Within the body of socialist literature, only Georg Lukacs’ Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Berlin, 1923), R. H. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society (London, 1921), and Henri de Man’s Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (Jena, 1926) have tried to discuss fundamental questions in a manner worthy of a political movement of the scope and aspirations of twentieth century socialism. These were perhaps the last works of socialist theory which were at the level of the best political and social-philosophical discussion of the time. It also may be mentioned that Lukacs and de Man were both severely criticized in their respective parties for their intellectual independence.
There are probably many causes for this evaporation of ethical ardor from socialist literature. The split between the Communists and Social Democrats which broke the discipline of practical judgment over the apocalyptic fanaticism of the extreme left and which withdrew from the former the stimulus which the latter provided is undoubtedly one of the most important factors. The deflation of socialism through the use of welfare and full employment measures by professional politicians and administrators, the check imposed by considerations of Soviet foreign policy on the excited sense of glory and immiment expectations which flourished in the first years of the Communist International, the general growth of hedonism and the further penetration of secularism, the continued expansion of bureaucracy in trades unions and left wing parties, and the growth in the size of the left parties with the consequent adulteration of membership, the internal development and wider diffusion of academic social science have all contributed to this result. But the detailed examination of this problem must be left for another occasion.
Sorel, who was most influenced in this regard by Proudhon and Le Play, differed from most of his socialist contemporaries by his deliberate conservatism concerning the family and his insistence on the value of tradition. But even among those of more radical and even bohemian tendencies, there was little ethical indifference. Emancipation in sexual relations was for the latter a positive ethical value, not just a morally neutral private affair to be settled in the light of personal taste or convenience.
Sorel regarded calculation of consequences as irrelevant for the determination of the ethical value of an action. Thus he was of the view that an aggressive bourgeoisie, proud, confident of its future and convinced of its calling, would constitute a moral improvement in our society. He explicitly excluded expectations of economic or political advantage from the merits of his own revolutionary tactics and strategy. And even his argument that the ethic of revolutionary violence would still be required in a socialist society, because it is the only admissible ethic and because it would, as a result of workshop solidarity and pride, improve production, seems definitely to regard increased output and the material gains as subordinate ends. The superiority of socialism for Sorel rested very clearly in the intrinsic ethical superiority of the actions and institutions which characterize the socialist society: small autonomous groups of producers, proud of their work, intensely solidary and free of egoism. The material advantages seem to be secondary. Incidentally, he hardly ever mentions poverty or material distress as a motive for socialism, and actually thought that poverty demoralizes those who suffer from it so that they are not morally qualified to be revolutionary socialists.
Sorel always emphasized his pessimism which he wished to contrast with the belief in inevitable progress and the innate goodness of man. But his pessimism did not imply man’s inevitable failure; it meant that the great obstacles presented by nature and society could be overcome only by heroic action. It meant also that man’s highest condition was not a state of harmony and ease. This was another of his points of difference from the main trends of European socialist thought.
Sorel was no sadist and no admirer of brutality. Violence without the charismatic excitement and the association with a sublime far-off end, was not regarded by him as genuine violence.
The first appendix, “Unity and Multiplicity,” was first published in the second edition (1910). The second appendix, “Apology for Violence,” was added to the third edition (1913) after having been published in Le Matin in 1908. The third appendix, “In Defense of Lenin,” was published in the fourth edition (1919). The first and third appendices are translated here for the first time.
His main books are: Contribution à l‘étude profane de la Bible (1889); Le Procès de Socrate (1889); La Ruine du monde antique (1898); Introduction à l’economie moderne (1903); Le Système historique de Renan (1906); La Decomposition du Marxisme (1908); Reflexions sur la violence (1908); Les Illusions du progrès (1908); La Revolution dreyfusienne (1909); Materiaux d‘une theorie du proletariat (1919), containing L’Avenir socialiste des Syndicats (1898); De l‘utilité du pragmatisme (1921); D’Aristotle à Marx: (L’ancienne et la nouvelle metaphysique) (1935). There is a bibliography of Sorel’s writings by Paul Delasalle, “Bibliographie Sorelienne,” in International Review for Social History, edited by The International Institute for Social History, Vol. IV (Leiden, 1939), pp. 463-487.
Sorel’s engineering and scientific training never led him into technocratic paths of thought. It is possible, however, that his studies at the École Polytechnique alienated him from the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne and intensified his conservative resentment against rationalistic politicians and professional intellectuals.
Oddly enough, it was only shortly after this that in his preface to Colajanni’s Le Socialisme (1900) he recommended that socialism should be transformed from sect to party, because sects incline towards violence, towards dictatorial solutions and towards self-isolation.
Its closest affinities in English-speaking countries were the bookish Guild Socialism in Great Britain, which took over its producers’ pluralism without its irrationalist violence, and the rough-handed Industrial Workers of the World in America, which adopted its violence as well as its antipathy towards political democracy and democratic politicians.
Sorel, while admiring its general readiness for violence, was not attracted by its main application in the form of sabotage. For him, sober application to the impersonal obligations of one’s task was an important part of the elevated ethic of the producers and was indispensable for the realization of socialism.
In the dedication to Materiaux d’une théorie du proletariat, prepared for publication in 1914, he describes himself as “a disinterested servant of the proletariat.”
Lewis, Wyndham, The Art of Being Ruled (London, 1926).
Cf. Hulme, T. E., Speculations (edited by Herbert Read) (London, 1924), Appendix A, “Reflections on Violence,” pp. 294-260. Hulme’s essay was originally intended to serve as an Introduction to the present translation, but I have been unable to find any edition in which it was printed.
A. Chuquet, Jean Jacques Rousseau, p. 179.
I recall here a phrase of Renan: “Reading, in order to be of any use, must be an exercise involving some effort” (Feuilles détachées, p. 231).
I think it may be interesting to quote here some reflections borrowed from an admirable book of Newman’s: “It will be our wisdom to avail ourselves of language, as far as it will go, but to aim mainly, by means of it, to stimulate in those to whom we address ourselves, a mode of thinking and trains of thought similar to our own, leading them on by their own independent action, not by any syllogistic compulsion. Hence it is that an intellectual school will always have something of an esoteric character; for it is an assemblage of minds that think, their bond is unity of thought, and their words become a sort of tessera, not expressing thought but symbolising it” (Grammar of Assent, p. 309). As a matter of fact, the schools have hardly ever resembled this ideal sketched out by Newman.
“The significant melancholy found in the masterpieces of Hellenic art prove that, even at that time, gifted individuals were able to peer through the illusions of life to which the spirit of their own surrendered itself without the slightest critical reflection” (Hartmann, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Eng. trans., vol. iii. p. 78; ii. p. 436).
I call attention to this view, which sees in the genius of the great Greeks a historical anticipation; few doctrines are more important for an understanding of history than that of anticipations, which Newman used in his researches on the history of dogmas.
Hartmann, loc. cit. vol. iii. p. 102.
The sham cries of despair which were heard at the beginning of the nineteenth century owed part of their success to the analogies of form which they presented to the real literature of pessimism.
Taine, Le Régime Moderne, vol. ii. pp. 121-122.
The Athenian comic poets have several times depicted a land of Cokaigne, where there was no need to work (A. and M. Croiset, Historie de la littérature Grecque, vol. iii. pp. 472-474).
Hartmann, loc. cit. p. 130. “Contempt for the world, combined with a transcendent life of the spirit, had, indeed, in India, already found a place in the esoteric doctrine of Buddhism. But this teaching was only within the reach of a narrow circle of celibate adepts; the outside world had only taken the ‘letter which kills,’ so that the thought only attained realisation in the eccentric phenomena of hermits and penitents” (p. 81).
Battifol, Études d’historie et de théologie positive, 2nd series, p. 162.
Hartmann, The Religion of the Future, Eng. trans., p. 23.
“At this epoch commenced the struggle between the Pagan love of life and the Christian hatred of this world and avoidance of it” (Hartmann, op. cit. p. 88). This pagan conception is to be found in liberal protestantism, and this is why Hartmann rightly considers it to be irreligious; but the men of the sixteenth century took a very different view of the matter.
If Socialism comes to grief it will evidently be in the same way, because it will have been alarmed at its own barbarity.
It seems to me that Pascal’s editors in 1670 must have been alarmed at his Calvinism. I am astonished that Sainte-Beuve should have said nothing more than that there “was in Pascal’s Christianity something which they could not understand, that Pascal had a greater need than they had of Christian faith” (Fort Royal, vol. iii. p. 383).
Cf. what I say about force in Chapter V.
I cannot succeed in finding the idea of international arbitration in fragment 296 of Pascal, where several people claim to have discovered it; in this paragraph Pascal simply points out the ridiculous aspect of the claim made in his time by every belligerent—to condemn the conduct of his adversary in the name of justice.
