CHAPTER XIV
4 NOVEMBER: THE CONSTITUTION
ON 4TH NOVEMBER 1848 the complete Constitution was voted on. There were 769 Representatives present at the session: 739 voted for and 30 against. Of these 30 votes against the motion, 16 were democrat-socialists and 14 legitimists. M. Odilon Barrot, current head of the ministry, abstained.
On the very day of the vote I found it necessary to have a letter published in
Le Moniteur explaining the motives that had determined my position. Here is that letter:
“Sir,
“The national Assembly has just proclaimed the Constitution to prolonged cries of: Long Live the Republic!
“I took part in my colleagues’ exaltation of the Republic; I put a blue ticket in the urn against the Constitution. I could not have seen my way to abstaining in such solemn circumstances, after four months of discussion; I would find it incomprehensible, after my vote, not to be permitted to explain myself.
“I did not vote against the Constitution in a vain spirit of opposition or as a form of revolutionary agitation, because the Constitution contained things I wished to eliminate or did not contain others that I wished to put in it. If reasons like that could predominate in a representative’s mind then there would never be any votes on any laws at all.
“I voted against the Constitution because it is a Constitution. The essence of a constitution—I mean a political constitution, there cannot be any question here of any other sort—is the division of sovereignty, in other words the separation into two powers, legislative and executive. That is the principle and the essence of any political constitution; outside that there is no constitution in the present sense of the word, there is only a sovereign authority, making its laws and implementing them by means of its committees and ministers.
509“We are not at all accustomed to such an organisation of sovereignty; in my opinion, republican government is just that and nothing else.
“I therefore find that in a republic a constitution is a perfectly useless thing; I think that the interim system we had for the previous eight months could very well have been rendered definitive with a little more regularity and a little less respect for monarchical traditions; I am convinced that the Constitution, the first act of which will be to create a presidency, with all its prerogatives, ambitions and culpable hopes, will imperil rather than guarantee liberty.
“My fraternal regards.
“P-J PROUDHON
“Representative for the Seine.
“Paris, 4th November 1848”
For myself as legislator this letter sufficed: the reporter owes his readers more ample explanations. We are so infatuated by power, we were so effectively monarchised, we love to be governed so much, that we cannot conceive of the possibility of living in liberty. We consider ourselves democrats because we have abolished hereditary royalty four times: some who have gone as far as rejecting elective presidency, only to invest all the powers in a Convention directed by a committee of public safety, imagine they have arrived at radicalism’s Pillars of Hercules.
510 But we do not see that in holding on so obstinately to this fixed idea of Government we are all, inasmuch as we engage in war to be able to exercise power, only a kind of absolutists!
What is a political constitution?
Can a society survive without a political constitution?
These are the questions that I propose to resolve, perhaps in fewer words than others might need to pose them. The ideas I am going to present are as old as democracy, as simple as universal suffrage; my only merit will consist in systematising them by putting a little coherence and order into them. They will still appear to be but a vision, one more utopia, even to democrats, of whom the majority, taking their right hand for their left, have never known how to develop anything but dictatorship from the sovereignty of the people.
In every society I find the distinction between two kinds of constitution, one of which I call the SOCIAL constitution and the other the political constitution; the first, native to humanity, liberal, necessary, the development of which consists above all in weakening and gradually eliminating the second, [which is] essentially factitious, restrictive and transitory.
The social constitution is nothing but the equilibrium of interests founded upon free CONTRACT and the organisation of ECONOMIC FORCES, which are in general: Labour, Division of Labour, Collective Force, Competition , Commerce, Money, Machines, Credit, Property, Equality in transactions, Reciprocity of guarantees, etc.
The political constitution has AUTHORITY as its principle. Its forms are: Class Distinctions, Separation of Powers, Administrative Centralisation, Judicial Hierarchy, Representation of Sovereignty by Election, etc. It was first thought up and then gradually developed in the interests of order and for lack of social constitution, the principles and rules of which were only discovered later after long experience and are still the subject of socialist controversies.
These two constitutions are, it is easy to see, of utterly different and even incompatible natures: but, as it is the destiny of the political constitution incessantly to provoke and produce the social constitution, there is always something of the latter slipping into and landing in the former, which very soon, rendered unsatisfactory, appearing contradictory and odious, finds itself propelled from concession to concession towards its final abolition.
It is from this point of view that we are going to take a closer look at the general theory of political constitutions, reserving the study of the social constitution for another time.
In the beginning the political idea is vague and undefined, reducible to the notion of Authority. In ancient times, when the legislator always speaks in the name of God, Authority is immense and constitutional regulation more or less non-existent. There is nothing in all of the Pentateuch
512 even vaguely resembling a
separation of powers, all the more such laws as are considered organic, having the purpose of defining the attribution of those powers and bringing the system into play. Moses had no idea whatsoever of a primary, so-called
legislative power, or of a second, the
executive, or a third, the bastard of the two others called the
judicial order. The
conflicts of attributions and
jurisdictions had never revealed to him the necessity of a
State Council; even less had political disputes, the inevitable result of the constitutional mechanism, made him feel the importance of a
High Court. The constitutional idea had remained a closed book to the Prophet; not until four centuries of popular resistance to the Law had passed did this idea appear for the first time in Israel, and that was specifically to justify the election of the first king. Mosaic
513 government had been found weak and it was felt to be desirable to fortify it: this amounted to a revolution. For the first time the constitutional idea manifested itself in its true character, the separation of powers. At that time, as at the time of Philippe-le- Bel
514 and Bonifacius VIII
515, they could only know two of these, the
spiritual and the
temporal. The distinction is easy to grasp: at the side of the Pontiff appeared the King. This did not go without protest, or to speak the language of the period, without a menacing revelation by the priesthood.
“Here is what will be the royal statute,” the constitution of government, Samuel said when the people’s delegates came to summon him to anoint a king for them. Take note of this: it is the preacher who is responsible for the king’s investiture; among all people, even when the priesthood is rebelled against, all power is of divine right. “He will take your sons and make them conscripts and your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. And when he has attained power he will impose taxes on persons, houses, furniture, lands, wine, salt, meat, commodities, etc, in order to maintain his soldiers and pay his servants and mistresses.”
