Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Translator: Iain McKay
La Voix du Peuple, 3 December, 1849
Revolutions do not recognise initiators: they come when destiny’s signal calls them; they stop when the mysterious force that makes them hatch is exhausted. They allow themselves to be pushed: they do not allow themselves to be dragged. This is what is demonstrated to us today, in a striking manner, by the example of all those who, eager for power and popular favour, have harnessed themselves to the chariot of revolutions, imaging that they would stop it when they ceased pulling it. But the indomitable machine rolls on, sweeping away pell-mell both those who want to hinder its course and its powerless drivers. Wise man, do you want to avoid being crushed under the wheels? Get behind the vehicle, and then, when you see it rushing forward, get on the running board.
Pius IX, one day, wanted to test whether the papacy and freedom could live together. He soon learns, at his cost, that freedom recognises neither mistress nor rival, and that it breaks, when it pleases, the institutions it has given itself, Monarchy and Catholicism, State and property. Then the pope, the first helmsman of the Revolution, steps back and wants to hold back the revolutionary chariot which passed over his body – Roll, Revolution.
After the Pope, it is the dynastic opposition. The example of Pius IX seizes and inflames it: Courage! Holy Father, it cries to him through the mouth of M. Thiers, taking one of the shafts; courage! Shame on this cowardly government which ignores the spirit of the century and the need for progress! – Courage! dynastics, shout the republicans in turn, attaching their trinkets to the former. – Courage, everyone! take up the socialists; let us not remain halfway: forward!... and the thundering chariot, chasing before it papacy, dynasty and bourgeoisie, hurls them one upon the other into the democratic and social Republic. – Roll, Revolution!
Halt! said then President of the Luxembourg, Louis Blanc: I am Minister of State for progress; no progress is made without my permission. Down with the anarchists, the individualists, the egalitarians! Men of the people, respect the State: the State is you!
Halt! cries the revealer of the Triad, the restorer of metempsychosis, the apocryphal author of the universal hearth, Pierre Leroux: I am the apostle of the neo-christians, the last of the seers. Down with the voltairians, the liberals and the atheists! Respect for my religion and my God! Worker, stop, in the name of brotherhood, charity, solidarity, humanity, unity!...
And the two heralds of Religion and State, out of breath, put themselves in the way of the chariot, which is carried along by its acquired speed and mass, and which is pushed by a mysterious, irresistible force. – Roll, roll, Revolution!
We have read, with a real pleasure, as this reading filled us with hope, the latest pamphlet of Louis Blanc, and the pious disquisitions of Pierre Leroux.
The former stateman of the provisional government, the beloved writer of classical republicans, romantic democrats, communitarians and fraternitarian socialists, shines in this diatribe with all the qualities of his style and all the poverties of his logic. Passion, a true passion this time, raises him above himself: he explodes, he is indignant, he insults, he slanders; he has superb insults and magnificent disdains. He calls the people as witnesses; he attests to the workers, his brothers, who awarded him the title of the premier worker of the Republic, and who now, in the midst of convalescence from the governmental epidemic, speak of doing without statesmen, as well as capitalists and priests. He even appeals to the proprietors, to whom he promises a fair, but not in advance, compensation, if they will allow him to seize their properties, intact to use them to organise work without a cataclysm, peacefully.
We feel that the famous utopian fights for his hearths and his gods: because the State, power is the patrimony, the life and blood of Louis Blanc. Extinguish the State, Louis Blanc is a dead man. The February Revolution was made for him, to achieve his plan for the organisation of work by the State. Also never has his wit been more lively and more frank. No more groomed tirades, idle epithets, affected sentimentalities, antitheses with effect: it is almost revolutionary language. Quousque tandem...[1]
Pierre Leroux joins Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux who also is interested in the debate; the holy man aspires to replace the Pope in his duties as vicar of God; some even go so far as to say that he remembers having been Jesus Christ. – No more government, he says, no more religion; all is lost! Where are you going, you wretch! Return to religion; without religion, no society. We are religion; UNITY! We are the Way, the Truth, the Life: TRINITY IN UNITY!... Sensation-feeling, knowledge: He who denies our Doctrine, and who disregards the Triad, that one is no republican!...
But let us leave the demagogue and the mystagogue together, and approach this great problem of the State, even more obscure than that of labour ever was: but which, we firmly hope, will soon became as clear, as positive.
The Revolution of February raised two critical questions: one economic, the question of labour and property; the other political, the question of government or the State.
On the first of these questions the socialist democracy is more or less in agreement. It is recognised that it is not a question of seizing and dividing property, not even of its buyback; of subjecting the wealthy and the proprietor to additional taxes in bad faith, which, while giving the lie to the principle of property, recognised in the Constitution, would only have the effect of upsetting the general economy, and of aggravating the situation of the proletariat. Economic reform consists, on the one hand, in creating competition for usurious credit, and, thereby causing capital to lose its income, in other words, in identifying, in every citizen and to the same degree, the quality of worker and that of capitalist; – on the other, in abolishing the entire system of current taxes, which only impact the worker and the poor man, and in replacing them all by a single tax on capital, as an insurance premium.
By these two great reforms the social economy is renewed from top to bottom, commercial and industrial relations are inverted, and the profits, today assured to the capitalist, are returned to the worker. Competition, currently anarchic and subversive, becomes emulative and fruitful; markets no longer being wanting, the worker and entrepreneur, united together, no longer have to fear either stagnation or unemployment. A new order is established upon the old institutions abolished or regenerated.
On this point the revolutionary route is charted; the meaning of the movement is known. Whatever variety is brought to the application, the reform will be carried out according to these principles and on these bases; the Revolution has no other outcome. The economic problem can therefore be considered as solved.
It is not the same, far from it, with the political problem, that is to say, with the judgment to be made, for the future, on government and the State. On this point the question is not even posed; there is nothing in the public conscience and the intelligence of the masses. The economic Revolution accomplished, as we have just said, can, should government, the State, still exist? This is what no one, neither within the democracy nor outwith the democracy, dares to question; and yet this is the question which, on pain of new catastrophes, must be addressed.
