Andr้ L้o
1869
V Right[1]
With the exception of a few serious minds, our epoch lives from day to day with facts rather than ideas, and facts without grandeur. The gossip to which current politics is reduced, the news of the artistic world and the salons, and this sad balance-sheet which under the title of journalism exposes the miseries, the crimes, the aberrations of every day, that limits itself to the intellectual and moral nourishment of the greatest number. It is not that it is empty of lessons, but the marrow is not extracted and these facts give those who live on them only a passing interest, taken in isolation from their consequences and their causes: the simple appetite for the incident, the love of the child for the tale; in the mind as in the newspaper, they remain unrelated, without order, separated by dividers. We think little; time is lacking; taste especially. Life, entirely devoted to the pursuit of the personal, immediate goal, harassed by social competition, is so breathless! Everything happens in haste and in the form of competition: action, thought. Going back to the sources takes too long.
Likewise, within the individual as in the masses there is a lack of connection and tradition. Among many hatreds, anxieties, impulses, fears, a few certain ideas. Here, aggressive ambitions; there, the desire to conserve taken to fury. Even within parties, minds float between ideas and facts of opposing origin; authoritarians encumber the camp of liberty; many people of good will slumber in the camp of privilege; individual life is made of compromise; social life is cluttered with crumbling structures, that we support much less out of love of the past than for fear of the future; for every dogma, custom; [self-]interest proclaimed the sole beneficial guide by honesty itself, discouraged; in the face of triumphant murder and lying, the conscience is forced to inevitable resignation; in the world of the mind, a chaos of keen assertions, questionable evidence, dazzling paradoxes, lost reputations, overrated personalities, tattered truths; no clear guidance; yesterdays dates forgotten or struck-out; old instincts, the blood of our ancestors, struggling in us against new perceptions; all things called into question; nothing left standing but habits.
We have a faith, however, a new faith; but [it is] so little known that many are anxious about its absence, and, colliding with it at every step, do not see it. We act above all by instinct, by fragmented opinions, under the influence of ideas floating in the atmosphere of the nineteenth century. We demand justice by denying it to others; everyone exerts himself with a view of himself alone. Most democrats are the last to understand that all rights are interdependent and have a common birthplace, [a common] principle.
Also, it is not amongst them that woman finds her least bitter adversaries. On this question, the revolutionaries become conservatives, and illogicality is imparted at the same time as dogmas and prejudices. More specifically, those whom we call republicans are on this subject the most rabid, and this is understandable: minds attached above all to form are necessarily superficial. Since they never go far, and only have a limited horizon, they hardly know where they come from, what principle created them. They are rebels, not renovators. Government hinders them, it is necessary that they fight against it. But much more as competitors than enemies, if they besiege it, it is to seize it, not to destroy it. The republican strictly speaking has not yet left the monarchical world. He has faith in force, in coups de main, in dictatorship. He is indignant at obeying, not at commanding. He does not know how to extend to others his own pride. Love and justice are lacking in his faith.
These so-called lovers of liberty, if they cannot all take part in the direction of the State, at least they will be able to have a little kingdom for their personal use, each at home. When we put gunpowder to divine right, it was not for every male (Proudhonian style) to have a piece. Order in the family without hierarchy seems impossible to them. Well, then, and in the State?
The socialists themselves, although more profound, and more consistent with revolutionary principles, are divided on the subject of women.
This question is so urgent, its time so now, that it was the first to be debated at public meetings and was discussed fiercely for more than three months in its general considerations, despite the agenda being limited to work.
It was there that a strange theory arose, in opposition to the individual right advanced by the proponents of the full right of women as for every human being to liberty, to equality.
They said No, the social unit is not the individual, it is the family, therefore hierarchical: father, mother, child. And the reasons for this strange dogma of a new trinity, no less dogmatic and mystical than the old, were found, as always, in the peculiar nature of woman and in the necessity of order within the family.
