social constitution without doing somersaults? I venture to answer in the affirmative. But I warn the reader that this will not come to pass by a transaction, an eclecticism, the sacrifice of an idea or any adjustment of forces and counterweights; it will be by elevating all the constitutional and social principles presently struggling with one another to their highest potency: centralisation and separation, universal suffrage and government, work and credit, liberty and order. At first sight it seems that this method must increase antagonism: its effect will however be to make it disappear. Except that we will no longer have this distinction of political constitution and social constitution at all: government and society will be identified and indiscernible from each other.
§II[32]
I have said that the vice of any constitution, political or social, what creates conflicts and antagonism in society, is on the one hand — to confine myself to the only question I wish to examine at present — the fact that the separation of powers, or to put it better, of functions, is badly done and incomplete; on the other, the fact that centralisation is insufficient, since it does not respect the law of specialism to a sufficient degree. It follows that collective power is almost nowhere in action, nor is thought, or universal suffrage, exercised. It is necessary to push the separation, when it is hardly begun, as far as possible, centralising every power separately; to organise universal suffrage in its plenitude according to individual nature and kind and give the people the energy and activity that it lacks.
This is the principle: to demonstrate it and explain the social mechanism I now only have to provide arguments, for which a few examples will suffice. Here, as in the natural sciences, the practice is the theory; exact observation of the fact is science itself.
For many centuries the spiritual power has been separated to a varying extent from the temporal power.
I will observe in passing that the political principle of the separation of powers, or functions, is the same as the economic principle of the separation of industries or division of labour: at which point the identity of the political constitution and the social constitution are already dawning upon us.
I will furthermore remark on the fact that the more reality and fecundity a function, industrial or otherwise, contains within itself, the more it grows, realises itself and becomes productive by means of separation and centralisation, so that a function’s maximum potency corresponds to its highest degree of division and convergence, its minimum to the lowest degree of the same. Lack of division and lack of potency are synonymous terms here. Separation and centralisation, that is the double criterion by means of which one may recognise whether a function is real or fictitious.
Now, not only have the temporal and spiritual powers together with the majority of political functions in no way been distinguished and grouped according to the laws of economy, but we shall see that these powers and functions are very far from being strengthened by the principles of organisation claimed to be suitable for them but are on the contrary wasted away and annihilated by this very organisation, to the extent that what is supposed theoretically to give life to authority is exactly what kills it.
First of all, there would thus be a complete separation between the spiritual and the temporal if the latter not only refrained from interfering in the celebration of the mysteries, the administering of the sacraments and the government of church parishes, etc., but also did not intervene in the matter of the nomination of bishops. There would subsequently be greater centralisation and therefore more regular government if the people in each parish had the right to choose its priests and succursalists[33] or even not take any at all; if the preachers in each diocese elected their bishop, if the bishops’ assembly or a primate of the Gauls sorted out all their religious affairs, the teaching of theology and questions of religious service by themselves. By this separation the clergy would cease to be in the hands of political power and thus no longer an instrument of tyranny towards the people; it would no longer retain the secret hope of recapturing political supremacy; and by this application of universal suffrage the ecclesiastical government, centralised in itself, receiving its inspirations from the people and not from the government or the Pope, would be in constant harmony with the needs of society and the moral and intellectual state of its citizens.
For it means nothing for the centralisation of a country that the church ministers, the agents of power as of every other social function, are answerable to a centre, if the centre itself is not answerable to the people but is placed above the people and independent of it. In that case centralisation is no longer centralisation; it is despotism.
Where the sovereignty of the people is taken as a dogma, political centralisation means nothing else than the people itself being centralised as a political force: to take away central agency from the people’s direct action is to deny it sovereignty and give it tyranny instead of centralisation. The suffrage of subordinates is the point of departure of all central administration.
Instead of this democratic, rational system what do we see? The Government, it is true, does not intervene in matters of religious practice, it does not teach the catechism, it does not give instruction at the seminary. But it does choose the bishops, who only find their centre at Rome in the person of the Pope without agreeing among themselves and without any superiors. The bishops choose the priests and succursalists, sending them into the parishes without the slightest participation of popular suffrage, often in fact in spite of the people’s wishes. This all amounts to the Church and the State, interlocked, if sometimes at war with each other, forming a kind of offensive and defensive league apart from the people, united against its liberty and initiative. Their concerted government weighs heavily on the nation instead of serving it. It is pointless for me to enumerate the consequences of this order of affairs: they immediately spring to everybody’s mind.
In order to achieve organic truth, political, economic or social, it is therefore necessary — for in this all is one: — 1st to abolish the existing constitutional amalgamation by taking the appointment of bishops away from the State and finally separating the spiritual from the temporal; — 2nd to centralise the Church in itself by a system of graduated elections; — 3rd to put the suffrage of the citizens at the basis of ecclesiastical power as with all the other powers of the State.
In this system what is meant by GOVERNMENT today is nothing but administration; the whole of France is centralised, as far as ecclesiastical functions are concerned; the country governs itself solely by means of its electoral initiative, as much in questions of salvation as in secular matters; it is no longer governed. Whether established religion will have to be maintained or suppressed is not the question at the moment. If it survives it will be by the energy intrinsic to it; if it dies out it will be for lack of vitality: in either case its destiny, whatever that might be, will be the expression of the people’s sovereignty, manifested by absolute separation and regular centralisation of functions, in other terms, by the organisation of universal suffrage in religious matters. And one already foresees that if it were possible to organise the whole country for temporal matters in the way we have indicated for its spiritual organisation, then the most perfect order and the most vigorous centralisation would exist without there being anything of what we call constituted authority, otherwise known as Government, which is nothing but a simulacrum of centralisation.
Another example:
At one time there was considered to be a third power, beyond the legislative and the executive, the judicial power. The Constitution of 1848, following those of 1830 and 1814, only speaks of the judicial order.
Whether order, power or function, here I find, as with the Church, a further example of the preponderance of the State, this time under the pretext of centralisation and, consequently, a new inroad on the sovereignty of the people.
Judicial functions, by their different specialities, their hierarchy, their convergence in a single ministry, manifest an unequivocal tendency to separation and centralisation.
But they are not at all answerable to judicially liable persons; they are all at the disposition of the executive power, appointed every four years by the people with irremovable spheres of duties, and are subordinate, not to the country by election but to the government — of president or prince. The result is that the liable persons are brought before their supposedly natural judges like the parishioners to their priests, meaning that the people belongs to the judiciary as by inheritance, that the litigant belongs to the judge and not the judge to the litigant.
Apply universal suffrage and election by degrees to judicial functions as to ecclesiastical functions, suppress irremovability, which is the loss of the electoral right; divest the State of all action or influence upon the judicial order and ensure that this order, being centralised in itself and separate, is only answerable to the people: and then you will first of all have robbed power of its most potent instrument of tyranny, having made justice a principle of liberty as much as of order. And, if you do not suppose that the people, from which must emanate all powers by virtue of universal suffrage, is in contradiction of itself by not wanting in justice what it wants in religion, you are assured that the separation of power cannot engender any conflict and can safely posit that henceforth separation and equilibrium are in principle synonyms.
In this way the people have the final say on the church and justice by means of a genuine separation of powers and centralisation; the functionaries of the two orders are directly or indirectly answerable to them, and the people do not obey but command, are not governed but govern.
But the consequences of effective separation and centralisation do not stop there. There are in society artificial functions, as we have said, which primitive barbarism suggested and made necessary but which civilisation tends to cause to disappear, first by the practice of liberty and then by the progress of separation itself. Religious observance and the courts are of this number.
If opinion in the matter of faith is truly free; if by the effect of this liberty all religions, either existing ones or those yet to emerge, are declared equal before the law; if every citizen is consequently permitted to vote for the ministers and contributions to the cost of his own religion without being forced to contribute to the maintenance of the others: then it follows 1st that as everyone is the judge in the last resort concerning a matter lacking in rational certainty and positive sanction, the unity or centralisation of a church is rendered impossible, all the more so because the divergence of professions of faith will become greater; 2nd that the importance of religious opinions will be weakened and the authority of the churches diminished by the same mechanism that was supposed to increase them; 3rd and finally, that the ecclesiastical function, being incompatible with universal suffrage and the laws of social organisation will gradually fall into disuse so that the church personnel will sooner or late be reduced to zero.
In a word, while the separation of industries is the condition of their equilibrium and the cause of wealth, religious liberty is the ruin of religion with respect to its power and social function: what more could one wish for? Faced with society, the Church does not exist.
The same must happen with justice, too. The election of judges by the People every five or ten years is not the final consequence of the principle: it will have to be recognised that in every court case the litigant or the accused has the right to choose his judges. What am I saying here? It is that one must avow with Plato that the true judge for every man is his own conscience, which leads in the long run to replacing the regime of courts and laws by the regime of personal obligations and contracts, that is to say, to the suppression of the judicial system ...
In this way, once the hypothesis of absolute Government is dismissed, and it cannot but be treated thus, the governmental principle, as with religion and justice, through the development of its own laws, the separation of faculties and their centralisation, ends up by negating itself: it is a contradictory idea.
I now pass to another order of things, the institution of the military.
Is it not true that the army is the Government’s own province and that it belongs much less to the country than to the State, whatever constitutional fictions might suggest? Once upon a time the staff of the army was part of the royal household; under the empire the gathering of the elite army corps bore the name of imperial guard, young and old. It is the Government that takes 80,000 recruits annually, not the country that gives them; it is Power that in the interests of its personal policy and to make its will respected appoints the leadership and orders troop movements at the same time as it disarms the national guards, not the nation which arming spontaneously for its defence avails itself of the public force, of its purest blood. There again the social order is compromised, and why? On the one hand because military centralisation not answerable to the people is nothing but pure despotism, on the other because the ministry of war, however independent it may be of the other ministries, is nevertheless still a prerogative of the executive Power, which only recognises one head, the President.
The people have a confused instinct for this anomaly when on the occasion of every revolution they insist on the removal of the troops, when they demand a law pertaining to military recruitment and the organisation of the national guard and the army. And the authors of the Constitution foresaw the danger when they wrote in article 50: The president of the Republic has the armed forces at his disposal without ever being able to command them in person. What prudent legislators, indeed! And what, one may inquire, does it signify that he does not command them in person if they are at his disposal, if he can send them where he will, to Rome or to Mogador? — if it is he who gives the orders, who appoints the different ranks of officers, who bestows the military crosses and pensions? — and if there are generals who command for him?
It is the right of the citizens to appoint the hierarchy of their military chiefs, the simple soldiers and national guards appointing the lower ranks of officers, the officers appointing their superiors.
Organised in this way the army retains its civic feelings; it is then no longer a nation within the nation, a fatherland within the fatherland, a sort of travelling colony in which the citizen as a naturalised soldier learns to fight against his own country. It is the nation itself, centralised in its strength and youth quite independently of Power, which like any magistrate of the judicial order or of the police can call for the public force in the name of the law, though that force is not at its disposal and cannot be commanded by it. As for the eventuality of war, the army only owes its obedience to the representatives of the nation and the military chiefs appointed by them.
Does it follow that I regard the military as a natural institution inherent to society and in which I only find one fault that endangers liberty, i.e. that of a defective organisation? That would be to suppose me to have a very mediocre understanding of the Revolution. I have endeavoured to show how the People has to organise its military in such a way as to simultaneously guarantee its defence and its liberties, while waiting for the nations to agree to terminate the armed peace, since they are the only ones competent to judge the opportunity of general disarmament. But who does not see that the same applies to war as to justice and religion and that the only sure means of abolishing it, after the conciliation of international interests, would be to organise the military as I have just indicated — and as prescribed by the principles of ’93 — while depriving the Government of its power to wage war against the wishes of the nation?
I will continue.
At all times societies have felt it necessary to protect their trade and industry against foreign imports: the power or function that protects indigenous labour in every country, guaranteeing it the national market, is the Customs.
I do not wish to give any impression here of prejudging the morality or immorality, the utility or disutility of the Customs: I shall take it as society offers it to me and confine myself to examining it from the point of view of the constitution of powers. Later, when we pass from political and social questions to the purely economic question, we shall seek to find a solution to the problem of the balance of commerce that is appropriate to it and see whether indigenous production can be protected without the cost of law and surveillance, in a word, without the Customs.
The Customs is by virtue of the fact of its existence a centralised function: its very origin, like its form of action, excludes any idea of piecemeal structure. But how is it that this function, which is within the special competence of merchants and industrialists and should by rights be exclusively the concern of the authority of the chambers of commerce, is still a dependency of the State?