“And you yourselves shall become his servants.”
516It is in these terms that Samuel, the successor to Moses, presented the future political constitution; and all our political commentators, from the Abbé Sieyès to M. de Cormenin, agree with him. But how could an anticipated criticism outweigh the necessity of the moment? The priesthood had served order badly, it was eliminated; this was justice. If the new government proved to be treacherous or incompetent it would be treated in the same way, and so on, until liberty and well-being were achieved, but one would never go backwards: that is the argument of all revolutions. In any case, far from being frightened off by the preacher’s sinister warnings, the appetites of the day, corresponding to the needs of the epoch, would rather be all the more thrillingly excited by them. Was not the political constitution, that is royalty, first of all in fact taxation, entailing honours and sinecures? Was it not monopoly, revenues, great property, leading to the exploitation of man by man, the proletariat? Wasn’t it in the last analysis liberty within order, in the words of Louis Blanc, liberty surrounded by pikes and arrows, and thus the omnipotence of the soldier? All the world wanted it: the Phoenicians, the English of the day, had enjoyed it for some time already; why should the Jewish people, which called itself the Messiah of nations, like all the rest of us, French, Polish, Hungarians or Cossacks—for it seems to be a mania—have remained behind its neighbours, we vainly cry? Truly, there is nothing new under the sun, not even constitutionalism, Christomania and Anglomania.
The great domain of political constitutions is, as I say in my letter to Le Moniteur, mainly the separation of powers, that is to say the distinction of the two natures—no more, no less—in government, spiritual nature and temporal nature, or, which comes to the same thing, legislative nature and executive nature, as in Jesus Christ, both God and man together: it is amazing how we always find theology at the basis of our politics.
But, you will say, does the people not know how to do without this mechanism? Does not the people, which after all established both royal families and priesthoods, know how to dispense with the two of them for its government instead of maintaining them both together? And supposing that for its religious duties and the protection of its interests it actually needs a double Authority, what need is there to further subdivide the temporal one? What is the good of a constitution? What can be the use of this distinction of two powers, with their prerogatives, their conflicts, their ambitions and all their perils? Isn’t it enough to have an Assembly which as the expression of national needs makes the laws and implements them by means of the ministers which it chooses from its members?
It was M. Valette (from the Jura) who, among others, spoke in this manner at the Assembly of 1848.
It is this question that reveals the fatal logic which leads peoples and determines revolutions.
Man is destined to live in society. This society can only exist in two ways: either by the organisation of economic forces and the equilibrium of interests or by the institution of an authority which, in the absence of industrial organisation, serves as arbiter, checks and protects. This latter manner of conceiving and realising order in society is what is called the State or Government. Its essential attribute, the condition of its effectiveness, is centralisation.
The Government able to define itself as the centralisation of the nation’s forces—whatever they are—will be absolute if the centre is a single one; it will be constitutional or liberal, if there is a double centre. The separation of powers has no other meaning. While it is pointless in a small State, where the citizens’ assembly can intervene in public affairs on a day to day basis, it is indispensable in a nation of several million men who are forced by their great number to delegate their powers to representatives. It thus becomes a guarantee of public liberties.
Imagine all the powers concentrated in a single assembly: you will only have augmented the threats to liberty by taking away from it its last sureties. Government by assembly is just as dangerous as that by a despot, without even the personal responsibility of the latter. Experience even proves that the despotism of assemblies is a hundred times worse than the autocracy of a single person, for the reason that a collective is impervious to those considerations of humanity, moderation, respect for others’ opinions, etc. that govern individuals. If therefore the unity of powers, i.e. the absence of a political constitution, has no other effect but to absorb the powers of a responsible president into the powers of an irresponsible majority, the conditions of government otherwise remaining the same, what progress has been made? Would it not be better to divide authority, make one of the powers the controller of the other, giving the executive the liberty of action while the legislative controls it as a counter-weight? Thus, we either get the separation of powers or the absolutism of power: the dilemma is inevitable.
Democracy has never produced a convincing response to this argument. Without a doubt, as the critics have well observed, the division of authority into two powers is the source of all the conflicts which have been tormenting our country for the last sixty years and pushing it to revolution more than despotism itself managed to. But this does not destroy the fundamental objection that without the separation of powers there can only be absolutist government, and that suppressing that division within the Republic is in effect establishing dictatorship in perpetuity.
The democratic Republic, the Republic without distinction of powers, has also never seemed to unprejudiced minds to be anything but a contradiction in terms, a veritable retraction of liberty. And I confess that for my part—given the hypothesis of a centralisation in which all social powers converge in a single centre, the sovereign initiator and ruler—I very much prefer separate and responsible presidential government controlled by an assembly to the absolute and irresponsible government by assembly alone, and government by a constitutional royalty to government by elective presidency. Whatever the type of Government that is to be divided, monarchy or senate, the separation of powers is the first step towards a social constitution.
This is therefore the basic pattern according to which society, ignorant of the constitution that might be appropriate to it, has hitherto sought to create within itself for the purpose of maintaining order:
First of all a centralisation of all its forces, both material and moral, political and economic, in a word, royalty, a government;
Secondly, to escape the inconvenient aspects of this absolutism, a central duality or plurality, which is to say, the separation and opposition of powers.
Given this last point, for political theoreticians the problem has been to constitute the separate powers in such a way that they could never either be fused or enter into conflict, and to find a way for society to be aided and not repressed by them in the manifestation of its wishes and the development of its interests.
It is this triple problem which all ancient and modern constitutions have endeavoured to solve, and which has represented a stumbling block for them all. The Constitution of 1848 succumbed to it as did the others.
The Constitution of 1848, an imitation of the Charter of 1830, is basically socialist but has a political or see-saw form. On its socialist side it promises instruction, credit, work, assistance; it creates universal suffrage and submits to progress: these are new principles not recognised by ancient legislators and which the constitutive Assembly added to the Creed. In its political form its object is to maintain order and peace while guaranteeing the exercise of ancient rights.