We therefore affirm, and as yet we are alone in affirming it, that with the economic revolution, no longer disputed, the State must entirely disappear; that this disappearance of the State is the necessary consequence of the organisation of credit and the reform of taxation; that, by the effect of this double innovation, government becomes successively useless and impossible; that it is with this, in this respect, as with feudal property, with lending at interest, with absolute or constitutional monarchy, with judicial institutions, etc., which have all served in the education of liberty, but which fall and vanish when liberty has reached its fullness.
Others, on the contrary, amongst whom Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux stand out in in the front ranks, maintain that after the economic revolution, the State must continue, an organisation of the State must be retained, on which they have hitherto provided neither principle nor plan. For them, the political question, instead of being annihilated by identification with the economic question, still remains: they retain, enlarging it still further, the State, power, authority, government. What they do is to change the names; to say, for example, instead of master-State, servant-State, as if it sufficed to change words to transform things! Above this system of government, utterly unknown, hovers a system of religion whose dogma is equally unknown, whose ritual is unknown, whose object, on earth and in heaven, is unknown.
This, then, is the question which at present divides the socialist democracy, at this time in accord, or nearly so, on the rest: Must the State continue to exist once the question of labour and capital has been resolved? In other words, will we always have, as we have had hitherto, a political Constitution apart from the social Constitution?
We reply in the negative. We maintain that, capital and labour once identified, society exists by itself, and no longer needs government. We are, consequently, as we have more than once proclaimed, anarchists. Anarchy is the condition of existence of mature societies, as hierarchy is the condition of primitive societies: there is an incessant progress in human society from hierarchy to anarchy.
Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux affirm the contrary: in addition to their capacity as socialists they retain that of politicians; they are men of government and authority, statesmen.
To settle the dispute, we must therefore consider the State, no longer from the point of view of the old society, which naturally and necessarily produced it, and which approaches its end; – but from the point of view of the new society, as it is made or must be made by the two fundamental and correlative reforms of credit and taxation.
Now, if we prove that from this last point of view, the State, considered in its nature, rests on a completely false hypothesis; that, secondly, considered in its object, the State finds no reason for its existence save in a second hypothesis, equally false; that, finally, considered in the reasons for its further extension, the State again can only invoke a hypothesis as false as the first two: these three points clarified, the question will be settled, the State will be regarded as a superfluous, consequently a harmful, an impossible, thing; government will be a contradiction.
Let us proceed at once with the analysis:
“What is the State?” asks Louis Blanc.
And he replies:
“The State in a monarchic regime is the power of one man, the tyranny of one.
“The State in an oligarchic regime is the power of a small number of men, the tyranny of a few.
“The State in an aristocratic regime is the power of one class, the tyranny of several.
“The State in an anarchic regime is the power of the first comer who happens to be the most intelligent and the most strong; it is the tyranny of chaos.
“The State in a democratic regime is the power of all the people, served by their elected representatives, it is the reign of freedom.”
Of the twenty-five or thirty thousand readers of Louis Blanc, perhaps there are not ten to whom this definition of the State did not seem conclusive, and who do not repeat, after the master: The State is the power of one, of a few, of several, of all, or of the first comer, according as the word State is prefaced by one of these adjectives: monarchic, oligarchic, aristocratic, democratic, or anarchic. The delegates of the Luxembourg [Commission] – who believe themselves robbed, it seems, when anyone allows himself to hold an opinion other than theirs on the meaning and tendencies of the February Revolution – in a letter made public, have done me the honour of informing me that they found Louis Blanc’s response quite triumphant, and that I had nothing to answer it. It seems that none amongst the citizen-delegates has learned Greek. Otherwise, they would have seen that their master and friend Louis Blanc, instead of saying what the State is, did nothing other than translate into French the Greek words monos, one; aligoï, a few; aristoï, the great; démos, the people; and a privative a, which means: no. It is with the help of these qualifiers that Aristotle differentiated the various forms of the State, which is expressed by archê, authority, government, State. We ask pardon of our readers, but it is not our fault if the political science of the President of the Luxembourg [Commission] does not go further than etymology.
And see the artifice! It was enough for Louis Blanc, in his translation, to use the word tyranny four times, tyranny of one, tyranny of several, etc., and to remove it once, power of the people, served by their elected representatives, to immediately draw applause. Every State other than the democratic, as Louis Blanc understands it, is tyranny. Anarchy above all is treated in a peculiar way; it is the power of the first comer, who happens to be the most intelligent and the most strong; it is the tyranny of chaos. What a monster is this first comer, who, although he is the first comer, nevertheless happens to be the most intelligent and the most strong, and who exercises his tyranny in chaos! Who, after that, could prefer anarchy to this amiable government of all the people, served so well, as we know, by their elected representatives? How overwhelming that is! At the first blow, we are on the ground. Ah! rhetorician. thank God for having created for your express benefit, in the nineteenth century, such stupidity as that of your so-called delegates of the working classes, otherwise you would have perished under boos the first time you touched a pen.
What is the State? This question requires a answer: the list that Louis Blanc, after Aristotle, has produced of the different forms of the State has taught us nothing. As for Pierre Leroux, there is no point in questioning him: he would tell us that the question is indiscreet; that the State has always existed; that it always will exist: this is the supreme reason of conservatives and old wives.
The State is the external constitution of the social power.
By this external constitution of its power and sovereignty, the people does not govern itself; it is sometimes one individual, sometimes several, who, by election or hereditary title, are charged with governing it, with managing its affairs, with negotiating and compromising in its name; in a word, with performing all the acts of a father of a family, a guardian, a manager, or a proxy, furnished with a general, absolute, and irrevocable power of attorney.
This external constitution of the collective power, to which the Greeks gave the name archê, principality, authority, government, rests then on this hypothesis, that a people, that the collective being which we call society, cannot govern itself, think, act, express itself, by itself, in a manner analogous to that of beings endowed with individual personality; that it needs, for that, to be represented by one or more individuals, who, in whatever capacity, are supposed to be the custodians of the will of the people, and its agents. According to this hypothesis, it is impossible for the collective power, which belongs essentially to the mass, to express itself and act directly, without the intermediary of expressly established organs, and, so to speak, staffed ad hoc. It seems, we say – and this is what explains the constitution of the State in all its varieties and species – that the collective being, that society, existing only as a being of reason, cannot make itself felt otherwise by way of monarchical incarnation, aristocratic usurpation, or democratic mandate; consequently, that all specific and personal manifestation is forbidden it.
