Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
1863
Translator: Iain McKay
The democracy is liberal, republican, socialist even, in the good and true sense of the word, of course, as M. de Lamartine said.
The democracy imposes this on itself. It never understood that revolutionary triad, Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, that in 1848, as in 1793, it always had in its mouth, and of which it has made such beautiful emblems. Its motto, definitively adopted, is a single term, UNITY.
It takes an entire philosophy, an entire jurisprudence, an entire science of man and things, of society and its economy, indeed, to understand Liberty, especially Equality, to feel Fraternity as a free man. How many resign themselves to such studies?... Whereas with UNITY, a physical, mathematical thing, which can be seen, touched and counted, we know everything in an instant. We are even exempted, in difficult cases, from reason. With UNITY, politics is reduced to a mere mechanism, wherein the only thing left to do is to turn the steering wheel. Too bad for anyone who gets caught up in the gears: he was not really a politician; he was an interloper, justly punished for his ambitious vanity.
Whoever says liberty, in the language of public right, says guarantee: guarantee of the inviolability of the person and of the home; guarantee of municipal, trade [corporatives[1]] and industrial freedoms; guarantee of due progress, presumption of innocence [protectrices de l’innocence] and free defence. How can all this be reconciled with governmental majesty, so so dear to the democracy, with Unity? It was the democracy, it was its leaders and its organs which, in 1848, instituted war councils, organised house searches, decreed the state of siege, enforced the deportation without trial of white workers,[2] as Mr. Lincoln decrees today the deportation without trial of black workers.[3] The democracy has little regard for individual freedom and respect for laws, incapable of governing on other terms than that of Unity, which is nothing but despotism.
Whoever says republic or equality of political rights, says administrative independence of the political groups which compose the State, says above all separation of powers. However, the democracy is above all centralising and unitary; it abhors federalism; under Louis-Philippe, it hunted at all cost parochialism [l’esprit de clocher]; it regards the indivision of power as the government’s mainspring, its anchor of mercy: its ideal would be a dictatorship coupled with an inquisition. In 1848, when the uprising roared in the street, it quickly hastened to gather all powers in the hands of General Cavaignac. Why, it thought, change the governmental mechanism? What absolute monarchy did against us, let us do against it and its partisans: for that we do not have to change the cannons; it is enough to turn its own guns against the enemy. The Revolution is nothing else.
Whoever says socialism, in the good and true sense of the word, naturally says freedom of commerce and of industry, the mutuality of insurance, the reciprocity of credit, the equalisation of taxes, the balancing and security of wealth, the participation of the worker in the firm’s fortunes, the inviolability of the family in inheritance. However, the democracy strongly inclines towards communism, the economic formula of unity: it is only through communism that it understands equality. What it needs are maximums [in prices], forced loans, progressive and extravagant taxes, accompanied by philanthropic institutions, hospices, asylums, nurseries, tontines, national workshops, savings and relief funds, all the paraphernalia of pauperism, all the livery of misery. It does not like piece work; its treats free credit as madness; it would tremble before a people [composed] of learned workers, knowing equally how to think, write, handle a pickaxe and a plane, and whose wives know how to do without servants in their households. It welcomes the inheritance tax, which, demolishing the family, tends to place property in the hands of the State.[4]
In short, whoever says freedom says federation, or says nothing;
Whoever says republic, says federation, or says nothing;
Whoever says socialism, says federation, or yet again says nothing.
But the democracy, as it has demonstrated for four years, is nothing, neither capable of nor wanting anything Federation produces, which Contract requires, which Right and Liberty require. The Democracy has as a principle unity; its goal is unity; its means, unity; its law, always unity. Unity is its alpha and omega, its supreme formula, its final reason. It is all unity and nothing but unity, as its speeches and actions demonstrate; that is to say, it does not leave the absolute, the indefinite, the void.
This is why the Democracy, which senses its emptiness and is afraid of its weakness, which took a revolutionary accident for the very idea of the Revolution, and made a dogma of a transient form of dictatorship, this old democracy of 1830 renewed from 93, is above all for strong power, hostile to all autonomy, envious of the Empire which it accuses of having stolen its policy, but it promises to sing the aria again, as M. Thiers said of M. Guizot, with variations and without false notes.