Now the Constitution of 1848, just like its predecessors, is incapable of actually keeping any of its promises, whether they be political or social; and, if the people were to take it too seriously, I venture to say that the government would find itself faced daily by the choice between a 24th of February or a 26th of June.
The reason for this inability is, as we will see, partly because the socialist prescriptions introduced into the Constitution are incompatible with the political allocations; the other aspect is that the tendency of government is always, whatever happens, to take centralisation to its logical conclusion, by which I mean to say: to reconcile the constitutional powers in absolutism.
One cannot accuse the parties of these contradictions: they are the natural product of both ideas and time. Governmentalism has always existed; it was in the majority in the Assembly, it was unthinkable for anyone to wish to abolish it. As to Socialism, it had been around in people’s minds long before the Constitutive Assembly was convoked and the February Revolution took place; even without any actual representatives it just had to be officially proclaimed owing to the need of the epoch and in consequence of the revolution. And if Louis-Philippe had remained on the throne, the same movement, which came into being through his fall, would have done so under his rule.
Three elements form the socialist part of the new pact:
1. The declaration of rights and duties, including the right to assistance in place of and as compensation for the RIGHT TO WORK.
2. The idea of progress, the origin of Article 111, which established the perpetual power of improvement for the country.
3. Universal suffrage, the still unnoticed but inevitable effect of which will be to change the public law utterly by suppressing government.
It is my view that these elements, in which it is necessary to see an incomplete and disguised expression of the social constitution, are by themselves incompatible with any form of governmentalism, and that furthermore when powers have been separated such declarations will inevitably become for them a perpetual occasion of division and conflict. The result of this is not only the fact that the powers are unable to fulfil the duties imposed on them by the Constitution but that thanks to those very duties they cannot fail to enter into conflict and, if that occurs, one or the other or both will provoke civil war.
As facts are the best demonstration of ideas, let us take the right to assistance as an example.
Who does not see at once that the right to assistance, guaranteed by the government as a substitute for work, it is the same thing as the right to work travestied by an appeal to selfishness? The right to assistance was granted in HATRED of the right to work; it is as if it were paying off a debt or paying ransom for a property that the Government regards itself as obliged to reorganise public charity. Now, for anybody with a sense of logic or law and who knows the way in which obligations between people are carried out, it is evident that the right to assistance, equally odious to those who receive it and those who dispense it, cannot become part of the institutions of a society, at least in this form, and therefore cannot be the object of a mandate given by the sovereign People to the government.
I am not talking of the problems of implementation, which are almost insurmountable.—Is assistance the same as charity? No. Charity cannot be organised or be the subject of a contract, it has no place in a legal system, it is animated solely by conscience. Assistance, when it is covered by the law and is the subject of an administrative or judicial action, recognised as a right by the Constitution, is something different from charity: it is
unemployment compensation. But if the right to assistance is a compensation, what will be the minimum of compensation rendered as assistance? Will it be 25, 50, 75 centimes? Will it be the same as the minimum wage?...What will be the maximum? Which individuals will have a right to receive assistance? What will be the payment according to age, sex, profession, infirmities, domicile? Will conditions be set for the needy? Will they for example be obliged to live in special lodgings and prescribed localities—in the country more than in towns? We are falling into the regime of prisons [
maisons de force]: assistance, or dole becomes a monstrous thing, compensation for lack of liberty. That is not all: who will bankroll the assistance—the proprietors? 200 million won’t be enough; new taxes will therefore have to be created, proprietors will have to be burdened to subsidise the proletariat. Will there be a system of making deductions from salaries? Well, then it is no longer the State or the proprietors and capitalists who render assistance but the workers who assist one another mutually: the working-man who has work pays for the one who hasn’t, the good pays for the bad, the thrifty for the wasteful and the dissolute. In all these cases assistance becomes a pension for misconduct, a give-away for laziness: it is the supporting pillar of beggary, the providence of poverty. Pauperism thus becomes a constitutional matter; it is a social function, a profession hallowed by law, paid, encouraged, multiplied. The poverty tax is an argument for disorder against savings accounts, pension funds,
tontines517 etc. While you inject moral fibre into the people by means of savings and credit institutions, you demoralise them by means of assistance. Once more: I do not wish to stir up controversy in such delicate questions, where abuse is always mixed with the good and useful, where justice is only preferential treatment. I would like to know what can be the action of power in an institution functioning on the twin principles of envy and hate? An institution that confirms, maintains and sanctifies the antagonism of the two castes and seems to figure in the Declaration of Rights and Duties as the stepping stones to a social war?
Evidently the right to assistance, as with the right to work, is not within the field of competence of the government. These two principles, affirmed by universal conscience, are part of a completely distinct order of ideas, incompatible with the political order whose base is authority and whose sanction is force. It may be, and for my part I affirm this, that the rights to work, assistance, property etc. can be realised within another Constitution; but that Constitution has nothing in common with the one that rules us at present; it is diametrically opposed to it and completely antagonistic.
I myself unintentionally contributed to the exclusion of the right to work from the Constitution—and I do not regret sparing my colleagues, as well as my country, this new lie—by a response I made to M. Thiers in the finance committee. Let me have the right to work, I said to him, and you are welcome to the right to property. By that I wished to indicate that as work incessantly modifies property and consequently the Constitution and the exercise of authority, the guarantee of work would be the signal for a complete reform of the institutions. However, my remark was not taken as such but as a menace to property, and I was not in the mood for explaining myself. The conservatives immediately vowed that work would be protected but not guaranteed, which from their point of view appeared fair just because they did not guarantee property itself any more than work. They thought they were working wonders and employing the ultimate tactical finesse by passing, in the absence of work, THE RIGHT TO ASSISTANCE, a nonsense instead of an impossibility. Could I not have said to these blind men: Oh well! Let me have the right to assistance and you are welcome to the right to work?... Then, hating the right to assistance, which had become as risky for all thinking persons as the right to work, it would have been necessary to fall back on another guarantee, or not grant anything at all, which was impossible. And as I could have reproduced the same argument every time in response to everything proposed by conservative philanthropy, on and on, ad infinitum, as social guarantees are after all nothing but the reverse of political guarantees, if I had wanted to I could have relied on making the conservatives reject everything including the very idea of the constitution, simply by pressing for those political guarantees.