The petit Parisien, that one always quotes with pleasure as the barometer of democratic stupidity, tells us that “this scornful definition of the elegant and immoral M. de Morny—Republicans are people who dress badly—seems to-day altogether without any foundation.” I borrow this philosophical observation from an enthusiastic description of the marriage of the charming minister Clémentel (October 22, 1905). This well-informed newspaper has accused me of giving the workers hooligan advice (April 7, 1907).
“I have seen violence myself,” he told the Senate on November 16, 1906, “face to face. I have been, day after day, in the midst of thousands of men who bore on their faces the marks of a terrifying exaltation. I have remained in the midst of them, face to face and shoulder to shoulder.” He boasted that in the end he had triumphed over the strikers in the Creusot workshops.
In the course of the same speech, Viviani strongly insisted on his own Socialism, and declared that he intended “to remain faithful to the ideal of his first years of public life.” If we are to judge by a brochure in 1897 by the Allemanistes , under the title La Vérité sur l’union socialiste, this ideal was opportunism; when he left Algeria for Paris, Viviani was transformed into a Socialist, and the brochure then asserts that his new attitude is a lie. Evidently this work was edited by fanatics with no understanding of the manners of polite society.
[Allemanistes: this was the name given to the members of the “Revolutionary Socialist Workmen’s Party” because Allemane was the best-known member of the group. They did not wish (in principle at any rate) to admit any but workmen into the party; they were for a long time very hostile to the parliamentary Socialists. During the Dreyfus affair they went with the rest and demanded a retrial; to-day they have disappeared, but they had some influence in the formation of the Syndicalist idea.—Trans. Note.]
In the Introduction à l’économie moderne, I have given the word myth a more general sense, which closely corresponds to the narrower meaning given to it here.
P. Bureau, La Crise morale des temps nouveaux, p. 213. The author, a professor of the Institut Catholique de Paris, adds: “This recommendation can only excite hilarity nowadays. We are compelled to believe that the author’s curious proposition was then accepted by a large number of his correligionists, when we remember the astonishing success of the writings of Léo Taxil after his pretended conversion.”
The principal object of these illusions seems to me to have been the calming of the anxieties that Renan had retained on the subject of the beyond (cf. an article by Mgr. d’Hulst in the Correspondent on October 25, 1892, pp. 210, 224-225).
Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël, vol. iv. p. 191.
Renan, loc. cit. p. 267.
Renan, loc. cit. pp. 199-200.
Renan, op. cit. vol. iii. pp. 458-459.
Renan, op. cit. vol. v. pp. 105-106.
Renan, Nouvelles Études d‘histoire religieuse, p. vii. Previously he had said, speaking of the persecutions: “People die for opinions, and not for certitudes, because they believe and not because they know . . . whenever beliefs are in question the greatest testimony and the most efficacious demonstration is to die for them” (L’Église chrétienne, p. 317). This thesis presupposes that martyrdom is a kind of ordeal, which was partly true in the Roman epoch, by reason of certain special circumstances (G. Sorel, Le Système historique de Renan, p. 335).
Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israel, vol. iii. p. 497.
Translator’s Note.—In French, “braves gens.” Sorel is using the words ironically to indicate those naive, philanthropically disposed people who believe that they have discovered the solution to the problem of social reform—whose attitude, however, is often complicated by a good deal of hypocrisy, they being frequently rapacious when their own personal interests are at stake.
Parties, as a rule, define the reforms that they wish to bring about; but the general strike has a character of infinity, because it puts on one side all discussion of definite reforms and confronts men with a catastrophe. People who pride themselves on their practical wisdom are very much upset by such a conception, which puts forward no definite project of future social organisation.
The Constitution of Virginia dates from June 1776. The American constitutions were known in Europe by two French translations, in 1778 and 1789. Kant had published the Foundations of the Metaphysic of Custom in 1785 and the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788. One might say that the utilitarian system of the ancients has certain analogies with economics, that of the theologians with law, and that of Kant with the political theory of growing democracy (cf. Jellinck, La Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, trad. franc., pp. 18-25; pp. 49-50; p. 89).
Bergson, Time and Free Will, Eng. trans., pp. 231-232. In this philosophy a distinction is made between duration which flows, in which our personality manifests itself, and mathematical time, which science uses to measure and space out accomplished facts.
Bergson op. cit., Eng. trans., pp. 238-239.
E. Le Roy, Dogme et critique, p. 239.
It is easy to see here how the sophism creeps in; the universe experienced by us may be either the real world in which we live or the world invented by us for action.
Renan, op. cit., vol. iv. p. 329.
“Assent,” said Newman, “however strong, and accorded to images however vivid, is not therefore necessarily practical. Strictly speaking, it is not imagination that causes action; but hope and fear, likes and dislikes, appetite, passion, affection, the stirrings of selfishness and self-love. What imagination does for us is to find a means of stimulating those motive powers; and it does so by providing a supply of objects strong enough to stimulate them” (op. cit. p. 82). It may be seen from this that the illustrious thinker adopts an attitude which strongly resembles that of the theory of myths. It is impossible to read Newman without being struck by the analogies between his thought and that of Bergson: people who like to make the history of ideas depend on ethnical traditions will observe that Newman was descended from Israelites.
It was evidently a method of this kind that was adopted by those Greek philosophers who wished to be able to argue about ethics without being obliged to accept the customs which historical necessity had imposed at Athens.
Renan, op. cit. vol. iii. p. 497.
It is extremely important to notice the analogy between the revolutionary state of mind and that which corresponds to the morale of the producers. I have indicated some remarkable resemblances at the end of these reflections, but there are many more analogies to be pointed out.
I believe that Léon de Seilhac was the first to render justice to the high qualities of Fernand Pelloutier (Les Congres ouvriers en France, p. 272).
These Reflections were first published in the Mouvement Socialiste (first six months, 1906).
Cf. “Les Grèves” in the Science sociale, October-November 1900.
In the Insegnamenti sociali della economia contemporanea (written in 1903, but not published till 1906) I had already, but in a very inadequate manner, pointed out what seemed to me to be the function of violence, in maintaining the division between the proletariat and the middle classes (pp. 53-55).
This expression is not too strong, seeing that the author’s studies have been mainly confined to Hegel.
Ch. Rappoport, La Philosophie de l‘histoire comme science de l’évolution.
See note p. 13. Trans.
This expectation has been realised; for in a speech in the Chambre des Deputés on May 11, 1907, Jaurès called me “the metaphysician of Syndicalism,” doubtless ironically.
Capital, Eng. trans., p. xxvi.
Loc. cit. p. xvii.
Some Belgian comrades have been offended by these innocent jokes, which nevertheless I retain here; Belgian Socialism is best known in France through Vandevelde, one of the most useless creatures that ever existed, who not being able to console himself for having been born in a country too small to give scope to his genius, came to Paris and gave lectures on all kinds of subjects, and who can be reproached, among other things, for having made an enormous profit on a very small intellectual capital. I have already said what I think of him in the Introduction à l’économie moderne, pp. 42-49.
The last four chapters have been much more developed than they were in the Italian text. I have thus been able to give more space to philosophic considerations. The Italian articles have been collected in a brochure under the title Lo Sciopero generale e la violenza with a preface by Enrico Leone.
Bernstein complains of the pettifoggery and cant which reigns among the social democrats (Socialisme théorique et socialdémocratie pratique, French translation, p. 277). He addresses these words from Schiller to social democracy: “Let it dare to appear what it is” (p. 238).
Aristotle, Politics, v. 9, §§ 10, 11.
Engels, La Question agraire et le socialisme. critique du programme du parti ouvrier français, translated in the Mouvement socialiste. October 15, 1900, p. 453. It has often been pointed out that certain Socialist candidates had separate bills for the town and the country.
Hampered by the monopoly of the licensed stockbrokers (agents de change), the other brokers (coulissiers) of the Bourse thus form a financial proletariat, and among them more than one Socialist admirer of Jaurès may be found. [Trans. Note.—The coulissiers are only allowed to deal in certain markets—the Kaffir, Argentine, etc. They are constantly conducting press campaigns against the privileged brokers. Many of them are naturalised German Jews, and the licensed brokers utilise this fact in defending their own position.]
The Socialist deputy Sudekum, the best-dressed man in Berlin, played a large part in the abduction of the Princess of Coburg; let us hope that he had no financial interest in this affaire. At that time he represented Jaurès’s newspaper at Berlin.
H. Turot was for some considerable time one of the editors of the nationalist paper, L’Eclair, and of the Petite Republique at the same time. When Judet took over the management of L’Eclair he dismissed his Socialist contributor.
J. Reinach, Démagogues et soclalistes, p. 198.
Clémenceau knows the Socialists in Parliament exceedingly well, and from long experience.
