INSTRUCTION I

By its power, the first and most substantial of all its attributes, the social being thus testifies to its reality and life; it is posited, it is created, on the same basis and under the same conditions of existence as other beings.

This is what the first people felt, although they expressed it in a mystical form, when they traced the origin of social power to the gods, from whom their dynasties were descended. Their naive reason, surer than their senses, refused to admit that society, the State, the power that is manifested in them, were only abstractions, although these things remained invisible.

And it is what the philosophers did not see, when they gave birth to the State from the free will of man, or more accurately the abdication of his freedom, thus destroying by their dialectic what religion had taken such care to establish.

Q.—An essential condition of power is its unity. How will this unity be assured if the formative groups remain equal, if none obtains preponderance over the others? However, if this preponderance is granted, we return to the old system: for what then shall serve to return power to the community?

A.—The diversity of functions in society entails divergence or plurality in power no more than it entails the diversity of the final product. Power is one by nature, or it is nothing: far from creating it, any competition or prepotency, either of a member, or as a fraction of society, would only serve to abolish it. Does electricity cease to be a single thing in the battery because this battery is composed of several elements? All the same the quality of the social power varies, its intensity rises or drops, according to the number and diversity of the groups: as for its unity, it remains immutable.

Q.—Any force presupposes direction: who directs the social power?

A.—Everyone, which is to say no one. Since political power results from the relation of many forces, reason dictates immediately that these forces must balance one another so as to form a regular and harmonic whole. Justice intervenes in its turn to declare, as it did in relation to general economy, that this balance of power, in conformity with right, required by right, obliges every conscience. It is thus to Justice that the direction of power belongs; so that order in the collective being, like health, the will, etc, in the animal, is not the product of any particular initiative: it results from the organisation.

Q.—And what guarantees that Justice will be observed?

A.—The same which guarantees to us that the merchant will obey the coin, the public faith, the certainty of reciprocity: in a word, Justice.—Justice is for intelligent and free beings the supreme cause of their determinations. It has need only to be explained and understood to be affirmed by everyone and to act. It exists, or the universe is only a phantom and humanity a monster.

Q.—Then doesn’t social power, to whatever degree, itself imply Justice?

A.—No: just like property, competition, and all the economic forces, all the collective forces, power is, by nature, a stranger to right; it is force. Let us say however that, since force is an attribute of any reality, and any force being able to increase indefinitely by association, consciousness acquires all the more energy in men and the respect of Justice all the more certainty in so far as the social group is more numerous and better formed: this is why in a civilised society, however corrupt or servile it may be, there is always more Justice than in a barbarian society.

Q.—What is to be understood by the division of powers?

A.—It is the very unity of power, considered in the diversity of the groups which form it. If the observer is placed in the centre of the bundle, and from there traverses the series of the groups, the power appears to him divided; if he looks at it as the resultant of the forces in relation, he sees its unity. Any true separation is impossible. It is thus that the assumption of two independent powers, each having their share of the world, such as spiritual power and temporal power appear today, is against the nature of things, a utopia, a nonsense.

Q.—What is the proper object of the social power?

A.—It results from its definition: it is to add unceasingly to the power of man, his wealth and his well-being, by a higher production of force.

Q.—Who benefits from the social power, and generally from any collective force?

A.—All those which contributed to form it, in proportion to their contribution.

Q.—What is the limit of power?

A.—Power, by nature and destination, has no limits other than those of the group that it represents, those of the interests and the ideas that it must serve.

However, by the limit of power, or powers, or, to be more precise, of the action of power, we mean that which is determined by the groups and sub-groups of which it is the general expression. Since each of these groups and sub-groups, indeed, up to the last term of the social series that is the individual, represents the social power with respect to the others, in terms of its function, it follows that the limitation of power, or rather, its distribution, regularly accomplished under the law of Justice, is nothing other than the formula for an increase in freedom itself.

Q.—What differentiation do you make between politics and economics?

A.—At base, they are two different ways of naming the same thing. One does not imagine that men need, for their freedom and their well-being, anything but force; for the sincerity of their relations, anything but Justice. Economy presupposes these two conditions: what more could politics yield?

Under current conditions, politics is the equivocal and risky art of making order in a society in which all laws of economy are ignored, all balance destroyed, every freedom compromised, every conscience warped, all collective force converted into a monopoly.

INSTRUCTION II

Of the Appropriation of the Collective Forces, and the Corruption of the Social Power

Q.—Is it possible that a phenomenon as considerable as that of the collective force, which changes the face of ontology, which almost touches physics, could have been concealed for so many centuries from the attention of the philosophers? How, in relation to something that interests them so closely, did the public reason, on the one hand, and personal interest, on the other, let themselves be misled for such a long time?

A.—Nothing comes except with the passage of time, in science as in nature. All starts with the infinitely small, with a seed, initially invisible, which develops little by little, toward the infinite. Thus, the persistence of error is proportional to the size of the truths. Thus, one is thus not surprised if the social power, inaccessible to the senses in spite of its reality, seemed to the first men an emanation of the divine Being, for this reason the worthy object of their religion. As little as they knew how to realise it through analysis, they had a keener sense of it, quite different in this respect from the philosophers who, arriving later, made of the State a restriction on the freedom of citizens, a mandate of their whim, a nothingness. Even today, the economists have barely identified the collective force. After two thousand years of political mysticism, we have had two thousand years of nihilism: one could not use another word for the theories which have held sway since Aristotle.

Q.—What was the consequence of this delay in knowledge of the collective Being for peoples and States?

A.—The appropriation of all collective forces and the corruption of social power; in less severe terms, an arbitrary economy and an artificial constitution of the public power.

Q.—Explain yourself on these two headings.

A.—By the constitution of the family, the father is naturally invested with the ownership and direction of the force issuing from the family group. This force soon increases from the work of slaves and mercenaries, the number of which it contributes to increase. The family becomes a tribe: the father, preserving his dignity, sees the power he has grow proportionately. It is the starting point, the type of all such appropriations. Everywhere where a group of men is formed, or a power of community, there is formed a patriciate, a seigniory.