It is the same with all the political and economic elements that society is founded on as with the right to work and the right to assistance: all can be replaced by one another, because they are incessantly converting and transforming themselves into one another, because they are just as correlative as they are contradictory.
Grant me education free of charge [
gratuité de l’enseignement], I said on another occasion,
and you are welcome to freedom of teaching [
liberté de l’enseignement].
518
In the same way I could also have said: Give me the right to credit and I’ll let you have the right to work and the right to assistance in one go.
Give me the equal treatment of all religions and I’ll let you have a State religion.
Give me the power of revision and I’ll obey the Constitution for ever and ever.
Give me the perpetual exercise of universal suffrage and I accept all the results of universal suffrage in advance.
Give me the liberty of the press and I will, being more tough-minded than you who prohibit the discussion of principles, permit you to discuss even the principle of liberty itself.
Society, which is an essentially intelligible affair, is completely based on these oppositions, synonymies or equivalencies which all interpenetrate one another, and the system of which is infinite. And the solution of the social problem consists in representing the different terms of the problem in such a way that they no longer appear to contradict one another, as they do at first in the very early epochs of social formation, but to be mutually deduced from one another: so that for instance the right to work, the right to credit, the right to assistance, all these rights, which are impossible to realise by taking the Government way, can be deduced from a primary transaction which is both outside and higher than the political system, as would be the Constitution of property, the equilibrium of values, the mutual guarantee of exchange, etc.; instead of awaiting the initiative of the public authority, it would actually make that authority subservient to itself.
It is our ignorance of these transformations, together with our republican negligence, that makes us blind to our means and makes us always desire to inscribe promises into the text of our constitutions and add them to the catalogue of our laws, promises which it is not in the power of any government to fulfil, which are antipathetic to it, however it is organised, whether as an absolute government, a constitutional government, or a republican government.
To put it concisely: is it your sole wish to produce political acts in society, to organise wars against foreign nations, to assure the supremacy of an aristocracy and the subordination of the working class domestically, to maintain privilege against the proletariat’s efforts to emancipate itself? The governmental system will suffice, with or without the separation of powers. It was invented for this purpose and has never served any other end. The separation of powers, which you propose as the primary condition of a free government, is nothing but a way of allowing the favoured classes of society to participate in the government’s revenues.
But if on the contrary you wish to guarantee the following to all, together with legitimately acquired property: work, assistance, exchange, credit, education, cheap goods, the freedom of opinion, the right to publish, the equality of means? In a word, only the system of economic forces can satisfy you. But far from this system being something that may be established by way of authority and grafted on to the political constitution, so to speak, it is actually the negation of authority. Its principle is neither force nor number: it is a transaction, a contract.
To vote for the Constitution of 1848, therefore, in which social guarantees are regarded as something emanating from authority, was to place the social constitution beneath the political constitution, the producer’s rights after the rights of the citizen; it was to abjure socialism and disown the Revolution.
Neither Article 1 of the Preamble, positing the principle of progress, nor Article 13, expressing the right to assistance, nor Article 24, establishing universal suffrage, were able to compel me to support it: these three principles were subordinated by the Constitution to the political system, despite their lofty socialist and anti-governmental drift, and it was the facts no less than logic which were to prove very soon that progress, the right to assistance and universal suffrage were to fare in the same way at the hands of the new power as the right to work had at the hands of the constituent assembly.
Progress! But it is evident that in the question of economic ideas the State is essentially stationary.
To organise work, credit or assistance is to affirm the social constitution. Now, the social constitution subordinates and even disavows the political constitution: how should the Government take the initiative in such progress? Progress, for the Government, is the opposite of what it must be for the worker; it is also true, and the whole of history proves it, that far from progressing the Government tends to regress. Where would you like it to go, indeed, with its constitutive principle of the separation of powers? To an ever greater division? That would mean its downfall. From the point of view of political constitutions the four-year presidency and the unity of national representation are far from being a step forward but rather already a sign of the system’s degeneration. The true formula of the constitutional regime is the Charter of 1830, just as the perfection of government is absolute power. Do you really want to return to the July monarchy or regress to Louis XIV?—for it is only in this sense that power can progress. Let those who haven’t had enough of that speak up!
Universal suffrage! But how could I have taken that into account, given a Constitution which had arrogated to itself the prerogative of not only using it to create a lie but even of restricting it? By establishing electoral indignities the Constitution opened the door to [the law of] May 31
st; and as for the veracity of universal suffrage and the authenticity of its decisions, what link can there be between the elastic product of a ballot and popular thinking, which is synthetic and indivisible? How could universal suffrage manage to manifest popular thinking—the real thought of the people—when that people is divided, by the inequality of wealth and by classes subordinated to one another, voting in servility or hate; when this same people, held on a leash by power, is not able to make its thought heard on any subject despite its sovereignty; when the exercise of its rights is confined to choosing its bosses and its charlatans every three or four years; when its reason, being fashioned according to the antagonism of ideas and interests, can only go from one contradiction to the other; when its good faith is at the mercy of a telegraphic dispatch, of an unforeseen event, of a captious question; when instead of inspecting its conscience its memories are evoked; when owing to the division of parties it can only avoid one danger by leaping into another, and is forced to lie to its conscience by the threat of losing its security? Society was immobilised by the 200 franc rule
519: a poet personified it in the god Terminus. Since the establishment of universal suffrage it has been spinning—on the spot. Before that it was rotting away in its lethargy; now it suffers from vertigo. So, let us be more advanced, richer and more liberated when we have made a million pirouettes?...
So if now the government, as it was made by the Constitution of 1848, cannot guarantee work, credit, assistance, education, progress, the sincerity of universal suffrage, nothing of what constitutes the social state, how could it guarantee the political state? How should it guarantee order? What a singular matter!—this political reform, which was intended to give us social reform, appears to us as a perpetual anomaly, from whichever side you take it.
