#ATTACH p-j-pierre-joseph-proudhon-the-federative-principl-2.pdf
#title The Federative Principle
#subtitle and the Need to Reconstitute the Party of Revolution
#author Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#LISTtitle Federative Principle
#date 1863
#source https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/NPL-Federative_Principle-draft-2024.pdf
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-09-02T08:02:34.564Z
#authors Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#topics anarchist federation, federalism, federations, mutualism, organization, revolution, classics
#notes Translator: Shawn P. Wilbur.

** Draft Translation by Shawn P. Wilbur

LAST REVISED, MAY 19, 2024.

[These *draft translations* are part of on ongoing effort to translate
both editions of *Proudhon’s* *Justice in the Revolution and in the
Church* into English, together with some related works, as the first
step toward establishing an edition of Proudhon’s works in English. They
are very much a *first step,* as there are lots of decisions about how
best to render the texts which can only be answered in the course of the
translation process. It seems important to share the work as it is
completed, even in rough form, but the drafts are not suitable for
scholarly work or publication elsewhere in their present state. — Shawn
P. Wilbur, translator]

** FOREWORD

When, a few months ago, in relation to an article on Italy in which I
defended federation against unity, the Belgian newspapers accused me of
preaching the annexation of their country to France, my surprise was no
small thing. I did not know which to believe, a hallucination by the
public or an ambush by the police, and my first word was to ask my
denunciators if they had read my work; in that case, if they seriously
made such a reproach to me. We know how this incredible quarrel ended
for me. I had been in no hurry, after an exile of more than four years,
to take advantage of the amnesty which authorized me to return to
France; I relocated abruptly.

But when, back in the country, I saw, and on the same pretext, the
democratic press accusing me of abandoning the cause of the Revolution,
shouting against me, no longer as an annexationist, but as an apostate,
I admit that my astonishment was overwhelming. I wondered if I was an
Epimenides emerging from his cave after a century of sleep, or if by
chance it was not French democracy itself which, following in the
footsteps of Belgian liberalism, had undergone a retrograde movement. It
seemed to me that federation and counter-revolution or annexation were
incompatible terms, but it was repugnant to me to believe in the mass
defection of the party to which I had hitherto attached myself, which,
not content with denying its principles, was going, in its fever for
unification, to the point of betraying its country. Was I going crazy?

Like Lafontaine’s rat,

       Suspecting some machine still below,

I thought the wisest thing to do was to postpone my answer and observe
the state of minds for some time. I felt that I was going to have to
take an energetic resolution, and I needed, before acting, to orient
myself on a ground which, since my departure from France, seemed to me to
have been upset, and where the men I had known appeared to me with
strange faces.

Where is the French people today, I wondered? What happens in the
different classes of the Society? What idea has germinated in public
opinion, and what are the masses dreaming of? Where is the nation going?
Where is the future? Who do we follow, and by what do we swear?…

I went on like this, questioning men and things, searching in anguish
and receiving only sorry answers. Let the reader allow me to share my
observations with him: they will serve as an excuse for a publication of
which I confess that the object is far beyond my powers.

I first considered the middle class, what used to be called
*bourgeoisie,* and which can no longer bear this name. I found it
faithful to its traditions, its tendencies, its maxims, although
advancing with an accelerated step towards the proletariat. Let the
middle class once again become mistress of itself and of the Power; let
it be called upon to remake for itself a Constitution according to its
ideas and a policy according to its heart, and one can predict with
certainty what will happen. Disregarding any dynastic preference, the
middle class will revert to the system of 1814 and of 1830, except
perhaps for a slight modification concerning the royal prerogative,
analogous to the amendment made to article 14 of the Charter, after the
revolution of July. Constitutional monarchy, in a word, is still the
political faith and the secret wish of the bourgeois majority. This is
the measure of the confidence it has in itself; neither its thought nor
its energy goes beyond that. But, precisely because of this monarchist
predilection, the middle class, although it has many and strong roots in
the present, although, by intelligence, wealth, number, it forms the
most considerable portion of the nation, cannot be considered as the
expression of the future; it reveals itself as the party par excellence
of the *status quo,* it is the *status quo* personified.

I then cast my eyes on the government, on the party of which it is most
especially the organ, and, I must say, I found them both at bottom
always the same, faithful to the Napoleonic idea, in spite of the
concessions wrung from them by, on the one hand, the spirit of the
century and, on the other, the influence of this middle class, outside
of which and against which no government is possible. Let the Empire be
restored to all the frankness of its tradition, let its power be equal to
its will, and tomorrow we shall have, with the splendors of 1804 and
1809, the frontiers of 1812; we shall see again the third Empire of the
West with its tendencies towards universality and its inflexible
autocracy. Now, precisely because of this fidelity to its idea, the
Empire, although it is actuality itself, cannot claim to be the
expression of the future, since by asserting itself as conqueror and
autocratic, it would deny liberty, since it has itself, by promising a
*crowning* *achievement,* posed as a transitional government. *The
Empire is peace,* said Napoleon III. So be it; but then how could the
Empire, no longer being war, not be the *status quo?*

I have seen the Church, and I willingly do it this justice: it is
immutable. Faithful to its dogma, to its morality, to its discipline, as
to its God, it makes no concessions to the century except in form; it
does not adopt its spirit, it does not walk with it. The Church will be
for eternity, if you will, the highest formula of the *status quo:* it
is not progress; it cannot be the expression of the future.

Like the middle class and the dynastic parties, like the Empire and the
Church, the Democracy is also of the present; it will be so as long as
there are classes superior to it, a royalty and noble aspirations, a
Church and a priesthood; as long as political, economic and social
leveling has not been accomplished. Since the French Revolution, the
Democracy has taken *Liberty, Equality* as its motto. As, by its nature
and function, it is movement, life, its watchword was: *Forward!* The
Democracy could therefore claim to be, and only it can be the expression
of the future; this is, indeed, after the fall of the first Empire and
during the advent of the middle class, what the world believed. But to
express the future, to realize its promises, we need principles, a
right, a science, a policy, all things for which the Revolution seemed
to have laid the foundations. Now, behold, an unheard of thing, the
Democracy proves to be unfaithful to itself; it has broken with its
origins, it is turning its back on its destiny. Its conduct for three
years has been an abdication, a suicide. No doubt it has not ceased to
be of the present: as part of the future, it no longer exists. The
democratic conscience is empty: it is a deflated balloon, which a few
cliques, a few political intriguers take back, but that no one has the
secret of reinflating. No more ideas: in their place, romantic
fantasies, myths of idols. 89 is on the sidelines; 1848 is scorned. For
the rest, neither political sense, nor moral sense, nor common sense;
ignorance at its height, the inspiration of the great days totally lost.
What posterity will not be able to believe is that among the multitude
of readers paid for by a favored press, there is scarcely one in a
thousand who suspects, even instinctively, what the word *federation*
means. Doubtless the annals of the Revolution could not teach us much
here; but in the end we are not the party of the future to become
immobilized in the passions of another age, and it is the duty of
Democracy to produce its ideas, to modi its motto accordingly.
Federation is the new name under which Liberty, Equality, the Revolution
with all its consequences, appeared, in the year 1859, to Democracy.
Liberals and Democrats saw in it only a reactionary plot!… Since the
institution of universal suffrage, the Democracy, considering that its
reign had come, that its government had proved itself, that there was
nothing left to discuss but the choice of men, that it was the supreme
formula of order, wanted to constitute itself in turn as a *status quo*
party. It is not, far from it, mistress of the affairs that it already
arranges for immobility. But what to do when one is called the
Democracy, when one represents the Revolution and one has arrived at
immobility? The Democracy thought that its mission was to repair ancient
injustices, to resurrect wounded nations, in a word, to remake history!
That’s what it expresses by the word NATIONALITY written at the head of
its new program. Not content with being part of the *status* *quo,* it
has made itself a retrograde party. And since Nationality, as the
Democracy understands and interprets it, has *Unity* as its corollary,
it has put the seal on its abjuration, by definitively declaring itself
an absolute, indivisible and immutable power.

Nationality and Unity, these then are the faith, the law, the reason of
State of today; these are the gods of the Democracy. But Nationality is
for it only a word, since in the thought of the democrats it represents
only shadows. As for Unity, we will see, in the course of this writing,
what it is necessary to think of the unitary mode. But I can say in the
meantime, with regard to Italy and the changes to which the political
map of this country has been subjected, that this unity for which so
many so-called friends of the people and progress, is nothing else, in
the minds of the skillful, than a *business,* a big business, half
dynastic and half bankocratic, glazed with liberalism, blotchy with
conspiracy, to which honest republicans, badly informed or taken for
dupes, serve as chaperones.

As it is with the democracy, so it is with journalism. Since the time
when I stigmatized, in the *Handbook of the Stock Exchange Speculator,*
the mercenary role of the press, this role has not changed; it has only
extended the circle of its operations. All that it once possessed of
reason, wit, criticism, knowledge, eloquence, is summed up, with rare
exceptions, in these two words that I borrow from the vocabulary of the
trade: EXHAUSTION and *Promotion.* The Italian affair having been
committed to the newspapers, neither more nor less than if it had been a
question of a limited partnership, these estimable squares of paper,
like a claque that obeys the signal of the chief, began by calling me a
*mystifier, juggler, bourbonnian, papalin, Erostrate, renegade,
sell-out:* I abridge the kyrielle. Then, assuming a calmer tone, they
began to recall that I was the irreconcilable enemy of the Empire and of
all government, of the Church and of all religion, as well as of all
morality; a materialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a kind of literary
Catiline sacrificing everything, even modesty and common sense, to the
rage to get people talking about him, and whose henceforth stale tactic
was, by slyly associating the cause of the Emperor with that of the
Pope, pushing them both against the democracy, to ruin all parties and
all opinions through each other, and to erect a monument to my pride on
the ruins of the social order. This was the basis of the reviews of the
*Siècle,* of the *Opinion nationale,* of the *Presse,* of the *Écho de
la Presse,* of the *Patrie,* of the *Pays,* of the *Débats:* I omit
some, because I have not read everything. It was recalled, on this
occasion, that I had been the principal cause of the fall of the
Republic; and there have been democrats soft enough in their brains to
whisper in my ear that such a scandal would never happen again, that the
democracy had returned from the follies of 1848, and that the first to
whom it intended its conservative bullets, was me.

I would not like to appear to attribute to ridiculous violence, worthy
of the papers that inspire it, more importance than it deserves; I cite
them as an influence of contemporary journalism and testimony to the
state of mind. But if my self-esteem as an individual, if my conscience
as a citizen is above such attacks, it is not the same with my dignity
as a writer interpreting the Revolution. I have had enough of the
outrages of a decrepit democracy and the insults of its newspapers. After
December 10, 1848, seeing the mass of the country and all the power of
the State turned against what seemed to me to be the Revolution, I tried
to get closer to a party which, if it was devoid of ideas, was still
worthy by its numbers. It was a fault, which I bitterly regretted, but
from which there is still time to come back. Let us be ourselves, if want
to be something; let us form, if necessary, with our adversaries and our
rivals, federations, never mergers. What has been happening to me for
three months has made up my mind, and there is no going back. Between a
party fallen into romanticism, which in a philosophy of right has been
able to discover a system of tyranny, and in the maneuvers of
speculation a progress; for whom the morals of absolutism are a
republican virtue, and the prerogatives of liberty a revolt; between
that party, I say, and the man who seeks the truth of the Revolution and
its justice, there can be nothing in common. The separation is
necessary, and, without hatred as without fear, I accomplish it.

During the first revolution, the Jacobins, feeling from time to time the
need to retemper their society, carried out on themselves what was then
called a purge. It is to a demonstration of this kind that I invite what
remains of the sincere and enlightened friends of the ideas of 89.
Assured of the support of an elite, counting on the common sense of the
masses, I, for my part, break with a faction that no longer represents
anything. Even if there were never more than a hundred of us, that is
enough for what I dare to undertake. From time immemorial truth has
served its persecutors; when I should fall victim to those I am
determined to fight, I will at least have the consolation of thinking
that once my voice has been stifled my thought will obtain justice, and
that sooner or later my own enemies will be my apologists.

But what am I saying? There will be neither battle nor execution: the
judgment of the public has justified me in advance. Hasn’t it been
rumored, repeated by several newspapers, that the answer I am publishing
at the moment would be entitled *Les Iscariotes?…* There is no such
justice as that of opinion. Alas! It would be wrong to give my pamphlet
this bloody title, for some too deserved. For two months that I have
been studying the state of souls, I have been able to realize that if
democracy is teeming with Judases, there are still many more Saints
Peter there, and I write for the latter at least as much for the former.
So I gave up the joy of a *vendetta;* I will consider myself very happy
if, like the rooster of the Passion, I can make so many weak courages
return to themselves, and restore to them both understanding and
conscience.

Since, in a publication whose form was more literary than didactic,
people have affected not to grasp the thought that was its soul, I am
forced to return to the procedures of school and to argue within the
rules. I therefore divide this work, which is much longer than I would
have liked, into three parts: the first, the most important for my
political ex-co-religionists, whose reason is suffering, will aim to lay
down the principles of the matter; — in the second, I will apply these
principles to the Italian question and to the general state of affairs,
and I will show the madness and immorality of the unitary policy; — in
the third, I will respond to the objections of those gentlemen
journalists, benevolent or hostile, who have thought it their duty to
concern themselves with my last work, and I will show by their example
the danger that the reason of the masses runs, under the influence of a
theory destructive of all individuality.

I beg the persons, of whatever opinion they may be, who, while more or
less rejecting the basis of my ideas, have received my first
observations on Italy with some respect, to continue their sympathy. It
will not be up to me, in the intellectual and moral chaos into which we
are plunged, at this hour when parties are distinguished, like knights
who fought in tournaments, only by the color of their ribbons, that men
of good will, from all over the horizon, do not finally find a sacred
ground on which they can at least stretch out a loyal hand and speak a
common language. This land is that of Right, Morality, Liberty, respect
for Humanity in short, in all its manifestations, Individual, Family,
Association, City; a land of pure and frank Justice, where all generous
souls fraternize, without distinction of party, school or cult, regrets
or hopes. As for this dilapidated section of the democracy, which
thought it was making me ashamed of what it calls the *applause* of the
legitimist, clerical and imperial press, I will only say one word to it
for the moment, and that is the shame, if there is shame, is all for it.
It was up to it to applaud me: the greatest service I can render it will
be to have proved that to it.

* PART ONE OF THE PRINCIPLE OF FEDERATION

** CHAPTER ONE. POLITICAL DUALISM. — AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY: OPPOSITION AND CONNECTION OF THESE TWO NOTIONS.

Before saying what is meant by *federation,* it is worth recalling in a
few pages the origin and filiation of the idea. The theory of the
federal system is quite new: I even believe I can say that it has not
yet been presented by anyone. But it is intimately linked to the general
theory of governments, let us speak more precisely, it is the necessary
conclusion.

Among so many constitutions that philosophy proposes and that history
shows attempted, only one unites the conditions of justice, order,
liberty and duration, outside of which society and the individual cannot
live. Truth, like nature, is one: it would be strange if it were
otherwise for the mind and for its greatest work, society. All
publicists have admitted this unity of human legislation, and, without
denying the variety of applications that the difference of times and
places and the genius proper to each nation demand; without ignoring the
part to be attributed, in any political system, to liberty, all have
endeavored to conform their doctrines to it. I undertake to show that
this unique constitution, which the greatest effort of the reason of the
people will be to have finally recognized, is none other than the
federative system. Any form of government that deviates from it must be
considered as an empirical creation, a provisional outline, more or less
convenient, under which society comes to take shelter for a moment, and
which, like the Arab’s tent, is removed in the morning after setting it
up in the evening. A severe analysis is therefore essential here, and
the first truth that it is important for the reader to take away from
this reading is that politics, infinitely variable as an art of
application, is, with regards to the principles that govern it, a
science of exact demonstration, neither more nor less so than geometry
and algebra.

The political order rests fundamentally on two contrary principles,
AUTHORITY and *Liberty:* the first initiator, the second determiner; the
latter having free reason as its corollary, the former the faith which
obeys.

Against this first proposal, I do not think that a single voice is
raised. Authority and Liberty are as old in the world as the human race:
they are born with us, and are perpetuated in each of us. Let us note
only one thing, to which few readers would pay attention on their own:
these two principles form, so to speak, a couple, whose two terms,
indissolubly linked to each other, are nevertheless irreducible to one
another, and remain, whatever we do, in perpetual struggle. Authority
invincibly presupposes a Liberty that recognizes it or denies it;
Liberty in its turn, in the political sense of the word, also supposes
an Authority that treats with it, restrains it or tolerates it. Remove
one of the two, the other no longer makes sense: Authority, without a
Liberty to challenge, resist or submit to it is an empty counterbalance
it, is nonsense.

word; Liberty, without an Authority to

The principle of Authority, familial principle, patriarchal,
magisterial, monarchic, theocratic, tending to hierarchy,
centralization, absorption, is given by nature, is therefore essentially
fatal or divine, as one wishes. Its action, resisted, hampered by the
contrary principle, can indefinitely expand or be restricted, but
without ever being able to be annihilated.

The principle of Liberty, personal, individualistic, critical; agent of
division, of election, of transaction, is given by the mind. An
essentially arbitral principle, therefore, superior to the Nature that
it makes use of, to the fatality that it dominates; unlimited in its
aspirations; susceptible, like its opposite, to extension and
restriction, but just as incapable as the latter of being exhausted by
development or of being annihilated by constraint.

It follows from this that in every society, even the most authoritarian,
a portion is necessarily left to Liberty; likewise in every society, even
the most liberal, a portion is reserved for Authority. This condition is
absolute; no political combination can avoid it. In spite of the
understanding whose effort incessantly tends to resolve diversity into
unity, the two principles remain present and always in opposition. The
political movement results from their inescapable tendency and their
mutual reaction.

All this, I admit, is perhaps nothing very new, and more than one reader
will ask me if this is all I have to teach him. No one denies either
Nature or Mind, whatever darkness envelops them; there is not a
publicist who dreams of taking issue with Authority or Liberty, although
their reconciliation, separation and elimination seem equally
impossible. Where then am I proposing to come from, in recasting this
commonplace?

I will say it: it is that all political constitutions, all systems of
government, federation included, can be reduced to this formula, the
*Balancing of Authority by Liberty, and vice versa;* it is consequently
that the categories adopted since Aristotle by a multitude of authors, —
with the help of which governments are classified, states are
differentiated, nations are distinguished, *monarchy,* *aristocracy,
democracy,* etc., here the federation excepted, — are reduced to
hypothetical, empirical constructions, in which reason and justice
obtain only an imperfect satisfaction; it is that all these
establishments, founded on the same incomplete
data, differing only by the interests, the
prejudices, the routine, at bottom resemble each other and are equal;
that thus, were it not for the unease caused by the application of these
false systems, of which the irritated passions, the suffering interests,
the disappointed self-esteem accuse each other, we would be, as for the
bottom of the things, very near to understanding one another; it is
finally that all these divisions of parties between which our
imagination digs abysses, all these contrarieties of opinions that seem
to us insoluble, all these antagonisms of fortunes which seem to us
without remedy, will soon find their definitive equation in the theory
of federative government.

So many things, you will say, in a grammatical opposition:
AUTHORITY-Liberty!,.. — Well! Yes. I have noticed that ordinary minds,
that children, grasp truth better reduced to an abstract formula than
magnified by a volume of dissertations and facts. I have wanted at the
same time to shorten this study for those who cannot read books, and to
make it more peremptory by operating on simple notions. AUTHORITY,
*Liberty,* two ideas opposed to each other, condemned to live in
struggle or to perish together: that is certainly not very difficult.
Just have the patience to read my work, dear reader, and if you have
understood this first and very short chapter, you will tell me afterwards
how you feel.

** CHAPTER II. *A priori* CONCEPTION OF THE POLITICAL ORDER: REGIME OF AUTHORITY,
REGIME OF FREEDOM.

We know the two fundamental and antithetical principles of all
government: authority, liberty.

By virtue of the tendency of the human mind to reduce all its ideas to a
single principle, thereby eliminating those that seem to it
irreconcilable with this principle, two different regimes are deduced,
*a priori,* from these two primordial notions, according to the
preference or predilection granted to one or the other: the *regime of
authority* and the *regime of liberty.*

Moreover, since society is made up of individuals, and the relationship
of the individual to the group can be conceived, from a political point
of view, in four different ways, there results four governmental forms,
two for each regime:


I. Regime of Authority.


 A. Government of all by one; — MONARCHY or PATRIARCHY;

 a. Government of all by all; — Panarchy or Communism,

The essential character of this regime, in its two species, is the
UNDIVIDED nature of the power.

 II. *Regime of Liberty.*

 B. Government of all by each; — DEMOCRACY;

 b. Government of each by each; An-archy or Self-government,

The essential character of this regime, in its two species, is the
*division* of the power.

Nothing more, nothing less. This classification, given *a priori* by the
nature of things and the deduction of the mind, is mathematical. Insofar
as politics is supposed to result from a syllogistic construction, as all
the ancient legislators naturally supposed, it cannot remain on this
side, nor go beyond. This simplism is remarkable: it shows us from the
outset, and under all regimes, the head of State striving to deduce his
constitutions from one single element. Logic and good faith are paramount
in politics: now, this is precisely the trap.

*Observations.* — I. We know how monarchical government arises, the
primitive expression of the principle of authority. M. de Bonald told
us: it is through paternal authority. The family is the embryo of the
monarchy. The first states were generally families or tribes governed by
their natural head, husband, father, patriarch, in the end king.

Under this regime, the development of the State is effected in two ways:
1. by the generation or natural multiplication of the family, tribe or
race; 2. by adoption, that is to say by the voluntary or forced
incorporation of neighboring families and tribes, but in such a way that
the united tribes form with the mother tribe only one family, the same
domesticity. This development of the monarchical state can reach immense
proportions, going as far as hundreds of millions of men, spread over
hundreds of a thousand square leagues.

Panarchy, pantocracy or community, is produced naturally by the death of
the monarch or head of the family, and the declaration of the subjects,
brothers, children or associates, to remain in joint possession, without
electing a new head. This political form is rare, if indeed there are
examples of it, the authority being heavier there and the individuality
more overwhelmed than under any other. It has hardly been adopted except
by religious associations, which, in all countries and under all cults,
tended to the annihilation of liberty. But the idea is none the less
given *a priori,* like the monarchic idea; it will find its application
in de facto governments, and we should mention it at least for the
record.

Thus monarchy, founded in nature, consequently justified in its idea,
has its legitimacy and its morality: and it is the same with communism.
But we will see presently that these two varieties of the same regime
cannot, in spite of their concrete element and their rational deduction,
maintain themselves in the rigor of their principle and the purity of
their essence, that they are consequently condemned to always remain
hypothetical. In fact, despite their patriarchal origin, their
good-natured temperament, their affectation of absolutism and divine
right, the monarchy and the community, preserving in their development
the sincerity of their type, are not encountered anywhere.

 II. How does democratic government, the spontaneous expression of the
     principle of liberty, arise in turn? Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the
     Revolution taught us: by convention. Here physiology is nothing:
     the State appears as the product, no longer of organic nature, of
     the flesh, but of intelligible nature, which is mind.

Under this other regime, the development of the State takes place by
accession or free membership. Just as the citizens are supposed to have
all signed the contract, the foreigner who enters the city is supposed
to adhere to it in turn: it is on this condition that he obtains the
rights and prerogatives of citizenship. If the State has a war to
support and becomes a conqueror, its principle leads it to grant the
conquered populations the same rights as those enjoyed by its own
nationals: what is called *isonomy.* Such was the concession of the
right of citizenship among the Romans. The children themselves were
supposed, at their majority, to have sworn to the pact; it is not in
reality because they are sons of citizens that they become citizens in
turn, as in monarchy the children of the subject are subjects by birth,
or as in the communities of Lycurgus and Plato they belonged to the
State: to be a member of a democracy, it is necessary, in right,
independently of the quality of *ingenuousness,* to have chosen the
liberal system.

The same thing will take place for the accession of a family, a city, a
province: it is always liberty that is the principle and furnishes the
motives.

Thus, the development of the authoritarian, patriarchal, monarchical or
communist state is opposed to the development of the liberal,
contractual and democratic state. And since there is no natural limit to
the extension of monarchy, which in all times and among all peoples has
suggested the idea of a universal or messianic monarchy, there is no no
more natural limit to the extension of the democratic state, which also
suggests the idea of a universal democracy or republic.

As a variety of the liberal regime, I have indicated ANARCHY or, as they
say in English, *self-* *government.* The expression anarchic government
implying a kind of contradiction, the thing seems impossible and the
idea absurd. There is, however, only the language to be taken up here:
the notion of *anarchy,* in politics, is just as rational and positive
as any other. It consists in the fact that, the political functions
being reduced to the industrial functions, the social order would result
from the sole fact of transactions and exchanges. Everyone could then
call himself his own autocrat, which is the opposite extreme of
monarchical absolutism.

In the same way, moreover, that monarchy and communism, founded in
nature and reason, have their legitimacy and their morality, without
ever being able to realize themselves in the rigor and purity of their
notion; in the same way democracy and anarchy, founded in liberty and
right, pursuing an ideal in keeping with their principle, have their
legitimacy and their morality. But we will also see that despite their
juridical and rationalist origin, they can no longer, by increasing and
developing in population and territory, maintain themselves in the rigor
and purity of their notion, and that they are condemned to remain in the
state of perpetual *desiderata.* Despite the powerful attraction of
freedom, neither democracy nor anarchy, in the plenitude and integrity of
their idea have been established anywhere.

** CHAPTER III. FORMS OF GOVERNMENT.

It is, however, with the help of these metaphysical trinkets that all
the governments of the earth were established from the beginning of the
world, and it is with them that we will succeed in unraveling the
political enigma, if only we want to take the trouble. So forgive me for
insisting on it, as one does with children who are taught the elements
of grammar.

In what precedes, you will not find a word that is not of the most
perfect exactness. We do not reason otherwise in pure mathematics. It is
not in the use of notions that the principle of our errors lies; it is
in the exclusions that, under the pretext of logic, we allow ourselves
to make there in the application.

 a. Authority — Liberty: these are indeed the two poles of politics.
    Their antithetical,

diametrical, contradictory opposition is a sure guarantee to us that a
third term is impossible, that it does not exist. Between the yes and
the no, just as between being and non-being, logic admits nothing.[1]

 b. The connection of these same notions, their irreducibility, their
    movement, are also

demonstrated. They do not go without each other; we cannot suppress one
or the other, nor resolve them into a common expression. As for their
movement, it suffices to bring them together, so that, mutually tending
to absorb each other, to develop at the expense of one another, they
immediately come into action.

 c. From these two notions result for society two different regimes,
    which we have named the

*regime of authority* and the *regime of liberty;* each of which can
then take two different forms, neither less nor more. Authority appears
in all its grandeur only in the social collectivity: consequently it can
only express itself, can only act, through the collectivity itself or
through a subject who personifies it; similarly, liberty is perfect only
when it is guaranteed to all, either because all have a share in the
government, or because the charge has devolved upon no one. It is
impossible to escape these alternatives: *Government of all by all* or
*government of all by one alone,* such is the regime of authority;
*government in participation of all by each* or *government of each* *by
himself,* such is the regime of liberty. All this is fatal like unity
and plurality, hot and cold, light and darkness. But, you will say, has
government ever been seen as the prerogative of a more or less
considerable part of the nation, to the exclusion of the rest:
*aristocracy,* government of the upper classes; *ochlocracy,* government
of the plebs; *oligarchy,* government of a faction? The observation is
correct, it has been seen: but these governments are *de facto*
governments, works of usurpation, violence, reaction, transition,
empiricism, where all the principles are simultaneously adopted, then
equally violated, misunderstood and confused; and we are currently
looking at the governments *a priori,* conceived according to logic, and
according to a single principle.

There is nothing arbitrary, once again, in rational politics, which
sooner or later must not be distinguished from practical politics.
Arbitrariness is a fact neither of nature nor of the mind; it is neither
the necessity of things nor the infallible dialectic of notions that
engender it. The arbitrary is a son, do you know of whom? Its name tells
you: of the *libre arbitre,* of free WILL, of Liberty. A marvelous thing!
The only enemy against which Liberty has to be on guard is not at bottom
Authority, which all men adore as if it were Justice; it is Liberty
itself, liberty of the prince, liberty of the great, liberty of the
multitudes, disguised under the mask of Authority.

From the *a priori* definition of the various kinds of governments, let
us now pass to their *forms.*

We call *forms* of government the way in which power is distributed and
exercised. Naturally and logically these forms are related to the
principle, the formation and the law of each regime.

Just as the father in the primitive family, the patriarch in the tribe,
is at the same time master of the house, the wagon or the tent, *herus,
dominus,* owner of the soil, of the herds and their growth, farmer,
industrialist, steward, merchant, sacrificer, warrior; likewise, in a
monarchy, the Prince is at the same time legislator, administrator,
judge, general, pontiff. He has the eminent domain of land and rent; he
is head of arts and crafts, of commerce, of agriculture, of the navy, of
public instruction, invested with all rights and all authority. In
short, the king is the representative of society, its incarnation; the
state is him. The *joining* or *indivision of powers* is the character
of royalty. To the principle of authority, which distinguishes the
father of the family and the monarch, is joined as a corollary the
principle of universality of attributions. A warlord, like Joshua; a
judge, like Samuel; a priest, like Aaron; a king, like David; a
legislator, like Moses, Solon, Lycurgus, Numa, all these titles united
in the same person: such is the spirit of monarchy, and such are its
forms.

Soon, by the extension given to the State, the exercise of authority
exceeds the forces of one man. The prince is then assisted by advisers,
officers or ministers, chosen by him, who act in his place and role, as
his agents and proxies with regard to the people. Like the prince they
represent, these envoys, satraps, proconsuls or prefects combine all the
attributes of authority in their mandate. But it is understood that they
must account for their management to the monarch, their master, in whose
interest and in whose name they govern, from whom they receive direction,
and who has them supervised so as to always ensure the high possession
of authority, the honor of command, the benefits of the state, and to
preserve themselves from all usurpation and all sedition. As for the
nation, it has no right to demand an account, and the prince’s agents
have none to render to it. In this system, the only guarantee of the
subjects is in the interest of the sovereign, who, moreover, recognizes
as law only his own *good pleasure.*

In the communist regime, the forms of government are the same, that is
to say that power is exercised jointly by the social community, just as
it was previously exercised by the king alone. It is thus that in the
*champs de mai* of the Germans the whole people, without distinction of
age or sex, deliberated, judged; it was thus that the Cimbri and the
Teutons, accompanied by their wives, fought against Marius: knowing
nothing of strategy and tactics, what had they to do with generals? It
was by a remnant of this communism that at Athens the criminal judgments
were rendered by the entire mass of the citizens; it was through an
inspiration of the same kind that the Republic of 1848 gave itself nine
hundred legislators, regretting not being able to unite in the same
assembly the ten million electors, whom it was necessary to content with
summoning to the ballot. The projects of *direct legislation,* by *yes*
and by *no,* proposed nowadays, emerged from this.

The forms of the liberal or democratic state also correspond to the
principle of formation and the law of development of this state;
consequently, they differ radically from those of the monarchy. They
consist in the fact that the power, instead of being collectively and
indivisibly exercised as in the primitive community, is distributed
among the citizens, which is done in two ways. If it is a service likely
to be materially shared, such as the construction of a road, the command
of a fleet, the police of a town, the instruction of youth, the labor is
shared by sections, the fleet by squadrons or even by ships, the city by
quarters, education by classes, on each of which is established an
entrepreneur, commissioner, admiral, captain or master. In their wars,
the Athenians used to appoint ten or twelve generals, each of whom
commanded for a day in turn: a practice which today would appear very
strange; but the Athenian democracy tolerated nothing else. If the
function is indivisible, we leave it whole, and, either we appoint
several holders, in spite of Homer’s precept, which says that the
plurality of commanders is a bad thing: this is how where we do only
send an ambassador, the elders dispatched a company; — or we are
satisfied for each function with a single civil servant who attaches
himself to it and gradually makes it his profession, his specialty:
which tends to introduce into the body politic a particular class of
citizens, namely public officials. From this moment Democracy is in
danger: the State is distinguished from the nation; its staff becomes
again almost as it was under the monarchy, more devoted to the prince
than to the nation and the state. On the other hand, a great idea arose,
one of the greatest in science, the idea of the *Division* or
*Separation of Powers.* Thanks to this idea, the Society takes on a
decidedly organic form; revolutions can follow one another like the
seasons, there is something in it that will never perish again, it is
this beautiful constitution of public power by categories, Justice,
Administration, War, Finances, Worship, Public Instruction, Commerce,
etc., The organization of liberal or democratic government is more
complicated, more learned, more laborious and less dazzling in practice
than that of monarchical government: it is consequently less popular.
Almost always the forms of free government have been treated as
aristocracy by the masses, who have preferred monarchical absolutism.
Hence the kind of vicious circle in which men of progress turn and will
turn for a long time to come. Naturally it is with a view to improving
the lot of the masses that the republicans demand liberties and
guarantees; it is therefore on the people that they must seek to lean.
But it is always the people who, through mistrust or indifference to
democratic forms, constitutes an obstacle to liberty.[2]

The forms of anarchy are indifferently, at the will of each individual,
and within the limits of his rights, those of monarchy or democracy.

Such are, in their principles and in their forms, the four elementary
governments, given *a* *priori* in the human understanding, to serve as
materials for all the political constructions of the future. But, I
repeat, these four types, although suggested by the nature of things at
the same time as by the feeling of liberty and right, are not in
themselves and according to the rigor of their laws called to
realization. These are ideal designs, abstract formulas, according to
which all *de facto* governments will be empirically and intuitively
constituted, but which themselves cannot pass into the state of facts.
Reality is complex in its nature; the simple does not leave the ideal,
does not arrive at the concrete. We possess in these antithetical
formulas the data of a regular constitution, of the future constitution
of humanity; but it takes centuries to pass, a series of revolutions to
unfold, before the definitive formula emerges from the brain that is to
conceive it, which is the brain of humanity.

** CHAPTER IV. COMPROMISES BETWEEN THE PRINCIPLES: ORIGIN OF THE CONTRADICTIONS OF POLITICS.

Since, on the one hand, the two principles on which all social order
rests, Authority and Liberty, are contrary to each other and always in
conflict, and, on the other hand, they can neither exclude nor resolve
one another, a compromise between them is inevitable. Whatever the
preferred system, monarchical or democratic, communist or anarchic, the
institution will not sustain itself for any time unless it has been able
to rely, in a more or less considerable proportion, on the existence of
its antagonist.

For example, one would be strangely mistaken if one imagined that the
regime of authority, with its paternal character, its family mores, its
absolute initiative, could meet its own needs through its own energy.
However little the State expands, this venerable paternity quickly
degenerates into impotence, confusion, unreason and tyranny. The prince
is incapable of providing for everything; he must rely on agents who
deceive him, rob him, discredit him, doom him in public opinion,
supplant him, and in the end dethrone him. This disorder inherent in
absolute power, the demoralization that follows, the catastrophes that
constantly threaten it, are the plague of societies and states. So we
can lay down as a rule that monarchical government is all the more
benign, moral, just, bearable and therefore durable, setting aside for
the moment external relations, as its dimensions are more modest and
more closely approach that of the family; and, *vice versa,* that this
same government will be all the more insufficient, oppressive, odious to
its subjects and consequently unstable, as the State becomes more vast.
History has preserved the memory, and the modern centuries have
furnished examples of these terriing monarchies, formless monsters,
veritable political mastodons, which a better civilization must
gradually make disappear. In all these states, absolutism is directly
related to the mass, it subsists from its own prestige; in a small state,
on the contrary, tyranny can only sustain itself for a moment by means
of mercenary troops; seen up close, it vanishes.

To obviate this vice of their nature, monarchical governments have been
led to apply, to a greater or lesser extent, the forms of liberty, in
particular the separation of powers or the division of sovereignty.

The reason for this modification is easy to grasp. If a single man can
hardly manage a hundred hectare estate, a factory employing a few
hundred workers, the administration of a commune of five or six thousand
inhabitants, how would he manage the burden of an empire of forty
million men? Here, then, the monarchy had to bow before this double
principle, borrowed from political economy: first, that the greatest
amount of labor is furnished and the greatest value produced, when the
laborer is free and acts on his own account as entrepreneur and owner;
second, that the quality of the product or service is all the better the
better the producer knows his part and devotes himself exclusively to
it. There is still another reason for this borrowing made by the
monarchy from democracy. It is that social wealth increases in proportion
to the division and the intermeshing of industries, which means, in
politics, that the government will be so much the better and will
present less danger for the prince, as the functions are better
distinguished and balanced: something impossible in the absolutist mode.
This is how princes have been led to *republicanize* themselves, so to
speak, in order to escape inevitable ruin: recent years have offered
striking examples of this in Piedmont, Austria, and Russia. In the
deplorable situation in which Czar Nicolas had left his empire, the
introduction of the distinction of powers in the Russian government is
not the least of the reforms undertaken by his son Alexander.[3]

Analogous but inverse facts are observed in democratic government.

It is in vain that we determine, with all the sagacity and precision
possible, the rights and obligations of citizens, the attributions of
civil servants, that we foresee incidents, exceptions and anomalies: the
fruitfulness of the unforeseen far exceeds the prudence of the statesman,
and the more one legislates the more disputes arise. All this requires
from the agents of power an initiative and an arbitration which, in order
to be heard, has only one means, which is to be constituted in
authority. Take away from the democratic principle, take away from Liberty
that supreme sanction, Authority, and the State perishes instantly. It
is clear, however, that we are no longer in the realm of free contract,
unless it is maintained that the citizens have precisely agreed, in the
event of a dispute, to submit to the decision of one of their own, a
magistrate designated in advance: which is exactly to renounce the
democratic principle and establish a monarchy.

Let the democracy multiply as much as it wants, with the civil servants,
the legal guarantees and means of control; let it surround its agents
with formalities, call citizens unceasingly to election, to discussion,
to vote: whether it likes it or not, its officials are men of
*authority,* the word is accepted; and if among this staff of public
functionaries there is one or a few charged with the general direction
of affairs, this head, individual or collective, of the government, is
what Rousseau himself called *prince;* for a trifle he will be a king.

Analogous observations can be made about communism and anarchy. There
was never an example of a perfect community and it is unlikely, however
high the degree of civilization, the morality and wisdom that the human
race attains, that every vestige of government and authority will
disappear there. But, while the community remains the dream of most
socialists, anarchy is the ideal of the economic school, which strongly
tends to suppress all governmental establishments and to constitute
society on the sole basis of property and free labor.

I will not multiply the examples any further. What I have just said
suffices to demonstrate the truth of my proposition, namely: that
Monarchy and Democracy, Community and Anarchy, none of which can be
realized in the purity of their ideal, are reduced to complementing each
other by means of reciprocal borrowings.

Of course, there is something here to humiliate the intolerance of
fanatics who cannot hear of an opinion contrary to their own without
experiencing a kind of horripilation. Let them therefore learn, the
unfortunates, that they themselves are necessarily unfaithful to their
principle, that their political faith is woven with inconsistencies, and
may the power in turn no longer see, in the discussion of the different
systems of government, any factional thought! By convincing himself once
and for all that these terms monarchy, democracy, etc., express only
theoretical conceptions, very far removed from the institutions that seem
to translate them, the royalist, at the words of *social contract,* of
*sovereignty of the people,* of *suffrage universal,* etc., will remain
calm; the democrat, on hearing of dynasty, of absolute power, of divine
right, will maintain his composure with a smile. There is no real
monarchy; there is no real democracy. Monarchy is the primitive,
physiological and, so to speak, patronymic form of the State; it lives
in the heart of the masses, and is strongly attested before our eyes by
the general tendency to unity. Democracy in its turn is bubbling on all
sides; it fascinates generous souls, and seizes the elite of society
everywhere. But it is the dignity of our time to finally renounce these
illusions, which too often degenerate into lies. Contradiction is at the
bottom of all programs. The popular tribunes swear, without their
suspecting it, by the monarchy; kings, by democracy and anarchy. After
the coronation of Napoleon I, the words *French Republic* could be read
for a long time on one side of the coins, which bore on the other, with
the effigy of Napoleon, the title *Emperor of the French.* In 1830,
Louis-Philippe was designated by Lafayette as *the best of republics;*
was he not also nicknamed *the* *king of proprietors?* Garibaldi
rendered Victor-Emmanuel the same service as Lafayette rendered
Louis-Philippe. Later, it is true, Lafayette and Garibaldi seemed to
repent; but their confession must be collected, all the more so as any
retraction would be illusory. No democrat can claim to be free from all
monarchism; no partisan of the monarchy flatters himself with being free
from all republicanism. It remains certain that since democracy did not
appear to be repugnant to the dynastic idea any more than to the unitary
idea, the partisans of the two systems have no right to excommunicate
each other, and that tolerance is mutually incumbent upon them.

What is politics now, if it is impossible for a society to constitute
itself exclusively on the principle it prefers; if, whatever the
legislator does, the government, reputed here to be monarchical, there
to be democratic, remains for ever a compound without frankness, where
the opposing elements mingle in arbitrary proportions according to whim
and interest; where the most exact definitions inevitably lead to
confusion and promiscuity; where, consequently, all conversions, all
defections can be admitted, and fickleness pass for honorable? What a
field open to charlatanism, intrigue, betrayal! What State could subsist
under such dissolving conditions? The State is not constituted, but
already it carries in the contradiction of its idea its principle of
death.

What a strange creation, where logic remains powerless, while
inconsistency alone seems practical and rational![4]

** CHAPTER V. DE FACTO GOVERNMENTS: SOCIAL DISSOLUTION

Monarchy and democracy, to concern myself from now on only with them,
being therefore two idealities provided by theory, but unrealizable in
the rigor of their terms, it has been necessary, as I have just said, to
resign in practice to compromises of all kinds: from these obligatory
transactions[5] have come all de facto governments. These governments,
works of empiricism, infinitely variable, are therefore essentially and
without exception composite or mixed governments.

I will observe in this connection that the publicists were mistaken and
that they introduced into politics a datum as false as it is dangerous,
when, not distinguishing practice from theory, reality from the ideal,
they put on the same line governments of pure design, not realizable in
their simplism, like pure monarchy and democracy, and *de facto* or
mixed governments. The truth, I repeat, is that governments of the first
kind neither exist nor can exist except in theory: every *de* *facto*
government is necessarily mixed, whether it is called a monarchy or a
democracy, no matter what. This observation is important; it alone makes
it possible to reduce to an error of dialectic the innumerable
disappointments, corruptions and revolutions of politics.

All the varieties of *de facto* governments, in other words, all the
governmental transactions tried or proposed from the most ancient times
down to our own day, are reduced to two principal species, which I shall
call, by their present designations, *Empire* and *Constitutional
monarchy,* This requires explanation.

War and the inequality of fortunes having been from the beginning the
condition of peoples, Society is naturally divided into a certain number
of classes: Warriors or Nobles, Priests, Proprietors, Merchants,
Navigators, Industrials, Peasants. — Where royalty exists, it forms a
caste by itself, the first of all: it is the dynasty.

The class struggle between them, the antagonism of their interests, the
manner in which these interests coalesce, determine the political
regime, consequently the choice of government, its innumerable
varieties, and its still more innumerable variations. Little by little
all these classes are reduced to two: a superior, Aristocracy,
Bourgeoisie or Patriciate; and an inferior, Plebs or Proletariat,
between which floats Royalty, organ of Power, expression of Authority.
If the aristocracy unites with royalty, the government that will result
from it will be a temperate monarchy, currently called constitutional; —
if it is the people who unite with authority, the government will be an
Empire, or an autocratic democracy. The medieval theocracy was a pact
between the priesthood and the emperor; the Caliphate, a religious and
military monarchy. In Tyre, Sidon, Carthage, royalty relied on the
merchant caste until the latter seized power. It appears that at Rome
royalty at first held patricians and plebeians in respect; then, the two
classes having coalesced against the crown, royalty was abolished, and
the state took the name of republic. However, the preponderance remained
with the patriciate. But this aristocratic constitution was as stormy as
the Athenian democracy; the government lived by expedients, and while
the Athenian democracy succumbed to the first shock, the Peloponnesian
War, the conquest of the world was the result of the necessity in which
the Roman Senate found itself of occupying the people. Peace given to
the world, civil war rages to the limit; to put an end to it, the plebs
gave themselves a chief, destroyed the patriciate and the republic, and
created the empire.

We are surprised that the government founded under the auspices of a
bourgeoisie or a patriciate, in agreement with a dynasty, is generally
more liberal than that founded by the multitude under the patronage of a
dictator or a tribune. The thing, in fact, must seem all the more
surprising, since at bottom the plebs are more self-interested and have
really more inclination to liberty than the bourgeoisie. But this
contradiction, the stumbling block of politics, is explained by the
situation of the parties, a situation which, in the case of a popular
victory, makes the plebs reason and act like autocrats, and, in the case
of a preponderance of the bourgeoisie, makes it reason and act like a
republican. Let us return to the fundamental dualism, Authority and
liberty, and we will understand it.

From the divergence of these two principles arise, under the influence
of contrary passions and interests, two opposite tendencies, two
opposing currents of opinion: the partisans of authority tending to make
the allowance for liberty, either individual, whether corporate or
local, the least possible, and to exploit as a result, for their
personal profit and to the detriment of the multitude, the power of
which they form the escort; the partisans of the liberal regime, on the
contrary, tending to restrict authority indefinitely and to vanquish the
aristocracy by the incessant determination of public functions, of the
acts of power and of its forms. By the effect of its position, by the
humility of its fortune, the people seek equality and liberty in
government; by a contrary reason, the proprietary patriciate, tend
towards a monarchy protecting great lives, capable of ensuring order for
its own benefit, which, consequently, gives greater importance to
authority, less to liberty.

All *de facto* governments, whatever their motives or reservations, are
thus reduced to one or the other of these two formulas: *Subordination
of Authority to Liberty,* or *Subordination of Liberty* *to Authority,*
But the same cause that arouses the bourgeoisie and the plebs against on
another soon makes them both turn around. Democracy, to ensure its
triumph, ignorant moreover of the conditions of power, incapable of
exercising it, gives itself an absolute head, before whose authority all
caste privileges disappear; the bourgeoisie, which fears despotism as
much as anarchy, prefers to consolidate its position by establishing a
constitutional monarchy. So that in the end it is the party that has the
greatest need of liberty and legal order which creates absolutism and it
is the party of privilege that institutes the liberal government, giving
it the sanction of limitation of political right.