Now, it is precisely this notion of the collective being, of its life, of its action, of its unity, of its individuality, of its personality; – for society is a person, do you hear? as all humanity is a person; – it is this notion of the collective human being that we deny today; and it is for this reason that we also deny the State, that we deny government, that we reject from the economically revolutionised society every constitution of the popular power, outside and above the mass, by hereditary royalty, feudal institution, or democratic delegation.
We affirm, on the contrary, that the people, that society, that the mass, can and must govern itself by itself; to think, act, rise, and halt, like a man, manifest itself, finally, in its physical, intellectual, and moral individuality, without the aid of all these intermediaries, who formerly were despots, who now are aristocrats, who from time to time have been so-called delegates, panderers or servants of the crowd, and whom we call merely and simply popular agitators, demagogues.
In short:
We deny government and the State, because we affirm what the founders of States have never believed in, the personality and autonomy of the masses.
We affirm further that every constitution of the State has no other object than to lead society to this condition of autonomy; that the different forms of the State, from absolute monarchy to representative democracy, are all only middle terms, illogical and unstable positions, serving in turn as transitions or stages to freedom, and forming the steps of the political ladder by the aid of which societies raise themselves to self-consciousness and self-possession.
We affirm, finally, that this anarchy, which expresses, as we now see, the highest degree of freedom and order that humanity can attain, is the true formula of the Republic, the goal to which the February Revolution impels us; so that between Republic and government, between universal suffrage and State, there is a contradiction.
We establish these systematic affirmations in two ways: first, by the historical and negative method, by demonstrating that all establishment of authority, all organisation of the collective force by exteriorisation, has become impossible for us. – This is what we began in the Confessions of a Revolutionary, by recounting the fall of all the governments that have succeeded one another in France for sixty years, by identifying the cause of their abolition, and finally noting the exhaustion and death of power in the corrupt reign of Louis Philippe, in the inert dictatorship of the provisional government, and in the insignificant presidency of General Cavignac and Louis Bonaparte.
Secondly, we prove our thesis by explaining how, through economic reform, through industrial solidarity and the organisation of universal suffrage, the people passes from spontaneity to reflection and consciousness; act, no longer by coaching and fanaticism, but with design; maintains itself without masters and servants, without delegates as without aristocrats, absolutely as would an individual. Thus, the notion of person, the idea of the self, finds itself extended and generalised: there is an individual person or self, as there is a collective person or self; in both cases, the will, the act, the soul, the spirit, the life, unknown in their principle, elusive in their essence, result from the animating and vital fact, the organisation. The psychology of nations and of humanity becomes, like the psychology of man, a possible science. It was to this positive demonstration that we have indicated, both in the publications we have produced on circulation and credit as well as in the section XIV of the manifesto of La Voix du Peuple relating to the constitution.
So, when Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux pose as defenders of the State, which means of an external constitution of the public power, they do nothing other than reproduce, under a variant that is their own and which they have not yet made known, that old fiction of representative government, whose integral formula, the most complete expression, is still the constitutional monarchy. Did we, then, make the February Revolution to achieve this retrogressive contradiction?
It seems to us, what do you say, readers?, that the question is beginning to be posed in a somewhat clearer manner; that the poor in spirit will be able, after what we have just said, to form an idea of the State, that they will understand how republicans can ask themselves if it is indispensable, after an economic revolution that changes all the relations of society, to maintain, for the vanity of so-called statesmen, and at a cost of two billion per year, this parasitic organ called government? And the honourable delegates of the Luxembourg, who, having sat in the armchairs of the peerage[2], believe themselves politicians, and so bravely attribute to themselves the exclusive understanding of the Revolution, will, without doubt, no longer fear that we, in our capacity as the most intelligent and the most strong, after having abolished government, as useless and too expensive, we will establish the tyranny of chaos. We deny the State and government; we affirm the autonomy of the People at the same time as its maturity. How could we be upholders of tyranny, aspirants to the ministry, competitors of Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux?
In truth, we do not understand the logic of our adversaries. They accept a principle without concerning themselves about the consequences; they adhere, for example, to the equality of taxation that the tax on capital realises; they adopt popular, mutual, and free credit, for all these terms are synonymous; they cheer at the deposing of capital and the emancipation of labour; then, when it comes to drawing the anti-governmental conclusions of these premises, they protest, they continue to talk of politics and government, without asking themselves whether government is compatible with industrial liberty and equality; whether there is a possibility of a political science, when there is a necessity for an economic science! Property they attack without scruple, in spite of its venerable antiquity; but they bow before power like churchwardens before the Holy Sacrament. Government is for them the necessary and immutable a priori, the principle of principles, the eternal archaeon.
Certainly, we do not offer our affirmations as proofs, we know, as well as anyone, under what conditions a proposition is demonstrated. We will only say that, before proceeding to a new constitution of the State, we must ask ourselves whether, in view of the economic reforms the Revolution imposes upon us, the State itself should not be abolished; if this end of political institutions does not result from the meaning and scope of economic reform? We ask if, in fact, after the explosion of February, after the establishment of universal suffrage, the declaration of the omnipotence of the masses, and the henceforth inevitable subordination of power to the popular will, any government whatever is still possible; if this government would not find itself placed in the perpetual alternative, either to follow docilely the blind and contradictory injunctions of the multitude, or to knowingly deceive it, as the Provisional Government did, as the demagogues in all ages have done? We ask, at the very least, which amongst the various remits of the State should be retained and enlarged, which abolished? For, if it happened, something which can still be foreseen, that, of all the current remits of the State, not one were to survive the economic reform, it would be necessary to admit, on the strength of this negative demonstration, that, in the new condition of society, the State is nothing, can be nothing; in short, that the only way to organise democratic government is to abolish government.
Instead of this positive, practical, realistic analysis of the revolutionary movement, what course do our so-called initiators take? They go to consult Lycurgus, Plato, Orpheus, and all the mythological wisdom; they interrogate the ancient legends; they appeal to remotest antiquity for the solutions to exclusively modern problems, and then give us as an answer the dizzying illuminations of their brain.