For the protection of its industry France maintains an army of more than 40,000 customs officials, all armed with rifles and sabres, costing the nation a sum of 26 million per annum. This army has a double mission: to pursue smugglers and to collect a tax of 100 to 110 million on imported and exported goods.
Now, who can know better than industry itself what need it has of being protected, what duties must be levied, which products merit premiums and encouragements? And as to the actual service provided by Customs, is it not evident that it is up to the interested parties to calculate its expense and not the job of Power to make it a source of emoluments for its creatures, for example by making the legislation on differential tariffs a source of revenue for its extravagances?
As long as the administration of Customs remains in the hands of government authority, the protectionist system, which by the way I do not judge per se, is bound to be defective; it will be lacking in sincerity and justice; the tariffs imposed by Customs will be extortionate, and smuggling can only be seen, in the words of the honourable M. Blanqui, as both a right and a duty.
Besides the ministries of the Cults [established religions], of Justice, of War, of international trade or of Customs, the government has accumulated others, such as the ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, the ministry of Public Works, the ministry of Public Education and above all, to juggle all of them, the ministry of Finance! Our supposed separation of powers is only the accumulation of powers, our centralisation is only an absorption.
Does it not appear to you that the farmers, already organised as they are in their confederations and associations, could well operate their centralisation and manage their general interests without passing through the hands of the State? And that the merchants, producers, manufacturers and industrialists of all kinds, with their completely open associations in the chambers of commerce, might equally, without the aid of Power, without having to await their salvation from its tender mercies or their ruin from its inexperience, organise a central administration themselves and at their own expense, debate their affairs in the general assembly, correspond with the other administrations and take all useful decisions without the signature of the president of the republic, and then entrust one of theirs, chosen by his peers to be the minister, with the execution of their wishes?
And that the public works, which concern everybody, whether in agriculture, industry, trade, the departments or the communes, should be distributed forthwith among the local and central administrations with an interest in them and no longer form a separate corporation which — as with the army, Customs, Excise Office, etc. — is completely under the control of the State with its own hierarchy, privileges and ministry, all with the purpose of permitting the State to traffic in mines, canals, railways, play the stock market, speculate on shares, hand over building projects of 99 years duration to friend’s companies, award works on roads, bridges, ports, sea walls, drillings, tunnels, locks, dredgings etc., etc., to a legion of entrepreneurs, speculators, usurers, corrupters and swindlers who live off the public wealth, the exploitation of artisans and workers, and the follies of the State?
Does it not seem to you that national education would be just as well UNIVERSALISED, administered and ruled; the primary and secondary school teachers, headmasters and inspectors just as well chosen; the study syllabuses just as perfectly in harmony with interests, customs and morals — if town or other local councils were authorised to appoint schoolteachers while the University only had to hand out diplomas to them; if in both public education and a military career periods of service on the lower echelons were required for promotion to the higher levels; if every grand university dignitary had had to pass through the positions of primary teacher and class monitor? Do you believe that this system, perfectly democratic, would damage school discipline, educational morality, the dignity of teaching or the security of families?
And, since money is the nerve of any administration: it is necessary that the budget is made for the country and not the country for the budget and that a tax must be freely voted for by the representatives of the people every year; this is the basic and inalienable right of the nation whether under a monarchy or under the Republic. Since both expenses and receipts must be consented to by the country before being authorised by the government, is it not clear that the consequence of this financial initiative, which has been formally recognised as pertaining to the citizens by all our constitutions, would be that the ministry of finance — all this fiscal organisation, in a word — should belong to the nation and not to its prince; that in fact it is directly answerable to those who pay the budget, not those who eat it; that there would be far less abuse in the management of the public treasury, less squandering of funds, fewer deficits, if the State had no more control of the public finances than of the churches, of justice, of the army, of Customs, of public works or of public education, etc.?
Without a doubt, in the case of Agriculture, Trade, Industry, Public Works, Education and Finance, separation will not end in annihilation, in the way that we have attempted to show it will in the case of the Churches, Justice, War and Customs. In this connection one might believe that with the development of economic forces compensating — and more — the suppression of political powers, the principle of authority will gain on the one hand what it has lost on the other, and that the governmental idea will be strengthened instead of disappearing.
But who does not see that the Government that has just come to an end with the extinction of its powers meets that end in this case in the fact of their absolute independence as much as in the mode of their centralisation, the principle of which is no longer authority but contract?
What makes for centralisation in both despotic and representative States is authority, hereditary or elective, which emanating from the King, President or directory descends on the country and absorbs all its powers. But what makes for centralisation in a society of free men, associating with different groups according to the nature of their industries or their interests and by whom neither collective nor individual sovereignty is ever abdicated or delegated, is the contract. The principle, you see, has changed: from this point on the economy is no longer the same; the organism, deriving from another law, has been turned upside down. Instead of resulting, as was hitherto the case, from the agglomeration and confiscation of forces by a so-called representative of the people, social unity is the product of the free support of the citizens. In fact and in law the Government has ceased to exist as a result of universal suffrage.[34]
I shall not accumulate any more examples here. After what has preceded it is easy to continue the series and see the difference between centralisation and despotism, between the separation of social functions and the separation of those two abstractions that have been rather unphilosophically named the legislative power and the executive power — in the end between administration and government. Do you believe, I say, that with this truly democratic regime, with its unity at the bottom and its separation at the top, the reverse of what now exists in all our constitutions, there would not be more severity concerning expenditure, more exactitude in the services, more responsibility for the functionaries, more benevolence on the part of administrations towards the citizens, and less servility, less esprit de corps, fewer conflicts, in a word, fewer disorders? Do you believe that reforms would then appear quite so difficult; that the influence of authority would corrupt the judgement of the citizens; that corruption would serve as the basis of morals, and that being a hundred times less governed we would not be a thousand times better run as a country?
It used to be believed that in order to create national unity it was necessary to concentrate all public powers in the hands of a single authority; then, as it soon became apparent that in proceeding thus one only created despotism, it was believed possible to remedy this inconvenience by means of the dualism of powers, as if in order to prevent the government’s war against the people there were no other means than organising the war of the government against the government!
For a nation to be manifested in its unity it is necessary, I repeat, that this nation be centralised in its religion, centralised in its justice, centralised in its military force, centralised in its agriculture, its industry and commerce, centralised in its finances, centralised in all its functions and powers, in a word; it is necessary that centralisation be effected from the bottom to the top, from the circumference to the centre, and that all functions be independent and govern themselves independently.
Do you then want to make this purely economic and invisible unity more apparent to the senses by means of a special organ or by an Assembly; to preserve the image of the superannuated government for love of your traditions?
Group these different administrations by their leading representatives: you will then have your council of ministers, your executive power, which might then very well do without a State Council.
Above all that now raise a grand jury, legislature or national assembly, directly appointed by the whole country and charged, not with appointing the ministers — they will be invested in their roles by their specific electoral bodies — but with verifying the accounts, passing laws, fixing the budget, settling the differences between the administrations, all this after having heard the conclusions of the public ministry, or ministry of the interior, to which the whole government will then be reduced: and you have a centralisation which is all the stronger for your multiplying the number of centres of power, a responsibility all the more real for the separation between powers being more clean-cut: you will have a constitution which is at the same time political and social.
There, the government, the State, power — whatever name you choose to give it — brought back within its just limits, which are not to legislate nor to execute, nor even to fight or judge, but as commissioner to witness: the sermons, if there are any sermons, the debates in tribunals and parliamentary discussions, if there are any tribunals and a parliament; to supervise the generals and armies, if circumstances make it necessary to keep the armies and generals; to remind people of the meaning of the laws and warn of the contradictions involved, to see to the execution of those laws and prosecute any breaches: there, I say, government is nothing other than the head teacher of society, the sentinel of the people. Or rather, government no longer exists, since by the progress of their separation and centralisation the powers formerly gathered together by the government have all either disappeared or escaped the latter’s initiative: an-archy has given birth to order. There at last you have the liberty of the citizens, the truth of institutions, the sincerity of universal suffrage, the integrity of the administration, the impartiality of justice, the patriotism of bayonets, the submission of parties, the impotence of sects, the convergence of wills. Your society is organised, living, progressive; it thinks, speaks, acts like a man, precisely because it is no longer represented by a man, because it no longer recognises personal authority, because in it, as in any organised and living being, as in Pascal’s infinity, the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.[35]
It is to this anti-governmental constitution that we are invincibly led by our democratic traditions, our revolutionary tendencies, our need for centralisation and unity, out love of liberty and equality, and the purely economic, if very badly applied, principle of all our constitutions. And it is this I would have gladly explained to the Constituent Assembly, if that Assembly, so impatient of commonplaces, had been capable of listening to something other than commonplaces; if, in its blind prejudice against any new idea, in its unfair provocations with the socialists, it had not had the empty words to say to them: I defy you to try to convince me!
But it is with assemblies as with nations: they only learn from misfortune. We have not suffered enough, we have not been sufficiently chastised for our monarchical servility and governmental fanaticism for us to come to love liberty and order so soon. Everything within us still conspires with the exploitation of man by man, the government of man by man.
Louis Blanc is in need of a strong power to do what he calls the good, which is the application of his system, and to keep down the bad, which is everything that opposes that system.
M. Léon Faucher is in need of a strong and pitiless power to contain the republicans and exterminate the socialists, to the glory of English political economy and Malthus.
Messrs. Thiers and Guizot are in need of a quasi-absolute power which enables them to exercise their great talents as tightrope walkers. What kind of nation is it from which a man of genius would be forced to exile himself for lack of men to govern, a parliamentary opposition to combat and intrigues to pursue with all the governments?
Messrs. de Falloux and Montalembert are in need of a power divine that every knee would bow to, every head incline to, every conscience prostrate itself to, in order that kings might no longer be any more than the gendarmes of the Pope, the vicar of God on earth.
M. Barrot is in need of a double power, legislative and executive, in order that there might be eternal contradiction in parliament and society never have any other end, in this life and the other, but to witness constitutional representations.
Ah! vain servile race that we are! We who pay 1,800 million a year for the follies of our governors and our own shame; who maintain 500,000 soldiers to machine-gun our children; who vote for fortresses for our tyrants so that they may keep us under perpetual siege; who invite nations to become independent only to abandon them to their despots; who wage war on our neighbours and allies, today for the vengeance of a preacher, yesterday for the pleasure of a courtesan; who have no esteem for any but our flatterers, no respect but for our parasites, no love but for our prostitutes, no hate but for our workers and our poor; once a race of heroes, now of hypocrites and sycophants: if it is true that we are the Christ of the nations, might we soon quaff the chalice of our iniquities to the dregs, or, if we have definitely abdicated liberty, serve by dint of distress and squalor as an eternal example to cowardly peoples and perjurers!
The funeral services for the powers-that-be got under way, with Louis Bonaparte presiding. This supreme transition was crucial if the way was to be prepared for the advent of the democratic, social republic. The situation in place prior to then and the events that followed December 10th and which are still being played out with inexorable logic will demonstrate as much to us.
By plumping for royalty in 1830 and founding constitutional rule, the governments of the Thiers, Guizots and Talleyrands had, deliberately and of their own volition, laid down the principle of a further revolution. Like a grub instinctively sensitive to approaching metamorphosis, it had woven its own winding-sheet. By endowing itself after a nine month crisis with a president, a shadow of a king, it had uttered its Consummatum est[36] and, before breathing its last, placed its final wishes on record.
The corruption of power had been the doing of the constitutional monarchy; the presidency’s mission is to lead the mourning for the authorities. Just as Cavaignac had been, and as Ledru-Rollin had been, Louis Bonaparte is merely an executor of that intent. Louis Philippe poured his poison into the old society: Louis Bonaparte escorted it to the burial ground. I will parade this lugubrious procession in front of you anon.
Take a close look at France: she is spent, done for. Life has retreated into itself: where the heart should be we have only the metallic chill of interests; where the thought should be, we have a torrent of opinions all contradicting one another and holding each other in check. A vermin-riddled corpse, one might say. You speak of freedom, honour, fatherland? France is dead: Rome, Italy, Hungary, Poland and the Rhineland kneel all around the coffin and recite the De Profundis![37] What once was the power and the glory of the French nation — monarchy and republic, Church and parliament, bourgeoisie and nobility, military glory, the sciences, letters, the fine arts — all of it is no more: everything has been mown down like a harvest, and tossed into the revolutionary mash. Take care not to detain this work of decomposition: don’t go mixing the living vermilion liquid with mud and sediment. That would be tantamount to killing Lazarus in the tomb a second time.