At The Hague Conference the German delegate declared that his country bore the expense of armed peace with ease; Léon Bourgeois held that France bore “quite as lightly the personal and financial obligations which the national defence imposed on its citizens.” Ch. Guieysse, who quotes this speech, thinks that the Tsar had asked for the limitation of military expenditure because Russia was not rich enough yet to maintain herself at the level of the great capitalist countries (La France et la paix armée, p. 45).
That is why Briand told on June 9, 1907, his constituents at Saint-Etienne that the Republic had made a sacred pledge to the workers about old-age pensions.
In the matter of social “clowneries” there are very few new things under the sun. Aristotle had already laid down the rules of social peace: he says that demagogues “should in their harangues appear to be concerned only with the interest of the rich, just as in oligarchies the government should only seem to have in view the interests of the people” (loc. cit.). That is a text which should be inscribed on the door of the offices of the Direction du Travail.
Cf. G. Sorel, Insegnamenti sociali, p. 343.
In his speech of May 11, 1907, Jaurès said that nowhere had there been such violence as there was in England during the period when both the employers and Government refused to recognise the trade unions. “They have given way; there is now vigorous and strong action, but which is at the same time legal, firm, and wise.”
Le Play, Organisation du travail, chap. ii. § 21. According to this writer, more attention should be paid to moral forces than to the systems that are invented in order to regulate wages in a more or less automatic manner.
About the forces which tend to maintain sentiments of moderation, cf. Insegnamenti sociali, part iii. chap. v.
The French law of December 27, 1892, seems to have foreseen this possibility; it lays down that delegates on conciliation boards should be chosen among the interested parties; it thus keeps out these professionals whose presence would render the prestige of the authorities and of philanthropists precarious.
G. Sorel, Insegnamenti sociali, p. 390.
Everybody who has seen trades union leaders close at hand is struck with the extreme difference which exists between France and England from this point of view; the English trades union leaders rapidly become gentlemen, without anybody blaming them for it (P. de Rousiers, Le Trade-unionisme en Angleterre, p. 309 and p. 322). While correcting this proof, I read an article by Jacques Bardaux, pointing out that a carpenter and a miner had been made knights by Edward VII. (Débats, December 16, 1907).
Some years ago Arsène Dumont invented the term social capillarity to express the slow climbing of the classes. If Syndicalism submitted to the influence of the pacifists, it would be a powerful agent of social capillarity.
It has often been pointed out that the workers’ organisation in England is a simple union of interests, for the purposes of immediate material advantages. Some writers are very pleased with this situation because, quite rightly, they see in it an obstacle to Socialistic propaganda. To embarrass the Socialists, even at the price of economic progress and of the safety of the culture of the future, that is the great aim of certain great Idealists dear to the philanthropic middle classes.
See Translator’s Note, p. 162.
This imbecile has become Minister of Commerce. All his speeches on this question are full of balderdash; he has been a lunacy doctor, and has perhaps been influenced by the logic and the language of his clients.
The Minister declared that he was creating “real democracy,” and that it was demagogy “to give way to external pressure, to haughty summonses, which, for the most part, are only higher bids and baits addressed to the credulity of people whose life is laborious.”
Ch. Guieysse, op. cit. p. 125.
Speaking of the elections of 1869, he said that there had been “violences of language which France had not till then heard, even in the worst days of the Revolution” (Organisation du Travail, 3rd ed. p. 340). Evidently, the revolution of 1848 was meant. In 1873, he declared that the Emperor could not congratulate himself on having abrogated the system of restraint on the press, before having reformed the morals of the country (Réforme sociale en France, 5th ed. tome iii. p. 356).
Sumner Maine observed a long while ago that it was England’s fate to have advocates who aroused very little sympathy (Le Droit international, French translation, p. 279). Many Englishmen believe that by humiliating their country they will rouse more sympathy towards themselves; but this supposition is not borne out by the facts.
This is apparently the way in which the proletarian movement is spoken of in the fashionable circles of refined Socialism.
Cf. the reflections of Engels in the preface to the new edition of articles by Marx which he published in 1895 under the title, Struggles of the Classes in France from 1848 to 1850. This preface is wanting in the French translation. In the German edition a passage has been left out, the social democratic leaders considering certain phrases of Engels not politic enough.
According to the necessities of the moment he is for or against the general strike. According to some he voted for the general strike at the International Congress of 1900; according to others he abstained.
Gambetta complained because the French clergy was “acephalous”; he would have liked a select body to have been formed in its midst, with which the Government could discuss matters (Garilhe, Le clergé séculier français un XIXe siècle, pp. 88-89). Syndicalism has no head with which it would be possible to carry on diplomatic relations usefully.
[The writers on moral theology who maintain that our actions should be guided only by absolutely sure maxims were called tutiorists; opposed to them were the laxists. In the Provinciales Pascal defends the tutiorist position, the Jesuits he attacks are laxists.—Trans. Note.]
Cf. G. Sorel, Insegnamenti sociali, p. 388. The hypothesis of a great European war seems very far fetched at the moment.
This notion of revolutionary preservation is very important; I have pointed out something analogous in the passage from Judaism to Christianity (Le Système historique de Renan, pp. 72-73, 171-172, 467).
Cf. what I have said on the transformation which Marx wrought in Socialism, Insegnamenti sociali, pp. 179-186.
[The French is sociétés de résistance. What is meant is the syndicate, considered principally as a means of combining workmen against the employers.—Trans. Note.]
I will come back to this resemblance in Chapter VII. iii.
P. de Rousiers La Vie américaine, l’éducation et la société, p. 19. “Fathers give very little advice to their children, and let them learn for themselves, as they say over there” (p. 14). “Not only does (the American) wish to be independent, but he wishes to be powerful” (La Vie américaine. ranches, fermes et usines, p. 6).
[This refers to the conduct of former syndicates which limited their ambitions to the interests of their own handicraft without concerning themselves with the general interests of the working classes.—Trans. Note.]
There is constant talk nowadays of organising labour, i.e., of utilising the corporative spirit by giving it over to the management of well-intentioned, very serious and responsible people, and liberating the workers from the yoke of sophists. The responsible people are de Mun, Charles Benoist (the amusing specialist in constitutional law), Arthur Fontaine, and the band of democratic abbés, . . . and lastly Gabriel Hanotaux!
Vilredo Pareto laughs at the simple middle class who are happy, because they are no longer threatened by intractable Marxians, and who have fallen into the snare of the conciliatory Marxians (Systèmes socialistes, tome ii. p. 453).
Cf. G. Sorel, Insegnamenti sociali, p. 53.
Mme. G. Renard has published in the Suisse of July 26, 1900, an article full of lofty psychological considerations about the workers’ fête given by Millerand (Léon de Seilhac, Le Monde socialiste, pp. 307-309). Her husband has solved the grave question as to who will drink Clos-Vougeot in the society of the future (G. Renard, Le Régime socialiste, p. 175).
In an article written in September 1851 (the first of the series published under the title: Revolution and Counter-revolution), Marx established the following parallelism between the development of the middle class and of the proletariat: To a numerous, rich, concentrated, and powerful middle class corresponds a numerous, strong, concentrated and intelligent proletariat. Thus he seems to have thought that the intelligence of the proletariat depends on the historical conditions which secured power in society to the middle classes. He says, again, that the true characters of the class war only exist in countries where the middle class has recast the Government in conformity with its needs.
“Those who, like Sismondi, would return to the just proportion of production, while preserving the existing bases of society, are reactionary, since, to be consistent, they should also desire to re-establish all the other conditions of past times . . . . In existing society, in the industry based on individual exchanges, the anarchy of production, which is the source of so much poverty is at the same time the source of all progress” (Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Eng. trans., p. 41).
Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (édition des œuvres complates ), livre ii. chapitres i., iii., iv., pp. 89, 91, 94, 288.
Tocqueville, Mélanges, pp. 155-156.
Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, pp. 35-37.
L. Madelin also comes to this conclusion in an article in the Débats of July 6, 1907, on the prefects of Napoleon I.
Tocqueville, L’Ancien Réglme et la Révolution, pp. 254-262, and Mélanges, p. 62. Cf. chapter IV. iv. of my study on Les Illusions du Progrès.
Kautsky has dwelt very strongly on the rôle played by the treasures which the French armies took possession of (La Lutte des classes en France en 1789, French trans., pp. 104-106).
Gaston Boissier, La Fin du paganisme, livre iv. chap. iii.
Fustel de Coulanges, Origines du régime féodal, pp. 566-567. I do not deny that there is a good deal of exaggeration in the thesis of Fustel de Coulanges, but the conservation was undeniable.
Fustel de Coulanges, La Monarchie franque, p. 650.
[Vico’s doctrine of “reflux” (ricorsi). Civilisation comes to an end in the “barbarism of reflection” which is worse than the primitive barbarism of sensation. . . . The mind, after traversing its course of progress, after rising from sensation . . . to the rational, from violence to equity, is bound, in conformity with its eternal nature, to retraverse the course, to relapse into violence and sensation, and thence to renew its upward movement, “to commence a reflux.” See chap. xi. of The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, by Benedetto Croce. Eng. trans.—Trans. Note.]