No principles, no organisation, no guarantees; only unity and arbitrariness, all decorated with the names Revolution and Public Safety: here is the profession of faith of the democracy today. Since 1848 I have asked it several times to produce its programme, and did not obtain a word. A programme! It is compromising, not sure. From which front will this democracy, empty of ideas, which the day after the stroke of luck which would bring it to power would be, like all its predecessor governments, conservative, from which front, I say, would it today decline the responsibility of activities with which I recognise it was not involved but that it would have performed in the same fashion and that it has covered with its approval?
The defeat of Garibaldi neither solved the problem nor improved the situation. The unification of Italy is, it is true, postponed indefinitely; M. Rattazzi, considered too centralising, had to withdraw in the face of municipalist demands; at the same time, the question of the Papacy was somewhat overshadowed by the garibaldian eclipse. But the antithesis of the two powers, Italian and French, remains ominous, irreconcilable; Italy is writhing in civil war and chaos, France is plagued by the fear of an immense threat.
Already there is talk of a return to the status quo, that is to say a division of Italy into four or five independent States, as before the war of 1859. If this solution is adopted, it will be the work of diplomacy; it will probably result in the restoration of fallen princes; the constitutional forms, the promised guarantees will be preserved: but the Democracy was denied, and indirectly through it the Revolution. The cause of the people, I mean by this the common working people of the towns and countryside, who must now be the focus of attention for true revolutionaries, has been sacrificed by the so-called party of action to personal speculations as ambitious as they are chimerical, and the real issue postponed for a long time.
The chauvinists, whom the prospect of a diminished France agitates to the point of terror, would like us to put an end to it with a thunder-clap, and that the Emperor of the French, boldly resuming the policy of his uncle, trusting in the sympathy of the masses and playing double or quits, declared the French Empire restored within the limits of 1804, and by a single act incorporated into France north Belgium and all the Rhine, south Lombardy and Piedmont. Victor Emmanuel would be offered the throne of Constantinople. Apart from that, they say, everything else will only ever be a palliative. France remains annulled; it is no longer the centre of gravity of politics. The most moderate recommend maintaining the agitation in Italy until, weary of war, tired of brigandage, the nation makes a new appeal to the liberator of 1859 and throws itself back into his arms.
These councils of despair very loudly accuse those who, by the most detestable calculations, have pushed the Italian people to this fantasy of unity. While in our country the old Democracy, out of palaver, aspires to remake itself in a general melee, and, without provocation, without motives, solicits new annexations; while there it redoubles its Machiavellianism and pushes the masses to revolt, England, which coldly observes the crisis, gains ground everywhere and challenges us; Germany, Austria, Prussia, Belgium, Russia stand ready. With the empire blocked, everyone expects an explosion. We can take for certain that we will succumb to a new Waterloo, if Victory, as usual, remains faithful to the big battalions, and, as a body politic, as a centre of civilisation from which philosophy, science, right and freedom have radiated over the world, we will be ended. The France of Henri IV, Richelieu and Louis XIV, the France of 89, 93, 1802, 1814, 1830, 1848, as well as that of 1852, will have said its last word; it will be over.
How this desolate situation would have seemed simple, easy and advantageous to all parties if it had been considered in 1859 from the point of view of principles, from the point of view of federation!
First consider that which makes Italy, as a maritime and industrial power, so formidable a rival to France disappears entirely in the federative system, without any loss for the Italian people. It is not, in fact, advantages of location and territory; it is not superiority of industry and capital that makes a people dangerous to its neighbours; it is their concentration. Distributed wealth is harmless and does not excite envy; only wealth agglomerated in the hands of a strongly based feudalism, and by this placed at the disposal of an enterprising power, can become a force of destruction in the economic and political order. The oppressive, dissolving influence of a financial, industrial and territorial aristocracy on the people it exploits and on the State is not in doubt: this truth, thanks to 1848, can pass today as a commonplace. Well! what the agglomeration of economics forces within is for the working class, it becomes outside for neighbouring nations; and conversely, what the equal distribution of the instruments of labour and the sources of wealth is for the welfare of a nation and for the freedom of the citizens, it also becomes for the community of peoples. The cause of the proletariat and that of European equilibrium are interlinked; both protest with equal energy against unity and in favour of the federative system. Need I say that the same reasoning applies to the government and the army, and that the bravest confederation, with the same number of soldiers, will never weigh on its neighbours as much as it would if it were transformed into a unified monarchy?