For nearly twenty years now our death has been in the making and we have occasionally thought our metamorphosis approaching its end! Nothing happened but this was interpreted by us as a sign of resurrection: the slightest sound reaching our ears rang like the trump of the Last Judgement. Yet year followed year and the big day never came. It was like the Middle Ages and their intoxicated millenarians. Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, Ancona, the Quadruple Alliance, the right to search, secret societies, infernal machines, parliamentary coalitions: then came Beirut, Krakow, Pritchard, the Spanish marriages, the Russian loan; then scarcity, electoral reform, the Sonderbund and, overlaying them all, corruption!…[38] Then, finally, the February revolution, a spectacle in twelve scenes, universal suffrage, the reaction and, once again, as ever, corruption! So many occasions to make our mark if we had any sort of a heart still beating, if we were a people! Sometimes, we tried to struggle to our feet ... but the chill of death pinned us in our coffin. We have thrown away our final flames on pitchers and glasses: toasts from the dynastics, the democrats, the socialists were our only share in the history of France from July 1847 through to September 1849.
We did not cease to show, and myself first and foremost, that the government of Louis Bonaparte was unjust! The way we used to do with Louis-Philippe. The government of December 10th? It is only there to seal up the burial chamber, let me tell you; let it perform its pall-bearer’s function. Following the ghastly, unparalleled handiwork of the July monarchy, the presidency’s duty is to lay you out in your charnel-house. Thanks to power, Louis-Philippe was society’s wrecker: Louis Bonaparte will be the destroyer of what Louis-Philippe had missed, authority. The circumstances attending his election, the place he occupies in the revolutionary series, the policy his elders have foisted upon him, the use he has been induced to make of his authority, the prospects opened up in front of him: all nudging him and hurrying him forwards. It is Revolution itself that has taught Louis Bonaparte a lesson. Did not he, like Louis-Philippe, yoke together the Jesuit and the doctrinarian, only to have each of them bring disgrace upon the other? Did he not state, in his inaugural address, that he would carry on with the policies of Cavaignac, the regicide’s son? ... I tell you truthfully: the role of the President of the Republic was written in the book of fate: his calling is to de-moralise the authorities the way Carrier[39] stripped the morality out of torture.
Once this situation was understood, the course that socialism had to follow was all set out. It had merely to press for demolition of the authorities, acting, so to speak, in concert with the authorities and favouring, by means of calculated opposition, the handiwork of Louis Bonaparte. Adopting those tactics, with divine Providence and human Providence in agreement, nothing would stand in our path. The misgivings that had made socialism doubtful prior to December 10th about alliance with the Mountain were banished: that alliance now became entirely profitable, wholly beneficial. Louis Bonaparte elected by an overwhelming majority, the reaction which he had made so formidable, any hope of re-capturing power was banished for a long time from the eyes of the Montagnards, committed by their programme and compelled to go where it might please us to lead them.
That left two things still undone: firstly, have the political question subsumed into the social question by simultaneously mounting a frontal assault on the capitalist principle and the authority principle: secondly, by having the latter follow through with all of the consequences of its latest formula, in other words, rendering the presidency as much help as we could muster in its suicidal undertaking.
In this way, the old society was plucked from its foundations; Jacobinism turned into pure socialism; democracy became more liberal, more philosophical, more real; socialism itself emerged from its mythological envelopment and made its stand, as if on two pillars, on the double repudiation of usury and of power. From which point onwards the social system wriggled free of the mists of utopias; society became conscious of itself; and, under the aegis of the popular genius, freedom blossomed without contradiction.
At the same time, power was peaceably moving towards its doom. The Freedom that had once ushered it in now spread the shroud over it; socialism’s triumph lay in giving it, as the people naively say, a glorious death.[40]
Alongside capital and power, however, there was a third power that seemed to have been asleep for the past sixty years, its death throes threatening to be altogether more dreadful: namely, the Church.
Capital, whose mirror-image in the political sphere is Government, has a synonym in the religious context, to wit, Catholicism. The economic notion of capital, the political notion of government or authority, the theological notion of the Church, these three notions are identical and completely interchangeable: an attack upon one is an attack upon the others, as all the philosophers today know fine well. What capital does to labour and the State to freedom, the Church in turn does to understanding. This trinity of absolutism is deadly, in its practice as well as in its philosophy. In order to oppress the people effectively, they must be clapped in irons in their bodies, their will and their reason. So if socialism wanted to manifest itself completely and positively, stripped of all mysticism, there was but one thing for it to do: to set the idea of this trilogy in intellectual circulation. And the occasion could scarcely have been more propitious.
As if they saw eye to eye with us, the leaders of Catholicism had come voluntarily to abide by the determination of revolutionary dialectics. They had sided with the Holy Alliance against nationality, with governments against subjects, with capital against labour. In Rome, there was an out-and-out contest between theocracy and revolution; and as if to render the socialist proof all the more spectacular, Louis Bonaparte’s government was loudly espousing the Pope’s cause in the name of Catholic interests.[41] Now we had merely to highlight this triple form of social slavery, this conspiracy of altar, throne and strong-box, for it to be readily understood. Even as the reaction was denouncing our atheism, which certainly did not cause us much in the way of discomfort, we were, every morning, recounting some episode from the Holy League and, without harangue or argument, the people were being de-monarchised and de-Catholicised.
From December 10th on, this was the battle plan spelled out by Le Peuple and broadly adhered to by the newspapers of the social democracy; and, dare I say it? if said plan has not yet reaped all the success one might expect it to deliver, it has already brought forth imperishable results: and the rest is only a matter of time.
Capital will never regain its whip hand; its secret has been exposed. Let it hold its last orgy: tomorrow it must burn atop the pyre of its treasures, as did Sardanapalus.[42]
The powers-that-be are done for in France, doomed to acting out on a daily basis and for the sake of self-protection, the most terrifying plot that socialism might devise for their destruction.
Catholicism has not waited for its mask to be torn away: the skeleton beneath the shroud stands exposed. The Christian world cries for vengeance against Church and Pope. The Oudinot expedition has delivered the coup de grace to the papacy; spurred on by the Jesuits, the doctrinaires, whose every thought was of how to destroy Jacobinism by attacking it in one of its heartlands, have done socialism’s job for it. Pius IX is the throne of St Peter brought low. Now, with the papacy demolished, Catholicism has nothing to recommend it: The serpent having died, its venom dies also.
When partisan fury, when men of God ignorant of the concerns of philosophy are doing things so well, it is highly imprudent and bordering upon criminal to hinder them in their endeavours. It only remained for us to explain the meaning of things as the short-sightedness of our enemies brought them to light; to highlight the logic, I nearly said the loyalty, with which the Louis Bonaparte government was tearing out its own entrails; to endorse and indeed sing the praises of the eloquent arguments mounted by the Barrot-Falloux-Faucher ministry, or, (and this amounted to precisely the same thing), denounce them so that such friends might find therein a ready source of further arguments for persistence.
From before February I had foreseen what was happening. No one was ever better prepared for a cold-blooded fight. But such is the fervour in political arguments that even the wisest are carried away by passion. When reason alone would have been enough to make me the victor, I threw myself into the fray with something akin to rage. The unfair attacks to which I had been subjected by a number of men drawn from the Mountain party had wounded me: the election of Louis Bonaparte, which I held was an affront to the republican party, weighed heavily upon me. I was like the people under the lash of tyranny, rearing up and roaring against its masters. Rather than assuaging my enthusiasm, the truth and justice of our cause served only to heighten it; so true is it that the men who rely so heavily upon their understanding are often the very ones whose passions are the most untameable. I have immersed myself in study; I have numbed my soul with meditations; I have merely succeeded in inflaming my irascibility all the more. Having recently recovered from a serious illness, I declared war on the President of the Republic. I marched out to do battle with the lion when I was not even a gadfly.
I freely admit it, now that I have the chance to gauge the facts better: such immoderate aggression on my part towards the head of state was unfair.
From the very first day he took office, the presidential government, faithful to the orders it had received from on high, paved the way for the extinction of the authority principle by stirring up conflict between the powers-that-be. Could I have asked for anything better than Monsieur Odilon Barrot’s summing-up to the Constituent Assembly and the famous Rateau proposal?[43] So how come the very confirmation of my forecasts made me lose my calm? What was the point of all this invective spewed at a man when, as an instrument of fate, after all is said and done, he deserved to be applauded for his diligence?
I knew only too well that by its very nature government is counter-revolutionary: it either resists, oppresses, or corrupts or wrecks. Government knows nothing else, can do nothing else and will never seek anything else. Put a St Vincent de Paul in power and he will turn into a Guizot or a Talleyrand. Look no further back than February and the provisional government: General Cavaignac and all those republicans and all those socialists who had a hand in affairs, were they not acting, some on behalf of dictatorship and some in the service of the reaction? How could Louis Bonaparte not have followed in their footsteps? Was it through any fault of his own? Were his intentions not pure? Were his thoughts, insofar as they were known, not at loggerheads with his politics? So why the vehement accusation which amounted to nothing short of a condemnation of fate? The blame that I was heaping on Louis Bonaparte was nonsensical: and in accusing him of reaction I myself was, in my keenness to thwart him, reactionary.
I was also not unaware — who ever knew it better than I did? — that if the President of the Republic, as specifically outlined in twenty one articles of the Constitution, was merely the agent and subordinate of the Assembly and, under the principle of separation of powers, he was its equal and, inevitably, its antagonist. So it was impossible for the government to have been free of jurisdictional squabbling and rival prerogatives — mutual trespasses and accusations resulting in the imminent breakdown of authority. The Rateau proposition, or anything of that sort, was bound to result from this constitutional dualism, as infallibly as the spark springs from the impact of the stone on the steel. Add that Louis Bonaparte, a mediocre philosopher, (not that I hold that against him), was being advised by the Jesuits and the doctrinaires, the worst reasoners and the most despicable politicians the world has ever seen; that in addition, due to the injustice of his position, he was personally answerable for a policy on which he had only to sign off; answerable for constitutional conflicts for which he became the whipping-boy; answerable for the silliness and noxious passions of advisors foisted upon him by the coalition of his electors!
When I think of the wretchedness of this head of state I am tempted to weep for him and I count my own imprisonment a blessing. Was there ever a man more frightfully sacrificed? The man in the street marvelled at such unprecedented elevation: I see it only as the posthumous penalty for an ambition that is in the grave but which social justice still pursues, although the people, with their short memory span, have long since forgotten it. As if the nephew should pay the penalty for the iniquities of the uncle. Louis Bonaparte, I am afraid, will prove to be merely yet another martyr to governmental fanaticism; he will be brought down as his monarch predecessors were brought down, or else he will become a companion in misfortune to the democrats who paved the way for him — Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin, Blanqui and Barbès. For he, no more and no less than all of them, stands for the authority principle: and whether he wishes, on his own account, to hasten or to fend off the revolution, the task will be too much for him and he will perish. You poor victim! Even as I was celebrating your efforts, I should have been pleading your case, making excuses for you, maybe even defending you, but I could spare you naught but insult and sarcasm: I behaved badly.
Had I the slightest faith in supernatural callings, I would say that one of two things must be true: that Louis Bonaparte has been summoned to the presidency of the Republic to redeem the French people from enslavement to the power restored and consolidated by the Emperor: or in order to expiate the Emperor’s despotism. Actually, there are two courses open to Louis Bonaparte: one which, by means of popular initiative and an organic fellowship of interests, leads directly to equality and peace, this being the course favoured by the socialist analysis and revolutionary history; and the other which, from a position of power, will inevitably lead him to catastrophe, this being the course of usurpation, surreptitious or brazen, to which the man elected on 10 December is to all appearances committed. Was it necessary for us to see him flounder like the rest and refused all chance to turn back? … Put it to the man himself: as for me, I have nothing more left to tell you. I am too great a foe to hazard advice: it is enough for me to open your eyes to our country’s future, reflected in her past as if in a mirror. He that lives will see!
Thus, prior to December 10th, the odds were a thousand to one that the president of the Republic, whoever he might turn out to be, would make his stand on the terrain of government, and therefore on reactionary ground. By as early as the 23rd, Louis Bonaparte was confirming that sinister prediction by pledging fealty to the Constitution. He would, he stated, be following Cavaignac’s policy, and, in a gesture of alliance, he shook hands with his rival. What a revelation it was for the general when, from the very lips of Louis Bonaparte, he heard it stated that his government’s record had been merely a paving of the way for absolutism! How he must have rued his dismal indulgence of the decent, moderate folk who had so unworthily betrayed him! And how he must have groaned not to have offered the amnesty that he was no doubt holding back as a token of reconciliation, for the day when he would come into his own! Do what you must, come what may! This feudal maxim was worthy of a republican.