The government is not only in conflict with itself through the separation of its powers, it is so with society through the incompatibility of its functions. Without the distinction of legislative and executive the government offers liberty no guarantees; without a declaration of social rights it is nothing but the force given to wealth to use as disciplinary action against poverty. But with the separation of powers you open the door to conflicts, corruption, coalitions, rifts, competitions; with the declaration of rights you create a final result of categorical refusal for all its decisions and acts: whatever you do the Constitution, which is intended to reconcile all, can only organise discord. At the bottom of your so-called social pact is civil war.
Is it possible to find a way out of this labyrinth, and to pass from the political constitution to the social constitution without doing somersaults? I venture to answer in the affirmative. But I warn the reader that this will not come to pass by a transaction, an eclecticism, the sacrifice of an idea or any adjustment of forces and counterweights; it will be by elevating all the constitutional and social principles presently struggling with one another to their highest potency: centralisation and separation, universal suffrage and government, work and credit, liberty and order. At first sight it seems that this method must increase antagonism: its effect will however be to make it disappear. Except that we will no longer have this distinction of political constitution and social constitution at all: government and society will be identified and indiscernible from each other.
I have said that the vice of any constitution, political or social, what creates conflicts and antagonism in society, is on the one hand—to confine myself to the only question I wish to examine at present—the fact that the separation of powers, or to put it better, of functions, is badly done and incomplete; on the other, the fact that centralisation is insufficient, since it does not respect the law of specialism to a sufficient degree. It follows that collective power is almost nowhere in action, nor is thought, or universal suffrage, exercised. It is necessary to push the separation, when it is hardly begun, as far as possible, centralising every power separately; to organise universal suffrage in its plenitude according to individual nature and kind and give the people the energy and activity that it lacks.
This is the principle: to demonstrate it and explain the social mechanism I now only have to provide arguments, for which a few examples will suffice. Here, as in the natural sciences, the practice is the theory; exact observation of the fact is science itself.
For many centuries the spiritual power has been separated to a varying extent from the temporal power.
I will observe in passing that the political principle of the separation of powers, or functions, is the same as the economic principle of the separation of industries or division of labour: at which point the identity of the political constitution and the social constitution are already dawning upon us.
I will furthermore remark on the fact that the more reality and fecundity a function, industrial or otherwise, contains within itself, the more it grows, realises itself and becomes productive by means of separation and centralisation, so that a function’s maximum potency corresponds to its highest degree of division and convergence, its minimum to the lowest degree of the same. Lack of division and lack of potency are synonymous terms here. Separation and centralisation, that is the double criterion by means of which one may recognise whether a function is real or fictitious.
Now, not only have the temporal and spiritual powers together with the majority of political functions in no way been distinguished and grouped according to the laws of economy, but we shall see that these powers and functions are very far from being strengthened by the principles of organisation claimed to be suitable for them, but are on the contrary wasted away and annihilated by this very organisation, to the extent that what is supposed theoretically to give life to authority is exactly what kills it.
First of all, there would thus be a complete separation between the spiritual and the temporal if the latter not only refrained from interfering in the celebration of the mysteries, the administering of the sacraments and the government of church parishes, etc., but also did not intervene in the matter of the nomination of bishops. There would subsequently be greater centralisation and therefore more regular government if the people in each parish had the right to choose its priests and succursalists
521 or even not take any at all; if the preachers in each diocese elected their bishop, if the bishops’ assembly or a primate of the Gauls sorted out all their religious affairs, the teaching of theology and questions of religious service by themselves. By this separation the clergy would cease to be in the hands of political power and thus no longer an instrument of tyranny towards the people; it would no longer retain the secret hope of recapturing political supremacy; and by this application of universal suffrage the ecclesiastical government, centralised in itself, receiving its inspirations from the people and not from the government or the Pope, would be in constant harmony with the needs of society and the moral and intellectual state of its citizens.
For it means nothing for the centralisation of a country that the church ministers, the agents of power as of every other social function, are answerable to a centre, if the centre itself is not answerable to the people but is placed above the people and independent of it. In that case centralisation is no longer centralisation; it is despotism.
Where the sovereignty of the people is taken as a dogma, political centralisation means nothing else than the people itself being centralised as a political force: to take away central agency from the people’s direct action is to deny it sovereignty and give it tyranny instead of centralisation. The suffrage of subordinates is the point of departure of all central administration.
Instead of this democratic, rational system what do we see? The Government, it is true, does not intervene in matters of religious practice, it does not teach the catechism, it does not give instruction at the seminary. But it does choose the bishops, who only find their centre at Rome in the person of the Pope without agreeing among themselves and without any superiors. The bishops choose the priests and succursalists, sending them into the parishes without the slightest participation of popular suffrage, often in fact in spite of the people’s wishes. This all amounts to the Church and the State, interlocked, if sometimes at war with each other, forming a kind of offensive and defensive league apart from the people, united against its liberty and initiative. Their concerted government weighs heavily on the nation instead of serving it. It is pointless for me to enumerate the consequences of this order of affairs: they immediately spring to everybody’s mind.
In order to achieve organic truth, political, economic or social, it is therefore necessary—for in this all is one:—first to abolish the existing constitutional amalgamation by taking the appointment of bishops away from the State and finally separating the spiritual from the temporal;—second to centralise the Church in itself by a system of graduated elections;—third to put the suffrage of the citizens at the basis of ecclesiastical power as with all the other powers of the State.
In this system what is meant by GOVERNMENT today is nothing but administration; the whole of France is centralised, as far as ecclesiastical functions are concerned; the country governs itself solely by means of its electoral initiative, as much in questions of salvation as in secular matters; it is no longer governed. Whether established religion will have to be maintained or suppressed is not the question at the moment. If it survives it will be by the energy intrinsic to it; if it dies out it will be for lack of vitality: in either case its destiny, whatever that might be, will be the expression of the people’s sovereignty, manifested by absolute separation and regular centralisation of functions, in other terms, by the organisation of universal suffrage in religious matters. And one already foresees that if it were possible to organise the whole country for temporal matters in the way we have indicated for its spiritual organisation, then the most perfect order and the most vigorous centralisation would exist without there being anything of what we call constituted authority, otherwise known as Government, which is nothing but a simulacrum of centralisation.