Several families, several societies, together, form a city: the presence of a superior force is felt at once, the object of the ambition of all. Who will become its agent, its recipient, its organ? Usually, it will be that of the chiefs who hold sway over the most children, parents, allies, clients, slaves, employees, beasts of burden, capital, land—in a word, those who have at their disposal the greatest force of collectivity. It is a natural law that the greater force absorbs and assimilates the smaller forces, and that domestic power becomes a title of political power, and only the strong may compete for the crown. One knows what became of the dynasty of Saul, founded by Samuel in contempt of this law, and the difficulty of King John, called Lack-Land, in gaining the throne of England. He never would have triumphed over the resistance of the barons without the charter that he granted to them, which became the foundation of English freedoms. In our own history, when the mayor of the palace, e.g., Pépin de Herstal ⁵⁹⁹ or Hugues le Blanc⁶⁰⁰, became more powerful in men and fiefs than the king, he was made king, in spite of the ecclesiastical consecration that protected the suzerain. In 1848, when Louis Napoléon was elected president of the Republic, the people of the countryside believed him to possess a fortune of twenty billion.

Furthermore, the alienation of the collective force, in addition to having been the result of ignorance, appears to have been a means of preparing races. To make the primitive man, the savage, fit for social life, a long trituration of bodies and souls must have been necessary. The education of humanity being accomplished by a kind of mutual instruction, the law of things dictated that the instructors enjoy certain prerogatives. In the future, equality will consist in the ability of each to exercise mastery in turn just as each in turn will have undergone discipline.

Q.—What you say aptly demonstrates how the great social dispossession was consummated, how inequality and misery became the cancer of civilisation. But how to explain this resignation of the consciences, this submission of wills, which for such a long period has been disturbed only by a few revolts by slaves, fanatics, proletarians?

A.—The old religion of power would, up to a certain point, rationalise the fact. One subjected oneself to power because one saw it as coming from the gods, i.e., because it was worshipped. But this religion is lost: dynastic legitimacy, droit du seigneur,⁶⁰¹ and divine right are no longer anything but odious words, displaced by the proud principle of popular sovereignty. However, the phenomenon persists: men nowadays appear no more reluctant to subject themselves to the authority and the exploitation of a single man than were their fathers formerly. Obvious proof of the vanity of the theological and metaphysical theories, the principles of which can either perish or survive without the facts that they are supposed to cause or prevent ever ceasing to occur.

On this sad subject, over which misanthropy and scepticism prevail, the banal excuses for so many treasons and cowardices, the theory of collective force provides a peremptory answer that radically confirms the morality of the masses, while leaving the oppressors and their accomplices to their infamy.

Through the grouping of individual forces, and through the relation of the groups, the whole nation forms one body: it is a real being, of a higher order, whose movement implicates the existence and fortune of everyone. The individual is immersed in society; he emerges from this great power, from which he would separate only to fall into nothingness. Indeed, as great as the appropriation of the collective forces may be, however intense may be the tyranny, it is obvious that a share of the social benefit always remains to the mass, and that in the end, it is better for each to remain in the group than to leave it.

It is thus not actually the exploiter, it is not the tyrant, whom the workers and the citizens follow: seduction and terror enter little into their submission. It is the social power that they respect, a power ill-defined in their thinking, but outside of which they sense that they cannot subsist; a power whose prince, whoever it may be, may show them its seal and see them tremble to break with it by a revolt.

For this reason any usurper of the public power never fails to cover his crime with the pretext of the public safety, to call himself the father of the fatherland, restorer of the nation, as if the social force drew its existence from him, while in fact he is only an effigy for it, a stamp, and, so to speak, a commercial brand. And he will fall, with the same ease with which he was established, the moment his presence appears to threaten the great interest that he claimed to defend: there, in last analysis, is the cause of the fall of all governments.

Q.—Social power having been constituted as a princedom, appropriated by a dynasty or exploited by a caste, what becomes of its relations with the nation?

A.—These relations are completely inverted. In the natural order, power is born from society, it is the resultant of all the particular forces grouped for labour, defence, and Justice. According to the empirical conception suggested by the alienation of power, it is, on the contrary, society which is born naked from it; it is the generator, the creator, the author; he is higher than it: so that the prince, instead of being the simple agent of the republic as truth wants it, is made sovereign by the republic, and, like God, the dispenser of justice.

The consequence is that the prince, occupied with his personal domination, instead of ensuring and developing the social power, creates for himself, through the army, the police force and the tax, a particular force, able to resist any attack from the interior and to compel the nation to obedience at need: it is this princely force which will be called from now on power. Napoléon III, like Napoléon I, says my army, my fleet, my ministers, my prefects, my government; and he is right to say this, because none belong to the nation any longer; on the contrary, all are against the nation.

Q.—How, then, is Justice to be conceived?

A.—As an emanation of power, that which is the very negation of Justice. Indeed, under the normal condition of society, Justice dominates power, the balance and distribution of which it makes a law. Under the dynastic mode, power dominates Justice, which becomes an attribute, a function of authority. From whence the subordination of Justice to raison d’État, the last word of the old politics, judgement of all the governments which follow it, and that Christianity, by adding the reason of salvation [raison du salut] to it, did not sanctify it at all. Princes and priests quarrel over the exercise of power: neither one nor the other are worthy of it, because they all ignore the supremacy of right.

Q.—How, in this system of usurpation, are the relations of citizens determined as to persons, services, and goods?

A.—Such is Justice before power, such will it be in the nation: i.e., Justice being seen as an emanation of force, as much human as divine, force becomes, in sum, the measure of right, and society, instead of resting on the balance of forces, has inequality for its principle, i.e., the negation of order.

Q.—After all that, what must the social and political organisation be?

A.—It is easy to render an account of it. The collective forces having been appropriated, public power having been converted into an inheritance, individuals and families, already unequal by the chance of nature, having become more so by civilisation, society is constituted as a hierarchy. This is what was expressed by the dynastic religion and the oath of fidelity to the imperial person. In this system, it is by principle that Justice, or what is called by this name, always weighs on the side of the superior against the inferior: which, under the appearance of an inescapable autocracy, is instability itself.