Matters of controversy quickly cropped up and the government’s suicide began. Coming in the wake of the summing-up by the prime minister, the Rateau proposal exposed these frictions. Irreconcilable differences between the authorities did not need thirty whole days to come to light: similarly, the people’s mutual and instinctive hatred of the government and the government’s of the people were more intensely manifested. The events of January 29th, when the government and the democrats could be found accusing each other of conspiracy and taking to the streets ready to do battle were probably sheer panic, the upshot of their mistrust of each other: what was plainest about this adventure was the fact that there was war brewing between the democracy and the President, just as it had been once upon a time between the opposition and Louis-Philippe.
Le Peuple stood out in the fray. Our early Parisian editions read like indictments. Harking back to his first profession, one minister, Monsieur Léon Faucher, was polite enough to answer back: his insertions in Le Moniteur, remarked upon by the republican press, triggered a tidal wave of anger and pity. By himself, this liverish creature, whom Heaven has made even uglier than his caricature and who suffers from a singular obsession with actually being worse than his reputation, did more damage to the authorities he represented than all the democrat and socialist diatribes. Yes, had the Mountain held its patience and Monsieur Léon Faucher held on to his ministerial office for another three months, the street-urchins of Paris might have dispatched Louis Bonaparte back to the fortress of Ham[44] and his ministers to Charenton.[45] But no such success awaited journalistic malice: the social question could not be decanted by this ridiculous bickering; which speaks volumes for it.
Having become, thanks to the lawmaker’s determination and the selfishness of his advisors, the agent in charge of a policy of reaction and rancour, within three months Louis Bonaparte had frittered away the greater part of the strength with which the December elections had endowed him. Compromised by O. Barrot, committed to a liberticidal expedition by M. de Falloux, disgraced by Léon Faucher, the Government under its new President caved in beyond recovery. Belief in the powers-that-be and respect for authority perished in the people’s hearts. What sort of power is it that is wholly reliant upon the point of a bayonet? Kings and princes no longer have any belief in it themselves: their interests as capitalists take precedence over their dignity as sovereigns. It is not their crowns that they fear for these days: it is their assets! No longer do they protest, as Louis XVIII did while exiled in Mittau, against the actions of democracy; they do insist upon their revenues from it. Trying out monarchy in France when everybody, title-holders included, now regards it only as a civil list matter, is akin to twisting the knife in a corpse.
There is no victory but brings its toll of dead or wounded. The battle fought out on 29th January between the legislative authorities and the presidential prerogatives earned me three years in prison. This being the sort of decorations and pensions that the democratic social Republic promises its soldiers. Not that I am complaining; As the holy Scripture says He who seeks danger will perish; and War is war. I cannot resist pointing out, however, the profound wisdom with which the legislator, alert to the vindictiveness of parties, has afforded them, in the shape of the jury institution, an honest means of decimating one another and reintroduced ostracism into our laws to cater for their hatreds.
In attacking Louis Bonaparte, I had thought that I was in perfect conformity with justice. The only offence with which I can be charged, if indeed I have committed any, was having offended the president of the Republic. Now, the President of the Republic being, like any other magistrate, answerable: the prerogatives of the royal personage, as determined by the law of 1819, being non-applicable in his case, I could only have been dragged before the courts on a complaint from the President I had supposedly offended and not on a specific charge from the public prosecutor who had no remit to meddle in a dispute between private individuals. So it was not so much a political charge that I was facing, as straightforward insult or defamation of the person. On which count I had nothing to fear. I had not attacked Louis Bonaparte in his private life; I had spoken simply of his performance in office. Later, during the debate on the recent press law, it was plainly the feeling that, under a special ordinance, the pursuit of offences committed in print against the President should be handed over to the public prosecution office.
But this hurdle, which seemed insurmountable to me as a scrupulous logician, was a mere bagatelle to the legal hair-splitters. To my extreme surprise, I found myself accused in connection with a pamphlet dealing exclusively with the President of the Republic:
1st Of inciting hatred against the government;
2nd Of incitement of civil war.
3rd Of attacking the Constitution and property!
Had it pleased Monsieur Meynard de Franc to charge me also, in relation to an article in Le Peuple about Louis Bonaparte, with the crimes of infanticide, rape or counterfeiting currency, he could have: the charge would have stood; and there was no reason for me not to have been also and just as judiciously convicted. Acting on its honour and its conscience, before God and before men, by a majority of 8 to 4, the jury found me guilty on all counts and I got my three years. You may ask, frank readers, how honour and conscience can possibly be ascribed to the arbitrariness of such a charge. Here is the key to the puzzle which will help you resolve all problems of the sort.
“The law” — states the Criminal Prosecution Code, Article 342 — “does not require of jurymen an account of the means whereby they have been persuaded: it prescribes them no rules whereby they are bound to gauge the fullness and sufficiency of evidence. It does not tell them: You will hold as true every fact to which such-and-such a number of witness may attest. Any more than it tells them: You are not to regard as sufficiently established any evidence that may not be made up of such-and-such a record, such-and-such components, such-and-such a number of witnesses and such-and-such particulars. It puts only this single question which encapsulates the entire extent of their obligations: Is it your heartfelt conviction?”
Now do you understand? Jurymen are told: In your heart of hearts, is it your conviction that citizen P-J Proudhon, here present, is a danger to the state, a hindrance to the Jesuits, a menace to your capital and your property? It counts for little whether or not an actual crime has occurred; that the public prosecutor has offered no evidence to substantiate his charge; that the rationale he uses bears no relationship to the crimes and offences imputed to the accused. The law does not ask you for an accounting of the means whereby you have been persuaded: it lays down no rules for your judgement. And when the afore-mentioned Proudhon might show you — as he is well capable of doing — that the facts cited in the charge sheet are contested and travesties; when he establishes, on the basis of evidence and testimonials, that he has done the very opposite of that of which he stands accused and that it is Louis-Bonaparte himself who, in the indicted articles, is attacking the constitution, inciting the citizenry to civil war, demolishing the Church and the government, you are not required to pay any heed to these things. You are familiar with the accused: you have heard tell of his teachings: he is out, they say, for nothing less than robbing capital of its revenue by making it compete with credit, as well as to demolish the government by organising universal suffrage. The law poses only this question to you; it encapsulates the whole and all of your obligations: Do you have a heartfelt conviction regarding this man?’
In civil proceedings, the judge is required to justify his determinations. He has to review the facts, the evidence, the testimony, the legal texts and the jurisprudence: then he shows his reasoning, his induction and sets out his principles and conclusions. In short, the essential part of any judgement is the elaboration of the rationale.
Criminal proceedings are a different matter: the jury is spared the requirement to explain its finding. It is tested only on its heartfelt conviction. It speaks instinctively, intuitively, as do women and animals in whom, it has always been believed, divinity resides: — What did Aristides ever do to you? one Athenian asked the rural juryman about to black-ball that illustrious outlaw. — He annoys me — the upright, free man answered — in that I am forever hearing him dubbed “THE JUST MAN”! So much for heartfelt conviction!
I have no reason to speak ill of my judges: they have merely abided by the spirit of their imperfect institution. Besides, as my friend Langlois says, who was at the time appearing on his own account in front of a Versailles jury, one of these days this jinx must fall upon my head. But whereas I was keen enough to be judged, convicted and maybe even jailed, I had at least made myself the heartfelt pledge that it would be for a heavyweight cause, the Bank of the People, for instance. Providence which is on my trail has not found me worthy enough to suffer for truth’s sake.
Long live the democratic and social Republic!
It was thus, by the election of December 10th and the formation of the Barrot-Faucher-Falloux ministry, that the forces of reaction made new progress. The government had passed from tomorrow’s republicans into the hands of the doctrinaires. One step more, one more manifestation of unintelligent democracy, and we would fall into the hands of Jesuits. Then the blows administered by its own theologians, now becoming the continuators of the Revolution, will lead to the downfall of the principle of authority.
Everything is interdependent in the forward march of societies, everything serves the progress of revolutions. And when, poor reasoners that we are, we believe all is lost because of one of those blunders committed by our own blind politics, all is saved. Reaction pushes us onwards just as much as action, resistance is movement. The President of the Republic, whose historical significance is to dissolve the principle of authority among us, did not need to address the Montagnards to accomplish his work of death. According to the laws of revolutionary dialectics, which lead both governments and societies without them being aware of it, that would have been a retrograde movement on the part of Louis Bonaparte. From February on, the axis of the world having shifted, progress was being made though there seemed to be regression. We have just observed M. Odilon Barrot attack the Constitution in the name of the constitution itself by increasing the conflict between the separate powers: we are going to see M. Léon Faucher, the instigator of the events of the 29th January, attack the Institutions by the law on the clubs. After the institutions it will be the turn of the Principles, and after the principles, the Classes of society. It is in this way that power reaches its own end: it cannot live either with the Constitution or the institutions, neither with principles nor with human beings. The auto-demolition of power forms a predetermined series of special acts, a sort of analytical operation which we shall see Louis Bonaparte’s government execute with a rigour and precision which are entirely peculiar to our nation. The French people is the most logical of all.
Certainly, after the February Revolution made in the name of the right of assembly, that right which citizens have to discuss the interests of the nation among themselves and solemnly express their opinion on the acts committed by the power of government; after, I say, this striking affirmation of popular initiative, if there were one institution that a democratic government was duty-bound to respect, nay, not merely to respect but to develop, to organise up to the point at which it would have made it the most potent means of order and peace, then it was the clubs. I say clubs, as I would say assemblies, popular societies, public meeting-rooms, colleges, academies, congresses, electoral committees, etc; in a word, associations and meetings of all kinds and varieties. The name is immaterial. Under the name of clubs, or any other you please to use, it is a matter of the organisation of universal suffrage in all its forms, of the very structure of Democracy itself.
The provisional government had been content with placing the clubs under surveillance: it prided itself on its tolerance. Tolerance! That was already a declaration of hostility and a denial of its own principle. After tolerance intolerance was bound to come. Cavaignac gave the signal; the ill-tempered Léon Faucher, finding his predecessor’s work insufficient, undertook to complete it. He proposed a Bill which purely and simply declared the prohibition of the clubs.
To prohibit the clubs, to suppress the right of assembly, to forbid citizens to meet in a number exceeding twenty persons for any reason except by the permission and at the pleasure of the authorities: this is to declare that power is all, that it alone owns progress, intelligence, ideas; that democracy is only a word, and the true constitution of society is the system of solitary confinement; and that it was absolutely necessary for the peace of the world and the order of civilisation that one of the two things should perish, namely either the initiative of the citizens or that of the State; either liberty or the government. M. Léon Faucher’s project did not contain anything but this dilemma, essentially.
When M. Odilon Barrot raised his hand against the Holy Ark of the government by fomenting the conflict of the separate powers, we responded to his thought by holding the sword of Damocles, presidential responsibility, over Louis Bonaparte’s head. M. Léon Faucher had it in for institutions: the best thing to do was to oppose a legal institution to him, namely legal resistance.
One recalls that famous session of the 21st March in which M. Crémieux, the rapporteur[46], declared in the name of the Committee appointed to examine the Bill on the clubs that the Constitution was violated by this Bill and that consequently the Committee would cease to participate in the debate. It is well-known that following this declaration nearly two hundred members of the constitutive Assembly left the debating chamber and immediately met in the Old Chamber to TAKE COUNSEL. This was nothing less than the beginning of a demonstration similar to that of June 13th, the first measure of constitutional resistance. But the proximity to February was too great, and we should admire the prudence of the representatives: afraid of weakening authority, they preferred to tolerate a violation rather than make a revolution. Thanks to a parliamentary compromise the demonstration by the minority had no consequences. The very next day, however, Le Peuple completed the opposition’s line of thought by calling upon all citizens to immediately offer resistance if the Assembly passed the bill.
As the question of legal resistance is of the highest seriousness, it being a part of republican law which is revived every day by the arbitrary nature of power and of the parliamentary majority, and because many people confuse it with the right to insurrection recognised by the Declaration of 1793, I am going to give a short account of its true principles before accounting for the political course followed by the People in this situation.
What is the right to insurrection?
How is one to understand the concept of legal resistance?
In which cases may one or the other apply?