Another example:
At one time there was considered to be a third power, beyond the legislative and the executive, the judicial power. The Constitution of 1848, following those of 1830 and 1814, only speaks of the judicial order.
Whether order, power or function, here I find, as with the Church, a further example of the preponderance of the State, this time under the pretext of centralisation and, consequently, a new inroad on the sovereignty of the people.
Judicial functions, by their different specialities, their hierarchy, their convergence in a single ministry, manifest an unequivocal tendency to separation and centralisation.
But they are not at all answerable to judicially liable persons; they are all at the disposition of the executive power, appointed every four years by the people with irremovable spheres of duties, and are subordinate, not to the country by election but to the government—of president or prince. The result is that the liable persons are brought before their supposedly natural judges like the parishioners to their priests, meaning that the people belongs to the judiciary as by inheritance, that the litigant belongs to the judge and not the judge to the litigant.
Apply universal suffrage and election by degrees to judicial functions as to ecclesiastical functions, suppress irremovability, which is the loss of the electoral right; divest the State of all action or influence upon the judicial order and ensure that this order, being centralised in itself and separate, is only answerable to the people: and then you will first of all have robbed power of its most potent instrument of tyranny, having made justice a principle of liberty as much as of order. And, if you do not suppose that the people, from which must emanate all powers by virtue of universal suffrage, is in contradiction of itself by not wanting in justice what it wants in religion, you are assured that the separation of power cannot engender any conflict and can safely posit that henceforth separation and equilibrium are in principle synonyms.
In this way the people have the final say on the church and justice by means of a genuine separation of powers and centralisation; the functionaries of the two orders are directly or indirectly answerable to them, and the people do not obey but command, are not governed but govern.
But the consequences of effective separation and centralisation do not stop there. There are in society artificial functions, as we have said, which primitive barbarism suggested and made necessary but which civilisation tends to cause to disappear, first by the practice of liberty and then by the progress of separation itself. Religious observance and the courts are of this number.
If opinion in the matter of faith is truly free; if by the effect of this liberty all religions, either existing ones or those yet to emerge, are declared equal before the law; if every citizen is consequently permitted to vote for the ministers and contributions to the cost of his own religion without being forced to contribute to the maintenance of the others: then it follows first that as everyone is the judge in the last resort concerning a matter lacking in rational certainty and positive sanction, the unity or centralisation of a church is rendered impossible, all the more so because the divergence of professions of faith will become greater; second that the importance of religious opinions will be weakened and the authority of the churches diminished by the same mechanism that was supposed to increase them; third and finally, that the ecclesiastical function, being incompatible with universal suffrage and the laws of social organisation, will gradually fall into disuse so that the church personnel will sooner or later be reduced to zero.
In a word, while the separation of industries is the condition of their equilibrium and the cause of wealth, religious liberty is the ruin of religion with respect to its power and social function: what more could one wish for? Faced with society, the Church does not exist.
The same must happen with justice, too. The election of judges by the People every five or ten years is not the final consequence of the principle: it will have to be recognised that in every court case the litigant or the accused has the right to choose his judges. What am I saying here? It is that one must avow with Plato that the true judge for every man is his own conscience, which leads in the long run to replacing the regime of courts and laws by the regime of personal obligations and contracts, that is to say, to the suppression of the judicial system ...
In this way, once the hypothesis of absolute Government is dismissed, and it cannot but be treated thus, the governmental principle, as with religion and justice, through the development of its own laws, the separation of faculties and their centralisation, ends up by negating itself: it is a contradictory idea.
I now pass to another order of things, the institution of the military.
Is it not true that the army is the Government’s own province and that it belongs much less to the country than to the State, whatever constitutional fictions might suggest? Once upon a time the staff of the army was part of the royal household; under the empire the gathering of the elite army corps bore the name of imperial guard, young and old. It is the Government that takes 80,000 recruits annually, not the country that gives them; it is Power that in the interests of its personal policy and to make its will respected appoints the leadership and orders troop movements at the same time as it disarms the national guards, not the nation which arming spontaneously for its defence avails itself of the public force, of its purest blood. There again the social order is compromised, and why? On the one hand because military centralisation not answerable to the people is nothing but pure despotism, on the other because the ministry of war, however independent it may be of the other ministries, is nevertheless still a prerogative of the executive Power, which only recognises one head, the President.
The people have a confused instinct for this anomaly when on the occasion of every revolution they insist on the removal of the troops, when they demand a law pertaining to military recruitment and the organisation of the national guard and the army. And the authors of the Constitution foresaw the danger when they wrote in article 50: The president of the Republic has the armed forces at his disposal without ever being able to command them in person. What prudent legislators, indeed! And what, one may inquire, does it signify that he does not command them in person if they are at his disposal, if he can send them where he will, to Rome or to Mogador?—if it is he who gives the orders, who appoints the different ranks of officers, who bestows the military crosses and pensions?—and if there are generals who command for him?
It is the right of the citizens to appoint the hierarchy of their military chiefs, the simple soldiers and national guards appointing the lower ranks of officers, the officers appointing their superiors.
Organised in this way the army retains its civic feelings; it is then no longer a nation within the nation, a fatherland within the fatherland, a sort of travelling colony in which the citizen as a naturalised soldier learns to fight against his own country. It is the nation itself, centralised in its strength and youth quite independently of Power, which like any magistrate of the judicial order or of the police can call for the public force in the name of the law, though that force is not at its disposal and cannot be commanded by it. As for the eventuality of war, the army only owes its obedience to the representatives of the nation and the military chiefs appointed by them.