And as always, each speaker presented his Eve, moulded by his own hand, but always drawn from Adams rib, tender and feeble, a masterpiece of grace and inconsistency, sublime, yet devoid of any moral sense and common sense! And covered with flowers, she was thrown out not only of the Republic but out of work; for woman, that delicate and charming being, born for the pleasure of man, must neither be toughened, nor emancipated, by labour. They forgot to prove that she could feed herself with love and dew. It is true that man was responsible for her sustenance. But what if he does not do it? This point was not touched upon. This rhetoric was too noble to speak of the dreadful and ever-increasing number of abandoned children, of deserted girls, of prostitutes and courtesans, of workers exhausted by overwork and poverty; nor of the mothers of the family beaten, exploited and robbed by their husbands; nor of this traffic in dowries, in marriages, which mirrors the exploitation of poor girls in cohabitation. Literature has its requirements: the strong, chivalrous man must necessarily appear opposite the tender and weak creature that you know. Antithesis is needed at all costs.
Let us loudly repeat it: the desire to maintain the supremacy of man over women has been able, very recently, in our century, to push democrats to these conclusions: that industrial work should be forbidden to women; that they should be fed by the man. A strange social system, let us admit it, which would make the existence of woman the duty of the man, and would give the life of the former as the stake for the forgetfulness of duty amongst the latter! Would this not constitute, for the benefit of each male being, a small absolute monarchy that would exceed the beautiful right of life and death of the Roman head of the family? For here the sentence does not even require the least offence, nor the embarrassment of a fit of anger; it is enough not to want; it is enough to be selfish [which is] in no hurry to disappear, it seems.
They did not think about it; but such a system requires a sanction. It is absolutely necessary to complement it with a law which decrees for every man, at such-and-such an age, marriage or death. After all, since death must follow, is it not more just that the bachelor is guilty? Simply, who will feed the unloved? We would inevitably see in France the pyres of Malabar.[2] Would humpback or epileptic girls be fed by the State?
The statute-book almost becomes a monument of freedom and equality in comparison with these theories.
Whoever in a hundred years will judge the current time by its allegations about, against, and even for women, will issue a severe judgement. On any issue, after all, books, systems, speeches, words, also bear the imprint of this debauchery of ideas which speaks to the disorder of morals. There, without faith, without study, outside of every school and every party, as of all logic, each expresses their interests or their prejudices. There, more than elsewhere, minds float at random, and all seek to cobble together compromises. In this respect there is no longer either democrats or conservatives; there are only vanities, alongside a few consciences.
Moreover, these appetites and these vanities, equally exalted by passion, are not mistaken. It is of the most grand and most radical of reforms that we are talking about: laws, morals, characteristics. Woman equal to man in society is prostitution forever destroyed. It is love purified by freedom, by the very force of things. It is morality passing from right into fact; at the same time as the last and strongest monarchical root pulled out, and democracy founded on the only solid foundation that it can occupy: morals.
Indeed, how could liberty reign in the State, as long as despotism reigns in the family? Do we think we can command the human soul to turn its feelings around, as we command an acrobat to charge in twelve steps? Do we believe that the maternal breast is only a hotel for the child? Only a purely material food? Do we still admit the radical, and fantastic, separation of body and soul? Or, with the Hindu code, that the woman is only the field where the seed germinates? Nature is constantly spoken of, and we seem not to see that everything is intertwined, that nothing is isolated, that arbitrary divisions, these violent contrasts, these absurd inconsistences only exist in our minds.
No, woman is not a thing, a pure receptacle. She moulds her child with her feelings and ideas as with her flesh; as a slave, she can only create slaves, and, according to what she is and the education she has received, her milk contains unhealthy germs or heroic ferments.
On the other hand, what is a despot, if not another form of slave? Will freedom be made better with masters than with subjects? Put these together or separately under a pestle, you will never get anything from it but brutality, servility, violence, injustice and cowardice, in roughly equal proportions. The Democracy believes it exists: it is only in a dream state within the old monarchical body wherein it still lies, and through whose brain it thinks. It has no organism of its own, nor even a language. It awaits the womb that must form it, the free mother who will give birth to it.
In the future we will regard them as monuments of illogicality these democrats who, in the aftermath of the famous declaration, Credo, explicitly incomplete without doubt but complete in power, of the new order:
Men are born free and equal in rights.
The goal of every political association is the conservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man.[3]
Claim to sacrifice half of humanity to a dogmatic conception, to absorb woman into the family, and to build yet another fiction on this worn-out pretext of all despotisms: order.