We see from this that setting aside the economic considerations that
hover over the debate, bourgeoisie and democracy, imperialism and
constitutionalism, or whatever name you give to these governments of
antagonism, are equivalent, and that questions such as the following: —
If the regime of 1814 was no better than that of 1804; if it would not
be advantageous for the country to return from the constitution of 1852
to that of 1830; whether the republican party will merge with the
Orleanist party or if it will attach itself to the empire, — such
questions, I say, from the point of view of law and principles, are
puerile: a government, with the elements that we know, is worthy only
through the facts that produced it and the men who represent it, and any
dispute of theory on this subject is vain and can only lead to
aberrations.

The contradictions of politics, the reversals of parties, the perpetual
inversion of roles, are so frequent in history, they hold such a great
place in human affairs, that I cannot help insisting on them. The
dualism of Authority and Liberty gives the key to all these enigmas:
without this primordial explanation, the history of States would be the
despair of consciences and the scandal of philosophy.

The English aristocracy made the Magna Carta; the Puritans produced
Cromwell. In France, it is the bourgeoisie that lays the imperishable
foundations of all our liberal constitutions. In Rome, the patriarchate
had organized the republic; the plebs gave birth to the Caesars and the
Praetorians. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation was at first
aristocratic; the mass remains Catholic or makes messiahs in the manner
of John of Leyden; it was the reverse of what we had seen four hundred
years before, when the nobles burned the Albigensians. How often (this
observation from Ferrari) did the Middle Ages see the Ghibellines turn
into Guelphs, and the Guelphs change into Ghibellines? In 1813, France
fights for despotism, the coalition for freedom, precisely the opposite
of what had happened in 1792. Today the legitimists and the clericals
support the federation, the democrats are unitary. There would be no end
to citing such examples; which does not prevent ideas, men and things
from always being distinguished by their natural tendencies and their
origins, the *blues being blues, and the whites always whites,* The
people, by the very fact of their inferiority and distress, will always
form the army of liberty and progress: labor is republican by nature:
the contrary would imply a contradiction. But, because of their
ignorance, the primitiveness of their instincts, the violence of their
needs, the impatience of their desires, the people incline to summary
forms of authority. What they seek is not legal guarantees, of which
they have no idea and do not conceive the power; it is not a combination
of cogs, a balancing of forces, which they themselves have nothing to do
with: it is a leader whose word they trust, whose intentions are known
to them, and who is devoted to their interests. To this leader they give
unlimited authority, irresistible power. The people, regarding as just
all that they judge to be useful to them, since they are the people,
make fun of formalities, disregard the conditions imposed on the holders
of power. Prompt to suspicion and slander, but incapable of methodical
discussion, they ultimately believe only in the human will, place hope
only in man, trusts only in his creations, *in principibus, in filiis
hominum;* they expect nothing from principles, which alone can save them
they have no religion of ideas.

It was thus that the Roman plebs, after seven hundred years of a
progressively liberal regime and a series of victories won by them over
the patriciate, thought they could cut short all the difficulties by
annihilating the party of authority, and by exaggerating the power of
the tribunes, gave Caesar perpetual dictatorship, silenced the Senate,
closed the comitia, and, for a bushel of wheat, *annona,* founded the
imperial autocracy. What is curious is that this democracy was sincerely
convinced of its liberalism, and that it prided itself on representing
right, equality and progress. Caesar’s soldiers, idolaters of their
emperor, were full of hatred and contempt for kings: if the tyrant’s
murderers were not immolated on the spot, it was because Caesar had been
seen the day before trying on his bald forehead the royal diadem. Thus
the companions of Napoleon I, who had left the club of Jacobins, enemies
of nobles, priests and kings, found it quite simple to deck themselves
out with the titles of barons, dukes, princes and to pay their court to
the Emperor; they did not forgive him for having taken a Habsburg
princess for his wife.

Left to itself or led by its tribunes, the multitude never founded
anything. Its face is turned backwards: no tradition is formed in it; no
spirit of result, no idea that acquires the force of law. Of politics it
understands only intrigue, of government only profusion and force, of
justice only vindictiveness, of liberty only the faculty of erecting
idols which she demolishes the next day. The advent of the democracy
opens an era of retrogression that would lead the nation and the State
to death, if they did not escape the fatality that threatens them by a
revolution in the opposite direction, which it is now a question of
assessing.

As much as the plebs, living from day to day, without property, without
business, outside of public employment, are sheltered from the risks of
tyranny and worry little about them, so much the bourgeoisie, which
owns, traffics and manufactures, eager for land and salaries, is
interested in preventing disasters and securing the devotion of the
power. The need for order brings it back to liberal ideas: hence the
constitutions it imposes on its kings. At the same time that it
surrounds the government with its choice of legal forms and subjects it
to the vote of a parliament, it restricts political right to a category
of censitaires and abolishes universal suffrage; but it is careful not
to touch administrative centralization, the buttress of industrial
feudalism. If the separation of powers is useful to it to balance the
influence of the crown and thwart the personal policy of the prince; if,
on the other hand, electoral privilege serves it equally well against
popular aspirations, centralization is no less precious to it, first of
all, because of the employments that it necessitates, which place the
bourgeoisie on the side of the power and the tax, then because of the
facilities it gives to peaceful exploitation of the masses. Under a
regime of administrative centralization and restricted suffrage, where,
while the bourgeoisie by its majorities remains master of the
government, all local life is repressed, all agitation easily
compromised, under such a regime, I say, the working class, penned in in
its workshops, is naturally dedicated to waged employment. Liberty
exists, but in the sphere of bourgeois society, cosmopolitan like its
capital; as for the multitude, they have resigned, not only politically,
but economically.

Should I add that the suppression or maintenance of a dynasty would not
change the system? A unitary republic and a constitutional monarchy are
one and the same thing: only one word has changed and there is one
functionary less.

But if democratic absolutism is unstable, bourgeois constitutionalism is
no less so. The first was backward, unbridled, unprincipled, despising
right, hostile to liberty, destroying all security and trust. The
constitutional system, with its legal forms, its juridical spirit, its
restrained temperament, its parliamentary solemnities, shows itself
clearly, in the end, as a vast system of exploitation and intrigue,
where politics is a counterpart to agiotage, where the tax is only the
civil list of a caste, and the monopolized power the auxiliary of the
monopoly. The people had a vague feeling of this immense spoliation: the
*constitutional guarantees* affected them little, and as we have seen,
particularly in 1815, they prefer their emperor, despite his
infidelities, to their legitimate kings, despite their liberalism.

The repeated, alternative failure of imperial democracy and bourgeois
constitutionality has resulted in the creation of a third party which,
flying the flag of skepticism, swearing by no principle, fundamentally
and systematically immoral, tends to reign, as one has said, by the
*bascule,* that is to say, by the ruin of all authority and all liberty,
in a word, by corruption. This is called the *doctrinaire* system.
Greeted at first by the hatred and execration of the old parties, this
system nonetheless quickly made a fortune, sustained by growing
discouragement, and justified in a way by the spectacle of universal
contradiction. In a short time it becomes the secret faith of the Power,
which modesty and propriety will always prevent from making public
profession of skepticism; but it is the avowed faith of the bourgeoisie
and the people who, no longer restrained by any consideration, allow
their indifference to burst out and take pride in it. Then, authority
and liberty lost in souls, justice and reason considered to be empty
words, society is dissolved, the nation fallen. What remains is only
matter and brute force; a revolution becomes, on pain of moral death,
imminent. What will come of it? History is there to answer; the examples
number in the thousands. The doomed system will be succeeded, thanks to
the movement of forgetful but constantly rejuvenated generations, by a
new compromise, which will provide the same career, and which, worn out
in its turn and dishonored by the contradiction of its idea, will have
the same end. And this will continue until general reason has discovered
the means of mastering the two principles and of balancing society by
the very regularization of its antagonisms.

** CHAPTER VI. POSITION OF THE POLITICAL PROBLEM. — PRINCIPLE OF SOLUTION.

If the reader has followed the preceding exposition with any diligence,
human society must appear to him as a fantastic creation, full of
astonishment and mystery. Let us briefly recall the different terms:

 a. The political order rests on two related, opposed and irreducible
    principles: Authority and

Liberty.

 b. From these two principles are deduced in parallel two opposite
    regimes: the absolutist or

authoritarian regime, and the liberal regime.

 c. The forms of these two regimes are as different from each other,
    incompatible and

irreconcilable as their natures; we have defined them in two words:
Indivision and Separation.

 d. Now, reason indicates that all theory must unfold according to its
    principle; all existence

must occur according to its law: logic is the condition of life as of
thought. But it is precisely the opposite that manifests itself in
politics: neither Authority nor Liberty can constitute themselves
separately, and give rise to a system that is exclusively proper to
each; far from it, they are condemned, in their respective
establishments, to make perpetual and mutual loans.

 e. The consequence is that, fidelity to principles existing in politics
    only in the ideal, practice

having to undergo transactions of all kinds, government is reduced, in
the last analysis, in spite of the best will and all the virtue in the
world, to a hybrid, equivocal creation, to a promiscuity of regimes that
severe logic repudiates, and before which good faith recoils. No
government escapes this contradiction.

 f. Conclusion: arbitrariness inevitably enters politics, corruption
    soon becomes the soul of

power, and society is dragged, without rest or mercy, down the endless
slope of revolutions.

This is the way of the world. It is neither the effect of satanic
malice, nor of an infirmity of our nature, nor of a providential
condemnation, nor of a caprice of fortune or a decision of Destiny:
things are thus, that is all. It is up to us to make the most of this
singular situation.

Let us consider that for more than eight thousand years—the memories of
history do not go back any further—all varieties of government, all
political and social combinations have been successively tried,
abandoned, taken up, modified, disguised, exhausted, and that failure
has constantly rewarded the zeal of reformers and deceived the hope of
the people. The flag of liberty has always served to shelter despotism;
the privileged classes have always surrounded themselves, in the very
interest of their privileges, with liberal and egalitarian institutions;
parties have always lied to their program, and always indifference
succeeding to faith, corruption to civic spirit, States have perished by
the development of the notions on which they were founded. The most
vigorous and intelligent races have worn themselves out in this work:
history is full of the stories of their struggles. Sometimes a series of
triumphs creating an illusion about the strength of the State, and we
could believe in an excellence of constitution, in a wisdom of
government that did not exist. But, when peace came, the vices of the
system became apparent, and the peoples rested in civil war from the
fatigues of foreign war. Humanity has thus gone from revolution to
revolution: the most famous nations, those that have provided the
longest career, have only been sustained by this. Of all governments
known and practiced to this day, there is not one that, if it were
condemned to subsist by its own virtue, would live to maturity.
Strangely enough, heads of state and their ministers are of all men
those who least believe in the duration of the system they represent;
until science comes, it is the faith of the masses that sustains
governments. The Greeks and the Romans, who bequeathed to us their
institutions with their examples, arriving at the most interesting
moment of their evolution, buried themselves in their despair; and
modern society seems to have arrived in its turn at the hour of anguish.
Do not trust the word of these agitators who shout, *Liberty, Equality,
Nationality:* they do not know anything; they are the dead who claim to
raise the dead. The public listens to them for a moment, as it does
buffoons and charlatans; then it passes, reason empty and conscience
desolate.

A sure sign that our dissolution is near and that a new era is about to
open, the confusion of language and ideas has reached the point that the
first comer can call himself republican, monarchist, democrat,
bourgeois, conservative, sharing, liberal, and all this at the same
time, without fear that anyone will convict him of a lie or an error.
The princes and barons of the first

+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| Empire had proved     | would                 | their sans-culottism. |
| bourgeoisie of 1814   |                       | Gorged have           |
|                       |                       | understood of         |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| revolutionary; 1830   | remade                | it conservative; 1848 |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
with national goods, the only thing the the institutions of 89 was
liberal, even made it reactionary, catholic, and more

monarchical than ever. At present, it is the Republicans of February who
serve the royalty of Victor-Emmanuel, while the Socialists of June
declare themselves unitary. Former friends of Ledru-Rollin rally to the
Empire as the true *revolutionary* expression and the most *paternal*
form of government; others, it is true, treat them as *sell-outs,* but
rage furiously against federalism. It is systematic waste, organized
confusion, permanent apostasy, universal betrayal.

It is a question of knowing if society can arrive at something regular,
equitable and fixed, which satisfies reason and conscience, or whether
we are condemned for eternity to this wheel of Ixion. Is the problem
without solution?… Still a little patience, reader; and if I don’t lead
you out of the imbroglio presently, you will have the right to say that
logic is false, progress a decoy, and liberty a utopia. Just deign to
reason with me for a few more minutes, although in such a case to reason
would be to expose yourself to fooling yourself and wasting your time
along with your reason.

 1. You will notice first that the two principles, Authority and
    Liberty, from which all theevil

comes, show themselves in history in logical and chronological
succession. Authority, like the family, like the father, *genitor,*
appears first: it has the initiative, it is affirmation. Reasoning
Liberty comes after: it is criticism, protest, determination. The fact of
this succession results from the very definitions of ideas and the nature
of things, and all history bears witness to it. There, no inversion is
possible, nor the slightest vestige of arbitrariness.

 2. Another no less important observation is that the authoritarian,
    paternal and monarchical

regime moves further away from its ideal, as the family, tribe or city
becomes more numerous and as the State grows in population and in
territory: so that the more the authority expands, the more intolerable
it becomes. Hence the concessions it is obliged to make to liberty. —
Conversely, the regime of liberty comes all the closer to its ideal and
multiplies its chances of success, as the State increases in population
and in extent, as relations multiply and science gains ground. First it
is a *constitution* that is demanded on all sides; later it will be
decentralization. Wait any longer, and you will see the idea of
federation arise. So that we can say of Liberty and Authority what John
the Baptizer said of himself and of Jesus: *Illam oportet crescere, hanc
autem minui,* This double movement, one of retrogradation, the other of
progress, which is resolved into a single phenomenon, also results from
the definition of the principles, their relative position and their
roles: here again no ambiguity is possible, nor the slightest room for
arbitrariness. The fact is objectively evident and mathematically
certain; this is what we will call a LAW,

 3. The consequence of this law, which can be said to be necessary, is
    itself necessary: it is that

the principle of authority — appearing first, serving as matter or
subject of elaboration for Liberty, reason and right — is gradually
subordinated by the juridical principle, rationalist and liberal; the
head of state, at first inviolable, irresponsible, absolute, like the
father in the family, becomes subject to reason, first subject of the
law, finally simple agent, instrument or servant of Liberty itself.

This third proposition is as certain as the first two, free from all
equivocation and contradiction, and loudly attested by history. In the
eternal struggle of the two principles, the French Revolution, like the
Reformation, appears as a diacritical era. It marks the moment when, in
the political order, Liberty officially took precedence over Authority,
just as the Reformation had marked the moment when, in the religious
order, free inquiry took precedence over faith. Since Luther belief has
everywhere become rational; orthodoxy as well as heresy has claimed to
lead man to faith by reason; the precept of Saint Paul, *rationalabile
sit obsequinm vestrum,* let your obedience be reasonable, has been
widely commented upon and practiced; Rome began to discuss like Geneva;
religion has tended to become science; submission to the Church was
surrounded by so many conditions and reservations that, except for the
difference in the articles of faith, there was no longer any difference
between the Christian and the unbeliever. They are not of the same
opinion, that is all; moreover, thought, reason, conscience in both
behave in the same way. Similarly, since the French Revolution, the
respect for authority has waned; deference to the prince’s orders has
become conditional; reciprocity and guarantees have been demanded of the
sovereign; the political temperament has changed; the most fervent
royalists, like the barons of Jean-Sans-Terre, wanted to have charters,
and MM. Berryer, de Falloux, de Montalembert, etc., can consider
themselves as liberal as our democrats. Chateaubriand, the bard of the
Restoration, boasted of being a philosopher and a republican; it was by
a pure act of his free will that he had constituted himself the defender
of the altar and of the throne. We know what happened to the violent
Catholicism of Lamennais.

Thus, while authority declines, becoming more precarious day by day,
right becomes clearer, and liberty, always suspect, nevertheless becomes
more real and stronger. Absolutism resists as best it can, but goes
away; it seems that the REPUBLIC, always combatted, reviled, betrayed,
banished, approaches every day. What advantage are we going to take from
this capital fact for the constitution of the government?

** CHAPTER VII. CLARIFICATION OF THE IDEA OF FEDERATION.

Since, in theory and in history, Authority and Liberty succeed each
other as if by a kind of polarization; Since the first drops
imperceptibly and withdraw, while the second grows and shows itself;
Since there results from this double march a kind of subalternization by
virtue of which Authority places itself more and more at the right of
Liberty; Since, in other words, the liberal or contractual regime
prevails day by day over the authoritarian regime, it is to the idea of
contract that we must attach ourselves as to the dominant idea of
politics. First of all, what do we mean by *contract?*

The contract, says the Civil Code, art. 1101, is an agreement by which
one or more persons bind themselves, towards one or more others, to do
or not to do something.

Art. 1102. — It is *synallagmatic* or *bilateral,* when the contracting
parties bind themselves reciprocally towards each other.

Art. 1103. — It is *unilateral,* when one or more persons are obliged to
one or more others, without there being any commitment on the part of
the latter.

Art. 1104. — It is *commutative* when each of the parties undertakes to
give or to do something which is regarded as the equivalent of what is
given to it or of what is done for it. — When the equivalent consists in
the chance of gain or loss for each of the parties, according to an
uncertain event, the contract is *aleatory,* Art. 1105. — A *charitable*
contract is one in which one of the parties provides the other with a
purely gratuitous benefit.

Art. 1106. — A contract by *onerous* title is one that binds each of the
parties to give or do something.

Art. 1371 — We call *quasi-contracts* those voluntary acts of man, from
which there results any engagement towards a third party, and sometimes
a reciprocal engagement of the two parties.

To these distinctions and definitions of the Code, relating to the form
and conditions of contracts, I will add a final one, concerning their
object: According to the nature of the things for which one deals or the
object that one proposes, contracts are *domestic, civil, commercial* or
*political,* It is with this last kind of contract, the political
contract, that we are going to deal. The notion of contract is not
entirely foreign to the monarchical regime, any more than it is to
paternity and the family. But, from what we have said about the
principles of authority and liberty and their role in the formation of
governments, we understand that these principles do not intervene in the
same way in the formation of the political contract; that thus the
obligation that unites the monarch to his subjects, a spontaneous,
unwritten obligation, resulting from the family spirit and the quality of
persons, is a *unilateral* obligation, since by virtue of the principle
of obedience the subject owes more to the prince than he does to the
subject. The divine right theory expressly says that the monarch is
responsible only to God. It may even happen that the prince’s contract
to the subject degenerates into a contract of pure *charity,* when,
through the ineptitude or idolatry of the citizens, the prince is
solicited to seize authority and take charge of his subjects, who are
incompetent to govern and defend themselves, like a shepherd over his
flock. It is much worse where the principle of heredity is admitted. A
conspirator like the Duke of Orleans, later Louis XII, a parricide like
Louis XI, an adulterer like Marie-Stuart, retain, despite their crimes,
their eventual right to the crown. Birth making them inviolable, one can
say that there exists between them and the faithful subjects of the
prince to whom they are to succeed, a *quasi-contract,* In short, by the
very fact that authority is preponderant, in the monarchical system, the
contract is not equal.

The political contract acquires all its dignity and its morality only on
the condition, first, of being *synallagmatic* and *commutative;*
second, of being confined, as to its object, within certain limits: two
conditions that are supposed to exist under the democratic regime, but
which, there again, are most often only a fiction. Can we say that in a
representative and centralizing democracy, in a constitutional and
tax-based monarchy, *a fortiori* in a communist republic, in the manner
of Plato, the political contract that binds the citizen to the State is
equal and reciprocal? Can we say that this contract, which deprives the
citizens of half or two-thirds of their sovereignty and a quarter of
their product, is contained within just limits? It would be truer to
say, — something that experience too often confirms — that the contract,
in all these systems, is exorbitant, *onerous,* since it is, for a more
or less considerable part, without compensation; and *aleatory,* since
the promised advantage, already insufficient, is not even assured.

For the political contract to fulfill the synallagmatic and commutative
condition suggested by the idea of democracy; so that, confining itself
within wise limits, it remains advantageous and convenient to all, the
citizen must, on entering into the association, first, have as much to
receive from the State as he sacrifices to it; second, retain all his
liberty, sovereignty and initiative, minus what relates to the special
object for which the contract is formed and for which the guarantee is
requested from the State. Thus regulated and understood, the political
contract is what I call a *federation.*

FEDERATION, from the Latin *fœdus,* genitive *fœderis,* i.e. pact,
contract, treaty, convention, alliance, etc., is an agreement by which
one or more heads of families, one or more communes, one or more groups
of communes or States, bind themselves reciprocally and equally towards
each other for one or more particular objects, the charge of which falls
specially then and exclusively on the delegates of the federation.[6]

Let us come back to this definition.

What constitutes the essence and character of the federative contract,
that to which I call the reader’s attention, is that in this system the
contracting parties, heads of families, communes, cantons, provinces or
states, not only bind themselves synallagmatically and commutatively
towards each other, they reserve individually, by forming the pact, more
rights, liberty, authority, property, than they abandon.

It is not so, for example, in the universal society of goods and gains
authorized by the Civil Code, in other words community, the miniature
image of all absolute states. Whoever engages in an association of this
kind, especially if it is perpetual, is surrounded by more obstacles,
subjected to more burdens than he retains initiative. But this is also
what makes the rarity of this contract, and what has always made
cenobitic life unbearable. Any commitment, even synallagmatic and
commutative, which, requiring from the partners the totality of their
efforts, leaves nothing to their independence and devotes them entirely
to the association, is an excessive commitment, which is equally
repugnant to the citizen and to the man.

According to these principles, the contract of federation having for its
object, in general terms, to guarantee to the confederated States their
sovereignty, their territory, the liberty of their citizens; to settle
their differences; to provide, by general measures, for all that
concerns security and common prosperity, this contract, I say, despite
the greatness of the interests involved, is essentially restricted. The
Authority charged with its execution can never prevail over its
constituents, I mean that the federal attributions can never exceed in
number and in reality those of the communal or provincial authorities,
just as these cannot exceed the rights and prerogatives of the man and
citizen. If it were otherwise, the commune would be a community; the
federation would again become a monarchical centralization; the federal
authority, from the simple agent and subordinate function that it must
be, would be regarded as preponderant; instead of being limited to a
special service, it would tend to embrace all activity and all
initiative; the confederated States would be converted into prefectures,
stewardships, branches, or public companies. The body politic, thus
transformed, could be called republic, democracy or whatever you like:
it would no longer be a state constituted in the fullness of its
autonomy; it would no longer be a confederation. The same thing would
take place, with all the more reason, if, by a false reason of economy,
by deference or by any other cause, the communes, cantons or
confederated States charged one among them with the administration and
the government others. The republic, once federative, would become
unitary; it would be on the road to despotism.[7]

In summary, the federal system is the opposite of the hierarchy or
administrative and governmental centralization by which are
distinguished, *ex aequo,* the imperial democracies, the constitutional
monarchies and the unitary republics. Its fundamental, characteristic
law is this: In federation, the attributes of central authority become
specialized and restricted, diminish in number, immediacy, and if I dare
say so, in intensity, as the Confederation develops through the
accession of new states. In centralized governments, on the contrary,
the attributes of the supreme power multiply, extend and become
immediate, attracting into the jurisdiction of the prince the affairs of
the provinces, communes, corporations and individuals, in direct
proportion to the territorial area and the number of population. Hence
that crushing under which all liberty, not only communal and provincial,
but even individual and national, disappears.

A consequence of this fact, with which I will end this chapter, is that,
the unitary system being the inverse of the federative system, a
confederation between great monarchies, *a fortiori* between imperial
democracies, is impossible. States like France, Austria, England,
Russia, Prussia, can make treaties of alliance or commerce among
themselves; it is repugnant that they federalize, first of all, because
their principle is contrary to it, that it would put them in opposition
to the federal pact; because consequently they would have to give up
something of their sovereignty, and recognize above them, at least in
certain cases, an arbiter. Their nature is to command, not to compromise
or obey. The princes who, in 1813, supported by the insurrection of the
masses, fought for the liberties of Europe against Napoleon, who later
formed the Holy Alliance, were not confederates; the absolutism of their
power forbade them from taking this title. They were, as in 92, *allies;*
history will give them no other name. It is not the same with the
Germanic Confederation, presently in the process of reform, whose
character of liberty and nationality threatens to one day to make the
dynasties that make obstacles to it disappear.[8]

** CHAPTER VIII. PROGRESSIVE CONSTITUTION

History and analysis, theory and empiricism, have led us, through the
agitations of liberty and the power, to the idea of a political
contract.

Immediately applying this idea and seeking to understand it, we
recognized that the social contract par excellence was a contract of
federation, which we defined in these terms: *A* *synallagmatic and
commutative contract, for one or more determined objects, but the
essential* *condition of which is that the contracting parties always
reserve for themselves a greater share of* *sovereignty and action than
that which they abandon,* Just the opposite of what takes place in the
old monarchical, democratic and constitutional systems, where, by the
force of situations and the influence of principles, individuals and
groups are supposed to abdicate into the hands of an imposed or elected
authority their whole sovereignty, and obtain fewer rights, preserve
less in guarantees and initiative, than it is incumbent upon them in
charges and duties.

This definition of the federation contract is a huge step, which will
give us the much soughtafter solution.

The political problem, as we said in the first chapter, reduced to its
simplest expression, consists in finding the balance between two
contrary elements, Authority and liberty. Any false balance is
immediately translated, for the State into disorder and ruin, for the
citizens into oppression and misery. In other words, the anomalies or
disturbances of the social order result from the antagonism of its
principles; they will disappear when the principles are coordinated in
such a way that they can no longer harm each other.

To balance two forces is to submit them to a law which, holding them in
respect to each other, brings them into harmony. What is going to
provide us with this new element, superior to Authority and Liberty, and
made by their mutual consent the dominant of the system? — The contract,
the substance of which makes RIGHT, and is equally binding on the two
rival powers.[9]

But, in a concrete and living nature, such as society, right cannot be
reduced to a purely abstract notion, an indefinite aspiration of
consciousness, which would be to throw us back into fictions and myths.
It is necessary, to establish society, to pose not simply an idea but a
legal act, to form a true contract. The men of 89 felt it when they
undertook to give France a constitution, and all the powers that
followed them felt it in the same way. Unfortunately, if the will was
good, the enlightenment was insufficient; so far the notary has failed
to draw up the contract. We know what its spirit must be: let us now try
to outline its content.

All the articles of a constitution can be reduced to a single article,
that which concerns the role and the competence of this great
functionary that is called the State. Our national assemblies have
occupied themselves endlessly with the distinction and the separation of
powers, that is to say, the faculties of action of the State; as for the
competence of the State in itself, its extent, its object, we do not see
that anyone was much concerned about it. We thought of *division,* as a
minister of 1848 naively said; as to the thing to share, it generally
seemed that the more there would be of it, the more beautiful the party
would be. And yet the delineation of the role of the state is a matter
of life and death for liberty, collective and individual.

The contract of federation, the essence of which is always to reserve
more for the citizens than for the State, more for the municipal and
provincial authorities than for the central authority, could alone put
us on the road to truth.

In a free society, the role of the State or government is par excellence
a role of legislation, institution, creation, inauguration,
installation; — it is, as little as possible, an executive role. In this
regard, the name of *executive power,* by which one designates one of
the aspects of sovereign power, has singularly contributed to falsiing
ideas. The State is not a public service contractor, which would be
likening it to the industrialists who take care of the works of the city
on a contract basis. The State, whether it enacts, or whether it acts or
supervises, is the generator and the supreme director of the movement;
if sometimes it puts its hand to the maneuver, it is as a first
manifestation, to give the impetus and set an example. The creation
effected, the installation or the inauguration done, the State
withdraws, leaving to the local authorities and the citizens the
execution of the new service.

It is the State that fixes the weights and measures, that gives the
unit, the value and the divisions of the currencies. The types provided,
the first issue terminated, the manufacture of gold, silver and copper
coins ceases to be a public function, a state employment, a ministerial
attribution; it is an industry left to the towns, which nothing if need
be would prevent, just like the manufacture of scales, balances, barrels
and bottles, from being completely free. The cheapest is here the only
law. What is required in France for gold and silver coinage to be
reputed to be authentic? One tenth alloy and nine tenths fine. Let there
be an inspector to follow and oversee the production, I want it: the
role of the State does not go beyond that.

What I say of currencies, I say again of a multitude of services,
abusively left in the hands of the government — roads, canals, tobacco,
posts, telegraphs, railways, &c. I understand, I admit, I demand, if
need be, the intervention of the State in all these great creations of
public utility; I see no need to leave them in its hands once they have
been delivered to the public. Such a concentration, in my opinion,
constitutes a real excess of attributions. I asked, in 1848, for the
intervention of the State for the establishment of national banks,
institutions of credit, provident fund, insurance, as for the railroads:
it never entered

my thought that the State, having

accomplished its work of creation, should remain forever banker,
insurer, carrier, etc. Certainly, Certainly, I do not believe in the
possibility of organizing the education of the people without a great
effort from the central authority, but I nonetheless remain a supporter
of the liberty of education, as of all liberties.[10] I want the school
to be as radically separated from the State as the Church itself. Let
there be a Court of Auditors, as well as a statistical office,
established to collect, veri and generalize all information, all
transactions, all financial operations on the surface of the Republic,
at the right time. But why should all expenditure and revenue pass
through the hands of a single treasurer, receiver or paymaster, minister
of state, when the state, by the nature of its function, must have
little or no service to perform, hence little or no spending?…[11] Is it
also really necessary for the courts to be dependent on the central
authority? To render justice has always been the highest attribution of
the prince, I know: but this attribution is a remainder of divine right;
it could not be claimed by a constitutional king,

*a fortiori* by the head of an empire

established by universal suffrage. From the moment, therefore, that the
idea of right, becoming human again, obtains as such the preponderance
in the political system, the independence of the magistracy will be the
necessary consequence. It is repugnant that justice be considered as an
attribute of central or federal authority; it can only be a delegation
made by the citizens to the municipal authority, at most to the
provincial one. Justice is the attribute of man, that no reason of State
should strip him of it. — I do not even exclude war service from this
rule, the militias, the warehouses, fortresses, pass into the hands of
the federal authorities only in cases of war and for the special purpose
of war; outside of that, soldiers and armaments remain in the hands of
the local authorities.[12]

In a regularly organized society, everything must be in continuous
growth, — science, industry, work, wealth, public health; liberty and
morality must go hand in hand. There, the movement, the life, do not
stop for a moment. The principal organ of this movement, the State, is
always in action, for it constantly has new needs to satis, new
questions to resolve. If its function as prime mover and high director
is incessant, its works, on the other hand, are not repeated. It is the
highest expression of progress. Now, what happens when, as we see almost
everywhere, as we have almost always seen, it lingers in the services
that it has created and yields to the temptation of monopolization? From
founder it becomes laborer; it is no longer the genius of the
collectivity, which fertilizes it, directs it and enriches it, without
imposing any embarrassment on it: it is a vast anonymous company, with
six hundred thousand employees and six hundred thousand soldiers,
organized to do everything, and which, instead of coming to the aid of
the nation, instead of serving the citizens and the communes,
dispossesses of and pressures them. Soon corruption, embezzlement,
laxity enter this busy system to support itself, to increase its
prerogatives, to multiply its services and to swell its budget, the
power loses sight of its true role, falls into autocracy and immobility;
the social body suffers, and the nation, contrary to its historical law,
begins to decline.

Have we not pointed out, Chap. VI, that in the evolution of States,
Authority and Liberty are in logical and chronological succession; that,
moreover, the first is in continuous decrease, the second in ascent;
that the Government, expression of Authority, is imperceptibly
subordinated by the representatives or organs of Liberty, namely: the
central power by the deputies of the departments or provinces;
provincial authority by the delegates of the communes, and municipal
authority by the inhabitants; that thus liberty aspires to make itself
preponderant, authority to become the servant of liberty, and the
contractual principle to substitute itself everywhere, in public
affairs, for the authoritarian principle?

If these facts are true, the consequence cannot be doubtful: it is that,
according to the nature of things and the play of principles, Authority
should be in retreat and Liberty should advance on it, but in such a way
that the two follow each other without ever colliding, the constitution
of society is essentially progressive, which means more and more
liberal, and that this destiny can only be fulfilled in a system where
the governmental hierarchy, instead of being placed on its summit, be
established squarely on its base, I mean in the federative system.

All the constitutional science is there: I summarize it in three
propositions:

 1. To form modest groups, respectively sovereign, and unite them by a
    pact of federation;
 2. To organize the government in each federated state according to the
    law of separation of

organs; — I mean: to separate in the power all that can be separated, to
define all that can be defined, to distribute among different organs or
functionaries all that will have been separated and defined; leave
nothing in joint ownership; to surround the public administration with
all the conditions of publicity and control;

 3. Instead of absorbing the federated States or provincial and
    municipal authorities into a

central authority, to reduce the powers of the latter to a simple role
of general initiative, mutual guarantee and oversight, the decrees of
which only receive their execution on the endorsement of the confederate
governments and by agents at their orders, as, in the constitutional
monarchy, any order emanating from the king must, in order to receive its
execution, be endorsed with the countersignature of a minister.

Assuredly, the separation of powers, such as it was practiced under the
Charter of 1830, is a fine institution and of high significance, but on
that it is childish to restrict to the members of a cabinet. It is not
only between seven or eight elected members, coming from a parliamentary
majority, and criticized by an opposing minority, that the government of
a country must be divided; it is between the provinces and the communes:
failing which political life abandons the extremities for the center,
and stagnation spreads to the nation, which has become hydrocephalic.

The federative system is applicable to all nations and to all ages,
since humanity is progressive in all its generations and in all its
races, and since the policy of federation, which is the policy of
progress par excellence, consists in treating each population, at such
times as may be indicated, following a regime of decreasing authority
and centralization, corresponding to the state of minds and morals.

** CHAPTER IX. DELAY OF THE FEDERATIONS: CAUSES OF THEIR DEFERMENT.

The idea of Federation appears as old in history as those of Monarchy
and Democracy, as old as Authority and Liberty themselves. How could it
be otherwise? Everything that the law of Progress causes to emerge
successively in society has its roots in nature itself. Civilization
advances, enveloped in its principles, preceded and followed by its
cortege of ideas, which make a circle around it incessantly. Founded on
the contract, solemn expression of Liberty, Federation cannot miss the
call. More than twelve centuries BC, it shows itself in the Hebrew
tribes, separated from each other in their valleys, but united, like the
Ismaili tribes, by a sort of pact based on consanguinity. Almost
immediately it manifests itself in Greek Amphictyonia, powerless, it is
true, to stifle discord and prevent conquest, or, what amounts to the
same thing, unitary absorption, but living testimony of the future right
of nations and of universal Liberty. We have not forgotten the glorious
leagues of the Slavic and Germanic peoples, continued to our day in the
federal constitutions of Switzerland, Germany, and even in this empire
of Austria formed of so many heterogeneous nations, but, whatever one
does, inseparable. It is this federal contract which, gradually
constituting itself into a regular government, must put an end
everywhere to the contradictions of empiricism, eliminate arbitrariness,
and establish Justice and Peace on an indestructible balance.

For long centuries, the idea of Federation seemed veiled and kept in
reserve: the cause of this postponement was in the original incapacity
of nations, and in the necessity of forming them by strong discipline.
Now, such is the role that, by a sort of sovereign council, seems to
have devolved to the unitary system.

It was necessary to tame, to fix the wandering, undisciplined and coarse
multitudes; to form groups of isolated and hostile cities: to found
little by little, by authority, a common right, and to lay down, in the
form of imperial decrees, the general laws of humanity. No other meaning
can be imagined for these great political creations of antiquity, which
were then succeeded, in turn, by the empires of the Greeks, Romans and
Franks, the Christian Church, the revolt of Luther, and finally the
French Revolution.

Federation could not fulfill this educational mission, firstly, because
it is Liberty; because it excludes the idea of constraint, because it is
based on the notion of the synallagmatic, commutative and limited
contract; and because its object is to guarantee sovereignty and
autonomy to the peoples it unites, to those consequently that it was a
question in the beginnings of keeping under the yoke, until they were
able to rule themselves by reason. Civilization, in a word, being
progressive, it implied a contradiction that federal government could be
established at the beginning.

Another reason for the provisional exclusion of the federal principle is
the weakness of the expansion of the States grouped under federal
constitutions.

*Natural limits of federative States.* — We said, in Chap. II, that
monarchy, by itself and by virtue of its principle, knows no limits to
its development, and that it is the same with democracy.

This faculty of expansion passed from simplistic or *a priori*
governments, to mixed or *de facto* governments, democracies and
aristocracies, democratic empires and constitutional monarchies, all of
which in this respect have faithfully obeyed their ideal. From there
came the messianic dreams and all the attempts at monarchy or universal
republic.

In these systems the encompassment has no end; this is where we can say
that the idea of a *natural frontier* is a fiction, or better said a
political fraud; it is there that the rivers, the mountains and the seas
are considered, no longer as territorial limits, but as obstacles over
which it belongs to the liberty of the sovereign and the nation to
triumph. And the reason of the principle wants it thus: the faculty of
possessing, of accumulating, of commanding and of exploiting is
indefinite; it has no limits except the universe. The most famous
example of this monopolization of territories and populations, in spite
of mountains, rivers, forests, seas and deserts, was that of the Roman
Empire, having its center and its capital in a peninsula, at the bosom
of a vast sea, and its provinces round about, as far as armies and taxes
could reach.

Every state is annexationist by its nature. Nothing stops its invading
march, except the encounter with another State, an invader like itself
and capable of defending itself. The most ardent preachers of
nationality do not fail, on occasion, to contradict themselves, as soon
as it is in the interest, *a fortiori* for the safety of their country:
which, in the French democracy, would have dared to protest against the
reunion of Savoy and Nice? It is not even rare to see the annexations
favored by the annexed themselves, peddling their independence and their
autonomy.

It is otherwise in the federal system. Very capable of defending itself
if attacked, as the Swiss have more than once demonstrated, a
confederation remains without strength for conquest. Apart from the very
rare case where a neighboring state asks to be accepted into the pact,
it can be said that, by the very fact of its existence, it prohibits any
expansion. By virtue of the principle which, limiting the pact of
federation to mutual defense and to a few objects of common utility,
guarantees to each State its territory, its sovereignty, its
constitution, the liberty of its citizens, and for the surplus reserves
to it more authority, initiative and power than it abandons, the
confederation restricts itself from it even all the more surely as the
localities admitted into the alliance move further away from each other;
so that we soon arrive at a point where the pact finds itself without
object. Let us suppose that one of the confederated States forms plans
for individual conquest, that it desires to annex a neighboring city, a
province contiguous to its territory; that it wants to interfere in the
affairs of another state. Not only will it not be able to count on the
support of the confederation, which will reply that the pact was formed
exclusively for the purpose of mutual defense, not of particular
aggrandizement; it will even see itself prevented in its undertaking by
federal solidarity, which does not want all to expose themselves to war
for the ambition of one. So that a confederation is at the same time a
guarantee for its own members and for its nonconfederated neighbors.

Thus, contrary to what is happening in other governments, the idea of a
universal confederation is contradictory. In this is shown once more the
moral superiority of the federal system over the unitary system, subject
to all the disadvantages and all the vices of the indefinite, the
unlimited, the absolute, the ideal. Europe would still be too big for a
single confederation: it could only form a confederation of
confederations. It is according to this idea that I indicated, in my
last publication, as the first step to be taken in the reform of
European public law, the reestablishment of the Italian, Greek,
Batavian, Scandinavian and Danube confederations, a prelude to the
decentralization of large states, and consequently of general
disarmament. Then all nationality would return to liberty; then the idea
of a European equilibrium would come true, as anticipated by all
publicists and statesmen, but impossible to obtain with great powers
with unitary constitutions.[13]

Thus condemned to a peaceful and modest existence, playing the most
unassuming role on the political scene, it is not surprising that the
idea of Federation has remained to our day as if lost in the splendor of
the great States. Until today, prejudices and abuses of all kinds
swarming and raging in federal states with the same intensity as in
feudal or unitary monarchies, prejudice of nobility, privilege of
bourgeoisie, authority of the Church, resulting in oppression of the
people. and servitude of the spirit, Liberty remained as if swaddled in
a straitjacket, and civilization plunged into an invincible *status
quo.* The federalist idea was supported, unperceived, incomprehensible,
impenetrable, sometimes by a sacramental tradition, as in Germany, where
the Confederation, synonymous with Empire, was a coalition of absolute
princes, some laymen, others ecclesiastics, under the sanction of the
Church of Rome; sometimes by the force of things, as in Switzerland,
where the confederation was composed of a few valleys, separated from
each other and protected against foreigners by impassable chains, the
conquest of which would certainly not have been worth starting over
again the business of Hannibal. Political vegetation arrested in its
growth, where the thought of the philosopher had nothing to take, the
statesman no principle to gather, from which the masses had nothing to
hope for, and which, far from offering the least aid to the Revolution, A
historical fact is that the French Revolution took over all the existing
federal constitutions, that it has amended them, inspired with its
breath, has provided them with the best they have, in a word, has put
them in a condition to evolve, without having received anything from them
up to now.

The Americans had been defeated in twenty encounters, and their cause
seemed lost, when the arrival of the French changed the face of things,
and compelled the English general Cornwallis to capitulate, October 19,
1781. It was after this coup that England consented to recognize the
independence of the colonies, which could then concern themselves with
their constitution. Well, what were the political ideas of the Americans
then? What were the principles of their government? A veritable jumble
of privileges; a monument of intolerance, exclusion and arbitrariness,
in which shone, like a sinister star, the spirit of aristocracy,
regulation, sect and caste; which aroused the reprobation of the French
publicists, and drew from them the most humiliating observations on the
Americans. The little true liberalism that penetrated America at this
time was, it may be said, the result of the French Revolution, which
seemed to be the prelude on this distant beach to the renovation of the
old world. Freedom in America has hitherto been more an effect of
Anglo-Saxon individualism, launched into immense solitudes, than that of
its institutions and its mores. The present war only demonstrates this
too well.[14]

It was again the Revolution that tore Switzerland from its old prejudices
of aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and recast its confederation. In 1801,
the constitution of the Helvetic Republic was revised for the first
time; the following year the mediation of the First Consul put an end to
the troubles. It would have put an end to nationality, if the reunion of
Switzerland in the Empire had been in Napoleon’s sights. But no: *I
don’t want you,* he told them. From 1814 to 1848, Switzerland never
ceased to be tormented by its retrograde elements, so much was the idea
of federation there confused with the idea of aristocracy and privilege.
It was not until 1848, in the Constitution of September 12, that it was
finally clearly laid down the true principles of the federal system.
Again, these principles were so little understood that a unitary
tendency immediately manifested itself, which had its representatives
even in the federal assembly.

As for the Germanic Confederation, everyone knows that the old building
was abolished through the mediation of the same Emperor, who was not so
successful in his restoration plan. At this moment, the system of the
Germanic Confederation is again being studied in the minds of the
peoples: may Germany finally emerge, free and strong, from this agitation
as from a salutary crisis.

In 1789, therefore, the test of federalism had not been made; the idea
was not established: the revolutionary legislator had no conclusion to
draw from it. It was necessary that the confederations, such as they
were, that throbbed in some corners of the Old and the New World,
animated by the new spirit, first learned to walk and to define
themselves, that their fertilized principle, developing, showed the
richness of its body; at the same time, under the new regime of
equality, it was necessary to make a final experiment with the unitary
system. Only on these conditions could Philosophy argue, the Revolution
conclude, and, the idea becoming general, the Republic of the peoples
finally emerge from its mysticism in the concrete form of a federation of
federations.

Facts today seem to give impetus to ideas; and we can, it seems, without
presumption or pride, on the one hand tear the masses away from their
disastrous symbols, on the other give politicians the secret of their
miscalculations.

** CHAPTER X. POLITICAL IDEALISM: EFFECTIVENESS OF THE FEDERAL GUARANTEE.

An observation to be made in general about the moral and political
sciences is that the difficulty of their problems comes above all from
the figurative way in which primitive reason has conceived their
elements. In the popular imagination, politics, like morality, is a
mythology. There, everything becomes fiction, symbol, mystery, idol. And
it is this idealism that, confidently adopted by philosophers as an
expression of reality, afterwards creates so much embarrassment for them.

The people, in the vagueness of their thought, contemplates itself as a
gigantic and mysterious existence, and everything in their language
seems made to maintain them in the opinion of their indivisible unity.
They are called the People, the Nation, that is to say the Multitude,
the Mass; they are the true Sovereign, the Legislator, Power, Dominion,
Fatherland, State; they have their Convocations, their Polls, their
Assizes, their Manifestations, their Pronouncements, their Plebiscites,
their direct Legislation, sometimes their Judgments and Executions,
their Oracles, their Voice, like thunder, the great voice of God. As
much as they feel innumerable, irresistible, immense, they abhor
divisions, splits, minorities. Their ideal, their most delectable dream,
is unity, identity, uniformity, concentration; they curse, as an attack
on his Majesty, everything that can share their will, cut their mass,
create in them diversity, plurality, divergence.

All mythology presupposes idols, and the People never lack them. Like
Israel in the desert, they improvise gods when no one takes care to give
them any; they have their incarnations, their messiahs, their
Dieudonnés. The People is the war chief raised on the bulwark; it is the
glorious, conquering and magnificent king, similar to the sun, or even
the revolutionary tribune: Clovis, Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Lafayette,
Mirabeau, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, Napoleon, Victor- Emmanuel,
Garibaldi. How many are there who, to mount the pedestal, are only
waiting for a change of opinion, a wing stroke of fortune! Of these
idols, most of them as devoid of ideas, as devoid of conscience as
themselves, the people are zealous and jealous; they do not allow them
to be discussed or contradicted, above all they do not bargain with them
for power. Do not touch their anointed ones, or you will be treated by
that as sacrilegious.

Full of their own myths, and considering themselves an essentially
undivided community, how would the people fully grasp the relationship
of the citizen to society? How, under their inspiration, would the
statesmen who represent them give the true formula of government? Where
universal suffrage reigns in its naivety, we can affirm in advance that
everything will be done in the direction of joint ownership. The people
being the collectivity that contains all authority and all rights,
universal suffrage, to be sincere in its expression, must itself be
undivided as much as possible, that is to say that the elections must be
made by ballot-list: in 1848 there were even *unitaires* who demanded
that there be only one list for the eighty-six departments. From this
undivided ballot therefore arises an undivided assembly, deliberating
and legislating as one man. In the event of a division of the vote, it
is the majority that represents, without any reduction, the national
unity. From this majority will in turn emerge an undivided Government
which, taking its powers from the indivisible Nation, is called upon to
govern and administer collectively and indivisibly, without any sense of
locality or parochial interest. It is thus that the system of
centralization, imperialism, communism, absolutism, — all these words
are synonymous, — flows from popular idealism; it is thus that in the
social pact, conceived in the manner of Rousseau and the Jacobins, the
citizen relinquishes his sovereignty, and that the commune, and above
the commune the department and the province, absorbed into the central
authority, are nothing more than agencies under the immediate direction
of the ministry.