That the Italians make the most of their geographical position, that they develop their navy, that they exploit their railways, that they become industrious and rich: it is their right, and we, the French, do not have to worry about it. To each nation its heritage; we have ours that it is up to us to claim. After all, we cannot claim to the exploitation any more than the conquest of the world: we must leave these ideas of industrial, commercial and maritime monopoly to the English. Let us not build our wealth on supplying the foreigner: the English, our rivals, could tell us that if, at times, the privilege of exporting produces enormous profits, it is compensated for by appalling miseries. In the general economy, the principal market of each nation is within itself; the external market is an accessory: it is only by exception that it can take precedence over the other. The economic development that is being remarked at this moment by all Europe is a demonstration of this law, of which the Italian federation would give a decisive application. Thus aristocratic England pushes with all her might the unity of Italy: the pre-eminence over the Mediterranean eluding her in any event, it understands that is important for it to oppose to French bankocracy and centralisation an equal centralisation and bankocracy.
I nevertheless admit that while industrial federation in Italy, organised by the very fact of political federation, does not create for unified France a legitimate cause for concern; if confederated Italy, having nothing in common with the French Empire either by its constitution or by its aspirations, not posing as a rival, cannot be accused of causing us any harm, its industrial and commercial progress will nevertheless be for us a cause of less income, a loss of earnings. But what conclusion can we draw from that? Only one: it is that the French people, if it wishes to maintain its leadership and sustain dignified competition, will have to follow the example of the Italian people: accepting that it will retain its political centralisation, it will at least wisely prepare its economic federation.[5] Such an outcome would be one of the most positive effects of federation, not only for Italy, but for France itself and for all Europe.
But it is also what the French partisans of Italian unity, speculators in general, business leaders, chasers after industrial stocks and bribes, who are loyal to the bankocracy, do not care about. These, to consolidate monopoly in France and at the same time guard against the competition of Italian monopoly, will not fail to organise, if it has not already done so, a monster association, in which will be merged and interlocked the capitalist bourgeoisie and all shareholders on both sides of the Alps. Let us not forget that the constitutional, bourgeois and unitary monarchy, tends, with regard to international politics, to guarantee from State to State the exploiting classes against the exploited classes, consequently to form the coalition of capital against wage-workers, of whatever language and nationality they all are. That is why Journal des Débats concurs with Siècle, Opinion nationale, Pays, Patrie and Presse on the Italian question. Here the political colour fades before the conspiracy of interests.[6]
Let us conclude this second part. Against the renewed project of the ancient Caesars for an unified Italy, there were:
The Peninsula’s geographical formation;
Municipal traditions;
The judicial, republican, principle of federation;
The favourable opportunity: Austria defeated, France offering its guarantee;
The Roman question to be resolved, which meant the Papacy to be secularised, the Church to be revolutionised;
The plebs to be emancipated;
The political and commercial susceptibilities of France, the self-esteem of the Emperor to be spared;
The progress of nations to be served and the European equilibrium to be reformed, through the development of federations.
If what we call opportunity, in politics, is not an empty word, I dare say that it was there.
The neo-Jacobin Democracy has admitted none of these considerations. Geography has been ignored by it; – history distained; – principles trampled underfoot; – the cause of the proletariat betrayed; – the opportunity rejected; the French guarantee scorned; - the Roman question confused; – France threatened, compromised; – the Emperor wounded; – European progress sacrificed, under the pretext of nationality, to a conspiracy of adventurers and intriguers. We know the rest.
It was up to Garibaldi, at a certain moment in his career, to give Italy, along with freedom and wealth, all the unity that a system of mutual guarantees between independent cities entails, but which will never he found in a system of absorption. It was up to him, by creating the federations of Europe in place of these forever extinct nationalities, to make the Republic preponderant everywhere, and to inaugurate with irresistible power the economic and social Revolution. Shall I say that he shrank from the task? God forbid: it would have been enough for him to see it for him to want to execute it. Garibaldi understood nothing of his era, consequently nothing of his own mission. His blindness is the crime of this retrograde democracy to which he listened too much, of these entrepreneurs of revolutions, restorers of nationalities, tacticians of adventure, statesmen in partibus, for whom he had too much deference. May he, now that his error has broken him, never understand in all its depth the truth that he has not recognised! The loss of his illusions, he would bear it as a philosopher, as a hero; his regrets would be too bitter for him.