Is this, once again, that science of society and of the Revolution which was to, at first sight, resolve all problems, an essentially practical and immediately applicable science; a science eminently traditional, no doubt, but above all a progressive science, and in which progress is accomplished by the systematic negation of tradition itself?...
We have just seen that the notion of the State, considered in its nature, rests entirely on a hypothesis which is at least doubtful, that of the impersonality and the physical, intellectual, and moral inertia of the masses. We will prove that this same notion of the State, considered in its object, rests on another hypothesis, still more improbable than the first, that of the permanence of antagonism in humanity, a hypothesis which itself is a consequence of the primitive dogma of the fall or of original sin.
We continue to quote Le Nouveau Monde:
“What would happen,” asks Louis Blanc, “if we should let the most intelligent or the most strong to obstruct the development of the faculties of those who are less strong or less intelligent? – Freedom would be destroyed.
“How can we prevent this crime? – By interposing between oppressor and oppressed the whole power of the people.
“If Jack oppresses Peter, will the thirty-four million men who compose French society all rush at once to protect Peter, to safeguard freedom? To claim so would be buffoonery.
“How then shall society intervene?
“Through those whom it has chosen to REPRESENT it for this purpose.
“But these REPRESENTATIVES of society, these servants of the people, who are they? – The State.
“So the State is nothing other than society itself, acting as society, to prevent. . . what? oppression; to maintain. . . what? freedom.”
That is clear. The State is a REPRESENTATION of society, externally organised to protect the weak against the strong; in other words, to bring peace between combatants and to create order! Louis Blanc did not go far, as we see, to find the purpose of the State. It can be traced from Grotius, Justinian, Cicero, etc., in all the authors who ever have written on public right. It is the Orphic tradition related by Horace:
Sylvestres homines sacer interpresque deorum.
Cædíbus et victu fœdo deterruit Orpheus,
Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres rabidosque leones,
Dictus et Amphion, Thebanæ conditor arcis,
Saxa movere sono testudinis, et prece blanda
Ducere quo vellet....
“The divine Orpheus, the interpreter of the gods, called men from the depths of the forests and filled them with a horror of murder and of human flesh. Consequently it was said of him that he tamed lions and tigers, as later it was said of Amphion, founder of Thebes, that he moved the stones by the sound of his lyre, and led them whither he wished by the charm of his prayer.”
Socialism, as we know, does not require with certain people great efforts of the imagination. They imitate, quite flatly, the old mythologies; they copy Catholicism, while declaiming against it; they ape power, which they covet; then they shout with all their might: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! and the trick is done. They pass for a revealer, a reformer, a democratic and social restorer; they are named as a candidate for the ministry of progress, or even for the dictatorship of the Republic!
Thus, by the confession of Louis Blanc, power is born of barbarism; its organisation attests, amongst early man, to a state of ferocity and violence, an effect of the utter absence of commerce and industry. To this savagery that the State had to put an end, by opposing to the force of each individual a superior force, capable, for want of any other argument, of constraining his will. The constitution of the State therefore supposes, as we said earlier, a profound social antagonism, homo homini lupus.[3] Louis Blanc himself says this when, after having divided men into the strong and the weak, quarrelling like wild beasts over their food, he interposes between them, as a mediator, the State.
So the State would be useless; the State would lack both an object and a motive; the State would have to abrogate itself, if there came a time when, for whatever cause, there were no longer in society either strong or weak, that is to say, when the inequality of physical and intellectual forces could not be a cause of theft and oppression, independently of the protection, more fictitious than real, of the State.
Now, this is precisely the thesis that we maintain today.
That which smooths morals, that gradually makes right reign in place of force, that which establishes security, which progressively creates freedom and equality, is, much more than religion and the State, labour; firstly, commerce and industry; then science, which spiritualises it; in the last analysis, art, its immortal flower. Religion, by its promises and its terrors, the State, by its tribunals and its armies, have only given to the sentiment of right, too weak amongst early man, a sanction, the only one intelligible to savage minds. For us, whom industry, science, literature, art, have corrupted, as Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] said, this sanction lies elsewhere; it is in the division of properties, in the cogs of industry, in the growth of luxury, in the pressing need for well-being, a need which makes labour a necessity of everyone. After the harshness of the early ages, after the pride of castes and the feudal constitution of the first societies, a last element of servitude still remained: capital. Capital having lost its dominance, the labourer, that is to say, the merchant, the worker, the farmer, the scholar, the artist, no longer needs protection; his protection is his talent, his knowledge, his industry. After the deposing of capital, the preservation of the State, far from protecting freedom, can only compromise freedom.
It is to form a sorry idea of the human species, of its essence, of its perfectibility, of its destiny, to conceive it as an agglomeration of individuals necessarily exposed, by the inequality of physical and intellectual forces, to the constant danger of reciprocal spoliation or the tyranny of a few. Such an idea attests to the most retrograde philosophy; it belongs to those times of barbarism when the absence of the true elements of social order left the genius of the legislator no other means of action than force; when the supremacy of a pacifying and avenging power appeared to all as the just consequence of a previous degradation and an original stain. To express our whole thought, we regard political and judicial institutions as the esoteric and concrete formula of the myth of the fall, of the mystery of redemption, and of the sacrament of penitence. It is curious to see so-called socialists, enemies or rivals of Church and State, copying all that they blaspheme: the representative system in politics, the dogma of the fall in religion.
Since they talk so much of doctrine, we frankly declare that this is not ours.
For us, the moral state of society is changes and improves with its economic state. The morality of a savage people, ignorant, and without industry, is one thing; that of an industrious and artistic people another: the social guarantees consequently, in the first differ to those amongst the second. In a society transformed, almost unconsciously, by the development of its economy, there are no longer strong or weak; there are only workers, whose faculties and means incessantly tend, through industrial solidarity and the guarantee of circulation, to equalise. In vain, to ensure the right and the duty of each, the imagination refers to this idea of authority and government which attests the profound despair of souls long frightened by the police and the priesthood: the simplest examination of the remits of the State suffices to demonstrate that, if inequality of fortunes, oppression, theft, and misery are not the eternal prerogative of our nature, the first leprosy we have to reform, the first plague to cure, after capitalist exploitation, is the State.