And, sad to say, all the world is complicit here with the prince: the spirit of equality which Justice creates in man was neutralised or destroyed by the contrary prejudice, which renders invincible the alienation of all collective force.

Q.—How, in this travesty of Justice, society, and power, is unity preserved?

A.—The nature of things implies that unity should result from the balance of forces, made compulsory by Justice, which thus becomes the true sovereign, and which, in this capacity, educates all the participants in public power. Today, unity consists in the absorption of any faculty, any interest, any initiative by the person of the prince: it is social death. And as society can neither die nor do without unity, antagonism is established between society and power, until the catastrophe arrives.

Q.—In this state of affairs, the diminution of power from time immemorial seemed a guarantee for society: of what does such a reduction consist, and for what can it serve?

A.—Apart from what the prince has by way of inheritance or private domain, apart from the command of the armies, the collection of taxes and the appointment of civil servants, the principle is that he hands over the surplus, lands, mines, cultures, industries, transportation, banks, trade, education, to the whims, to the absolute disposition, to the unrestrained competition or immoral coalition of the privileged class. What enters into the province of economy is supposed not to concern him at all; it must not be interfered with. What one calls the limit of power, in a word, is the surrender of the true social force to a feudal caste, which is decorated with the name of civil liberties: an absurd transaction that no government can support, and that will before long serve as a new leavening agent for the revolution. Today, in France, the emperor is master of all: but by the same token, he has always put himself in danger of losing everything: thus time shall tell, one way or another.

Q.—Thus conditioned, power is without an object.

A.—No: the object of power is precisely then to maintain this system of contradictions, in the absence of Justice and as an inverted image of Justice.

Q.—Give the synonymy of power.

A.—The artificial constitution of power having deteriorated its concept, language was to feel the effects: here, as everywhere, words are the key to history.

Regarded as the inheritance of the prince, as his establishment, his profession, his trade, the social power was called the State. Like the common people, the king said: my State, or my Estates, for my domain, my establishment. —The Revolution, transporting from the prince to the country the property of power, preserved this word, today synonymous with the res publica , the republic.

As the personnel of power is supposed to govern the nation and to govern its destinies, one gives to this personnel and to power itself the name of government, an expression as false as it is ambitious. In theory, society is ungovernable; it obeys only Justice, on pain of death. In fact, the so-called governments, liberal and absolute, with their arsenal of laws, decrees, edicts, statutes, plebiscites, payments, ordinances, never controlled anyone or anything. Living a completely instinctive life, acting at the pleasure of invincible necessities, under the pressure of prejudices and circumstances which they do not understand, generally being pushed by the current of society which from time to time breaks them, they can hardly, by their own initiative, accomplish anything other than disorder. And the proof of it is that all end miserably.

Finally, if one considers in power this eminent dignity that makes it higher than any individual, any community, one calls it sovereign: a dangerous expression, from which it is to be wished that democracy will guard itself in the future. Whatever the power of the collective being, it does not constitute for that reason, in comparison with the citizen, a sovereignty: it would make almost as much sense to say that a machine in which a hundred thousand spindles turn is the sovereign of the hundred thousand spinners it represents. As we have said, Justice alone commands and governs, the Justice that creates power by making the balance of power obligatory for all. Between power and the individual, there is thus nothing but right, and all sovereignty is denied; sovereignty is the denial of Justice, it is religion.

INSTRUCTION III

Of the Forms of Government and Their Evolution During the Pagan-Christian Period

Q.—Would the history of nations and the revolutions of States then present nothing but the play of economic forces, at times contrary and conflictual, according to the views of the prince, the egoism of the great, and the prejudices of the people, sometimes favoured and harmonised according to right?

A.—It is so: let us add only that the arbitrary must have its period, Justice always bringing society back to balance, having sooner or later to triumph definitively over subversive influences.

Q.—For this long period, which one could, in a sense, call revolutionary, since the State continually goes from one revolution to another, what are the forms of power?

A.—According to whether the government is supposed to belong to only one, several, or all, one calls it monarchy, aristocracy or democracy. A compromise also often takes place between these elements, and a mixed government results from it, which one supposes for that reason to be more solid, and which is no more sustainable than the others.

In another sense, one calls the forms of government the conditions to which the existence of power is subjected. Thus, the Charter of 1830, having fixed the principles of public law, defines in some chapters the forms of government, i.e. that which concerns the king, the Chambers, the ministers, the legal order.

The idea of consecrating the conditions of power in writing is an old one: the Jews attributed their constitution to God, who would have given it to Moses under the name of Berith,⁶⁰² alliance, pact, charter or testament.

These constitutions all rest on the preconceived idea that since society does not progress by itself, having in itself neither potentiality nor harmony, power as well as direction coming to it from on high via a dynasty, a Church, or a senate, one could not be too prudent in the organisation of power, in the choice of the prince, in the election of the senators, in legislative and administrative formalities, in jurisdiction, etc.

Q.—Which of these governmental forms deserves preference?

A.—None: other than the extent to which they partake of the nature of things and express the genius of the people, their defects are the same; this is why history shows them supplanting one another continuously, without society being able to find stability anywhere.

The consecration of the principle of inequality by the lack of balance in economic transactions;

The appropriation of collective forces;

The establishment of a factitious power in place of the real power of society;

The abolition of Justice by raison d’État;

Direction given over to the prince’s whim, if the State is monarchical, and, on any other assumption, to party cabals;

The continual tendency to the absorption of society by the State:

That, for the duration of the preparatory period, is the basis on which the political order is constituted, whatever name it takes and whatever pretended guarantee it gives.

Q.—But democracy means the restoration of the nation to the ownership and enjoyment of its own forces: why does it appear that you condemn this form of government as much as the others?

A.—As long as democracy is not elevated to the true conception of power, it cannot be, as it has not been so far, anything other than a lie, a shameful transition of brief duration, sometimes from aristocracy to monarchy, sometimes from monarchy to aristocracy. The Revolution held onto this word as a promise [une pierre d’attente]; some seventy years hence, we have made of it a broken promise [une pierre de scandale].

Q.—Thus, short of a revolution in ideas, is all political stability, all social morality, all freedom or happiness impossible for man and the citizen?