I have said what my principles were, what I would have wanted to do if I had been in the place of Garibaldi and Mazzini; what I would have advised if I had had a say in the matter; what I believed I had sufficiently expressed in my last publication. Could the unitary democrats tell me in turn what they wanted and what they want? Could they explain what they mean by Liberty, Sovereignty of the people, Social Contract, and give a definition of the REPUBLIC?
What is happening on the other side of the Atlantic, three thousand leagues from the regions where the Mazzinian idea hovers, is clear proof of this truth that, outside of federalism, politics, regardless of the virtue and kindness of the heads of State, tends to degenerate into tyranny, plunder and extermination.
For half a century, the republic of the United States was regarded as the model for societies and the standard for governments. Indeed, an incomparable freedom unfolded there, surrounded by an unprecedented prosperity. But this republic, with its federalist forms, was infected with profound flaws. The fever of exploitation, imported from Europe with religion and laws, the pride of blood and wealth, had developed the principle of inequality and class distinctions to a frightening degree, and made the return to unitary government inevitable.
Three categories of subjects make up American society: black workers, slaves; white workers, increasingly driven into the proletariat; and the landed, capitalist, industrialist aristocracy. As slavery and the proletariat were incompatible with republican values, the southern states, although they call themselves DEMOCRATS par excellence, first conceived the idea of centralising the United States and dominating the Confederation. At the same time, they wished to develop over the entire surface of the republic their particular institution, namely black servitude. Rejected by those in the North, the vast majority, and who preferred to cover themselves with the title of REPUBLICANS; struck in their local interests by this majority, which intended to use the power in its turn and speak in the name of the entire Union, they broke the federal pact and constituted a slaveholder democracy, presumably unitary.
Two things would have been necessary, by common accord and energetic will, to save the Union: 1) free the blacks and give them citizenship, which the states in the North only half granted and which those of the South did not want at all; 2) energetically fight the growth of the proletariat, which did not enter the views of anyone. Threatened in the South and the North by black servitude and by the white proletariat, the Confederation was in peril: the obstinacy of both parties rendered the evil almost incurable. What if, in fact, things had been left alone, if the owning class of the North and the aristocracy of the South had remained united, only occupied with developing their respective exploitations, without doing anything for the waged or enslaved workers, and without worrying about the time when the two populations would meet, we could foresee the day when, the two floods colliding, the democratic multitude of the South would permeate the republican mass of the North, at the same time as the latter would overflow into the former. Then white workers and black workers mingling and soon understanding each other, the class of exploiters would have to change its confederation into a unitary State with a police force and gendarmes, a large standing army, centralised administration, etc., to protect itself from the slave and proletarian insurrection, if it did not wish to be subjected to seeing slaves and proletarians marching against it, it would have to name, like the examples of Haiti and Mexico, an emperor. If, on the contrary, the difference of the exploited races, if the divergence of the customs developed by the exploiters and the contradiction of their interests made separation inevitable, and which no force could prevent, the fortune of the North would be seriously compromised from the triple political, economic and strategic point of view, and we could still foresee that the time would come when the republican majority would demand on its own terms an alliance with the slaveholding minority. In any event, the confederation was going to perish.
In this situation, the South took the initiative by proclaiming its independence: what has been the conduct of the North? Jealous to preserve its supremacy and considering that the territory of the United States comprised, according to it, a single nation, it began by treating the separatists as rebels; then, to remove any pretext for secession, it decided to transport, with compensation to the owners, all the slaves out of the republic, except those who requested permission to remain, but in an inferior condition, reminiscent of the Hindu pariahs. Thus, while they declare the confederates of the South rebels who, to save their particular exploitation, ask to leave a confederation that has become impossible, they decree by authority, they legalise, they render irrevocable the political and social separation of men by colour: a new way of applying the principle of nationality! Such is Lincoln’s plan. If this plan comes to pass, it is clear that black servitude will only change its form; that a good number of blacks, indispensable for cultivation in hot regions, will be retained in the states where they live; that American society will not be more homogenous; that, furthermore, the desire to prevent any future attempt at separation by the southern States will have been a further step toward centralisation, so that, the geographic constitution here assisting the social constitution,[7] the federative republic of the United States will have only moved more quickly toward the unitary system by the Lincoln solution.