Let us see, in fact, budget in hand, what the State is.
The State is the army. – Reformer, do you need an army to defend you? In that case, you understand public security like Cæsar and Napoléon. . . You are not a republican, you are a despot.
The State is the police; urban police, rural police, police of the waters and forests. – Reformer, do you need police? Then you understand order like Fouché, Gisquet, Carussidière, and M. Carlier.[4] You are not a democrat, you are an informer.
The State is the entire judicial system: justices of the peace, tribunals of first instance, courts of appeal, court of cassation, high court, industrial tribunals, commercial tribunals, councils of prefects, councils of State, councils of war. – Reformer, do you need all these judges? Then you understand justice like MM. Baroche, Dupin, and Perrin Dandin.[5] You are not a socialist, you are a mercenary [routier[6]].
The State is the treasury, the budget. – Reformer, you do not want the abolition of taxation? Then you understand public wealth like M. Thiers, for whom the biggest budgets are the best. You are not an organiser of labour, you are an exciseman [rat de cave[7]].
The State is the custom-house. – Reformer, do you need, to protect national labour, differential duties and toll-houses? Then you understand commerce and circulation like M. Fould and M. Rothschild. You are not an apostle of fraternity, you are a Jew. [8]
The State is the public debt, the mint, the amortisation, the savings-banks, etc. – Reformer, is that your prime science? Then you understand social economy like MM. Humann, Lacave-Laplagne, Garnier-Pagès, Passy, Duclerc, and l’Homme au quarante écus. You are a Turcaret.[9]
The State. . . but we must stop. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the State, from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom, that is not an abuse to be reformed, a parasitism to be suppressed, an instrument of tyranny to be destroyed. And you talk to us of preserving the State, of augmenting the responsibilities of the State, of rendering the power of the State stronger and stronger! Come on, you are not a revolutionary; for the true revolutionary is essentially a simplifier and a liberal. You are a mystifier, a trickster; you are a muddlehead.
Here arises, in favour of the State, a final hypothesis. Because the State, say the pseudo-democrats, has hitherto performed only a role of parasitism and tyranny, this is no reason to deny it a more noble and more humane destiny. The State is destined to become the principal organ of production, consumption, and circulation; the initiator of freedom and equality.
For freedom and equality are the State.
Credit is the State.
Commerce, agriculture, and manufactures are the State.
Canals, railroads, mines, insurance companies, as well as tobacco-shops and post-offices, are the State.
Public education is the State.
The State at last, abandoning its negative responsibilities to clothe itself with positive ones, from the oppressive, unproductive and regressive that it always was, must become an organiser, producer and servant. This is feudalism regenerated, the hierarchy of workers’ associations, organised and positioned according to a potent formula, the secret of which Pierre Leroux reserves the right to reveal to us.
Thus, the organisers of the State suppose, for in all this they only go from supposition to supposition, that the State can change its nature, turn itself, so to speak, from Satan to become an archangel; and, after having lived for centuries by blood and slaughter like a wild beast, graze upon the laburnum with the deer, and suckle the lambs. This is what Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux teach us; this is, as we said long ago, the whole secret of socialism.
“We love the tutelary, generous,
devoted power, taking as its motto these profound words of the Gospel: Let
the first amongst you be the servant of all the others, and we hate the
depraved, corrupting, oppressive power, making the people its prey. We admire
it representing the generous and living part of humanity; we abhor it when it
represents the cadaverous part. We revolt against what is insolent, usurpation,
brigandage in this notion: the master-State,
and we applaud what is touching, fruitful, and noble in this notion: the servant-State. Let us put it better:
there is a
belief to which we hold a thousand times more than
life, it is our belief in the coming and definitive TRANSFORMATION of power. That
is the triumphant passage from the old world to the new world. All the
governments of Europe rest today on the notion of the master-State; but they are dancing, distraught, the dance of
the dead.” (Le Nouveau Monde, 15 November 1849)
Pierre Leroux is entirely in favour of these ideas. What he wants, what he teaches and what he calls for is a regeneration of the State – he has not said yet by whom and by what this regeneration must be effected – as he wants and calls for a regeneration of Christianity, without having been able, as yet, to present his dogma and bestow his Credo.
We believe, contrary to Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc, that the theory of the tutelary, generous, devoted, productive, initiating, organising, liberal and progressive State is a utopia, a pure illusion of their intellectual vision. Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc resemble, we believe, a man who, standing at a mirror and seeing his image reversed, would pretend that this image must become a reality and one day replace, if we may use the expression, his natural person.
This is what separates us from these two men, whose talents and services, whatever they may say, we have never dreamt of denying, but whose stubborn hallucination we deplore. We do not believe in the servant-State: for us it is quite simply a contradiction.
Servant and master, when applied to the State, are synonymous terms; just as more and less, when applied to equality, are identical terms. The proprietor, by interest on capital, demands more than equality; communism, by the formula, to each according to his needs, grants less than equality: it is always inequality; and this is why we are neither a communist nor a proprietor. Likewise, whoever says master-State says usurpation of the public power; whoever says servant-State says delegation of the public power: it is always an alienation of this power, always a power, always an external, arbitrary authority, in place of the immanent, inalienable, untransferable authority of citizens: always more or less than freedom. It is for this reason that we do not want the State.
Moreover, to emerge from metaphysics and return to the domain of experience, here is what we have to say to Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux.
You claim and affirm that the State, that the government can and must be completely transformed in its principle, in its essence, in its action, in its relations with the citizens, as in its results; that thereby the State, a bankrupt and a counterfeiter, must be the source of all credit; that, for so many centuries an enemy of knowledge, and at this moment still hostile to primary education and the freedom of the press, it is for it to provide, ex officio, for the education of citizens; that after having left commerce, industry, agriculture, and all the instruments of wealth to develop without its aid, often even despite its resistance, it is for it to take the initiative in all work as in all ideas; that finally, an eternal enemy of freedom, it must again, not leave freedom to itself, but create, direct freedom. It is in this marvellous transformation of the State that, according to you, the present Revolution comprises.