Eighty years have passed since the inauguration of human rights and it is still an almost bizarre novelty to demand justice for women, bent since the beginning of the world under a double yolk, as slaves doubly enslaved, a slave always within the free family, and even now, in our civilisations, deprived of all initiative, of all growth, delivered either to the depravations of inactivity or to those of poverty, and everywhere and always subject to the demoralising effects of the shameful mixture of dependence and love.
And here is the spectacle that the democracy presents:
It proclaims freedom necessary for the dignity and morality of the human being; it expects from it the development of every generous feeling, prosperity, the happiness of the world, and its grand sublime blossoming.
But, when talking of woman, freedom immediately becomes an object of suspicion and terror. It would be incompatible with the exercise of duty.
The democracy sees in science the redemption of humanity, the light that purifies and fertilises the depths of superstition and ignorance, the limitless field in which all intellects must meet and unite.
But it thinks it prudent to instruct women only with reserve. Science for woman would be a poison.
The democracy believes in association as the natural antidote to competition and hierarchy. It therefore believes in the agreement of interests, unity of views, free grouping by affinity, by love. Indeed, without the possibility of association, that is to say of agreement and peace between equals, democracy is a crazy pretence, a dream, and the world has to seek refuge only in monarchy, under the aegis of the saviours of society.
However, the democrats see in marriage no other guarantee of order and peace than obedience. They cry out: there must be a chief, a directorship; who will decide?
They admit association between strongboxes; it is a social habit; but in the home, where the most powerful moral and material interests command it, where love establishes it, it is a chimera.
It is their conviction that freedom given to woman would unerringly turn her into a monster of selfishness and shamelessness.
That without the [current] laws, the family would no longer exist; that love, trust, dignity, are not practical.
But what, then, is the faith which distinguishes them, these so-called democrats, from those who deny the greatness of liberty, and slander human nature?
Could they not leave it to their adversaries to claim that the great truths on which our present and our future are based are empty words, good only for harangue and for battle? But that in reality, we must always return to the old system of order by oppression [compression] and by hierarchy.
Order, this eternal pretext, what in the end is it?
Peace?...
But until now the whole history of mankind struggles, revolts, wars, massacres, atrocities, rapes, miseries seems to be that of a sick man in the throes of delirium and the convulsions of a hot fever. It is also the history of the system of order by oppression.
And it is after thousands of centuries of such an experiment that they still come to plead order to justify oppression! And it has not been sufficiently understood in the democratic party itself that these two words order and oppression are two ideas that exclude each other, two born enemies, who scream at the strange association imposed upon them!
Order, that spirit of the past raised to the importance of a cause, or a divine law, is only an effect from a democratic point of view. In the conception of the past, order is immobility. In a democracy, on the contrary, it results from movement and the free play of forces. It is harmony of right and duty.
To invoke order as an argument to legitimise oppression, the violation of a right, the smothering of a will, is to speak the language of all revealers, from Manu to Joe Smith.[4] It is to legitimise the power of Caesar Augustus, the Holy Church, the Holy Inquisition, and St. Bartholomew, including the massacres at the Abbey. It is to embalm this corpse of the old world which weighs so cruelly on the new; since it is in the name of order that tyranny is still imposed. It was in the name of order, also, that a spurred legislator discussed in France in the XIX century the usefulness of polygamy, robbed woman of all dignity, the mother of all rights, and punished the illegitimate child for the misconduct of the father. Order in its old meaning has never been more than the silence of the oppressed, that is to say the hypocrisy of disorder. True order is the world we are seeking. It is the complete realisation of the three great words liberty, equality, fraternity and not in the ways of despotism.
All men are born free and equal in rights.
Every era has its light and its darkness. This was a storm, and the unfinished lighting did not embrace the whole sky.
Who could deny, however, that from this time right has a new basis, and that the whole social order is in principle renewed? Replace the word: men by: human beings; the spirit is the same and the ambiguity ceases. Whoever would seek an exception in this thought, as broad as humanity itself, would understand nothing of the impulse which formulated it.
Then finally, what does it matter this omission, or rather this veil, that left part of the truth obscure? Right, which is eternal, does not depend on the more or less far-sightedness of an era, however great it may be.