Now, the same Democracy which amongst us supports Italian unity also supports, under the pretext of the abolition of slavery, American unity; but, as though to better demonstrate that those two unities are in its eyes only two bourgeois, quasi-monarchical manifestations, having the purpose of consolidating human exploitation, it applauds the conversion of the slavery of the Blacks into the proletariat that Mr. Lincoln proposed. Compare that to the proscription which it has struck socialism since 1848, and you will have the secret of this democratic philanthropy, which does not support slavery, of course!... but accommodates itself wonderfully to the most brazen exploitation; you will have the secret of all these unities, the purpose of which is to break, by administrative centralisation, every force for resistance in the masses; you will have acquired the proof that what governs the politics of the so-called republicans and democrats in the United States, as well as in Italy and France is not justice, it is not the spirit of freedom and equality, it is not even an ideal, it is pure egotism, the most cynical of reasons of state.
If in its discussions on the American affair the democratic press had contributed as much judgment as zeal; if, instead of urging the North against the South and shouting Kill! Kill!, it had sought means of conciliation, it could have provided the warring parties wise counsel and noble examples. It would have told them:
“In a federal republic, the proletariat and slavery appear equally unacceptable; the tendency must be to abolish them.
“In 1848, the Swiss Confederation, after including in its new constitution the principle of equality before the law and abolishing all the old bourgeois and familial privileges, did not hesitate, by virtue of this new principle, to bestow citizenship and its rights on the heimathlosen (people without a country). – Can the American confederation, without forsaking its principle and without going backwards, refuse already emancipated men of colour who abound on its territory the same benefits that Switzerland granted to its heimathlosen? Instead of rejecting these men and afflicting them with indignities, must not all Anglo-Saxons, those of the North and those of the South, receive them in comradeship and welcome them as fellow citizens, equals and brothers? Now the consequence of that measure will be granting to blacks hitherto kept in servitude, along with freedmen, equal political rights.[8]
“In 1860, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, after freeing the peasants of his States, numbering more than twenty-five million souls, and bestowing upon them the enjoyment of such civil and political rights as the government of his empire provides, gave them all ownership of the land of which previously they were only serfs, reserving for himself the power to compensate the dispossessed nobles. – Will the American confederation do less for its emancipated blacks than Tsar Alexander, an autocrat, did for his peasants? Is it not prudent and just that it also bestows upon them land and ownership, so that they do not fall into a worse servitude than whence they came?
“The American confederation is called upon by the sequence of ideas which govern it and by the inevitability of its situation, to do even more: it must, upon pain of recrimination on the part of the Southern States, attack at its sources [what creates] the white proletariat, by providing possessions for the wage-workers [possessionnant les salariés] and organising, alongside political guarantees, a system of economic guarantees. It is up to the North to take the initiative on this reform, and lead the South by the force of example rather than by that of arms.
“Outside of that, the North’s hypocritical and unholy attack against the South can only lead to the ruin of all the States and the destruction of the Republic.”
At least Mr. Lincoln, obliged to take into account the aristocratic spirit and moral revulsions of the Anglo-Saxon race, is excusable to a certain extent, and the sincerity of his intentions must pardon his strange philanthropy. But the French, men trained in the school of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Revolution, in whom the egalitarian sentiment must be innate, how did they not sense that the demand of the North entailed all these consequences? How can they be content with Mr. Lincoln’s semblance of emancipation? How do they have the courage to applaud the recent appeal for slaves to revolt, an appeal which is obviously made by a North desperate for a means of destruction, and which repudiates both the laws of war and the rights of peoples?... Where is the excuse of these so-called liberals? Do they not see that the feeling that drives them is not love of humanity, but the cold calculation of a hypocrite economist, who says to himself after comparing its costs: Certainly, it is more advantageous for the capitalist, for the head of industry, for property and the State whose interests here are united, to use free workers, who support themselves with their wages, than enslaved workers who give more trouble than wage-workers and produce proportionally less profit regardless of [the costs of] their subsistence?