You have therefore to, at the same time, firstly establish the truth of your hypothesis, by deducing its traditional legitimacy, its historical titles, and outlining its philosophy; secondly, by applying it.
Now, it appears already that both theory and practice, in your hypothesis, is in formal contradiction, and with the idea itself, and with the historical facts, and with the most authentic tendencies of humanity.
Your theory, we say, implies a contradiction in its terms, since it claims to make freedom a creation of the State, while it is the State, on the contrary, which must be a creation of freedom. Indeed, if the State imposes itself upon my will, the State is master; I am not free; the theory is undermined.
It is in contradiction with the historical facts, since it is certain, and as recognised by you, that everything positive, good, and beautiful that has been produced within the sphere of human activity has been the exclusive product of freedom, acting independently of the State, and almost always in opposition to the State; which leads directly to this proposition, which ruins your system, that freedom is sufficient unto itself and has no need of the State.
Finally, the manifest tendencies of civilisation contradicts your theory; since, instead of continually adding to individual freedom and dignity by making every human soul, following Kant’s precept, an exemplar of all humanity, an aspect of the collective soul, you subordinate the private person to the public person, you subject the individual to the group, you absorb the citizen in the State.
It is for you to remove all these contradictions by a principle superior to freedom and to the State. We, who plainly and simply deny the State; who, resolutely following the line of freedom, remain faithful to revolutionary practice, we do not have to demonstrate to you the falsity of your hypothesis, we await your proofs. The master-State is lost; you agree with us. As for the servant-State, we do not know what it can be; we distrust it as a supreme hypocrisy. The servant-State seems to us to be exactly the same thing as a servant-mistress; we do not want it; we prefer, until further notice, to espouse Freedom in legitimate marriage. Explain, then, if you can, why, after having demolished the State through love of this adored freedom, we must now, by virtue of the same love, return to the State. Until you have solved this problem, we will continue to protest against all government, all authority, all power; we shall maintain, in spite of everything, the liberal prerogative. We will say to you: Freedom is, for us, a thing gained; now, you know the rule of law: Melior est conditio possidentis[10]. Produce your titles to the reorganisation of government; otherwise, no government!
To summarise:
The State is the external constitution of the social power.
This constitution supposes, in principle, that society is a rational being devoid of spontaneity, providence, unity and which needs, to act, to be fictitiously represented by one or more elected or hereditary proxies: a hypothesis whose falsity the economic development of societies and the organisation of universal suffrage also contribute in demonstrating.
The constitution of the State supposes further, as to its object, that antagonism or a state of war is the essential and indelible condition of humanity, a condition which necessitates, between the weak and the strong, the intervention of a coercive force which puts an end to the conflicts by a general oppression. We maintain that, in this respect, the mission of the State is ended; that, by the division of labour, industrial solidarity, the taste for well-being, the equal distribution of capital and taxation, freedom and justice obtain surer guarantees than all those formerly afforded to them by religion and the State.
As for an utilitarian transformation of the State, we consider it as a utopia that contradicts both the governmental tradition, and the revolutionary tendency, and the spirit of the now accepted economic reforms. In any case, we say that it would be up to liberty alone to reorganise power, which today is equivalent to the complete exclusion of power.
As a result, either no social revolution, or no more government; such is our solution of the political problem.
Now, a few words of explanation from the writer to citizens Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux.
To Louis Blanc:
You complain that for a long time you have been the target of a systematic attack on my part; you say that you have always been reluctant to respond to it, because you did not want to give the counter-revolution the spectacle of our disagreements. You will permit me to acknowledge that I am not very grateful to you for this deigned moderation, which is only a surreptitious way of indicating me to the criticism of the democrats. The questions must be studied. (The Revolution does not accept these mutual complacencies). If you have supposed for a single moment that I would keep quiet or conceal anything in your books that seems to me false and dangerous, you have not done me justice; you have been mistaken.
I have never slandered your intentions; I have often asserted the honour, very rare in the world, that you have of being the first to put the social question in a formal manner. It is a glory that cannot be taken from you; for my part, no one thinks less of it. I have, moreover, called attention to your theory, which I know, be sure, better than you; not because I approve of it, of course, but because it expresses one of the sides of humanitarian development, the communist and governmental side, which is the one I combat.
Also, without any regard for your person, I have always considered you as the least disguised expression of absolutism and, as such, as one of the most dangerous men for the Revolution. I believed, in criticising your ideas, to fulfil a duty: I regret that you have not been able to understand it. I am, in your eyes, the theoretician of tyranny by chaos, to borrow your style: whatever! I have just told you what I mean by anarchy and abolition of the State; I had already made it sufficiently clear in various tracts, and, quite recently, in the manifesto of the Voix du Peuple. You need only open your eyes to see that there is a long way from these ideas to those of tyranny and chaos. It has pleased you, for the sake of your popularity and the satisfaction of your self-esteem, to distort and conceal my sentiments. You owe it to me to set the record straight on this point and retract your words: I demand it.
You insinuate, always for the sake of your popularity and in order to draw upon me the hatred of the democracy, you attribute to me intentions for the guillotine with regard to you and all those who, with you, remain Jacobins. You are a man of letters: you must know better than anyone that, despite the vehemence of the discourse, violence is what is most foreign to the soul of the man of letters. Here again, you own me reparation; and in order that it may cost less to your pride, I will give you the example of frankness.
It is true that I appreciate Robespierre’s role and work differently than you do; I think, with many others, that Robespierre was, before Bonaparte, the fatal man who, after having served it energetically, lost the Republic. M. Royer-Collard said one day to M. Odilon Barrot: “I know you, you are Pétion.” Well, I recognise you too, citizen Louis Blanc, you are Robespierre. You have the same love of speaking, the same backward-looking thoughts, the same reactionary ways, and, if I must tell you everything, the same nullity of ideas, the same political incapacity. And, admire the astonishing analogy of the times: you still have, in Pierre Leroux, your Dom Gerle, and I am sure that Catherine Théo will not miss you. Does it follow, because I draw your horoscope thus, that I myself am a Girondin? You alone could claim it. Far from it, I accuse Robespierre precisely of having lost the Republic by precipitating, through the disgust for his petty person and the intolerance of his fanaticism, the fall of the Mountain and the defeat of the Jacobins.
