Translator: Iain McKay
La Voix du Peuple, 7 December 1849
My dear Pierre Leroux
Would you like us to suspend our polemic for a moment, to have a friendly chat? Put aside your sensitivity and your suspicions: it is a new pact that I propose to you, in which you will not have to put anything of your own.
I am determined to endure everything from you, the most mortifying criticism, the most severe corrections, except that you say of me that I am not a republication, a democrat and a socialist; that I am a villain and an atheist.
Such imputations, addressed not to ideas but to the person, you have no right to express, for the reason that no man in the world has the right to inquire into the intentions of his neighbour. Inquiring into intentions, great God! Do you know, Pierre Leroux, who knows so many things, what that is? It is the inquisition, it is organised denunciation, systematic slander, condemnation without trial, without grounds, without evidence, without corpus delicti.[1] It is the abolition of all fraternity between men, the negation of the Gospel, the apotheosis of Torquemada, of Fouquier-Tinville, of Marat, the glorification of the revolutionary tribunal.
Is it then, Pierre Leroux, that you want to repeat Marat? Are you an incarnation of Fouquier-Tinville? Would your soul have once animated the atrocious figure of Torquemada? What! you cry out so loudly against slander, which I have never used against you, as far as I know; you who compare slander to the assassins dagger, you profess to erect it into a system, under the pretext of inquiring into intentions! Do you therefore already possess canonical infallibility, to arrogate to yourself the right to accuse the intentions of a living man! Do you forget that the slightest error of judgement, while you speak of intentions, becomes slander!
Say as much as you please: Such a proposition, such an idea, does not seem republican to me, all the better! Say that I am mistaken in the way I understand democracy and socialism; prove it in your own way: I have no reason to disagree. I even undertake, as a response, to prove that, apart from your antediluvian fantasies, your opinions on government, property, association, credit, are none other than mine. The public will appreciate it.
But do not go and conclude from what appears to you to be my ideas what you might then take to be my intentions: you have no right to do so. You could not do so without a slanderous intention, without first being yourself guilty of the crime you seek in others.
I am a republican: as I have proven for twelve years. It was necessary to be Pierre Leroux, to have made the Triad, the Circulus and Metempsychosis the criterion of republicanism to discover, after twelve years of fighting for the holy cause of the Republic, that I am not a republican.
I am a democrat: my explanations, endless repeated, of what I mean by an-archy are proof of this. Are there no democrats in France except those who swear with you by the Triad, who believe in the Circulus and Metempsychosis? I greatly fear that on this account there does not exist, there has never existed a republican other than you alone, in all past, present and future republics.
Finally, I am a socialist: I have said a hundred times that socialism, insofar as it limits itself to the criticism of current political economy, and offers its hypotheses for criticism, is a protest; that insofar as it formulates practical and positive ideas, it is the same thing as social science. I protest against current society and I seek science; on both counts, I am a socialist. You have no right to take this status away from me, because I recognise neither the Triad, nor Metempsychosis, nor the Circulus. On this account, Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Louis Blanc, would be no more a socialist than me: you alone would be Socialism, as you alone are Democracy and the Republic.
I reject the definition of atheist, not out of hypocrisy, you should know, nor out of any religious terror; but because this word, taken in the vulgar sense, implies an odious insinuation. The atheist is the abject materialist, without respect for justice and humanity, who makes a law of his egoism, a god of his belly, a cult of the satisfaction of his passions. It is not so, as you know, that Spinoza was an atheist; it is not for such causes that Kant, Fichte, Hegel later deserved the name. The so-called atheism of these great men was nothing other than idealism raised to its highest power, the culmination of metaphysical and religious speculation.
I will not mention the other epithet of enfant terrible that you bestow upon me, after having translated it, lest the public may mistake it for villain. You, who speaks so much of intentions, you naively reveal your own. What! I am an enfant terrible, that is to say, in the language of Pierre Leroux, a villain, because I believe neither in the Triad, nor in the Circulas, nor in Pantheism, nor in Metamorphosis, nor in Metempsychsis! I am a renegade of the Republic, and of Socialism, of all that the People venerate, because I had the scandalous audacity to laugh at your would-be dogmas! You told yourself: “orthodoxy is my doxy”; and thereupon you go around shouting that I am an atheist, a villain, the scourge of the Democratic and Social Republic.
You abuse the consideration with which the people honour you, the opinion they have of your sincerity, your probity, to make me suspect in their eyes. You avenge, by this immolation of my person, a few jokes more cheery than offensive, all this for the greater glory of the Circulus and the Doctrine. Do you know what this means, Pierre Leroux? It is that you prefer your doctrine to the Truth, to Charity, to the Republic.
No, I do not believe in the Triad, nor in the Circulus, nor in Metempsychosis, any more than I believe in the resurrection of the dead and in constitutional monarchy; I am neither theist, nor pantheist, nor atheist. I have no faith, love or hope except in Liberty and Homeland. That is why I systematically oppose everything that seems to me hostile to Liberty, foreign to this sacred land of Gaul. I want my country returned to its original nature, freed once and for all from foreign beliefs, from all alien institutions. For a long time the Greek, the Roman, the Barbarian, the Jew, the English have influenced our race: one gave it its religion, the other its law; this one its feudalism, that one its government.
And as if this long invasion of foreign ideas were not enough, you come to offer us, renewed from Hindustani fables, the Triad, the Circulas, Metempsychosis and castes. You do not want this poor people, the premier of the earth, to regain, with its initiative, its lost auto-mathie. You forbid them to live their own life, to speak to the world of the abundance of their heart and their genius; for their legitimate inspiration you substitute metempsychosis and the triad.
Ah! you who reproach me for not being a republican, you are not of your land. You have not heard, like me, since childhood, the oak trees of our druidic forests weep for the ancient homeland: you do not feel your bones, moulded from the pure limestone of the Jura, thrill at the memory of our Celtic heroes, Vercingetorix dragged in triumph by Caesar, Orgetorix, Ariovistus, and that old Calgacus defeated by Agricola; you did not see, on the banks of our Alpine torrents, liberty appear to you in the guise of Velleda the Gaul.
You are a not a child of Brennus: you understand nothing of this restoration of our nationality, which, beyond economic reform and the transformation of a debased society, appears as the highest aim of the February Revolution. You are on the side of the foreigner; this is why Freedom, which was everything for our ancestors, is odious to you; this is why you understand nothing of the work to which I am dedicated, and why you slander my intentions; this is why you bring us the Triad, the Circulus and the Doctrine.
Speak then, Pierre Leroux, since you have knowledge; but do not touch Freedom, and above all do not slander: that is all I have to say. You will not find me lacking in good manners.
[1] Corpus delicti is a common law Latin phrase that translates to “body of the crime.” The phrase generally refers to the principle that no one should be convicted of a crime without sufficient evidence that the crime actually occurred. (Translator)