The reader may usefully refer to a very interesting chapter of Bernstein’s book, Socialisme théorique et socialdémocratie pratique, pp. 47-63. Bernstein, who knows nothing of the aims of our present-day syndicalism, has not, in my opinion, drawn from Marxism all that it contains. His book, moreover, was written at a time when it was impossible still to understand the revolutionary movement, in view of which these reflections are written.
[The word “conclusions” is employed in two senses in civil proceedings. Each counsel presents his claims and arguments to the court in writing in a document which is called “conclusion.” On the other hand, at the end of the case the ministre public states what, in his opinion, is the decision the court ought to make for the best administration of Justice; these are the “conclusions” of the ministre public. The judgment always declares that the ministre public has been heard in his “conclusion.” Proudhon uses the word in the second sense. On the return of the Bourbons, Louis XVIII, issued a proclamation in which he stated the principles on which it seemed to him the government of the country must henceforth rest.—Trans. Note.]
Proudhon, La Guerre et la paix, livre v. chap. iii.
Tocqueville, Mélanges, p. 189.
It is very remarkable that in the seventeenth century Boileau had already pronounced against the supernatural Christian epic; this was because his contemporaries, however religious they might have been, did not expect that angels would come to help Vauban to capture fortresses; they did not doubt what was related in the Bible, but they did not see matter in it for epics, because these marvels were not destined to be reproduced.
Ernest Hamel, Histoire de la conspiration du général Malet, p. 241. According to some newspapers, Jaurès, in his evidence before the Court of Assizes of the Seine on June 5, 1907, in the Bousquet-Lévy trial, said that the police officers would show more consideration for the accused, Bousquet, when he had become a legislator. [Bousquet was the secretary of the bakers’ syndicate, with whom the police dealt rather harshly. As he was a good orator Jaurès looked upon him as a future deputy.—Trans. Note.]
Drumont, La Fin d’un monde, pp. 137-138.
Drumont, op. cit. p. 128.
Drumont, op. cit. p. 136.
Basoche was a name given somewhat ironically to all the people employed in the law courts—principally solicitors and ushers.
Taine, La Révolution, tome i. p. 155.
Yet this was the article which was applied to Dreyfus, without anybody, moreover, having attempted to prove that France had been in danger.
The details themselves of this law can only be explained by comparing them with the rules of the old penal law.
Modern authors, by taking literally certain instructions of the papacy, have been able to maintain that the Inquisition had been relatively indulgent, having regard to the customs of the time.
Tocqueville is probably alluding here to the maxims of Blackstone on the unlimited power of the English Parliament. The economists of the eighteenth century thought that the State had the right to do everything, since it was the expression of “reason,” and no single force could oppose the action of this “reason.”
Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, p. 100.
Tocqueville, op. cit. pp. 235-240.
Tocqueville, op. cit. p. 241.
In the history of judicial ideas in France, full consideration must be given to the dividing up of landed property, which, by multiplying the independent heads of productive units, contributed more to the spread of judicial ideas among the masses than was ever done among the literate classes by the finest treatises on philosophy.
Sumner Maine, Essais sur le gouvernement populaire, French trans., p. 20.
The extraordinary and illegal severity which was brought to bear in the application of the penalty is explained by the fact that the aim of the trial was to terrify certain spies who, by their situation, were out of reach; whether Dreyfus was guilty or innocent troubled his accusers little; the essential thing was to protect the State from treachery and to reassure the French people, who were maddened by the fear of war.
In L’Humanité of November 17, 1904, there is a letter from Paul Guieysse and from Vazeilles, declaring that nothing of this kind can be imputed to Colonel Hartmann. Jaurès follows this letter with a strange commentary; he considers that the informers acted in perfect good faith, and he regrets that the colonel should have furnished “imprudently, further matter for the systematic campaign of the reactionary newspapers.” Jaurès has no suspicion that this commentary made his own case much worse, and that it was not unworthy of a disciple of Escobar.
J. Jaurès, La Convention, p. 1732.
This was on March 24, 1898, at a particularly critical moment of the Dreyfus case, when the Nationalists were asking that agitators and enemies of the army should be swept away. J. Reinach says that De Vogüé openly invited the army to begin again the work of 1850 (Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus, tome iii. p. 545).
De Vogüé has the habit in his polemics of thanking his adversaries for having given him much amusement; that is why I take the liberty of calling him jovial, although his writings are rather soporific.
J. Jaurès, op. cit. p. 1434.
J. Jaurès, op. cit. p. 77.
J. Jaurès, op. cit. p. 1731.
I bring to notice here a fact which is perhaps not very well known: the Spanish war in the time of Napoleon was the occasion of innumerable atrocities, but Colonel Lafaille says that in Catalonia the murders and cruelties were never committed by Spanish soldiers who had been enlisted for some time and had become familiar with the usages of war (Mémoires sur les campagnes de Catalogne de 1808 à 1814, pp. 164-165).
According to Joseph Reinach, an error was committed after the war in choosing as generals former pupils of the military schools (Saint-Cyr and the Polytechnique). He said that the Jesuit colleges had sent many clericals to the School, and it would have been better to choose instead officers who had risen from the ranks; the generals would have then been less clerical. Loc. cit. pp. 555-556 (I believe that his system would not have had the result he imagined it would).
“The society which will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers will transport the whole machinery of State to where its place will be henceforward—in the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe” (Engels, Les Origines de la Société, French trans. p. 281).
Manifeste communiste, translated, Andler, tome i. p. 39.
After the trial of Hervé, Léon Daudet wrote: “Those who followed this case were thrilled by the testimonies, by no means theatrical, of the trade union secretaries” (Libre Parole, December 31, 1905).
Yet Jaurès had the audacity to declare in the Chamber on May 11, 1907, that there was only “on the surface of the working-class movement a few paradoxical and outrageous formulas, which originated, not from the negation of the fatherland, but from condemnation of the abuse to which word and idea were so often put.” Language like this could only have been used before an assembly which was entirely ignorant of the working-class movement.
The Petit Parisien, which makes a specialty of Socialist and working-class questions, warned strikers on March 31, 1907, that they “must never imagine that they are absolved from the observance of the ordinary social duties and responsibilities.”
At the time when the antimilitarists were beginning to occupy public attention, the Petit Parisien was distinguished by its patriotism: on October 8, 1905, it published an article on “The Sacred Duty” and on “The Worship of this Tricolor Flag which has carried all over the World our Glories and our Liberties” ; on January 1, 1906, it congratulated the Jury de la Seine: “The flag has been avenged for the insults flung by its detractors on this noble emblem. When it is carried through the streets it is saluted. The juries have done more than bow to it; they have gathered round it with respect.” This is certainly very cautious Socialism.
Two motions had been discussed at length by the National Council, one proposing that the departmental federations should be invited to enter the electoral struggle wherever it was possible, the other that candidates should be put forward everywhere. One member got up and said, “I should be glad of your earnest attention, for the argument which I am about to state may at first sight appear strange and paradoxical. (These two motions) are not irreconcilable, if we try to solve this contradiction according to the natural Marxian method of solving any contradiction” (Socialiste, October 7, 1905). It seems that nobody understood. And, in fact, it was unintelligible.
The nature of these articles will not allow of any long discussion of this subject but I believe that it would be possible to develop still further the application of Bergson’s ideas to the theory of the general strike. Movement, in Bergson’s philosophy, is looked upon as an undivided whole; which leads us precisely to the catastrophic conception of Socialism.
Bourdeau, Evolution du Socialisme, p. 232.
This is seen, for example, in the efforts made by the trade unions to obtain laws absolving them from the civil responsibilities of their acts.
Tarde could never understand the reputation enjoyed by Sidney Webb, who seemed to him to be a worthless scribbler.
Mátin, Le Socialisme en Angleterre, p. 210. This writer has received from the Government a certificate of socialism; on July 26, 1904, the French Commissioner-General at the St. Louis exhibition said: “M. Métin is animated by the best democratic spirit; he is an excellent republican; he is even a socialist whom working-class organisation should welcome as a friend” (Association ouvrière, July 30, 1904). An amusing study could be made of those persons who possess certificates of this kind, given to them, either by the Government, the Musée social, or the well-informed press.
The errors committed by Marx are numerous and sometimes enormous (cf. G. Sorel, Saggi di critica del marxismo, pp. 51-57).
It has often been remarked that English or American sectarians whose religious exaltation was fed by the apocalyptic myths were often none the less very practical men.
At the present time, this doctrine occupies an important place in German exegesis; it was introduced into France by the Abbè Loisy.
Cf. the Letter to Daniel Halévy, IV.