The consequences are not long in being felt: the citizen and the commune
stripped of all dignity, the invasions of the State multiply, and the
burdens of the taxpayer grow in proportion. It is no longer the
government that is made for the people, it is the people that are made
for the government. Power invades everything, seizes everything,
arrogates everything to itself, in perpetuity, forever, forever: War and
Navy, Administration, Justice, Police, Public Instruction, public
creations and repairs; Banks, Stock Exchanges, Credit, Insurance,
Relief, Savings, Charity; Forests, Canals, Rivers; Cults, Finances,
Customs, Trade, Agriculture, Industry, Transport. Above all, a
formidable tax, which deprives the nation of a quarter of its gross
product!

Faced with this disposition of minds, in the midst of powers hostile to
the Revolution, what could be the thought of the founders of 89, sincere
friends of liberty? Not daring to break the bundle of the State, they had
to concern themselves above all with two things: first, to contain the
Power, always ready to usurp; second, to contain the People, always
ready to allow themselves to be carried away by their tribunes and to
replace the mores of legality by those of omnipotence.

Until now, in fact, the authors of constitutions, Syeyes, Mirabeau, the
Senate of 1814, the Chamber of 1830, the Assembly of 1848, have
believed, not without reason, that the essential point of the political
system was to contain the central Power, while allowing it the greatest
liberty of action and the greatest strength. To achieve this goal, what
was done? First, as has been said, the Power was divided by categories
of ministries; then legislative authority was distributed between
royalty and the Chambers, to the majority of which the choice that the
prince had to make of ministers was still subordinated. Finally the tax
was voted, for one year, by the Chambers, which took this opportunity to
review the acts of the government.

But, while the parliament of the Chambers was organized against the
ministers, while the royal prerogative was balanced by the initiative of
the representatives, the authority of the crown by the sovereignty of
the nation; while one opposed words to words, fictions to fictions, one
adjudged to the government, without any reserve, without any other
counterweight than a vain faculty of criticism, the prerogative of an
immense administration; all the forces of the country were placed in its
hands; local liberties were suppressed for greater security;
*parochialism* was annihilated with frenetic zeal; one created, finally,
a formidable, crushing power, to which one then gave oneself the
pleasure of making a war of epigrams, as if reality were sensitive to
personalities. So what happened? The opposition ended up getting the
better of the people: the ministries fell one upon the other; a dynasty
was overthrown, then a second; empire was added to the republic, and
centralizing, anonymous despotism continued to grow, liberty to
decrease. This has been our progress since the victory of the Jacobins
over the Gironde. The inevitable result of an artificial system, in
which metaphysical sovereignty and the right to criticize were placed on
one side, and on the other all the realities of the national domain, all
the powers of action of a great people.

In the federative system, such apprehensions cannot exist. The central
authority, initiating rather than executing, possesses only a fairly
limited part of the public administration, that which concerns the
federal services; it is placed under the hands of the States, absolute
masters of themselves, enjoying, in all that concerns them respectively,
the most complete authority, legislative, executive and judicial. The
central Power is all the better subordinated in that it is entrusted to
an Assembly formed of the delegates of the States, members themselves,
very often, of their respective governments, who, for this reason,
exercise over the acts of the Federal Assembly a surveillance all the
more jealous and severe.

To contain the masses, the embarrassment of the publicists was no less
great; the means employed by them equally illusory, and the result
equally unfortunate.

The people are also one of the powers of the state, the one whose
outbursts are the most terrible. This power needs a counterweight: the
democracy itself is forced to agree, since it is the absence of this
counterweight which, delivering the people to the most dangerous
excitations, leaving the State exposed to the most formidable
insurrections, twice caused the fall of the republic in France.

The counterweight to the action of the masses was believed to be found
in two institutions, one very onerous in the country and full of perils,
the other no less dangerous, especially painful to the public
conscience, these are, 1. the standing army, 2. the restriction of the
right to vote. Since 1848 universal suffrage has become the law of the
State: but the danger of democratic agitation having increased in
proportion, it has been necessary also to increase the army, to give
more nerve to military action. So that, to protect oneself from popular
insurgency, one is obliged, in the system of the founders of 89, to
increase the force of the Power at the very moment when one takes
precautions against it on the other hand. So much so that the day the
Power and the people stretch out their hands, all this scaffolding will
crumble. A strange system, where the People cannot exercise sovereignty
without exposing itself to breaking the government, nor the government
using its prerogative without marching towards absolutism!

The federative system cuts short the effervescence of the masses, all
the ambitions and excitements of demagoguery: it was the end of the
regime of the public square, of the triumphs of the tribunes, like the
absorption of the capitals. Let Paris make revolutions within its walls:
what good is it if Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen,
Lille, Strasbourg, Dijon, etc., if the departments, masters of
themselves, do not follow? Paris will be responsible for its costs… The
federation thus becomes the salvation of the people because it saves it
both, by dividing it, from the tyranny of its leaders and from its own
madness.

The Constitution of 1848, on the one hand by removing the command of the
armies from the President of the Republic, on the other by declaring
itself reformable and progressive, had tried to ward off this double
danger of the usurpation of the central Power and of the insurrection of
the people. But the Constitution of 1848 did not say what progress
consisted of, under what conditions it could be effected. In the system
it had founded, the distinction between classes, bourgeoisie and people,
still existed: we had seen this during the discussion of the right to
work and the law of May 31, restricting universal suffrage. The unitary
prejudice was stronger than ever; Paris giving the tone, the idea, the
will to the departments, it was easy to see that, in the event of a
conflict between the President and the Assembly, the people would follow
their elected rather than their representatives. The events confirmed
these predictions. The day of December 2 showed what purely legal
guarantees are worth, against a Power which has joined to popular favor
the power of the administration, and which also has its rights. But if,
for example, at the same time as the Republican Constitution of 1848,
the municipal and departmental organization had been made and brought
into force; if the provinces had learned to live a life of their own; if
they had had their large share of the executive power, if the inert
multitude of December 2 had been something in the state apart from the
ballot, certainly the coup d’état would have been impossible. The
battlefield being limited between the Élysée and the Palais-Bourbon, the
outcry of the executive power would have involved at most only the
garrison of Paris and the personnel of the ministries.[15]

I will not end this chapter without quoting the words of a writer whose
spirit of moderation and profundity has sometimes been appreciated by
the public in *the Courrier du Dimanche, M.* *Gustave* CHAUDEY, lawyer
at the Court of Paris. They will serve to make it understood that it is
not a question here of a vain utopia, but of a system currently in
practice, whose living idea develops daily:

The ideal of a confederation would be the pact of alliance, which one
could say brings only restrictions to the particular sovereignties of
the federated States which become, in the hands of the federal
authority, extensions of guarantee for the liberty of the citizens,
increased protection for their individual or collective activity.

By this alone one understands the enormous difference that exists
between a federal authority and a unitary government, in other words, a
government representing only one sovereignty.

M. Chaudey’s definition is of the most perfect exactness; and what he
calls ideal is none other

than the formula given by the most rigorous theory. In the federation,
the centralization is limited to certain special objects detached from
the cantonal sovereignties and which are supposed to have to return
there, it is *partial;* in the unitary government, on the contrary,
centralization extends to everything and never renders anything, it is
UNIVERSAL, The consequence is easy to foresee:

Centralization, continues Mr. Chaudey, in unitary government, is an
immense force at the disposal of the power, the employment of which, in
one direction or another, depends solely on the various personal wills
that express power. Change the conditions of this power, you change the
conditions of centralization. Liberal today with a liberal government,
tomorrow it will become a formidable instrument of usurpation for a
usurping power, and after the usurpation, a formidable instrument of
despotism; not to mention that for that very reason it is a perpetual
temptation to power, a perpetual threat to the liberties of the
citizens. Under the influence of such a force, there are no individual
or collective rights that are sure of a future. In these conditions,
centralization could be called the disarmament of a nation for the
benefit of its government, and liberty is condemned to an incessant
struggle against force.

The opposite is true for federal centralization. Instead of arming the
power with the force of the WHOLE against the *part,* it is the PART
that it arms with the force of the *whole* against the abuses of its own
power. A Swiss canton whose liberties would be threatened by its
government, instead of its strength alone, can oppose it with the
strength of the twenty-two cantons: isn’t that well worth the sacrifice
of the right to revolution that the cantons have made in the new
Constitution of 1848?

The law of progress, essential to federative Constitutions, impossible
to apply under a unitary Constitution, is no less well recognized by the
writer I am quoting:

The Federal Constitution of 1848 recognizes the right of cantonal
constitutions to revise and modi themselves; but it puts a double
condition on it: it wants the changes to be made according to the rules
drawn up by the respective Constitutions of the cantons, that moreover
these changes express progress, not regressions. It wants a people to
modi its Constitution to advance, not to retreat. It says to the Swiss
people: If it is not to increase your liberties that you want to change
your institutions, it is because you are hardly worthy of what you have:
stick to it. But if it is to increase your freedoms, it is because you
are worthy of going forward: march under the protection of all of
Switzerland.

The idea of guaranteeing and insuring a political constitution, much as
one insures a house against fire or a field against hail, is in fact the
fundamental idea and certainly the most original of the system. Our
legislators of 91, 93, 95, 99, 1814, 1830 and 1848, only knew how to
invoke, in favor of their constitutions, the patriotism of the citizens
and the devotion of the national guards; the constitution of 93 went as
far as the call to arms and the right of insurrection. Experience has
shown how illusory such guarantees are. The Constitution of 1852, to
very nearly the same degree as that of the Consulate and the first
Empire, is not guaranteed by anything and it is not I who will reproach
it for that. What guarantee, apart from the federal contract, could it
invoke?… The whole mystery, however, consists in distributing the nation
into independent, sovereign provinces, or which at least, administering
themselves, have sufficient strength, initiative and influence, and in
making them guarantee the each other.[16]

An excellent application of these principles is found in the
constitution of the Swiss army:

*The increase in protection is everywhere,* says Chaudey; *the danger of
oppression nowhere,* Passing under the federal flag, the cantonal
contingents do not forget the paternal ground: far from it, it is because
the fatherland commands them to serve the confederation that they obey
it. How could the cantons fear that their soldiers would become the
instruments of a unitary conspiracy against them? It is not the same for
the other States of Europe, where the soldier is taken from the people
only to be separated from them, and to become body and soul the man of
the government.[17]

The same spirit dominates in the American Constitution, which, however,
can be reproached for having multiplied beyond measure the attributions
of the federal authority. The powers attributed to the American
president are almost as extensive as those granted to Louis-Napoleon by
the Constitution of 1848: this excess of attributions was not unrelated
to the thought of unitary absorption which was first manifested in
States of the South, and which today in turn involves those of the
North.

The idea of Federation is certainly the highest to which political
genius has risen to our day. It far exceeds the French constitutions
promulgated for seventy years in spite of the Revolution, whose short
duration does so little honor to our country. It resolves all the
difficulties raised by the accord of Liberty and Authority. With it we
no longer have to fear getting bogged down in governmental antinomies;
to see the plebs *emancipate themselves* by proclaiming a perpetual
dictatorship, the bourgeoisie manifest their *liberalism* by pushing
centralization to the limit, the public spirit is corrupted in this
debauchery of license copulating with despotism, power constantly
returning to the hands of the *schemers,* as Robespierre called them,
and the Revolution, according to the word of Danton, *to remain always
with the greatest scoundrels.* Eternal reason is finally justified,
skepticism vanquished. Human misfortune will no longer be blamed on the
failure of Nature, the irony of Providence or the contradiction of the
Mind; finally, the opposition of principles appears as the condition of
universal equilibrium.

** CHAPTER XI. ECONOMIC SANCTION: AGRICULTURAL-INDUSTRIAL FEDERATION.

All, however, is not said. Irreproachable as the federal constitution
may be in its logic, whatever guarantees it offers in its application,
it will sustain itself only insofar as it does not encounter incessant
causes of dissolution in the public economy. In other words, political
right must have the buttress of economic right. If the production and
distribution of wealth is left to chance; if the federative order serves
only to protect capitalist and mercantile anarchy; if, as a result of
this false anarchy, society finds itself divided into two classes, one
of proprietorscapitalists-entrepreneurs, the other of wage-earning
proletarians; one rich, the other poor; the political edifice will
always be unstable. The working class, the most numerous and the
poorest, will end up seeing only a disappointment in it; the workers
will coalesce against the bourgeois, who on their side will coalesce
against the workers; and we will see the confederation degenerate, if
the people are the strongest, into a unitary democracy, if the
bourgeoisie triumphs, into a constitutional monarchy.

It was in anticipation of this eventuality of a social war that strong
governments were formed, as was said in the previous chapter, objects of
the admiration of publicists, in the eyes of whom confederations seem to
be hovels incapable of supporting the Power against the aggression of
the masses, which means, the enterprises of the government against the
rights of the nation. Because, once again, make no mistake about it, all
power is established, every citadel built, every army organized against
the inside as much at least as against the outside. If the mission of
the State is to make itself absolute master of society, and the destiny
of the people to serve as an instrument in its enterprises, it must be
recognized that the federal system does not bear comparison with the
unitary system. There, neither the central power by its dependence, nor
the multitude by its division, can do any more than the other against
public liberty. The Swiss, after their victories over Charles the Bold,
were for a long time the leading military power in Europe. But, because
they formed a confederacy, capable of defending themselves against the
foreigner, — they have proved it, — but unskilled in conquest and coups,
they remained a peaceful republic, the most harmless and least zealous
of states. The Germanic Confederation also had, under the name of
Empire, its centuries of glory but, because the imperial power lacked
fixity and center, the Confederation was torn apart, dislocated, and the
nationality compromised. The Confederation of the Low Countries vanished
in its turn in contact with the centralized powers: it is useless to
mention the Italian Confederation. Yes, certainly, if civilization, if
the economy of societies were to maintain the ancient *status quo,*
imperial unity would be better for the peoples than federation.

But everything announces that times have changed, and that after the
revolution of ideas must come, as its legitimate consequence, the
revolution of interests. The twentieth century will open the era of
federations,[18] or humanity will start a thousand-year purgatory again.
The real problem to be solved is not actually the political problem, it
is the economic problem. It was by this last solution that we proposed
in 1848, my friends and I, to continue the revolutionary work of
February. The democracy was in power; the Provisional Government had
only to act to succeed; the revolution made in the sphere of labor and
wealth, one should not be at all troubled about that to operate
afterwards in the government. Centralization, which would have had to be
broken later, would have temporarily been a powerful help. Nobody at
that time, except perhaps the one who writes these lines and who from
1840 had declared himself an *anarchist,* dreamed of attacking unity and
asking for federation.

Democratic prejudice decided otherwise. The politicians of the old
school maintained, and still maintain today, that the real way forward
in social revolution is to begin with government, and then to occupy
ourselves, at leisure, with labor and property. The democracy recusing
itself after having supplanted the bourgeoisie and driven out the prince,
what had to happen has happened. The empire has come to impose silence
on these talkers without a plan; the economic revolution took place in
the opposite direction to the aspirations of 1848, and liberty was
compromised.

One can be certain that I am not going, in connection with federation,
to present the table of economic science, and to show by the menu all
that there would be to make in this order of ideas. I am simply saying
that the federative government, after having reformed the political
order, has as a necessary complement a series of reforms to be carried
out in the economic order: here in a nutshell is what these reforms
consist of.

Just as from the political point of view, two or more independent States
can confederate to mutually guarantee the integrity of their territories
or for the protection of their liberties; in the same way, from the
economic point of view, one can form a confederation for the reciprocal
protection of trade and industry, which is called *a customs union;* one
can confederate for the construction and maintenance of lines of
communication, roads, canals, railways, for the organization of credit
and insurance, etc. The purpose of these particular federations is to
save the citizens of the contracting states from capitalist and
bankocratic exploitation both from within and

from without; together they form, in opposition to the financial
feudalism that is dominant today, what I will call
*agricultural-industrial federation,* I will not go into any development
on this subject. The public, which for fifteen years has more or less
followed my work, knows well enough what I mean. The purpose of
financial and industrial feudalism is to consecrate, by the
monopolization of public services, by the privilege of instruction, the
fragmentation of work, the interest of capital, the inequality of
taxation, etc., the forfeiture politics of the masses, economic serfdom
or wage labor, in a word, inequality of conditions and fortunes. The
agricultural-industrial federation, on the contrary, tends to
approximate equality more and more through the organization, at the
lowest cost and in other hands than those of the State, of all the
public services; by the mutuality of credit and insurance, by the
equalization of taxes, by the guarantee of labor and education, by a
combination of labor that enables each worker to become from a simple
laborer, an industrial worker and artist, and from employee master.

Such a revolution obviously cannot be the work of either a bourgeois
monarchy or a unitary democracy; it is the result of a federation. It
does not pertain to a *unilateral* or *benevolent* contract nor to the
institutions of charity; it is proper to the synallagmatic and
commutative contract.[19]

Considered in itself, the idea of an industrial federation serving as a
complement and sanction to political federation, receives the most
striking confirmation from the principles of economics. It is the
application on the highest scale of the principles of mutuality,
division of labor and economic solidarity, which the will of the people
would have transformed into laws of the State.

Let labor remain free; let the power, more deadly to labor than community
itself, refrain from touching it: that is good. But the industries are
sisters; they are dismemberments of each other; one cannot suffer
without the others suffering. Let them federate, therefore, not to
absorb and merge, but to mutually guarantee the conditions of prosperity
that are common to them and of which none can arrogate the monopoly. By
forming such a pact, they will not infringe upon their liberty; they will
only give it more certainty and strength. It will be with them as in the
State it is with powers, and in animals with organs, the separation of
which precisely creates power and harmony.

Thus, — an admirable thing, — zoology, political economy and politics
find themselves here in agreement in telling us first, that the most
perfect animal, the best served by its organs, consequently the most
active, the most intelligent, the best constituted for domination, is
the one whose faculties and members are most specialized, serial,
coordinated; — second, that the most productive society, the richest,
the best assured against hypertrophy and pauperism, is the one in which
labor is best divided, competition most complete, exchange most loyal,
circulation most regular, wages the fairest, property the most equal,
and all the industries best guaranteed by each other; — third, finally,
that the freest and most moral government is that in which the powers are
best divided, the administration best distributed, the independence of
groups most respected, the provincial, cantonal, and municipal
authorities best served by the central authority; it is, in a word, the
federative government.

Thus, just as the principle of monarchy or authority has as its first
corollary the assimilation or incorporation of the groups it associates
with itself, in other words administrative centralization, what we could
still call the community of the political household; as a second
corollary, the undivided power, in other words absolutism; as a third
corollary, landed and industrial feudalism; — similarly, the federative
principle, liberal par excellence, has as its first corollary the
administrative independence of the rallied localities; for second
corollary the separation of powers in each sovereign state; for the
third corollary, agricultural-industrial federation.

In a Republic constituted on such foundations, one can say that liberty
is elevated to its third power, authority reduced to its cubic root. The
first, in fact, grows with the State, in other words multiplies with the
federations; the second, subordinated from step to step, is found whole
only in the family, where it is tempered by the double love of conjugal
and paternal love.

Doubtless the knowledge of these great laws could only be acquired by
long and painful experience; perhaps also it is the case that, before
attaining liberty, our species needed to pass through the forks of
servitude. Each age has its idea; each era has its institutions.

Now the time has come. The whole of Europe is crying out for peace and
disarmament. And as if the glory of such a great benefit were reserved
for us, it is to France that the wishes are directed, it is from our
nation that the signal of universal felicity is expected.

Princes and kings, to take them literally, are of the antique style: we
have already *constitutionalized* them; the day is approaching when
there will only be federal presidents. Then we will be done with
aristocracies, democracies and all *cracies,* gangrenes of nations,
scarecrows of liberty. Does this democracy, which believes itself to be
liberal and which knows only how to anathematize federalism and
socialism, as in 93 their fathers anathematized them, have even the idea
of freedom?… But the ordeal must have an end. Here we begin to reason
about the federal pact; it is not presuming too much, I suppose, of the
stupefaction of the present generation, to assign the return of justice
to the cataclysm which will prevail.

For me, whose speech a certain press has undertaken to stifle, sometimes
by a calculated silence, sometimes by travesty and insult, I can throw
this challenge to my adversaries:

All my economic ideas, elaborated over twenty-five years, can be summed
up in these three words: *Agricultural-Industrial Federation;* All my
political views are reduced to a similar formula: *Political Federation*
or *Decentralization;* And as I do not make my ideas a party instrument
or a means of personal ambition, all my hopes for the present and for
the future are expressed by this third term, a corollary of the two
others: *Progressive federation.*

I challenge anyone to make a clearer profession of faith, of a higher
scope and at the same time of greater moderation; I go further, I de
any friend of liberty and right to reject this one.

* PART TWO. UNITARY POLITICS

A *Fructibus corum cognoscetis eos.* ]

** FIRST CHAPTER.  **Jacobin tradition: Federalist Gaul, Monarchical France.**

Gaul, inhabited by four different races, the Galls, the Kimris, the
Vascons and the Ligurians, subdivided into more than forty peoples,
formed, like its neighbor Germania, a confederation. Nature had given it
its first constitution, the constitution of free peoples. Unity came to
it by conquest; it was the work of the Caesars.

The limits are generally assigned to Gaul, to the north the North Sea
and the English Channel; to the west the ocean; to the South the
Pyrenees and the Mediterranean; to the east the Alps and the Jura; to
the northeast the Rhine. I do not want to discuss here this
circumscription, supposedly natural, although the basins of the Rhine,
the Moselle, the Meuse and the Scheldt belong rather to Germania than to
Gaul. All that I want to point out is that the territory comprised in
this immense pentagon, easily agglomerated, as the Romans and the Franks
proved in turn, is no less happily disposed for a Confederation. It can
be compared to a truncated pyramid, whose slopes, united by their crests
and pouring their waters into different seas, thus ensure the
independence of the populations that inhabit them. Roman policy, which
already, doing violence to nature, had unified and centralized Italy,
did the same for Gaul: so that our unfortunate country, having to
undergo successively the Latin conquest, the imperial unity, and soon
after converting to Christianity, lost forever its language, worship,
freedom, and originality.

After the fall of the Western Empire, Gaul, conquered by the Franks,
resumed under Germanic influence the appearance of a federation which,
rapidly denaturing, became the feudal system. The establishment of the
communes could have revived the federalist spirit, especially if they
had been inspired by the Flemish commune rather than the Roman
municipality: they were absorbed by the monarchy.

However, the federative idea, indigenous to old Gaul, lived like a
memory in the heart of the provinces, when the Revolution broke out.
Federation, one can say, was the first thought of 89. Monarchical
absolutism and feudal rights abolished, provincial boundaries respected,
everyone felt that France was going to find itself in a confederation,
under the hereditary presidency of a King. The battalions sent to Paris
from all the provinces of the kingdom were called *fédérés.* The
notebooks provided by the States, which hastened to regain their
sovereignty, contained the elements of the new pact.

Unfortunately, in 89, we were as always, in spite of our revolutionary
fever, rather an imitating people than an initiating people. No example
of a federation so remotely remarkable offered itself to us. Neither the
Germanic Confederation, established in the *Holy Apostolic Empire,* nor
the Swiss Confederation, steeped in aristocracy, were models to follow.
The American Confederation had just been signed on March 3, 1789, the
day before the opening of the States- General; and we saw in the first
part how defective this draft was. As soon as we gave up developing our
old principle, it was no exaggeration to expect from a constitutional
monarchy, based on the Declaration of Rights, more liberty, above all
more order, than from the constitution of the United States.

The National Assembly, usurping all powers and declaring itself the
*Constituent Assembly,* gave the signal for reaction against federalism.
From the oath of the Jeu de Paume, it was no longer a meeting of
quasi-federal deputies contracting on behalf of their respective states;
they were the representatives of an undivided collectivity, who began to
overhaul from top to bottom French society, to which they were the first
to deign to grant a charter. To make the metamorphosis irrevocable, the
provinces were cut up and made unrecognizable, any vestige of provincial
independence annihilated under a new geographical division, the
departments. Syeyès who proposed it, who later provided the type of all
the invariably unitary constitutions that for seventy-two years have
governed the country, Syeyès, nourished by the spirit of the Church and
the Empire, was the true author of the current unity; it was he who
repressed in its germ the national confederation, ready to be reborn if
only one man had been found capable of defining it. The necessities of
the moment, the salvation of the Revolution, were Syeyes’ excuse.

After the disaster of August 10, the abolition of royalty again brought
people back to federalist ideas. They were not satisfied with the
Constitution of 91, which had become impracticable. They complained of
the dictatorship of the last two Assemblies, of the absorption of the
departments by the capital. A new meeting of the representatives of the
nation was convened, it received the significant name of *Convention.*
It was an official denial of the unitary ideas of Syeyès, but one that
was to raise terrible debates and lead to bloody proscriptions. As it
had been at Versailles after the opening of the States-General,
federalism was defeated for the second time in Paris on May 31,

 1793. Since this fatal date, all vestige of federalism has disappeared
       from French public law; the

very idea has become suspect, synonymous with counter-revolution, I
almost said treason. The notion has faded from people’s minds: in France
we no longer know the meaning of the word *federation,* which one might
believe was borrowed from the Sanskrit vocabulary.

Were the Girondins wrong to want, by virtue of their *conventional*
mandate, to call for the decision of the departments of the one and
indivisible republic of the Jacobins? Admitting that they were right in
theory, was their policy appropriate? Undoubtedly the omnipotence of the
new assembly, elected in an essentially anti-unitary spirit, the
dictatorship of the committee of public safety, the triumvirate of
Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon, the tribunician power of Marat and
Hébert, the judicature of the revolutionary tribunal, all that was
scarcely tolerable, and moreover justified the insurrection of the
seventy-two departments against the commune of Paris. But the Girondins,
unable to define their own thought and formulate another system, unable
to bear the weight of public affairs and to face the danger to the
fatherland that they had so well denounced, were they not guilty of a
clumsy excitation, of a serious imprudence?… On the other hand, if the
Jacobins, who remained alone in power, were able, to a certain extent,
to boast of having saved the Revolution and defeated the coalition at
Fleurus, could we not with just as much justice reproach them for having
themselves created, in part, the danger in order to ward it off
afterwards; of having, by their fanaticism, by a terror of fourteen
months and by the reaction that it provoked, wearied the nation, broken
the public conscience and discredited liberty?

Impartial history will judge this great trial, in view of the best
understood principles, of the revelations of contemporaries and of the
facts.

As for me, if I am permitted, while awaiting the final decision, to
express a personal opinion — and what are the judgments of history made
up of, if not summaries of opinions? — I will say frankly that the French
nation, constituted for fourteen centuries as a monarchy by divine
right, could not transform itself overnight into a republic of some
kind; that the Gironde, accused of federalism, represented better than
the Jacobins the thought of the Revolution, but that it was mad if it
believed in the possibility of a sudden conversion; that prudence, we
would say today the law of progress, governed temperaments, and that the
misfortune of the Girondins was to have compromised their principle by
opposing it both to the monarchy of Syeyès and Mirabeau and to the
democracy of the Sans-Culottes, which have now become united. As for the
Jacobins, I will add with the same frankness that by seizing power and
exercising it with the fullness of monarchical attributions, they showed
themselves, for the occasion, wiser than the statesmen of the Gironde;
but that by re-establishing, with an increase in absolutism, the system
of royalty under the name of the *one and indivisible republic,* after
having crowned this republic with the blood of the last king, they
sacrificed the very principle of the Revolution and gave proof of a
Machiavellianism of the most sinister omen. A temporary dictatorship
could be admitted; a dogma, the result of which was to consecrate all
the invasions of power and to annul national sovereignty, was a
veritable outrage. The one and indivisible republic of the Jacobins did
more than destroy the old provincial federalism, evoked perhaps
inappropriately by the Gironde; it made liberty impossible in France and
the Revolution

illusory. One could still hesitate, in 1830,

regarding the disastrous consequences of the victory won by the
Jacobins: doubt is no longer possible today.

The debate between federation and unity

has just recurred with regard to Italy, in

circumstances that are not without analogy to those of 93. In 93 the
federative idea, confused by some with democracy, accused by others of
royalism, had against it the misfortune of the times, the fury of
parties, the forgetfulness and incapacity of the nation. In 1859, its
adversaries were the intrigues of a minister, the fancy of a sect and
the skillfully excited mistrust of the people. It is a question of
knowing if the prejudice that since 89 has constantly pushed us from the
paths of Revolution into those of absolutism, will hold out for a long
time before the truth, finally demonstrated, and the facts.

I have tried, in the first part of this writing, to give the
philosophical and historical deduction of the federative principle, and
to highlight the superiority of this conception, which we can say is of
our century, over all those that preceded it. I have just said by what
series of events, by what combination of circumstances, the opposite
theory took possession of people’s minds. I am going to show what has
been the conduct of the Democracy in recent years under this deplorable
influence. By reducing itself to the absurd, the policy of unity
denounces itself as finished and gives way to the federation.

** CHAPTER II. **The Democracy since December 2.**

The French democracy, at least insofar as it is represented by certain
newspapers to which the imperial government has been pleased to grant or
retain the privilege of publication, has reigned for ten years, without
control, over public opinion. It alone was able to speak to the masses;
it told them what it wanted; it directed them according to its views and
interests. What were its ideas and gestures? This is what it is not
useless to recall at this time.

The democracy, by the way it judged the *coup d’état,* gave it its
assent. If the undertaking of the President of the Republic was good, it
can claim its share of the honor; if it was a bad thing, let it also
take its share of the responsibility. What was the pretext for the *coup
d’état,* and against whom was it chiefly directed? The reasons that
supported the *coup d’état* in the eyes of public opinion and assured
its success three years in advance were the danger to which society was
exposed by the new theories and the social war with which they
threatened the country. Now, who has accused socialism more than the
democracy? Who hunted it more atrociously? Who pursues it, even today,
with more relentlessness? In the absence of Louis-Napoleon or the Prince
of Joinville, candidate designated for the Presidency for the elections
of 1852, the *coup d’état* against the socialist democracy would have
been made by the non-socialist democracy, in other words by the unitary
republic, which is nothing other, as we have shown, than a
constitutional monarchy in disguise. The newspapers of this so-called
republic have maneuvered so well for ten years that a good number of
workers, who in 1848 took part in all the socialist demonstrations, came
to say, following the example of their bosses: Without socialism, we
would have preserved the republic!… And what would this republic be,
madmen, ingrates that you are? A republic of exploiters! Truly, you
deserve no other, and you are worthy to serve as its wardens.

The Democracy initially refused to take the oath to the Emperor. Why?
Then it took the oath, even calling those who refused to do so bad
citizens. Why again? How did what was a shame in 1852 become a duty, an
act of public safety, in 1857?

The Democracy rallied to the industrial movement that took place, in the
opposite direction to economic reform, following the coup d’état. With
the most ediing zeal, it entered into that financial feudalism, the
invasion of which socialism had announced twenty years in advance. Not a
word was uttered by it against the merger of the railway companies: that
would have been an attack on the unity of the republic! It got its share
of grants, it discounted its share of shares; when the scandals of the
Stock Exchange were denounced by socialism, which was the first,
according to the testimony of M. Oscar de Vallée, to raise the flag of
public morality on this occasion, it declared that these enemies of
speculation were enemies of progress. Who undertook to defend, in hatred
of socialism, Malthusian morality, produced openly in the Academy? Who
has taken under his patronage, effeminate literature, romantic
licentiousness and all literary bohemianism, if not that retrograde
democracy disdained by the *coup d’état?*

The Democracy applauded the Crimean expedition: it was natural. I do not
intend here to criticize imperial policy, placed beyond the reach of my
criticism. The Emperor’s government did, in 1854 and 1855, what he
thought was good about the Ottoman Empire: it would be too risky for me
to discuss his motives. Our soldiers behaved gloriously: I do not
hesitate to add my laurel leaf to their wreaths. But I am permitted to
say that there was a moment when the policy of accommodation,
represented by M. Drouin de Lhuys, then as now Minister for Foreign
Affairs, nearly prevailed, and that if the powerful voice of the
democracy had come to support this statesman, France would have saved
1,500 million and one hundred and twenty thousand soldiers, I do not
know the exact figures, spent in support of the Turkish nationality. A
democracy animated by a true republican spirit, more concerned with the
liberties of the country than with the exaltation of the central power,
miserly above all with the blood of the people, would have seized with
ardor all the chances for peace. The unitary zeal of our
citizen-publicists decided otherwise. Their belligerent patriotism
tipped the scales in favor of… England. War against Russia, they said,
is the Revolution! They constantly have the Revolution in their mouths:
that’s all they know about it. They had come to understand, in 1854,
this fact, however so clear, that the day after December 2 Louis-Napoleon
had become, by the force of his situation, by the inevitable
significance given to the *coup d’état,* the head of European
conservatism. It is as such that he has been hailed by Emperors and
Kings, and shall I say so? — by the republics themselves. Oh! Let no one
today accuse the French nation of frivolity. The Empire is the work of
the whole of Europe. Our democrats must have noticed this when the
allied powers decided that the war would remain political, that it would
be limited, and that consequently the assistance of the brave men who
had come from all the asylums of Europe would be refused.

The Democracy cried *bravo!* to the expedition to Lombardy: war against
Austria, according to it, was still the Revolution. We will examine this
presently. But I can say in advance that without the democracy, which
gave, so to speak, the *exequatur* to Orsini’s request, Napoleon III
would very probably have been careful not to throw himself into this
galley, in the service of which we have spent, for M. de Cavour’s
spectacles, 500 millions and forty thousand men.

The Democracy, after having blamed the intervention of the government in
the affairs of Mexico, wanted the present expedition, which the imperial
government would perhaps have renounced, on the motion of Jules Favre,
if it had seen this orator energetically supported by newspapers. But
no: the democratic press claimed that, even after admitting that it had
been misled about the feelings of the Mexican people, the government
could not, after a failure, deal *with honor* other than in Mexico City.
Was it still the Revolution that called us to Mexico? Not at all. The
Mexicans seek to constitute themselves into a federative republic; they
want no prince, no more German than Spanish; and their current President
Juarez happens to be the most capable, honest and popular they have had.
Republicans worthy of the name would have understood that the true
dignity, for a government as strong as ours, was to recognize one’s
mistake, even after a failure, and would have insisted on retreat. But
the republic, as our democrats understand it, has a horror of
federalism, and is especially touchy on the point of honor.

The Democracy, in fact, is essentially militaristic; without it it would
have been Praetorian politics. Its speakers and its writers can be
compared to the grumblers of the first Empire, always criticizing the
undertakings of the great man, basically devoted body and soul to his
designs, always ready to defend him with arm, mind and heart. In vain do
you represent to them that standing armies are for the people no longer
anything but instruments of oppression and subjects of mistrust; in vain
do you make them see, by reasons and figures, that conquests serve
absolutely nothing for the fortune of nations, that annexations cost
more than they bring in; in vain do you prove to them that the law of
war itself, the law of force, if it were applied in its truth, would
lead to the cessation of war and to a completely different use of force.
They don’t hear it that way: Napoleon I, they say, was the sword of the
Revolution. But the sword also has its revolutionary mandate, which is
far from being fulfilled!

The Democracy has given its hands to free trade, the sudden application
of which, if we counted it, would amount to one of those glorious
campaigns of the first Empire which invariably crowned a new call for
men and money. So, for all our swagger, we are in tow of England,
sometimes for war against Russia, sometimes for free trade, sometimes for
Italian unity. Could our patriots do less for the theory of Cobden, the
dream of Bastiat, the *whim* of M. Jean Dolfus, the hobbyhorse of M.
Chevalier, who has so fortunately already straddled the question of
gold? Free trade, in fact, the war against monopolists en masse, is this
not also the Revolution?… These powerful reasoners will never manage to
understand that the mass of the monopolists of a country is the mass of
the nation, and that in waging war against this mass, there is always
grave danger, when there is no not sovereign iniquity.
[19] What did the Democracy want by taking sides in
the war in the United States in the way it did? To parade philanthropy,
above all to satis it unitary mania. *Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!*
it exclaimed: war on slavery, war on the split, it is the whole
Revolution. For this it pushed the North against the South, inflamed
anger, poisoned hatred, made the war ten times more atrocious. A part of
the spilled blood and the miseries that in Europe are the repercussions
of this fratricidal war, must weigh on it as it bears the responsibility
for them before history. [20] Oh! I hear them
exclaim, these great politicians: Yes, we wanted the Crimean and
Lombardy expeditions, because in themselves these expeditions were
useful and revolutionary. But we protested against the way they were
conducted: can we answer for a policy that was not ours? Yes, we wanted
the Mexico expedition, although directed against a republican
nationality; we wanted it because it is important not to let down the
prestige of France, the supreme organ of the Revolution. Yes we wanted
free trade for the honor of the principle, and because we cannot allow it
to be said that France fears England, any more on the markets than on
the battlefields. Yes, we want the Revolution to remain armed, the
Republic one and indivisible, because without an army the Revolution is
incapable of exercising its mandate of justice among the nations;
because without unity the Republic no longer functions like a man: it is
an inert and useless multitude. But we want the army to be a citizen,
and for every citizen to find his freedom in unity. — Wretched talkers!
If the policy followed in the East and in Italy was not yours, why did
you approve the undertakings? What were you getting involved in? You
speak of national honor: what is there in common between this honor and
the intrigues that prepared, surprised perhaps, the intervention in
Mexico? Where did you learn to practice responsible government? You
support free trade in principle. Fine: but do not sacrifice to it the no
less respectable principle of the solidarity of industries. You want the
Revolution to remain armed: but who threatens the Revolution if not you?

** CHAPTER III.  **Democratic monogram, unity.**

Democracy presents itself as liberal, republican, even socialist, *in
the good and true sense of the* *word,* of course, as M. de Lamartine
said.

Democracy imposes itself. It never understood the revolutionary
trinomial, *Liberty-Equality-* *Fraternity,* which in 1848, as in 1793,
it always had in its mouth, and of which it made such beautiful emblems.
Its motto, definitively adopted, is a single term, Unity.

To understand *Liberty,* indeed, especially *Equality,* to feel
Fraternity as a free man, one needs a whole philosophy, a whole
jurisprudence, a whole science of man and things, of society and its
economy. How many resign themselves to such studies?… Whereas with
Unity, a physical, mathematical thing that can be seen, touched and
counted, we know everything in an instant. We are even dispensed, in
difficult cases, from reasoning. With *Unity*, politics is reduced to
simple machinery, of which all you have to do is turn the wheel. So much
the worse for anyone who gets caught up in the process: he wasn’t really
a politician; he was an intruder, justly punished for his ambitious
vanity.

Whoever says *liberty,* in the language of public right, says guarantee:
guarantee of inviolability of the person and the domicile; guarantee of
municipal, corporate and industrial liberties; guarantee of legal forms,
protectors of innocence and free defence. How can all this be reconciled
with governmental majesty, with the democracy that is so costly, with
Unity? It is democracy, it is its leaders and its organs that, in 1848,
instituted councils of war, organized domiciliary visits, populated the
prisons, decreed a state of siege, carried out the transportation
without trial of white workers, as M. Lincoln now decrees the
transportation without trial of black workers. Democracy discounts
individual liberty and respect for the law, incapable of governing on
any terms other than those of Unity, which is nothing but despotism.

Whoevery says *republic* or *equality* of political rights, says
administrative independence of the political groups of which the State
is composed, says above all separation of powers. Now, democracy is
above all centralizing and unitary; it has a horror of federalism; it
pursued to excess, under Louis-Philippe, *the spirit of parochialism;*
it regards undivided power as the great mainspring, the sheet anchor of
the government: its ideal would be a dictatorship coupled with an
inquisition. In 1848, when the riot rumbled in the street, it quickly
hastened to unite, in the hand of General Cavaignac, all the powers.
Why, it asks itself, have you changed the machinery of government? What
absolute monarchy has done against us, let us do against it and against
its partisans: for that we do not have to change batteries; it suffices
to turn one’s own guns against the enemy. The Revolution is just that.

Whoever says *socialism,* in the good and true sense of the word,
naturally says freedom of trade and industry, mutuality of insurance,
reciprocity of credit, equalization of taxes, balance and security of
fortunes, participation of the worker in the opportunities of
businesses, inviolability of the family in hereditary transmission. Now,
democracy inclines strongly to communism, the economic formula of unity:
it is only through communism that it conceives equality. What it needs
are maximums, forced loans, progressive and lavish taxes, with the
support of philanthropic institutions, hospices, asylums, crèches,
tontines, national workshops, savings and relief funds, all the
paraphernalia of pauperism, the whole livery of misery. It doesn’t like
piecework; it treats free credit as madness; it trembles at the thought
of a nation of learned workers, who also knew how to think, write,
handle the pickaxe and the plane, and whose women could do without
servants in their households. She smiles at the inheritance tax, which,
demolishing the family, tends to place property in the hands of the
state.

In summary, who says liberty says federation, or says nothing; Whoever
says republic, says federation, or says nothing; Whoever says socialism,
says federation, or still says nothing.

But democracy, as it has manifested itself for four years, is nothing,
can and wants nothing of what Federation produces, what the Contract
supposes, what Right and Freedom demand. Democracy has unity as its
principle; its end is unity; its means, unity; its law, always unity.
Unity is its *alpha* and its *omega,* its supreme formula, its ultimate
reason. It is all unity and nothing but unity, as its words and deeds
demonstrate; that is to say, it does not emerge from the absolute, from
the indefinite, from nothingness.

This is why Democracy, which feels its nothingness and is frightened by
its weakness; which took a revolutionary accident for the very idea of
the Revolution, and made a dogma of a passing form of dictatorship, this
old democracy of 1830 renewed from 93, is above all for strong power,
hostile to any autonomy, envious of the Empire, which it accuses of
having stolen its policy, but which it promises to sing for us again, as
M. Thiers said of M. Guizot, with variations and without false notes.

No principles, no organization, no guarantees; only unity and
arbitrariness, all adorned with the names of *Revolution* and Public
Safety : this is the profession of faith of the present democracy. Since
1848 I have summoned it on several occasions to produce ot program, and
have not obtained a word of it. A program! It is compromising, not
certain. From what front would this democracy, devoid of ideas, which the
day after the stroke of fortune that would bring it to power, would
become, like all the governments of its predecessors, conservative, from
what front, I say, would it decline today the responsibility of
undertakings to which I recognize that it did not put its hand, but
which it would have executed in the same way and which it has covered
with her approval?

** CHAPTER IV.  **Unitary maneuver.**

We have just seen how unity has become in democratic thought the
equivalent of nothingness. Now, the characteristic of empty souls, who
feel their nothingness, is to be invincibly inclined to suspicion, to
violence and to bad faith. Obliged to feign principles that they lack,
they become hypocrites; attacked by stronger ideas, they have only one
means of defending themselves, which is to destroy their adversaries by
calumny; called upon to govern, they know only how to supply reason with
authority, that is to say, with the most pitiless tyranny. As a result,
taking the ink bottle as a *creed,* speculating on waste, looking for
dirty tricks and fishing in troubled waters, slandering those who cannot
be intimidated or seduced: this has always been the policy of the
democrats. It is time for the country to learn to judge a sect that for
thirty years has only known how to brandish the popular torch, as if it
represented the people, as if it cared about the people other than to
*cast them on the fields of battle,* as I have heard it said so many
times in 1848, or failing that on those of Lambessa. We must know what
is under these cardboard skulls, which only seem so terrible because
Diogenes has not yet taken it into his head to hold his lantern up to
them. The history of Italian unity provides ample material for our
observations.

Democracy pushed with all its might for war against Austria; then, the
battle won, to the unification of Italy. That is why she protested
against the Treaty of Villafranca; that is why she treats as a friend of
Austria and of the Pope whoever takes the liberty at this moment of
recalling unhappy Italy to her natural law, federation.

There is in all this an appearance of a system that deludes the simple.

Note first that these democrats, champions par excellence of unitary
government, and whom you, my friend reader, might be tempted to take for
political capacities, say or insinuate to whoever wants to listen to
them, that the Kingdom of Italy was never more than a *tactic* on their
part; that it is above all a question of wresting, by a national effort,
Italy from the hands of Austria, the Pope, the King of Naples, the dukes
of Tuscany, Modena and Parma; that to this end it was essential to rally
the Italians under the monarchical flag of Victor-Emmanuel; but that,
the foreigners expelled, the independence of the nation assured, the
unity consummated, we would have *presto* rid ourselves of the
gallant-man king, and the republic would have been proclaimed. That’s
the bottom line, if my antagonists are to be believed: as for me, my
crime is to have come to thwart, by the inopportune cry of Federation!
such a beautiful plan.

Thus, let us understand, it is even less my federalism that is blamed
than the perfidious inopportuneness of my criticism. We are above all
democrats; we are republicans: God forbid that we ever blaspheme this
sacred name of republic! God forbid that people seriously thought of
embracing the cause of kings! But this republic, we wanted it to be
unitary; we were sure to get there through unity; it is denied that it
was realizable otherwise. And it was I who, by joining my voice to those
of the reaction, made the republic impossible!

But, if such is the saying of honorable citizens, the question of good
faith is becoming generalized: it is no longer just federalism that
should be asked, it is also, and first of all, *unitarism.* The party
that, in Italy and in France, has demanded with such loud cries the
unification of the Peninsula, is this party really republican, or is it
not rather monarchist? I have the right to ask the question and ask for
pledges, as nothing looks more like a monarchy than a unitary republic.
Why, when federation was proposed, was it rejected, when the federative
principle had at least the advantage of leaving no ambiguity? The public
safety is alleged. But the federation assured Italy of the perpetuity of
French protection; under this protection, Italy could organize itself at
leisure and later, if unity was its delight, centralize it. To
republicans common sense said that with the federation the republic was
more than half done; while beginning with unity, what am I saying? by
the monarchy in flesh and blood, we risked burying ourselves there.

Do you see, reader, how a little thought changes things? Political
schemers, embarrassed by my interrogations, undertake to doom me in
public opinion by representing me as a secret trustee of Austria and the
Church—what do I know? perhaps as the bearer of King Bomba’s last
wishes. Such was the strongest of their arguments against the
federation.

In a word, I throw my adversaries on the defensive, for, I declare,
neither Mazzini’s reputation as a conspirator, nor Garibaldi’s
chivalrous humor, nor the notoriety of their friends in France, are
sufficient to reassure me. When I see men denying, at least verbally,
their republican faith, raising the monarchical flag, shouting *Long
live the king!* with all the strength in their chests, and making signs
with their eyes that all this is only a farce of which the acclaimed
king must be the butt; especially when I know how weak their republic
is, I confess that I am not without anxiety about the sincerity of the
betrayal. Ah! *Messieurs les unitaires,* what you are doing is certainly
not an act of republican virtue: With what intention do you commit the
sin? Who are you betraying?