If it were possible that the government were truly concerned with order, if it respected liberty and sought less to impose arbitrary decisions, it would make haste to deal with these questions officially and not leave the job to a journalist. But the government hates all questions of legality above all things and hushes them up as much as it can. What occupies it most is to persecute authors, printers, newspaper sellers, peddlers, bill-posters: it reserves its instructions and circulars for them.
I will observe first of all that the rights of insurrection and resistance belong to the period of subordination and antagonism: they fall into disuse when liberty is practised. In a democracy organised on the basis of the popular initiative originating in multiple locations with no superior authority the exercise of such rights would have no grounds for taking place at all. By the establishment of universal suffrage the Constitution of 1790 had already invalidated, while implicitly recognising, the right to insurrection. Imperial despotism, the Charters of 1814 and 1830, the 200 franc poll tax suppressing the intervention of the masses in public affairs, all these re-established it. The February revolution had once more abolished it, at the same time as the death penalty: the monstrous doctrine of the omnipotence of parliamentary majorities which the government would like to impose restores it again.
After all, it is not, to tell the truth, a principle of democratic and social institutions that we are discussing here: it is a principle of absolute and constitutional monarchy, an idea born of privilege. Socialism repudiates the right to insurrection and legal resistance: its theory has no need of such sanctions. However, forced to defend itself on the terrain where the Constitution challenges it, it borrows the right from absolutists and doctrinaire politicians, authors or instigators of that Constitution, and uses it against them in the manner of an argumentum ad hominem, to use the scholastic expression.
The right to insurrection is that by virtue of which a people can claim its liberty, either against the tyranny of a despot or against the privileges of an aristocracy, without a previous denunciation as warning, and by force of arms.
It may happen, and hitherto this has been the almost constant state of the majority of nations, that an immense, scattered people, disarmed and betrayed, finds itself at the mercy of a few thousand enforcers under the orders of a despot. In this state, insurrection is fully justified and has no rules but those of prudence and opportunity. The insurrections of the 14th July and 10th August were of this nature. There was a chance that Malet’s conspiracy in 1812 could have provoked an insurrection which would have been equally legitimate. The insurrection of July 1830, in which the country sided with the parliamentary majority against a king who violated a pact, was irreproachable. That of 1848, in which the majority of the country rose against the parliamentary majority to claim the right to vote, was all the more rational for having as its object the abolition of the right to insurrection by re-establishing universal suffrage.
So when the Convention, after having organised the primary assemblies and re-consecrated universal suffrage, wrote the right to insurrection into the constitution of the Year II, it was creating retrospective legislation, to be exact; it took out a guarantee against a danger which no longer existed in principle. The Constituent Assembly of 1848 acted in the same way when, having declared direct and universal suffrage in Article 24, in Article 110 it adds that it entrusts the Constitution and the rights that it preserves to the guardianship and the patriotism of all the French. In principle, let me repeat, universal suffrage abolishes the right to insurrection: in practice, the antagonism of the separate powers and the absolutism of majorities can cause it to be reborn. How and in what cases is precisely what must yet be determined.
The right of insurrection has a particular characteristic, viz. that it presupposes a people oppressed by a despot, a third estate by an aristocracy, the greater number by the lesser. That is the principle, apart from which the right of insurrection vanishes at the same time as the conflicts of opinions and interests. The social union effectively takes on a different character inasmuch as the practice of universal suffrage becomes more widespread and propagates itself, while economic forces tend toward equilibrium; the empire of minorities is succeeded by that of majorities, which latter is itself succeeded by that of universality, that is absolute liberty, which excludes any idea of conflict.
There is, however, one case when the right of insurrection might be legitimately invoked by a minority against a majority: that would be in a transitional society when the majority wishes to abolish universal suffrage, or at least limit its application, in order to perpetuate its despotism. In that case, I maintain, the minority has the right to resist oppression, even by force.
Universal suffrage is basically the mode by which the majority and the minority manifest themselves; it is this from which the majority draws its right at the same time as its very existence, which implies that if universal suffrage were suppressed any minority might stake its claim to be the majority without fear of contradiction and consequently call for an insurrection. That is what legitimises the thirty-year-old conspiracy which we have seen certain members of the provisional government boast of from their parliamentary platform. From 1814 to 1848 universal suffrage did not exist, so the legitimacy of the government could always be doubted, and experience has proven twice over, essentially, that outside of universal suffrage this legitimacy of the government is null and void.
In a word, notwithstanding any vote to the contrary by the people or its representatives, the tacit or manifest consent by the people to the abolition of universal suffrage cannot be presumed.[47]
Such is the jurisprudence, if I may put it like that, of the right of insurrection according to our imperfect constitutions and our revolutionary traditions. What is most worth retaining of all that is the fact that as the progress of democracy advances this terrible right abolishes itself, and one may assert that unless a restoration of absolutist ideas were to take place, which has in fact become impossible, the time of conspiracies and revolts has passed.
We now come to legal resistance.
We have said that the right of insurrection cannot be allowed to pertain for a minority against a majority in a country where universal suffrage has begun to develop. However arbitrary the decisions of that majority may be and however flagrant the violation of the pact may appear, a majority can always deny that there is a violation as such, which reduces the difference to a simple question of perspective and consequently offers no pretext for revolt. Even if the minority invoked certain rights prior or superior to the Constitution that it claims the majority has overlooked, it would be easy for the latter to invoke in its turn other prior or superior rights like the public safety by virtue of which it could legitimise its will. This would be so effective that it would always be necessary to arrive at a definitive solution by voting, to appeal to the law of number. So let us admit this proposition as proven: between the minority and the majority of the citizens as constitutionally manifested by universal suffrage an armed conflict is illegitimate.
A minority cannot be permitted to be at the mercy of a majority, however: justice, which is the negation of force, demands that the minority have its guarantees. For it may occur as a result of political passions and the opposition of interests that the minority reacts to an action of the ruling majority by claiming that the Constitution has been violated, which the majority denies; when the people are called upon as a final arbiter of this disagreement, being the supreme judge in these matters, the majority of the citizens joins the majority of representatives with uncompromising egoism in deliberately treading underfoot both truth and justice, though they are precisely the ones who should defend them according to the Constitution. The minority, overtly oppressed, is then no longer a party in political and parliamentary opposition but a proscribed party, a whole class of citizens thus being placed outside the law. Such a situation is shameful, is suicide, is the destruction of all social bonds. Yet insurrection in the terms of the Constitution is forbidden: what can the minority do in this extreme case?
When the law is audaciously violated; when a fraction of the people is outlawed by society; when the passionate impetus of a party has come to the point of saying: We will never give in; when there are two nations in the nation, one of them weaker and oppressed, the other, more numerous, which oppresses: if the division is admitted on both sides, my opinion is that the minority has the right to consummate this division by declaring it. The social bond being broken, the minority is freed from any political agreement with the majority: this is expressed by the refusal to obey those in power, to pay one’s taxes, to do one’s military service etc. A refusal motivated in this way has been called legal resistance by journalists because the government has gone beyond the bounds of law, and the citizens remind it of that fact by refusing to obey it.
The law on clubs, the police intervention in electoral meetings, the bombardment of Rome, all of these violated the Constitution and outlawed the democratic party, so to speak, thus motivating the application of the principle of legal resistance, inasmuch as the democratic party was in the minority in the country; if this party gained a majority and then the government persisted the right of insurrection would follow.
With ministers like the one who pretended that the cry of Long Live the democratic and social Republic! — which sums up the whole Constitution — is unconstitutional and seditious, or the other who denounced the democratic socialists as criminals and looters, or a third one who actually had them prosecuted, judged and condemned as such, with a government that understood by the word order nothing but the extermination of republican opinion, and which, not daring to openly attack the Revolution in Paris, went to Rome in order to suppress it, which declared war ON IDEAS, which said aloud: No concessions! — which repeated at every instant, as on the June 23rd, There must be an end to this! — the situation was clear, there was nothing to be misunderstood. Open persecution was declared on social democracy, we were denounced in terms of contempt and hate, singled out for public condemnation by the authorities, as was not concealed by the minister responsible for the Bill in question. This may be judged by the following description reported at the time by La Presse, words that I would like to see inscribed on a bronze tablet to the eternal shame of the one who was its hero:
“There is but one thing more difficult to describe than the treatment inflicted on M. Furet, and that is the letter that was written by M. Léon Faucher when he was the domestic minister to his colleague the Minister of the Navy on the question of the discipline to which the insurgents of June were to be subjected. It was not merely a question of recommending that there should be no distinction made between them and the convicts condemned for murder and theft, no, the refinement of repression was extended to the point of refusing those convicted in June the consolation of being shackled to their fellows and ordering that every insurgent be chained to a murderer or thief! Fortunately, the ministry of the interior’s temporary directive having been entrusted to M. Lacrosse, very different orders were in fact issued.”
M. Léon Faucher is one of those characters whom one only encounters once every four thousand years. To find his match you have to go back to the mythical period and the Homeric brigand who caused his victims to die by attaching them to corpses. Well! this is the man who, on the 29th January, for the love of order! — which translated means for hatred of the revolution, invited the national guard to massacre the socialists; who on March 21st presented the brutal law which failed to bring about the overthrow of those in power; who on May 11th lied in a telegram in order to suppress the national representation of republican candidates;[48] who, thrown out by the ministry and taking curative showers to calm his fever, still accused his successor of undue moderation towards democrats; who of late agitated among the departments, inciting them to rise against the Constitution in the name of order... I will stop here: I would need a book to tell of all the evil that the passage of this fanatic to the ministry has done to the country much more than to socialism. Visit the prisons; have them show you the registers of custody; question the detainees; ask the lawyers; check the secret and apparent reasons for convictions; and then count the number of unfortunates arbitrarily arrested, kept in preventive custody for months at a time, led with a chain round their necks from police station to police station, condemned on the most futile pretexts, all because they were socialists. Then count those who were really guilty of crimes and whose penalties were increased in severity because they were suspected of socialism, because socialism had become an aggravating circumstance for the judges, because it was the intention of the authorities to categorise socialists as criminals: and then you will tell me whether a party counting more than a third of the nation — the elections of May 13th justify that claim — might well consider itself unjustly persecuted, whether the Bill concerning the clubs knowingly violated the Constitution, whether Léon Faucher’s law was not a declaration of social war?
As for me, I thought it was our duty immediately to organise — not an insurrection, for we were a minority against a majority, one party against a coalition of parties — but legal resistance to whatever extent that concept might provide for.
I have no intention at this moment to repeat a proposal which remained fruitless. From the 13th June on, circumstances have changed; and if I have just given an account of the means that I proposed to employ at that time, it is because, such is at least my fervent hope, the occasion for employing those means has passed, never to return. The Revolution, in its rapid course, can make nothing of this rusty horseshoe of legal resistance any more, so now I can summarise the theory without endangering the public peace. I fought a good, hard war against the government of Louis Bonaparte; more than once, perhaps, things would have turned out differently if I had been believed. But in the socialist army of Grouchy and Bourmont[49] there were incompetents and traitors: and it is just because in my opinion taking recourse to legal resistance would be a mistake in the light of the present complications of politics, almost a crime against the Revolution in fact, that I protest against the abuse that could be committed in its name at the same time as I recall here the formalities appropriate to a measure of this kind.
The means were not new. They were the same ones that MM. Guizot, Thiers and their kind were preparing to employ in 1830 before the legitimist reaction precipitated events which led to their more complete and prompt victory. But if the idea was old its execution was extremely simple and reliable.
The Mountain had to proclaim legal resistance to the tribune, at first in a commentary form. The democratic press subsequently made it the text of its instructions to the people for one month. The representatives wrote about it to their electorate: everywhere the government was enjoined not to continue on its reactionary course. If those in power persisted in their course despite the warnings that had been given them, committees were formed to block the government in an airtight manner; the citizens and local boroughs agreed to refuse to accept taxation; all governmental rights to financial awards, state control, navigation, registration etc; military service; obedience to the authorities — all at the same time. Public opinion was fomented until resistance spontaneously exploded into life everywhere without any signal. The motivation of the resistance was simple and clear: the law on clubs, the Rome expedition and judicial persecutions were part of a war on the Republic: was it the republicans’ duty to furnish money and soldiers for this purpose?...