A.—It is not only history that reveals this to be true, nor Justice and equality, which demonstrate it as their inevitable sanction; it is economic science at its most elementary, positive, and real that proves it. The collective forces having been appropriated, the social power having been corrupted and alienated, the government oscillates from demagogy to despotism and from despotism to demagogy, sowing ruin and multiplying catastrophes, in almost regular periods.

Q.—Is there nothing more to be gathered, for the philosopher, from this study of the formation, growth, and decline of the old States?

A.—They were, in their very inorganism, the revelation of a new State, and something like an embryogenesis of the Revolution. What progress, indeed, what idea do we not owe to them?

The development of the economic forces, among the first rank of which the collective forces are to be found;

The discovery of the social power in the relation of all these forces;

The rationality of forms of government, varying according to race, soil, climate, industry, the relative importance of the constituent elements serving to mark the political centre of gravity in each country;

The idea of universal solidarity or humanitarian force, sometimes emerging from the struggle of States, sometimes from their agreement;

The idea of a balance of economic and social forces, attempted in the name of a balance of powers;

The development of right, the highest expression of man and society;

A greater understanding of history, to resume the perspective of this physiology of the collective being; so many centuries of a civilisation that was seemingly negative, because it was the enemy of equality, becoming centuries of affirmation, demonstrating the genesis and equilibrium of forces:

Here are what philosophical thought discovers underneath the revolutions and cataclysms; here, for the constitution of the order to come, the fruit of so many sorrows and disappointments.

Q.—It is perpetual peace which you announce after so many others. But do you not think that war, having its principle in the unsoundable abysses of the human heart, the war that all religions commend, that nothing is enough to engage, like the duel, is incoercible, indestructible?

A.—War, in the person of which the Christian worships the judgement of God, which some so-called rationalists attribute to the ambition of princes and popular passions, is caused by the imbalance of economic forces and the insufficiency of the statutory, civil, public and popular law that serves as a rule. Any nation in which economic balance is violated, the forces of production constituted as a monopoly, and public authority given over to the discretion of exploiters is, ipso facto, a nation at war with the remainder of mankind. The very principle of monopolisation and inequality that presided over its political and economic constitution pushes it to the monopolisation, per fas et nefas,⁶⁰³ of all the globe’s wealth, to the subjugation of all peoples: no truth in the world is better established. Let balance be established, let Justice arrive, and all war is impossible. There is no more force to sustain it; it would imply an action of nothingness upon reality, a contradiction.

Q.—You explain everything by collective forces, by their diversity and inequality, by their alienation, by the conflict to which this alienation gives rise, by their imperceptible but ultimately victorious tendency, via the influence of an indefectible Justice, to equilibrium. What share of influence over human events do you attribute to the initiative of heads of State, to their councils, their geniuses, their virtues, and their crimes? What part, in a word, is played by free will?

A.—It is a priest who said that man acts and God disposes. Man is the absolute power, inexperienced, blind man, to whom is promised empire over the earth; God is the social legislation that directs this untamed will without its knowledge, enlightening it little by little, and finally recreating it in its own likeness. Human action in history is thus, initially, force, spontaneity, combat; then recognition of the law that it enacts, and that is nothing other than the balancing of its freedom, i.e., Justice. In its struggles, the free being expresses, by its oscillations, the formula of its movement; it is this formula that constitutes civilisation and takes the place of providence for us: here is all the mystery. May the day come when all this governmental crew that swarms in the darkness shall disappear.

Q.—What is theocracy?

A.—A symbolic of the social force.

Among all people, the feeling of this force caused national religion to emerge, under the influence of which domestic religions, little by little, disappeared. Everywhere, the god was this collective force, personified and adored under a mystical name. The religion thus serving as a basis for government and Justice, logic dictated that theology would become the heart of politics, that consequently the Church would take the place of the State, the priesthood that of the noble, and the sovereign pontiff that of the emperor or king. Such is the theocratic idea. A product of Christian spiritualism, its appearance awaited the moment when, all nations meeting under a common law, the things of heaven would gain preponderance over the things of the earth in our souls. But it was the dream of a moment, an attempt aborted as soon as it was conceived, which was to always remain in a theoretical state. The Church, placing the reality of its ideal in heaven, above and apart from the social community, consequently denied the immanence of a force in this community, just as it denied in man the immanence of Justice; and it is this force, of which princes remained only the agents and instruments, that gave the Church its exclusionary status.

Q.—What improvement did Christianity bring to the government of peoples?

A.—None: it did nothing but change the protocol. The ancient noble, patrician, warrior or sheikh asserted his usurpation by virtue of necessity; the noble Christian asserts it in the name of Providence. For the first, nobility was a fact of nature; for, second; it is a fact of grace. But for both of these, royalty supported noble privilege, religion consecrated it. Wherefore the claims of the catholic Church to sovereignty, and its attempt at theocracy, vigorously repressed by the princes, and soon abandoned by the theologians themselves. A transaction intervened: the separation of spiritual and temporal was set up in axiom of public law; a new leaven of discord was thrown among the nations. Half pagan, half Christian, politics carried tyranny in its train; Justice was sacrificed and freedom compromised more than ever.

INSTRUCTION IV

Constitution of Social Power by the Revolution

Q.—In what terms has the Revolution expressed itself on the reality of social power?

A.—No express declaration exists in this respect. However, as much as the Revolution finds repugnant the ancient mysticism that placed Justice and power in heaven, it also finds insufficient the nominalism that followed it, which tends to make the collective being and the power that is in it, like Justice, words, concepts. There is not a single idea, not a single act of the Revolution that can be explained through this metaphysics. All that it produced, all that it promises, would be a castle in the air and another illusory transcendence if it did not presuppose in society an effectivity of power, consequently a reality of existence that is assimilated to all creation, to all being. In any case, the silence of the Revolution as to the nature of power pertains only to the first two acts of this great drama: aren’t we, today, especially since 1848, in the midst of an eruption of revolutionary ideas? And don’t science and philosophy join with induction to confirm our thesis?

Q.—In the absence of texts, can you give your reasons?