Talk about *inopportunity!* But you had three years to build your unity.
During these three years you have used and abused speech almost
exclusively. As far as I am concerned, I only broached the question on
July 13, 1862, after Mazzini’s desperate retirement; I took it up again
on September 7, after Garibaldi’s defeat; and I renew my entreaties,
today when the Rattazzi ministry had to give way to the Farini ministry,
charged by the majority of Parliament with making amends to your unity
on the federative principle. Of course, this is the case or never to
judge what has been done. Your policy is ruined without resource; all
you have to do, if you love Italy and liberty, is to return to common
sense and change the system. This is what I have taken the liberty of
advising you, and you report me as an apostate from Democracy. Oh! you
are the synagogue of Machiavelli; you continue tyranny, and your maxim
is *Per fas et nefas.* For three years you have been desolating Italy
with your unity, and you find it convenient to blame federalism for it.
Back, politicians of nothingness!

** CHAPTER V. **entering the campaign: federation conjured away.**

On both sides of the Alps, therefore, democracy had taken at face value
the word of Napoleon III that France was waging war for an *idea;* that
this idea was the independence of Italy, and that our troops would only
stop at the Adriatic. The principle of *nationalities,* as it is called,
was thus laid down, according to commentators, in the declaration of
war.

Nationalities! What is this political element? Has it been defined,
analyzed? Have we determined its role and importance? No: no one in the
unitary democracy knows a word about it, and she might one day hear it
from me for the first time. It doesn’t matter: nationalities, they assure
us, are always the Revolution.

Well, so be it. It does not enter my mind to blame at all the more or
less exaggerated expectations that the descent of the French army into
Italy had caused to be conceived. Everyone knows how much in war events
modi resolutions; it would have been wise to take this into account: I
will not take advantage of this lack of reserve. It is not I, a
federalist, who will quibble with independence for anyone. My
observations have another purpose.

Nationality is not the same thing as unity: one does not necessarily
imply the other. These are two distinct notions that, far from calling
for one another, very often exclude each other. What constitutes Swiss
nationality, for example, what gives it originality and character, is
not the language, since three idioms are spoken in Switzerland; it is
not race, since there are as many races as there are languages: it is
cantonal independence. [21] But Italy, no less than
Switzerland, seems to have been cut out by nature for a confederation:
why then, before the start of the campaign, did you raise this question
of unity? Why this extension given to the primitive and perfectly
defined goal of the expedition? Was there a need, an opportunity? That’s
what you have to see.

When I invoked, after so many others, in favor of an Italian federation,
the geographical constitution of Italy and the traditions of its
history, I was told that these were exhausted platitudes, fatalities
which it belonged to an intelligent and free nation, acting in the
fullness of its power and for its greatest interest, to surmount. The
theory that tends to explain politics and history by the influences of
soil and climate has been said to be false, even immoral; I was almost
called a materialist, because I thought I saw in the configuration of
the Peninsula a condition of federalism, which in my opinion means a
guarantee of liberty.

This singular argumentation of my opponents made revealed to me a very
sad thing: ideas exist in their memory in the state of an anthill; their
intelligence does not coordinate them. Hence the incoherence of their
opinions and that ineffable arbitrariness that directs their policy.

The supreme goal of the state is liberty, collective and individual.

But liberty is not created out of nothing; one does not arrive there at
full leap: it results, not only from the energy of the subject, but from
the more or less happy conditions in the midst of which it is placed; it
is the end of a series of oscillatory movements, marches and
countermarches, the whole of which composes social evolution and leads
to the federative pact, to the republic.

Among the influences whose action can hasten or retard the creation of
liberty, the most elementary and decisive is that of soil and climate.
It is the soil that gives the first molding to the race; it is the
combined influences of race and soil that then shape the genius, arouse
and determine the faculties of art, legislation, literature, industry;
it is all these things together, finally, that make agglomerations more
or less easy. Hence the systems of institutions, laws, customs; hence
the traditions, all that constitutes the life, individuality and
morality of peoples. No doubt, in the midst of these influences, of
which fatality is the point of departure, reason remains free, but if its
glory is to subjugate fatality to itself, its power does not go so far
as to destroy it; it leads the movement, but on condition of taking into
account the quality of the forces and respecting their laws.

So when I appealed to geography and history with regard to Italian
unity, it was not to make a quibble on certain accidents of *fatality;*
it is an organized whole, it is Italy in person, in its body, its soul,
its spirit, its life, Italy in all its existence that I had in view, and
which, created according to me for the federation, like the bird for the
air and the fish for the waves, protested in my mind against the project
of centralizing it.

Italy, I meant to say, is federal by the constitution of its territory;
it is so by the diversity of its inhabitants; it is so by its genius; it
is so by its mores; it is still so by its history; it is federal in its
entire being and from all eternity. You speak of nationality: but
nationality in Italy, as in Switzerland, is the same thing as
federation; it is through federation that Italian nationality arises,
asserts itself, secures itself; by federation that you will make it free
as many times as it will form independent States; whereas with unity you
will precisely create for it a fatalism that will suffocate it.

Why then, once again, this artificial unity, which has its roots only in
Jacobinic fantasy and Piedmontese ambition, and the first and deplorable
effect of which has been to hook the minds of Italians for four years on
this insoluble problem: *Accord of political unity with administrative*
*decentralization?* [22] At least, was that which
the general physiology of the States seemed to have to prohibit,
authorized by the circumstances, by exception? Was there a danger of
death for Italy, a reason of public safety? Here, the skill of the party
will show itself to be at the height of its philosophy.

Let us consider that the cessation of Austrian influence in the
Peninsula was to bring about a change of regime for all of Italy: the
Dukes, the King of Naples, the Pope himself, were going to be forced to
grant their peoples constitutions. The question, for an intelligent,
patriotic democracy, was therefore to dominate them all, by making the
reforms converge towards general freedom. It was not so. M. de Cavour
conceived the project of confiscating the movement for the profit of the
house of Savoy: in which he was perfectly served by the unitary
democrats. Before independence was won, people were already thinking of
making Italy pay for it, immersed in the Piedmontese baptismal font.

I need not concern myself with the dynastic interests interested or
compromised in the expedition. Attacked by so-called liberals, democrats
and republicans, it is from the point of view of the republic, of
democracy and of liberty, that I have to defend myself. I therefore say
that the policy to be followed was that which, setting aside Piedmontese
absorption, placed the princes, the kings and the Papacy in the hands of
the liberals: it was the federalist policy. On the one hand, the small
Italian monarchies were going to find themselves between two perils:
peril of absorption by one of them or of subalternization to a federal
authority. To the principle of parliamentary representation and the
separation of powers which was to result from the new constitutions, if
you add that of a federative bond, what remained of the old absolutism?
Nothing. In contrast, liberty profited from all that the old
sovereignties were going to lose, since it is precisely the effect of
the federation that liberty increases, for the citizens of each State,
because of the guarantee that the federal pact brings to them. The duty
of the leaders of the democracy, Garibaldi and Mazzini in the front line,
was therefore to oppose the ideas of M. de Cavour, relying if necessary
on the Emperor of the French. Nothing did not oblige us to bring about
already the downfall of dynasties, which it was impossible to oust en
masse, but which would have been dominated by their rivalry as much as
by the new right.

This is what sound policy prescribed at the beginning of 1859, in
accordance with the interest of the masses and common sense. The
projects of Piedmont once unmasked, democracy would have had as
auxiliaries, with Napoleon III who could not refuse himself, the King of
Naples, the Pope and the dukes themselves, all obliged, in order to
preserve their crowns, after having signed with their respective subjects
a new pact, to take refuge in the confederation. Why did Garibaldi and
Mazzini prefer the zigzags of their unitary tactics to this simple, sure
way of driving? Strange thing! It was the men who carried the flag of
democracy who took charge and responsibility for the great monarchical
work; and it is the princes, formerly absolute, who invoke right and
liberty.

Certainly, if the will of the Italian people is to give themselves up to
Victor-Emmanuel, or, what amounts to the same thing, to form a unitary
state with a president or a dictator, I have nothing to object to, and I
am prepared to believe that, in spite of Emperor and Pope, Italy will
end up giving itself the pastime of it. But let there be no more talk
then of liberty or of a republic: Italy, bidding farewell to its federal
tradition, declares itself ipso facto retrograde. Its principle is now
the same as that of the old Caesars, unless it is that of the bourgeois
monarchy, centralizing and corrupting, where bureaucracy replaces the
union of the communes, and financial feudalism the agricultural and
industrial federation.

** CHAPTER VI. **Villafranca: contradictory policy.**

Napoleon III had promised to drive Austria back to the Adriatic:
everything proves that his intention was sincere. How was he prevented
from keeping his promise? Why did he stop after Solferino? We have not
said everything in this regard; but it emerges from documents and facts
that the real cause was the prospect of that unitary Italy that stood
before him. Instead of attracting the head of the French army by federal
demonstrations, which would have reassured him, nothing has been
neglected that could discourage him by worrying him, by wounding him by
declarations that would certainly have put off one less patient than
him. I will say the thing as it appears to me: rather than accepting the
emancipation of Italy up to the Adriatic on conditions that would have
made the Peninsula at least a federation of constitutional monarchies,
while waiting for it to become a federation of republics, it was
preferred to send home the emancipator of Italy; to secure in a rival
power, England, another ally; to leave Venice under the yoke of Austria;
to offend the Catholic world by war on the Holy See, except then to
accuse the Emperor of the French of inconsistency, of suppressed spite,
of disappointed ambition. This is the origin of the Treaty of
Villafranca. Did those who provoked it show intelligence, and were their
tactics *opportune?…*

However, by signing the treaty of Villafranca, and by stipulating a
confederation of the Italian States, Napoleon III still offered his
guarantee; he imposed on Austria his victorious mediation. It was the
case for democracy to recognize the fault committed, a fault that could
not be irreparable. But the presumption of the tribunes remains deaf to
the warnings. Mazzini, who at first had held back, took it upon himself
to refuse in the name of the popular party. He exhorts Victor-Emmanuel
to seize Italy; he offers him his help at this price: Dare, Sire, he
writes to him, and Mazzini is yours!… Could it be better understood
that, provided that it is given unity, the essence of monarchy, the so-
called Democracy is satisfied; that unity takes the place of principle,
doctrine, Right and morals; that it is its whole policy? Thus it is
always the republic, always liberty that is eliminated, for the benefit
of the house of Savoy and in exchange for a bourgeois system. And under
what pretext? Under the pretext that as long as Italy has not been
unified, it will be incapable of subsisting, exposed to the incursion of
the Gauls and the Germans.

It seems, however, that the army that had won at Solferino and Magenta,
that the nation that declared itself sister to Italy, could pass for a
respectable guarantee, and that if to the solidity of this guarantee
were added a liberal and restorative policy, the existence of the
Italian confederation within Europe would have become an irrevocable
fact. It seems, I would say again, that the simplest propriety required
a nationality so unsure of itself to abstain from all insulting mistrust
towards an ally who only asked for its care to recti the frontier on the
side of the Alps. But that would have looked too much like a republic of
labor and peace: Italian democracy had more grandiose projects, it was
in a hurry to show its ingratitude.

It is said as an excuse that the most important thing was to drive out
the princes, to dethrone the Pope and the King of Naples, whom the
Treaty of Villafranca had maintained, and who, secretly in agreement with
Austria, would have turned the forces of the confederation against civil
liberties.

One recognizes the Jacobin tactic in this defeat. Is it a question of
preventing a revolution favorable to liberty, to the positive
sovereignty of nations, but contrary to its instincts of despotism? The
Jacobin begins by casting suspicion on the good faith of the personages
with whom it is a question of dealing, and to disguise his ill will, he
denounces the ill will of others. “They won’t consent,” he says; “or
else, if they consent, it will be with the ulterior motive of
betraying.” But what do you know? Who tells you that, faced with the
imperious necessity of the century, these princes, born in absolutism,
will not agree to abandon their chimera? And if once they consent, how
can you not see that you have in their acceptance, even made in bad
faith, a more precious pledge than their expulsion would be at this
moment? Do you forget what it cost Louis XVI, Charles X, to have wanted
to retract? Do you forget that the only royalty that does not return is
that which, by clumsiness or perjury, has put itself in the necessity of
abdicating? And why, in the circumstances, do you trust less in François
II, Pius IX, Leopold or Robert, than in Victor-Emmanuel? Why this
preference in favor of a prince whom Italian irony seems to have
nicknamed *the gallant man* only in memory of the long perfidies of his
ancestors? Have you made a pact, Democrats, with Piedmontese good faith?

<quote>
“Italy,” retort these king-eating Puritans with a disdainful air, “had
seven, both emperor and pope, kings and dukes. Of these seven our plan
was to throw down six first, after which we would soon have got the
better of the last.”
</quote>

I have seen men of order, honest and timid bourgeois, whom the innocent
outings of March 17, April 16 and May 15, 1848, made, fifteen years ago,
fall in love, smile at this policy of corsairs. So true is it that in
three quarters of mortals the touchstone of good and evil is not in the
conscience, it is in the ideal!

Perhaps the calculation would be correct, and as a Republican I would
have shut my mouth, if Italy, delivered from Austria and its princes,
including Victor-Emmanuel, had had to remain in the status quo, that is
to say, to form as before seven different states, seven governments. We
would then have been in full federation. But this is precisely what is
not wanted by our tribunes with the look of regicides, for whom it is
above all a question of bringing Italy back to political unity. Their
ideal, of which they are careful not to see the contradiction, is to
couple Democracy and unity together. To this end, what do they offer? To
first set aside six suitors, much as in Turkey, at the death of the
sultan, the crown is assured to the eldest son by the massacre of his
brothers. That done, they add, the republic would easily have got the
better of Victor-Emmanuel. But here I ask who guarantees me the success
of the plot? It is clear that the monarchy, gaining in power what it
will have lost in number, has nothing to fear from the conspirators. One
does not come to end an eaglet like seven nightingales. And when the
goal of Italian democracy had been precisely to make the six proscribed
princes serve as a stepladder to Victor-Emmanuel, could it do it
differently? Unity is not achieved, far from it; Victor-Emmanuel still
only reigns over three quarters of Italy, and he is already much
stronger than the democrats. What can Garibaldi and Mazzini do to him
now? Admitting, moreover, that this well-conceived coup had succeeded,
what would liberty have gained? Would unity, that is to say the
monarchy, the empire, have been less established, the republic less
excluded?… The truth is that the neo-Jacobins did not care any more
about the Republic, which they continue to proscribe under the name of
federalism, than their ancestors cared about it in 93. What they need
is, according to the diversity of temperaments and the energy of
ambitions, for some a monarchy with centralization and oscillation,
according to the ideas of Syeyes and M. Guizot; for others a praetorian
empire renewed by Caesar and Napoleon; to this one a dictatorship, to
that one a caliphate. For we must not forget the case where, the seventh
head of the beast being cut off, the monarchy would remain without a
dynastic representative, a prey offered to the most popular, or, as
Danton said, to the most villainous. Thus unity wills it: *The dead*
*king, long live the king!*

** CHAPTER VII. **The Papacy and the Religious Sects.**

Shall I repeat what I have written elsewhere about the Papacy and the
temporal power, that this question, which has become a stumbling block
in the system of unity, does not even exist in that of federation?

Let’s start from a principle. Regenerated Italy will admit, I suppose,
freedom of worship, except of course submission of the clergy to the laws
of the state. *The Free Church in the Free State* is a maxim received by
the Unitarians; Mazzini, in his greatest anger against the Papacy, never
said that he dreamed of proscribing Christianity. I am therefore
reasoning on an acquired fact, that of religious liberty. Now, in
whatever way the existence of the clergy is provided for in Italy:
whether there is a concordat or whether there is not; whether the
priests are paid from the budget, whether they live on the subscription
of the faithful, or whether they retain their real estate endowments, it
matters little, they will enjoy, like all citizens, their civil and
political rights. Only the case of the Italian people declaring
themselves deist or atheist en masse could create a threatening
situation for the Church. But no one, in Italy any more than in France,
is there.

This granted, I say that, by the very fact that the existence of the
Church would be fully recognized, authorized, and in one way or another
subsidized by the nation, the Church would have its place, large or
small, in the State. There is no example of a society at once political
and religious in which the government and the priesthood do not have
intimate relations between them, as organs of the same body and
faculties of the same mind. With all the subtlety in the world, you will
no better succeed in drawing a sharp line of demarcation between
religion and government than between politics and political economy.
Always, whatever you do, the spiritual will insinuate itself into the
temporal and the temporal will overflow onto the spiritual: the
connection of these two principles is as fatal as that of Freedom and of
Authority. [23] In the Middle Ages, the
relationship between Church and State was regulated by the pact of
Charlemagne, which, while distinguishing the two powers, did not isolate
them, but made them equal; nowadays, this same relationship is
established in another way, more intimate and more dangerous, as we
shall see.

The freedom of worship declared law of the State, any relationship
whatsoever between the Church and the State recognized, it follows that
any minister of a religion, any Catholic priest consequently, any bishop
and any monk, can, in his double capacity of citizen and priest, be
elected representative of the people, be appointed senator, as has been
the practice in France since 1848, or even be promoted to the presidency
of the republic, as in the past among Jews and Muslims, without being
able to plead any incapacity or legal incompatibility. Oh what! You have
a law that allows the priest to accept any kind of governmental
function, of political mandate; to become a minister, Granvelle,
Ximenes, Richelieu, Frayssinous; senator, like MM. Gousset, Morlot,
Mathieu; representative, academician, like the Abbé Lacordaire, and you
are surprised that in a country of religion and priesthood, in this
pontifical Italy, where theocracy is fifteen centuries older than Jesus
Christ, a bishop, the head of Catholic bishops, may be at the same time
the prince of a small state of four million faithful! Begin then by
abolishing your Concordat; begin by excluding the priest, what am I
saying? — excluding any individual professing Christianity, from the
electoral mandate and political office; begin by proscribing, if you
dare, religion and the Church, and you may be allowed to demand, on
account of incompatibility, the dismissal of the Holy Father. Because, I
warn you: if the clergy want it, however little it pleases them to
support their candidacies with a few demonstrations of reform and
progress, in a few years they are sure to obtain by popular vote more
nominations than democracy and government put together. What did I say ?
It is they who will become the organ of democracy. And take care, if you
take the Pope from them in Rome, that they do not give him back to you in
Paris. Universal suffrage works these miracles.

The evangelical precept or counsel of the separation of powers is
alleged. This is a matter of theology, which concerns exclusively the
clergy and does not come under public Right. I am surprised that men who
claim to be brought up in the principles of ’89, orators of the
Revolution, should have thrown themselves into such a controversy. The
law, in the system of the Revolution, is superior to faith, which has
led to the rather crude saying that it was an atheist. If therefore the
priest, by the vote of his fellow citizens, is invested with a political
character, charged with a parliamentary or ministerial mandate, it will
not be, if you like, directly and exclusively as a priest, it will be, I
repeat, both as citizen and priest. The priesthood, in a State where the
usefulness of religion is recognized and freedom of worship accepted,
again becomes a title to political office, no more, no less than the
quality of jurist, scientist, tradesman or industrialist. It will be
absolutely the same if the prince of priests, in other words the Pope,
is elected President of the Republic, head of the state in which he
resides. Everyone remains free, in their innermost being, *Placuit
Spiritui sancto et nobis;* before the civil law it results from
revolutionary right, which declared all men equal before the law,
admissible to all the employments and sovereign judges of the religion
that it suits them to follow. That after that a scrupulous theologian
comes to blame this accumulation of the temporal and the spiritual, to
claim that there is a violation of the law of Christ, what does this
seminary dispute do to democracy? Are we or are we not the posterity of
89?

Note that to support this argument I do not need to resort to the
federative right, which is more liberal, without comparison, than
unitary law; it suffices that I place myself on the ground of the
constitutional monarchy, which is that of the one and indivisible
republic; on the terrain of M. de Cavour and of the whole Franco-Italian
democracy, terrain cleared, planted and watered by Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mirabeau, Robespierre, Talleyrand and all our authors of constitutions.
This temporal power of the Holy See, which scandalizes our strong minds,
against which we argue about Saint Matthew, Saint Paul, Saint Thomas,
etc., well, it would be justified if necessary by philosophical
tolerance, barely won by a century of debate; it would be justified by
all our declarations of rights, inspired by the purest genius of
incredulity; it would be justified, I say, by the very atheism of the
law. Until now the clergy has not taken advantage of the right
guaranteed to every ecclesiastic by the legislation of 89, but why? It
is because since 89 the situation of the Church, its relations with the
State, its social influence, have been regulated in another way, by the
concordat.

For me, if someone asks me how I think I can get out of this frightening
vicious circle, which shows us, in the eventualities of the future,
among the suggestions of a society that has become mystical again
through materialism, a universal caliphate emerging from a universal
ballot, I declare, even if one were to tax me with monomania, that I see
no escape except in the federation.

Let us first observe that in order to reason correctly in this matter,
as in any other, it is appropriate first to generalize the question.
Democracy sees in the Roman question only Rome and the Papacy: Rome,
which it covets to complete Italian unity; the Papacy, whose spiritual
authority it is no less jealous of than the temporal. We must consider
in this question of Rome and the Holy See all the churches, all the
synagogues, all the mystical sects, all the cults and all the temples of
the universe, in their relations with public law and the morality of
nations. Any other way of reasoning, being particular, is for that very
reason partial. Subject to this reservation, which extends to all
religious creeds what we have to say of the Roman Church, we can
approach the papal question.

The Church, regardless of its dogma, is the mother of all authority and
unity. It is through this unity that it has become, so to speak, the
capital of mysticism. No religious society could, in this respect, be
compared to it. Its motto is One God, One Faith, One Baptism, *Unus
Dominus, una* *fides, unum baptisma;* — its maxim of government, the
excommunication or cutting off of the rebels: Let him who does not
listen to the Church be regarded by you as pagan and publican, *Qui*
*non audierit Ecclesiam, sit vobis sicut ethnicus et publicanus.* It is
from the Church that emperors and kings derive their policy of unity and
their prestige; it is from its brilliance that they borrow their majesty.
The one and indivisible Republic of the Jacobins, the *Dio e popolo* of
Mazzini, are also only plagiarisms of its doctrine. Also, apart from its
quarrels, modern democracy is for the Church what the emperors since
Constantine and Charlemagne have been, full of deference and submission.
Robespierre, at the time of his revenge, always had a weakness for
priests and we saw, in 1848, with what eagerness the Republic received
them into its bosom. Whether the Church, Bonapartist or Legitimist,
declares itself to be democrat tomorrow, it hardly risks it, and the
reconciliation will soon be made. There exists in Paris, since 1830, a
fraction of the democracy that regards the French Revolution as a
corollary of the Gospel; if this party is logical, it must consider
democracy as a synonym of the Church. In all the countries where it has
spread, the Church therefore possesses, by anteriority of prerogative,
the force that unity communicates to the government: this is why, in
past centuries, in the event of a misunderstanding between the spiritual
and the temporal, we have seen so many times the Church withdraw all
temporal authority from itself, excommunicate princes, untie peoples from
the oath of fidelity, effect a revolution in the government. As in the
Middle Ages, similar facts can still occur, and perhaps before a few
generations we would witness it, if, the corruption of morals pursuing
its course, politics turning more and more by the exaggeration of unity
and authority to despotism, the Church remained alone as moral and
moderating authority.

Federation, on the contrary, is liberty par excellence, plurality,
division, self-government by self. Its maxim is Right, not given by the
Church, interpreter of heaven, or defined by the prince, representative
of the Divinity and arm of the Holy Father; but determined by free
contract. In this system, law, right, justice are the arbitral status of
wills, a status therefore superior to all authority and belief, to all
Church and religion, to all unity, since authority and faith, religion
and the Church, being exclusively within the province of the individual
conscience, place themselves by that very fact below the pact, the
expression of universal consent, the highest authority there is among
men. Finally, in the federation, the principle of authority being
subordinated, liberty preponderant, the political order is an inverted
hierarchy in which the greatest share of advice, action, wealth and
power remains in the hands of the confederate multitude, without power
ever passing into those of a central authority.

Suppose now, in the confederation, an extraordinary development of
religious feeling, giving rise to exaggerated pretensions on the part of
the ecclesiastical ministry, and ending in a conflict between the two
orders, temporal and spiritual. It is possible then that the clergy,
enjoying like the rest of the people civil and political rights, obtains
a certain influence in the administration of the localities; possible
for the bishop to become, in a canton, president of the senate, of the
legislative body, of the council of state. The Church will never be able
to become mistress of the Confederation; universal suffrage will never
make a federal republic a pontifical state. The proportion of clerics in
the electorate being naturally very limited, the principle of authority
and unity completely subordinate, always, in case of conflict, the
political and economic interest, that is to say temporal, anti-clerical,
will prevail over the ecclesiastical interest.

But here is what is more decisive. According to what has just been said,
the idea of a pact formed between individuals, towns, cantons, states,
different in religion as well as language and industry, implicitly
supposes that religion is not necessary to morality; that the Gospel
itself has not said the last word of right; that the law of charity is
incomplete, and that a justice based on adoration is an inexact justice:
this is what a jurist interpreting the thought of the Revolution called
the atheism of law. It follows from this that one can foresee the case
where, by considerations, not of high policing as in 93, but of high
public morality, the abolition of cults that have fallen into wantonness
and extravagance should be decreed, the Church outlawed, its ministers
excluded from all public functions and honors, and the pure religion of
Justice inaugurated without symbolism and without idols. We are not at
such extremes; but history is full of facts that legitimize all
forecasts and politics in its constitutions does not respect creeds and
persons any more than justice in its decrees. The Church has not lost
the memory of the Gnostics; the empire of the Caesars saw the plebs of
the praetorium, after having elected Trajans and Marcus Aurelius, cover
Heliogabalus, Alexander Severus and Julien with the purple. We could,
following some democratic and social orgy, have to take up again on new
motives the work of the ancient persecutors. The genius of religions is
not dead, ask the author of *France mystique,* M. Erdan. It is therefore
important that we be on our guard, not only for the particular case of
the Roman Papacy, which does not want to make amends or divest itself,
but for that much more serious one, just as much to be expected from a
recrudescence and of a coalition of all the fanaticisms, of all the
superstitions and mystics of the earth.

Against this cataclysm of consciences I know, I repeat, of no remedy but
the division of the masses, not only by States, communes and
corporations, but by churches, synagogues, consistories, associations,
sects, schools. Here unity, far from being an obstacle to danger, would
aggravate it still more. The enthusiasm of the masses, one day mad with
impiety, the next day drunk with superstition, increases with all the
power of the collectivity. But to the political federation join the
industrial federation; to the industrial federation add that of ideas,
and you can resist all the drives. The federation is the popular storm
breakwater. What could be simpler, for example, than to contain papal
absolutism by the very subjects of the Pope, not handed over, as is
demanded, to the Piedmontese, but restored to their autonomy by the
federative constitution, and protected in the exercise of their rights
by all the forces of the confederation? So make it, once again, this
pact of free union, it’s not too late; and not only will you no longer
have to worry about the Papacy having become half the power of the
century, you hold the whole Church, revolutionized in its head and
forced to walk with liberty; you escape the inconvenience of stirring up
the Catholic universe against you.

In 1846, when the Jesuits, by their perpetual intrigues, had brought
seven Swiss cantons to break with the Confederation and to form a
separate alliance, the fifteen other cantons declared the pretensions of
the Jesuits and the scission that followed them incompatible with the
federal pact, with the very existence of the Republic. The Sunderbund
was defeated, the Jesuits expelled. Victorious Switzerland did not then
think of abusing its triumph, either to draw up a form of religious
faith, or to change the federative constitution of the country into a
unitary constitution. It contented itself with introducing into the
federal constitution an article stating that the cantons could modi
their particular constitutions only in the direction of freedom, and it
brought into the pact the clericals who had wanted to deviate from it.
[24] The conduct of the Swiss in this circumstance
is excellent to cite. As I said just now, we can foresee that one day it
will not be only a religious corporation that the Revolution will have
to deal with, but an insurrection, either of Catholicism, or of all of
Christianity. So no more doubt: society would have the right to oppose
its justice-bringing federations to this new *Sunderbund;* it would
declare the insurgent churches, whatever they were, guilty of an attack
on morals and public liberties, and it would crack down on
propagandists. But the time does not seem to have arrived and such is
not the concern of the unitaries. The conflagration of mystagogical
ideas does not enter into their forecasts. What they are asking,
protesting their deepest respect for Christ and his religion, is to
remove the Pope’s crown in order to pay homage to Victor-Emmanuel, and
thus to violate once more the federal principle, identical in Italy to
the principle of nationality itself.

If the thought of Villafranca, although proposed by an Emperor, had been
supported, one of these two things would inevitably have happened:
first, the stronger of the two principles, the supernaturalist principle
or the rationalist principle, would have absorbed the other; the
Revolution would have prevailed against the Church, or the Church would
have stifled the Revolution; or else, second, the two compromising
principles would have given rise by their amalgamation to a new idea,
superior to at least one of its constituents if not to both; in any case
the friends of progress would have had reason to rejoice in the
evolution. The party of unity has none of these aspirations. Of the
Revolution it knows nothing, *Nescio vos,* it said of it; from the Church
it is always ready to receive the blessing: give it the patrimony of
Saint Peter to compose its kingdom and it will kiss the mule of the
Pope, as indifferent to the distinction between the temporal and the
spiritual as to that between liberty and nationality.

** CHAPTER VIII. **Danger of political and commercial rivalry between France and Italy in the system of unity.**

It is a principle in the *charitable* contract that the benefit received
cannot become for the beneficiary a means of harming the benefactor: a
maxim written in the conscience of the people, but which does not appear
to be for the use of modern democrats. Did not one of their writers
reproach me, as an act of courtesy towards the Emperor and of felony
towards the party, for having described the unitary policy of the
Italians as ungrateful? Yet the Emperor is in this only the
representative of the French people.

Much has been said of Napoleon III’s secret views on Italy. It has been
said that he counted on collecting from his expedition, for himself, the
iron crown worn by his uncle; for his cousin Prince Napoleon, the Duchy
of Tuscany; for his other cousin Murat, the throne of Naples; for his
son, the title of King of Rome, and that it was the spite of a
disappointed ambition which had made him retreat after Solferino. This
retreat has been used as a pretext to arouse mistrust against him; we
therefore declared ourselves quits towards him; it was concluded that it
was not enough to arm Italy against Austria, that it was necessary to
arm it equally against its magnanimous ally, and the title of benefactor
that Napoleon III had just acquired with regard to them became an
additional motive for the Italians to form themselves into a single
state.

The secret of the Plombières interview is still unknown. I do not know
what agreements were verbally made between M. de Cavour and Napoleon
III; with all the more reason I can say nothing of the particular
projects of the Emperor of the French. In my view, the knowledge of such
secrets is perfectly useless to politics. But there is at least one
thing certain: it is that Italy freed could not fail, by uniting its
parts in a single political group, to become for Imperial France a cause
of anxiety much more serious than had been Austria itself, and that after
having provided for Italian independence Napoleon III would have to
provide for the maintenance of French preponderance.

I have already said it, and in a rather forceful style, in my last
publication: Nothing, not even the salvation of the fatherland, would
make me sacrifice justice. Against the interest of my country I am ready
to support, with my vote and my pen, the cause of the foreigner if it
seems to me just and it is not possible to reconcile the two interests.
I therefore admit that a nation has the right to develop according to
the faculties and advantages with which it has been endowed, while
respecting the rights of others, of course. If it is in the destiny of
Italy to determine by its own political and economic evolution the
downfall of its neighbour; if this result is fatal, well! let us resign
ourselves and let the providential decree be accomplished. Humanity
cannot stop by the consideration of any power. It has been said that the
Revolution will go around the world: it is apparently not chained to
French territory. All I ask is that we don’t take the aims of ambition
for orders from Providence.

I propose to demonstrate in this chapter and in the following ones:

 1. That Napoleon III wanted the emancipation of Italy, but that he
    wanted it subject to the

reservation of an Italian Confederation and the maintenance of the
French prepotence, because, in the present conditions of civilization,
in the data of the imperial monarchy, which are still those of all the
States, it was impossible for him to act under other conditions;

 2. Setting aside the question of prepotence, which it cannot be
    appropriate for an impartial

writer to maintain despite his patriotism, and reasoning exclusively from
the federative point of view, that the condition proposed to the
Italians by the Emperor of the French, that is to say, Confederation,
would have been more advantageous to them than Unity.

Consequently, that Unitary Democracy, in Italy and in France, has done
itself a double wrong, first by opposing the measures of simple prudence
of the Emperor of the French with the most ambitious and most
threatening projects, then, by making Italy lose with the benefit of
Unity, that of a political, economic and social revolution.

I don’t want to exaggerate anything, neither the Italian potentiality,
still so weak that one doubts in more than one place the regeneration of
this country; nor the decadence of our nation, denounced fifteen years
ago, with frightful statistical luxury, by M. Raudot. But as everything
moves and changes in the life of societies, as the historical movement
is composed for each people of a series of ascending and descending
evolutions, as today the hearth of civilization seems fixed in one,
tomorrow in the other, it is reasonable and it is only foresight to
wonder what could happen for France, for Italy and for the whole of
Europe, from an event as significant as the constitution of the new
kingdom.

France, at the time of writing, is a tired nation, uncertain of its
principles, which seems to doubt its star. Italy, on the contrary,
awakened from its long numbness, seems to have all the inspiration and
ardor of youth. The first aspires to repose, to peaceful reforms, to the
purification of its morals, to the refreshment of its genius and its
blood; the second asks only to work, no matter under what conditions, no
matter under what system. Let a few men be born to her, a Richelieu, a
Colbert, a Condé: in less than a generation it becomes, as a federative
state, the richest and happiest of republics; as a unitary state, it
takes its place among the great empires, and its influence can become,
but at the expense of its internal happiness, formidable in Europe. Of
these two destinies, so different from each other, the first assured if
one had wanted it, the second full of perils, the Democracy has
understood only the last. More eager for political glory and
governmental action than for well-being for the masses, it formally
announces the intention of using Italian centralization, if it succeeds
in constituting it, against all odds.

Let us stand in front of a map of Europe. Italy is a bridge thrown over
the Mediterranean, extending from the Alps to Greece, which forms the
great route from the West to the East. With the railway line that extends
from Genoa, Cuneo or Geneva to Taranto, Italy first monopolizes all the
transit of travelers from Western Europe to the ports of the Levant, and
soon, by the opening of the Isthmus of Suez, of those who travel to
India, China, Japan, Oceania and Australia. With steam and the railway,
Italy becomes once again the center of European movement: it is through
her that Spain, Portugal, France, England, Belgium, Holland, the Rhine,
Prussia, Germany, Switzerland, part of Austria, communicate with Sicily,
the Ionian Islands, Candia, Lepanto, Athens, the Archipelago,
Constantinople, Odessa and the Black Sea, Smyrna, Cyprus, Rhodes,
Saint-Jean-d’Acre, Alexandria, Suez, and the whole Upper East.

From now on, this position makes itself felt. Travelers who go from
London, Paris or Brussels to the Levant by the Imperial Messageries
service no longer embark at Marseilles: they go by rail to take a
stopover at Genoa, which saves them twenty-four sailing hours; the same
thing takes place for the return. Suppose the railway line is completed
from Turin to Naples and Taranto, it is at one of these two ports that
embarkation and disembarkation will take place, to the great
satisfaction of travelers who, by sparing themselves the fatigues of the
sea, will still find a saving of time. Under these conditions, there
would not be a single French traveler, either from the center or from
Bordeaux, Toulouse, Bayonne or Perpignan, who, leaving for Egypt, Greece
or Asia Minor, would embark at Marseilles. We would prefer, by following
the line of the South or of Lyon, then that of Sète to Marseilles,
Toulon and Nice, to join the Italian railroad, thus sparing four hundred
leagues of navigation and four days at sea. France would lose to the
clientele of its travellers.

As for the goods circulating on the same line, the French navy could, it
is true, keep those sent from the country or destined for the country;
but it would lose transit for Russia, Belgium and Germany: competition
from Genoa and Trieste would leave it nothing. Franche-Comté, Burgundy,
Alsace, Lorraine, the North, would be disputed with it. Thus would,
incidentally, the principle of free trade be inscribed by the care of
Anglo-unitary Saint-Simonism in our public right.

That is not all. Freed Italy cannot fail to become in its turn, like
Austria and Germany, a center of manufacturing production. The raw
material, brought from India or America, will naturally be worked at the
point closest to the places of consumption: there is for France the
outlet of the Danube, of Servia, of Bulgaria, of the Moldo-Walachia, from
Roumelia, from Greece, lost; there is the Black Sea that disappears from
our relations: all this motivated, no doubt not by hatred of the French
name, but by an average difference of seven to eight hundred kilometers
of transport, which, at ten centimes per kilometer, gives a saving of 70
at80 fr. per thousand kilograms. More than once we have seen trade move
for lesser advantage.

In this situation, how could France, isolated from the main trade routes,
struck by free trade which would nulli its navigation, deforested by the
enormous supply of its railways, still aspire to be a maritime power? Of
what use will be, to say it in passing, the piercing of the Isthmus of
Suez, undertaken *under the beard of England* with almost exclusively
French capital, and become for Russia, Greece, the Danubian Republics,
Austria, Turkey, and above all Italy, the source of unrivaled
prosperity? The passage of Suez, if success responds to the
announcements, will be a cause of decadence for Marseilles and ruin for
Le Havre, since, however we consider the thing, nothing can come back to
us: the more useful it will be to the foreigners, the more it will harm
us. We speak of natural alliances, of communities of principles, of the
sympathy of races: what are these phrases in the presence of the
antagonism of interests?

It is this marvelous situation of Italy that it is a question of unitary
people serving, not precisely for the prosperity of the Italian
populations, which would be entirely within Right and against which I
would have absolutely no nothing to say, but for the power and action of
the new government, that is to say the development of a new and
formidable monarchy, imperialist or constitutional, but to the
humiliation of French power and the perpetuity of the unitary regime.

From the strategic point of view, the advantage of Italy over France
would not be less. In this regard, those who so eloquently preach to us
the brotherhood of nations will not fail to repeat that the century is
repugnant to war, that the progress of mores pushes towards disarmament,
that civilization now only admits peaceful struggles of industry, etc We
have just seen what this industrial struggle will be for France, and
with what prosperity free trade threatens us. But, without speaking of
the hard condition imposed on our manufacturers and our ship-owners, the
facts of each day show moreover, for whoever is neither blind nor deaf,
that since 89 the state of war has not ceased to be the normal state of
nations, and that if since the fall of the first Empire conflicts have
diminished in importance, the cause is not in economic institutions and
the softening of mores, it is in standing armies, maintained at great
expense to preserve our sad equilibrium.

Since the risks of conflagration are therefore always the same, I will
not say despite the interests and their solidarity, but precisely
because of the interests, Italy, a central and first-rate power, one of
the most interested, cannot fail to come into line: on whose side will
it line up? On the side of its interests no doubt, which, as I have just
demonstrated, are radically contrary to French interests. Opposed in
interests to France, Italy inevitably finds itself our political rival
and our antagonist; one is the consequence of the other. Cretinism and
betrayal alone can deny it.

Now, let us cast our eyes on the map one last time: it seems that nature
herself, after having made this maritime position for Italy, took care to
forti it further in anticipation of a struggle against France. Look at
this enclosure of bastions called the Alps, which extends from Nice to
Valais: against whom, I pray you, is this immense fortress turned? It is
not against England, nor against Russia, nor against Germany, nor
against Austria herself, no more than against Switzerland: Italy, by its
maritime and continental position, is a friend of all peoples except one,
which is the French people.

Five passages can give way to an invasion of the French in Italy, and
reciprocally to an irruption of the Italians on France: passage from
Geneva to the valley of Aosta by the Saint- Bernard; Mont-Cenis railway;
passing through Mont-Genèvre; Cuneo Railway; passage of the Corniche.

Concentrate a hundred thousand men at Turin, in the center of the
semi-circle: these hundred thousand men, being able to move quickly and
*en masse* to the attacked point, are sufficient to guard all the
passages; while to triumph over such a concentration of forces would
require, as for the siege of a place, a triple or quadruple army. Where
would France take this army, threatened as it would be in the North and
East by England, Belgium and the Rhine? Assuming France at war with
Italy alone, the game would still not be equal: the ultramontane army
being able to resupply and renew itself constantly from the south of the
Peninsula, while the French army, repulsed after a first effort,
demoralized and diminished, would be unable to return to the charge.
Italy would have renewed against us, with redoubled facilities and much
more numerous chances, the tactics employed in 1796 by General Bonaparte
against the Austrian generals. Thus, while we believe we are covered by
the Alps, we are in reality dominated by them: it suffices, to change
the relationship, to create on the other side of this immense wall a
single State, instead of the six that existed before. This is precisely
what French democracy, fraternizing with Italian democracy, demands
today, and what we have tried in the last place to achieve by the means
we will see presently.

Undoubtedly, and I am happy to repeat it, if there were for Italy, apart
from Germanic or Gallic oppression, no political existence other than
that of a unitary monarchy; if, to enjoy its natural advantages, it had
no other means than to fire on us with all its batteries, we would have
to resign ourselves. Our only chance of salvation would be to turn
ourselves into an Italian province, unless we were strong enough to make
Italy itself an annex of the Empire. In either case, the Democracy would
not have to congratulate itself: it would have proved once more that the
genius for peace and freedom is not in it; that it is much better at
arming nations against each other than at organizing them, and that,
like those soldiers who see only strategic positions, they can only see
the forces of nature as instruments of destruction. Obliged to conquer
in order to be conquered, Italy, barely liberated by France, but become
formidable to France as much as to Austria, could again regard itself as
lost.

** CHAPTER IX. **Difficulties of the situation in 1859.**

France he wanted the independence of Italy, it has wanted it as a just
thing: I don’t ask my country to give up on it. Let liberty happen, even
to our disadvantage. The Lombard-Venetian, Tuscan, Roman, Neapolitan
railways, formidable instruments of exploitation with regard to the
masses, of agglomeration of forces for the power, of competition against
foreigners, are executed or in the process of being executed: far be it
from me to obstruct them; this incomparable line must be carried out. The
interest of civilization before our own.

But we wanted more than that. We wanted the formation of all Italy in a
single state; this unity is half done, and nothing, from the point of
view of the liberty and well-being of the Italian people, any more than
of general progress, justifies it: why was it allowed to happen? It was
easy, I hope to demonstrate it presently, to reconcile the interests of
Italy with the situation acquired in our country and the sensitivities
of our nation: how did these same interests become antagonistic to us?
That unification is consummated; let

the people and the Italian government show

themselves at the height of their ambition; let Europe, irritated
against us, support them, and the hour has struck for France of
continual abasement, in commerce, in politics and in war. In less than a
generation, we can be a shadow of ourselves. We posed, through the war
against Austria, as saviors of nationalities: who would save us in turn
from the inexorable consequences of this expedition, which was to be so
fortunate for the two nations, and which today threatens to become so
fatal for us Frenchmen?

Let us go back to the eve of the start of the campaign, and consider in
what position the Emperor of the French must have found himself after he
had destroyed Austrian influence in Italy, if it were to be admitted
that he had promised lightly what was later claimed to be demanded of
him. England and the other powers, remaining spectators, had sent their
notes, formulated their reservations; Napoleon III, called upon, so to
speak, to explain himself, had had to declare that he acted solely for
the consideration of Italy,

without any motive of personal ambition or

aggrandizement for his empire. While acting as a high European
justice-bringer, he had obeyed a summons from the neutrals. Such an
expedition, however, and for such an end had never been seen. Everyone
was surprised; many were incredulous; this was the origin of the
mistrust which the Emperor aroused against France and against himself.
Clumsy servants having spoken of the throne of Naples for Prince Murat,
of the Duchy of Tuscany for Prince Napoleon, Italian patriotism was
awakened: everywhere public

opinion, skilfully excited, showed itself to be

contrary to the French pretenders. The imperial government, if I
remember, declared itself a stranger to these candidacies: so much so
that the Italian campaign, glorious for our arms, but dangerous for our
power, if it were true that it was to have for conclusion the formation
of a monarchy of twenty-six million souls, seemed, by the impulse given
to the minds, to end for us as a mystification.

It remained, however, to settle the fate

of Italy. The conqueror of Solferino, to whose

arbitration the new constitution of the Peninsula was to be submitted,
had to decide between a great military state and a Confederation.
Granted a small increase in territory in Savoy and Nice, after declaring
himself disinterested, he had no other alternative, and the world had
its eyes on him. An empire? Not to mention the incompatibility between a
creation of this nature and Napoleonic ideas, the dignity of France after
such a service; the care of its safety in the present conditions of
Europe, did not allow it. A confederation? But, in the business
situation, to give Italy a federal constitution was, from another point
of view, to undermine the empire, by provoking the rise of a hostile
principle; it was to oppose to the France of December 2, instead of a
material power capable of balancing its own, an institution which, being
attached to the Swiss, Germanic, Dutch-Belgian, Danubian and
Scandinavian systems, would isolate it more and more and sooner or later
was bound to put an end to its prepotence.

If Napoleon III declared himself in favor of unity, as heir to the
traditions and the thought of the First Empire he was duped, as Head of
the French State he abdicated all claim to precedence. If he opted for
confederation, he would be accused of jealousy and bad will; thereby he
made himself odious, and what was worse he organized and developed the
federations of Europe against him. Finally, if he left Italy in the
*status quo,* he contradicted himself and canceled the expedition.

Napoleon III decided for the federal system.

Oh! I have not received a mission to defend the policy of the Emperor
any more than the cause of the Pope; I know nothing of Napoleon III’s
intentions in 1859 any more than of his current thoughts. But I must
confess, the more I reflect on this Italian affair, the more I feel the
need to believe, for the honor of my nation, that its leader was not, in
1859, the most improvident of men; that he wanted , loyally and
knowingly, both the emancipation of Italy and its formation into a
federative system; that he expected from this combination the happiest
results for the two peoples; that he made the point of departure of a
new policy, both for his domestic government, and for his diplomacy
abroad; but that he was deceived in his expectation, first by
Piedmontese politics, then by the suggestions of England, finally by the
democratic drive; that in the presence of demonstrations, clamors,
revolts and annexations, he did not think he could call on his
authority, and that he relied on the action of time.

Hence the anxieties and hesitations of French politics, from Villafranca
to the retirement of

M. Thouvenel. What could reticence, distinctions, procrastination,
subterfuge and all the skills of

diplomacy do in a contradictory situation? We allowed what we had the
right and the duty to do and which we did not have the courage to
prevent; we left the floor to events, which means to adventures;
absolutist Europe was asked to recognize a kingdom whose usurping origin
was disapproved of as much as its danger was understood; public opinion
has been fatigued by tugging it sometimes in the Voltairian and
demagogic direction, sometimes in the royalist and clerical direction.
And the contradiction has become ever more flagrant, the responsibility
more intense, the situation worse.

