Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Translator: Iain McKay
La Voix du Peuple, 26-27 December 1849
I said to myself: What will we do with Louis Blanc? A polemicist or an insulter? – his choice. Either one suits La Voix du Peuple. It is up to him to prove, by the way he responds to our inquiries, that he has even more wit than eloquence. Otherwise, a booed author, he must disappear from the revolutionary stage. Whatever he does, and whatever he says, stupidity or stroke of genius, we will draw our conclusions. Science will gain, the Revolution will benefit, and the people will take notice. Quidquid dîrerit, argumentabor.[1]
On that, I wrote a book, Manifesto of La Voix du Peuple, in which, acknowledging Louis Blanc, I told him in substance:
You claim to be a revolutionary! But all your economic science is only a clumsy application to society of the domestic economy, an absurd generalisation of mercantile and proprietary routine; but your system of government is only a bloating of the policy of Ferdinand Flocon, who competed for it with M. Armand Marrast, who held it in a direct line from M. Thiers, who was a crony of M. Guizot, who had studied under M. Royer-Collard, who himself, under the name of doctrine, introduced this variety of Absolutism amongst us. You are, in short, a pseudo-socialist and a pseudo-democrat. This is why in March you responded to Blanqui; how in April, believing him dead, you aspired to dictatorship; how, by your ultra-governmentalism, you have made the social revolution odious to the peasant and to the bourgeois, and contributed, more than anyone else, to the defeats of the democracy. It is time for the people to get out of the rut you have created for them, which can only lead to a total dissolution. What do you have to say?
At the same time, to give Louis Blanc every facility for justification, and to make the discussion between him and us more instructive, I propose that he insert his explanations in Voix du Peuple, while, for his part, he will publish my observations in Nouveau Monde. Could I have said it better?
Certainly, if the ex-president of the Luxembourg had had the slightest glimmer of faith in what he so complacently calls his System, he would have had a fine opportunity to perform. He had only to restate this well-known theme: that the family is the element of society; that consequently the domestic economy is the model for the social economy; that therefore a nation must be like a big household, where the government, in turn monarchic, aristocratic or democratic, takes the place of the father, and the workers of the children; where finally liberty, equality, property, work, all rights and all duties, flow from the authority of the law, expressed by the representatives of the people, and as sanction the force of the State. The country listened: the opposition that had suddenly burst forth within the democracy assured Louis Blanc a passionate audience. What a moment to make his eloquence shine! Had he succumbed in the struggle, the theoretician of the organisation of labour by the State would have fallen with honour, and, victor or vanquished, the recognition of patriots was his. The error would have been excused in favour of the intention.
When, fifty or sixty years ago, Catholic and monarchical absolutism was on the eve of descending into the grave, it made a supreme effort. It was then that it produced its most illustrious apologists, de Maistre, de Bonald, Chateaubriand and Lamennais, whose marvellous destiny was to show the world, in the single lifetime of a thinker, the philosophical progress of eighteen centuries. Now, in the person of Louis Blanc, an idea more general, more profound, more ancient than the old absolutism, the very idea of government, adequate to the idea of God, was called into question. What a thesis for an orator of some genius! What a case to defend for a publicist, for a historian, for a statesman! It was a tradition to justify, an universal belief to avenge, a popular prejudice, so dear to demagogues, to enflame, a glorious prize to conquer. I expected a magnanimous struggle, from which I hoped to reap only the honour, certainly very modest, of having been the first, with a profound awareness and a certain dose of reason, to pose the problem, the inevitable problem of the State.
Well, what did Louis Blanc say in response?
In his first diatribe, through strong personal attacks, digressions, protests of respect towards the sovereignty of the people, he throws in my face what is called in rhetoric an antithesis of words. To the MASTER STATE, he opposes the SERVANT STATE; and here is his demonstration.
The State, says Louis Blanc, has been until now the master and the tyrant of the citizens; henceforth it must be their servant. The relation is changed; therein lies the whole revolution. – As if, at all times, the apologists of the monarchy had not also claimed that royalty was the servant of the people – that kings were made for the people, not the people for kings, and other parables of which the experience of the people has rightly judged. We know today what this servitude of the State, this devotion of the government is worth. Did not Bonaparte, a compatriot of Louis Blanc, call himself the servant of the Revolution? What services he rendered it!...