Does it follow that I regard the military as a natural institution inherent to society and in which I only find one fault that endangers liberty, i.e. that of a defective organisation? That would be to suppose me to have a very mediocre understanding of the Revolution. I have endeavoured to show how the People has to organise its military in such a way as to simultaneously guarantee its defence and its liberties, while waiting for the nations to agree to terminate the armed peace, since they are the only ones competent to judge the opportunity of general disarmament. But who does not see that the same applies to war as to justice and religion and that the only sure means of abolishing it, after the conciliation of international interests, would be to organise the military as I have just indicated—and as prescribed by the principles of ’93—while depriving the Government of its power to wage war against the wishes of the nation?
I will continue.
At all times societies have felt it necessary to protect their trade and industry against foreign imports: the power or function that protects indigenous labour in every country, guaranteeing it the national market, is the Customs.
I do not wish to give any impression here of prejudging the morality or immorality, the utility or disutility of the Customs: I shall take it as society offers it to me and confine myself to examining it from the point of view of the constitution of powers. Later, when we pass from political and social questions to the purely economic question, we shall seek to find a solution to the problem of the balance of commerce that is appropriate to it and see whether indigenous production can be protected without the cost of law and surveillance, in a word, without the Customs.
The Customs is by virtue of the fact of its existence a centralised function: its very origin, like its form of action, excludes any idea of piecemeal structure. But how is it that this function, which is within the special competence of merchants and industrialists and should by rights be exclusively the concern of the authority of the chambers of commerce, is still a dependency of the State?
For the protection of its industry France maintains an army of more than 40,000 customs officials, all armed with rifles and sabres, costing the nation a sum of 26 million francs per annum. This army has a double mission: to pursue smugglers and to collect a tax of 100 to 110 million francs on imported and exported goods.
Now, who can know better than industry itself what need it has of being protected, what duties must be levied, which products merit premiums and encouragements? And as to the actual service provided by Customs, is it not evident that it is up to the interested parties to calculate its expense and not the job of Power to make it a source of emoluments for its creatures, for example by making the legislation on differential tariffs a source of revenue for its extravagances?
As long as the administration of Customs remains in the hands of government authority, the protectionist system, which by the way I do not judge per se, is bound to be defective; it will be lacking in sincerity and justice; the tariffs imposed by Customs will be extortionate, and smuggling can only be seen, in the words of the honourable M. Blanqui, as both a right and a duty.
Besides the ministries of the Cults [established religions], of Justice, of War, of international trade or of Customs, the government has accumulated others, such as the ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, the ministry of Public Works, the ministry of Public Education and above all, to juggle all of them, the ministry of Finance! Our supposed separation of powers is only the accumulation of powers, our centralisation is only an absorption.
Does it not appear to you that the farmers, already organised as they are in their confederations and associations, could well operate their centralisation and manage their general interests without passing through the hands of the State? And that the merchants, producers, manufacturers and industrialists of all kinds, with their completely open associations in the chambers of commerce, might equally, without the aid of Power, without having to await their salvation from its tender mercies or their ruin from its inexperience, organise a central administration themselves and at their own expense, debate their affairs in the general assembly, correspond with the other administrations and take all useful decisions without the signature of the president of the republic, and then entrust one of theirs, chosen by his peers to be the minister, with the execution of their wishes?
And that the public works, which concern everybody, whether in agriculture, industry, trade, the departments or the communes, should be distributed forthwith among the local and central administrations with an interest in them and no longer form a separate corporation which—as with the army, Customs, Excise Office, etc.—is completely under the control of the State with its own hierarchy, privileges and ministry, all with the purpose of permitting the State to traffic in mines, canals, railways, play the stock market, speculate on shares, hand over building projects of 99 years’ duration to friends’ companies, award works on roads, bridges, ports, sea walls, drillings, tunnels, locks, dredgings etc., etc., to a legion of entrepreneurs, speculators, usurers, corrupters and swindlers who live off the public wealth, the exploitation of artisans and workers, and the follies of the State?
Does it not seem to you that national education would be just as well UNIVERSALISED, administered and ruled; the primary and secondary school teachers, headmasters and inspectors just as well chosen; the study syllabuses just as perfectly in harmony with interests, customs and morals—if town or other local councils were authorised to appoint schoolteachers while the University only had to hand out diplomas to them; if in both public education and a military career periods of service on the lower echelons were required for promotion to the higher levels; if every grand university dignitary had had to pass through the positions of primary teacher and class monitor? Do you believe that this system, perfectly democratic, would damage school discipline, educational morality, the dignity of teaching or the security of families?
And, since money is the nerve of any administration: it is necessary that the budget is made for the country and not the country for the budget and that a tax must be freely voted for by the representatives of the people every year; this is the basic and inalienable right of the nation whether under a monarchy or under the Republic. Since both expenses and receipts must be consented to by the country before being authorised by the government, is it not clear that the consequence of this financial initiative, which has been formally recognised as pertaining to the citizens by all our constitutions, would be that the ministry of finance—all this fiscal organisation, in a word—should belong to the nation and not to its prince; that in fact it is directly answerable to those who pay the budget, not those who eat it; that there would be far less abuse in the management of the public treasury, less squandering of funds, fewer deficits, if the State had no more control of the public finances than of the churches, of justice, of the army, of customs, of public works or of public education, etc.?
Without a doubt, in the case of Agriculture, Trade, Industry, Public Works, Education and Finance, separation will not end in annihilation, in the way that we have attempted to show it will in the case of the Churches, Justice, War and Customs. In this connection one might believe that with the development of economic forces compensating—and more—the suppression of political powers, the principle of authority will gain on the one hand what it has lost on the other, and that the governmental idea will be strengthened instead of disappearing.
But who does not see that the Government that has just come to an end with the extinction of its powers meets that end in this case in the fact of their absolute independence as much as in the mode of their centralisation, the principle of which is no longer authority but contract?
What makes for centralisation in both despotic and representative States is authority, hereditary or elective, which emanating from the King, President or directory descends on the country and absorbs all its powers. But what makes for centralisation in a society of free men, associating with different groups according to the nature of their industries or their interests and by whom neither collective nor individual sovereignty is ever abdicated or delegated, is the contract. The principle, you see, has changed: from this point on the economy is no longer the same; the organism, deriving from another law, has been turned upside down. Instead of resulting, as was hitherto the case, from the agglomeration and confiscation of forces by a so-called representative of the people, social unity is the product of the free support of the citizens. In fact and in law the Government has ceased to exist as a result of universal suffrage.