Now admire the judgments of public opinion and its feedback. Arbiter of
Europe, I say conservative Europe, in 1852 and 1856; hope of democracy
in 1859, the imperial government is today denounced by both, and for
what crime? If I was not mistaken in the assessment that I have just
made of the Emperor’s intentions with regard to the Italians, which I
sincerely hope, his crime, in the eyes of opposing parties, is to have
wanted: 1. To emancipate Italy; 2. to confederate it. For this idea, the
healthiest and happiest, of which he will be taken into account in
history, he is at the same time banished from those who sumptuously call
themselves the Revolution, and from those who by much better title we
call the counter-revolution. If the good man Géronte were still alive,
he would say to Napoleon III: But what were you going to do, Sire, in
this accursed galley? The Republic alone could free Italy because it
alone could, without making itself suspect, give it, and if need be
impose on it, federation.

** CHAPTER X. **Garibaldi’s plan: Italian unity fails by fault of the Democrats.**

Fortune, therefore, during the first half of 1862, seemed to smile on
the partisans of unity; it had to try someone less daring than
Garibaldi. The manner in which he had conquered the kingdom of Naples,
the excitement of minds, promised him an even easier success, but of
incalculable significance. What was it? To wear down resistance
imperceptibly, and to force Napoleon’s hand without appearing to. The
tactic was indicated: if Garibaldi had a political genius equal to his
hatred for France and for the Emperor, the game was lost for us, and we
could date our downfall from the voluntary evacuation of Rome by our
troops. The *scenario* would have been less brilliant for the general
than in 1860; the result, from the point of view of unity, a hundred
times greater.

This was the case, in fact, for this Democracy that had not hesitated to
take as its watchword the cry of *Vive le Roi!* to follow its monarchist
policy to the end. It was necessary in its turn to pose as a party of
conservation and order, to put aside the insurrectionary and fantastic
idea of nationalities, to seek preferably the support of organized
forces and established interests, to attach governments, which all could
not have asked for better; not to speak of Venetia, which would have
been found later; to lull French prudence; to set aside the discussion
on temporal power, by referring exclusively to the initiative of the
masses the defection of the States of the Church; to finally conspire
with Victor-Emmanuel, instead of conspiring against him.

But the Democracy had other commitments. Its hypocrisy was beginning to
weigh on it; it longed to throw off the mask, flattering itself, as
always, that it could do it alone. Besides, it was not so devoted to the
cause of unity that it consented to silence its particular ambitions,
personal rivalries and grudges. The Democracy, at base, has no other
goal than itself, that is to say the satisfaction of its leaders and
cronies, who do not form, as the vulgar imagine, a political party, but
a coterie. If Italian unity is not an accomplished fact at this time,
the fault lies with the democrats.

Garibaldi’s plan had as its base of operations the principle of
nationality, which became, as I said above, synonymous with the
principle of unity. This is how the idea has been everywhere understood
and its consequences formulated in popular intuition. For the Italians,
who already claimed aloud old lost possessions, Corsica, Ticino, Tyrol,
Trieste, Dalmatia, nationality is the reestablishment of imperial and
pontifical Italy according to types more or less modified from
Charlemagne and Leo III: capital, Rome. For the Greeks, who certainly
believe themselves as capable as the Italians and would not have been
left behind, nationality consists in the restoration of the old
schismatic empire: capital, Constantinople. For the Hungarians, who
consider Croatia, Transylvania, Slavonia, Galicia (why not Moravia and
Bohemia yet?) as extensions of the crown, nationality is resolved in the
substitution of a Magyar dynasty for that of Habsburg: capital, Vienna.
For the Poles, to whom one would have first of all restored their limits
of 1772, an area of 38,000 square leagues including a crowd of
populations who never had anything Polish about them except the stamp,
nationality was to lead to the formation of a Slavic empire, which would
have included even Moscow and Petersburg. Finally, it was by virtue of
the principle of nationality that a certain German party, apparently
more careful of the purity of the race than avid of annexation, once
proposed to form, with the help of the Emperor of French, a unitary
empire, even if it meant sacrificing the left bank of the Rhine to this
ally.

A certain understanding, fruit of the similarity of aspirations, had
therefore been formed between the representatives of these
nationalities, as far as one can judge from the harangues of Garibaldi,
the revelations of Kossuth and Klapka and the entirety of events. A
simultaneous uprising plan had been concerted in Italy, Greece,
Montenegro, Hungary and Poland. Branches extended into the county of
Nice, and even, according to what I was told, on the coast of France as
far as Marseilles. Those who have traveled to Provence know that this
Italian-speaking population is not yet entirely Frenchified, and the
hunt for Republicans and Socialists in 1852 did not incline its feelings
any more towards Paris. At the given signal, the explosion was to take
place everywhere at once: the people rose up, governments were
overthrown, dynasties expelled, soon replaced as one might imagine;
Venice and Trieste were returned to the Italians, the map of Europe
reworked; and Garibaldi, in heroic ecstasy, after having endowed with one
hand his country with that glorious unity, which was to make Italy the
most central power and at the same time themore independent of Europe,
restored liberty to France on the other, in compensation for her lost
pre-eminence.

Did the democratic press in Paris adhere to this plan? Did it at least
know of its existence? Did it take it seriously or did it only admit it
on condition of inventory? Who can tell? I do not believe that it can
itself shed the slightest light on the subject, so light is its
conception, inattentive to facts, indiscreet in its speeches, unworthy
of the confidence of its own friends. Besides, M. Guéroult is a friend of
the Empire; M. Havin a friend of the Empire; M. Peyrat was in no way
considered at odds with the Empire; the *Patrie* and the *Pays* are as
devoted as the *France* itself to the Empire; the *Journal des Débats,*
in spite of the favor it accords to Piedmont, has more than one
connection with the Empire; the *Temps* declared, when it was founded,
that it belonged to no party. Then, all this journalism blamed, perhaps
without understanding it, the last outcry of Garibaldi: which does not
mean that it rejects the principle of nationality understood in the
Garibaldian way; it only declined the general’s attempt as incongruous
and untimely.

Certainly, the project of a unitary Italy considered from an exclusively
governmental point of view, leaving aside the economic interests and the
well-being of the masses, which the federal system alone can satis,
above all leaving aside the general liberty for which all these
political units are increasingly an obstacle, this project, I say, had
its plausible side, and there was a moment when one could believe that
it would succeed. For that, as I said above, it was necessary to wait
for everything from time and from the pressure of circumstances; to
address the governments worried by the progress of French arms, to the
Emperor of the French himself, who was exhausted by the affair of Rome,
and who would have ended up being carried away by the Democracy, ready
to sacrifice to the greatness of the new kingdom the manifest interest
of the Empire.

But from the moment that Garibaldi and Mazzini separated from
Victor-Emmanuel, appealed to the nationalities, that is to say, to all
the factions ousted from Europe, declared war on the dynasties, on
Austria, which had become constitutional, on Russia, the emancipator of
her peasants, to imperial France, whose intervention had just restored
liberty to Italy; from the moment that they refused to reckon with the
established powers and with the necessities of the century to indulge in
their demagogic outburst, the game was lost for them, and their project
of unity, condemned by the Revolution and by Political Economy,
appeared, from a political point of view, only as an unsustainable
utopia.

The resurrections of Lazares, brought about by the virtue of popular
*pronouncement,* apart from the most common prudence, here, then, is the
fund and the depths of the policy of the modern democrats! Instead of
pushing the peoples along the path of federations, which is that of all
political and economic liberties, they are drunk on gigantic utopias,
they are invited to Caesarean counterfeits, without thinking that the
history of nations is not uniform, that progress does not consist in
vain repetitions, and that what could be justified at one time would be
a culpable chimera in an other; and when, by an unhoped-for fortune, the
opportunity arises to realize these retrograde projects, everything is
compromised, everything is lost, through indiscipline, personality and
the extravagance of the manifestations.

Success had to respond to tactics. First, in matters of conspiracy, it
is rare for the conspirators to come to an agreement. Each claims to
exploit the affair for his own profit: it is to whoever will seize the
initiative and make all the effort of the league converge towards his
particular designs. The battle is not engaged but already the
conspirators are wary of each other and threaten each other.

The Montenegrins and the Greeks give the signal, followed by those of
the Ionian Islands. But Garibaldi did not answer the call, busy as he
was to ensure above all the triumph of Italian unity. The Turk, who had
to be killed first, remains standing; the Ionians set in order by the
English their masters, friends for the surplus of Garibaldi. Garibaldi
had not thought of the difficulty of maintaining, in this conjuncture,
the support of England and the cooperation of the Ionians. Also the
British press is unanimous in blaming the mad enterprise of the general.
The Montenegrins are crushed: the result for the Greeks is to expel,
instead of the Sultan, their own king Otho, who is currently being
replaced by any prince, as long as he is neither English, nor French,
nor Russian, if you prefer, as the *Siècle* recently proposed, create
for Greece a confederation!… Finally, Garibaldi appears on the scene and
calls Hungary: but Klapka and Kossuth abandon him in their turn,
reproaching him for coming too late and declaring that they do not
recognize in him the voice of Italy, as soon as he does not march with
Victor-Emmanuel. To which Garibaldi could very well have replied that if
he, Garibaldi, had to march with Victor-Emmanuel for the service of
Hungary, they, Kossuth and Klapka, had to march with Franz-Joseph for
the service of Italy: which concluded to the very negation of the
enterprise. Finally Garibaldi, whose only chance was in the hope he had
of training the royal army, left to himself, succumbs at the first
encounter, when he tries to play in Aspro-Monte the role of Napoleon I
in Grenoble. The Piedmontese soldiers, his compatriots, fired on him as
the enemy of their nation. And now Poland is collapsing in desperate
insurrection and assassination; Germany is yawning at unity, and we
Frenchmen are waiting for our deliverance!

Is all of this absurd enough? Is this what one can call an intelligent,
liberal, republican policy? Is this revolution? Do you recognize, in
these organizers of conspiracies, founders of States, heads of nations,
real politicians?

I have rendered back to Garibaldi’s private virtues, to his bravery, to
his disinterestedness, a testimony that has been quoted with
satisfaction by some of my adversaries. But, this sincere homage
rendered to the man, can I do otherwise than condemn the agitator? Can I
take Garibaldi seriously shouting *Vive Victor-Emmanuel* and working to
demolish him; affirming unity and calling himself a democrat, even a
republican, which apparently means a man of all rights and all
liberties; accusing Minister Rattazzi of betraying unity, and
reproaching him for his *municipalism* as too centralizing? Garibaldi,
as quick to seize the dictatorship as to resign from it; having in him
Caesar and Washington; an excellent, devoted, but undisciplined heart,
which seems to be governed by an unfortunate genius, does he even
suspect what monarchy and republic, unity and decentralization are? Has
he ever noticed that between democracy and empire there is not the
thickness of a sheet of paper? What was he doing, on February 3, 1852,
in Santos-Lugares, where, at the head of 900 Italians, he decided the
victory in favor of Urquiza, leader of the rebels of La Plata,
supposedly armed for the confederation of the republics of the South and
soon after dictator, against Rosas, leader or dictator of the Argentine
Republic, who also carried on his side the flag of the confederation?
Was it for a principle, or only against a tyranny that Garibaldi was
fighting? Which side was the unity on, according to him, at Buenos
Aires? On which side the federation? Why did Garibaldi interfere in this
quarrel? And in Rome, where, in 1849, he distinguished himself by his
prowess against the French army, was he for the federation or for unity?
Was he with Cernuschi the federalist or with Mazzini the unitary? Or did
he obey, as some claim, only his own inspirations?

We attribute to Garibaldi, speaking of Napoleon III, the following
statement: *This man has a* *tail of straw, and it is I who will set it
on fire.* The phrase would be pretty if it had been based on success.
After the disaster of Aspro-Monte, it is nothing more than boastfulness,
the ridicule of which falls on its author. Alas! What the Democracy took
for the tail of straw of Napoleon III was the tail of the devil, which
it is condemned to pull for a long time yet, if the tribunes in whom it
has placed its confidence do not change tactics and maxims.

** CHAPTER XI. **Hypothesis of a solution by the federative principle.**

Garibaldi’s defeat neither solved the problem nor improved the
situation. The unification of Italy is postponed, it is true,
indefinitely; M. Rattazzi, considered too centralizing, had to withdraw
in the face of municipalist demands; at the same time, the question of
the Papacy faded somewhat in the Garibaldian eclipse. But the antithesis
of the two powers, Italian and French, remains threatening,
irreconcilable; Italy is writhing in civil war and anarchy, France is a
prey to the anguish of an immense peril.

Already there is talk of a return to the *status quo,* that is to say a
division of Italy into four or five independent states, as before the
war of 1859. If this solution is adopted, it will be the work of
diplomacy; it will probably result in the restoration of fallen princes;
the constitutional forms, the promised guarantees will be preserved: but
the denial will have been given to the Democracy, and through it
indirectly to the Revolution. The cause of the people, I mean of this
working plebs of the cities and the countryside that must henceforth fix
all the attention of the true revolutionaries, will have been sacrificed
by the so-called party of action to personal speculations as ambitious
as they are chimerical, and the real question for a long time adjourned.

Chauvinists, whom the prospect of a weakened France agitates to the
point of terror, would like us to end it with a clap of thunder, and for
the Emperor of the French, boldly resuming the policy of his uncle,
trusting in the sympathy of the masses and playing double or quits, to
declare the French Empire restored within the limits of 1804, and by one
and the same act incorporated into France, to the north Belgium and all
the Rhine, to the south Lombardy and Piedmont. Victor- Emmanuel would be
offered the throne of Constantinople. Beyond that, they say, everything
will only ever be palliative. France remains cancelled; it is no longer
in it that the center of gravity of politics is to be found. The most
moderate recommend maintaining agitation in Italy until, weary of war,
tired of brigandage, the nation makes a new appeal to the liberator of
1859 and throws itself back into his arms.

These councils of despair openly accuse the error of those who, by the
most detestable calculations, pushed the Italian people to this fantasy
of unity. While in our country the old Democracy, at the end of its
chatter, yearns for a general melee to revive itself and, without
provocation, without motives, solicits new annexations; while there it
redoubles it Machiavellianism and drives the masses to revolt, England,
which coldly observes the crisis, is everywhere gaining ground and
deing us; Germany, Austria, Prussia, Belgium, Russia stand ready. The
empire blocked, everyone expects an explosion. That we will succumb in a
new Waterloo, which we can take as certain if Victory, as is her habit,
remains faithful to the big battalions, and, as a body politic, as a
center of civilization from which philosophy, science, law, liberty
radiated over the world, we will have had our day. The France of Henri
IV, Richelieu and Louis XIV, the France of 89, 93, 1802, 1814, 1830,
1848, as well as that of 1852, will have said its last word; it will be
over.

How simple, easy, advantageous to all parties would this distressing
situation have seemed, if one had considered it, in 1859, from the point
of view of principles, from the point of view of the federation!

Consider first that what makes Italy, as a maritime and industrial
power, such a formidable rival to France, disappears entirely, without
any loss for the Italian people, in the federal system. It is not, in
fact, the advantages of position and territory, it is not the
superiority of industry and capital that makes a people dangerous to its
neighbors; it is their focus. Distributed wealth is harmless and does
not excite envy; only the wealth agglomerated in the hands of a strongly
established feudalism, and by the latter placed at the disposal of an
enterprising power, can become, in the economic order and in the
political order, a force of destruction. The oppressive, dissolving
influence of a financial aristocracy, the industrial and territorial
influence on the people it exploits and on the State is not in doubt:
this truth, thanks to 1848, can today pass for a commonplace. Well! What
the agglomeration of economic forces is at home for the working class,
it becomes so for the neighboring nations abroad; and reciprocally what
is for the well-being of a nation and for the freedom of the citizens the
equal distribution of the instruments of work and the sources of wealth,
it also becomes so for the community of peoples. The cause of the
proletariat and that of European balance are united; both protest with
equal energy against unity and in favor of the federative system. Must
it be said that the same reasoning applies to the government and the
army, and that the bravest confederation, having the same number of
soldiers, will never weigh on its neighbors as much as it would if it
were transformed into unitary monarchy?

Let the Italians make the most of their geographical position, let them
develop their navy, let them exploit their railways, that they become
industrious and rich: it is their right, and we do not have, we French
people, to worry about it. To each nation its heritage; we have ours,
which it is up to us to assert. After all, we cannot claim to exploit any
more than to conquer the globe: we must leave these ideas of industrial,
commercial and maritime monopoly to the English. Let us not build our
fortune on supplies from abroad: the English, our rivals, could tell us
that if, at times, the privilege of exportation produces enormous
profits, it is compensated for by terrible miseries. In the general
economy, the main market of each nation is within itself; the outside
market is an accessory: it is only exceptionally that it can take
precedence over the other. The economic development that is being
noticed at this moment by all Europe is a demonstration of this law, of
which the Italian federation would have made a decisive application. So
aristocratic England pushes with all its forces for the unity of Italy:
it understands that, in any case, the pre-eminence on the Mediterranean
having to escape it, it is important for it to oppose to the French
bankocracy and centralization an equal centralization and bankocracy.

I admit, however, that if the industrial federation, being organized in
Italy by the very fact of the political federation, does not create for
unitary France a subject of legitimate concern; if Confederate Italy,
having nothing in common with the French Empire either by its
constitution or its aspirations, not posing itself as a rival, cannot be
accused of causing us any prejudice, its industrial and commercial
progress will nevertheless be for us a cause of less profit, of loss of
earnings. But what consequence can we draw from this? Only one: it is
that the French people, if it wants to preserve its initiative and
sustain competition worthily, will have to follow the example of the
Italian people: admitting that it keeps its political centralization, it
will do wisely to prepare at least its economic federation.

But this is also what the French partisans of Italian unity care about,
speculators in general, businessmen, hunters of industrial actions and
bribes, subservient to the bankocracy. These, in order to consolidate
the monopoly in France and at the same time protect themselves against
competition from the Italian monopoly, will not fail to organise, if this
has not already been done, a monstrous association, in which they will
find themselves merged and united the capitalist bourgeoisie and all the
shareholders on this side and on that side of the Alps. Let us not
forget that the constitutional monarchy, bourgeois and unitary, tends,
with regard to international policy, to guarantee from State to State the
exploiting classes against the exploited classes, consequently to form
the coalition of capital against wages, of whatever language and
nationality they all may be. This is why the *Journal des Débats* finds
itself in agreement with *Le Siècle,* l’Opinion *nationale, le* *Pays,
la Patrie* and *la Presse* on the Italian question. Here the political
color gives way to the conspiracy of interests.
[25] Let’s finish this second part. Against the
renewed project of the former Caesars of an Italian unity, there was:

The geographical constitution of the Peninsula; Municipal traditions;
The legal, republican principle of federation; The favorable occasion:
Austria defeated, France offering its guarantee; The Roman question to
be resolved, which meant the Papacy to be secularized, the Church to be
revolutionized; The plebs to be emancipated; The political and
commercial susceptibilities of France, the self-esteem of the Emperor,
to spare; The progress of nations to serve and the European balance to
reform, through the development of federations.

If what is called opportunity in politics is not an empty word, I dare
say that it was there.

The Neo-Jacobin Democracy did not accept any of these considerations.
Geography has been misunderstood by her; — history despised; —
principles trampled upon; — the cause of the proletariat betrayed; —
opportunity rejected; — the French guarantee despised; — the Roman
question confused; — France threatened, compromised; — the Emperor
wounded; — European progress sacrificed, under the pretext of
*nationality,* to a conspiracy of adventurers and intriguers. We know
the rest.

It was up to Garibaldi, at a certain moment in his career, to give
Italy, with freedom and wealth, all the unity that a regime of mutual
guarantees entails between independent cities, but that the we won’t
ever find in a system of absorption. It was up to him alone, by creating
the federations of Europe in the place of those nationalities forever
extinct, to make the Republic everywhere preponderant, and to inaugurate
with irresistible power the economic and social revolution. Shall I say
that he backed down from the task? God forbid: it would have been enough
for him to see it for him to want to execute it. Garibaldi understood
nothing of his time, consequently nothing of his own mission. His
blindness is the crime of this retrograde democracy to which he listened
too much, of these entrepreneurs of revolutions, restorers of
nationalities, tacticians of adventure, statesmen *in partibus,* for
which he had too much deference. May he, now that his error has broken
him, never fully comprehend the truth that he misunderstood! The loss of
his illusions he would bear as a philosopher, as a hero; his regrets
would be too bitter for him.

I have said what my principles were, what I would have wanted to do, if
I had been in the place of Garibaldi and Mazzini; what I would have
advised, if I had had a voice in the matter; what I thought I had
sufficiently expressed in my last publication. Could the Unitary
Democrats tell me in turn what they wanted and what they want? Could
they explain what they mean by *Liberty, Sovereignty of the People,
Social Contract,* and give a definition of the Republic?

* PART THREE. THE UNITARY PRESS

*Abacus dolo and injuria.*

** FIRST CHAPTER. Of the dignity of the journalist. — Influence of Unitaryism on the reason and conscience of writers.

I have been mistreated in my person by the unitary press; I will not
retaliate against it. I want, on the contrary, to repay it good for
evil, by showing it presently, through the example of some of its most
respected representatives, what danger the reason and the conscience of
the writer runs, when he allows himself to be dominated by a prejudice
of a nature to affect the independence of his opinion.

I read in a recent publication by M. Pelletan, *The Italian Tragedy,*
page 43:

But tell me, don’t you find it strange and somewhat unfortunate that the
democratic press, that the Voltairean press, flowers its buttonhole with
the twice ediing order of Saint-Maurice and Saint-Lazare, and that it
defends Piedmont to the limit with the livery of Piedmont on its chest?

And when it insults us, as it does, because we do not share its blissful
admiration for Piedmontese politics, we have every right to say to it:
Take off your ribbon, if you want people to believe you!

The author I quote returns several times to these decorations, of which
he had already spoken in an earlier pamphlet, *The Italian Comedy,* No
protest was raised against his words.

However, according to what came back to me, M. Pelletan’s reproach would
lack accuracy, at least in one point, the wearing of the decoration. The
editors of the monarchical sheets, such as the *Débats,* the *Patrie,*
the *Pays,* wear their decoration; the editors of democratic newspapers,
such as the *Siècle* and the *Opinion nationale,* refrain from doing so.
Why? It is not because the decoration was given to them by a foreign
government: otherwise, it would have been easier to refuse it. It is
said that it does not become democrats to wear a monarchical insignia.
Singular scruples, indeed!

So this seems to be true:

Decorations were distributed to French journalists by the government of
Piedmont, in recognition of their articles on Italian unity; Among those
who have received them, some, frankly rallied to the monarchical
principle, have no difficulty in adorning themselves with them; the
others, democrats or considered as such, put more style into it and
deprive themselves of them; But, political opinion aside, everyone
agrees that an honorary award given to journalists for their
publications, even by a foreign government, is in no way incompatible
with the duties of their profession.

Now, such is precisely the opinion that I come here to combat.

On the one hand, truth is absolute; it suffers neither increase nor
decrease. Such as it appears to us, such we must express it: *Is, is;
no, no;* such our fellow men have the right to demand it of us. The
truth gassed, amended or illustrated, is a lie. — On the other hand, the
practice of the truth is difficult, as difficult as that of justice:
this is why the man who has given himself the mission of telling and
publishing the truth, must offer, as disinterestedness, the most
absolute independence. representative, one as incorruptible as the
other.

a pledge of veracity, the most perfect Such is the truth, such must be
its

In principle therefore, a journalist cannot receive from anyone
whatsoever, in recognition of his articles, either gratuity or
decoration, and retain his office. One of two things must be true:
either he will renounce a testimony which, by his zeal, his talent, his
high probity, he may have deserved or, if he thinks he must accept it,
he will resign. A journalist cannot be decorated, even by his fellow
citizens, until after his death. The idea of any compensation, pecuniary
or honorary, in addition to the indemnity due to the writer for his
work, is incompatible with his mandate. In itself, this compensation
undermines his disinterestedness and his independence; all the more so
if it has been offered by an interested party and in a doubtful cause.

Admittedly, the mission of a journalist is painful: this is what makes
it worthy. The man who devotes himself to the manifestation of the truth
must be ready to risk everything for it: fortune, affections,
reputation, security. He must break all the ties of his heart and his
mind, he must trample popularity, favor of power, human respect. Where
is the truthful herald, the incorruptible orator, the fearless and
blameless writer? When I consider the tribulations that await him, the
seductions and snares that envelop him, the martyrdom hanging over his
head, I no longer know if I can trust even the most holy names:
Socrates, Confucius, Jesus Christ.

Such is not the rule of conscience for our journalists, and it must be
agreed that in the conditions in which they are placed, under the
influence of the prejudices that they share, of the interests of which
they have their share, it is difficult to obtain this high independence
and this spotless veracity, which are the virtues par excellence of the
publicist as of the historian. Their truth is never more than relative,
their virtue a half-virtue, their independence an independence that
needs, in order to sustain itself, a sufficient and prior indemnity.

Let us take a look at what a journalistic enterprise is today.

A society is formed for the publication of a newspaper. It is composed
of the most honorable citizens; it will be anonymous; the drafting will
remain, as far as possible, collective; any opinion, any individual
preponderance, is challenged in advance: what guarantees of
impartiality!… Well! this anonymous company, this ministry of publicity
freed from any particular influence, is an association of lies, where the
collectivity of the editorial staff serves only to dissimulate the
artifice, let us say the word, the venality.

First, this society needs capital; this capital is provided by shares.
It is a trading company. Therefore the law of capital becomes the
dominant of the company; profit is its goal, subscription its constant
preoccupation. Here is the newspaper, organ of truth, industry, shop. To
increase its profits, to win over the subscriber, the newspaper will
have to spare, to caress the prejudice; to ensure its existence, it will
spare the power even more, will support its policy while appearing to
censor it; joining hypocrisy to cowardice and to avarice, it will justi
itself by alleging the numerous families it supports. Loyalty, to the
truth? — no, to the shop: such will be, whether he likes it or not, the
first virtue of the journalist.

Entrepreneur of announcements and publications, the journalist could
cover his responsibility, by limiting his ministry to a simple
insertion. But the subscribers expect better of him: what they are
asking for are reviews, that’s what makes the newspaper especially
interesting. Therefore, if the newspaper refrains from any kind of
unfavorable judgment on the things it announces, because that would take
away from it the most lucrative branch of its trade, there will
nevertheless be certain objects, certain enterprises, that will deserve
its suffrage, and which, for a wage, he will recommend to the public.
The whole question will be for him to place his recommendations well and
to arrange things so as not to contradict them. Consistency in
friendships, loyalty and discretion to the *customers:* such is the
probity of the journalist. It is that of the clerk who would have
scruples about stealing a penny from the cash register, and who treats
the barge ruthlessly. From this moment you can count on prevarication
and infidelity to preside over the making of the sheet. Do not wait any
longer for any guarantee from this pharmacy, branch of the companies and
establishments that subsidize it, trafficking in its advertisements,
levying tribute, with the aid of its reports or bulletins, throughout
the world, stock market, commerce, industry, agriculture, navigation,
railways, politics, literature, theatre, etc. It’s quite an alchemy to
extract the truth of the comparison of its articles with those of its
competitors.

It is much worse when, as never fails to happen, this society,
supposedly formed for the service of truth, espouses a political opinion
and becomes the organ of a party. You can definitely regard it as a
factory of counterfeit money and a seat of iniquity. Any means is good
for it against the enemy. Did the democratic gazette ever speak with
propriety of a monarchical government, and did the royalist paper ever
do justice to the aspirations of the democracy? What judgments are those
made by liberals and clericals against each other! What criticism is
that of these amateur writers, without specialization, often without
studies, paid to read and to bury all kinds of writings, treating
literary justice as an amplification of rhetoric or of a club invective!
The more the newspaper bears witness to violence and bad faith, the more
it imagines that it has done an act of virtue. Loyalty to the party, as
well as to the shop and to the customers: isn’t that its supreme law?

The periodical press received the most cruel outrage that can be
inflicted on journalists in our day, when the government decided that
the reports of the chambers should be furnished to the newspapers by the
quaestorship. Doubtless I do not claim that the quaestorship is
infallible, nor the *Monitor* itself; it is not by such measures that I
would like to reform the press. I say the punishment was deserved. The
abuse of twisting, like that of publicity and lambasting had become
intolerable; and when the newspapers complain of the shackles of power,
they can be told that they have made their own destiny. Let them treat
the public and the truth as they would like the government to treat
them, and I venture to predict it to them: the truth would soon be free
in France and the press with it.

We should now understand, from this very shortened monograph on the
newspaper, how certain editors of the principal newspapers of Paris were
led to accept the decoration of the Piedmontese government. Our
political and social system is such that any life, any profession, any
enterprise, necessarily arises from an interest, from a coterie, from a
corporation, from an opinion, from a party, from a clientele, in a word,
from a group. In such a situation, the writer is always in relative truth
and probity; for him there is no truth or true virtue. To serve the
truth without sharing, it would be necessary to free oneself from all the
servitudes that make up almost all of existence, to frankly confront all
these groups of high and powerful interests, to break all these unities.
An impossible thing, at long as the political and social system has not
be remade from top to bottom.

Things being thus, the advertising entrepreneur naturally wonders why,
after many services rendered by him to his opinion, to his party, let us
say it even, to his fellow citizens, to his country, he would not
receive any honorary distinction, or even an emolument? Why would he
refuse a reward from a foreign cause, but analogous to that which he is
responsible for defending in his own country and attached to it by a
bond of solidarity? What could be simpler, for example, than the organs
of unity, such as the *Débats,* the *Pays,* the *Patrie,* the *Siècle,*
the *Opinion nationale,* etc., considering the Italian monarchy as a
counterpart of the French monarchy, or of the one and indivisible
republic, accepting the decoration of the King of Italy?

And this is what I answer, not, like M. Pelletan, by pointing out the
impropriety of a monarchical decoration placed on a democrat’s chest,
but in the name of truth itself, which, absolute in its nature, demands
of him who makes himself its apostle an equally absolute guarantee of
independence.

Do we want irrefutable proof? Suppose that instead of a decoration it is
a subsidy, as rumor has it. Would those who, in all security of
conscience, have received the decoration of Saint-Lazare, have accepted
a sum of money in the same way? No, certainly; and if I allowed myself
to accuse them of it, I would be sued by them for defamation. Note,
however, that the subsidy could be justified in the same way as the
decoration; that whatever can be said in favor of this one could be
repeated in favor of that; that in an exact logic, finally, there is
parity between the two facts. Why then, by an inconsistency which
testifies to their honesty, do the same men make such a great difference
between one and the other? It is that in the end, while acknowledging
that they represent only relative truth, as evidenced by their
decoration, they understand that their true mandate is that of absolute
truth; that this absolute truth, although inaccessible in the
environment in which they live, nevertheless retains its rights; that
the public intends to refer to it, and that if it tolerates the
newspapers on which it forms its opinion collecting a ribbon from their
good offices, it would not allow them to receive cash. There is here a
transaction of conscience that excuses the state of mores, but which a
morality, I do not say rigid, but however slightly rational cannot
admit.

For me, who makes a profession, not of rigorism, but of dogmatic
exactitude; I who have faith in a system where justice, truth and
independence would be the greatest interest of the citizen and of the
State, I also conclude, with regard to the newspapers, against subsidies
and against decorations. I say to the gentlemen of the unitary press:
You do not represent the right, but the interests; you are no more men
of truth than of liberty. You are the representatives of ambiguity and
antagonism; and when you allow yourself to indict me on account of my
federalist opinions, which no one has either decorated or subsidized,
and which I defend at my own risk and peril, you are not my peers.
Because, know it well: an impartial, honest and truthful press cannot be
found in this system of centralized interests in which your thought
moves; where the power, object of the competition of the parties, is
directed by a reason of the State that is something other than truth and
right; where consequently truth and right, varying according to
intrigues, are venal things, reason and conscience mercenary faculties.
A blameless press, such as liberty supposes and the progress of
institutions demands, can exist only where justice is the supreme law of
the state, the pivot of all interests; it can only exist in the federal
system.

The truth understood disposes to indulgence: I will therefore not be as
severe as M. Pelletan. I will not say like him to the editors of the
democratic press: *Take off your ribbon, if you want to be* *believed.*
I would rather say to them: Put on your ribbon, if you insist on it, so
that people know you; do better still, accept all the subsidies that
will be offered to you, provided that you give a public receipt of them,
and you will preserve your honor; it will be for you all benefit. The
public will know, it is true, that you speak as hired orators from
Piedmont, not as free journalists; they will be on guard against your
word; but in the end they will read you as if they were reading a note
from the Piedmontese embassy, and you will still have the chance of being
believed. The lawyer receives his fees like the doctor, and neither his
reputation nor the authority of his word suffers. Jules Favre, pleading
for Orsini the mitigating circumstances, was not therefore an accomplice
of the regicide. Why wouldn’t you, unofficial publicists, you enjoy the
same advantage?… I would almost swear to it: those whom M. Pelletan
accuses are only guilty of inadvertence. In the unitary environment
through which their thought moves, it was difficult for them to have the
exact notion of their rights and their duties, and it will be enough for
me to warn them against ambiguity. Do you speak, Gentlemen, as
journalists or as lawyers? One is as respectable as the other: but
explain yourself, for confusion between these two equally respectable
things would make an infamy.

** CHAPTER II. The *Siècle.* — Unitary hallucinations of M. Delort.

Come, M. Taxile Delort, speak first. Make your confession, if, something
I don’t want to assume, you have something to confess. You have heard M.
Pelletan’s reproach; you know the rumors that go around, and I have just
told you under what conditions, if the alleged facts are true, you can
make them innocent. You have called me, in regard to a pamphlet on
Italian unity, Janicot.[20] To be a Janicot, in your opinion, is
doubtless no great thing: however, I will not repay you insult for
insult, and I will be careful not to treat you as sold. I am content to
ask you this simple question: Are you, yes or no, decorated with
Saint-Maurice and Saint-Lazare? If not you, is it M. Edmond Texier, or
M. de la Bédollière, or M. Léon Plée, or M. Havin?Are you all, or is
there no one? I am not talking to you about subsidies: that is a
suspicion I don’t want to burden anyone with. Speak then, and frankly.
You were in 1848, if I remember, Republican, even Socialist, and
sometimes my collaborator in *Le Peuple.* What do you do first at the
*Siècle?* You have always been regarded as a paragon of integrity and
puritanism, and you have shown it, by showing the readers of the
*Siècle,* for the benefit of Piedmont and at my expense, that I am only
a *Janicot.* Well, citizen Delort, decorated or undecorated, I am going
to show you that the love of unity does not act only on the conscience
of the journalist, that it also affects the understanding, and that in
what concerns you, it has at least perplexed your mind.

Contrary to my federalist opinion, an opinion that does not date from
yesterday, M. Delort thought he could quote words from me of which he
would have been very obliged to me to indicate the source, because I
have the misfortune of never re-reading myself, and what I forget the
most readily are my own books:[21]

The REPUBLIC must say to the Austrian: *I want you to leave Italy,* and
the Austrian will leave; — it will say to the Scythian: “I want you to
leave my dear Poland,” and the Scythian will take the road to the
desert.

It is impossible for me today to guess what the tone of this passage
could borrow from the work from which it is taken. But what connection is
there between this apostrophe of the Republic to the Austrian and the
Scythian, and Italian *unity?* I say that the Republic, the Republic
alone, do you understand, and a federal republic still could restore
liberty to the Italians and the Poles; and

M. Taxile Delort, a former republican, draws from this an argument in
favor of the monarchy of

Victor-Emmanuel! Those poor Piedmontists! They no longer even know how
to understand what they are quoting: when they are told Republic or
Federation, they mean unity and kingdom!…

Another quotation from M. Delort, still without indication of the book:

The insurrection of the Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian
nationalities, what is it if not the negation of this great feudalism of
nations created beyond all right and all law by the Holy Alliance?[22]

Certainly I deny *the great feudalism* of nations, both that of the
Middle Ages and that of the present century; I deny noble feudalism and
industrial feudalism; I deny the feudalism of States, and why? No doubt
because I am a federalist. Why then remind me of this sentence? Do I
disavow it, and could you tell me how it serves you? But you who make
*nationality* synonymous with UNITY, and who through unity return with
so much precision, although republican, to MONARCHY, what are you doing
but reforming this great feudalism whose elementary condition is unity
and higher formula the Holy Alliance?

Is it not the same Proudhon, continues M. Delort, who wrote at the same
time: — The Revolution in Europe is identical and universal; the
counter-revolution is similarly identical and universal. All the
questions that are debated at this moment in France, in Hungary, in
Rome, and throughout Germany, are basically the same question. Their
solidarity, their identity is obvious:

everyone feels it, sees it, proclaims it.

Well! I do not think otherwise today. I am perfectly convinced, for
example, that the Polish question cannot be resolved otherwise than the
Italian question, that is to say by federation, and that is why I am
radically opposed to the what is now called the restoration of Poland,
and which is none other than the reconstitution of a great political
unity for the benefit of a landed aristocracy justly condemned by
history. But, once again, what can the client of the *Siècle,* the
gallant king, have to gain from this?

M. Delort quotes again, intrepidly: An ardent partisan of the principle
of nationalities in 1849, M. Proudhon showed himself the

fierce adversary of the Holy See: he demanded the immediate
establishment of the *Christian* REPUBLIC, whose center would no longer
be in Rome, but, as the Emperor wanted it, in Paris.

Let us pass over the epithet of *Christian,* which in 1849 scandalized
no one any more than it scandalizes M. Delort today, and which under my
pen took on an extension that orthodoxy certainly does not grant it. I
still ask what connection there is between the spiritual REPUBLIC, which
I predicted then, which I still affirm, and which in my mind never meant
anything but the Revolution and Justice, and the unitaryism of M.
Delort? Where is the contradiction on my part? From the fact that, as a
justicier and a revolutionary, I am opposed to the Church, are you going
to draw the conclusion that I must vote with you for the transfer of the
Estates from the Holy Father to Victor-Emmanuel? What logic!

One last quote, according to M. Delort:

The abolition of the temporal power of the Popes, what else is it but
the Democracy making its solemn entry into the city of kings, consuls,
emperors and popes? From a higher point of view, the fall of the
temporal power of the Popes indicates the definitive return of humanity
to philosophy, the abjuration of Catholicism, which, once detached from
the earth, will return to heaven, from whence the will of Charlemagne
made him descend.

Admire the oratorical artifice of M. Taxile Delort. The subscribers to
Le *Siècle* are honest liberals who intend to stick to the principles of
the Revolution; they nearly even believe themselves to be republicans:
moreover, they see no malice in it. Provided that we speak to them from
time to time *revolution, democracy, eighty-nine, liberty,* etc., they
are content, and do not quibble about the application. Crimean War,
revolution; Lombardy War, Italian unity, revolution; expulsion of the
Pope, revolution, and revolution, *ron, ron.* Quote to them, through
this mess, a few sentences by an author in which the words revolution,
democracy, liberty, abolition of the temporal and spiritual power of the
Church are pronounced on a slightly strained diapazon: no doubt, this
revolutionary writer is of the opinion of the *Siècle* on the creation
of the new kingdom, he is a partisan of unity, a friend of
Victor-Emmanuel. But here you teach these excellent subscribers that the
same writer protests against the kingdom in the name of the federation:
Oh! Then he must be an impudent renegade; he is a counter-revolutionary.

What! You rely enough on the stupidity of the readers of the *Siècle* to
present to them as an argument in favor of Italian unity and a testimony
to the contradictions of my mind the most striking passages I have ever
written against your thesis! I confess that the abolition of the
temporal power in the Church implied in my mind, at the time when I
wrote this passage, the abolition of the spiritual: that is why I marked
the fall of the temporal power of the Popes in the presence of the
triumphant Democracy as the precursor sign of the decline of
Catholicism. But Piedmontese royalty is not the Democracy before which,
according to the thought that you denounce, the Papacy must be eclipsed;
but the usurpation of the States of the Church is not the exclusion of
the Church from all participation in the temporal power; but neither the
*Siècle* nor anyone among the *unitaires* calls for this exclusion, no
one admits that the spirituality of the Gospel can be succeeded by a
spirituality of the Revolution. On the contrary, one demands, and M.
Taxile Delort like the others, the right of citizenship for the Church,
offering to restore to it its honors, pensions, influence, properties,
etc., all that it will have lost by the withdrawal of its prerogative.
So, what does M. Taxile Delort accuse me of? If there is a contradiction
somewhere, it is not with me, who, in my pamphlet on Italian unity,
abstained from formulating any request either for or against the Church;
it is rather in the *Siècle,* which sometimes performs an act of
Christian piety and votes honors to the Church, sometimes provokes the
dismissal of the Pontiff- King. What would be logical on the part of the
*Siècle* would be that, instead of a measure of spoliation, it should
propose a law of justice which, separating society from all religion,
would satis moral needs of the peoples better than

the Gospel itself; which, organizing higher

education, no longer only for *one hundred and twenty-seven thousand
four hundred and seventy-* *four* privileged subjects, but for a mass of
SEVEN

AND A HALF MILLION children of either sex,

would finally destroy all the sources of ignorance and uproot prejudice.
What would be logical on the part of the *Siècle* would be to demand the
abolition of the concordat, the suppression of the ecclesiastical
budget, the dismissal of the Senate of the cardinals, the recovery of
the properties given to the Church under an order of ideas that no
longer exists. Then the *Siècle* could make fun of my anti-Christian
demonstrations; it would have the advantage of theory and practice over
me; and one would believe it animated by the true revolutionary spirit.
So have the courage, Gentlemen of the *Siècle,* I do not say of your
impiety, but of your rationalism, if indeed in your polemic against the
Papacy there is anything rational. Beyond that, do not hope to rally me
to your Piedmontese intrigue: for as much as I place the right of the
Revolution and the pure morality of humanity above the Church, so much
and a thousand times lower below the faith of Christ I place you
yourselves, with your unity, your Voltairianism and all your
hypocrisies.

Of all the criticisms that have been made of my last pamphlet, the one
that pained me the most, on account of the name of the author, is that
of M. Taxile Delort. We just saw what weight it carries. The quoter saw
or wanted to see in my words the opposite of what I put there: that’s
all. — In the past, when M. Delort worked at the *Charivari,* he was
considered serious, cold, and not cheerful; whence it was concluded that
his place was at a grave journal. Since M. Havin called him, he seems to
have become cheeky, he flutters, he competes with his comic colleague M.
Edmond Texier: so we find him light even for subscribers to the *Siècle.
Inventus is minus habens!* Self-diminishment is the punishment of all
who have espoused the cause of unity.

** CHAPTER III. L’opinion nationale. — The bascule politics of M. Guéroult.

When I ask a journalist from the democratic press: *Are you decorated
with the order of Saint-* *Lazare?* — the reader should not assume that
my question is tantamount in my thinking to an accusation of corruption,
and that the one whom I challenge is indirectly designated by me as a
venal writer: it is a matter of something quite different. As far as I
am concerned, I repeat, I do not believe in the subsidies, for the
excellent reason that, if the fact were true, it would be concealed, and
I could not denounce it without exposing myself to a lawsuit for
slander. As for the decorated, I don’t know of any. All I can say is
that the reproach was articulated publicly, that no protest was raised;
that among the decorated, some wear their decoration, others abstain from
it out of pure party consideration; that all, moreover, had no
difficulty in accepting it. To my way of seeing this is a serious thing.
Every individual has the right to receive a decoration, or even a
pension, from a foreign sovereign. But the newspaper is a quasi-public
function, the journalist a kind of sworn writer: the proof is the
authorization that he must obtain and the security required of him; it
is above all the implicit trust of readers. In the rigor of the law, a
journalist should not receive any honorary distinction or monetary
reward from anyone, not even from the government of his country. He must
know no other favor than that of public opinion, no other money than
that of his subscribers. It is a question of public faith, not of
private morality; and it is in this sense that I continue my
interpellations, without acceptance or exception of anyone. it is above
all the implicit trust of readers. In the rigor of right, a journalist
should not receive any honorary distinction or monetary reward from
anyone, not even from the government of his country. He must know no
other favor than that of public opinion, no other money than that of his
subscribers. It is a question of public faith, not of private morality;
and it is in this sense that I continue my interpellations, without
acceptance or exception of anyone.

M. Guéroult was good enough to dedicate two or three articles to me in
his journal. As a man

who knows his trade, he began by teasing me about the *thesis* and *the
antithesis,* forgetting that his boss, M. Enfantin, was very busy with
these metaphysical curiosities and did not come off happily. Then he
made an unflattering description of my character; he laughed at my
sudden *tenderness* for poor Pius IX who will soon have to defend him,
he says, only M. Guizot the Protestant, M. Cohen the Jew and M. Proudhon
the atheist. He explained my present federalism by my former anarchy: in
short, he did his best to demolish the idea in me by the writer’s
disrepute.

Since M. Guéroult thought he had to research my background as a
controversialist about federation and unity, he won’t find it bad that I
also say something about his people: it is fair game!

M. Guéroult belongs to the bankocratic, androgynic and pancreatic school
of M. Enfantin,

which seems to have made it a rule, since the catastrophe of
Ménilmontant, to serve all opinions and all governments
indiscriminately. This is why Saint-Simonism, which has become
*enfantinien,* has always maintained editors in most newspapers: M.
Chevalier at the *Débats,* M. Jourdan at the *Siècle,* M. Guéroult at
the *République,* from which he was expelled after the coup, today at the
*Opinion nationale;* M. Émile Barraut I don’t know where, still others
on the left and on the right. These skirmishers in double parts are well
worth the *theses* and *antitheses* of M. Proudhon.

What is M. Guéroult’s current politics?

After December 2, the Bonapartist party arrived *en masse* in government.
Like the emigration after 1814, it can be said without insult that this
party was both old and young: old, in that it no longer knew, in matters
of politics, anything but glory and victory, as the emigration knew only
the faith and the king; young, in that the issues on the agenda were new
to it and it had to do its apprenticeship. Hence, in part, the
oscillations of the imperial government, oscillations common to all
novice governments; hence also the formation in the party of two
tendencies, of two policies, one inclined in preference to conservation,
the other displaying democratic sentiments, pretensions to the
Revolution. More than once, in its warnings to the newspapers, the
imperial government declared that it would not be influenced, and we
must take the fact for certain. As for the party, we can compare it, as
a whole, to that man who walked on the Seine with a bucket on each foot.

For example, the question of Italian unity arises before imperial
arbitration. The Bonapartists of the resistance protest, allege respect
for crowns, the legitimacy of dynasties, the exorbitance of Piedmontese
pretensions, the danger of revolutionary agitation. The Bonapartists of
the movement declare themselves, by virtue of the principle of
*nationality* and Jacobinic traditions, for the agglomeration. Between
the fraction of the left and the fraction of the right, what does the
centre, the bulk of the party, do? They go, while waiting for His
Majesty’s decision, from M. Thouvenel to

M. Drouyn de l’Huys; they sometimes give reason to the Patrie and to the
Pays against La France,

sometimes to *La France* against the *Opinion nationale* and the
*Patrie…* No one examines either the law inaugurated in 89, or the
economic interest of the masses, or the progress of civilization, or the
safety of Europe; all the more reason no one raises their voice in favor
of the theory that alone could solve the problem, Federation.