In French petite science. This expression is used to indicate the popular science with which the majority is much more familiar than it is with the difficult researches of the real scientists. These latter are generally as modest as the writers on popular science are vain and boastful.
I have tried to show elsewhere how this social myth, which has disappeared, was succeeded by a piety which has remained extremely important in Catholic life; this evolution from the social to the individual, seems to me quite natural in a religion (Le Système historique de Renan, pp. 374-382).
I believe, moreover, that the whole of Spencer’s evolutionism is to be explained as an application of the most commonplace psychology to physics.
This is another application of Bergson’s theories.
This is the “global knowledge” of Bergson’s philosophy.
I do not remember that the official Socialists have ever shown up the ridiculousness of the novels of Bellamy, which have had so great a success. These novels needed criticism all the more, because they presented to the people an entirely middle-class ideal of life. They were a natural product of America, a country which is ignorant of the class war; but in Europe, would not the theorists of the class war have understood them?
In the article which I have already quoted, Clemenceau recalls that Jaurès made use of these outbidding tactics in a long speech which he made at Beziers.
In an article, Introduction à la metaphysique, published in 1903, Bergson points out that disciples are always inclined to exaggerate the points of difference between masters, and that “the master in so far as he formulates, develops, translates into abstract ideas what he brings is already in a way his own disciple.” [Eng. trans. by T. E. Hulme.]
A. Métin, op. cit. p. 191.
G. Sorel, Avenir socialiste des syndicats, p. 12.
Bergson, loc. cit.
Bergson, loc. cit.
I do not know whether the learned (economists and other people who make inquiries on social conditions) have always quite understood the function of piece-work. It is evident that the well-known formula, “the producer should be able to buy back his product,” arose from reflections on the subject of piece-work.
“It may be said that the economic history of society turns on this antithesis,” —of town and country (Capital, vol. i. p. 152, col. 1).
It may be remembered that in the eruption at Martinique a governor perished who, in 1879, had been one of the protagonists of the Socialists congress held at Marseilles. The Commune itself was not fatal to all its partisans; several have had fairly distinguished careers; the ambassador of France at Rome was among the most importunate of those who, in 1871, demanded the death of the hostages.
G. Le Bon, Psychologie du socialisme, 3rd ed. p. 111 and pp. 457-459. The author, who a few years ago was treated as an imbecile by the little bullies of university Socialism, is one of the most original physicists of our time.
The Socialists are mistaken in believing that the existence of a middle class is bound up with the existence of the capitalist industrial system. Any country submitted to a bureaucracy, directing production—either directly or through corporations—would have a middle class.
I know, for instance, a very enlightened Catholic, who gives vent with singular acrimony to his contempt for the French middle class; but his ideal is Americanism, i.e. a very young and very active capitalistic society.
P. de Rousiers was very much struck by the way rich fathers in the United States forced their sons to earn their own living; he often met “Frenchmen who were profoundly shocked by what they called the egoism of American fathers. It seemed revolting to them that a rich man should leave his son to earn his own living, that he did nothing to set him up In life” (La Vie américaine, l’éducation et la société, p. 9).
Capital, vol. i. p. 342, col. 1.
It is not difficult to see that propagandists are obliged to refer frequently to this aspect of the social revolution: this will take place while the intermediary classes are still in existence, but when they become sickened by the farce of social pacification, and when a period of such great economic progress has been reached that the future will appear in colours favourable to everybody.
Kautsky has often dwelt on this idea, of which Engels was particularly fond.
Bernstein said about this story that Brentano might have exaggerated a little, but that “the phrase quoted by him was not inconsistent with Marx’s general line of thought” (Mouvement socialiste, September 1, 1899, p. 270). Of what can Utopias be composed? Of the past and often of a very far-off past; it is probably for this reason that Marx called Beesly a reactionary, while everybody else was astonished at his revolutionary boldness. The Catholics are not the only people who are hypnotised by the Middle Ages, and Yves Guyot pokes fun at the collectivist troubadourisrn of Lafargue (Lafargue and Y. Guyot, La Propriété, pp. 121-122).
I have elsewhere put forward the hypothesis that Marx, in the penultimate chapter of the first volume of Capital perhaps wished to demonstrate the difference between the evolution of the proletariat and that of middle-class force. He said that the working class is disciplined, united and organised by the very mechanism of capitalist production. There is perhaps an indication of a movement towards liberty, opposed to the movement towards automatism which will be discussed later when we come to consider middle-class force (Saggi di critica, pp. 46-47).
The history of scientific superstitions is of the deepest interest to philosophers who wish to understand Socialism. These superstitions have remained dear to our democracy, as they had been dear to the beaux esprits of the Old Regime; I have touched on a few of the aspects of this history in Les Illusions du progrès. Engels was often under the influence of these errors, from which Marx himself was not always free.
Marx quotes this curious phrase from Ure, written about 1830: “This invention supports the doctrine already developed by us: if capital enlists the aid of science, the rebel hand of labour always learns how to be tractable” (Capital, Eng. trans., vol. i. p. 188, col. 2).
To use the language of the new school, science was considered from the point of view of the consumer and not from the point of view of the producer.
Atlanticus, Ein Blick in den Zukunftsstaat. E. Seillière reviewed this book in the Débats of August 16, 1899.
“It has not been enough noticed how feeble is the reach of deduction in the psychological and moral sciences. . . . Very soon appeal has to be made to common sense, that is to say, to the continuous experience of the real, in order to inflect the consequences deduced and bend them along the sinuosities of life. Deduction succeeds in things moral only metaphorically so to speak” (Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 224). Newman had already written something similar to this, but in more precise terms: “Thus it is that the logician for his own purposes, and most usefully as far as these purposes are concerned, turns rivers, full, winding and beautiful, into navigable canals. . . . His business is not to ascertain facts in the concrete but to find and dress up middle terms; and, provided they and the extremes which they go between are not equivocal, either in themselves or in their use. Supposing he can enable his pupils to show well in aviva voce disputation, . . . he has achieved the main purpose of his profession” (Grammar of Assent, pp. 261-262). There is no weakness in this denunciation of small talk.
See note, p. 66.
This is the office of the Minister for Labour, and is principally occupied with the Syndicates. It gives itself a certain socialistic air in the hope of duping the workmen.
A few years ago, this illustrious warrior (?) was instrumental in blocking the candidature for the Collège de France of Paul Tennery (whose erudition was universally recognised in Europe) in favour of a positivist. The positivists constitute a lay congregation which is ready for any dirty work.
Pascal protested eloquently against those who considered obscurity an objection against Catholicism, and Brunetière was right in looking upon him as being one of the most anticartesian of the men of his time (Etudes critiques, 4e série, pp. 144-149).
J. Reinach, Diderot, pp. 116-117, 125-127, 131-132.
Brunetière, Évolution des genres, p. 122. Elsewhere he calls Diderot a philistine, p. 153.
it is to the credit of the impressionists that they showed that these fine shades can be rendered by painting; but some few among them soon began to paint according to the formulas of a school, and then there appeared a scandalous contrast between their works and their avowed aims.
Tocqueville, Democratie en Amérique, tome i. chap. iii. Le Play, Réforme sociale en France, chap. xvii. 4.
In my Introduction à l’économie moderne I have shown how this distinction may be used to throw light on many questions which had till then remained exceedingly obscure, and notably to show the exact value of certain important arguments used by Proudhon.
[Laws in France are discussed by a committee elected by the Chamber; they alter the text of the law, and it is the duty of the rapporteur, named by the committee, to defend the amended text in open discussion in the Chamber. —Trans. Note.]
Doctor Augagneur was for a long time one of the glories of that class of Intellectuals who looked upon Socialism as a variety of Dreyfusism; his great protests in favour of Justice have brought him to the governorship of Madagascar, which proves that virtue is sometimes rewarded.
In Algeria the scandals in the administration of the consistories (the administrative councils of the Jewish community), which had become sinks of electoral corruption, compelled the Government to reform them; but the recent law respecting the separation of the Churches and the State will probably bring about a return to the old practices.
An attempt to organise a railway strike was made in 1898; Joseph Reinach says this about it: “A very shady individual, Guérard, who had founded an association of railway workers and employees which had a membership of 20,000, intervened (in the conflict with the navvies of Paris) with the announcement of a general strike of his syndicate. . . . Brisson authorised search warrants, had the stations guarded by soldiery, and placed lines of sentinels along the track; nobody came out” (Historie de l‘affaire Dreyfus, tome iv. pp. 310-311). Nowadays the Guérard syndicate is in such good odour with the Government that the latter has granted it permission to start a big lottery. On May 14, 1907, Clemenceau spoke of it in the Chamber as a body of “sensible and reasonable people,” opposed to the goings-on of the Confédération du Travail.
Mouvement socialiste, December 1-15, 1905, p. 130.