Can you imagine what an organised resistance could have been like in the 37,000 communes of France? The democratic party represented more than a third of the nation: just try to find garnisaires and gendarmes prepared to constrain three million people to make their contributions! The peasants, whatever their political opinion, would no sooner have heard about refusing to pay taxes than they would have declared themselves in favour and started by just not paying any more; their hate of the salt tax, the drinks tax and the 45 cent tax was a sure guarantee of their dispositions. Something would have happened in town and country that happens in banks, stock exchanges and all the financial and commercial world at the moment of political crises: in the uncertainty surrounding events, and in order not to be duped, everyone postpones his payments as long as he can. Would the government have wished to have implemented strict measures? Any prosecutions would only have fanned the fire. At a single stroke, without any conflict, without bloodshed, our very complicated taxation system would have been overturned and changed from top to bottom as a matter of necessity; military conscription would have been abolished, the system reformed and the credit institutions conquered. The people being called upon to vote on taxes itself, socialism by means of this minority resolution would have become a law of necessity and part of the practice of the State.
One only needs very little knowledge of the people and of governmental machinery to understand what an irresistible force such a system of opposition would have had, if solemnly announced and energetically maintained, especially after the elections of May 13th. The democratic party was alone in finding it mean-spirited, impracticable, impossible. They spoke of furniture being seized and auctioned off, peasants terrified by the government debt collectors! The most advanced and furiously revolutionary papers were amazed by this inconceivable policy, this procureur tactic, as they claimed. They trembled at the idea of exposing the people to a collective billeting of garnisaires! The most benevolent ones still found the resolution imprudent, hazardous and above all anti-governmental. If the people, they said, refused to pay its taxes once, it would never pay them again and government would become impossible! If the citizens are taught to split themselves up, if the history of the Roman people on the Sacred Mount[50] is repeated by way of a parliamentary conflict, very soon the departments and provinces will separate from one another: centralisation will be attacked on all sides, we will fall into federalism: there will be no more Authority! It is always the government which preoccupies the Jacobins. They need a government and with it a budget, secret funds, as many as possible. In short, the counter-revolution was admirably defended by the organs of the revolution: the Jacobins, who detested the Gironde so much because it opposed centralised despotism in the name of local liberties, spoke in favour of doctrinaire politicians. The Peuple got five years in prison and a fine of 10,000 francs for its initiative and the Constitutionnel, laughing up its sleeve, only had to keep quiet.
What a lesson for me! What a pitiable downfall! How badly I had judged my contemporaries, conservatives and friends of order to the core! How little I knew of our so-called revolutionaries, really power-mongers and intriguers whose understanding of the Republic founded in 1792 was limited to Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety and his police force! And these were the reds who enraged Léon Faucher! These were the so-called terrorists that Louis Bonaparte’s government made such a bogey-man of! What calumny!
Parties are like societies, like man himself. When they get old they return to childhood. The history of Jacobinism, from the 25th February 1848 to the 13th June 1849, is nothing but a succession of mistakes. But I have to make another admission, however painful it is to my self-esteem. The Revolution was better served by the incapacity of its agents than by the decisive steps that I proposed. From the 13th June on we had finished with parties and with government: that is preferable to re-establishing the Montagnards in the place of the doctrinaires and the Jesuits. The power of events leaves us nothing more to do. Il mondo va de se![51]
And now, dear reader, whatever your opinion may be, if that the facts that I have told you are true and that you do not have the means to refute them; if the importance that I have assigned to them is correct, and if it has been sufficient, in order to assure you of this, to relate them to their causes and compare these to one another; if, in the final analysis, their development proved both predictable and ultimately fatal (two terms, which, when applied to humanity, mean exactly the same thing); and if, in order to state the inevitability of this evolution, you only had to observe it as it unfolded from its very source, namely the Reason of humanity itself: if, and I urge you so to do, you permit yourself to believe your eyes, your memory, your judgement, just judge for yourself where the February Revolution has taken us.
The July Monarchy, having carried out the dissolution of all the old principles, left itself a double task to achieve. These were, on the one side, the dissolution of the Parties as a result of the dissolution of ideas; and on the other, the bankruptcy of power, reduced through the successive elimination of all its principles to the worthless corpse of authority, to the blunt instrument of force.
On June 13th, 1849, Jacobinism was the first to fall, itself having been resurrected in 1830 with the reappearance of a monarchy and then only managing to revive the revolutionary idea of 1789. This last expression of governmental democracy or demagogy, agitator without cause, ambitious without intelligence, violent without heroism, not even having four people to call upon nor a system to implement, then perished from consumption and inanity as had dogmatism, its precursor and antagonist.
In the same way, Socialism, mystical, theogonical and transcendental, vanished like a ghost, relinquishing its place to traditional, practicable, positive social philosophy. The day when Louis Blanc demanded his Ministry of Progress[52] and proposed to shake up and uproot the whole country, when Considérant managed to solicit an advance of four million and an extensive acreage upon which to build his model community, when Cabet, on abandoning France as an accursed land, thus abandoning his school and his memory to his slanderers, left for the United States to (if I may avail myself of the expression) to drop his babies; on this day, judgement was passed on this governmental, phalansterian and icarian Utopia; it admitted its guilt.
Along with Socialism, Absolutism lies also on the verge of disappearing. Forced right back into a final corner by its own indefatigable contradictions, Absolutism has betrayed itself: it has revealed to the world every aspect of its hatred for liberty. Forced to revert back to tradition, as Socialism is forced to rush headlong into Utopianism, it absents itself from the present, removing itself from any sense of historical or social truth.
There are no longer any parties in French society endowed with any kind of vital force; and until new principles, springing from the inexhaustible sources of human practice, other interests, other mores, a new philosophy, transforming the old world without breaking with it, and regenerating it, have opened Opinion to new solutions; there no such parties shall be left among us. In the absence of the first idea, the diversity of opinions that would unfold from that idea is impossible.
For this very same reason there no longer exists a Government, and there never will be one. Since it creates nothing in the real world which is not as a result of something else, neither does it defend a principle nor an idea which has not been already expressed: a Government that has neither opinion nor a Party to represent expresses nothing, is nothing.
The men we see still carrying the old Party banners, who solicit and galvanise power, who tug at the Revolution’s strings from both Left and Right are not even alive: they are dead. They neither govern nor represent opposition to the government: they celebrate, by means of a symbolic dance, their own funerals.
The Socialists, not daring to seize power when power was at its most audacious, lost three months involving themselves in Club intrigues, in gossip from factions and sects, in chaotic demonstrations; later, they tried to give themselves official consecration by having the “right to work” inscribed on the Constitution, without demonstrating any means by which to guarantee it; they, not knowing what to do with themselves, continue to press for ridiculous and untrustworthy schemes: the Socialists, don’t they have designs on governing the world? They are dead; they have swallowed their tongues (as a French peasant would say!) Let them sleep their sleep, as they wait for a scientific answer, which is and never has been theirs, to call them.
And the Democratic-Governmentalist Jacobins having spent eighteen years conspiring among themselves, with no concept of a single aspect of social economy, then exerted control for four months during the dictatorship[53] and failed to harvest any more fruit than a succession of reactionary actions, followed by a terrible civil war; they, at the last moment, speaking always of liberty, continue to dream of dictatorship: would it also be unfair to speak of them as dead, and to claim that their tomb has already been sealed? When the people have rebuilt a philosophy and a faith, when society knows whence it has emerged and where it is heading, what it is capable of and what it wants, only then will these demagogues be able to return, not to govern the people, but to re-ignite their passion.
The Doctrinaires are dead too: the men of the insipid juste-milieu, the partisans of the so-called constitutional regime, breathed their last at the session on October 20th, after having, at the one on April 16th, made a Republican Assembly decree the institution of a doctrinaire Papacy. Do you think we would let them govern us again? They have already revealed themselves. In politics no less than in philosophy, there are more than two ways to achieve a genuine eclecticism: the Charter of 1830 and the Acts of Government of Louis Bonaparte have managed to extinguish the potential creativity of the juste-milieu.
The Absolutist Party, first in logic, first in history, won’t be far behind all the others in expiring amid convulsions of blood-spattered agony and liberticide. In the wake of the victories of Radetzki, of Oudinot, of Haynau[54], the principle of authority, both spiritually and temporally, is destroyed. It is no longer by means of government that Absolutism is imposed: it is by means of murder. What looms over Europe now is nothing but the shadow of tyranny: soon the sunshine of Liberty will rise, only to set when humankind’s time is over. Like Christ eighteen centuries ago, Liberty triumphs: it reigns, it governs. Its name is on everyone’s lips and thus in everyone’s heart. As for Absolutism, in order that it will not rise again, it is no longer sufficient to silence its advocates; it is necessary instead, as Montalembert wanted, to conduct a war of ideas. Losing the souls along with the bodies — essentially the function of the expedition of Rome, and thus also the function of ecclesiastical government — there came a realisation, too late for their common salvation, that it was also necessary to incorporate an element of secularism.
It is this confusion of Parties, this death of power that Louis Bonaparte revealed to us; and like the Chief priest among the Jews, Louis Bonaparte was prophetic: “France has elected me,” he said, “because I don’t belong to any Party!” Yes, France elected him because it did not want anyone to govern any more. A man consists of a body and a soul; similarly, a government consists of a Party and a principle: however, now there are neither Parties nor principles. That is what has become of Government.
This is what the people denounced in February when, unifying two denominations in a single one, they ordered, under their sovereign authority, the fusion of two Parties which expressed in a far better way both the ideology and the practice of the revolution, thus naming the Republic democratic and social.
However, if, according to the will of the people, all shades of democracy and all schools of socialism were to disappear and to become unified as one, similarly absolutism and constitutionalism would equally disappear and become one. This is what the democratic socialist organs were telling us when they said that there were only two parties left in France, the Party of Labour and the Party of Capital; and this definition was accepted immediately by the two reactionary parties, and it acted as the watchword for the elections of May 13th.
The London exiles acted on the same idea when they made known their intention never to convene before the High Court. On June 13th, one of the great revolutionary stages was reached. Power fell in tandem with the last remaining Party with any life left in it: what was the point in giving an account to the New France of the demonstrations that had taken place in another era? The London Declaration[55] represented the resignation of the Jacobin Party: shadows fought shadows for a shadow of authority. Thus Ledru-Rollin and his friends perfectly understood the meaning of their presence at the trails of Versailles. Let us be wary, Republicans, of agitating retrospectively and thus creating a Counter-Revolution!
And, since I am accounting here for my every smallest utterance, I reaffirm that it is the same idea, the same necessity for social and political transformation that has informed my conduct since the last elections.
I declined the candidacy which was offered to me because the list upon which my name was inscribed no longer made any sense in the situation; the spirit which had caused this list to be drawn up tended to perpetuate the old classifications, whereas it was necessary to oppose these; since the political routine, of which the people have been dupes and victims for sixty years, had committed a slow suicide on 13th June, I did not want to be the one to revive it.
In conjunction with my fellow prisoners, I proposed another list which, moving away from all consideration of personality, taking no account of nuances of opinion, faithful to the politics of fusion proclaimed by the people themselves after the February events, better expressed (in my opinion) the thoughts of Republican France and the needs of the movement. Published on the Tuesday, the list could have rallied all the democratic forces, had it been wished. It was criticised for arriving too late. The demagogic tail was wagging again; and my opinions and advice were currently out of fashion. Under instruction to withdraw my list — I say mine because it was attributed to me even though I was only its editor — with the express purpose, it was said, of not dividing the voice of the party, I refused. I no longer recognised the Party; I did not even want it to continue to exist. My conduct in relation to the party was, on this occasion, the same as on 10th December. I protested against the general mistaken principle in the hope that the state of decay was not universal and in the hope that SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY, in opening up its ranks, could become, in a significant way, the party of LIBERTY.
No, I did not want to further the ambitions of those who, from February 25th,1848 to June 13th, 1849, had continually sacrificed the Revolution to their own selfish passions; those who constantly misunderstood its character; those who were the first to react against it; those who, in taking up the reins of government themselves, ended up, like the men of 1793, forgetting about such matters as liberty and the people.
I did not want to assist either the prolongation of power by the Parties nor the Parties by power. With this in mind, the result of the demonstration of June 13th, as outrageous as it appeared to me with regard to the Constitution and liberty, served the Revolution only too well, such that, by July 8th, all I wanted was to overturn this result.
I refused to work for the restoration of the monarchy, seeing in the monarchy fertile ground for the re-emergence of Jacobinism. My readers must be enlightened enough about the progress of societies to know that an idea never advances alone, and that opposites often arise simultaneously.
I never consented to making myself the instrument of a coterie which, despite managing on May 13th, June 13th and July 8th, with certain amount of compromise, to rally all of the republican strands under the democratic socialist banner and thus becoming the embodiment of the nation, preferred to remain a faction; and furthermore, treating its candidates as machines, its allies as dupes, its egoism as its yardstick, when the leadership declared victory to its representatives, impatient of the law and mistrustful of their patriotism, it instructed them once more to descend to street level and to commit suicide.