Or else, it is the existence of the Papacy that is called into question
by the very fact of Italian unity. Again the Bonapartist party splits:
MM. de la Guéronnière and de la Rochejaquelein, united with the
cardinals, took up the defense of the temporal power, which MM. Piétri
and de Persigny cut excessively. No one dreams of examining the question
either from the point of view of the eternal morality contained in the
principles of the Revolution, or from that of the federative principle,
alone capable of doing exact justice to the claims of the Pontificate.
Far from it, everyone protests his respect for Catholicism, which
implicitly resolves the question in favor of the Popeking: only while
some ask if temporal power is not a cause of failure for the Church,
others maintain that it is for her an indispensable guarantee.

M. Guéroult has thrown himself into this fray: what is he doing there?
The bascule. He would

not dare to deny it, he who, while waging a war of defamation rather
than controversy against Catholicism, reproaches MM. Renan and La Roque,
as well as myself, for being *atheists:* as if in philosophy, as if in
the thought of the Revolution, atheism and theism, materialism and
spiritualism were something other than simple metaphysical aspects.
Regarding the play by M. Émile Augier, M. Guéroult had the good fortune
to be given a warning: he had fallen victim to clerical persecution. But
don’t worry: M. Guéroult has the protection of the Voltairian
Bonapartism, who attended the performance of Le *Fils de Giboyer,* and
who will not let a hair fall from his journalist’s head.[23]

I have supported the independence of Belgium, a nationality as
respectable as any other, against the appetite of the annexationists,
among whom we count M. Guéroult in the first rank. As a reward, I got,
what? the favor of the Laeken Palace? Leopold’s order? No, I received a
*charivari.* The whole Belgian liberal press inveighed against me! It is
true that I invoked the policy of federation in favor of Belgian
independence, and that for some time Belgian liberalism and the
government of King Leopold, by a contradiction that everyone has
noticed, seem to incline toward unitary ideas… Moreover, I understand
that a publicist takes sides for the unity against the federation:
question delivered to the disputes. I even admit, in spite of the
etymology, that martyrdom is not a certain testimony of the truth, any
more than the venality of the witness is a demonstration of false
testimony: but I have the right to know whether the writer I am reading
speaks as a lawyer or as a teacher. M. Guéroult, would you not be
decorated with the order of Saint-Lazare?

Addressing the question on the merits, has M. Guéroult at least provided
plausible reasons in favor of the cause he is defending? Has he
destroyed my arguments for Federalism? His ways of reasoning are most
singular. If I bring in geography and history, M. Guéroult treats these
considerations as *commonplaces.* So be it: I accept the reproach. I did
not invent geography any more than history; but until M. Guéroult has
proven that the historical traditions and geographical conditions of
Italy lead to a unitary government, or until he has changed both, I will
hold my reasons to be sound, precisely because that these are
commonplaces.

He claims that a unified Italy, becoming ungrateful and hostile, could
do nothing against us. Without having studied the strategy, I believe
that the opposite results from the simple inspection of borders. Does one
have to be a great naturalist to say, at the sight of a quadruped armed
with claws and teeth, like the lion, that this animal is organized for
carnage, destined to feed on living flesh and to drink of blood? So it
is with Italy, armed to the teeth on the side of France, harmless to us
only when she is divided. M. Guéroult maintains, it is true, that this
armature is destined for Austria; as for France, the similarity of
principles makes it a sister of Italy. Sweet fraternity! Unfortunately,
experience, another commonplace, gives the most striking denial to these
two assertions. It is with the fatherland of Brennus that Italy has
always been at war; it is from this side that she has always dreaded
invasion; it was against France that, after the death of Louis the

Debonaire, Roman policy called the Germans to the empire; it is by the
effect of this antipathy of the Italian nation against ours that we
threw ourselves headlong into unity, and that Austria is still today in
possession of the State of Venice; it is against France, finally, that
the house of Savoy has constantly directed its policy.

You talk about the *similarity of principles.* But, at the present time,
there is more similarity of principles between Austria and Piedmont,
both

constitutional, than between the latter and

Imperial France; and it is still a commonplace that, if Austria
consented in return for indemnity to return Venice, the most tender
friendship would unite the courts of Vienna and Turin. Perhaps M.
Guéroult means by *similarity of principles* that France returning to
constitutional mores, a treaty of mutual guarantee would unite the
capitalist interests of France, Italy and Austria? I showed previously
that this consolidation of *bourgeoisism,* as Pierre Leroux said, is
within the data of the constitutional monarchy. In this case, let us not
talk about *nationality* or *democracy* anymore; let us above all leave
aside the Saint-Simonian motto, which considered *the emancipation of
the most* *numerous and poorest class* as the end of the Revolution.
Italian unity, married under these conditions to French unity and
Austrian unity, and forming with them a trinity, would then find itself
turned against whom? Against the proletariat of the three countries.
Will it be said that I slander the democratic and socialist sentiments
of M. Guéroult? But here the past and the present answer for the future:
Saint-Simonism, which was the first, through the mouth of Saint-Simon,
to denounce industrial feudalism, gave itself the mission, in the person
of M. Enfantin and his disciples, to realize it. This is why we have
seen him convert, first to the July Monarchy, then to the Second Empire;
so that nothing remains of M. Guéroult’s transitory republicanism, not
even an intention.

Mr. Guéroult criticizes the federal government for multiplying the
general staffs. The objection on his part lacks sincerity: it is the
opposite, he knows, that is true. Who would believe that a follower of
M. Enfantin, one of those sectarians who have contributed so much over
the past twenty years to the multiplication of large companies,
seriously complains about what makes up the charm of everything he
likes, corporations and large political units? I recalled in my last
brochure, according to the budgetary statistics of the different States
of Europe, and M. Guéroult knows these documents as well as I, that the
general expenses of government progress in direct and geometric
proportion to the centralization, so that, the average contribution per
head being 15 fr. 77 in the canton of Vaud, plus the federal contribution
which also amounts to 6 fr. 89, total 22 Fr. 66; — this same average
rises to 30 francs in Belgium and 54 in France. However we see that in
Switzerland, for a population of 2,392,760

inhabitants, there are twenty-five cantonal

governments, plus the federal government, totaling *twenty-six* staffs,
as M. Guéroult says. I don’t know the budgets of the other cantons; but
supposing them all equal to that of Vaud, one of the most populous and
richest cantons, we would have for the total expenditure of these
twenty-six governments a sum of 53,821,531 fr. 20 c. In France, for a
population of 38 million souls, that is to say sixteen times greater
than that of Switzerland, there is only one state, one government, one
single general staff; but it costs, according to the forecasts of the
last budget, *two billion sixty-eight* *million,* or, per head, 54 fr.
40. And in this budget, the expenses of the communes, those of the city
of Paris, for example, whose excise taxes together amount to 75 million,
and which has debts, are not included. This is what M. Guéroult would
have tried to answer if he had been in good faith. But what is good to
know is not always good to say, and M. Guéroult has found it easier to
dismiss the inculpatory evidence I had given against unity as
federalism. This is how business is done and how newspapers are written.

M. Guéroult insists, with particular affectation, on the reproach of
anarchy, which he goes so

far as to confuse with federation. M. Taxile Delort knows as well as M.
Guéroult the audience he is addressing. What the Papacy is for the
readers of the *Siècle,* who are otherwise excellent Christians, anarchy
is, it seems, for the subscribers of the *Opinion nationale,* who are
moreover perfect democrats. — Will we then always be the same ignorant
and smug people? It is said that when the Venetians sent ambassadors to
apologize to Louis XIV, certain bourgeois of Paris thought they would
die of laughter when they learned that the Venetians were a nation that
lived in a republic, and that the republic was a government without a
king. To whom, of M. Guéroult or of his readers, should I teach that
anarchy is the corollary of liberty; that in theory, it is one of the *a
priori* formulas of the political system in the same way as monarchy,
democracy and communism; that in practice it figures for more than three
quarters in the constitution of society, since one must understand,
under this name, all the facts that come exclusively from individual
initiative, facts whose number and importance must increase constantly,
to the great displeasure of the authors, instigators, courtiers and
exploiters of monarchies, theocracies and democracies; that the tendency
of every industrious, intelligent, and upright man has always been and
necessarily anarchic, and that this holy horror inspired by anarchy is
the work of sectarians who, positing the innate malignity and incapacity
of the human subject, accusing free reason, jealous of the wealth
acquired by free labor, suspicious of love itself and of the family,
sacrificing, some the flesh to the spirit, the others the spirit to the
flesh, endeavor to annihilate all individuality and all independence
under the absolute authority of the big general staffs and the
pontificates.

After this mock refutation, M. Guéroult begins to scrutinize the
mysteries of my conscience. According to him, the thought that made me
write would have been an inspiration of the most infernal
Machiavellianism.

What is the interest that drives him? he exclaims, speaking of me. Is it
the interest of religion?

Is it the tenderness he has for the Empire and the dynasty? His natural
modesty would not admit this explanation. In religion, he is an atheist;
in politics, he is in favor of anarchy, in other words of the
suppression of all kinds of government… Now, M. Proudhon is too honest a
man to work on anything other than his ideas. Must we then suppose that
by defending the temporal power, he hopes to work for the progress of
atheism? That by indissolubly linking the cause of the Emperor and that
of the Pope, he hopes to compromise them and drag them both into the
same ruin, and cause holy anarchy to flourish on the ruins of the
Church? This would be very Machiavellian, but would not be at all
stupid; and as Mr. Proudhon does not write for the sake of writing, as
he has an aim in writing, we hazard this interpretation until *La
France* indicates a better one to us…

Thereupon M. Guéroult, who insists on proving that it is he, the
respectful critic of Villafranca’s thought, who is the true friend of the
Empire, not I who maliciously took up this idea, who then treacherously
commented on it and satanically developed it, M. Guéroult continues in
this mode:

If, while criticizing the acts of this government more often than we
would like to do, we respect its principles, and if we believe that it
has before it a great mission to fulfill, it is precisely because, based
on the national will, continuing the first Empire, not in its military
excesses, but in its role of organizer of the principles of 89, it is
today, of all the forms of government in perspective, that which can
best, without crisis, without internal upheaval, without external
cataclysm, promote the moral elevation, the intellectual emancipation of
the working classes and their advent to well-being; it is it that,
popular and democratic by origin, can best achieve triumph in Europe,
gradually and as events allow, So when M. Proudhon tries to link
indissolubly the destiny of the Empire founded on universal suffrage
with that of the temporal power rejected by the wish of the Romans and
of all Italy, he does his job as enemy of the Empire, his role as an
apostle of anarchy; he tries to compromise the Empire with the past in
order to embroil it more surely with the future. In doing so, M.
Proudhon fulfills his role and plays his game.

M. Guéroult could have dispensed with this species of denunciation with
regard to me. I hold

him, until further notice, as a devoted friend of the Empire, and do not
think of disputing with him the privilege of princely graces either in
Italy or in France, any more than I dispute with Catholics the favor of
papal blessings. But I could very well have done without being pointed
out, in connection with the Treaty of Villafranca, as an *enemy of the
Empire and of the dynasty,* Enough mistrust haunts me, without adding
the risks of imperial anger.

Is what I have said of the relations between the Papacy and the Empire
so difficult to understand that M. Guéroult, after racking his brains,
was only able to discover there a dreadful pitfall laid out by the
darkest of conspirators? But I spoke as history does. I said that every
institution, like every family, has its genealogy; that Napoleon I,
having reopened the churches, signed the Concordat, closed the mouths of
the Jacobins by throwing them titles, decorations and pensions, creating
under the name of EMPIRE a monarchy that clung to both the Revolution
and divine right, democracy and feudalism, had in its own way revived
the chain of the times; that his plan had been to continue, under new
forms and conditions, the tradition, not only of Charlemagne, but of
Constantine and Caesar; that his thoughts had been understood and
acclaimed when his soldiers, after Friedland, hailed him Emperor of the
West; that in this respect Napoleon I had become more than the
son-in-law, but the true heir of the Holy Roman Emperor; that he had
displayed his thoughts clearly when he had given himself as a sort of
colleague the Czar Alexander, head of the Greek Church and continuator
of the empire of Constantinople; that apart from this historical fact,
the imperial constitution was devoid of meaning. No doubt I do not share
these ideas of Napoleon I, but it is no less true that as a result of
these ideas Napoleon III can today neither allow, as emperor, the
formation of Italian unity and the dispossession of the Pope, nor
organize, as representative of the Revolution, the federal system. Does
it follow that I have lied to history, calumniated the Napoleonic idea,
and that I must be pointed out as an *enemy of the Empire* *and of the
dynasty?*

And I too have a tradition, a political genealogy to which I hold as the
legitimacy of my birth; I am the son of the Revolution, which was itself
the daughter of the Philosophy of the eighteenth century, which had for
mother the Reformation, for ancestor the Renaissance, for ancestors all
the Ideas, orthodox and heterodox, that succeeded one another from age to
age from the origin of Christianity to the fall of the Eastern Empire.
Let us not forget, in this splendid generation, the Communes, the
Leagues, the Federations, and even that Feudalism, which by its
hierarchical constitution and its distinction of castes was also, in its
time, a form of liberty. And whose son is Christianity itself, which I
do not separate from this revolutionary genealogy? Christianity is the
offspring of Judaism, Egyptianism, Brahmanism, Magism, Platonism, Greek
philosophy and Roman law. If I did not believe in the Church, Saint
Augustine exclaims somewhere, — he meant to say in the tradition, — I
would not believe in the Gospel. I say like Saint Augustine: Would I
have confidence in myself and would I believe in the Revolution, if I
did not find its origins in the past?

M. Guéroult understands nothing of these things. The enfantinism, from
which he emerged,

and of which neither he nor his author M. Enfantin could show the
historical and philosophical filiation, the childishness, which founded
the promiscuity of concubinage, glorified bastardy, invented the
pantheism of the flesh, makes adultery a fraternity, and which imagines
that human institutions hatch, like M. Pouchet’s rotifers, from the mud
of the gutters; that childishness, I say, is communism at its grossest,
unity at its most material; as such, it is the sworn enemy of all
authentic descent; it has a horror of holy generations, patronymic names
and domestic religions; the sons of families are not *liberi* for it, as
the Romans said, that is to say children of Liberty, they are children
of Nature, *nati, naturales;* they do not belong to their parents, but
to the community, *common;* which does not, on occasion, prevent the
*infantiniens,* as little as it serves them, from calling themselves
dynastic. For the dynasty, after all, if it is far from childish
theocracy, nevertheless represents, although in a very imperfect manner
according to the sect, Authority and Unity, outside of which there is no
salvation. The notion of right does not exist in this school of the
flesh: what it values in democracy is the anonymous; what it likes in a
government is concentration; what it likes in the empire founded by
Napoleon I and restored by Napoleon III, it is not this traditional
series, illusory according to me, but full of majesty, of which it would
be the development, it is the *coups de main* that put an end to the
republic and imposed silence on free thought; what it appreciates in
Italian unity, finally, is that it is made up of a series of
expropriations. I asked M. Guéroult if he was decorated with the Order
of Saint-Lazare: I would have done better to ask Victor-Emmanuel if he
aspired to reign by the grace of M. Enfantin.

** CHAPTER IV.

The Presse, the Patrie, the Pays, the Débats, the Echo de la Presse, the
Revue Nationals.

Everyone recognizes in M. Peyrat a remarkable talent for invective, and
an even greater art of confusing questions by means of tempestuous
phraseology and indigestible erudition. He says that I was *the scourge
of democracy* in 1848, compares me to Hébert, calls my argument
*pitiful;* and, after asserting that unity is necessary for Italy to
*fight Austria,* that *small States are leaving,* that *the trend is for
large units,* like a superb lion awakened by a field mouse, he casts me
away from him. What do you want me to say to this swordsman, for whom
neither geography, nor history, nor public right and the right of
peoples are anything; who, in his whole life, has not reflected for five
minutes on the federal system any more than on the Charter of 1814 or
the Constitution of 93, and who sees progress and the Revolution in
unity and the good pleasure of the old Jacobins? — Are you decorated, M.
Peyrat, with the order of Saint-Maurice and Saint-Lazare?

M. Peyrat has just succeeded M. de Girardin in the direction of the
Presse. As he has only just

arrived, I must change the form of my interpellation: does M. de
Girardin want the ribbon?

The former editor of the *Presse* has reappeared more lively than ever.
Six years of retirement have not aged him: it is still the same
petulance, the same enthusiasm, the same bravery. His comeback has given
a little life to the newspapers. His proposals amused and interested the
public. Veteran of Liberty, which he chose as his motto, how could he
not have declared himself a federalist first? It is he who, it is true,
said in 1848: I would rather have three months of power than thirty
years of journalism. From which we can conclude that the Liberty of M.
de Girardin is a first cousin of centralization! It was already a bold
thing to support Italian unity in 1860, when, Naples *conquered* by
Garibaldi, everyone believed that unity had been achieved. M. de
Girardin does not hesitate to take it under his protection when it is
collapsing on all sides. The solution he proposes consists of something
like this: In the name of Liberty and Unity, a decree from the Emperor
would separate the Church from the State, abolish the budget for worship,
withdraw popular education from the hands of the clergy, and exclude the
cardinals from the Senate. That done, and the imperial government having
become anti-Christian like the directorial government of old, nothing
could be simpler than to recall our soldiers from Rome, to give carte
blanche to General Cialdini, and to leave the Holy Father in the care of
Providence… Part of what I was challenging earlier the *Siècle,* in the
person of M. Taxile DELORT, to try. Well! M. de Girardin, your
tendencies are worth more than your theories: we could almost understand
each other.

Notice one thing though. If the Emperor returns, as far as the Church is
concerned, to the *status quo* from 1795–1802, it must follow the data to
the end. An idea never goes alone, and politics does not support
splitting. The Consulate implied the reopening of the churches, read M.
Thiers instead: one can even say that one of the causes of the success
of 18 Brumaire and the popularity of the Consulate was that the
Directory could not, by its principle, give satisfaction to public
piety. To break with the Church, as M. de Girardin proposes, would
therefore be to abjure the imperial tradition, to begin again in the
opposite direction on 18 Brumaire and 2 December, to abolish the
dynastic principle, to reestablish, with the constitution of 1848, the
freedom of the press, the right of association and assembly, freedom of
education; to execute, finally, on top of a political revolution, an
economic, social, moral revolution, four times as much work as the
Estates- General undertook in 1989, the Convention in 1993, and the
First Consul in 1999. To break with the Church, in a word, would be to
attack this fine unity, the object of M. de Girardin’s worship, and to
endanger the imperial system.

Does M. de Girardin feel strong enough, in head and heart, to support
such a task? I dare say no. But then his plan for a solution is reduced
to zero: he has spoken to say nothing. After having understood very well
that the papal question drags the religious question in its wake, he was
seriously mistaken if he imagined that, to resolve this, it would
suffice to put the clergy out of the budget and property by imperial
decree, the cardinals outside the Senate, the Church outside the school,
religion outside politics. This is the time to remind him of the phrase:
*Chase them out the* *door, they will come in through the window..* Are
you able to replace religion, which no doubt your intention is not to
proscribe? And if you are not in a position to effect this replacement,
can you, Monsieur de Girardin, prevent, under a regime of liberty,
religious meetings and associations? Can you close free schools? Can you
exclude ecclesiastics from the right of suffrage, candidacies and jobs?…
Decreed for ostracism by the government, the Church will therefore, by
virtue of legislation and liberty, reappear, whatever you do, in the
temporal power, in the state, in the government. It will re-establish
itself there all the more strongly in proportion as you have shown
yourself more incapable of replacing its ministry in the higher regions
of the moral order. You will then realize that the religious question is
not resolved by ordinance, any more than the question of Italian unity
can be resolved by giving Naples, Rome and Venice to Victor-Emmanuel.

Is it seriously, moreover, that you would propose to a head of Empire
emerging from two *coups* *d’état* against the Revolution, allied by
blood to almost all the princely families of Europe, eldest son of the
Church, devoted to capitalist interests, to adopt such a policy? Oh!
When I said that the Empire was in solidarity with the Papacy; that
their destinies, despite their quarrels, were inseparable, I was
profoundly right. The Emperor without the Church, as M. de Girardin
would have it, would be quite purely Robespierre, unless it were Marat:
Robespierre following on foot, a bouquet in his hand, the procession of
the Supreme Being, six weeks before 9 Thermidor; Marat, the day of his
triumph, carried by bare arms, two months before Charlotte Corday’s
visit. I seem to hear the Emperor exclaim like the Pope: *Non possumus!*

M. de Girardin, like all Unitaires, believes little in ideas; he makes
fun of the discussions of the

press and the tribune and has faith only in expedients, in what he
calls, with his old enemies the Jacobins, politics of *action.* From the
point of view of unity, where the salvation of interests, that of the
dynasty, is the supreme law, where the Power is in agreement with the
ruling class, where the question of the Church is associated with the
question of State, M. de Girardin may be right: the influence of an
opposition press is not to be feared. In fact, the greatest lie is
engendered by the greatest mass of interests, and that one absorbs and
cancels all the others. As for the truth, it is so trivial that it
worries no one.

But these gigantic coalitions are, in spite of the necessity that
provokes them, most unstable; and when the split broke out, the anarchy
of minds found its most powerful auxiliary in the press.

Then the truth, as if it wanted revenge, takes on a terrible aspect;
then also the interests again unite against it; quickly one appeals to
repression, and returns to order by the door of despotism. But the truth
will end by having its day: *And blessed,* says Jesus Christ, *are those
whom it will not* *scandalize!…* After the *Presse,* here is the *Écho de
la presse,* the *Pays,* the *Patrie,* newspapers devoted to the Empire,
whose fidelity for this reason should not be suspected any more than
that of Caesar’s wife. Bitter against the temporal power of the Pope,
all the more favorable to the Kingdom, these newspapers, at least as far
as the Roman question is concerned, belong to the so-called advanced
part of the Bonapartist party. To know if they are decorated with
Saint-Lazare is not what worries me: I am assured besides that they do
not hide it. But here is what I would like.

Article 42 of the Swiss Federal Constitution, reformed in 1848,
provides:

<quote>
“The members of the federal authorities, the civil and military
functionaries of the Confederation, and the representatives or the
federal commissioners, cannot receive from a foreign government either
pensions or salaries, or titles, presents or decorations. — If they are
already in possession of pensions, titles or decorations, they must
renounce the enjoyment of their pensions and the wearing of their titles
and decorations for the duration of their functions.”
</quote>

Would it be too demanding, under a unitary government, where no
periodical publication, dealing with political matters, can exist
without authorization and guarantee, to ask, 1. that following the
example of what is practiced in Switzerland, journalists could not
receive any decoration or subsidy from a foreign government; 2. that in
this respect they were assimilated to the public functionaries? We would
at least gain by not being exposed to seeing the government newspapers
defend the foreigner against the country, and wear an anti-national
decoration.

The *Journal des Débats* has always reserved for me the honor of its
most venomous diatribes; for me alone it loses its temper and forgets
its atticism. What did I do to it? It never inspired me with anger or
hatred.

The attitude of this serious and academic newspaper, suddenly taking
sides for Piedmontese unity, surprised me at first. Thinking about it, I
found his conduct quite natural; then, thinking about it further, I was
puzzled. It is not easy to probe into the politics of the *Débats,*
First, the *Journal des Débats* is said to be devoted to the Orleans
family, united by the closest kinship to the Bourbons of Naples. How,
and this is what caused my surprise, was the *Journal des* *Débats* able
to give its approval to a fact that so seriously undermines the dynasty
of Bourbon, in consequence of the dignity of that of Orleans? Others
claim that it is, or nearly so, rallied to the Empire. In this case, its
position is the same as that of the *Pays* and the *PAtrie:* how, having
to defend French prepotence, does it give its support to Italian unity?
How does it not follow the example of *La France?…* — But, on the other
hand, the *Journal des Débats* is inviolably attached to the system of
the great constitutional, bourgeois and unitary monarchies, of which the
princes of Orléans are, after all, only a symbol; and it is said that,
symbol for symbol, a Bonaparte is in the end equal to a d’Orleans. We
can even say, in praise of the *Débats,* that with it respect for
principle, I mean bourgeois interest, outweighs affection for people.
This second reasoning seemed to me as logical, conclusive and natural as
the first. Now, what to decide?

The *Journal des Débats* has been since 1830 and after 1848 the most
relentless organ of reaction: this is its glory. If the Republic came
back to business, it might have more than one account to settle with it.
How did the sheet of MM. Molé, Guizot, Thiers, Falloux, etc. declare
itself for the kingdom of Italy, a revolutionary creation? This again
surprised me. — But the *Journal des Débats* contributed to the July
Revolution; it was one of the main beneficiaries. If it values
legitimacy, usurpation does not displease it at all. In a circumstance
like this, where it was a question both of keeping and of taking, one
could decide for one or the other party, as M. Guizot says. The reason
justified everything. Note, moreover, that Napoleon III, to whose
government the *Journal des Débats* is said to have ultimately rallied,
was, like Louis-Philippe, both conservation and the Revolution. What,
then, is the motive that determined the *Journal des Débats* in favor of
Piedmont? Is this a reason for reaction or a reason for revolution? Is
it one and the other at the same time?

The *Journal des Débats* supported the *Sunderbund* in 1846, in 1849 the
expedition against Rome: how can it fight the rights of the Holy Father
today? — But the *Journal des Débats* is Voltairean as much as
Christian, Jansenist as much as Jesuit, bourgeois and unitary as much as
dynastic, revolutionary as much as conservative and friend of order. Who
knows? Perhaps it is convinced that religion would gain from the
dispossession of the Pope. What could be simpler then that, in the
interest of the great bourgeois coalition as well as in that of the
triumph of the Church, it sacrificed the temporality of the Holy Father
to Italian unity? Whichever way you turn, the *Journal des Débats* gives
you a reason. What is its reason, well, its real reason? *Quœrite, et
non* *invenietis,* Before 1848, the *Journal des Débats* was almost the
only organ of M. Guizot, the austere one; but it was at the same time
that of MM. Teste, Cubières and Pellaprat… — It is a misfortune: no one
can answer for the virtue of his friends: to each his faults.

The people who read the *Debates* and who follow their direction,
readily admit two morals, the *great* and the *small.* By combining
these two morals, we could sum up the entire politics of the *Débats* in
this formula of transcendent middle ground and lofty doctrine:

VIRTUE IS NEEDED, says the proverb, BUT NOT TOO MUCH:

Religion is needed, but not too much; Justice is needed, but not too
much; Good faith is needed, but not too much; Probity is needed, but not
too much; Fidelity to princes is needed, but not too much; Patriotism is
needed, but not too much; Civic courage is needed, but not too much;
Modesty is needed, bit not too much…

The litany would not end.

Timorous souls will find this system unediing. What sort of impudence,
what cowardice, what felony, what treason, what wickedness, what crime
against God and against men cannot be justified by this middle term
between *great* and *petty* morality? But, after all, one is not obliged
to have more faith than the coalman, nor more wisdom than the proverbs.

The *Journal des Débats* decides on the great lord; it affects his
elegance and arrogates his impertinence, priding itself on being, among
its colleagues, a model of good taste and good taste. Here, I stop short
the *Journal des Débats.* These aristocratic ways

Only impress people who are not from here,

as Alceste says. It is twisted slang. We know, since the July
Revolution, — wouldn’t the *Journal* *des Debats* itself have said so? —
that there are scoundrels above and scoundrels below.

For the rest, the *Journal des Débats* treats Italian federalism like
the *Pays* and the *Patrie:* it does not argue, something pedantic, it
*exhausts.*

To ask the *Journal des Débats* if it is decorated with the
Saint-Lazare, after all that I have said on the unitary principle in
general and on Italian unity in particular, after what everyone knows
about the monarchical, religious, bourgeois and Voltairean sentiments of
the *Débats* and its antecedents, would be a question without
significance. Why would it refuse the decoration? Is it democratic? Is
not the cause of unity its cause? Is not that of the constitutional
monarchy its cause? When the *Journal des Débats* defends these great
causes, it fights *pro aris et focis:* what wonder that it receives,
here below, its reward?

But, without it being necessary to go back very far in the history of
the *Débats,* one could prove that the cause of the Papacy is also its
cause, that of the legitimate and quasi-legitimate dynasties, still its
cause. The *Journal des Débats* could bear the order of Saint-Grégoire
as well as that of Saint-Lazare, the cross of Saint-Louis as well as the
star of the Legion of Honor: who knows if it does not have them all?
Before bourgeois solidarity was established, before the fusion of
capitals had been imagined, before the constitutional monarchy and
restricted suffrage; prior to this skillful centralization which,
resolving all local activity and all individual energy into an
irresistible force of collectivity, makes the exploitation of the
multitudes so easy and Liberty so little formidable, the Church had made
unity an article of faith, and chained in advance, through religion, the
people to wage labor. Before financial feudalism existed, the charter of
1814 had said: “The old nobility resumes its titles; the new retains its
own.” The *Journal des Débats* has not forgotten this: this is what once
motivated its respect for the Church and its devotion to the legitimate
dynasty. I therefore ask the *Journal des Débats* if, by accepting the
decoration of Saint- Lazare and implicitly pronouncing himself for
Piedmontese royalty against the Papacy, it henceforth judges the Church
useless, even compromising for its system; if it thinks that the Orleans
dynasty, like that of Bourbon, is worn out; if, consequently, it has
chosen another principle, the Napoleonic idea, for example, or that of
Mazzini, *Dio e popolo,* or any other; or else, if it reserves the right
to purely and simply follow the unity wherever it goes, under whatever
flag it appears, in accordance with the maxim of Sosie:

The true Amphitryon Is the Amphitryon at whose board we dine?

I said at the beginning that Italian unity seemed to me to be, for the
skillful, nothing more than a *business.* Note, in fact, that all this
journalism, which has taken so warm a position for the kingdom of Italy,
is business journalism, and its politics business politics: this
explains everything. The *Siècle,* a business newspaper; *La Presse,* a
business newspaper; *l’Opinion Nationale,* a business newspaper; the
*Patrie,* the *Pays,* the *Débats,* business journals. Do MM. Mirès,
Millaud, Solar, Havin, Bertin, Delamarre, etc., owners of the said
newspapers; are the Saint-Simonians Guéroult, Jourdan, Michel Chevalier,
etc., politicians? I was therefore right to say that Italian unity had
been for the French press, democratic and liberal, only a business, a
quotable, discountable business, for some already discounted, but whose
shares at this hour tumble. Ah! The onlookers of the Democracy asked me
if I was not blushing at the applause of the legitimist and clerical
press. If this apostrophe had any significance, I would refer it to
Garibaldi. I would ask him if he is not ashamed, he, the patriot par
excellence, to see himself patronized by the stock market press, a press
for which right and patriotism, the idea and art are venal material;
which, transporting into politics the mores of the anonymous society,
embracing all of Italy in the network of its speculations, after having
exhausted all the forms of *puff,* has democracy and nationality been a
double claim?

The article in the *Revue Nationale* surpasses all the others in its
violence and sharpness. There reigns there an accent of personality and
hatred that I do not understand, since the author is unknown to me. This
article is signed LANFRAY. Who is M. Lanfray? A zealot of the unitary
republic, one of those fiery democrats distinguished above all by their
horror of socialism, to whom the idea of economic and social reform
gives the shivers, and who in their reactionary delirium are preparing
for new June days. Already they think they are at the moment of seizing
power, and they draw up their list of proscriptions. Good luck, M.
Lanfray. But why shout, why insult? Are you afraid that your friends will
forget your zeal, or that I myself will lose sight of you? Calm down,
worthy journalist: names like yours, just mark them with a cross to say
what they are worth and put them in their place. M. Lanfray has written a
pamphlet against the Church that is not equal to that of M. About, and
he thinks himself a politician! He reproaches me for making a dent in
*our glories:* what glories? Let him name them, so that another time I
will do them justice by adding his own. It is a crime for me to use the
official style in speaking of the Emperor. Let him give me the example,
he who has discovered the secret of publishing, with the authorization
of the Emperor’s government, a *Revue,* while I for ten years have not
been able to obtain it. He complains that I called people of his opinion
*fools.* The quote is not exact, I said also *schemers:* one can choose.
There are even subjects to whom both epithets fit. Yes, they are fools
who, aspiring to the development of the Revolution and parading their
patriotism, did not see that Italian unity was a plot directed at once
against the emancipation of the proletariat, against liberty and against
France; schemers those who, for reasons of ambition or speculation now
brought into the light, surprised, in favor of Victor-Emmanuel, the
simplicity of the masses, always easy to lead with phrases and cockades.
Is M. Lanfray decorated with the Saint-Lazare?… The reprimand he
addresses on this subject to M. Pelletan is heavy and contorted: it is
true that it is the usual quality of his style.

** CHAPTER V. Le Temps, the Indépéndant de Charente-inférieure, the Journal des
Deux-Sevres. — Mental Bondage of M. Nezer.

It is difficult, not to say impossible, in our liberal country of
France, to maintain the independence of one’s opinions, especially since
a certain democracy, crystalized in Unity, Authority and Nationality,
has constituted itself the guardian and the oracle of free thought. Who
would seriously want it, there wouldn’t even be security. The influence
of this Medusa is felt even in the sheets that have taken up the task of
freeing themselves from it, but whose trembling genius cannot bear the
fascination of its gaze. In the good democracy one does not reason: the
wind blows from who knows where; the weather vanes turn, and thus is the
opinion made. The mass follows without reflection, thinking as one man,
speaking as one man, standing and sitting as one man. The best
consciences, the healthiest intelligences follow in their turn, seized
as by an endemic fever: this is called the *current of opinion.* Before
this current everyone yields, some out of sheepishness, others out of
human respect. The miracle of unity! We would know little about the
Democracy and the secret of its setbacks if we were not aware of this
phenomenon. The example I am about to cite is one of the most curious.

When *Le Temps* was founded, the editor, M. Nezer, told the minister in
his application for permission and warned the public that the intention
of the new paper was to stand *apart from all* *parties.*

As a general thesis, such a profession of faith is a banality, when it
is not an act of cowardice or flattery. The editor of *Le Temps*
certainly had higher motives. What were those motives? Against whom, in
particular, was his statement directed?

M. Nezer is no legitimist, as we know; he is not an Orléanist, we know
that. The manner in

which he had last directed the *Presse* proved that he was no more
Bonapartist or ministerial, accustomed to the Tuileries or to the
Palais-Royal. In ecclesiastical matters, the education of M. Nezer, his
relations would have brought him nearer to Protestantism than to the
Orthodox faith, if he had not long since made himself known for a mind
exempt from *prejudice.* Moreover, M. Nezer could call himself, as much
as a man of the world, a friend of liberty, a partisan of progress,
devoted to improving the lot of the working classes. Now, when a writer
in the daily press is neither legitimist nor Orleanist, neither
Bonapartist, nor clerical, nor Bancocrat, like M. Nezer; when, on the
other hand, he announces himself as frankly liberal, a friend of progress
and wise reforms, and when at the same time he declares that he *is not
attached to any party,* this clearly means that he is even less of the
democratic party than of any other, since without the care he takes to
deny his affiliation, it is to this party that he would be attached. *Le
Temps* does not belong to the democracy, insofar as the democracy forms
a party, that is to say a union; his design was to maintain
independence: that is what M. Nezer meant, hardly having said anything
at all. And *Le Temps* has repeatedly proved, by its discussions with
the *Siècle,* the *Opinion Nationale* and the *Presse,* that such was
indeed the thought of its editor.

Thus, let us note this: To preserve one’s freedom, in France, to have a
frank, independent opinion, it is not enough to separate oneself from
dynasties, churches and sects, one must also, one must above all,
distance oneself from the democrats.

But saying and doing are two different things. M. Nezer, I fear, did
not reflect that, not being on anyone’s side, he was condemned to be on
his own side: which presupposed on his part the indication of the aim
and object of his journal, of the policy that he proposed to follow, in
a word, of his principles. To speak in the name of liberty, of science,
of right, is vague; all parties do the same. To define oneself is to
exist. Now, I beg the honorable editor’s pardon, he has not defined
himself; we do not know his own idea; his newspaper has no objective, as
the military men say. Much more, he has declared himself, at least in
politics, for Unity, without reflecting that the liberty whose tradition
he claimed to follow, as well as the philosophy, is separation. The
result was that, whether he liked it or not, he fell back into
Jacobinism.

*Le Temps* was kind enough to devote a few articles to discussing my
opinion of Italy: I expected something original from it. What did it
find? Nothing but what has been provided by both the official and
unofficial democracy. *Le Temps* declaring itself, without further
examination, unitary, as much for Italy as for France, as much for
America as for Italy, has put itself purely and simply at the tail end
of the democratic party; it followed the views and interests of that
party; it did not know how or did not dare to be itself; it joined its
number, side by side with MM. Guéroult, Havin and Peyrat, and that for
free; it cannot even say today: *Nos numerus sumus et* *fruges consumere
nati;* for it is doubtfuk that this discolored journal received either
decoration or pension.

And first *Le Temps,* reasoning in succession, declared itself for the
kingdom. To whom did it want to pay homage with its disinterested vote?
How did Italian unity seem to it better than federation? The fact is
that *Le Temps,* obeying the seduction of *nationalities,* let itself go
without further examination with the democratic current. It speaks of
the federative principle as an indifferent form of government, even
inferior, which one is free to accept or reject, *ad libitum:* by which
it simply proved that it had never reflected on matter. Otherwise it
would have known that federation is Liberty, all Liberty, nothing but
Liberty, as it is Right, all Right and nothing but Right: which cannot
be said of any other system.

*Le Temps* has rightly alleged, following the example of its leading
democrats, the lack of importance that the confederations have obtained
until now in the political world, the mediocrity of their role. Coming
from a supporter of progress, the objection is surprising. The truth, in
politics as in all things, is revealed little by little; it is not even
enough, in order to apply it, to know it; favorable conditions are
necessary. It is following the *Sunderbund* that the Swiss have acquired
full awareness of the principle that has governed them for more than
five centuries; as for the United States of America, the civil war that
desolates them, the obstinacy of the South to maintain slavery and the
strange way in which the North intends to abolish it, the examination of
their constitution, the accounts of travelers on their manners;
everything proves that the idea of federation was never among them
except in a sketchy state, and that their republic is still entirely
impregnated with aristocratic and unitary prejudice. Does this prevent
the federal system from being the law of the future? The political world,
which seems so old to us, is undergoing a metamorphosis; the Republic,
today as in the time of Plato and Pythagoras, is its ideal, and everyone
can convince himself by his own judgment that this ideal, this
republican myth, always affirmed, never defined, has no other formula
than federation. Moreover, we know that the causes that for so many
centuries have postponed the development of the federalist idea are
tending to disappear: it is abusing empiricism to oppose to a principle,
as an end of inadmissibility, the novelty of its appearance.

One thing holds *Le Temps* in difficulty and diverts it from the
federalist idea, which is the drive of the masses, of the Italians in
particular, towards unity. Never would a publicist thinking for himself,
apart from the action of the parties, have alleged such a reason. What
does the voice of the masses prove in terms of doctrine? Leave, M.
Nezer, these arguments to M. Havin and his fifty thousand subscribers.
Monks, said Pascal, are not reasons. The Republic has shown itself, and
the Republicans have not recognized it: it had to be. The republic is
Liberty, Right, and consequently Federation; the Democracy is Authority,
Unity. It is the effect of its principle, and one of the signs of the
times, that the Democracy has lost the understanding of its own future.
Well! The Italian people, consulted on unity, said, Yes. But now the
force of things responds, No; and Italy will have to contend with the
force of things. The agreement of political unity with administrative
decentralization is impossible; it is, like the squaring of the circle
and the trisection of the angle, one of those problems from which one can
only get out by an artificial approximation or a evasion. The unitary
current is now being replaced by a federalist counter-current. They cry
in Italy: *Down with Centralization!* with more force than we shouted
six months ago: *Long live Unity and* *Victor-Emmanuel!* It takes all
the bonhomie of *Le Temps* so that it does not realize that Italian
unity is a cause henceforth very compromised, not to say a lost cause.

To the observation made by me that the geography of the Peninsula
excludes the idea of a single State, or at least of a unitary
Constitution, *Le Temps* replies that the territorial configuration is
one of those *fatalities* over which it is up to human liberty to
triumph, which liberty would manifest itself in this circumstance
precisely by unity. MM. Guéroult, Peyrat, etc., had said it in other
terms: does M. Nezer believe that he has shown independence by
supporting them with his philosophical style? What would M. Nezer say
to someone who said this to him: “For man, the body is a fatality from
which he is commanded to free himself if he wants to enjoy the liberty of
his mind. This is what the apostle Saint Paul teaches in these words
where he calls death: *Cupio* *dissolvi and esse cum Christo.* From
which should I conclude that the first of our rights and the holiest of
our duties is suicide?…” — M. Nezer would reply very Germanically to
this hypochondrium: “Go to the devil and leave me alone!…” I will
content myself with pointing out to

M. Nezer that what he takes for an anti-liberal fatality is precisely,
in the case in question, the

very condition of liberty; that the soil is to the nation what the body
is to the individual, an integral part of being, a fatality if you will,
but a fatality with which we must resign ourselves to living, that we
are even commanded to treat like our spirit and as best we can, on pain
of annihilation of body, soul and liberty itself.

The railways, continues M. Nezer, will be a powerful means of
unification. This is also the opinion of M. Guéroult. We see more and
more, by the example of *Le Temps,* that it suffices to approach the old
democracy to immediately become a sheep of Panurge. I replied to M.
Guéroult and consorts that the railways were machines indifferent by
themselves to ideas, ready to serve equally federation and unity,
liberty and despotism, good and evil; admirable machines, which
transport quickly and cheaply what they are given to transport, as the
donkey does his pack and the postman his dispatches; that consequently,
in federalist hands, the railways would serve energetically to revive
political life in the localities that they serve, which through
centralization had lost it, to create economic equilibrium in place of
the proletariat, while in unitary hands these same paths, maneuvering in
the opposite direction of liberty and equality, undertaking the
depletion of the province for the benefit of the center, would lead the
people to poverty and society to ruin.

On the subject of the Roman question, *Le Temps,* like the perfect
theologian that it is and like the good old democrat that it cannot help
being, has devoted itself to long dissertations on the spiritual and the
temporal. It was even astonished, along with the bulk of the party, at
the unexpected help that I brought, according to him, to the Pope’s
cause. *Le Temps* has not better grasped this side of the difficulty
than the others, and its docility seriously impaired its judgment. By
taking sides for the Kingdom against the Church, it did not realize that
it was sacrificing one unity to another unity, which always comes under
unitary paralogism. First of all, it is not theology that we must ask
for the solution of the Roman question, it is public right, that is to
say, in this case, the federative principle. Everything that has been
said about the economic distinction between the two powers is an
appetizer, the slightest defect of which is to hypocritically put the
Gospel at the service of a dynastic ambition. As to the question of
knowing whether the dispossession of the Holy Father would not advance
the destruction of Catholicism, if, consequently, it was not my duty,
above all others, to applaud it, I would point out to M. Nezer that the
destruction of religions has not been, as far as I know, put on the
agenda of Democracy; that Garibaldi walked surrounded by priests and
patriotic monks, as we did in 1848; that one of the most serious
reproaches addressed to me by M. Guéroult is that I am *atheist;* that
M. Nezer himself, since the founding of *Le Temps,* has turned his back
on Hegel and shown himself favorable to mystical ideas; that in this
again he followed the example of all Jacobinism, from Robespierre to M.
Guéroult; that in such a state of things I was justified in thinking
that, the Democracy being definitively attached to religious ideas, the
opposition made to the Papacy and to the Church could only be, in the
eyes of any free thinker, sect-to-sect warfare; that the Revolution
having no interest in swearing by Luther or Calvin rather than by Pius
IX or by Enfantin, my duty was to abstain and denounce the intrigue; and
that the day when the debate between the Revolution and the Church
arises, we will have other things to do than transport the Papacy to
Avignon or Savona.

*Le Temps,* refuting me as best it could, treated me with respect, a
thing to which the old Democracy has not accustomed me, and for which I
thank it as much as I congratulate it. Let it finally have the courage
to walk in its freedom and its independence, as it announced to the
minister, and whatever difference there is between our opinions, it can
count me among its friends. However, and although M. Nezer called me
neither *Janicot,* nor *Erostrate,* nor juggler, I will ask him
nonetheless, like the others, if he is decorated with the Saint-Lazare?
It is an interpellation of order from which I am not permitted to except
anyone, and which *Le Temps* has incurred by breaking the word it had
given to keep itself apart from all parties.

— An esteemed departmental journalist, M. VALLEIN, editor of *the
Indépendant de la* *Charente-Inférieure,* after perusing my last
pamphlet, felt obliged to declare that up to that moment he had honored
himself to be my disciple, but now he was moving away from my direction.
I learned that from the *Opinion Nationale,* which did not fail to make
it a trophy. I did not have the honor of knowing M. Vallein, whose
sympathy I sincerely regret having lost. So I won’t argue with him. I
will only ask him if he, my so-called disciple, who has just repudiated
me on such a fundamental question, is sure that he has ever understood a
word of my works; if, now that he has returned to the bosom of the old
democracy, he positively feels his heart freer, his mind more lucid; if,
finally, instead of seeing me defend the Pope, as they say among his new
friends, he would have preferred that I had deserved, by my unitary zeal,
the decoration of Saint-Lazare?

I will make no other reply to the *Journal des Deux-Sèvres* which,
mingling affectionate words with marks of lively impatience, exclaims
somewhere: *“No, this man has never had in mind* *anything but the
constitutional monarchy!…“* Note that it is in the name of the Italian
monarchy, constitutional, bourgeois and unitary, and in hatred of the
federation, that this reproach is addressed to me. This recalls M.
Taxile Delort, finding in my old federalist and revolutionary statements
evidence in favor of Victor-Emmanuel. Say after that that the heads have
not turned to the democrats! Poor bo ! Yet this is how the *disciples,*
in the nineteenth century, understand their *masters* and how their
write their history.

** CHAPTER VI. *Le Progrès* (of Lyons). — Catholic-Jacobin paralogisms of
M. Fr. Morin.

*Le Progrès* (of Lyons) had opened fire on me with the vivacity of one
decorated, when M. Frederic MORIN, the newspaper’s correspondent,
intervened, and recalled the editor, if not to better feelings, at least
to a better mind.