The clerical party thought that it would be able to make use of these tactics to block the application of the law regarding the congregations; it hoped that some show of violence would cause the Government to give way, but the latter stuck to its guns, and it may be said that one of the mainsprings of the Parliamentary system was thus broken, since there are fewer obstacles than formerly to the dictatorship of Parliament.
In 1890 the National Congress at Lille of the Guesdist party passed a resolution by which it declared that the general strike of the miners was actually possible, and that a general strike of the miners by itself would bring about the results that are expected in vain from a stoppage of every trade.
“There may be room in the party for individual initiative, but the arbitrary fancies of the individual must be put down. The safety of the party lies in its laws; we must steadfastly abide by them. It is the constitution freely chosen by ourselves which binds us together, and which will enable us to conquer together or to die.” Thus spoke a learned exponent of Socialism at the National Council (Socialiste, October 7, 1905). If a Jesuit expressed himself thus, there would be an outcry about monkish fanaticism.
J. Jaurès, La Convention, p. 1384.
Deville, Le Capital, p.10.
Paul Leroy-Beaulieu recently proposed to call the whole body of Government employees “the Fourth Estate,” and those in private employment “the Fifth Estate”; he said that the first tended to form hereditary cases (Débats, November 28, 1905). As time goes on, the distinction between the two groups will grow more pronounced; the first group is a great source of support to Socialist politicians, who desire to transform it into a perfectly disciplined corporation capable of taking the lead in the working-class movement; thus, by the intermediacy of the employees of the State, the Parliamentarians would govern the more easily the workers in private industry.
This does not prevent Vandervelde from comparing the future world to the Abbey of Thelema, celebrated by Rabelais, where everybody did as he pleased, and from saying that he aspires to an “anarchist community” (Destrée and Vandervelde, Le Socialisme en Belgique, p. 289). Oh, the magic of big words!
Many French papers advertised the merits of the Russian minister, Witte, exactly as they advertised cures made by patent medicines. The French press receives at all time large subventions from the Russian embassy, but in this period Witte spent much more than usual, in order to secure his continuance in office by quoting French opinion.
The correspondent of the Débats, in the issue of November 25, 1906, related how the members of the Duma had congratulated a Japanese journalist on the victories of his compatriots. (Cf. the Débats, December 25, 1907.)
We may also ask how much the old enemies of military justice desire the abolition of the courts martial. For a long time, the Nationalists were able to maintain with some show of reason that they were retained in order that Dreyfus, if the Court of Cassation ordered a third trial, should not be brought up before a Court of Assizes; a court martial can be more easily packed than a jury.
Engels feared that the Socialists, in order to gain adherents in the electoral struggles rapidly, would make promises which were contrary to Marxist doctrine. The antisemites told the peasants and the small shopkeepers that they would protect them from the development of capitalism. Engels thought that an imitation of this procedure would be dangerous, since, in his opinion, the social revolution could only be realised when capitalism had almost completely destroyed the small proprietors and small industries; if the Socialists, then, endeavoured to hinder this evolution, they would ultimately compromise their own cause. Engels did not know that the French Socialists (whose agrarian programme he was criticising) had often made such promises, and that several Socialist deputies were very friendly with Drumont. Engels, “La Question agraire et le Socialisme,” in the Mouvement socialiste, October 15, 1900, p. 462. Cf. pp. 458-459 and p. 463.
Jaurès, Études socialistes, p. 107.
Many idiotically serious things like this may be found in Tarbouriech’s Cité future. People who call themselves well-informed say that Arthur Fontaine, Directeur du Travail, has some astonishing solutions of the social question in his portfolios, and that he will reveal them on the day he retires. Our successors will bless him for having saved up for them pleasures we shall not know.
Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, p. 297.
In the Avant-Garde of October 29, 1905, may be read the report of Lucien Rolland to the National Council of the Unified Socialist Party on the election at Florac of Louis Dreyfus, a speculator in grain and shareholder of L’Humanité . “I was greatly pained,” says Rolland, “to hear one of the rois de l’époque (kings of the time) speak in the name of our Internationale, of our red flag, of our principles, and cry, ‘Long live the social republic!’ ” Those whose only knowledge of this election has been gained from the official report published in the Socialiste of October 28, 1905, will have gained a singularly false idea of it. Official Socialist documents should be mistrusted. I do not believe that, during the Dreyfus case, the friends of the general staff ever distorted truth so much as the official Socialists did on this occasion.
The fourieriste Tousseil published in the reign of Louis-Philippe a book entitled Les Juifs rois de l’époque, in which he attacked the great speculators. Rolland is alluding to this, and wishes to recall the fact that L. Dreyfus was a large speculator in corn.
The Intellectuals are not, as is so often said, men who think: they are people who have adopted the profession of thinking, and who take an aristocratic salary on account of the nobility of this profession.
For example, Vaillant says: “Since we have to fight this great battle, do you think that we can win it if we have not the proletariat behind us? We must have the proletariat; and we shall not have it if we have discouraged it, if we have shown it that the Party no longer represents its interests, no longer represents the war of the working class against the capitalist class” (Cahiers de la Qutnzaine, 16e de. la IIe série, pp. 159-160). This number contains the shorthand note of the proceedings at the Congress.
I note here, in passing, that the Petit Parisien, the importance of which as an organ of the policy of social reform is so great, took up strongly the case of the Princess of Saxony and the charming teacher Giron. This newspaper, which is very fond of sermonising the people, cannot understand why the outraged husband obstinately refuses to take back his wife. On September 14, 1906, it said that “she had broken with the ordinary moral code”; it may be concluded from this that the moral code of the Petite Parisien is something quite out of the ordinary.
Jansen, L’Allemagne et la Réforme, French trans., tome i. p. 361.
The application of the social laws gives rise—in France, at least—to very singular inequalities of treatment; judicial proceedings depend on political or financial conditions. The case of the rich tailor may be remembered who was decorated by Millerand and against whom proceedings had so often been taken for infringement of the laws for the protection of work-girls.
Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël, tome iv. pp. 199-200.
The distinction between the two aspects of war is the basis of Proudhon’s book on La Guerre et la paix.
L’Alliance de la démocratie socialiste, p. 15. Marx accused his opponents of modelling their policy on Napoleonic lines.
Bernstein evidently had in mind here a well-known article by Proudhon, from which, moreover, he quotes a fragment on page 47 of his book. This article closes with imprecations against the Intellectuals: “Then you will know what a revolution is, that has been set going by lawyers, accomplished by artists, and conducted by novelists and poets. Nero was an artist, a lyric and dramatic artist, a passionate lover of the ideal, a worshipper of the antique, a collector of medals, a tourist, a poet, an orator, a swordsman, a sophist, a Don Juan, a Lovelace, a nobleman full of wit, fancy, and fellow-feeling, overflowing with love of life and love of pleasure. That is why he was Nero” (Représentant du peuple, April 29, 1848).
Bernstein, Soctalisme théorique et social-démocratie pratique, pp. 226 and 298.
Cf. Gervinus, Introduction à l’histoire du XlXe siècle, French trans., p. 27.
The history of the papacy very much embarrasses modern writers; some of them are fundamentally hostile to it on account of their hatred of Christianity; but many are led to condone the greatest faults of the papal policy in the Middle Ages on account of the natural sympathy which inclines them to admire all the efforts made by theorists to tyrannise the world.
One of the ludicrous comedies of the Revolution is that related by Jaurès in La Convention, pp. 1386-1388. In the month of May 1793 an insurrectionary committee was set up at the Bishop’s palace, which formed an État postiche (see above), and which on May 31 repaired to the town-hall and declared that the people of Paris withdrew all powers from every constituted authority; the general council of the Commune, having no means of defence, “was forced to give in,” but not without assuming an air of high tragedy: pompous speeches, embracings all round, “to prove that there was neither wounded vanity on the one part, nor pride of domination on the other”; finally, this buffoonery was terminated by an order which reinstated the council which had just been dismissed. Jaurès is delightful here: the revolutionary committee, he says, “freed (the legal authority) from all the fetters of legality.” This happy thought is a reproduction of the well-known phrase of the Bonapartists: “Sortir de la légalité pour rentrer dans le droit.”
Jaurès, Législative, p. 1288.
Capital, English translation edit. by Engels, p. 76.
Marx points out that in Holland taxation was used to raise the price of necessities artificially; this was the application of a principle of government: this system had a vicious effect on the working class and ruined the peasant, the artisan, and the other members of the better-paid workers; but it secured the absolute submission of the workers to their masters, the manufacturers (Capital, Eng. trans. p. 781).
Capital, Eng. trans. p. 761.
Capital, Eng. trans. p. 738.