Thus, the servant State, that is Louis Blanc’s answer to my first question. As for the question of how the State can really and effectively become a servant; how, being a servant, it can still be the State, Louis Blanc does not explain; he keeps a prudent silence. He is content to protest that, if he, the premier worker of the Republic, ever became a stateman and minister of progress again, he will be the very humble servant of the people; that he will govern with the people: which will not prevent him, on occasion, from resisting the whims and drives of the people!... In truth, this man has nothing in his breadbin. He is only a nibbler of political crusts. I blame myself for having taken so long to believe it, and especially to say it. Judge for yourself.
Asked on what he based the necessity, under an egalitarian regime, in which credit, work and outlets are guaranteed to all, for an external representation of society: – he replied, covering his ears: I do not understand.
Asked repeatedly: How do you reconcile the theory of free credit, which you claim, simultaneously with Pierre Leroux, to be the father of, since the idea became popular, with your initiative of power, with your communist tendencies, with your love of dictatorship, with your system of the factotum[2] State, with your hotch-potch economy?
Said: that I was a professional gladiator, a destroyer of popular renown, a panegyrist of tyrants, manipulator, spreader of birdlime, sower of doubts, whisperer of discord, extinguisher of enlightenment, slanderer of the people, offspring of Thrasymachus, offspring of Lysander, offspring of Tallien (it is just as well he believes himself to be Robespierre), sophist, partisan of Louis-Phillippe, and what is worse, Hellenist, Galimafron, monster, conceited, vain, coarse, brutal, self-idolater, Satan, schoolboy, Erostratus, madman; – that I was a free student at the Besançon college; that I belong to Pitt and Cobourg; that I forbid audacity to the republicans; that after having defended him, Louis Blanc, in an article in the Peuple, I am today making the reaction laugh at his expense, etc., etc., etc.
What say you about this appendix by Pierre Leroux to the litany composed in my honour: Malthusian, eclectic, liberal, individualist, atheist and proprietor? Choir of seraphim! When the first says: Kill! the other answers: Destroy! These people do not even know that an insult, to be in good taste and to be tolerated by honest people, must be the just expression of the fact and the idea, and never reveal the secret and vile passion of the one who resorts to it.
All this interspersed with warm handshakes to the twelve or fifteen so-called delegates who once made up the sycophants of the Luxembourg, and a few commonplaces about government and the State, incubated since 9 Thermidor in the bedwarmers of the knitters.[3]
Certainly, we have had many mystifications after February; but, I must admit, I would never have expected this one. What! It is to give birth to the servant-State that the Revolution, this woman of the Apocalypse, clothed with the sun like a mantle and crowned by the stars, has been in labour for forty centuries! It is for the servant-State that Christianity has brought about the fusion of cults and founded the centralisation of the human race! It is for the servant-State that we have attacked royalty, on August 19, on July 29, on February 24! It is for the servant-State, and the ministry of progress no doubt, that suffered death and passion in June 48, and that the young Mountain protested in June 49!
What! here is a man who, taking metaphors for ideas, comes to tell us that the State is the head of society; that in the State resides the soul of the people, as, according to Descartes, the soul of man has its seat in the pineal gland; that the collective Being needs, in order to make itself manifest, this cranioscopic REALISATION; that it thinks, acts, exists only insofar as it is this representatively REALISED: as if every being were not essentially a collection, a group; as if there existed something else, in nature, than collections or groups; as if all the difference between realities or collections did not consist solely in the fact that some form organisms, others simple aggregates; as if finally life and thought did not necessarily appear everywhere there is organisation in the collection, whatever, moreover, the formula of this organisation!