A.—Science says to us that any body is a composite the final elements of which no analysis can find, held to one another by an attraction, a force.

What is force? It is, like substance, like the atoms it holds grouped together, a thing inaccessible to the senses, that the intelligence grasps only through its manifestations, as the expression of a relationship.

RELATIONSHIP: here, in the last analysis, is that to which all phenomenality, all reality, all force, all existence is referred. Just as the idea of being encompasses that of force and relation, in the same way that of relation inexorably presupposes force and substance, becoming and being. So that everywhere where the mind grasps a relation, experience discovering nothing else, we must conclude from this relation the presence of a force, and consequently a reality.

The Revolution denies divine right, in other words, the supernatural origin of social power. That means, in theory, that if a being does not have its power to be in itself, it cannot be; in fact, that the power which is detected in society having human relations for expression, its nature is human; consequently that the collective being is not a phantom, an abstraction, but an existence.

Confronted with divine right, the Revolution thus posits the sovereignty of the people, the unity and the indivisibility of the Republic. Meaningless words, fit only to serve as a mask for the most appalling tyranny, and sooner or later contradicted by events, if they do not refer to the higher organisation, formed by the relation of industrial groups, and with the commutative power that results from it.

The Revolution, renewing civil right as well as political right, places in labour, and in labour alone, the justification for property. It denies that property founded on man’s arbitrary whim and considered as manifestation of pure ego is legitimate. This is why it abolished ecclesiastical property, which was not founded on work, and why, before the new régime, it turned the priest’s benefice into wages.⁶⁰⁴ However, what is property, thus balanced by work and legitimated by right? The realisation of individual power. But the social power is composed of all the individual powers: of which it also expresses a subject. The Revolution could not affirm its realism more energetically.

Under the regime of divine right, the law is a commandment: it does not have its principle in man. The Revolution, in the person of Montesquieu, one of its fathers, changes this concept: it defines the law as the relation of things,⁶⁰⁵ and with stronger reason, as the relation of persons, i.e., of faculties or functions, giving birth to the social being through their co-ordination.

Turning to the matter of government, the Revolution says formally that it must be made up according to the double principle of the division of powers and their balance. However, what is the division of powers? The same thing as what the economists call division of labour, which is nothing more than a particular aspect of the collective force. As to the balance of powers, a subject otherwise little understood, I need say only that it is the condition of existence for organised beings, for which the absence of balance entails disease and death.

It is useless to recount the more or less regular steady stream of acts accomplished since 1789 under the terms of this revolutionary ontology: administrative centralisation, unification of weights and measurements, the creation of the general ledger, the foundation of the centralised school system, the establishment of the Bank of France, the amalgamation, under our very eyes, of the railroad systems in preparation for their operation by the State and their conversion into a system of workers’ associations. All these facts, and many others, testify to the realistic thought that governs our public law. Thanks to all these achievements, France has become a great organism, whose power of assimilation would sweep the world, were it not corrupted by those who exploit and govern it.

Q.—Why, for seventy years, has the application of these ideas made so little progress? Why, instead of the free State, identical and adequate to society itself, have we preserved the feudal, royal, imperial, military, dictatorial State?

A.—That is due to two causes, henceforth easy to appreciate: one is that the balance of products and services did not cease to be a desideratum of economy; the other, that the appropriation of the collective forces was maintained, even extended, as if by natural right.

From this follows the whole series of inevitable consequences: in the nation, the conservation of the old prejudice in favour of the inequality of conditions and fortunes, formation of a capitalist feudality in the place of the feudality of the nobles, a recrudescence of the ecclesiastical spirit and a return to the practices of divine right; in government, the substitution of a seesaw system for the balance of forces, a concentration leading to despotism, a monstrous development of the military and police forces, the continuation of machiavellian politics, the destruction of Justice by raison d’État, and, to conclude, increasingly frequent revolutions.

Q.—What is it that you call the seesaw system?

A.—The seesaw, also called doctrine,⁶⁰⁶ is in politics what the theory of Malthus is in economics. Just as the Malthusians claim to establish balance in the population by mechanically blocking the generative function, in the same way the doctrinaires make the balance of power by transpositions of majority, electoral manipulations, corruption, terrorism. The constitutional machine, such as we have seen it function since 1791, with its distinctions of Upper House and Lower Chamber, legislative and executive power, upper classes and middle classes, large and small colleges, responsible ministers and irresponsible royalty, is inevitably a seesaw system.

Q.—One could not better explain, in relation to the reality of the social being, the inmost thought of the Revolution. But the Revolution is also freedom, that above all: in this system of balances, what becomes of it?

A.—This question brings back to us to that of weighting forces which we have just raised.

Just as several men, by grouping their efforts, produce a force of collectivity, superior in quality and intensity to the sum of their respective forces, in the same way, several labouring groups, placed in a relation of exchange, generate a power of a higher order, which we have specifically considered as being social power.

For this social power to act in its plenitude, for it to yield all the fruit that its nature promises, it is necessary that the forces or functions of which it is composed should be in balance. However, this balance cannot be the effect of an arbitrary determination; it must result from the balancing of forces acting on one another with complete freedom and equalising one another. Which presupposes that the balance or proportional mean of each force being known, everyone, individuals and groups, will accept this as the measure of its right and subject himself to it.

Thus public order results from the citizen’s reason; thus this social sovereignty, which initially seemed to us to be the resultant of individual and collective forces, presents itself now in the form of an expression of their freedom and their justice, the attributes par excellence of the moral being.

This is why the Revolution, abolishing the corporative regime, the privileges of mastery and the entire feudal hierarchy, declared the principle of public right to be the freedom of industry and trade; therefore it raised above all councils of State, above all parliamentary and ministerial deliberations, the freedom of the press, universal control, and proclaimed, by instituting the jury, the jurisdiction of the citizen over any individual and any thing.

Freedom was nothing: it is everything, since order results from its balancing by itself.

Q.—If freedom is everything, in what does government consist?

A.—For us to form an idea of it, let us look at it from the point of view of the budget, and posit a principle.

The government has the aim of protecting freedom and making sure that Justice is observed. However, by their nature, freedom and Justice tend to be gratuitous: they take care of themselves, so to speak. Just as work, exchange, and credit have only to be defended against the parasites who, under the pretext of protecting and representing them, absorb them.