As for the rest, I confess that, to the extent that one knows me and one wishes to save me from future pointless slander, I have never been much of a flexible character, and neither have I an easy-going nature and personality; never have I been one to submit to an occult power nor to work for the profit of my gainsayers, nor to devote myself to that which I despise, nor to bow down before the dogmatism of a dozen fanatics, nor, having been blessed with a sense of reasoned thinking, to become the blind instrument of a school of thought which I mistrust and which only shows its true colours under examination from the upholders of the law.
I belong to the Party of Labour against the Party of Capital; and I have laboured all my life. Now, let it be remembered: of all the parasites I know, the worst type is still the revolutionary parasite.
I wish neither to Govern nor to be Governed! Let those who, at the time of the elections of July 8th accused me of ambition, of pride, of indiscipline, of venality, of treason, search their own hearts. When I so vigorously attacked the Government’s response, when I solicited the initiative of the people, when I proposed a refusal to pay a tax, when I wanted to establish democratic socialism within the law and according to the constitution, was it not perhaps against their ambition, their pride, their governmental spirit, their economic utopias that I was waging war?
Now, enough of regrets, enough of failures! We have established a slate clean of Parties and of Government. The story is reaching its climax: if the people only open their eyes, they can be free.
No power, divine or human, could stop the Revolution. What remains for us to do now is simply to declare this before the Old Order, thus strengthening support for the sacred cause. The people are propaganda enough. Our task, as publicists, is to protect the revolution from the dangers with which its path is littered, it is to guide it according to its eternal principle.
The dangers which threaten the revolution are as follows:
The dangers presented by power. — Power, as embodied by those same people who accuse the new spirit of materialism, is nothing more than a word. Take away its bayonets and you will see what I mean. Let us take care to prevent a soul from re-inhabiting this corpse, possessed as it is by a diabolical spirit. Let us keep away from the vampire that still thirsts for our blood. May an exorcism by organised universal suffrage return it to its grave forever.
The dangers presented by the parties — All of the parties trailed far behind the revolutionary idea; all of them betrayed the people by implementing dictatorship; all showed themselves to be resistant to liberty and progress. Let us not resuscitate them only so that they can revive their in-fighting. Let us not try to convince the people that it would be possible to guarantee work, well-being and liberty if only the Government were to pass from this person here to that person there; the Right, having crushed the Left, is in turn crushed by the Left. As Power is the instrument and citadel of tyranny, so are Parties its lifeblood and intelligence.
The dangers presented by the reaction — I have fought throughout my life against many ideas: this was my right. I have never and will never simply react against an idea for its own sake. Philosophy and history prove that it is a thousand times easier, more human, more just, to change ideas than to repress them. I will remain, whatever happens, faithful to that wisdom. The Jesuits, the Janissaries of Catholicism, today the oppressors of everybody, will fall when it pleases God: I will not react to Catholicism. After the Jesuits, the governmental and communitarian demagogy[56] may give to the world, if the world permits it, one last representation of authority: I will help its emergence from the chaos into what it will become; I will work to repair its ruins; I will not react to communism.
The principle of the Revolution, let us remind ourselves, is Liberty.
Liberty! By which we mean: 1st, political emancipation by means of universal suffrage, by the independent centralisation of social functions, by the continuous and unceasing revision of the Constitution; 2nd, industrial emancipation by the mutual guarantee of credit and markets.
In other words:
No more government of man by man by means of accumulated power:
No more exploitation of man by man by means of accumulated capital.
Liberty! This is the first and last word of social philosophy. Isn’t it strange that, after all the oscillations and back-tracking along the unreliable and complicated road of revolutions, we should end up discovering that the remedy for all the miseries, the solution to all the problems, consists of giving a freer passage to liberty, removing the barricades which have been set in its path by public and proprietary Authority?
But no matter! This is how humanity always reaches an understanding and implementation of its ideas.
Socialism appears: it evokes the fables of antiquity, the legends of uncivilised people, all the reveries of the philosophers and thinkers. It presents itself as a pantheistic, metamorphic, epicurean trinity; it speaks of the body of Christ, of planetary generations, of unisexual love, of phanerogamy, of omnigamy, of communal child-rearing, of a gastrosophical regime, of industrial harmony, of analogies among plants and animals. It shocks and outrages everybody. What then does it want? What exactly is it? Nothing. It is the product that wants to become Money; it is the Government that wants to become Administration! And that is the only reform it offers!
What our generation lacks is not a Mirabeau nor a Robespierre, nor a Bonaparte: what it lacks is a Voltaire. We know nothing of how to understand our world with an independent and irreverent interpretation. We are slaves to our opinions and our interests and, in taking ourselves too seriously, we are rendered stupid. Science, of which the most precious fruit is its unceasing contribution to liberty and thought, becomes for us a form of pedantry; instead of emancipating intelligence, it stupefies it. In sum, with regard to that which we love and that which we hate, we have lost the ability to laugh at others and they at us: in losing our spirit, we have lost our liberty.
Liberty produces everything in the world, and I mean everything; even that which it then comes to destroy, be it religions, governments, nobility, property…
In the same way that Reason, its sister, has yet to construct a system, it is still working to extend and refashion it; thus liberty tends to ceaselessly modify its earlier creations, to emancipate itself from the organs it has created and to create new ones from which it, in turn, will detach itself, as with the previous ones, regarding them with the same pity and dislike with which it regards those which it has already replaced.
Liberty, like Reason, only exists and manifests itself through the continued reinvention of its own works; its downfall is its own narcissism. This is why irony has always been the mark of liberal and philosophical genius, the seal of the human spirit, the irresistible instrument of progress. Unchanging peoples are peoples without joy; a member of a society that knows how to laugh is a thousand times closer to rationality and liberty than the praying anchorite[57] or the quibbling philosopher.
Irony, you are true liberty! You are what saves me from ambition to power, from servitude to parties, from respect for routine, from scientific pedantry, from the worship of great men, from the mystification of politics, from the fanaticism of reformers, from the superstition of this great universe and from the adoration of myself. You revealed yourself to the Wise One on the Throne when he cried out, in view of the world in which he was regarded as a demi-god: Vanity of Vanities! You were the familiar-demon of the Philosopher when he unmasked, at a single stroke, both the dogmatist and the sophist, the hypocrite and the atheist, the epicurean and the cynic. You consoled the Righteous One in his final hours as he prayed on the cross for his torturers: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!
Sweet Irony! You alone are pure, chaste and discreet. You give grace to the beauty and piquancy of love; you inspire charity through tolerance; you dispel murderous prejudice; you teach modesty to women, bravery to warriors, prudence to statesmen. You appease, with your smile, conflict and civil wars; you bring peace between brothers; you heal the fanatic and the sectarian. You are the Mistress of Truth; you serve to protect genius; and what of virtue? That, O Goddess, is you too!
Come, my sovereign: pour upon my citizens a ray of your light; ignite in their souls a spark of your spirit: allow this, my confession to resonate with them such that this inevitable revolution may accomplish its full potential in a spirit of serenity and joy.
Sainte-Pélagie, October 1849
[1] The Biblical Latin quote is from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 11:19 and means “it is inevitable that there will be heresies.” (Translator)
[2] “All authority comes from God.” (Translator)
[3] Under the July Monarchy (1830-1848) the law forbade parties to define themselves as “Republican” and so “Radical” was used as an alternative. The radicals considered themselves as the heirs of the Jacobins from the Great Revolution. They advocated universal suffrage within a centralised and indivisible republic, freedom of the press, right of assembly, and so on as a vehicle of social progress. Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc were part of its left-wing. (Editor)
[4] Louis IX (1214–70) was King of France from 1226 until his death. He established the Parliament of Paris which gradually acquired the habit of refusing to register legislation with which it disagreed until the king held a lit de justice or sent a lettre de cachet to force them to act. He was the only king of France to be canonised (in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII). (Editor)
[5] Also called Holy Communion, this is a Christian sacrament or ordinance, generally considered to be a commemoration of the Last Supper. (Editor)
[6] System of Economic Contradictions, Chapter 1: “economic science is to me the objective form and realization of metaphysics; it is metaphysics in action…” (Editor)
[7] A reference to the Provisional Government created by the February Revolution having state socialists Louis Blanc and Albert within it and that decreed the “right to work” and the creation of National Workshops for the unemployed. (Editor)
[8] Vide General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, in which the contradiction between the political regime and the economic regime is demonstrated. – Paris, Garnier frères, 1851. (note to the 1851 edition)
[9] On the question of divorce the best solution is still that of the Church. In principle the Church does not accept that a marriage contracted in a regular way may be dissolved, but through a casuistical fiction it declares that in certain cases the marriage does not actually exist or has ceased to exist. Clandestinity, impotence, crime that entails civil death , erroneous identification of person(s) etc, are for the Church, like death itself, so many occasions for dissolving the marriage. Perhaps it might be possible to equally satisfy the needs of society, the requirements of morality and the respect due to families by perfecting this theory without going as far as divorce, by means of which the marriage contract is really no more than a contract of concubinage.
[10] The Concordat of 1801 was an agreement between Napoléon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII that re-established the Roman Catholic Church in France and ended the breach caused by the church reforms of the French Revolution. The Roman Catholic faith was acknowledged as the religion of the majority of the French people but was not proclaimed as the established religion of the state. Napoléon gained the right to nominate bishops, but their offices were conferred by the pope. The state paid the clergy. To implement the concordat Napoléon issued in 1802 the so-called Organic Articles; these restated the traditional liberties of the Gallican church including resistance to papal authority. (Editor)
[11] The Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume) was a pivotal event of the French Revolution. The meeting of the Estates-General of 20 June 1789 saw the members of the Third Estate and a few members of the First Estate pledge to continue to meet until a constitution had been written, despite royal prohibition. It was both revolutionary act and an assertion that political authority derived from the people rather than from the monarch. (Editor)
[12] The Château de Saint-Cloud was the site of the coup d’état led by Napoléon Bonaparte that overthrew the French Directory in 1799. (Editor)
[13] The sceptical philosophy of Pyrrho, a Greek philosopher, who asserted that since all perceptions tend to be faulty, the wise man will consider the external circumstances of life to be unimportant and thus preserve tranquillity. In short, extreme or absolute scepticism. (Editor)
[14] The Scholastic theologians and philosophers of the middle ages. (Editor)
[15] Referring to the findings of a government commission, published as Rapport de la commission d’enquête sur l’insurrection qui a éclaté dans la journée du 23 juin et sur les événements du 15 mai (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Assemblée Nationale, 1848). (Editor.)
[16] At the June 22nd session of the National Assembly, deputy Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870) had read this passage aloud as evidence of the danger that nationalising the railroads would set a socialistic precedent. He was careful to point out that this very passage from La République had been “reproduced with praise in another journal, Le Représentant du Peuple, directed, if I am not mistaken, by one of our most celebrated colleagues, the honourable M. Proudhon.” (Editor.)
[17] Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus (244–311), commonly known as Diocletian, was a Roman Emperor. He issued a series of edicts rescinding the legal rights of Christians and demanding that they comply with traditional religious practices. The Diocletianic Persecution was the last and most severe persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. The edicts were unsuccessful and strengthened the resolve of the Christians. Diocletian also issued an imperial edict fixing a maximum price for provisions and other articles of commerce, and a maximum rate of wages. (Editor)
[18] Reference to state repression of a popular revolt in Paris under the Monarchy on 5-6 June 1832 with at least 150 killed. (Editor)
[19] Proudhon, System of Economic Contradictions or the Philosophy of Poverty, 1846
[20] Five months after the June days, a cabal formed within the party of so-called decent and moderate Republicans tried to place upon General Cavaignac the sole responsibility for the civil war. If, they argued, the General, heeding the warnings and entreaties of the Executive Committee, had called more troops than he had been asked to, and earlier, and if he had launched his soldiers against the barricades from the first day instead of allowing the insurgency to develop freely, events would have taken place differently, and Paris would not have been delivered, for four days, into the horrors of civil war.
It was quietly concluded that the riot had been favoured, the massacre prepared, organised, by General Cavaignac, in connivance with MM. Senart and Marrast, in order for the three of them to capture the government and form a triumvirate.
