Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
1862
Translator: Iain McKay
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The first effect of centralisation, and here it is nothing else, is to eliminate, in the various localities of a country, every kind of indigenous character; while we imagine by this means to exalt political life in the mass, we destroy it in its constituent parts and even in its elements. A State of 26 million souls, such as Italy would be, is a State in which all provincial and municipal freedoms are confiscated for the benefit of a superior power, which is the government. There, every locality must be keep quiet, the parochial spirit must be silent: except on the day of elections, in which the citizen expresses his sovereignty by a proper name written on a ballot paper, the collectivity is absorbed into the central power; everything concerning administration, justice, army, education, public works, police, religions, etc., ends up in the ministry; everything concerning legislation, in parliament. Fusion, in a word, that is to say, the annihilation of specific nationalities, in which citizens live and are distinguished, into an abstract nationality in which we no longer breathe or know each other: this is unity. Mazzini is a nationalist; in his manifesto he speaks of, and intends to assert, only national right. Now, if the principle of nationalism is true, it is true for the smallest nationalities as well as for the largest; it implies the independence and autonomy of the smallest groups as well as of the largest agglomerations, all the more so since in the last analysis it is impossible, outside of the territorial divisions sometimes given by nature, sometimes by politics, to clearly delimit a nationality.
But the principle of nationality is only a lure in the mouths of the unitarians, and I would not like Mazzini to believe that I take his words more seriously than he himself does. These gentlemen care about nationalities as they do about spiritual power: we can judge this from the way in which the agents of the Piedmontese government treat the annexed who make demands.
To govern twenty-six million men from whom self-possession has been taken away, to operate this immense machine, a prodigious bureaucracy is needed, legions of functionaries; to defend it from within and without, to make it respected by its subjects and its adversaries, a standing army is necessary. Officials, soldiers, tributaries, this is what will henceforth replace the nation. In France, fifteen years ago, the number of functionaries was estimated at six hundred thousand. This number has certainly not decreased since the coup d'état. The figure for the army and navy is in keeping with this. All this is essential to unity: these are the general expenses of the State, expenses which increase in direct proportion to centralisation and inversely to the freedom of the provinces.
This grandiose unity, finally, requires glory, prestige, luxury: hence an imposing civil list, magnificent salaries, encouragement of literature and the arts, assignments, allowances, sinecures. The ambitious, the schemers, the declassed, the bohemians, all partisans of unity, swarm around the government. Naturally, one cannot give everything to some and nothing to others. Under a regime of unity, everyone holds out his hand; cities like individuals solicit. An intelligent power attaches commune, parishes, brotherhoods, by gifts, subsidies, orders [for products or services]; work of beautification or public utility is undertaken; construction and demolition are carried out; railways and strategic routes are multiplied; monuments are erected to local glories; commerce, agriculture, industry are encouraged by awards, exhibitions, tax rebates and provision of capital. Mines, canals, railways, colonies, exchange agencies, ministerial offices, tenders, concessions of all sorts, supplies, are the currency with which governments pay their majorities, keep the public on tenterhooks, and make everyone hope for wealth. Everything is taken from the masses: it is about who will get the biggest piece. Whoever says a unitary nation, says a nation corrupted by its government, urbem venalem. A town is bought for a church, a village for a tobacco shop. I have seen a head of a canton punished by the recall of an infantry company that had been sent to garrison there; I have seen another renounce his opposition for a position as police commissioner.
And who benefits from the regime of unity? The people? No, the upper classes.