What does freedom of trade cost? Nothing; perhaps a supplement of expenses for the maintenance of the markets, ports, roads, channels, railroads, moved by the larger multitude of the merchants.

What does freedom of industry cost, the freedom of the press, all freedoms? Again, nothing, if not some measurements of order relating to statistics, improvement and patents, royalties, etc

In two words, the old State, by the anomaly of its position, tends to complicate its mechanisms, which means increasing its expenses indefinitely; the new one, by its liberal nature, tends to reduce them indefinitely: such is the difference between them, expressed in budgetary language.

Thus, to have a government that is free, reasonable, and cheap, it is enough to simply cut off, reduce, or modify all the articles in the current budget that are contrary to the principles here established. That is the whole system: there is nothing else to be concerned with.

Q.—Give an outline of the new budget.

A.—Let us suppose the Revolution to have been accomplished, peace with the outside world assured by the federation of peoples, stability guaranteed to the interior by the balance of values and services, by the organisation of labour, and by the restoration of the people to ownership of its own collective forces.

National debt—Nothing. It would imply a contradiction, in a society where services are balanced, fortunes levelled, credit organised on the principle of reciprocity, to suppose that the State should contract debts, as if this society had at its disposal anything but its means of production and its products. No one can become his own lender, otherwise than by labour. What the old government is unable to do, the new democracy shall do always: it shall provide for its non-recurring expenses [dépenses extraordinaires] by a non-recurring effort [travail extraordinaire]. Justice demands it, and it will never cost a quarter of what the capitalists demand.

Pensions—Nothing. Any individual, whatever category of service to which he may belong, has a life-long duty to work, except in case of disease, infirmity, or mutilation. In this case, his subsistence is regulated by the law of general insurance and carried by the account of his corporation.

Civil list⁶⁰⁷—Nothing.

Senate—Nothing. The duality of chambers is a product of class distinctions, or, what amounts to the same thing, to the divergence of interests, marked by these two terms: labour and capital. In democracy, these two interests are fused. The senate, an inert body in the empire, would be an insult to the Republic.

Council of State—Nothing. The function of the Council of State is absorbed by the legislative Body and the ministers.

Legislative body, or assembled representatives: this costs approximately two million today. Let us accept this figure.

Beside the legislative body will be created an office of jurisprudence, a bureau of historical, legal, economic, political, statistical information, to enlighten the representatives in their work. The supreme court of appeal belongs to this office. Expense to be added to the preceding.

Thus, since the national debt, consolidated and lifelong, forming, along with the expenses of war, the police force, the dynasty, and the aristocracy, the most unproductive part of the budget, is approximately 1,000 million to 1,200 million, one can judge, by this economy, what an ordering power there is in freedom and Justice.

Ministers’ service—The legislative power is not distinguished from the executive power. Representatives of the nation, being deputy chiefs of the various public services, industrial groups, corporations and all territorial districts, are, by this fact, real ministers.

These ministers, amongst whom the parliamentary monarchy had such difficulty maintaining agreement, although their number did not exceed seven or eight, now numbering two hundred and fifty or three hundreds, bearing all the titles of their respective and perpetually revocable categories, form, by their meeting, a national convention, the Council of Ministers, a Council of State, a legislature, a sovereign court. As for their agreement, notwithstanding the heat of the deliberations, it is guaranteed by that of the same interests as they represent.

Q.—And what guarantees the agreement of interests?

A.—As we have already said, their mutual weighting.

Q.—Will you pass on to the budget ministries?

A.—The expenditure of the ministries is of two species, according to whether they belong to the overheads of the nation, or that they must be brought back to the service of which the minister, or deputy, is the body. In the first case, they must be charged to the budget of the State: such are the expenditure of the legislative Body itself, of the monuments; in the second, they fall to the charge of the territorial groups, corporations and districts: such are the expenditure of the railroads, the budget of the communes, etc.

This distinction having been established, one can proceed to the ruling.

Justice—The legal hierarchy reduced to its simplest expression the jury organised for civil as well as for criminal [law], the court expenses are composed: 1^st, the salary of the judge directing the hearings and applying the law; 2^nd, that of the bodies of the public ministry, charged to supervise the observation of the laws throughout the country. The first is the responsibility of the communes which choose the judge; the second is carried by the budget of the State.

Interior—Joined together, part with the public ministry, which supervises but does not manage; part with the municipalities, part with other ministries.

Police force—On the charge of the localities.

Worship—Nothing. No more Church, no more temples. Justice is the apotheosis of humanity. The old budget for worship passes to the medical service and state education.

State education—Partly to the charge of the localities, partly to the charge of the State.

Finances—Joined with the central bank.

Tax collection—The creation of public warehouses in the cantons and districts for the regularisation of markets will make it possible to receive everywhere tax or revenue in kind, which means revenue in labour, of all the forms of taxation the cheapest, the least vexatious, that which tends least to inequality of distribution and exaggeration of demands.

It is useless to push these details further. Each can take the pleasure of doing so and judging for himself, by making the critique of the budget, what would become of government in a nation like France if this great principle were applied to it, at once a moral principle, a governmental principle, and a principle of taxation: That Justice and freedom subsist in themselves, that they are essentially free, and that they tend in all their operations to suppress their protectors as well as their enemies.

INSTRUCTION V

Question of the Agenda

Q.—What would you do on the day after a revolution?

A.—It is useless to repeat it. The principles of the economic and political constitution of society are known: that is enough. It is up to the people, to its representatives, to do what they must, taking account of the circumstances.

From time immemorial, the question of the day after the revolution worried the old parties, whose every thought is to stop the cataclysm, as they say, by taking the side of the fire. It is to this end that for six years, issues of aristocratic, catholic, dynastic, even republican publications have appeared, whose authors ask nothing better than to pass for enemies of despotism and devoted to freedom. It would be most naïve to take such proclamations for models, and to play at formulating programs. Let the people be penetrated by the meaning and scope of this word, Justice, and take it into hand: there is its day after the revolution. As to its execution: the idea having been acquired, execution shall be infallible.