These rumours gave rise, on November 25th, 1848, to a solemn discussion in the Constituent Assembly, which, on the motion of Dupont (from the Eure district), declared that General Cavaignac had deserved well of his country. But the blow had been struck; the extreme left, which should have been on its guard against such gossip in view of the circumstances in which the charges had been made, the memory of the facts, and the loyalty with which General Cavaignac returned his powers, received them greedily, and General Cavaignac, whose explanations were not as conclusive as could have been expected, since in his position any recrimination was forbidden, General Cavaignac, victor of June, remained the scapegoat.
We, with no coterie interests, no personal grievances, animated by no rivalries or ambition, we can tell the truth.
Yes, there was provocation, machination, conspiracy against the Republic, in June 1848: the facts we have recounted, all of which are genuine, prove it. The national workshops were the pretext, the dissolution of these workshops was the signal.
But in this plot, everyone’s hands were dirty, directly or indirectly, with or without premeditation: First, the Legitimists, the Orleanists, the Bonapartists, whose orators led the Assembly and opinion while their agents inflamed the riot; secondly, the Republican moderates, including MM. Arago, Garnier-Pages, Duclerc, Pagnerre, etc., all of whom played an active role in the repression; and finally, the Mountain, whose inertia in these deplorable times has earned them history’s harshest reprimand.
Without doubt, General Cavaignac had his share in the intrigues within the Assembly, within and under the Executive Committee. But to make him the leader of the conspiracy, and moreover out of ambition — he, who only thought to get rid of the competition of Louis Bonaparte while he could — that would be to gratuitously attribute to him before the fact notions of ascendancy that he did not even conceive afterward.
General Cavaignac was the tool of an anonymous and virtually leaderless reaction against the socialist Republic that had formed out of the hostility of some, the inertia of others, and the fear and madness of all. As to the General’s strategic arrangements, so strongly criticised, I will say, without setting myself up as judge, that it does not belong to the reds to criticize; that to reproach Cavaignac for having lacked energy and speed in suppressing the riot is to join, from another point of view, in provocation, in approving the recall of the troops which the People protested against: Finally, if the non-bloody victories of General Changarnier on January 29th and June 13th, 1849 appear to cast doubt on General Cavaignac’s abilities, then one must not place such value on the strength and courage of the rebels in June 1848. To acknowledge the strength of General Cavaignac, we end up slandering the insurgency and pouring contempt on all the great days of popular action, from July 14th, 1789 to February 1848.
[21] This phrase is sloppy. I should have written: Outside that there is no Constitution in the present sense of the word; there is only one of these two things: a monarchical or an oligarchical dictatorship, making its laws and implementing them by means of its ministers; or a mass of free citizens, negotiating on the question of their interests, either individually or in councils, carrying out all the tasks of labour and society without any intermediaries.
[22] In classical mythology, the Pillars of Hercules marked the westward bounds of the known world. (Editor)
[23] This chapter, very obscure in the earliest editions, has been completely rewritten and argued according to the principles developed in the General Idea of the revolution in the 19th century.
[24] The name of the first five books of the Old Testament. (Editor)
[25] The body of juridical, moral, and ceremonial institutions, laws and decisions based on the last four books of the Pentateuch, and ascribed by Christian and Hebrew tradition to Moses. (Editor)
[26] Philip IV of France (1268-1314) reigned as King of France from 1285 until his death. Nicknamed the Fair (le Bel) because of his handsome appearance. (Editor)
[27] Pope Boniface VIII (1235-1303) had feuds with Dante, who placed him in a circle of Hell in his Commedia, and King Philip IV of France. (Editor)
[28] See Samuel 8:11-17. (Editor)
[29] A tontine is a scheme for raising capital that combines features of a group annuity and a lottery. Each investor then receives annual dividends on his capital. As each investor dies, his or her share is reallocated among the surviving investors. This process continues until only one investor survives. (Editor)
[30] The phrase “freedom of teaching” (liberté de l’enseignement), in French political debates around 1848, meant preserving the role of the Church in schooling, as against demands for the establishment of a government monopoly on schools, which then would be lay institutions. (Editor)
[31] A reference to the property qualification for voting under the July Monarchy which restricted suffrage to a small number of wealthy Frenchmen. This was abolished by the February revolution until universal male suffrage was effectively eliminated by the law of 31st May 1850. (Editor)
[32] In my book General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century I offered, together with the principles and forms of the economic constitution, a solution to the problem of the annihilation of the Government by means of social liquidation and the organisation of industrial forces. What I wished to demonstrate in this section was that the principles of centralisation and separation which constitute the political mechanism both lead, when pushed to their extreme consequences, to the absolute suppression of the State. In a word, while in the General Idea I showed the economic constitution producing itself out of many parts and replacing the political constitution by eliminating it, in the Confessions I confine myself to showing the political constitution transforming itself into the economic one. – It is always the same equation obtained by different procedures.
[33] Heads of a succursal parish (mission church). They were not canonically parish priests (curés) and received no remuneration from the State. (Editor)
[34] See General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century for how these diverse categories of services are constituted wholly apart from any governmental form by means of economic organisation.
[35] A reference to the Pensées of philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-62): “Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” (Editor)
[36] The last words of Jesus on the cross, from the Latin Vulgate of the New Testament, John 19:30: “It is finished.” (Editor)
[37] Psalm 130 (De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord”). (Editor)
[38] Proudhon rapidly references a series of events marking the period of Louis-Philippe’s reign:
Poland… Krakow: Despite popular sympathy for the Polish revolts of 1830-1831, France did not come to Poland’s aid.
Belgium… Ancona: In 1831, France intervened on behalf of Belgium against the Netherlands, and sent troops to occupy Ancona, Italy in 1832.
The Quadruple Alliance… Beirut: In 1840, a Quadruple Alliance was formed between Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia to assist Turkey in opposing Muhammad Ali’s claim to rule of Egypt and Syria; Ali resisted this pressure on the assumption that the French would act as his allies, but Louis-Philippe decided not to support him, and the British proceeded to military action against Ali, beginning by invading Beirut.
The right to search: The right to stop and search ships suspected of illegal trafficking in slaves on the high seas, an issue of contention between France and Britain, was the subject of a treaty signed in 1845.
Secret societies, infernal machines: Under Louis-Philippe’s reign, secret societies were organised by a variety of political factions, from Bonapartists to Republicans; one of the latter, the Société des Droits de l’Homme, was the target of repressive laws proclaimed by Louis-Philippe in 1834, leading to an unsuccessful 1835 assassination attempt employing a “machine infernale” (a special gun with twenty-five barrels).
Parliamentary coalitions: Between 1832 and 1840, a series of “coalitions” were formed in the course of machinations over political power.
Pritchard: In 1844, British consul George Pritchard was expelled by a French admiral in the course of a dispute over control of Tahiti.
The Spanish marriages: In 1846, Louis-Philippe’s son, Antoine d’Orléans, was married to Luisa Fernanda, heiress-presumptive to the Spanish crown.
The Russian loan… scarcity: During the economic crisis of 1847-1848, Russia made a 50 million franc loan to France in the form of a purchase of bonds, allowing France to buy grain from Russia.
Electoral reform: under Louis-Philippe, suffrage was slightly expanded, but in ways that tended to benefit the bourgeoisie.
Switzerland… the Sonderbund: In 1845, seven Conservative cantons created the Sonderbund, so provoking a civil war two years later. (Editor)
[39] Jean-Baptiste Carrier (1756-94) was a French Revolutionary, known for his cruelty to his enemies, especially to clergy. Carrier was sent, early in October 1793, to Nantes by the National Convention to suppress an anti-revolutionary revolt where invented a variety of extremely torturous means of killing. This gained Carrier a reputation for wanton cruelty. He was recalled by the National Convention, took part in the attack on Robespierre on the 9th Thermidor, and was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the 11th. He was guillotined on 16 November 1794. (Editor)
[40] It has been just two years since these pages were written. Today, none can deny that the author’s predictions have been faithfully fulfilled.
[41] The Roman Republic was declared on February 9th, 1849, when the government of the Papal States was overthrown by a republican revolution led by Giuseppe Mazzini. President Louis Napoléon sent troops to restore the Pope and on April 25th some eight to ten thousand French troops landed near Rome. After a siege in June, a truce was negotiated on July 1 and the French Army entered Rome on July 3, re-establishing the Pope’s temporal power. The expedition was commanded by Charles Nicolas Victor Oudinot. (Editor)
[42] According to the Greek writer Ctesias of Cnidus, Sardanapalus was the last king of Assyria. It is not sure whether he existed or not, Ctesias presented a character who was a debauchee, living a live of sloth and luxury who was, at the last, forced ineffectually to take up arms and who avoided capture by suicide, dying in the flames that consumed his palace. (Editor)
[43] Rateau was an obscure representative in the National Assembly who brought the motion for a no-confidence vote against the Barrot Ministry on January 6th, 1849. Proponents of the motion argued that dissolution of government was essential to restore the economy and consolidate order. (Editor)
[44] A castle which was turned into a state prison. It had many famous prisoners, the last of whom was Louis-Napoléon who escaped after six years by adopting the identity of a painter, Badinguet. Later, his opponents would often refer to him disparagingly as Badinguet. (Editor)
[45] Charenton was a lunatic asylum, founded in 1645 by the Frères de la Charité in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, now Saint-Maurice, Val-de-Marne, France. (Editor)
[46] Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880), a moderate republican, was appointed Minister of Justice after the February Revolution. Elected to the National Assembly in April, Crémieux retained the justice portfolio and was sent as part of a parliamentary delegation to explain the decision to abolish the national workshops to national guard units in June. He acted as rapporteur for numerous committees, i.e., he made reports on various questions which he then read to those committees. (Translator)
[47] This was written more than 6 months before the Law of 31st May 1850 which deprived more than 300,000 citizens of their right to vote and replaced universal suffrage by limited suffrage. At the time of the passing of that law I was at Doullens, where the administration had sent me for an article about the April elections. It was not due to my colleagues on the Voix du Peuple that the democrats did not put into practice the principles developed in my Confessions. The police made sure of that by suppressing the newspaper; and the People, more wisely, I admit, understood that it was better for the defence of its rights to allow the powers that be to lose their way through their own violation of the pact rather than offer them the opportunity for a useless massacre and perhaps even a victory. This wise conduct was entirely to the benefit of the Revolution and forever closed the possibility of a return to Jacobinism.
[48] Just before elections, Faucher sent a telegram to the rural prefects describing the republican representatives who had opposed the military action in Rome as “agitateurs” who were “ready to mount the barricades and bring back the days of June,” listing their names, apparently so that voters could be warned against re-electing them. The Constituent Assembly censured Faucher so harshly in response that he was forced to resign on May 14th. (Editor)
[49] Grouchy and Bourmont were two military commanders under Napoléon during the battle of Waterloo. Grouchy was sent to pursue part of the retreating Prussian army and despite hearing the cannon sound from nearby Waterloo, he decided to obey his orders and engage the one Prussian Corps in Wavre. The troops committed to this battle could have turned the tide at Waterloo. Bourment was a royalist who betrayed Napoléon by handing the campaign plans to the Prussians. (Editor)
[50] Ancient Rome was marked by increasing inequality and internal political struggle between the aristocratic patricians and the common people (“plebs”). Many of the latter were imprisoned or enslaved when they could not repay their debts. In 494 B.C. the plebs simply walked out of the city to the Sacred Mount leaving the patricians rulers of an empty city. The patricians had no choice but to negotiate and so the tribunes of the plebs were founded to protect the people against oppression. (Editor)
[51] Italian: “The world runs itself.” (Editor)
[52] Blanc wrote: “The logic of history demands the creation of a Ministry of Progress, having as its special purpose the energising of the Revolution, the opening of the road that leads to dazzling horizons.” This proposal, which would have given him a budget to control, was rejected, and instead Blanc was given his place on the Luxembourg Commission. (Editor)
[53] The period between the February Revolution and the election of the Constituent Assembly in May. As the provisional government was not elected, many commentators at the time referred to it as a dictatorship as a result. (Editor)
[54] Radetzki and Haynau were Austrian Generals who crushed popular revolutions in Italy in 1848/9 while Oudinot lead the French destruction of the revolutionary republic in Rome in 1849. (Editor)
[55] André Louis Jules Lechevalier (1800-50) was an economist and journalist, an ardent follower of Victor Considérant. He was arrested and convicted for taking part in the demonstration on 13 June, 1849. Anticipating this, Lechevalier fled to London in July 1849 and wrote his Déclaration in October. (Editor)
[56] Communautaire, advocates of centralised and regimented socialism (or “community”). (Editor)
[57] A person who has retired into seclusion for religious reasons. (Editor)