TO SOME WORKERS FROM PARIS

AND ROUEN WHO HAD SOUGHT HIS VIEWS OF THE ELECTIONS

December 1864

Citizens and friends,

THIS ESSAY HAS BEEN INSPIRED BY YOURSELVES; IT BELONGS TO YOU.

Ten months ago you asked me what my thoughts were regarding the electoral Manifesto issued by sixty workers from the [department of the] Seine. You were primarily interested in knowing whether, having cast a negative vote in the 1863 elections, you should abide by that line or whether, in the light of circumstances, it was legitimate for you to throw your votes and your influence behind the candidacy of a comrade deserving of your sympathy.

As to the thinking behind the Manifesto, my opinion could scarcely have been in doubt and, in acknowledging receipt of your letters, I told you so frankly. Certainly, I was delighted at this awakening of Socialism; and who but I in the whole of France would have had more right to rejoice at it?… Moreover, I was in agreement with you and with the Sixty that the working class is not represented and that it is entitled to be: how could I possibly have thought otherwise? Today as in 1848, would not worker representation, if such a thing were possible, amount to, in political and economic terms, a formal affirmation of socialism?

But I made no bones about there being, in my view, a huge gulf between this and participation in elections, which would have signed away, along with its democratic conscience, its principles and its future… And let me add that that reservation, which you welcomed to a man, has since been confirmed by experience.

Where is the French Democracy, once so proud and pure, which, on the reassurances of a few ambitious men, suddenly imagined that it was about to stride from victory to victory on the basis of a false pledge? What gains have we made? By what brand new and mighty idea has our politics distinguished itself? Eighteen months on, what success has flagged up the forcefulness of our advocates and rewarded their palaver? Have we not been witness to their perpetual defeats and shortcomings? Gulled by their hollow parliamentarism, have we not seen them, on nearly every issue, routed by the Government’s speakers? And quite recently, when hauled before the courts on charges of unwarranted association and assembly and required to explain themselves to the Country and to the Powers that be, have they not been confounded by the very legality into which they invited us and as whose spokesmen they posed? What pathetic scheming! Such an even more pathetic defence! I will leave it to you to judge ... Finally, after all the noisy debates, are we in a position to deny that, at bottom, our representatives have no other ideas, tendencies or policies to offer than the Government’s policies, tendencies and ideas?

So, thanks to them, the game is up for the young democracy just as it is for the elderly liberalism to which they would hitch it: the world is beginning to slip away from them both. Truth, it is said, and righteousness and liberty, are no more on their side than on any other.

The issue, then, is to disclose to the world, on the basis of authentic testimony, the thinking, the true thinking of modern folk: to legitimise their reforming aspirations and entitlement to sovereignty. Universal suffrage, fact or fiction? Once again, the preoccupation has been with restricting it and the fact is that very few, outside of the labouring classes, take it seriously.

The point is to show the labour Democracy which, for want of sufficient self-awareness and an inadequate appreciation of its Idea, has lent the backing of its votes to names that do not represent it, on what conditions a party ventures into political life; how, in a nation, the upper class having lost its grasp on and leadership of the movement, it falls to the lower class to pick up the baton and how a people incapable of self-regeneration by means of such an orderly succession is doomed to perish. The issue, dare I say it?, is to get it through to the French plebes that if, in 1869, it sets its sights on winning yet another battle on behalf of its masters, like the one it won for them in 1863–64, its emancipation may be postponed by a half a century.

For—do not doubt this, my friends—protests registered in the form of blank ballot papers are badly misunderstood and not welcomed, but still cause the public some unease and the political world everywhere has started to engage in: this declaration of utter incompatibility between an outmoded system and our most cherished aspirations: this stoic veto, finally, which we pronounced upon presumptuous candidacies, was nothing less than a heralding of a new order of things, our self-possession as the party of righteousness and freedom, a solemn registration of our entry into political life and, if I may make so bold, a signalling to the old world of its imminent and inevitable downfall…

I had undertaken, citizens, to explain myself to you on these matters; I have now honoured that promise. Do not judge this essay by its extent, which I might have reduced to forty pages; you will find herein but one idea, the IDEA of the new Democracy. But I thought it useful to present that Idea through a series of examples, so that friend and foe may know once and for all what it is that we seek and with whom they are dealing.

Receive, citizens and friends, my fraternal greetings,

P-J PROUDHON