1863
Translator: Iain McKay
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.[1] 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.[2]
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?
[1] 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)
[2] 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?