522I shall not accumulate any more examples here. After what has preceded it is easy to continue the series and see the difference between centralisation and despotism, between the separation of social functions and the separation of those two abstractions that have been rather unphilosophically named the legislative power and the executive power—in the end between administration and government. Do you believe, I say, that with this truly democratic regime, with its unity at the bottom and its separation at the top, the reverse of what now exists in all our constitutions, there would not be more severity concerning expenditure, more exactitude in the services, more responsibility for the functionaries, more benevolence on the part of administrations towards the citizens, and less servility, less esprit de corps, fewer conflicts, in a word, fewer disorders? Do you believe that reforms would then appear quite so difficult; that the influence of authority would corrupt the judgement of the citizens; that corruption would serve as the basis of morals, and that being a hundred times less governed we would not be a thousand times better run as a country?
It used to be believed that in order to create national unity it was necessary to concentrate all public powers in the hands of a single authority; then, as it soon became apparent that in proceeding thus one only created despotism, it was believed possible to remedy this inconvenience by means of the dualism of powers, as if in order to prevent the government’s war against the people there were no other means than organising the war of the government against the government!
For a nation to be manifested in its unity it is necessary, I repeat, that this nation be centralised in its religion, centralised in its justice, centralised in its military force, centralised in its agriculture, its industry and commerce, centralised in its finances, centralised in all its functions and powers, in a word; it is necessary that centralisation be effected from the bottom to the top, from the circumference to the centre, and that all functions be independent and govern themselves independently.
Do you then want to make this purely economic and invisible unity more apparent to the senses by means of a special organ or by an Assembly; to preserve the image of the superannuated government for love of your traditions?
Group these different administrations by their leading representatives: you will then have your council of ministers, your executive power, which might then very well do without a State Council.
Above all that now raise a grand jury, legislature or national assembly, directly appointed by the whole country and charged, not with appointing the ministers—they will be invested in their roles by their specific electoral bodies—but with verifying the accounts, passing laws, fixing the budget, settling the differences between the administrations, all this after having heard the conclusions of the public ministry, or ministry of the interior, to which the whole government will then be reduced: and you have a centralisation which is all the stronger for your multiplying the number of centres of power, a responsibility all the more real for the separation between powers being more clean-cut: you will have a constitution which is at the same time political and social.
There, the government, the State, power—whatever name you choose to give it—brought back within its just limits, which are not to
legislate nor to
execute, nor even to
fight or
judge, but as commissioner to witness: the sermons, if there are any sermons, the debates in tribunals and parliamentary discussions, if there are any tribunals and a parliament; to supervise the generals and armies, if circumstances make it necessary to keep the armies and generals; to remind people of the meaning of the laws and warn of the contradictions involved, to see to the execution of those laws and prosecute any breaches: there, I say, government is nothing other than the head teacher of society, the sentinel of the people. Or rather, government no longer exists, since by the progress of their separation and centralisation the powers formerly gathered together by the government have all either disappeared or escaped the latter’s initiative:
anarchy has given birth to order. There at last you have the liberty of the citizens, the truth of institutions, the sincerity of universal suffrage, the integrity of the administration, the impartiality of justice, the patriotism of bayonets, the submission of parties, the impotence of sects, the convergence of wills. Your society is organised, living, progressive; it thinks, speaks, acts like a man, precisely because it is no longer represented by a man, because it no longer recognises personal authority, because in it, as in any organised and living being, as in Pascal’s infinity, the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.
523It is to this anti-governmental constitution that we are invincibly led by our democratic traditions, our revolutionary tendencies, our need for centralisation and unity, out love of liberty and equality, and the purely economic, if very badly applied, principle of all our constitutions. And it is this I would have gladly explained to the Constituent Assembly, if that Assembly, so impatient of commonplaces, had been capable of listening to something other than commonplaces; if, in its blind prejudice against any new idea, in its unfair provocations with the socialists, it had not had the empty words to say to them: I defy you to try to convince me!
But it is with assemblies as with nations: they only learn from misfortune. We have not suffered enough, we have not been sufficiently chastised for our monarchical servility and governmental fanaticism for us to come to love liberty and order so soon. Everything within us still conspires with the exploitation of man by man, the government of man by man.
Louis Blanc is in need of a strong power to do what he calls the good, which is the application of his system, and to keep down the bad, which is everything that opposes that system.
M. Léon Faucher is in need of a strong and pitiless power to contain the republicans and exterminate the socialists, to the glory of English political economy and Malthus.
MM. Thiers and Guizot are in need of a quasi-absolute power which enables them to exercise their great talents as tightrope walkers. What kind of nation is it from which a man of genius would be forced to exile himself for lack of men to govern, a parliamentary opposition to combat and intrigues to pursue with all the governments?
MM. de Falloux and Montalembert are in need of a power divine that every knee would bow to, every head incline to, every conscience prostrate itself to, in order that kings might no longer be any more than the gendarmes of the Pope, the vicar of God on earth.
M. Barrot is in need of a double power, legislative and executive, in order that there might be eternal contradiction in parliament and society never have any other end, in this life and the other, but to witness constitutional representations.
Ah! vain servile race that we are! We who pay 1,800 million francs a year for the follies of our governors and our own shame; who maintain 500,000 soldiers to machine-gun our children; who vote for fortresses for our tyrants so that they may keep us under perpetual siege; who invite nations to become independent only to abandon them to their despots; who wage war on our neighbours and allies, today for the vengeance of a preacher, yesterday for the pleasure of a courtesan; who have no esteem for any but our flatterers, no respect but for our parasites, no love but for our prostitutes, no hate but for our workers and our poor; once a race of heroes, now of hypocrites and sycophants: if it is true that we are the Christ of the nations, might we soon quaff the chalice of our iniquities to the dregs, or, if we have definitely abdicated liberty, serve by dint of distress and squalor as an eternal example to cowardly peoples and perjurers!