The Federative Principle

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,

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.

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

1. 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.

2. Regime of Liberty.

2. Government of all by each; — DEMOCRACY;

2. 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.

2. 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.

1. 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]

2. 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.

3. 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:

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

Liberty.

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

authoritarian regime, and the liberal regime.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

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?

“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.”

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.

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.

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:

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

1. 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;

2. The Confederation aims to rally them in a pact of mutual guarantee;

3. 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.

[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.

[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?

[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.)