Q.—What do you think of dictatorship?

A.—What good is it? If the purpose of dictatorship is to found equality by principles and institutions, it is useless: one does not need for that anything other than the 20 districts of Paris supported by the people of the 86 departments, achieving their mandate in three times twenty-four hours. If, on the contrary, the only end of dictatorship is to avenge insults to the party, to rein in the rich and subdue a frivolous multitude, then it is tyranny: we have nothing more to say about it.

Dictatorship has enjoyed popular acclaim at all times; it does so now more than ever. It is the secret dream of some lunatics, the most extreme argument that democracy can provide for the conservation of the imperial mode.

Q.—What is your opinion on universal suffrage?

A.—As all constitutions have established it since ’89, universal suffrage is the strangulation of the public conscience, the suicide of popular sovereignty, the apostasy of the Revolution. Such a system of votes can well, on the occasion, and despite all the precautions taken against it, give a negative vote to power, as did the last Parisian vote (1857): it is unable to produce an idea. To make the vote for all intelligent, moral, democratic, it is necessary, for having organised the balance of services and having ensured, by free discussion, the independence of the votes, to make the citizens vote by categories of functions, in accordance with the principle of the collective force which forms the basis of society and the State.

Q.—What will be the foreign policy?

A.—It is very simple. The Revolution must spread around the world: peoples depend upon one another, as do industrial groups and individuals in the State. As long as its balance has not globally established, the Revolution may be in danger.

Q.—Will the Revolution, presumably made in Paris or Berlin, declare war on the whole world?

A.—The Revolution does not act in the manner of the old governmental, aristocratic or dynastic principles. It is right, balance of forces, equality. It recognises neither cities nor races. It has no conquests to pursue, nations to subjugate, borders to defend, fortresses to build, army to feed, laurels to gather, hegemony to maintain. Its policy toward the outside consists in preaching by example. If it is realised in one place the world shall follow it. The power of its economic institutions, the gratuity of its credit, the brilliance of its thought, are enough for it to convert the universe.

Q.—The old society will not yield without resistance: who are the natural allies of the Revolution?

A.—Any alliance of a people with another people is given by the idea or the interest that dominates it. Is it capital that governs? then we have the English alliance; despotism? then we have the Russian alliance; the dynastic spirit? then we have the Spanish marriages and the wars of succession. The Revolution has for its allies all those who suffer oppression and exploitation: let it appear, and the universe will open its arms.

Q.—What do you think of the European balance of power?

A.—A glorious notion of Henri IV’s,⁶⁰⁸ of which only the Revolution can give the true formula. It is universal federalism, the supreme guarantee of all freedom and rights, and which must, without soldiers or priests, replace Christian and feudal society.

Q.—Federalism finds little favour in France; couldn’t you render your idea in a different way?

A.—To change the names of things is to compromise with error. No matter what Jacobin prudence says, the true obstacle to despotism is in the federative union. How did the kings of Macedonia become masters of Greece? By being declared heads of the amphictyonie,⁶⁰⁹ i.e. in substituting themselves for the confederation of the Hellenic peoples. Why, after the fall of the Roman Empire, did not catholic Europe be reformed into only one State? Because the foremost thought of the invasion was independence, i.e. the negation of unity. Why has Switzerland remained a republic? Because it is, like the United States, a confederation. What was the Convention itself? Its name proves it, a federative assembly. What is true of States, is, by equal reason, true of the cities and districts of the same State: federalism is the political form of humanity.

Q.—In this federation, where the city is equal to the province, the province equal to the empire, the empire equal to the continent, where all groups are politically equal, what becomes of nationalities?

A.—Nationalities will be all the better assured in so far as the federative principle will have received a more complete application. In this respect, one can say that for thirty years, public opinion has gone astray.

The feeling for one’s country is like that for the family, for territorial possession, for the industrial corporation, an indestructible element of the conscience of the people. We might even say, if need be, that the concept of homeland [patrie] implies that of independence and sovereignty, so that the two terms, State and Nation, are adequate one with the other and can be regarded as synonyms. But it is far from the recognition of nationalities to the idea using them for certain restorations [then it] becomes useless, not to say dangerous.

What is today called the re-establishment of Poland, of Italy, of Hungary, of Ireland, is nothing else, at bottom, than the unitary constitution of vast territories, on the model of the great powers whose centralisation so heavily weighs on the people; it is monarchical imitation to the profit of the democratic ambition; it is not freedom, much less progress. Those who call so loudly for the restoration of these national units have little taste for personal freedoms. Nationalism is the pretext which they use to dodge the economic revolution. They pretend not to see that it is politics that subjugated the nations that they claim today to emancipate. Why, thus, should these nations undergo the same ordeal under the flag of raison d’État? Would the Revolution amuse itself, like the first Emperor Napoléon, by carving and re-carving the Germanic Confederation, altering political agglomerations, making Poland or Italy unitary? The Revolution, in rendering men equal and free by the balance of forces and of services, precludes these immense agglomerations, the objects of potentates’ ambitions, but for the peoples, pledges of an inescapable servitude.

Q.—Is there any hope of dislodging the dynastic principle?

A.—Certainly, the world up to now did not believe that freedom and dynasty were incompatible things. The old French monarchy, convening the Estates General, engaged the Revolution; the constitution of 1791, imposed by the French National Assembly, the charter of 1814,⁶¹⁰ imposed by the Senate, that of 1830, corrected by the 221,⁶¹¹ testify to the country’s desire to reconcile the monarchical principle with democracy. The nation found in it various advantages: one reconciled, so it seemed, tradition with progress; one satisfied the habits of command, the need for unity; one entreated the danger of presidencies, dictatorships, oligarchies. When, in 1830, Lafayette ⁶¹² defined the new order of things as a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions, he conceived what analysis has revealed to us, the identity of the political order and the economic order. The true republic consisting in the balance of forces and services, one was pleased to see a young dynasty maintaining this balance and guaranteeing its accuracy. Finally, the example of England, although equality is unknown there, and that of the new constitutional States, give fresh support to this theory.