These facts, these analogies and these considerations posed, here are the questions that I address to Fr. Morin.[9]
The federative principle here appears closely linked to those of the social equality of races and the balance of fortunes. The political problem, the economic problem and the problem of races are one and the same problem, to be solved by the same theory and the same jurisprudence.
Notice, with regard to black workers, that physiologists and ethnographers recognise them as being of the same species as whites; – that religion declares them, along with whites, children of God and of the Church, redeemed by the blood of the same Christ and consequently their spiritual brethren; – that psychology sees no difference between the constitution of the negro conscience and that of the white, no more than between the comprehension of one and the other; – finally, [and] this is proven by daily experience, that with education and, if needed, interbreeding, that the black race can yield offspring as remarkable in talent, morality and industry as the white one can and that more than once already it has been an invaluable help in reinforcing and rejuvenating it.
I therefore ask M. Fr. Morin:
If the Americans, after forcibly removing the blacks from their African countries to enslave them on American soil, have the right today to expel those that they no longer want;
If this deportation, which only renews in an inverse direction the odious fact of the first removal, does not constitute, amongst the so-called abolitionists, a crime equal to that of the slavers;
If, by a century of servitude, the Negroes have not acquired the right of use and of habitation on American soil;
If it is sufficient for the French proprietors to say to their proletarian compatriots, to all those who possess neither capital nor resources and who exist by the hiring of their arms, “The soil is ours; you do not own an inch of land, and we no longer need your services: go”; – for the proletarians to skedaddle;
If the Black, as free as the White by nature and by his human dignity, can, by recovering the possession of their momentarily lost person, be excluded from citizenship;
If this right is not acquired by the double fact of his recent emancipation and his prior residence;
If the condition of pariah, to which the Lincoln plan dooms the Black, would be no worse for this minority race than slavery;
If that derisory emancipation is not shameful for the North and does not morally defeat the claim of the South;
If Federals and Confederates, fighting only over the type of servitude, must not be declared equally blasphemers and renegades of the federative principle, and shunned by [other] nations;
If the European press, which by its incitements, by its unitarism and its anti-egalitarian tendencies, has become their accomplice in all this, does itself not deserve the stigma of public opinion?
And generalising my thought, I ask M. Fr. Morin:
If he believes that the inequality of faculties between people is such that it can legitimise inequality of prerogatives;
If inequality of fortunes, for which the inequality of faculties serves as a pretext and which creates in society such dreadful antagonisms, is not far more the work of privilege, cunning and chance, than that of Nature;
If the first duty of States is not therefore to repair, by institutions of mutuality and a vast system of education, the insults of birth and the accidents of social life;
If it does not seem to him, therefore, that the principle of equality before the law must have as a corollary, 1) the principle of equality of races, 2) the principle of equality of conditions, 3) that of ever more approached, although never achieved, equality of fortunes;
If, according to what is happening before our eyes, it appears to him that those principles, the negation of every political, economic and social privilege, of every meaning of people and races, of every preference of fate, of every class superiority, can be seriously applied and pursued under a government other than a federative government;
If, finally, as far as logic, history and contemporary facts allow us to judge, is there no true incompatibility between Right and the destiny of mankind and the practices and aspirations of the unitary system?