France, bourgeois by its habits and its institutions, is Montagnard by temperament: it prefers, in revolution, coups de mains to methodical transitions; it is after having shown its strength that it consents to return to ideas. That is why our aspirations to freedom have always been disappointed: 1799, 1814, 1830 and 1848 are there to attest to that. At each of these times, the country made an effort to free itself from a corrupting and tyrannical power; but, the ideas not being up to the circumstances, the country again fell back into oppression.
According to this disposition of our dear and unfortunate homeland, and given the speed of events, my predictions, very impartial as you will judge, are that the democratic and social republic will be established under the influence of the ideas of which you are the most prominent mouthpiece; and that one day, soon perhaps, you will occupy that eminent post that you covet in the State. The demagogic carnival, predicted by me, must come to fruition. Events moving faster than ideas, your theory of the State, all imagination, being more easily grasped than the scientific theory of freedom, it seems to me almost inevitable that we will escape the experience of the Luxembourg’s theories. But I predict to you in advance: you will not govern as you imagine, neither you nor anyone else. The worker, whatever favour he may show to your ideas, will not leave the initiative to you this time; he intends to govern himself; you will be the instrument of a disorganised multitude, and you will have compromised, for the second time, the February Revolution, by constantly stirring up revolutionary passion instead of the idea.
This is why I, a republican, against whom you sow distrust and hatred, try today to ward off the danger by casting out into the world some positive ideas that may one day join the democracy and serve as ballast for your deplorable glibness. For, despite the unpopularity to which I expose myself by combating your sad influence, I know full well that my ideas are not wasted. Did not one of your people say to me one day: We will create free credit without you, in spite of you and against you? And is that not what you yourself are already doing, when you stitch the theory of free credit onto your theory of the State!
You still dare to say that after having condemned power in [the hands of] Robespierre, I exalt it in Louis-Philippe; that after having spat upon the Jacobin’s scaffold, I kneel before the dunghill into which the monarch sank.
If I had the slightest sensitivity left for calumnies of this kind, I would not go far to seek my answer. I would apply to you Pascal’s mentiris impudentissime, and leave you there. But I want to treat with more respect the president of those poor delegates of the Luxembourg, who receive your speeches so preciously and admire you so naively. Oblige me, therefore, to tell them, since they take your word for it and do not read me, that what you are doing to me is pure mockery, with the sole aim of pointing me out to patriotic vengeance, in case triumphant neo-Jacobinism creates a batch of reactionaries and aristos. Is he not a reactionary, in fact, who dares to laugh at your so-called Organisation of Labour? Is he not an aristocrat who allows himself an opinion outside the common profession of faith!
To Pierre Leroux:
My dear theosophist,
Your three articles essentially state that I am a conceited person, an eclectic, a liberal, a sophist, a Voltairean, a Fourierist, a Malthusian, an egoist, an atheist, an Erostratus[11], a bourgeois, a proprietor, which does not prevent you from calling me your friend and saying to me: My dear Proudhon; – that I have plundered, without saying a word, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Fourier and yourself; but that if I have taken some of your ideas, it has been with bad intentions, and solely to overturn your doctrine; that after having criticised Louis Blanc, Considérant, Cabet and others, about whom you care in petto as much as I do, I had the audacity to attack you, the victor over M. Cousin and eclecticism, whom I have called a théologastre, while you are well and duly the theologian of socialism; in short, I am not a republican.
You spent fifteen columns of the République reeling off this rosary to me. I ask you: what does all this prove? What an argument for your readers is this myriad of insulting epithets, for the use of the hypocrites of social democracy! And what does it matter to you, great theomacer, great theomime, not to say theomane, of whom I had said nothing, that Louis Blanc and the others, who worked so well after February, were confessed by me ex-officio, since they refuse to speak!
The question you had to answer was very simple, and I had posed it in precise terms.
What is God? I asked myself. And I answered following Kant, following all philosophers, following yourself: We do not know.
What is government? – We do not know.
And I added, by way of commentary: It seems to me that by occupying ourselves with these questions, we seem like astrologers seeking the future in the stars.
You had only one thing to do: it was to show me, empirically or by dialectical formula, what God is, what government is. You had a great opportunity to present your theory! Instead, you are inflamed, you declaim; you treat me as sacrilegious, as a Malthusian, as not a republican! Finally, you threaten to treat me as you did eclecticism, that grand open door of modern philosophy, which you had the glory of breaking down all by yourself. What is the matter with you? What horsefly is biting you? What hypochondria are you prey to? I suspect, if you are not mad, some excitation of the people, some trick of Carlier, as M. de Lareochejacquelein elegantly says. Be careful: we are surrounded by informers, who only think of making us say, when they do not make us do, stupid things.
Do you want me to tell you what I think?
At bottom, you have no other ideas about God, religion, property, government, association than those which I am trying to clarify, whereas you confuse them with the triad, the circulus, the metempsychosis and all sorts of metaphysical and erotic enlightenments. That is why you declare yourself my adversary: it annoys you to see me sow your ideas, like sand, in the public square.
God, you say it yourself, cannot be proven, cannot be explained. – And what else do I say?
Religion, again according to you, is social democracy. – I accept, subject to verification, this definition. I abandoned the word with the thing; you, by abandoning the thing, you deny the word. Nothing is easier than for us to understand each other.
Property, it is always you whom I quote, is the right that every man has to develop himself in the triple physical, moral and intellectual respects. – Thus defined, who would be foolish enough to deny property! I agree with you: I had only believed that property was something else.
After having thus explained yourself about God, religion and property, you declare yourself a supporter of FREE CREDIT, of which you even claim the original idea. Only, you claim that the Bank of the People is nothing but an absurdity, exclusively my invention. This at least proves that, in agreement on the principle and the theory, we differ only on the application. But what would the public say if it learned that the cause of the rebuke you disgorge upon the Bank of the People comes solely from the fact that I had banished from it, in spite of you, any kind of triad? You wanted initially, in the Bank of the People, THREE divisions: Production, Consumption and Circulation. Then you distinguished THREE types of credit: then you established THREE funds. Everything was in threes, multiples and sub-multiples of three. I told you that you knew nothing about book-keeping, and the lectures ended there. How I regret not having published them! Will you tell us one day, metaphysician of the Trimurti, why a pot cannot have three legs, while a cart has four wheels?