Under the Caesers, unity was praetorian autocracy, the pillage of the provinces, the gratuitous maintenance of the plebs of Rome. God forbid that I should compare the empire of Napoleon III to that of Nero, Commodus or Caracalla! Unity, today and since 1815, is simply a form of bourgeois exploitation under the protection of bayonets. Yes, political unity, in the great States, is bourgeois: the positions it creates, the intrigues it provokes, the influences it caresses, all this is bourgeois and goes to the bourgeois. There are in the French army twenty-five thousand officer positions of all ranks and as many non-commissioned officers: is it to be believed, if the subjects who fill these positions were as uninterested in their employment as the soldiers are in their service, that the army would remain only twenty-four hours without disbanding, and that the government could count on it? Of the two billion sixty million that make up the budget of the Empire, two-thirds go to the bourgeois class: since Brumaire, this has been its way of participating in the government. There is nothing to be gleaned for the bourgeois, banker, speculator, large landowner, clerk, artist or man of letters, in a small State. Complicated functions, little or no pay, thankless cares, free services, obscure devotions: this is not enough to temp a noble ambition, to sustain a powerful individuality.
Mazzini is a republican, he boasts of it. Does he know what he has done for Italy with its unity? He has infected it with despotism. Mazini is a democrat; the cause he defends is that of the plebs. Does he know what he has done for the Italian plebs, by making them fanatics of unity? He has established bourgeois rule over them, a reign that was doomed, judged, condemned in France in 1847; a reign that was the error of the first Constituent Assembly, of the Jacobins, of the Consulate, of the Restoration of the July Monarchy, and which is the fatality of Napoleon III.
What France no longer wanted in 1848, Mazzini, more than anyone, if his unitary programme is realised, will have contributed to giving to Italy. For, after all, what else is it, this constitutional monarchy of which Victor Emmanuel is the principal beneficiary, a governmental thing substituted for provincial and municipal autonomy for the benefit of that class which wears a suit against that which wears a smock? In Italy, as everywhere, the bourgeois loves paid positions, of which the common man does not dream. Mazzini was present at the scramble for spoils: what have his friends, the men of the people, grabbed? In Italy there is a mass of ecclesiastical property whose sale the bourgeois are loudly demanding. How much of this sacred land will accrue to the proletarian without savings, to the peasant who believes himself doomed to hell if he took, by paying, his share of the patrimony of poor?
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Let us not forget, in this sad episode undertaken in the name of the principle of nationalities, to note the brutality with which party selfishness, let us be blunt, national selfishness, occurs. They conspire, they arm themselves, in the name of freedom and the fraternity of nations; but each intends to exploit the alliance for its own profit. The Greeks, the Montenegrins and the Serbs begin the dance; but Garibalidi, who thinks only of Rome, is not ready. Each to his own, each for himself. Then he enters the scene in his turn and calls Hungary; but Hungary decares that it is too late, and that Garibaldi must provide for his own salvation, Italia fara da se. This reminds me that Mazzini, when approached one day by the Poles, refused to join his cause to theirs, saying that the Polish aristocracy had nothing in common with the Italian democracy. Very good, if it is only a question of economic reforms and the emancipation of the proletariat. But we have just seen that in Italy the question was entirely unitary and nationalist: why then rebuff the Poles?
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A few more words on the harm done to the democracy by the boost given over the last ten years to Jacobin and Mazzinian politics, and my subject is exhausted.
In 1848, the different socialist schools, although not agreeing amongst themselves, had posed the question on its true terrain, not only for France but for the whole of Europe: economic and social reforms, guarantee of work, discipline of interests, better distribution of wealth, popular education, communal organisation, in other words, administrative decentralisation, regeneration of morals.
The problems being new, no solution could immediately be produced: but at least the socialist democracy had compelled widespread attention; the old politics were relegated to the background: and that in itself was an immense progress. It was proven, in our opinion, and what has been accomplished in the last ten years has only made this truth more striking, that the political boost of 89 was exhausted; that French society, on pain of collapsing upon itself and entering a period of decay, had to get out of the rut it had hitherto followed; that all agitation, outside the line indicated by socialism, was sterile and retrograde; that henceforth questions of dynasty, of government form, of nationality, of preponderance, were secondary; that diplomacy and militarism had had their day, and that religion itself, succumbing under the burden, called for, if not the substitution of a new principle, at least a total transformation.
These were our thoughts in 1848: we know how they were received. [. . .]