As for me, immorality and servitude are what I have discovered at the bottom of this policy of unity, which is that of Mazzini and the Jacobins; which tomorrow will be that of President Lincoln, if a better inspiration does not come to extract him and his compatriots from their fatal and ruthless prejudices.[10]
[1] It should be noted that corporatives was the medieval French equivalent for guilds and that, when Proudhon was writing, a common term within working class circles for the self-managed trade associations which would replace wage-labour within capitalist firms. (Translator)
[2] A reference to the crushing of the working class revolt – “the June Days” – in response to plans to close the National Workshops, created by the Second Republic in order to provide work for the unemployed. Between 23 to 26 June 1848, troops led by General Louis Eugène Cavaignac killed around three thousand and wounded many thousand more. Afterwards, four thousand insurgents were deported to Algeria. This marked the end of the hopes of a “Democratic and Social Republic” (République démocratique et sociale) and the victory of the liberals over the left. (Translator)
[3] A reference to President Lincoln’s long-standing support for the removal of freed slaves from the United States. At his urging, the Confiscation Act of 1862 included a clause “for the transportation, colonization, and settlement, in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States, of such persons of the African race, made free by the provisions of this act, as may be willing to emigrate.” The Bureau of Emigration was subsequently created to direct his colonisation projects. See Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). (Translator)
[4] In terms of inheritance, Proudhon’s views should be seen in terms of his wider economic reforms: “I see what shocks you in heredity: heredity, according to you, is only good for maintaining inequality. But inequality does not come from heredity; it results from economic conflicts. Heredity takes things as it finds them: create equality, and heredity will render equality to you.” (Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère [Paris: Guillaumin, 1846] II: 258)
[5] Proudhon sketches his ideas on economic federation – “an agricultural-industrial federation” in an earlier chapter (Part 1, Chapter XI) entitled “Sanction économique : Fédération agricole-industrielle” (“Economic Ratification: Agricultural-Industrial Federation”). This is included in Property is Theft! (Translator)
[6] The capitalist coalition between France and Italy is three-quarters complete: you only have to glance at the editorial page [quatrième page] of the newspapers to be sure. What are the so-called Italian, Piedmontese, Roman loans; the borrowing from the city of Milan, the Cavour canal, the Lombard, Venetian, Roman railways, etc., if not French assets as much and even more than Italian ones? The Parliament of Turin has decided that the shares of the Naples track will be reserved for Italian capital: Italia fara da se [Italy will take care of itself]. But we know that behind these native names there will be, as always, French financiers. A new Italian loan, with a capital of 500 million, is being prepared: by whom will it be underwritten? By the house of Rothschild, a person quite familiar with this sort of thing assured me recently. Sooner or later there will be created in Italy a mortgage credit company [Crédit foncier] and a personal credit company [Crédit mobilier]: who will be the founders? The same people, or their peers, who created Crédit mobilier in France and Spain. Combining the capital of all countries in a vast anonymous bond is what is called an agreement of interests, a fusion of nationalities. What do the neo-Jacobins think?
[7] If ever a confederation was placed in disadvantageous geographic conditions, it is surely that of the United States. We can say that fate is fundamentally hostile and that freedom has much to do. A vast continent, six hundred by one thousand leagues wide, squarish in shape, bathed on three sides by ocean, but whose coasts are so far apart that the sea can be said to be inaccessible to three-quarters of the inhabitants; in the middle of this continent, an immense corridor, or rather moat (Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio), which, if not neutralised or declared common property, will only form, for nineteen out of twenty residents, a route with no exit: here, in short, is the general configuration of the American Union. Thus the danger of secession was immediately understood, and it is undeniable that in this regard that the North fights for its existence as much as for Unity. Everything there at present is in contradiction: Whites and Blacks, the North and the South, the East and the West (Protestants and Mormons), the national character (Germanic and federalist) expressed by pact, and territory, interests and morals. At first glance, North America seems destined to form a great unitary Empire, comparable, even superior, to that of the Romans, the Mongols or the Chinese. But is it not also a marvellous thing that this continent has just fallen into the hands of the most federalist race due to its temperament, its genius and its aspirations, the Anglo-Saxon race? Let Mr. Lincoln teach his compatriots to overcome their revulsion; let him grant the blacks citizenship and at the same time declare war on [what creates] the proletariat, and the Union is saved.
[8] This echoes Proudhon’s comments in General Idea of the Revolution (1851): “There will no longer be nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only places of birth. Whatever a man’s race or colour, he is really a native of the universe; he has citizen’s rights everywhere.” (Property is Theft!, 597). (Translator)
[9] Frédéric Morin (1823-74) was a French republican and journalist who opposed the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon and stood as an opposition candidate in 1857 and 1863. (Translator)
[10] It must be noted that, as Proudhon feared, the failure after the war to provide a solid economic footing for the freed slaves – most became wage-workers – is now considered a cause of the failure of Reconstruction. W. E. B. DuBois captured that failure well in 1935 when he wrote: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery”. (Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 [New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2013], 26) Incidentally, this perspective was shared by many Negroes at the time who “understood that their status after the war, whatever their situation legally, would depend on whether they owned the land they worked on or would be forced to be semislaves for others.” Nor should it be ignored as the Southern states “enacted ‘black codes’ which made the freed slaves like serfs” after the end of the Civil War. (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present [New York: HarperCollins Books, 2003], 196, 199). See, Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday Books, 2008). (Translator)