In perfect community of ideas on capital and interest on capital, we are also on government. You deny, as I do, the government of man by man. You were the first to say that, in the Republic, each citizen should be his priest and his emperor. You go so far as to reproach me for having stolen the idea from you. Sorry! I did not even know that it was yours; and even if I had known, I would not have believed that it lost anything by passing through my mouth: I have a better reputation than you for knowing what I am talking about.
But who could have put into your mind that double formula: Abolition of the exploitation of man by man and Abolition of the government of man by man; that we affirm, you and I, [but] was on my part a treacherous antinomy, while with you it is simply a deduction? That if I affirmed these two propositions at the same time, it was in order to ruin one by the other, and to perpetuate in this way both the exploitation of man by man, and the government of man by man? How could you have attributed to me this antinomic wickedness, when I never cease to repeat, from one end of my Confessions to the other, that the two phrases are identical and correct, that they derive from the same principle, and serve each other as a corollary. And that is what you are basing your cry from the rooftops that I am not a republican! Once again, is this madness, or slander?
Yes, yes, yes – must I drum it into your ears! – I deny all at once, collectively, identically and synthetically, both the exploitation of man by man, and the government of man by man, and, what you are very wrong to forget, dear Theopompus, the worship of man by man. In denying it, I swear to you, I am making neither antinomy nor antithesis, I do not in the least intend to demolish your Doctrine; I do not even know if you have a doctrine.
The conformity of our sentiments in matters of religion, government, credit and property, thus ascertained, and by your words, and by this harsh claim of ideas, of which, it seems, you would be the father, while I would only be the midwife; is it not a shame for you to come suddenly with brilliance, with scandal, to take up the defence of religion, which rejects you; of government, which repudiates you; of property, which abhors you! What is this crusade of which you are now Peter the Wanderer in favour of religion, of government, of property? What are you attacking? What are you defending? Who, what do you care about? What does this torrent of pedantic ramblings mean, where all that one discovers most clearly is that the idea of the century, the immortal idea, under whose invocation I have very humbly placed my booklet, this idea is yours? Could you not say to your readers, simply, and without calling me Malthusian, Erostratus, proprietor, etc.: Citizens, He who solved the problem of the proletariat, He who alone has the right to raise his hand to heaven and say: My idea is immortal, that man is not Proudhon, it is PIERRE LEROUX! It is ME!
Listen to me, dear Theoglosse. I will spare you, for today, all the follies and absurdities that you have poured out in your three diatribes; I would make you suffer too much by bringing them up again. But, I warn you, I do not like this Jesuit way of slitting a man’s throat whilst kissing him. I prefer a thousand time the avowed, cordial hatred of Louis Blanc to your false good nature. You can accuse my ideas, it is your right; but I forbid you to accuse my intentions: otherwise, I will accuse your good-self; I will mark you so deeply and so ardently that it will be remembered in future generations. It will be, for you, a means of achieving posterity, more surely than the Triad, the Circulus and the Doctrine.
[1] Quousque tandem is a Latin phrase that means “for how much longer?” or “how long will you abuse our patience?”. It is a line from Cicero’s first speech to the Roman Senate. (Translator)
[2] The Luxembourg Commission was initially met at the palais du Luxembourg in Paris, the former seat of the upper house of the French parliament during the July Monarchy. Members of the Chamber of Peers (Chambre des pairs) included most surviving pre-Revolutionary ecclesiastical (Reims, Langres, and Châlons) and lay peerages, with new members appointed by the French king. (Translator)
[3] Man is wolf to man. (Translator)
[4] Joseph Fouché (1759-1820), Minister of Police for the Emperor Napoléon, and several Prefects of Police: Henri Gisquet (1792-1866), Marc Caussidière (1808-61), and Pierre Carlier (1794-1858). (Translator)
[5] Pierre Jules Baroche (1802-70), Republican turned right-wing statesman after 1848, later Minister of Justice; André Dupin (1783-1865), politician and procureur-général; Perrin Dandin, a character from Rabelais notable for passing arbitrary judgements. (Translator)
[6] In the Middle Ages, these were irregular soldiers belonging to organised bands who, in times of war, hired their services to one or other of the parties involved, and, in times of peace, engaged in pillage and brigandage on their own account. (Translator)
[7] “Cellar rats” was the term used under the Ancien Régime for the dreaded agents of the Contributions Indirectes (Indirect Contributions), responsible for the control of wines and alcohols. (Translator)
[8] Achille Fould (1800-67) and Jakob Mayer Rothschild (1792-1868), both Jewish citizens of France, were financiers. (Translator)
[9] Georges Humann (1780-1842), a financier, was also Minister of Finance; Jean Lacave-Laplagne (1795-1849) was a politician and financial minister; Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès (1803-78) was made Minister of Finance in 1848; Hippolyte Philibert Passy (1793-1880) was an economist and politician active on financial matters; Charles Duclerc (1812-88) succeeded Garnier-Pagès as Minister of Finance; The Man With Forty Crowns (L’Homme aux quarante écus) is a fable by Voltaire, published anonymously in 1768, which aimed to oppose the economic and fiscal conceptions of physiocrats, who considered that only agriculture created wealth (unlike industry and commerce, considered as sterile activities) and that only the products of the earth should be taxed.; Turcaret, a greedy money-man, is the protagonist of Alain-René Lesage’s satirical play, Le Financier (1709). (Translator)
[10] Latin for the condition of the party in possession is the better one; a maxim stating that the onus of making out a claim to title in law falls upon the shoulders of the party who makes the claim against the existing possessor. (Translator)
[11] Erostratus syndrome is the desire to become famous at any cost, an unbridled search for notoriety and public recognition which often leads people to commit extreme or controversial acts in order to achieve fame. It is named after Erostratus, who lived in ancient Greece and burned the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus with the sole purpose of going down in history as the person who destroyed one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. (Translator)