M. Fr. Morin is one of the most distinguished writers who have appeared
in the periodical

press since the *coup d’état.* He belongs to the unitary democracy,
whose prejudices he is far from sharing in everything and following the
inspiration, as he proved to me. With a mind of this temper, the
controversy might have been as agreeable as it was useful: vanity had no
place in it; the interlocutors, like two pioneers of the truth,
proposing in turn their hypotheses, examining the solutions, deducing
the principles, without any other passion than that of truth and
justice. It would therefore have been with infinite pleasure that I
would have started a discussion of this kind with M. Fr. Morin, if in
the two articles full of benevolence that he published on my brochure, I
had encountered a lofty critic who invited me to do so. Unfortunately, I
am forced to say it, M. Fr. Morin did not exceed the level of his party.
Superior in conscience, he remained the equal of the masses in thought;
and if I take up here some of his proposals, if further on I take the
liberty of addressing a few more questions to him, it is solely in order
to demonstrate to him, by his own example, that, in the political
environment in which he placed, his reason as a publicist and
philosopher has already begun to go astray and decline. Yes, I repeat
it, it is the centralizing and unitary preoccupations that, distorting
the reason of its writers and its speakers, have thrown the French
democracy into an impasse; this is what makes freedom and right
unintelligible, impossible for us today, just as before the hypothesis
of Copernicus, under the influence of the theory of Ptolemy, the system
of the world was unintelligible, impossible.

Mr. Frédéric Morin, after noting that, “According to M. Proudhon, the
only political system that can be reconciled with the true revolution
and achieve political equality as well as economic mutuality, is the
federal system,” adds that he has *established the falsity of this idea.
(Le Progrès,* Nov. 11.)

I don’t know where M. Fr. Morin established that. I did not find this
demonstration in the articles he published on my pamphlet; and since I
return today, with more ample details, to the federative principle, I
would be grateful to him if he would in turn reproduce his thesis with
new developments. I am curious how he will set out to show that liberty
and equality can result from the undivided power, from administrative
centralization, from the concentration of economic forces, from the
monopolization and supremacy of capital, how economic mutuality could be
something other than a federation.

Mr. Fr. Morin rejects with me “this *false unity* that absorbs all local
life in the immobile abyss of the State;” but he claims that there is a
middle ground between *absolute centralization* and *federalism.* He
observes that the forms of human sociability are not reduced to two;
that they are extremely numerous; that the Greek city was not the same
kind of political association as the Italian municipality, nor the
latter the same as the medieval commune of which it was the antecedent;
that the commune has been surpassed in its turn by modern *nationality,*
very different from what was called a *people* in antiquity; that there
are states that are both *unitary* and *decentralized,* such as Belgium,
England and Prussia; and he concludes with an appeal to the French
bourgeoisie, whom he invites, following the example of the English
aristocracy, to seize, in the interest of the masses and in their own,
the reins of government, and to reconstitute the national unity while
decentralizing it.

I confess that I was far from expecting similar conclusions from such a
pronounced democrat as M. Morin, and I am greatly afraid that these fine
ideas, the misunderstanding of which he attributes to a *distraction* of
my mind, are simply the effect of a confusion of his.

One thing, however, explains these opinions of M. Morin to me. He is
resolutely of his party, that is to say Jacobin; as such, a partisan of
the government of the bourgeoisie; consequently one rallied to the
unitary government, tempered by a fairly strong dose of middle ground.
It is in this sense that he protests against all *oligarchy* and
*absolute centralization.* What M. Fr. Morin is basically asking for,
despite the reservations in which he wraps himself, is a reorganization
or fusion of the constitutional monarchy and the unitary republic, two
political forms that differ from each other as, under Louis-Philippe, the
dynastic opposition differed from the ministerial majority. I call the
attention of the *Journal des Deux-Sèvres,* who so judiciously
reproached me for never having had anything else in mind than the
constitutional monarchy, to this point.

In a few lines, M. Fr. Morin has raised more questions than we could
each deal with in two hundred pages, so I will content myself with
responding to his laconic observations with others that I will endeavor
to render as summary than his.

I would therefore say to him, in the first place, that his hypothesis of
a State that is both unitary and decentralized is a pure chimera, of
which the most skillful publicist would be challenged to give an
intelligible exposition, and that the examples he cites of it are
controverted and disguised. It is true, for example, that the claim of
the Belgian government has been to unite the double advantage of unity
and decentralization; but it is also certain, and recognized by all
Belgians, however little educated, that centralization is increasing in
Belgium, while the old communal and federative spirit is disappearing;
that the central power is waging a harsh war against the latter, and
does not even conceal it. I have already said that one of the causes of
the discontent that I aroused in Belgium by my article on Italian
unitaryism, was that by attacking it I was indirectly combating Belgian
unitaryism.[24] An analogous phenomenon occurs in England, in Prussia,
and wherever the federative principle is not strongly constituted and
rigorously defined. The United States war is further proof of this.

All power tends towards concentration and monopolizing traditions; race,
genius have nothing to do with it; and it suffices, for this
centralizing tendency to become a reality, that there exists in fact or
in law an opposition of classes, bourgeoisie and people. It is a fatal
consequence of the antagonism of interests, that they work together for
the concentration of power. Belgium, cited earlier by M. Fr. Morin, is a
sad example.[25]

Let us therefore beware, please, of taking for a *form of sociability*
what is only a phenomenon of political distortion, the transition from
federation to unity, or *vice versa.* Above all, let us beware of
concluding from this pretended *form* on a patronage which would be
nothing other than the re-establishment of the condemned principle of
castes, to which you arrive straight by your unfortunate appeal to the
bourgeoisie. Do not forget that everything moves, everything changes and
everything is constantly evolving in society, and that if your political
system is not organized in such a way as to constantly develop liberty
and to create, through it, balance, your government will always revert
to centralization and absolutism.

Undoubtedly, the *forms* of human association are innumerable: this is
the part devolved to liberty in the constitution of the State, but the
laws are constant, all the better the more rigorously they express
right. Now, I believe I have proved that all forms of government, first
*a priori* or theoretical, then *a posteriori* or empirical, fit into
each other; that there are so many different, hypothetical, infinitely
variable ways of creating a balance between Authority and Liberty; but
that of all these governmental combinations there is and can be only one
that fully satisfies the conditions of the problem, Liberty and Right,
reality and logic, Federation. All other forms are essentially transient
and corruptible; only federation is stable and final. What is the use
here of speaking of varieties of forms and middle terms? Undoubtedly the
confederations will not all be alike in detail; but they will resemble
each other in principle, just as all constitutional monarchies today
resemble each other. What good is this recourse to the bourgeois class
and all these middle ground concerns, when the spirit of Democracy
itself is to ensure that there is no longer either lower class or upper
class, but a single and even people? Do you possess the elements of a
bourgeoisie, no more than of a nobility? France demands the government
of right by an institution of justice and liberty that finally subsists
by itself, immutable in its law, variable only in the detail of its
applications.

This institution, you are required, journalist of the democracy, to seek
it like me; and as you only have these two alternatives, authority or
contract, you are required to justi your unity, not to mutilate it, nor
to bastardize it, in which you will not succeed, or else to accept
federation.

I have misunderstood, according to M. Morin, the modern idea of
*nationality.* But what he with so many others calls nationality is the
product of politics much more than of nature: now, politics having been
up to this day as faulty as the governments of which it is the verb,
what value can I grant to the nationalities issued from its hands? They
do not even have the merit of a *fait* *accompli,* since the institution
that gave birth to them being precarious, the so-called nationalities,
the work of a vain empiricism, are as precarious as it, are born and
disappear with it. What did I say? The currently existing nationalities,
coming to crumble through the collapse of the system that established
them, would give way to the primitive nationalities whose absorption
served to form them, and which would regard as a liberation what you, in
your system, would call a destruction.

I agree that, if tomorrow Imperial France was transformed into a
Confederation, the new Confederate States, twenty or thirty in number,
would not immediately give each other, for the pleasure of exercising
their autonomy, a new Civil Code, a Commercial Code, a Penal Code,
another system of weights and measures, etc. In the beginning, the
federation would be reduced to administrative independence; for the
rest, the unity would in fact be maintained. But soon the influences of
race and climate resuming their empire, differences would be noticed
little by little in the interpretation of the laws, then in the text;
local customs would acquire legislative authority, so much so that the
States would be led to add to their prerogatives that of the legislature
itself. Then you would see the nationalities whose fusion, more or less
arbitrary and violent, composes the France of the present, would
reappear in their native purity and their original development, very
different in figure from the fantasy that you pay tribute to today.

Such are in substance the observations that I oppose to those of M.
Morin, and on which I regret not being able to insist further. Either I
am very wrong, or they would convince him that what makes him hesitate
before the federative principle and retains him in unity, is not a
serious political reason: it is the established fact, always so
imposing; it is the Jacobin tradition and party prejudice; it is that in
the eyes of the old Democracy there is *res judicata* against the
Gironde; it is that the French people have always understood the
government as in 93 they understood war: *En* *masse on the enemy!* that
is, centralization and unity; it is, finally, that as far as matters of
the Revolution are concerned, the reason of the philosophers has
hitherto only followed the ardor of the masses. Let M. Morin lay his
hand on his conscience: is it not true that it would cost him at this
hour to separate himself from his friends the unitary democrats? And why
would it cost him? Because the Revolution is still for the people a
matter of sentiment, not of right or science; that to prefer right and
science to sentiment is, in the opinion of the people, to separate
oneself from them, and that M. Fr. Morin insists on not separating
himself from the people, even in the interest of the popular cause, even
for a moment.

Independent of the party relations that attach him to the democracy, I
have still other reasons to cast suspicion on M. Morin’s independence of
mind. I find in his article of November 11 the following passage,
concerning the Roman question:

M. Proudhon recognizes that Rome belongs to the Romans. Let the Romans
be consulted, and

let everyone bow before the verdict that, in right, is sovereign; that,
in fact, is the only one capable of pulling us out of a contradictory
situation.

This observation is exactly the same as was addressed to me, in terms of
perfect courtesy, by a respectable minister in Rotterdam. It means that,
in the thought of M. Fr. Morin, a devout Catholic, religious unity,
which must one day unite all believers in the same profession of faith,
has as a condition of realization to be clearly separated from political
unity. Thus M. Morin is doubly unitary; he is so in his heart, and in
his understanding, he is so in religion and in politics. How, given
that, can he call himself a democrat, a liberal, or even a
revolutionary? I confess that it is an enigma for me.

Be that as it may, neither M. Morin nor my Dutch correspondent
understood me. First of all, did I deny that the Romans had the right to
decide, insofar as it depends on them, the matter of the temporal by
giving the exclusion to the Holy Father? Never. That is not the question
for me. It is a matter of deciding between federation and unity.
Whereupon I confine myself to saying, disregarding the dynastic rights
or pretensions of the Holy See, that if the Romans, like the Neapolitans
and the Tuscans, give preference to the kingdom over the federation,
they are perfectly its masters; only they lack, in my opinion, the
tradition of Italy, the guarantees of liberty and the true principles of
right, and moreover they do not get on well with the Catholic world. I
say that instead of advancing by this policy along the revolutionary
way, they retreat; that instead of bringing Catholicism to reason,
which, moreover, is not their intention, they are preparing a resurgence
for it.

As for the pontifical temporal, which Fr. Morin would like, as a
Catholic and in the interest of the Church, suppress, I will limit
myself to asking him a simple question: Does he deny that if the sixty
or eighty thousand priests who are in France, prosecuted in their
material existence, judged it appropriate to choose among themselves
candidates for the Legislative Body and to present them at the next
elections in the eighty-nine departments, they have the right to do so?
Does he deny that if universal suffrage received the majority of these
candidacies, the clericals would have the right to enter the government
*en masse?* Does he deny that politics then legitimately became
Christian politics, if not quite ecclesiastical? No, he cannot deny
that, since it is written in our public law. Much better M. Frédéric
Morin, Democrat and Catholic, would he not be happy with this triumph of
religion? Certainly. Therefore the separation of the temporal and the
spiritual, as I have affirmed so many times, is in itself a chimera;
therefore, since on the one hand the spiritual and the temporal are
connected, and on the other hand the interests that compose the temporal
are divergent, the unity of religion is as chimerical as that of
government; therefore there is not by virtue of this triply false
principle, a religious unity, a governmental unity, and their
separation, that the party of the Revolution must attack the Church and
claim the States of the Holy Father; therefore the real, the only
question between the party of faith and the party of progress is the
moral question, a question in which we are certain to succumb, and we
condemn ourselves by making an unfair war against our antagonist and by
joining hypocrisy to spoliation. What sustains the Church against all
attacks and makes the Catholic party the most powerful of all, M.
Fr. Morin must know better than anyone, is not its unity, it is the
collapse of consciences that no idea either from above or from below any
longer sustains; it is the materialism of our teaching; it is the
abandonment of revolutionary thought, replaced by the most detestable
self-righteousness; it is our impure romanticism and our Voltairean
licentiousness.

According to M. Morin, “in studying the hypothesis of the suppressed
temporal Papacy, I would have been appalled by the image of temporal
authority crowning itself with absolute royalty over souls.” — I am
grateful to my honorable critic for seeking high motives for my conduct
with regard to the Papacy; but such are not precisely my preoccupations.
I believe in and I await the end of the temporal Papacy, since I believe
in and await absolute Justice and the pure morality of Humanity, of
which the French Revolution was, in my opinion, the precursor. I
therefore believe that there will come a day when spiritual authority
will no longer be distinguished from temporal authority, since both will
be founded on the same Conscience, the same Justice, the same Reason and
the same liberty. What worries me and what I would cry about with tears
of blood, it is some jugglery of reform, renewed from Luther and Calvin;
some antics of state religion or national church copied from Henry VIII;
worse than that, some new cult of the Supreme Being or of Reason;
masquerades like those of Ménilmontant, a theophilanthropy, a Mapah, or
any other spiritualist and Mormonic madness. In the decay of souls, I
believe, in fact of superstition, everything is possible. Our so-called
Voltairianism does not reassure me; I have no confidence in strong minds
who only know how to joke and enjoy. Philosophy, if it is not armored
with virtue, only inspires me with disdain. This is why, while keeping
with regard to the Church the position that, in my opinion, the
Revolution has made for the modern world, I denounce to public contempt,
with the maneuvers of the unitary democracy, the *bascule* blows of a
pantheism without morals and from a coterie without principles.

After the support indirectly lent to the Papacy, as a temporal power, M.
Morin reproaches me for having supported, “not only the republican
federation, but even the monarchical federation of Villafranca.” — M.
Cernuschi, on the contrary, the chief of the barricades of Rome,
principal author of the Roman Republic in 1849, whose name I forgot in
my last publication to mention alongside those of Ferrari, Montanelli,
Ulloa, Henri Cernuschi said to me the other day: “To their unitary
republic, I would have preferred a federation of monarchies a hundred
times over.” And, with due respect to M. Fr. Morin, I agree with M.
Cernuschi. The odds are ten to one that a unitary republic, like that of
the Jacobins, will become, by virtue of unity, a constitutional
monarchy; and it is just as good a bet that a federation of monarchies
will become, by virtue of the federative principle, a federative
republic. This is what the logic of principles dictates, according to
which the preponderant element ends up by involving the others. Since
when are ideas condemned in hatred of those who produce them or who
express them? The astonishing modesty of Jacobinism! It was an emperor,
Napoleon III, who proposed federation to the Italians: therefore, we
would reject it because it came from an emperor, and we would prefer to
it, — what? — royalty. It is constitutional princes who will represent
this confederation: so again we will have to reject it because the
confederate states would be monarchies, and we will prefer to it, —
what? — a military royalty, a competition with the Emperor!

Besides, let us not be fooled by this Jacobin delicacy. Jacobinism is
above all unitary, that is to say monarchical, with or without a king;
M. Fr. Morin recognizes this on his own behalf, speaking out against the
federation. Jacobinism is bourgeois in the interest of order: M.
Fr. Morin declares this by appealing to the bourgeoisie. Jacobinism,
finally, is the happy medium: M. Fr. Morin does not hide it, advocating
a system of unity and decentralization at the same time. Unitaryism,
bourgeoisism, happy medium: that is, basically, why Jacobinism is
opposed to federation, that is why democracy has declaimed so much
against the Treaty of Villafranca. Are we at the end of contradictions?
No. As the feelings of M. Fr. Morin attach him in preference to the
plebs, here he is who, while supporting unity and appealing to the
bourgeoisie, already testifies to the fear that the government of
Victor-Emmanuel is too unitary, too bourgeois, too middleground. This
reminds us of Robespierre pursuing with his invectives Feuillants,
Girondins, Dantonists, Hebertists and Moderates, without his being able
to say of what opinion he was himself. By enlisting in Jacobinism, M.
Fr. Morin, what did you do with your independence as a philosopher? What
have you done with your Christian ingenuity? You have lost even your
logic, and you are at this time incapable of clearly formulating an
opinion.

But I have even more serious observations to submit to the correspondent
of *Le Progrès:* these will be the subject of the following chapters.

** CHAPTER VII. Moral and political questions. — The reason of state.

Mr. Fr. Morin reproached me, it is his last and main grievance, for
having attacked Mazzini. On this subject, he thought himself obliged,
for my edification, to collect the records of service and to make the
apology for the great conspirator.

I thank Fr. Morin once again for the courteous manner in which he
appealed to my feelings in favor of Mazzini on this occasion. His
sympathy did not give him the opportunity to let the slightest word of
disparagement fall upon me. This moderation of language being a good
example as well as good taste, I will endeavor to imitate it, without
the truth that free thinkers owe each other suffering.

I would first point out to M. Fr. Morin, with all the consideration that
his character deserves, that his eulogy for Mazzini, very sincere I have
no doubt, nevertheless seems to me, in the place he occupies, to have
been somewhat intended to get the rest of the article across. M.
Fr. Morin needed this parachute to make his Lyon readers understand,
without exposing himself to losing their confidence, that a man could
very well reject Italian unity and fight the policy of Mazzini, without
being therefore an enemy of the people and of liberty. It is thus that
M. Pelletan, protesting in his two pamphlets against Italian unitaryism,
thought himself obliged to mix with his criticisms, on the one hand, a
pompous eulogy for Garibaldi, although he was forced to condemn the
expedition, on the other a diatribe against Austria, *Liberty as in
Austria!* which earned him a month in prison.

Such is the intellectual and moral misery of the democracy today that
its most devoted defenders cannot venture the slightest observation
beyond current prejudice without immediately making themselves suspect.

By what dreadful oath must you be reassured?

A democratic writer must always have this line from Hippolytus to Theseus
present in his memory. To be Fr. Morin, Pelletan, and to resign oneself
to the Caudine Forks of a perpetual justification!

Well! Let’s talk about Mazzini again. I repeat, and it will be for the
last time, that it is not a question here of the man, but of the
tribune; that I believe Mazzini as honorable, as virtuous in his private
life as the late Savonarola and Garibaldi, and that no one admires the
constancy of his character more than I do. But I add that, this
reservation made, — a reservation of right, that it is humiliating for
the democracy to have to constantly renew, — I do not conceive how,
being what I am, energetically denying the system of unity

and affirming the federation, consequently

condemning the principle and all the policy of Mazzini, I should then
bow before his fame as an agitator. What would become of the liberty of

opinion, the independence of criticism, the

frankness of the tribune and of the press, if, after having overturned a
doctrine by discussion, having shown its errors and its immorality, one
should, as a conclusion, throw a crown to its author? Is this how
Mazzini himself understands politics? If I was not mistaken, first in my
assessment of the events that took place in the Peninsula, then in the
theory that I presented of the federal system, I was right to say that
Mazzini had been the scourge of Italian liberty and of the Revolution,
and I have the right to demand that he retire. How would the asceticism
of a party leader serve as a cover for the disasters caused by his
system? throw a crown to its author? Is this how Mazzini himself
understands politics? If I was not mistaken, first in my assessment of
the events that took place in the Peninsula, then in the theory that I
presented of the federal system, I was right to say that Mazzini had
been the scourge of Italian liberty and of the Revolution, and I have
the right to demand that he retire. How would the asceticism of a party
leader serve as a cover for the disasters caused by his system?

Mazzini is the man of one *idea* and one *politics.* What distinguishes
him among all is that he has the religion of his idea, and that to serve
it he does not hesitate to follow its maxims down to their final
consequences. Few men have this courage: it is by this that innovators
worthy of the name are distinguished, which makes them great in history,
when by chance their idea responds to the conscience of their
contemporaries. Let us therefore judge the idea and the policy of
Mazzini, without prejudice but without weakness, and leave the man. If I
make any mistake, I will be happy to have it shown to me, and I will
hasten to retract it, much less out of consideration for Mazzini, whose
person must remain outside the debate, than for the democracy itself. of
which he is only the representative here.

Mazzini is a democrat, in the same way as Robespierre was and all the
Jacobins are. That is to say that, if by his point of departure and by
the interests which he represents, liberty, in general, is his dominant,
it soon changes into pure authority by the substitution of collective
sovereignty for dynastic sovereignty. This appears in the life, writings
and all the politics of Mazzini. Individual liberty, the right of man
and of the citizen, hold little place in his concerns. The social
contract is in his eyes only a tacit, unilateral contract, where man
disappears into the mass, where individuality is sacrificed to unity.
His motto, *God and People;* his horror of anarchy and socialism, his
efforts for Italian unity, demonstrate that this democrat is, like
Robespierre, only a man of authority.

Mr. Fr. Morin, whose dogmatic character, unitary preferences and
puritanical mores give him some resemblance to Robespierre and Mazzini,
would first please me to tell myself whether, as regards the
relationship between authority and liberty, he agrees with the feelings
of the two famous tribunes? The theory I gave of the federal system in
the first part of this writing; the consequences that I then brought
out, for the practice, of the unitary theory, will make him understand
the meaning and the scope of my question. (See Part II, Ch. iii above.)

From the way of conceiving the relationship between authority and
liberty, the political maxim that directs the government, in other words
the reason of State, is immediately deduced. If liberty is preponderant,
this maxim will be RIGHT: it cannot be anything else. If it is
authority, it will be an *idea,* God, for example, religion, Church or
priesthood, interest of nobility, respect for authority, dynasty, or all
of these things together, For Mazzini, as for Robespierre, it is, above
all, unity.

The consequence is terrible. If the political maxim or the reason of the
state is justice, by virtue of the incontestable principle that the end
determines and justifies the means, everything must be, in the councils
of the nation, subordinated to right, public right, civil right,
economic right, international right. The very salvation of the nation,
if by hypothesis one could conceive that at a given moment the salvation
of the nation was outside of right, should be sacrificed to the right,
which means that the nation should be a martyr of justice. If, on the
contrary, the political maxim, deriving from the principle of authority,
is an idea, a dogma, this dogma taking precedence over justice, all
right and all morality may be sacrificed, on occasion, to the reason of
state, as is taught by the famous motto of the Jesuits, *Ad majorem Dei
gloriam,* or that other which is only its corollary, *Salus populi
suprema lex esto,* etc. So that there will be two morals, a state
morality, a corollary of the reason of state, superior to right and
justice, and a vulgar morality, having the force of law in all cases
where there is no there is no reason to appeal to the reason of
State.[26]

The sovereignty of the reason of state has been admitted to this day in
all governments without exception, even in republican and democratic
governments. It has been until now the *sine* *qua non* and the seal of
reprobation of politics. By this atrocious sovereignty, Liberty and
Justice, insofar as they can thwart the action of the Prince or the
government, are systematically proscribed. The ideal of the government,
in this respect, would therefore be that in which the reason of state
would be no more than the equal of all other reason; to put it better,
it would be that in which Justice and Liberty would themselves be taken
for reasons of State. However, this system exists, it is the federal
system.

Does M. Fr. Morin accept Justice as the only reason of State, or does he
think, according to the example of Mazzini, of Robespierre and of
Machiavelli, of the example of Kings, Emperors, Pontiffs and all the
tribunes of the people, that there may be another one? Does he believe
that there are circumstances in which the republic and society would be
in danger if Justice were not sacrificed to a supposedly superior
interest, to a political ideal, religion, Church, priesthood, nobility,
dynasty, democracy, nationality, unity, authority, community, etc.? Is
he resolutely, finally, for the prerogative of Right against any other
prerogative, or does he admit, at certain times if not always, a law of
higher order and which takes precedence over Right?

The question is most serious. A good number of democrats decline this
sovereignty of justice, which tends to nothing less, in fact, than to
eliminate all the old systems, unitary democracy like the others. To
exclude from politics any kind of reason of state, in fact, and to give
the reign to right alone, is to affirm the confederation; it is as if
the Legislator were saying to the masses, by returning the words of the
Decalogue: You will have no other law than your own statute, no other
sovereign than your contract; it is to abolish the unitary idolatry.

A consequence of all this, depending on whether one declares oneself
exclusively for Justice or whether one recognizes a reason of State
superior to Justice, is the following, which, in practice, has its
importance.

According to Mazzini, government not being based on a positive contract,
but on a tacit, unilateral contract, analogous to that which binds the
child to the family; not originally arising from liberty, as a
preponderant principle, but from an idea prior to and superior to any
convention, such as divine authority, *Dio e popolo,* or any other, it
follows that in the eyes of Mazzini republic, democracy, monarchy and
empire are formulas that may have their importance in common use, but
which do not touch the bottom of things and can very well permute; that
the essential thing is that the anterior and superior idea be respected
and the state maxim obeyed; that consequently a man such as himself,
Mazzini, can in conscience, on occasion, while calling himself a
republican and a democrat, cry out and make people cry out *Long live
the king!* it suffices that it serve the higher idea, unity. There is
only one thing that the Republican-Democrat Mazzini and his adherents
cannot afford, and that would be to call themselves federalists, since
by affirming the federation they would be renouncing their political
idealism, their reason of state.

This is not the case with those who have attached themselves with
conviction and heart to the federal idea. The political system and the
entire social order resting, for them, no longer on a myth, a poetic
ideal or any other conception, but on the pure law expressed by the
contract, they cannot, under any pretext, recognize as an expression of
this principle, either royalty or pontificate; doing so would lie to
their conscience. The federalist can wish health, prosperity and long
life to the prince, as well as to any individual whose opinions he does
not share: his benevolence extends to all men. Similarly, he swears no
hatred to royalty, makes no display of regicide: he knows that liberty
is progressive, that royalty is a transitory institution, as well as
adoration and sacrifice, and he respects all institutions. But, like the
Christian who, praying for Caesar, refused to sacrifice to the Genius
and the Fortune of Caesar, because it would have been an act of
idolatry, so the federalist, even if he would make vows regarding the
person of the monarch, will never cry, with Mazzini and Garibaldi: *Long
live the king!*

Thus federalism and Jacobinism separate from each other: the first,
indifferent to questions of persons, but intractable on principles; the
second, weak in ideas, powerful only in hatred, but knowing when
necessary to impose silence on its grudges and make itself possible.

** CHAPTER VIII. The Political Oath.

The question of the political oath is one of the most delicate that a
publicist can propose.

The oath has something sacramental about it which essentially
distinguishes it from any other promise, obligation or commitment, tacit
or formal. Thus, in marriage, the oath is required of the spouses,
because the obligation they contract by devoting themselves to each
other does not result from the mere fact of cohabitation and the promise
of mutual love, and because without the oath, taken before the
magistrate in the presence of witnesses, neither they nor anyone else
could say whether the pact that unites them is a vow of marriage or an
agreement of concubinage. Even if the formality of the appearance of the
fiancés before the civil officer were abolished, and the oath was
declared sufficiently taken on by the marriage contract preceded by
legal publications and followed by cohabitation, the oath would still
exist. It would be supposed to have been taken. The trouble one would
have taken to provide for the lack of the ceremony would prove its
essential nature. It would be like the banknote, which serves in the
place of money, but which only testifies to the importance of the money
itself.

In testimonies, arbitrations and expert opinions, the oath is also
required, and for an analogous reason. The individual called as an
expert, arbitrator or witness is deemed to have no personal interest,
direct or indirect, in telling or concealing the truth. But he can be
influenced by friendship, hatred, fear; he can be seduced or intimidated;
and the object of the oath is to dedicate him to the truth, by raising
him above vulgar considerations, by interesting his honor by the fear of
perjury, and freeing him from all human fear and respect.

In marriage, in short, the oath is a consecration, *sacramentum,* which
makes the spouses inaccessible to all others; in the cases of testimony,
arbitration, expertise, the oath is also a consecration that protects
the witness, arbitrator or expert from any reproach on the part of the
parties. Apart from these special cases and a few others, we do not
swear. The promise, written or verbal, is sufficient. One does not swear
to pay one’s debts, to discharge a promissory note, to fulfill one’s
duties as a servant, as an employee, as an associate, as an agent; it
would seem, and with good reason, indecent, ridiculous. However, the
oath may be referred to a debtor in bad faith who claims to have paid
his debt and against whom there is no title, as well as to a creditor
who denies having been reimbursed and whose receipt is lost. In these
two cases, the oath is an *ex-secration* by which he who takes it
devotes himself to infamy, if his assertion is false.

The same principles govern the oath required of public functionaries on
taking up their duties, an oath that must not be confused with the
political oath or feudal homage, although in its tenor it does not
appear to differ.

The judge, the administrator, the ministerial officer, the agents of the
public force, up to the rural guard, take the oath. This does not simply
mean that they promise to fulfill their duties with honor and probity,
which goes without saying and does not need an oath any more than the
obligation of the tenant to pay his term; this also means that these
functionaries, having no regard for persons, are free from any hatred or
resentment as a result of the acts of their ministry. He who
unofficially, in a personal interest, denounces a crime, very often makes
himself odious; but the sworn official, whose mandate it is to see to
the execution of the law and to bring the offenders before the courts,
is honorable. Unless he abuses his power to torment the innocent, he
arouses no hatred. Where does this difference come from? From the oath.

From this, it is easy to see that the oath of public functionaries
cannot be attributed to the sovereign, whoever he may be, any more than
that required of spouses, witnesses, arbitrators, etc. The civil
servant, with regard to the performance of his duties, swears on his
conscience, nothing more. To make him take an oath to the prince, or
even to the nation, is to suppose that his duty is subordinate to a
superior order; that justice is not his supreme law, but the reason of
State: which enters into Machiavellian and Mazzinian politics and
changes the nature of the oath.

This understood, we can get a clear idea of the oath made to the prince,
of its scope, and of the cases in which it may be required.

The political oath is also a contract of devotion, therefore unilateral,
which aims to bind the citizen who takes it to the prince who receives
it by a personal consecration, superior to any consideration of fact and
right whatsoever: the prince to whom the oath is taken being himself,
for those who pay homage to him, right personified, better still, the
very source of right.

In an absolute monarchy, in an idealist and unitary democracy, where the
reason of state is something superior to right, it is quite simple that
the oath be required, that moreover it be taken in the hands of a man or
of the assembly that represents the public authority, the reason of
State. Under the old regime, for example, the government was personal,
autocratic, which was sufficiently demonstrated by the undivided power.
The political system was embodied in the prince, emperor or king, who,
on dying, was electively or hereditarily replaced, but outside of whom
there was nothing. Suppose that the functionary, the soldier, the
citizen could have said to this man: “I do not know you;” there you have
the State overthrown, society dissolved. Without a doubt, not all who
were part of society took the oath: do children take an oath to their
father? But all owed it, and the day when the sovereign called some of
them to constitute them in dignity, the debt became, with regard to
these elect, exigible.

In a federal republic, where authority is subordinate, the government
impersonal, the state based on a contract, things can no longer happen
in the same way. The oath cannot be taken to anyone. It will not be to
the prince: the prince, in the capacity that he exists, president,
landammann, or whatever you like, is an inferior functionary; it will
not even be to the nation, nor to the assembly of the nation, since the
nation itself exists only by virtue of the pact, as it is composed of
independent States, equal in dignity, which have made among themselves a
contract of insurance, a mutual, synallagmatic and commutative contract
that excludes any idea of oath.

It will perhaps be objected to me that the founders of Swiss liberty
bound themselves by oath in the plain of the Grutli, and that more than
once, in their national wars, the Swiss have renewed that oath. But,
without taking into account that this initial act should only be seen as
a verbal, solemn and passionate form of synallagmatic commitment, can we
not also say that the Grutli oath was, like all the oaths taken in such
cases, a kind of *ab-juration* or *ex-secration* by which the
confederates declared themselves free from all homage, and formed among
themselves a political society of a new kind, founded on free contract?
Here the oath is the solemn farewell to political anthropomorphism; it
is the reprobation of the oath. Never have the Swiss been more sublime
than in renewing from age to age this abjuration of their ancestors.

From all these considerations, I conclude that the political oath is
essentially contrary to the republican spirit in general, but especially
to the federal spirit. In 1848, I was deeply shocked, I confess, by the
manner in which the formality of the oath was abolished in the name of
the Republic. This repeal was poorly motivated; it contained something
indecent, insincere, insulting to the nation and to the Republic. We
seemed to say that since 89 all the oaths had been perjuries, that it
was useless to impose them, that no one could be trusted, that the
Republic had not even to count on the fidelity of its constituents. And
as if they wanted to continue, in another form, this tradition of
perjury, they shouted all the louder: *Long live the Republic!* Why not
abolish this cry as well as the oath!… Note that, by an inconsistency
that was only too well noted, this same oath, abolished for everyone,
was, by exception, required of the President of the Republic. The truth
was that taking the oath is nonsense in a Republic; unfortunately there
was something here that falsified the principle and made everyone a
hypocrite. The Republic being unitary, pushing back, under the name of
*Right to work,* the industrial federation, impatiently supporting the
democratic wave, admitting *prior and superior* principles, which were
not defined and which opened the door to idealism, one had no right to
claim to be bound by the sole virtue of the contract, and faced with the
premature abrogation of the oath, the national conscience protested with
the redoubled cry of: *Long live the Republic!*

In the constitutional monarchy, a hybrid, equivocal system, based both
on authority and on contract, the oath of loyalty to the prince is
required of officials and representatives; but it is at the same time
required of the prince, who is obliged, on his accession, to swear
fidelity to the constitution. Here, the power is divided for the
ministerial categories, but the administration is centralized; there,
the government is impersonal, in the sense that every ordinance of the
king must be countersigned by a minister; but it becomes personal again
inasmuch as it is the king who chooses the ministers, and it is very
difficult for him not to find, if need be, one who signs for him. All
this, when you look at it closely, is quite heterogeneous, and events
have proven it. But after all that can be understood: it is more
reasonable, after all, than absolute monarchy; we have even recognized
that of all the foundations of empiricism it had hitherto been the most
fortunate. We can therefore admit that in a society where the monarchy
is recognized as an integral part of the political system, concurrently
with the sovereignty of the people, the oath may be required by the
crown. Monarch and subjects are related to each other, as they were in
the Middle Ages, but by a pact or oath different from that of the Middle
Ages. This is what the men of 89 expressed by the formula: *The Nation,
the Law, the King,* Let us now return to Mazzini and his politics.

Mazzini is the man of *unity,* which implies, if not quite the
constitutional monarchy, at least the unitary republic, the pure essence
of monarchy. By virtue of his principle, not only could Mazzini exact
from his adherents the oath of fidelity to the Republic, one and
indivisible, superior to right and liberty, and of which he has made an
idol; he could even give it and have it given to any representative,
individual or collective, of this Republic, to Victor-Emmanuel, for
example, to whom we can say that he has pledged himself on his side by
oath, when he offered him his assistance on the condition that
Victor-Emmanuel would devote himself to unity. This is more or less how
the Jacobins of Robespierre took the oath to Napoleon in 1804, and
later, in 1814, to Louis XVIII. Only the federalist republican, for whom
government is exclusively the product and expression of a contract, is
justified, in logic and in right, in refusing the oath. The federative
pact and the feudal or imperial homage imply contradiction.

We will soon have elections in France. Naturally M. Fr. Morin, Jacobin,
Mazzinian, Roman Catholic, would admit, had he no other reason than by
virtue of the principle of unity which is the soul and reason of state
of his party, that the candidates of the Democracy can perfectly take
the oath to the Emperor. They have no need for that to be affectionate
to his person or to approve of his policy, any more than formerly the
royalist, in taking the oath, needed to love and esteem his king; no
more than M. Thiers, entering the ministry and taking the oath, had a
need to be the damned soul of Louis-Philippe. It suffices, today as
then, that the prince be the expression of the general thought to which
the one who takes the oath adheres.

Thus, by the admission of the Democracy and M. Frédéric Morin himself,
on the one hand the French constitution, — royalist, imperial or
democratic, the title and the form do not matter, — being a constitution
based on a contract, but in which there enters more authority than
liberty, which consequently admits, to a certain extent, the government
personality; on the other hand Napoleon III having been created by
universal suffrage as the first representative of the nation and head of
state, the oath, which nothing forces him to demand, could logically and
legally be made obligatory by him in this case, there is no doubt that
any good democrat can with a clear conscience take it. Between the
democratic opposition and Napoleon III, let us not lose sight of this,
there is no more difference than between Louis-Philippe and Lafayette,
Victor-Emmanuel and Garibaldi. The refusal of the oath, by which the
elected representatives of the Democracy announced themselves in 1852,
was addressed to the person of the sovereign, but did not affect his
dignity. Now the oath is no longer refused, which amounts to saying that
the Democracy, if it criticizes imperial policy, finally recognizes the
right of the Emperor and the consanguinity that unites them. It keeps
its attitude of opposition; but this opposition is no more than what in
England is euphemistically called *Her Majesty’s Opposition.*

So that M. Fr. Morin better understands the importance of the question,
I will point out to him that Mazzini, after having taken the oath,
possesses, in case he is displeased with the prince, and always by
virtue of his theory, a means to break free. If the state maxim is not
respected; if, for example, the unity of Italy, the goal of the
Mazzinian Democracy, is not achieved; if Victor- Emmanuel showed himself
incapable or unwilling; if he yielded to foreign injunctions, Mazzini
could declare the prince unfaithful to the reason of state, a traitor to
unity and to the homeland, and proclaim himself released from his oath.
Thus in the Middle Ages, when a king was guilty of some attack on public
or domestic morality, on the rights of the nobility or on the authority
of the Church, he was excommunicated by the Sovereign-Pontiff and his
subjects released from their oath. But this theory of the dissolution of
the oath, already highly doubtful when the dissolution was pronounced in
the name of Christian society by the head of the spiritual power, and
which has raised the strongest complaints against the popes, is even
more reproachable when the decision to be made depends solely on the
conscience of the individual. It is no longer anything other than the
application of the Jesuitic maxim: *Jura, perjura,* etc. For, finally,
to take an oath subject to reservations, to be judge of the case where
the oath must be kept and of the one where it will not be, or to treat
such a serious act as a mere formality: this is, in principle, to
disregard the essence of the oath; in this case, it is to deny the right
of the prince, initially hailed as an integral part of the constitution;
it is, in a word and without necessity, to perjure oneself.

Does M. Frédéric Morin accept this theory of perjury? Does he think,
like a good number of democrats, that one can, with a clear conscience,
after having taken an oath of loyalty to the Head of State, declare
oneself immediately freed, on the ground that the said Head would have
failed, by his personal policy, the terms of the pact formed between him
and the people?

That is not all: released from his oath to Victor-Emmanuel, Mazzini could
conspire against the king, dethrone him. Because Victor-Emmanuel,
declared a traitor to the unity, is no longer the representative of one
and indivisible Italy; it is Mazzini and all those who with Mazzini,
swearing by unity and nationality, have condemned Victor-Emmanuel’s
expectant policy. Like the theory of perjury, the theory of regicide
derives from that of excommunication; it is a copy. In all this, Mazzini
and the Jacobins only imitate the popes.

I asked all the Italians I knew if they thought that Mazzini was a man
to pursue in practice these consequences of his theory. All replied that
such was their opinion; that this was precisely what constituted the
character, the morality and the force of Mazzini’s policy, and that such
was the exact meaning of the word thrown by him as a farewell to the
King of Italy: *We will conspire!* Perhaps, but I would be careful not
to affirm it, perhaps, I say, conspiracy and political assassination
could be conceived, if their aim was to save justice, superior to any
reason of state and the homeland itself. But, without taking into
account that these practices of reason of state are repugnant to
justice, we know that justice by itself is not Mazzini’s maxim; that it
was not that of Orsini either, nor that of the assassin who remained
unknown to Rossi.[27] M. Fr. Morin thinks, with all these sectarians,
that what could hardly be excused by the need to save Justice, the
greatest interest of humanity, be sufficiently legitimized by the
consideration of a system, such as Mazzinian unity, for example?

Let us observe that the federalist republican does not have to worry
about these frightful cases of conscience. For him, the political system
being exclusively contractual, the authority subordinated to Liberty,
the magistrate an impersonal being as a functionary, and as a man the
equal of all citizens, he has no oath to swear to anyone; he would fail
the federation, his right and his duty, he would make himself an
accomplice in the destruction of public liberties if he swore. And if
the circumstances were such that it was necessary to renounce the
federation, well then, either he would abstain from all participation in
the business, devouring his regrets and hiding his hopes; or, if he
thought his co-operation necessary to the prince and to the country, he
would keep his oath.

Last consequence of the political oath and its corollary the reason of
State. The reason of State being sovereign, it is not only against a
prince, a minister, a writer, declared infidel, that a virtuous citizen
such as Mazzini can find himself invested with a vengeful dictatorship;
it is against cities and provinces, against an entire population. As
regards Italy, for example, as Mazzini decided it would be, unity is
adequate to nationality. Now nationality is above the nation, as the
idea is above its own realization. Just as the Roman dictator, father of
the country, alone in front of his guilty army, had the right to decimate
it as perjuring and decimated it in fact; just as the Jacobins in 93,
supported by the people of Paris and the patriotic societies of a dozen
departments, had the right, by virtue of the Revolution as interpreted
by them, to take action against the mass of the nation if it had become
refractory; — in the same way Mazzini would have the right to treat as
rebels all those, were they twenty-five million, who would resist the
policy of unity, and break the mystical pact sworn between him and
Victor-Emmanuel; he could, by virtue of this pact, exterminate like
brigands the partisans of federation, burn the cities, ravage the
countryside, decimate, *puri,* amend a whole people, guilty, according
to Mazzini, of *lèse-majesté* towards himself. Isn’t that what the
Piedmontese have been doing for two years in Naples, in the Calabria,
wherever Victor Emmanuel’s sovereignty is disputed?

Does M. Frédéric Morin have anything to object to this deduction from
Mazzinian politics? Let him weigh his answer carefully. I didn’t want to
surprise him, and that is why I do not disguise or soften the proposals
on which I allow myself to question him. But let there be no mistake:
this unitary policy that I attribute to Mazzini, policy of the reason of
state, of the oath and of perjury, differs in absolutely nothing from
that of the Jacobins of 93, proscribing in the name of the French people
six-sevenths of the French people; it is the same as that of the Roman
patriciate, arrogating to itself the right of life and death over the
citizen militia as over its children and slaves, and delegating this
right to the consul; it is that of Moses causing the idolatrous
Israelites to be massacred in the desert; of the Roman and Spanish
inquisition, sending to the stake any individual guilty or only
suspected of heresy; of Ferdinand and Isabella banishing Jews and Moors
from their homes; of Catherine de Medici performing the Saint-Barthélemy;
of the Holy League and the Jesuits, causing the assassination in turn of
William the Silent, Henry III, Henry IV, etc. It is the policy of all
theocracy, of all absolutism and of all demagoguery. Only the federal
system, based on free contract, making pure justice its sovereign maxim,
is opposed to this policy of fire and carnage.

** CHAPTER IX. Slavery and the proletariat.

What is happening on the other side of the Atlantic, three thousand
leagues from the regions where the Mazzinian idea hovers, is striking
proof of the reality that, besides federalism, politics tends to
degenerate into tyranny, plunder and extermination regardless of the
virtue and leniency of the heads of state.

For half a century, the republic of the United States passed for the
model society and type of government. In fact, an incomparable liberty
was displayed there, along with unprecedented prosperity, but that
federalist republic was infected with profound defects. The fever for
exploitation, imported from Europe with religion and laws, and the pride
of blood and wealth, had developed the principle of inequality and class
distinctions to a frightening degree and made the return to unitary
government inevitable.

Three categories of subjects make up American society: *black workers*
(slaves), *white* *workers,* who are daily more submerged in the
proletariat, and the landowning, capitalist, industrialist aristocracy.
Because slavery and the proletariat are incompatible with republican
values, the southern states, although they call themselves DEMOCRATS par
excellence, were the first to collaborate on the idea of centralizing
the United States and controlling the confederation. At the same time,
they wanted to develop their *peculiar institution,* black servitude,
that is, over the entire surface of the republic. Rejected by those in
the North, who were in the vast majority and who preferred to cloak
themselves with the mantle of REPUBLICANS, those in the South, struck
down in their local interest by this majority, which intended to use its
power and speak in the name of the entire Union, broke the federal pact
and formed a slaveholder democracy, apparently unitary.

To save the Union, two things were necessary through common accord and
energetic will: 1) to free the blacks and give them civil rights, of
which the northern states only granted half and which the southern
states did not want to grant at all; 2) to energetically resist the
growing proletariat, which entered into no one’s plans. Threatened in
the South by black servitude and in the North by the white proletariat,
the confederation was in danger: the obstinacy of both parties made the
evil almost incurable. In fact, if things had been left alone, if the
proprietary class of the North and the aristocracy of the South had
remained united and concerned solely with developing their respective
forms of exploitation, doing nothing for paid or enslaved workers,
unconcerned with regard to the time when the two would meet, we could
predict that, on the day the two floods collided, the democratic
multitude of the South would infiltrate the republican mass of the North
and vice versa. Then, white workers and black workers mixing and quickly
getting along, the exploiting class, to protect itself from the slave and
proletarian insurrection, would no longer only have to change its
confederation into a unified state with police forces and a large
standing army, centralized administration, etc., but, if it did not want
to be exposed to slaves and the proletariat marching against it, it
would have to name an emperor, as in the case of Haiti and Mexico. If,
on the contrary, the racial difference were exploited, if the divergence
of the exploiters’ habits and the contradiction of their interests made
separation inevitable, and no force could stop it, the political,
economic and strategic fortune of the North was going to be seriously
compromised, and we could still predict that the time would come when
the republican majority would demand alliance on its terms with the
slaveholding minority. Either way, the confederation was going to
perish.

In that situation, the South took the initiative and proclaimed its
independence: and how did the North proceed? Intent on retaining its
supremacy and whereas, according to it, the territory of the United
States comprised one nation, it began by calling the separatists
*rebels;* then, to remove any pretext for secession, they decided to
transport all the slaves away from the republic, compensating
slaveholders, but to give the slaves of those slaveholders who requested
it authorization to remain but in an inferior condition that reminds one
of the condition of ungodly pariahs. Therefore, when the confederates of
the South called *rebels,* who, to escape their particular exploitation,
asked to leave a confederation that had become impossible, they decreed
their authority to legalize and render irrevocable the political and
social separation of people of color: a new way to apply the principle
of nationality! Such is Lincoln’s plan. If that plan comes to pass, it
is clear that black servitude will only change its form, that many
blacks, indispensable for the production of southern crops, will be held
in the states in which they live, that American society will not be more
homogenous, that, besides the desire to prevent any future separation
attempt by the southern states from taking one more step toward
centralisation, the plan will ensure, the geographic composition here
assisting the social composition,[28] that the federal republic of the
United States will only move more quickly toward the unified system by
means of Lincoln’s solution.