Capital, Eng. trans. p. 776. The German text says that force is an oekono-mlsche Potenz (Kapital, 4th edition, p. 716); the French text says that force is an agent économique. Fourier calls geometric progressions puissancielles (Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire, p. 376). Marx evidently used the word Potenz in the sense of a multiplier; cf. in Capital, p. 176, col. 1, the term travail puissancié for labour of a multiplied productivity. [The English translation has economic power.—Trans. Note.]
Capital, tome i. p. 327, col. 1.
Natural, in the Marxian sense, is that which resembles a physical movement as opposed to the idea of creation by an intelligent will; for the deists of the eighteenth century, natural was that which had been created by God, and which was both primitive and excellent; this is still, it seems, the view of G. de Molinari.
in a very advanced capitalist régime questions of agricultural rights, women’s dowries, the division of landed property go into the background; the first place is occupied by commercial associations, bills of exchange, sale of stocks and shares, etc.
In an article in the Radical (January 2, 1906), Ferdinand Buisson shows that those classes of workers who are more favoured at the present time will continue to rise above the others; the miners, the railway workers, employees in the State factories or municipal services who are well organised form a “working-class aristocracy,” which succeeds all the more easily because it has continually to discuss all kinds of affairs with corporative bodies who “stand for the recognition of the rights of man, national supremacy, and the authority of universal suffrage.” Beneath this nonsense is to be found merely the recognition of the relationship existing between politicians and obsequious followers. 42 “A portion of the nation throwing in its lot with the proletariat to demand its just rights,” says Maxime Leroy, in a book devoted to the defence of the syndicates of civil servants (Les Transformations de la puissance publique, p. 216).
The inadequacy of, and the errors contained in Marx’s work in respect to everything concerning the revolutionary organisation of the proletariat may be cited as memorable examples of that law which prevents us from thinking anything but that which has actual bases in life. Let us not confuse thought and imagination.
“One day Michel Chevalier came beaming into the editorial room of the Journal des débats. His first words were: ‘I have achieved liberty!’ Everybody was all agog; he was asked to explain. He meant the liberty of the slaughterhouses” (Renan, Feuilles débachés, p. 149).
P. Bureau, Le Paysan des fjords de Norwège, pp. 114 and 115.
De Rousiers, La Vie américaine: ranches, fermes et usines, pp. 224-225.
De Rousiers, La Vie américaine, l’education et la société, p. 218.
De Rousiers, loc. cit. p. 221.
P. Allard, Dix leçons sur le martyre, p. 171.
Renan, Église chrétienne, p. 137.
P. Allard, op. cit. p. 137.
Revue des questions historiques, July 1905.
P. Allard, op. cit. p. 142. Cf. What I have said in Le Système historique de Renan, pp. 312-315.
P. Allard, op. cit. p. 206.
P. Allard, op. cit. p. 142.
G. Sorel, Le Système historique de Renan, pp. 335-336.
It is probable that the first Christian generation had no clear idea of the possibility of replacing the apocalypses imitated from Jewish literature by the Acts of the Martyrs; this would explain why we possess no accounts prior to the year 155 (letter of Smyrniotes telling of the death of Saint Polycarpe), and why all memory of a certain number of very ancient Roman martyrs has been lost.
Marc Aurèle, p. 500.
As we consider everything from the historical point of view, it is of small importance to know what reasons were actually in the mind of the first apostles of anti-patriotism; reasons of this kind are almost never the right ones; the essential thing is that for the revolutionary workers anti-patriotism appears an inseparable part of Socialism.
This propaganda produced results which went far beyond the expectations of its promoters, and which would be inexplicable without the revolutionary idea.
Cf. Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël, tome iv. pp. 289 and 296; Y. Guyot, La Morale, pp. 212-215; Alphonse Daudet, Numa Roumestan, chap. iv.
G. Sorel, Essai sur l‘église et l’état, p. 63.
Quand est-ce? This was the question addressed to the newcomer in a workshop, to remind him that according to custom he must pay for drinks all round —“Pay your footing.”
Denis Poulot, Le Sublime, pp. 150-153. I quote from the edition of 1887. This author says that the grosses culottes very much hampered progress in the forges.
the compagnonnages were very ancient workmen’s associations, whose principal purpose was to enable carpenters, jointers, locksmiths, farriers, and others, to make a circular tour round France, in order to learn their trades thoroughly. In the towns on this circuit there was an hotel kept by the Mère des compagnons; the newly arrived workman was received there and the older men found him work. The compagnonnages are now in a state of decay.
Martin Saint-Léon, Le Compagnonnage, pp. 115, 125, 270-273, 277-278.
Each trade possessed often several rival associations of workmen, which often engaged each other in bloody combats. Each association was called a Devoir. What was intended by de Jacques and de Subise has long been forgotten. They are traditional words indicating the rules, and so by extension, the associations which follow these rules.
Martin Saint-Léon, op. cit. p. 97. Cf. pp. 91-92, p. 107.
In 1823, the companion joiners claimed La Rochelle as theirs, a town which they had for a long time neglected as being of too little importance; they had previously only stopped at Nantes and Bordeaux (Martin Saint-Léon, op. cit. p. 103). L’Union des travailleurs du tour de France was formed in 1830 to 1832 as a rival organisation to the compagnonnage, following the refusals with which the latter had met a few rather modest demands for reforms presented by the candidates for election (pp. 108-116, 126, 131).
On March 30, 1906, Mons said in the Senate: “We cannot write in a legal text that prostitution exists in France for both sexes.”
Hartmann here bases his statements on the authority of the English naturalist Wallace, who has greatly praised the simplicity of life among the Malays; there must surely be a considerable element of exaggeration in this praise, although other travellers have made similar observations about some of the tribes of Sumatra, Hartmann wishes to show that there is no progress towards happiness, and this preoccupation leads him to exaggerate the happiness of the ancients.
Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, French trans., pp. 464-465.
De Rousiers, La Vie amérlcaine: l’éducation et la société, p. 217.
Several small countries have adopted these ideas, thinking by such imitation to reach the greatness of the large countries.
It must be noticed that in Germany there are so many Jews in the world of speculation that American ideas do not spread very easily. The majority look upon the speculator as a foreigner who is robbing the nation.
Hartmann, loc. cit., p. 465.
[The League was a political organisation directed by the partisans of the Duc de Guise against the Protestants; it resisted Henri IV, for a considerable time.—Trans. Note.]
At a meeting of the Municipal Council of Paris on March 26, 1906, the Prefect of Police said that the resistance was organised by a committee sitting at 86. rue de Richelieu, which hired pious apaches at between three and four francs a day. He asserted that fifty-two Parisian curés had promised him either to facilitate the inventories or to be content with a merely passive resistance. He accused the Catholic politicians of having forced the hands of the clergy.
[I.e. in the time when MacMahon was President.—Trans. Note.]
The people in the provinces are not, as a matter of fact, so accustomed as the Parisians are to indulgence towards non-violent trickery and brigandage.
[“Dry guillotine,” popular expression meaning persecution.—Trans.]
Cahiers de la quinzaine 9th of the VIth series, p. 9. F. de Pressensé was at the time of the Panama affair Hébrard’s principal clerk; we know that the latter was one of the principal beneficiaries from the Panama booty, but that has not injured his position in the eyes of the austere Huguenots; the Temps continues to be the organ of moderate democracy and of the ministers of the GospeL
Cahiers de la quinzaine, loc. cit. p. 13.
Rousseau, stating the question in an abstract way, appeared to condemn every kind of association, and our Governments for a long time used his authority to subject every association to authority.
In his Morale, published in 1883, Y. Guyot violently attacks this policy. “In spite of the disastrous experiences [of two centuries], we are taking Tunisia, we are on the point of going to Egypt, we are setting out for Tonkin, we dream of the conquest of Central Africa” (p. 339).
I have pointed this out in the Ère nouvelle, March 1894, p. 339.
According to the Socialist deputy, Marius Devèze, the Prefect du Gard undertook this leadership of the Syndicalist movement under the minister Combes (Études socialistes, p. 323). I find in the France du Sud-Ouest (January 25, 1904) a notice announcing that the Prefect of La Manche, delegated by the Government, together with the under-prefect, the mayor, and the municipality, officially inaugurated the Bourse du Travail at Cherbourg.
Blacks and reds—clericals and Socialists.
Y. Guyot, Morale, pp. 293, 183-184, 122, 148 and 320.
De Rocquigny, Les Syndicats agricoles et leur œuvre, pp. 42, 391-394.
This is all the more remarkable since the syndicates are represented in the circular as capable of aiding French industry in its struggle against foreign competition.
[See note p. 80.—Trans.]
It was thought to be merely a question of permitting agricultural labourers to form themselves into syndicates; Tolain declared, in the name of the Committee, that he had never thought of excluding them from the benefits of the new law (De Rocquigny, op. cit. p. 10). As a rule, the agricultural syndicates have served as commercial agencies for farm bailiffs, landowners, etc.
Taine, Le Régime moderne, vol. ii. p. 10.