And this man, the Américo Vespucci of Socialism, has produced, with his meagre crass ignorance, a book that everyone has read, on the Organisation of Labour! Without knowing a word about organisation, he was counted, by force of palaver, amongst the organisers! On 22 February, the people, attracted by the label, chose him first to be part of the provisional government. A member of this government, he dared to solicit, through six thousand petitioners and under the name of Ministry of Progress, dictatorship. It is still, for a crowd of people whom the clattering of words strikes more than the evidence of reason, the purest, most advanced expression of the Revolution! It is in the presence of the hangings of Haynau, the beatings of Radetski, the amnesties of the Pope, the fiscal, police, scholarly reaction of Louis Bonaparte; it is when the revealed secret of the most unbridled squandering, when the most all-consuming stagnation, the most dreadful misery, testify every day to the radical impotence, not only of the men in power, but of the very principle of power; it is at this moment that Louis Blanc, that stunted shadow of Robespierre, dares to plead the cause of Power, of strong, and ever stronger, Power! What are we destined for, great God! If, after M. Molé, M. Guizot, M. Thiers; after the provisional government and the executive commission, after M. Sénart, M. Dufaure, M. Barrot, M. Faucher, M. de Falloux, M. d’Hautpoul, we must still hear Louis Blanc sing us the same tune, the tune of strong power, the music of the organising, initiating, industrious State!... Oh! we should despair of our race, if we had to judge its genius on such examples. But let us not be discouraged, let us not cease to knock at these empty skulls: it is the best way to give the people an awareness of their own laws, and to teach them to judge their masters. Do we therefore want the democratic and social edifice to be founded sometime? Let us begin by draining the soil; let us set fire to the undergrowth: we still have more than one wild boar to get rid of.
So, Louis Blanc does not accept the struggle in the closed arena that we courteously proposed to him in the Nouveau Monde and the Voix du people. A prudent shepherd, he is careful not to expose his flock to the contagion of severe critique, which, by teaching them to reason, tighten their hearts. Instead of the sainfoin of controversy, he prefers to make them graze on the straw of his monthly flattery. Here we are, thanks to him, free from learned demonstrations, from those long historical, philosophical, economic dissertations, which tired the poor workers, and broke the heads of the people. From now on, we with reason prosaically, as true physicians and following the Socratic method, fortunately substituted for the German dialectic. What good is it, indeed, of raising our minds to discuss the servant-State and the realisation of the collective Being, and the society that gives itself a head and a brain by the election of its representatives?
Let us talk about the State, simply, plainly, without metaphysics or scholarship, as if it were a question of the society of tailors or cooks.
Unhappy State! After having plummeted, for twenty years, from Charles X to Louis-Phillippe, from Louis-Philippe to the provisional government, from the provisional government to the executive commission, from the executive commission to Cavaignac, and from Cavaignac to Louis Bonaparte, it was still in its destiny to have as an apologist the most vain, the most empty, the most impudent, the most nauseating rhetorician that, in the most verbose of centuries, the most cowardly of literature has produced! – Let us also speak of association: it seems that it is Louis Blanc’s strong point; and we shall have, on this interesting subject, curious revelations to make to the people. No one knows, no one has yet said what association can, must be in the future. Then we will explain to the workers the Triad, the Circulus and the Metempsychosis. We will make them aware of these great discoveries of modern enlightenment. And since our conduct is constantly being discussed, we agree to render our accounts; but beware! we summon our adversaries to render theirs as well.
In the meantime, let the workers continue to associate, we do not put the slightest obstacle in their way. Association is a right of man and of the citizen, which the Constitution guarantees, which universal practice proclaims, and against which we have no reason to object. Let the workers form themselves into groups and squads; let them centralise their forces; let them organise their circulation and their exchanges, and not be discouraged by a few setbacks. Faith in charlatans has led them down a false path; their experience, more than our advice, will draw them out of it. Association can no longer be what they imagine: we will demonstrate it to them, and they will soon agree. But it is good, it is essential that they experiment for themselves with the ideas of their dreamers: They will always have something left. Enlightened by daily practice, they will grasp its principles better, as they are brought to their meditations; then it will be easy for them to recognise who are the manipulators, those who spare them no truth, no relief, or those who, not having an idea to which they can pay homage, know only how to stroke, in the interest of a desperate ambition, their passions and their prejudices. It will not be long.
A little more patience, proletarians; and if you are not enlightened this time; if, being enlightened, you do not know how to be free, blame only yourselves; blame only your intelligence and your heart for your misfortune.
[1] Whatever he says, I will argue. (Translator)
[2] Latin for “do everything”, having many diverse activities or responsibilities. (Translator)
[3] The women of the people who, during the French Revolution, attended sessions of the National Convention, popular clubs and the revolutionary tribunal while knitting, noted for their vehement calls for the Terror. (Translator)