What matters is the incontestable fact that we live at this time; the principle from which henceforth everything arises, around which all that must live intertwines and from which everything that dies moves away, individual right. Embodied henceforth in the human spirit, this principle has become like a natural social law which necessarily, either by proponents [les semblables] or by opponents [les contraires], mysteriously or in plain sight, completes its evolution, and will continue until its complete realisation in equality. Its march, at once audacious and dull, is irregular: it goes from the whole idea to the incomplete fact, clearing its path through endless ruins; it leaps with one bound to universal suffrage and falls back; but it takes ignorance by the throat and does not let go. In what does it consist? In conquest? or in birth, as before? In immunities brought, or redeemed, in cash? In genius? In education? In an unspecified capacity? No, none of that: in the being itself; in the indomitable strength of a conscious will, which recognises in its domain no suzerain; which, in the moral order, apart from what concerns the rights of others, is accountable only to itself; which in the intellectual order has no judge, for it can always appeal; because an opinion opposite an opinion are to each other like two units of the same order, as one is to one.
Thus right is only the result of existence. The human being, the individual, has become the unit of measurement for a new mathematics, a new order. By that, everything is suddenly overturned, from the bottom to the top, and the Revolution divides history into two eras, the second of which is yesterday. It is no longer a question of charters granted from above, either by the deity itself or by his anointed. Living and palpable reality, in human form, replaces arbitrary conceptions; study replaces revelation; the social order is nothing more than the harmony of individual rights; all relationships change.
The society of the past was made on the model it was always necessary of a living organism: a head, a body, arms and legs.[5]
Brahmanism was the most pronounced expression of this conception, which is found more or less in all other systems. The famous apologue of Menenius Agrippa (still taught in our schools) shows that this ideal was that of the Roman Republic. There was no other then. The natural instincts of the people, then as now, posed the social question; but ignorance of true right found nothing to answer Menenius and badly convinced, but reduced to silence, the people descended from the Aventine.[6] It could not plead that every human being, being a complete organism, which is sufficient in itself, cannot consent to play the part of a mere cog in a monstrous organism; that society is not a structure to be built, following such or such laws of equilibrium, but a set of associated forces.
Throughout the past until 89, we would search in vain for the revelation of human right. We find the inspiration of freedom, nowhere is its expression in the equality of right. Always the impulse is given from top to bottom. Everywhere temples, from which revelation descends, thrones for immediate command, or, in the absence of the throne, the aristocracy; in the absence of the aristocracy, oligarchy; finally everywhere, as a social necessity, more or less extensive, slavery, the slavery that in the XVIII century Rousseau still presents, naively, as the probably necessary condition for the liberty of the citizen.
In this construction, all hierarchical despite the forms and names inequality of conditions being regarded as necessary for order, man was only a more or less important cog of the machine, the being was inferior to society, like the part to the whole. That seemed mathematical; only, this mathematics forgot life. Life does not lie in society, but in the being alone, in the individual who feels, thinks and wills, whose impressions are exalted, or corrected, in contact with those of others; but takes place only in itself, and cannot exist elsewhere.
We have not yet sufficiently understood the madness of these conceptions formed outside of the self, the unique place of human life, and the inanity of an ideal which is fulfilled elsewhere than in the being. The advantages of a plan which harms the individual, which cannot be enjoyed by this plan itself, are obviously lacking all merit.
Yet, since the world has known itself, human beings have always been sacrificed to the idea of order. And not a few to the many (which would still be wrong and unjust, but more plausible) but the very many to the few. This fact is generally explained in history by the Machiavellianism of the privileged; but that is too petty a spring for an universal and so durable effect. Without a general common conception, this little calculation would have been too easily overturned, by a simple sum made by the multitude. This conception, common to the privileged and the exploited, was the apologue of the limbs and the stomach, the conviction that to direct the great social body, a head was needed.
How can it be doubted, when this conception still generally reigns amongst us?
Yes, fortunately, there is much less cowardice than error in human abdications. In all times, humanity has sacrificed itself to its ideal, however futile it was; it put heroism into its deception.
But now that human right has been understood, that the two systems, one nascent, the other expiring, meet in a supreme struggle, we must agree on what belongs to one or to the other, and separate the two camps.
When they oppose the demands of woman for freedom and equality, when they come to formulate a constitution of the family whose first article is the subjugation of the woman, and her material dependence, it must at least be admitted that they still live in the spirit of the past, that they are the champion of the old order, against the principles of the new order.