Now, the same Democracy that among us supports Italian unity also
supports, under the pretext of the abolition of slavery, American unity;
but, as if to better testi that these two unities are in its eyes only
two bourgeois, quasi-monarchical expressions, having as their aim the
consolidation of human exploitation, it applauds the conversion,
proposed by M. Lincoln, from the slavery of the blacks into the
proletariat. Compare that to the proscription with which it has struck
socialism since 1848, and you will have the secret of this democratic
philanthropy, which does not support slavery, fie!… but which
accommodates itself marvelously to the most insolent exploitation; you
will have the secret of all these unities whose aim is to smash, by
administrative centralization, any force of resistance in the masses;
you will have acquired the proof that what governs the politics of the
so-called republicans and democrats in America, as well as in Italy and
France, is not justice, it is not the spirit of freedom and of equality,
it is not even an ideal, it is pure egoism, the most cynical of the
reasons of state.

If in its discussions on the American affair the democratic press had
brought as much judgment as zeal; if, instead of pushing the North
against the South and shouting: *Kill! kill!* It had sought the means of
conciliation, it could have offered to the belligerent parties wise
advice and noble examples. It would have said to them:

“In a federative republic, the proletariat and slavery seem equally
inadmissible; the trend must be towards their abolition.

“In 1848, the Swiss Confederation, after having established in its new
constitution the principle of equality before the law and abolished all
the old privileges of bourgeoisie and family, did not hesitate, by
virtue of this new principle, to confer to the *heimathlosen* (people
without country) the quality and the rights of citizens. Can the
American confederation, without failing in its principle and without
retreating, refuse to the men of color, already freed, who swarm on its
territory, the same advantages that Switzerland has granted to its
*heimathlosen?* Instead of repelling these men and overwhelming them
with insults, shouldn’t all Anglo-Saxons, those of the North and those
of the South, receive them into their communion and salute in them their
fellow citizens, equals and brothers ? Now, the consequence of this
measure will be to admit to isonomy, with the freedmen, the blacks
retained until now in servitude.

“In 1860, Czar Alexander II of Russia, after having restored freedom to
the peasants of his States, to the number of more than twenty-five
million souls, and having called them to the enjoyment of civil and
political rights such as comprises the government of his empire, has
given them all ownership of the land on which before they were only
serfs, reserving to himself to compensate as he could the dispossessed
nobles. — Will the American confederation do less for its emancipated
blacks than Czar Alexander, an autocrat, did for his peasants? Is it not
prudent and just that it also confer land and property on them, so that
they do not fall into a bondage worse than that from which they escaped?

“The American confederation is called by the chain of ideas that govern
it and by the fatality of its situation, to do even more: it must, on
pain of recrimination on the part of the States of the South, attack in
its sources the white proletariat, by giving property to wage-earners
and by organizing, alongside political guarantees, a system of economic
guarantees. It is up to the North to take the initiative in this reform,
and to lead the South rather by force of example than by force of arms.

<quote>
“Beyond that, the attack of the North against the South, hypocritical
and impious, can only end in the ruin of all the States and the
destruction of the republic.”
</quote>

At least M. Lincoln, compelled to reckon with the aristocratic spirit
and the moral repugnances of the Anglo-Saxon race, is up to a certain
point excusable, and the sincerity of his intentions should cause his
strange philanthropy to be pardoned. But Frenchmen, men trained in the
school of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Revolution, in whom the egalitarian
feeling must be innate, how did they not feel that the summons of the
North entailed all these consequences? How can they be satisfied with
the semblance of emancipation from M. Lincoln? How do they have the
courage to applaud the recent call for the slaves to revolt, a call that
is obviously on the part of the beleaguered North only a means of
destruction, which is also condemned by the law of war and the rights of
people?… Where is the excuse of these so-called liberals? Do they not
make it clear that the feeling that animates them is not the love of
humanity, but the cold calculation of a Pharisee economist, who says to
himself after having compared his cost-prices: Certainly it is more
advantageous to the capitalist, to the head of industry, to property and
to the State whose interests are here solidarity, to employ *free*
workers, having charge of themselves for wages, than slave workers,
without concern for their subsistence, giving more trouble than
wage-earners and returning proportionally less profit?

These facts, these analogies and these considerations posed, here are
the questions that I address to M. Fr. Morin.

The federative principle here appears intimately linked to those of the
social equality of races and the balance of fortunes. The political
problem, economic problem and problem of races are but one and the same
problem, which must be solved by the same theory and the same
jurisprudence.

Notice, so far as the *black workers* are concerned, that physiology and
ethnography recognize them as being of the same species as the whites; —
that religion declares them, as well as the whites, children of God and
of the Church, redeemed by the blood of the same Christ, and
consequently their spiritual brothers; — that psychology grasps no
difference in constitution between the consciousness of the negro and
that of the white, any more than between the understanding of the latter
and the understanding of the former; — finally, this is proved by
everyday experience, that with education and, if necessary,
cross-breeding, the black race can give products as remarkable for
talent, morality and industry as the white one, and that more than once
already it has been of invaluable help in rekindling and rejuvenating
it.

I therefore ask M. Fr. Morin:

If the Americans, after having kidnapped blacks by force from their African
country to make them slaves on American soil, have the right to expel
them today, when they no longer want them; If this *deportation,* which
only repeats in the opposite direction the odious fact of the first
abduction, does not constitute, among the so-called abolitionists, a
crime equal to that of the slave traders; If, by a century of servitude,
the blacks have not acquired the right to use and inhabit American soil;

If it would suffice for French landowners to say to the proletarians,
their compatriots, to all those who possess neither capital nor funds
and who subsist on the hiring of their hands: “The soil is ours; you
don’t own an inch of land, and we no longer need your services: be gone;
— so that the proletarians clear out; If the black, as free as the white
by nature and by his dignity as a man, can, by recovering the possession
of his momentarily lost person, be excluded from the right of
citizenship; If this right is not acquired by the double fact of his
recent release and his previous residence; If the condition of pariah,
to which the Lincoln project would doom the black, would not be worse,
for this minor race, than servitude; If this derisory emancipation is
not a disgrace for the North, and does not morally justi the claim of
the South; If *federals* and *confederates,* fighting only for the
variety of servitude, should not be declared, *ex aequo,* blasphemers
and renegades from the federative principle, and banished from nations; If
the press of Europe which by its excitations, by its unitaryism and its
anti-egalitarian tendencies, has become their accomplice to all, does
not itself deserve the stigma of public opinion?

And generalizing my thoughts, I ask M. Fr. Morin:

If he believes that the inequality of faculties between men is such that
it can legitimize an inequality of prerogatives; If the inequality of
fortunes, for which the inequality of faculties serves as a pretext and
which creates such formidable antagonisms in society, is not much more
the work of privilege, cunning and chance, than that of nature ; If the
first duty of the States is not therefore to repair, through the
institutions of mutuality and through a vast system of education, the
insults of birth and the accidents of social life; If it does not seem
to him, therefore, that the principle of equality before the law has as
its corollary, first, the principle of the equality of races, second,
the principle of the equality of conditions, third, that of an ever
closer, though never realized, equality of fortunes; If, after what is
happening before our eyes, it seems to him that these principles, the
negation of all political, economic and social privilege, of all respect
of persons and races, of all favor of fate, of all class preeminence,
can be seriously applied and prosecuted under a government other than
the federative government; If, finally, as far as logic, history and
contemporary facts make it possible to judge, there is not decidedly an
incompatibility between the Right and the destiny of the human race and
the practices and aspirations of the unitary system?

Immorality and servitude, that, for my part, is what I discover at the
bottom of this policy of unity, which is that of Mazzini and the
Jacobins; which tomorrow will be that of President Lincoln, if a better
inspiration does not come to snatch him and his compatriots from their
disastrous and pitiless prejudices.

** CONCLUSION.

The French people are demoralized for want of an idea. They lack the
intelligence of the time and of the situation: they have retained only
the pride of an initiative whose principle and goal escape them. None of
the political systems they have tried have fully met their expectations,
and they imagined no other.

Legitimacy hardly arouses a feeling of pity in the masses, the royalty
of July hardly a regret. Whether the two dynasties, finally reconciled,
merge or do not merge, what does it matter? They still have and can only
have one and the same meaning for the country, constitutional monarchy.
Now, we know this constitutional monarchy; we have seen it at work and
we have been able to judge it: a transitional edifice that could have
lasted a century and from which there was better to expect, but which was
destroyed in its very construction. The constitutional monarchy is
finished: the proof is that today we no longer have what it would take
to re-establish it; and if, by any chance, we manage to do it again, it
will fall again, if only from its own impotence.

The constitutional monarchy, in fact, is bourgeois rule, the government
of the Third Estate. Now, there is no longer a bourgeoisie, there is not
even enough to form one. The bourgeoisie, at bottom, was a feudal
creation, neither more nor less than the clergy and the nobility. It had
no meaning, and it could only find one, through the presence of the
first two orders, the nobles and the clerics. Like its elders, the
bourgeoisie was struck in 89; the establishment of the constitutional
monarchy was the act of their common transformation. In place of this
monarchical, parliamentary and censitaire bourgeoisie, which absorbed
the two superior orders and shone for a moment on their ruins, we have
democratic equality and its legitimate manifestation, universal
suffrage. Try, with that, to remake bourgeois!… Let us add that the
constitutional monarchy, were it to return to the world, would succumb
to the task. Would it repay the debt? With what ? — Would it reduce the
tax? But the increase in taxes is the very essence of unitary
government,
and we would have in addition, as an
extraordinary expense, the cost of reinstalling the system. — Would it
diminish the army? What force then would it oppose as a counterweight to
democracy?… Would it attempt a liquidation? But it would only come to
prevent the liquidation. Would it restore freedom of the press, freedom of
association and assembly? No! no! no! The manner in which the bourgeois
press has for ten years used the privilege of publication that has been
preserved for it by the Empire, proves, moreover, that the love of truth
and liberty is not what possesses it, and that the system of
compression, organized in 1835 against social democracy, developed in
1848 and 1852, would impose itself on it with the violence of a
fatality. Would the restored constitutional monarchy try, as it did in
1849, to restrict the right to vote? If so, it would be a declaration of
war on the plebs, therefore the prelude to a revolution. If not,
February 1848 predicted its fate, sooner or later it would die of it:
another revolution. Think about it for five minutes, and you will remain
convinced that the constitutional monarchy, placed between two
revolutionary fatalities, henceforth belongs to history, and that its
restoration, in France, would be an anomaly.

The Empire exists, asserting itself with the authority of possession and
the mass. But who does not see that the Empire, which reached its third
manifestation in 1852, is in turn tormented by the unknown force that
incessantly modifies all things, and which pushes institutions and
societies towards unknown ends which far exceed forecasts of men? The
Empire, as far as its nature permits, tends to approach contractual
forms. Napoleon I, returned from the island of Elba, is forced to swear
by the principles of 89, and to modi in the parliamentary direction the
imperial system; Napoleon III has already modified more than once, in
the same direction, the constitution of 1852. While restraining the
press, he gave it more latitude than his imperial predecessor had done;
while moderating the tribune, as if he had not had enough of the
harangues of the Legislative Body, he invited the Senate to speak. What
do these concessions mean, except that above the monarchical and
Napoleonic ideas hovers in the country a primordial idea, the idea of a
free pact, granted, guess by whom, O princes! by LIBERTY… In the long
series of history, all States appear to us as the bearers of more or
less brilliant transitions: the Empire is also a transition. I can say
it without offense: the Empire of the Napoleons is in full
metamorphosis.

An idea remains to us, unexplored, affirmed suddenly by Napoleon III, as
at the end of the reign of Tiberius the mystery of redemption was
affirmed by the high priest of Jerusalem the

FEDERATION.

Until now, Federalism had only awakened ideas of disintegration in
people’s minds: it was reserved for our time to conceive of it as a
political system.

 a. The groups that make up the Confederation, what is elsewhere called
    the State, are

themselves States, governing, judging and administering themselves in
complete sovereignty according to their own laws;

 b. The Confederation aims to rally them in a pact of mutual guarantee;
 c. In each of the confederated States, the government is organized
    according to the principle of

the separation of powers: equality before the law and universal suffrage
form the basis:

That’s the whole system. In the Confederation, the units that form the
body politic are not individuals, citizens or subjects; they are groups,
given *a priori* by nature, whose average size does not exceed that of a
population gathered in a territory of a few hundred square leagues.
These groups are themselves small states, democratically organized under
federal protection, and whose units are heads of families or citizens.

Thus constituted, the Federation solves alone, in theory and practice,
the problem of the agreement of Liberty and Authority, giving to each
its fair measure, its true competence and all its initiative. It alone
therefore guarantees, with the inviolable respect of the citizen and the
State, order, justice, stability, peace.

In the first place, the Federal Power, which here is a central power, an
organ of the greater community, can no longer absorb the individual,
corporate and local liberties, which predate it, since they gave birth
to it and they alone support it; which moreover, by the constitution
that they gave him and by their own, remain superior to him.[29]
Therefore, no more risk of reversal: political agitation can only lead
to a renewal of personnel, never to a change of system. You can make the
press free, the tribune free, the association free, the meetings free;
abolish all political police: the State does not have to be wary of the
citizens, nor the citizens to be wary of the State. Usurpation in this
one is impossible; insurrection among others impotent and aimless. Right
is the pivot of all interests and itself becomes the reason of state;
truth is the essence of the press and the daily bread of opinion.

Nothing to fear from religious propaganda, from clerical agitation, from
mysticism, from the contagion of sects. Let the Churches be free like
opinions, like faith: the pact guarantees them liberty, without fearing
any attack. The Confederation surrounds them and liberty balances them:
were the citizens all united in the same belief, burning with the same
zeal, their faith could not turn against their right, nor their fervor
prevail against their freedom. Suppose France federalized, and all this
Catholic recrudescence which we are witness to falls instantly.
Moreover, the spirit of the Revolution invades the Church, obliged to be
content for herself with liberty, and to confess that she has nothing
better to give to men.

With Federation, you can give higher education to the whole people and
insure yourself against the ignorance of the masses, something
impossible, even contradictory, in the unitary system.

The Federation alone can satis the needs and rights of the laboring
classes, solve the problem of the agreement of labor and capital, that
of association, those of taxation, credit, property, wages, etc.
Experience has shown that the law of charity, the precept of
beneficence, and all the institutions of philanthropy are radically
powerless here. There remains, therefore, recourse to Justice, sovereign
in political economy as well as in government; there remains the
synallagmatic and commutative contract. Now, what does justice tell us,
what does justice, expressed by the contract, command us? To replace the
principle of monopoly by that of mutuality in all cases where it is a
question of industrial guarantee, credit, insurance, public service: an
easy thing in a federal system, but which is repugnant to unitary
governments. Thus, tax reduction and equalization cannot be achieved
under a power at high pressure, since to reduce and equalize tax, one
would have to begin by decentralizing it; thus the public debt will
never be liquidated, it will always increase more or less rapidly, as
well under a unitary republic as under a bourgeois monarchy; thus the
external outlet, which should bring to the nation an increase in wealth,
is canceled by the restriction of the internal market, a restriction
caused by the enormity of the taxes it will always increase more or less
rapidly, as well under a unitary republic as under a bourgeois monarchy;
thus the external outlet, which should bring to the nation an increase
in wealth, is canceled by the restriction of the internal market, a
restriction caused by the enormity of the taxes;[30] thus values, prices
and wages will never be regularized in an antagonistic environment where
speculation, traffic and the shop, banking and usury prevail more and
more over labor. Thus, finally, the workers’ association will remain a
utopia, as long as the government has not understood that the public
services must not be carried out by itself, nor converted into private
and anonymous enterprises, but entrusted on a lump sum and by leases
eventually to companies of united and responsible workers. No more
interference by the Power in labor and business, no more encouragement
of trade and industry, no more subsidies, no more concessions, no more
loans or borrowing, no more bribes, no more exclusive or industrial
shares, no more stock-jobbing: from what system can you expect such
reforms, if it is not the federative system?

The Federation gives ample satisfaction to democratic aspirations and
feelings of bourgeois conservation, two elements everywhere else
irreconcilable and how is that? Precisely by this politico-economic
*guarantism,* the highest expression of federalism. France, brought back
to its law, which is average property, which is honest mediocrity, the
increasingly approaching level of wealth, equality; France, restored to
her genius and her morals, constituted as a bundle of sovereignties
guaranteed by each other, has nothing to fear from the communist deluge,
any more than from dynastic invasions. The multitude, now powerless to
crush public liberties with its mass, is just as powerless to seize or
confiscate property. Much better, it becomes the strongest barrier to
the feudalization of land and capital, towards which all unitary power
inevitably tends. While the city-dweller esteems property only for its
income, the peasant who cultivates esteems it above all for itself: this
is why property is never more complete and better guaranteed than when,
by a continuous and well-ordered division, it approaches equality,
federation. No more bourgeoisie, and no more democracy; nothing but
citizens, as we asked in 1848: isn’t this the last word of the
Revolution? Where is the realization of this ideal to be found if not in
Federalism? Certainly, and whatever was said in 93, nothing is less
aristocratic and less of the *ancien regime* than Federation; but it
must be confessed, nothing is also less vulgar.

Under federal authority, the policy of a great people is as simple as
its destiny. To make room for liberty, to procure work and well-being
for all, to cultivate intelligences, to forti consciences, that is it
for the inside; outside, to set an example. A confederate people is a
people organized for peace; armies, what would it do with them? All
military service is reduced to that of the gendarmerie, staff clerks,
and guards of stores and fortresses. No need for an alliance, any more
than for commercial treaties: between free nations, common right
suffices. Freedom of exchange, except for tax levies, and in certain
cases debated in the Federal Council, a compensation tax: that’s it for
business; — freedom of movement and residence, subject to the respect due
to the laws of each country: there you have it for persons, while
waiting for the community of the homeland.

Such is the federalist idea, and such is its deduction. Add that the
transition can be as imperceptible as desired. Despotism is of difficult
construction, of perilous preservation; it is always easy, useful and
legal to return to liberty.

The French nation is perfectly disposed for this reform. Accustomed for
a long time to difficulties of all kinds and to heavy loads, it is not
very demanding; it will wait ten years for the building to be completed,
provided that each year the building rises by one story. Tradition is
not against it: remove from the old monarchy the distinction of castes
and feudal rights; France, with its provincial states, its customary
rights and its bourgeoisies, is no more than a vast confederation, the
king of France a federal president. It is the revolutionary struggle
that gave us centralization. Under this regime, Equality maintained
itself, at least in morals; liberty has gradually diminished. From the
geographical point of view, the country offers no fewer facilities:
perfectly grouped and delimited in its general circumscription, with a
marvelous aptitude for unity, as we have seen only too well, it is no
less fortunately suitable for the federation by the independence of its
basins, the waters of which flow into three seas. It is up to the
provinces to make their voices heard first. Paris, from a capital to a
federal city, has nothing to lose in this transformation; it would find
there, on the contrary, a new and better existence. The absorption it
exerts on the provinces congests it, if I may say so: less burdened,
less apoplectic, Paris would be freer, would earn and return more. The
wealth and the activity of the provinces ensuring for its products a
market superior to that of all the Americas, it would recover in real
business all that it would have lost by the diminution of parasitism;
the fortunes of its inhabitants and their security would know no more
intermittences.

Whatever the power in charge of the destinies of France, I dare say it,
there is no longer any other policy for it to follow, no other way of
salvation, no other idea. Let it therefore give the signal for the
European federations; let it make itself the ally, the leader and the
model, and its glory will be all the greater, as it will crown all
glories.

END.



[1] Becoming is not, whatever certain philosophers who are more mystical
    than profound have said, a middle term between being and non-being;
    becoming is the movement of being, it is being in its life and its
    manifestations.

[2] What is important to remember is that governments are distinguished
    by their ESSENCE, not by the title given to the magistrate. Thus the
    essence of the monarchy is in the governmental and administrative
    indivision, in the absolutism of the prince, one or collective, and
    in his irresponsibility. The essence of democracy, on the contrary,
    is in the separation of powers, in the distribution of employs,
    control and accountability. The crown and heredity itself are here
    only symbolic accessories. No doubt it is through the father-king,
    through heredity and through the coronation, that the monarchy
    becomes visible to the eyes: which made the vulgar believe that the
    missing sign, the thing no longer existed. The founders of
    democracy, in 93, believed they had done a marvelous thing by
    cutting off the king’s head, while they were decreeing
    centralization. But it is an error that should no longer deceive
    anyone. The council of ten, in Venice, was a real tyrant, and the
    republic an atrocious despotism. On the contrary, give a prince,
    with the title of king, to a republic like Switzerland: if the
    constitution does not change, it will be as if you had put a felt
    hat on the statue of Henry IV.

[3] It was from the need to separate powers and distribute authority that
    feudalism was born, in part, after Charlemagne. Hence also this false
    air of federalism that it took on, to the misfortune of the people
    and the Empire. Germany, held in the status quo of an absurd
    constitution, still suffers from these long rifts. The Empire
    crumbled, and nationality was compromised.

[4] There would be an interesting work to write on the Political
    Contradictions, to parallel the Economic Contradictions. I have
    thought about it more than once but, discouraged by the poor
    critical reception, distracted by other work, I gave it up. The
    impertinence of the report-makers would have been even more amused
    by the antinomy, the thesis and antithesis; the French mind,
    sometimes so penetrating and so fair, would have shown itself, in
    the person of the journalists, to be very foolish, very ridiculous
    and very stupid; the gawkers would have counted a new triumph, and
    everything would have been said. I would have spared my compatriots
    from mystification by immediately giving them the solution that I
    would always have owed them, if I had laid out before them all the
    difficulties of the problem.

[5] TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: I have been rendering the French transaction as
    in English as “compromise” much of the time — and there will
    eventually be a lot to say, I think, about Proudhon’s discussion of
    “transactions” in other, more narrowly economic contexts. Just as a
    number of the key terms in Justice in the Revolution and in the
    Church seem to occupy a sort of undecided space, in which the
    definitions of the two regimes compete, terms like the French
    transaction seem to indicate points where we could focus in thinking
    about the proposed transition from governmental society to social
    relations with a more economic focus.

[6] In the theory of J.-J. Rousseau, which is that of Robespierre and
    the Jacobins, the Social Contract is a legal fiction, imagined to
    provide the reason, — other than by divine right, paternal authority
    or social necessity, — for the formation of the State and the
    relationship between the government and individuals. This theory,
    borrowed from the Calvinists, was a progress in 1764, since its aim
    was to bring back to a law of reason what until then had been
    considered as belonging to the law of nature and religion. In the
    federal system, the social contract is more than a fiction; it is a
    positive, effective pact, which was really proposed, discussed,
    voted on, adopted, and which is regularly modified at the will of
    the contracting parties. Between the federal contract and that of
    Rousseau and 93, there is the whole distance from reality to
    hypothesis.

[7] The Swiss Confederation is made up of twenty-five sovereign states
    (nineteen cantons and six halfcantons), with a population of two
    million four hundred thousand inhabitants. It is therefore governed
    by twenty-five constitutions, analogous to our charters or
    constitutions of 1791, 1793, 1795, 1799, 1814, 1830, 1848, 1852,
    plus a federal constitution, of which naturally we do not have, in
    France, the equivalent. The spirit of this constitution, consistent
    with the principles stated above, results from the following
    articles: “Art. 2. The purpose of the confederation is to ensure the
    independence of the country against foreigners, to maintain domestic
    tranquility and order, to protect the liberties and rights of the
    confederates, and to increase their common prosperity.”Art. 3. The
    cantons are sovereign insofar as their sovereignty is not limited by
    federal sovereignty, and as such they exercise all rights not
    delegated to the federal power. “Art. 5. The confederation
    guarantees the cantons their territory, their sovereignty within the
    limits set by art. 3, their constitutions, the liberty and rights of
    the people, the constitutional rights of the citizens, as well as
    the rights and powers that the people have conferred on the
    authorities.” Thus a confederation is not precisely a State: it is a
    group of sovereign and independent States, united by a pact of
    mutual guarantees. A federal constitution is also not what we mean
    in France by charter or constitution, which is the summary of the
    public law of the country; it is the pact that contains the
    conditions of the league, that is, the reciprocal rights and
    obligations of the States. What we call Federal Authority, finally,
    is no more a government, it is an agency created by the States, for
    the joint execution of certain services which each State
    relinquishes, and which thus become federal attributions. In
    Switzerland, the Federal Authority consists of a Deliberative
    Assembly, elected by the people of the twenty-two cantons, and an
    Executive Council composed of seven members appointed by the
    Assembly. The members of the Assembly and the Federal Council are
    appointed for three years; the federal constitution being subject to
    revision at any time, their attributions are, like their persons,
    revocable. So that the Federal Power is, in the full force of the
    word, an agent placed under the hand of its constituents, whose
    power varies at their discretion.

[8] Federative public right raises several difficult questions. For
    example, can a slave state be part of a confederation? It seems not,
    any more than an absolutist state, the slavery of part of the nation
    being the very negation of the federal principle. In this respect,
    the United States of the South would be all the better justified in
    demanding separation since it is not the intention of those of the
    North to grant, at least soon, to emancipated blacks, the enjoyment
    of political rights. However, we see that Washington, Madison and
    the other founders of the Union were not of this opinion; they
    admitted the slave states to the federal pact. It is also true that
    at this moment we see this unnatural pact being torn apart, and the
    States of the South, to preserve their exploitation, tend towards a
    unitary constitution, while those of the North, to maintain the
    union, decree the deportation of slaves. The Swiss federal
    constitution, reformed in 1848, decided the question in favor of
    equality; its article 4 reads: “All Swiss are equal before the law.
    In Switzerland there are neither subjects nor privileges of place,
    birth, persons or families.” From the promulgation of this article,
    which purged Switzerland of all aristocratic elements, dates the
    true Swiss federal constitution. In the event of opposition between
    interests, can the Confederate majority oppose the indissolubility
    of the pact to the separatist minority? A negative response was
    supported in 1846 by the Sunderbund against the Swiss majority; it
    is supported today by the Confederates of the South of the American
    Union against the Federals of the North. For me, I believe that the
    separation is according to right, if it is a question of cantonal
    sovereignty left outside the federal pact. Thus it has not been
    demonstrated to me that the Swiss majority drew its right against
    the Sunderbund from the pact: the proof is that in 1848 the federal
    constitution was reformed, precisely in view of the dispute that had
    led to the formation of the Sunderbund. But it can happen, through
    considerations of commodo and incommodo, that the claims of the
    minority are incompatible with the needs of the majority, that
    furthermore the split compromises the liberty of the States; in this
    case the question is resolved by the law of war, which means that
    the most considerable part, the one whose ruin would cause the
    greatest damage, must prevail over the weaker. This is what took
    place in Switzerland and what could also be practiced in the United
    States, if, in the United States as in Switzerland, it was only a
    question of an interpretation or a better application of the
    principles of pact, such as gradually raising the condition of
    blacks to the level of that of whites. Unfortunately, Mr. Lincoln’s
    message leaves no doubt on this subject. The North, no more than the
    South, means to speak of true emancipation, which makes the
    difficulty insoluble, even by war, and threatens to annihilate the
    confederation. In the monarchy, all justice emanates from the king:
    in a confederation, it emanates, for each State, exclusively from its
    citizens. The establishment of a federal high court would therefore,
    in principle, be a departure from the pact. It would be the same for
    a Court of Cassation, since, each State being sovereign and
    legislator, the legislation is not uniform. However, as there are
    federal interests and federal affairs; as offenses and crimes
    against the confederation can be committed, there are, for these
    particular cases, federal courts and federal justice.

[9] There are three ways of conceiving the law, depending on the point
    of view taken by the moral being and the quality he himself takes
    on, as a believer, as a philosopher and as a citizen. The law is the
    commandment issued to man in the name of God by a competent
    authority: this is the definition of theology and divine law. The
    law is the expression of the relations of things: this is the
    definition of the philosopher, given by Montesquieu. The law is the
    arbitral status of the human will (Justice in the Revolution and in
    the Church,  Study): it is the theory of contract and federation.
    The truth being one, although variable in appearance, these three
    definitions fit into each other and must be considered fundamentally
    identical. But the social system that they generate is not the same:
    by the first, man declares himself subject of the law and its author
    or representative; by the second, he recognizes himself as an
    integral part of a vast organism; by the third, he makes the law his
    own and frees himself from all authority, fate and domination. The
    first formula is that of the religious man; the second that of the
    pantheist; the third that of the republican. This alone is
    compatible with freedom.

[10] According to the Swiss federal constitution of 1848, the
     Confederation has the right to create a Swiss University. This idea
     was energetically opposed as an attack on the sovereignty of the
     cantons, and in my opinion it was good policy. I do not know if the
     project was followed up.

[11] In Switzerland, there is a federal budget, administered by the
     Federal Council, but which only concerns the affairs of the
     Confederation, and has nothing in common with the budget of the
     cantons and cities.

[12] Swiss Federal Constitution, art. 13. — “The Confederation does not
     have the right to maintain permanent armies.” I give this article
     to our unitary republicans to ponder.

[13] There has been talk many times, among the democrats of France, of a
     European confederation, in other words, of the United States of
     Europe. Under this designation, we do not seem to have ever
     understood anything other than an alliance of all the States, large
     and small, currently existing in Europe, under the permanent
     presidency of a Congress. It is implied that each state would
     retain the form of government that best suited it. Now, each State
     having in Congress a number of votes proportional to its population
     and its territory, the small States would soon find themselves, in
     this so-called confederation, subservient to the large ones;
     moreover, if it were possible that this new Holy Alliance could be
     animated by a principle of collective evolution, we would quickly
     see it degenerate, after an internal conflagration, into a single
     power, or great European monarchy. Such a federation would
     therefore only be a trap or would have no meaning.

[14] [note on next page] [NOTE 14] “The principles of the American
     Constitution, in the opinion of penetrating men, heralded premature
     decadence. Turgot, a zealous friend of the American cause,
     complained:”1. — That the customs of the English were imitated
     without any useful object; “2. — That the clergy, being excluded
     from the right of eligibility, had become a foreign body in the
     State, although in this case they could not make a dangerous
     exception;”3. — That Pennsylvania required a religious oath from
     members of the legislative body; “4. — That Jersey required belief
     in the divinity of Jesus Christ;”5. — That the Puritanism of New
     England was intolerant, and that the Quakers of Pennsylvania
     considered the profession of arms illegal; “6. — That in the
     southern colonies there was a great inequality of fortunes, and the
     Blacks, although free, formed with the Whites two distinct bodies in
     the same State;”7. — That the state of society in Connecticut was
     an average state between savage and civilized nations, and that in
     Massachusetts and New Jersey, the slightest cabal excluded
     candidates from the number of representatives; “8. — That several
     disadvantages resulted from the emancipation of the Negroes;”9. —
     That no title of nobility should be conferred; “10. — That the
     right of primogeniture should be abolished, and freedom of commerce
     established;”11. — That the extent of jurisdiction should be
     calculated according to the distance from the place of residence;
     “12. — That a sufficient distinction had not been made between
     landowners and those who were not;”13. — That the right to regulate
     commerce was assumed in the constitution of all States, and even
     the right of prohibition; “14. — That there was no principle
     adopted for taxation, and that consequently each State had the
     right to create taxes as it fancied;”15. — That America could do
     without a connection with Europe, and that a wise people should not
     let its means of defense slip from its hands. “The famous Mirabeau
     found in the society of Cincinnatus, composed of officers of the
     army of the Revolution, the principle of hereditary distinctions.
     Other objections were made by Price, Mably and other foreign
     writers. American legislators were able to take advantage of this,
     by modiing a few accessories, but by retaining all the materials
     of the republican building which, instead of deteriorating as was
     prophesied, has improved over time and promises a long life.”
     (Description of the United States, by WARDEN, translated from
     English. Paris, 1820 volume V, p. 255.) The following passage from
     the same writer is no less revealing: “Jefferson, and those who
     acted in concert with him, were convinced that attempts made for
     the happiness of the human race, without regard to opinions and
     prejudices, rarely obtained a result happy, and that the most
     palpable improvements should not be introduced by force into
     society. No new measure was therefore proposed, without public
     opinion being mature enough to appreciate it.” This policy of
     Jefferson and his friends is certainly worthy of all our praise. It
     is the glory of man and of the citizen that he must make truth and
     justice his own before submitting to their laws. We are all kings,
     said the citizen of Athens. And didn’t the Bible also tell us that
     we were GODS? As kings and as gods, we owe obedience only to
     ourselves. But it nevertheless follows from Jefferson’s opinion
     that, under his presidency, 1801 to 1805, the American people were
     perhaps the least liberal there was in the world, and that, without
     this negative liberty given by the scarcity of population in a
     territory of incredible fertility, it would have been better to
     live under the despotism of Louis XV or Napoleon than in the
     republic of the United States.

[15] Some imagined that, without the vote of November 24, 1851 which
     vindicated the Presidency against the right and ensured the success
     of the coup d’état, the republic would have been saved. There was a
     lot of declamation, on this occasion, against the members of the
     Mountain who had spoken out against the right. But it is obvious,
     according to the law of political contradictions (see above Chap.
     VI and VII) and according to the facts, that if the Presidency had
     been defeated, the people having abstained, the bourgeois principle
     would prevailed, the unitary republic transformed without the
     slightest difficulty into a constitutional monarchy, and the
     country returned, not to the status quo of 1848, but to a regime
     perhaps more rigorous than that of December 2, since at least one
     force equal in the government, it would have joined, by the
     decisive preponderance of the middle class and the already
     half-finished restriction of the right to suffrage, the deserved
     deprivation of the masses.

[16] Swiss federal constitution of 1848, art. 6: “The guarantee of
     confederation is granted to cantonal constitutions, provided a)
     that these constitutions do not contain anything contrary to the
     provisions of the federal constitution; b) that they ensure the
     exercise of political rights in republican, representative or
     democratic forms; c) that they have been accepted by the people and
     that they can be revised, when the absolute majority of citizens so
     requests.”

[17] Le Républicain Neuchâtelois, August 19 and 31, September 1, 1852.

[18] I wrote somewhere (On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church,
      study, Belgian edition, note), that the year 1814 had opened the
     era of constitutions in Europe. The mania for contradiction has
     caused this proposition to be booed by people who, indiscriminately
     mixing history and politics, business and intrigue, in their daily
     ramblings, are even ignorant of the chronology of their century.
     But that’s not what interests me at the moment. The era of
     constitutions, very real and perfectly named, has its analogue in
     the Actiac era, indicated by Augustus, after the victory won by him
     over Antony at Actium, and which coincides with the year 30 BC.
     These two eras, the actiac era and the era of constitutions, have
     this in common that they indicated a general renewal, in politics,
     political economy, public law, freedom and general sociability. Both
     inaugurated a period of peace, both testi to the awareness that
     contemporaries had of the general revolution which was taking
     place, and to the desire of the heads of nations to participate in
     it. However, the Actiac era, dishonored by the imperial orgy, has
     fallen into oblivion; it was completely erased by the Christian
     era, which served to mark, in a much more grandiose, moral and
     popular way, the same renewal. It will be the same for the
     so-called constitutional era: it will in turn disappear before the
     federal and social era, whose deep and popular idea must repeal the
     bourgeois and moderationist idea of 1814.

[19] A simple calculation will highlight this. The average education to
     be given to both sexes, in a free State, cannot cover a period of
     less than ten to twelve years, which comprises approximately a fifth
     of the total population, or, in France, seven million and half of
     individuals, boys and girls, out of thirty-eight million
     inhabitants. In countries where marriages produce many children,
     such as in America, this proportion is even more considerable.
     There are therefore seven and a half million individuals of both
     sexes to whom it is a question of giving, in an honest measure, but
     which would certainly have nothing aristocratic about it, literary,
     scientific, moral and professional instruction. However, what is
     the number of individuals in France who attend secondary and higher
     schools? One hundred and twenty-seven thousand four hundred and
     seventy-four, according to Mr. Guillard’s statistics. All the
     others, numbering seven million three hundred and seventy thousand
     five hundred and twenty-five, are condemned to never go beyond
     primary school. But they are far from all going there: recruitment
     committees note an increasing number of illiterates every year.
     Where would our rulers be, I ask, if they had to resolve this
     problem of an average education to be given to seven million three
     hundred and seventy thousand five hundred and twenty-five
     individuals, in addition to the one hundred and twenty-seven
     thousand and four one hundred and seventy-four who occupy the
     schools? What can the unilateral pact of a bourgeois monarchy, the
     contract of charity of a paternal Empire, the charitable
     foundations of the Church, the foresight of Malthus, and the hopes
     of free trade do here? All the committees of public safety
     themselves, with their revolutionary vigor, would fail there. Such
     a goal can only be achieved by means of a combination of learning
     and schooling that makes each student a producer: which presupposes
     a universal federation. I know of no more crushing fact for the old
     politics than this.

[20] A Basque god associated with witchcraft, but also with Janus, so
     presumably the accusation is of being two-faced. — Translator.

[21] The source is the “Manifeste du Peuple,” September 2, 1848. —
     Translator.

[22] The source is “Aux électeurs de Paris,” signed “les rédacteurs du
     PEUPLE,” Le Peuple no. 175 (May 13, 1849): 1. The next quotation is
     from the same source. — Translator.

[23] By mentioning the name of M. Émile Augier alongside that of M.
     Guéroult, I do not intend to envelop them in the same disapproval.
     The playwright seizes on the fly the vices and the ridiculousness
     of his time: it is his right, and it is not, I like to believe, the
     fault of M. Augier if his work, which I have neither seen nor read,
     is used for political maneuvering. M. Guéroult, joining the dynasty
     in order to be able to take advantage of the Church all the better
     and serve his sect, is not in the same situation. One thing,
     however, surprises me, and that is to see a certain party applaud
     with so much enthusiasm the same writer who not long ago, in Les
     Effrontés, of which Le Fils de Giboyer is a sequel, inflicted such
     harsh stirrup-blows on it. Would the applause given to Giboyer fils
     aim to make Giboyer père forget?

[24] The law that abolished excise duties in Belgium made the
     decentralization of this country a real anomaly. Seventy-eight
     towns or municipalities have renounced by this law the right to
     have their own income: it is from the state budget that they now
     receive the amount of their expenses; it is the representatives of
     the nation who vote for them; it is the Minister of Finance who,
     consequently, is the true chief financial administrator of all
     Belgian municipalities. Suddenly the whole of Belgium was
     transformed into a vast prefecture. How can we conceive, in such a
     State, the existence of what France, once again an Empire, persists
     in demanding, municipal liberties? I repeat: the thing would not
     only be contrary to the right of the State, to the right of the
     Chambers as well as of the government; it would be a budgetary
     irregularity, an impossibility. The inhabitants of the Belgian
     municipalities wanted it this way; the Chambers, on their command,
     voted for it: we can say that the resignation of the country into
     the hands of the government was complete. And this honest Belgian
     bourgeoisie makes fun of our unitary inclinations!…

[25] The abolition of excise duties in Belgium could be a public economy
     measure that was both useful and liberal: the difficulty was to
     replace the income from excise duties with another contribution
     system. This care particularly concerned the cities, each of had to
     to determine, in the best of its interests, its ways and means. The
     government and the Chambers were only to intervene to approve the
     decisions taken by the communes. In general, the simplest method
     was to replace the excise with a rental tax. But it would have been
     necessary to exempt the entire poor population from the tax; and the
     bourgeois class, tempted by the minister, preferred to risk, not to
     say sacrifice, its municipal liberties, and throw the burden on the
     entire mass of the country. This is how the budget of the
     seventy-eight largest municipalities in Belgium became a chapter of
     the state budget. The Belgian bourgeoisie can boast of having sold
     their birthright for a plate of lentils, and M. Frère Orban of
     having carried out the greatest act of corruption of modern times.
     From now on, in Belgium, municipal councils are nothing more than
     branches of the Ministry of the Interior. In England, the
     centralizing movement is less rapid than in Belgium; this is due to
     the existence of an aristocracy and the property regime. Would M.
     Fr. Morin, to achieve his agreement on decentralization with Unity,
     want to bring us back to the right of the eldest and the feudal
     system? In Prussia, there also exists a nobility, a true remora of
     the Prussian bourgeoisie and democracy, the last obstacle to the
     development of constitutional freedoms and unitaryism. Suppress this
     nobility, abolish all that remains of feudal customs in Prussia,
     and, depending on whether the bourgeoisie or the democracy is
     predominant, you will have the plebeian empire or the bourgeois
     royalty, both as unitary as the other.

[26] People unfamiliar with these matters will perhaps imagine that I am
     exaggerating, by transforming into a political system the crimes
     committed here and there by a few crowned monsters, in the name of
     the reasons of state. Such an opinion would be as unfortunate as it
     is erroneous; and I must protest against it, in the interest of
     public safety as well as that of truth. The practice of what I call
     the reason of state is everyday in matters of politics and
     government; it has passed into the church, into corporate and
     professional affairs; it has invaded all levels of society; we find
     it in the courts as well as in industrial societies, and even in
     the domestic home. When Luther, for example, in order to preserve
     the protection of the landgrave Philip of Hesse during the
     Reformation, authorized him, by an opinion signed by his hand, to
     possess two women at the same time, thus violating, for reasons of
     religion, religious morality, he followed the reasons of state. —
     When a doctor, to save the honor of an adulterous woman and
     preserve the peace of a household, procures her an abortion, making
     himself, out of horror of the scandal, complicit in infanticide, he
     obeys the reason of State. — When Louis XIV arbitrarily detained
     the stranger in the iron mask in prison, he was following the
     reasons of state. — The provost’s courts, the exceptional
     tribunals, are applications of the reasons of state. — When
     Napoleon I, after fifteen years of marriage, repudiated Josephine, he
     sacrificed morality to the reasons of state. And the official who
     agreed to break up the religious marriage for formal defects, for
     his part sacrificed religion to the reasons of state. When the
     Jesuits had William of Orange, Henry III and Henry IV assassinated,
     they were also acting for reasons of state. All Roman policy, and
     the government of the Popes, and the discipline of the cloisters,
     are only a series of acts accomplished by virtue of the reasons of
     State. The system of lettres de cachet, abolished by the
     Revolution, was a sort of organization of the reasons of state. The
     massacres of September 1792, the batches of the Revolutionary
     Tribunal, the transportations without trial, the shootings of the
     Luxembourg and the Tuileries, all these atrocious facts, carried
     out sometimes by a municipality, sometimes by a Directory,
     sometimes by simple citizens, are facts attributable to the reasons
     of state. When the Girondins demanded the prosecution of the
     perpetrators of the September massacres, they were reacting against
     the reasons of state. And when Robespierre and others fought the
     Gironde on this point, they supported the reasons of state. The
     true revolution would be the one which, raising consciences above
     all human considerations, would abolish in politics and in all
     relations of society this awful reserve of the reason of state,
     which, under the pretext of order, of honor, public safety,
     morality, sometimes allows, sometimes absolves the most obvious and
     best qualified crimes.

[27] Political assassination is indigenous to Italy: we can almost say
     that this unfortunate country has never had any other way of
     expressing opposition and understanding politics. Italy is
     Machiavellian to the depths of its soul. La Presse of February 1,
     in an article signed A. Dumas, contained the most atrocious details
     on this subject. French justice succeeded in destroying the
     relatively generous mores of vendetta in Corsica; but who will be
     able to destroy the awful institution of the CAMORRA in the kingdom
     of Naples? I dare say that federal right alone can triumph here
     over the bloodthirsty habits of a people in whom despotism and
     superstition have mortified the conscience and destroyed even the
     moral sense. From this point of view the founders of Unity will
     have done more than delay the regeneration of Italy; they will have
     made themselves the supporters of its most abominable customs.

[28] If ever a confederation was placed in disadvantageous geographical
     conditions, it was certainly that of the United States. There we
     can say that fate is fundamentally hostile and that liberty has
     everything to do. A vast continent, six hundred to a thousand
     leagues wide, square in shape, bathed on three sides by the ocean,
     but whose coasts are so distant from each other that the sea can be
     said to be inaccessible to three-quarters of the inhabitants; in
     the middle of this continent, an immense corridor, or rather a gut
     (Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio), which, if it is not neutralized or
     declared common property, will form, for nineteen twentieths of the
     residents, only a dead end artery: this, in two words, is the
     general configuration of the American Union. Also the danger of the
     split was immediately understood, and it is indisputable that in
     this respect the North is fighting for its existence at least as
     much as for Unity. There everything is at this moment in
     contradiction: Whites and Blacks, North and South, East and West
     (Protestants and Mormons), the national character (Germanic and
     federalist) expressed by the pact, and the territory, interests and
     morals. At first glance, North America seems predestined to form a
     great unitary Empire, comparable, even superior, to those of the
     Romans, the Mongols or the Chinese. But is it not also a wonderful
     thing that this continent has precisely fallen into the hands of
     the most federalist race in terms of its temperament, its genius
     and its aspirations, the Anglo-Saxon race? May Mr. Lincoln teach
     his compatriots to overcome their repugnance; let him admit blacks
     to the right of citizenship and at the same time declare war on the
     proletariat, and the Union is saved.

[29] The relationship between central or federal power and local or
     federated powers is expressed by the distribution of the budget. In
     Switzerland, the federal budget is barely a third of the total
     contributions that Switzerland devotes to its political life; the
     other two thirds remain in the hands of the cantonal authorities.
     In France, on the contrary, it is the central power which has
     almost all of the country’s resources; it is he who regulates
     revenues and expenses; it is also he who is responsible for
     administering, by commission, the large cities, such as Paris,
     whose municipalities thus become purely nominal; it is also he who
     is the depositary of the municipal funds and who supervises their
     use.

[30] France produces, on average, 30 to 35 million hectoliters of wine
     each year. This quantity, combined with that of ciders and beers,
     would not much exceed the consumption of its thirty-eight million
     inhabitants, if everyone were allowed to go to Corinth, that is to
     say say to drink their share of wine, beer or cider. So what is the
     point of looking outside for an outlet that we have among
     ourselves? But there is worse: the internal outlet closed in some
     way by state taxes, by transport costs, grants, etc., we have
     thought it would get another one abroad. But the foreigner only
     buys luxury wines; he rejects ordinary wines, for which he cares
     little or which would cost him too much: so much so that the
     producer remains with his merchandise, without a buyer either
     inside or outside. The Gironde had counted on the trade treaty with
     England for the placement of its wines; large quantities were
     shipped to London: they remain unsold in the docks. Search, and you
     will see that this anomaly, so often pointed out, is due to a series
     of causes that all resolve into one: the unitary system. (See my
     Theory of Taxation, 1 vol., 1861.)