Undoubtedly, in France, the alliance of the dynastic principle with freedom and equality did not yield the fruit that was expected from it; but this was the fault of governmental fatalism!: the error here was shared by the princes and the nation. Moreover, though the dynastic parties had shown themselves unfavourable to the Revolution since 1848, the force of things brings it back; and as France, whatever its fortunes, always liked to give itself a Premier, to mark its unity by a symbol, it would be exaggeration to deny the possibility of a dynastic restoration. How we have heard the republicans say: “He shall be my prince who shall raise the flag of freedom and equality!” And they are neither the least pure nor the least intelligent; it is true that they do not aspire to dictatorship.

However, it should be recognised that if the dynastic principle can still play some minor part, it is only as an instrument of transition from the political regime to the economic regime. As of now, one could not deny that it is considerably diminished. The constitutional system, the condition sine qua non of modern royalty, destroyed the prestige of monarchy. The crowned head of State is no longer a true king; he is a mediator between parties. What need will there be of one when balance in the State will come of its own accord by virtue of the very fact of the balance of economic forces? The kings themselves are no longer taken seriously: they are no longer the personification of their people. The posterity of kings may return, we know in advance under what conditions, the royalty never. It is no longer even a myth: Non datur regnum aut imperium in œconomia.⁶¹³

Q.—And of the parliamentary system what do you forecast?

A.—In spite of its preceding ambiguities, the seesawing that so long dishonoured it pertained to purely economic causes, its reappearance is inevitable. The Parliament has become a form of French thought: it will survive all the dynasties. The economic revolution, by constituting social power according to true principles, will perhaps modify parliamentary manners; it will not repeal the institution. Languages and the geniuses of languages vary; eloquence clothes itself in forms more or less happy: the word is as irremovable as the thought.

Q.—What was, until now, the greatest act of the Revolution?

A.—It was neither the Tennis Court Oath, nor August 4^th, nor the Constitution of ’91, nor the jury, nor January 21, nor the Republican calendar, nor the system of weights and measures, nor the Great Book of the Public Debt:⁶¹⁴ it was the decree of the Convention of November 10, 1793, instituting the worship of Reason. This decree issued in the senatus-consultum of February 17^th, 1810 which, by joining the Papal States to the Empire, tore up the pact of Charlemagne for all of Europe.⁶¹⁵

Q.—What will be the greatest act of the Revolution in the future?

A.—The demonetisation of silver, the last idol of the Absolute.

Q.—The Republic once having been organised according to principles of economy and right, do you believe the State secure against all agitation, corruption and catastrophe?

A.—Undoubtedly, since, thanks to universal balance, it is impossible for a single living soul to appropriate, by violence or by rhetoric, the labour of any [other], the credit and the force of all, the pretext, the cause, and the means lacking for an 18^th Brumaire, a December 2^nd, the political edifice can no longer deviate from its upright position: it is firmly seated, it has conquered what it lacked before, stability.

Q.—Humanity is, above all, passionate! How shall it live when it no longer has either a prince to lead it to war, nor priests to assist it in piety, nor great men to maintain it in admiration, nor the corrupt nor the poor to excite its sensibilities, nor prostitutes to appease its lust, nor wandering minstrels to make it laugh with their cacophonies and platitudes?

A.—It shall do what Genesis says, what the philosopher Martin in [Voltaire’s] Candide recommends: it shall cultivate its garden. The tilling of the soil, formerly the role of the slave, becomes the first among arts as it is first among industries, man’s life shall pass in the calm of the senses and the serenity of the spirit.

Q.—When shall this Utopia be realised?

A.—As soon as the idea is popularised.

Q.—But how to popularise the idea if the bourgeoisie remains hostile; if the people, made stupid by servitude, full of prejudices and bad instincts, remain sunken in indifference; if the pulpit, the academy, the press, calumniate you; if the courts prevail; if power silences you? For the nation to become revolutionary, it would have to have been revolutionised already. Shouldn’t we conclude from it, with the old democrats, that the Revolution must start with the government?

A.—Such is, indeed, the circle in which progress seems to turn and which today serves the purely political reformers as a pretext: “First, make the Revolution,” they say, “after which everything else will be cleared up.” As if the Revolution itself could be made without ideas! But let us be reassured: just as the lack of ideas dooms the most beautiful parties, the war on ideas only serves to postpone the Revolution. Don’t you see already that the mode of authority, inequality, predestination, eternal salvation and raison d’État, becomes every day, for the affluent classes whose conscience and reason it torments, even more unbearable than it is for the plebeians whose stomachs it makes cry out? From whence we will conclude that what is most certain is to keep to the word of the royal jester: What would you do, my lord, if, when you said yes, everyone else said no?⁶¹⁶ To midwife this No from the multitude is the task of all good citizens and men of spirit.

Q.—Do you concede that insurrection is the first among rights, the holiest of duties?

A.—I concede nothing: I say that it is absurd to place a guarantee which is always lacking at the moment when it is claimed in a political constitution. When the ideas are raised, the paving stones will lift themselves, unless the government does not have enough good sense not to await them.

Q.—What of tyranny and tyrannicide?

A.—We will speak of it elsewhere: it is not a matter for the catechism.

Q.—But what! if so many threatened interests, so many offended convictions, so many kindled hatreds finally had the courage to resolutely will what they will, i.e., the extinction of revolutionary thought, couldn’t it come about that right would be definitively overcome by force?

A.—Yes, if!… But this if is an impossible condition. For that, it would be necessary to stop the movement of the human spirit. You can find, whenever you like, four rascals willing to act in concert for the purpose of market speculation; I defy you to form an assembly that decrees theft. In the same way you can, by laws concerning the press, forbid such and such a discussion: you will never decree lies.

Against all the forces of the reaction, against its metaphysics, its Machiavellianism, its religion, its courts, its soldiers, the sheer protest that it carries with it would suffice as a last resort. The same humanity produced, at various times, religious conscience and free conscience. Was it not the emigration that brought back freedom in 1814? All the same, if we fail at our task, the conservatives of today would be the revolutionaries of tomorrow. But let us not be reduced to this; the idea makes its way in the world, and the right of sanction and revenge does not appear close to perishing from among men.