If the human being is free by the mere fact of their existence; if the conscience is inviolable; if there is no jurisdiction for thought; and if justice is finally realised in the living and conscious being, what is the reason to exclude women from the inherent right of every individual of the human species? Utility? It has no right against right. Against right, it does not even exist. Utility, in the old order, was an enormous mystification; it is nothing more than arbitrariness, and we fall back into this nonsense which sacrifices the individual to society, the being to the abstraction. Utility, in the true order, merges with justice, which is measured by the individual being.
A physical inferiority? But the social contract aims to replace the right of the strongest by common rights.
A moral inferiority? But there is no morality without freedom, without responsibility.
An intellectual inferiority? Without repeating all that has already been said on this very point if woman were less intelligent, would it follow that she should have been deprived of her right? Does she have less to the degree that you please thought, consciousness, will, in short what constitutes equality of nature, consequently equality of right. Is it a diploma of doctoral capacity that is issued to every voter? No, a simple card bearing the name of a human person. And this is so because it is impossible to do otherwise. Has there ever been any attempt to attach the right to vote to a certificate of intellectual capacity? Who would dare to sign it? We obtain educational certificates on special facts, on specific knowledge; but where is the human being who can say to his fellow: I know your limits; I incorporate you, I exceed you and I judge you; I am your God And when his presumptuousness dares to say it, is not the simple challenge of the judged sufficient to restore equality between them? Negation against affirmation, the balance is made. To base right on capacity we would have to simply do this: determine the exact degree of intensity of each intelligence, feminine or otherwise, and the precise limit where each ends.
Even suppose this work is done human intelligence being progressive and modifying its data in contact with events, it would be necessary to redo this work every day, every hour All this is impossible, is it not? Yes; and that is a pity; for by virtue of this principle, that more capacity confers more rights, our consistent democrats, whose principle argument against the freedom of women is drawn from the hypothesis of their intellectual inferiority, would be forced to turn back to the purest aristocracy, then to monarchy, finally, to the papacy of the strongest brain to this past, in short, whose spirit still animates them and inspires these inconsistencies.
In short, either the principle upon which modern society coalesces very slowly is false, or woman as well as man possesses the natural and inalienable right restored to humanity by the Revolution. In her as in him the unity of nature and the diversity of manifestation demand their double right of equality and freedom. It is necessary to return to the old ideal of a society built upon an arbitrary plan, declared divine by its authors, a plan that sacrifices the being to a preconceived idea[7], or else it is necessary to take as a basis of right, and of any social combination, human unity, an irreducible measure, a living formula, at once precise and progressive, of truth and justice.
[1] A previous translation appears in A Libertarian Reader (Active Distribution, 2023) volume 1. We have taken the opportunity to revise it for publication here. (Translator)
[2] A reference to Sati, an obsolete Hindu funeral custom where a widow immolates herself on her husbands pyre. The French dramatist Antoine-Marin Lemierre (1733-1793) wrote a tragedy on this theme entitled La Veuve de Malabar (The Widow of Malabar) in 1770. (Translator)
[3] The first sentences of Articles I and II, respectively, of the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1789, agreed by the National Constituent Assembly at the start of the French Revolution. (Black Flag)
[4] Manu has various meanings in Hinduism, here referring to the title or name of fourteen mystical Kshatriya rulers of earth. Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1844) was an American religious leader, founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. (Translator)
[5] Man has always made everything in his image, society like God. Only, here, an error in the plan spoils everything; as he sought unity outside of the hearth, the great out of the simple, he ends up with the monstrous and the chimerical.
[6] Menenius Agrippa (died 493 BC) was a consul of the Roman Republic in 503 BC. According to Livy, writing five hundred years after the fact, Menenius was chosen by the patricians to persuade the plebs to end their secession in 494 BC and told a fable about the parts of the human body and how each has its own purpose in the greater function of the body. The rest of the body thought the stomach was getting a free ride so the body decided to stop nourishing the stomach. Soon, the other parts became fatigued and unable to function so they realized that the stomach did serve a purpose and they were nothing without it. The stomach represented the patrician class and the other body parts represented the plebs. An accord was eventually reached between the patricians and the plebs. (Translator
[7] That is to say, to recreate a religious or aristocratic society; but with what? To found something in humanity requires a belief or a principle.