Taine, loc. cit. p. 11.
This is what Mme. Georges Renard very sensibly points out in her report of a workmen’s fête given by Millerand (L. de Seilhac, Le Monde socialiste, p. 308).
[Préfets violets; this expression was used ironically by several papers to designate bishops who were too submissive to the Government. Catholic bishops wear a violet robe.—Trans. Note.]
Millerand did not keep on the former Director of the Office du Travail, who was doubtless not pliant enough for the new policy. It seems to me to be clearly established that at that time considerable attention was being given in this Government department to a kind of enquiry as to the state of feeling among the militants of the syndicates, evidently in order to ascertain in what way they might be advised. This was revealed by Ch. Guieysse in the Pages libres of December 10, 1904; the protestations of the department and those of Millerand do not appear to have been very serious (Voix du peuple, December 18, 25, 1904, January 1, 1905, June 25, August 27). [The Office du Travail is a ministerial office, which makes enquiries about labour and publishes statistics; it was created principally in the hope that it would serve to put the Government into connection with the leaders of the syndicates.—Trans.]
It may be questioned whether Waldeck-Rousseau did not go too far, and thus started the Government on a very different road from that which he wanted it to take; I do not think that the law about associations would have been voted except under the influence of fear, but it is certain that its final wording was much more anti-clerical than its promoter would have wished.
In a speech on June 21, 1907, Charles Benoist complains that the Dreyfus case had thrown discredit on “reasons of State,” and had led the Government to appeal to the elements of disorder in the nation in order to create order. 58 I suppose that no one is ignorant of the fact that no important undertaking is carried through without bribery.
I borrow from a celebrated novel by Léon Daudet a description of the character of the barrister Méderbe. “The latter was a curious character, tall, thin, of a well-set-up figure, surmounted by a head like a dead fish, green impenetrable eyes, oiled and flattened hair, his whole appearance being frozen and rigid. . . . He had chosen the profession of a barrister as being one which would supply his own and his wife’s need of money. . . . He took part chiefly in financial cases, on account of the large profit to be made out of them, and of the secrets he learned from them; he was employed in such cases on account of his semi-political, semi-judicial relations, which always secured him victory in any case he pleaded. He charged fabulous fees. What he was paid for was certain acquittal. This man then had enormous power. . . . He gave one the impression of a bandit armed for social life and sure of impunity. . . .” (Les Morticoles, pp. 287-288). It is clear that many of these traits are copied from those of the man the Socialists so often called the Eiffel barrister, before they made him the demi-god of Republican Defence. [In the Panama affair, Eiffel was prosecuted for having illegally appropriated a large sum. Waldeck-Rousseau defended him in the law courts.—Trans.]
[The “catholiques soceaun” form a definite party. De Mutz has been for a long time the recognised leader of the party and still exercises considerable influence.—Trans. Note.]
I do not think that there exists a class less capable of understanding the economics of production than the priests.
In Turkey when a high palace dignitary receives a bribe, the Sultan takes the money and then gives a certain proportion of it back to his employé; what proportion is given back depends on the Sultan’s disposition at the moment. The Sultan’s ethical code in these matters is also that of our Catholic social reform group.
Proudhon, De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église, vol. i. 216.
Proudhon, loc. cit. pp. 216-217. “During
Proudhon thinks that this was also lacking in pagan antiquity: “During several centuries, polytheistic societies had customs, but no ethics. In the absence of a morality solidly based on principles, the customs gradually disappeared” (loc. cit. p. 173).
Heinrich Heine claims that the Catholicism of a wife is a very good thing for the husband, because the wife is never oppressed by the burden of her sins; after confession she begins again “to chatter and laugh.” Moreover, there is no danger of her relating her sin (L’Allemagne, 2nd edition, vol. ii. p. 322).
Renan, Marc-Aurèle, p. 558.
Catholic saints do not struggle against abstractions but often against apparitions which present themselves with all the signs of reality. Luther also had to fight the Devil, at whom he threw his inkpot.
Renan, loc. cit. p. 627.
Karl Kautsky, La Révolution sociale, French trans., pp. 123-124. I have pointed out elsewhere that the decay of the revolutionary idea in the minds of former militants who have become moderate seems to be accompanied by a moral decadence that I have compared to that which as a rule one finds in the case of a priest who has lost his faith (Insegnamente sociali, pp. 344-345).
De Rocquigny, op. cit. pp. 379-380. I am curious to know how exactly a tax can be iniquitous. These worthy progressives speak a special language.
[This is a reference to the “solidarista” doctrine, invented by Buisson; the interests of the classes are not opposed, and the more wealthy have their duties toward the poorer.—Trans. Note.]
Renan even wrote: “The war of 1813 to 1815 is the only one of our century that had anything epic and elevated about it . . . [it] corresponded to a movement of ideas and had a real intellectual significance. A man who had taken part in this great struggle told me that, awakened by the cannonade on the first night that he passed with the volunteer troops collected in Silesia, he felt that he was witnessing an immense divine service” (Essais de morale et de critique, p. 116). Compare Manzoni’s ode entitled “Mars 1821,” dedicated to “the illustrious memory of Théodore Koerner, poet and soldier of German independence and killed on the field of battle at Leipzig, a name dear to all those peoples who are struggling to defend or to reconquer their fatherland.” Our own wars of Liberty were also epic, but they have not been so well written up as the war of 1813.
Drumont has often denounced this state of mind of the fashionable religious world.
Proudhon, De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église vol. i. p. 70.
Proudhon, loc. cit. p. 74. By juridical faith Proudhon here understands a triple faith, which dominates the family, contracts, and political relations. The first is “the conception of the mutual dignity (of husband and wife) which, raising them above the level of the senses, renders them more sacred to the other even than dear, and makes their fertile community a religion for them, sweeter than love itself”—the second “raising the mind above egoistical appetites, is made happier by respect for the right of another than by its own fortune” —without the third “citizens submitting to the attraction of individualism could not form, whatever they did, anything other than a mere aggregate of incoherent and repulsive existences that the first wind will disperse like dust” (loc. cit. pp. 72-73). In the strict sense of the world, juridical faith would be the second of these three.
Proudhon, loc. cit. p. 93.
The two first epochs are those of paganism and of Christianity.
Proudhon, loc. cit. p. 104.
This deputy had made a very anticlerical speech from which I quote this curious idea that “the Jewish religion was the most clerical of all religions, possessing the most sectarian and narrowest type of clericalism.” A little before this he said, “I myself am not an anti-Semite, and only make one reproach to the Jews, that of having poisoned Aryan thought, so elevated and broad, with Hebraic monotheism.” He demanded the introduction of the history of religions into the curriculum of the primary schools in order to ruin the authority of the Church. According to him the Socialist party saw in “the intellectual emancipation of the masses the necessary preface to the progress and social evolution of societies.” It is not rather the contrary which is true? Does not this speech prove that there is an anti-Semitism in free-thinking circles quite as narrow and badly informed as that of the clericals?
So do like musk? It has been put everywhere.
G. de Molinari, Science et religion, p. 94.
G. de Molinari, op. cit. p. 198.
G. de Molinari, op. cit. p. 61.
G. de Molinari, op. cit. p. 54.
G. de Molinari, op. cit. pp. 87 and and 93.
I have already mentioned that in 1883 Y. Guyot violently denounced the conduct of Chagot, who placed his workmen under the direction of the priests, and forced them to go to Mass (Morale, p. 183).
Mouvement socialiste, June 15, 1889, p. 649.
See, for example, the Socialiste of June 30, 1901. “As in a communist society the morals which clogs the brains of the civilised will have vanished like a frightful nightmare, perhaps to be replaced by another ethic, which will Incite women to flutter about like butterflies, to use Ch. Fourier’s expression, instead of submitting to being the property of a male. . . . In savage tribes and among barbarous communists women are much more honoured when they distribute their favours to a great number of lovers.”
On June 21, 1907, Clemenceau, replying to Millerand, told him that in introducing the bill to establish old age pensions, without concerning himself with where the money was to come from, he had not acted as “a statesman nor even as a responsible person.” Millerand’s reply is quite characteristic of the pride of the political parvenu: “Don’t talk about things that you know nothing about.” Of what then does he himself speak?
I am pleased here to be able to support myself in the incontestable authority of Gérault-Richard who in the Petite République on March 19, 1903, denounced the “intriguers, people who wish to get on at all costs, starvelings and ladies’ men (who) are only after the spoils” and who at that time were trying to bring about the fall of the Combes ministry. From the following number we see that he is speaking of Waldeck-Rousseau’s friends, who, like him, were opposed to the destruction of the congregations.
This is what Benedetto Croce pointed out in the Critica of July 17, 1907, pp. 317-319. This writer is well known in Italy as a remarkably acute critic and philosopher.
In the New-Harmony colony founded by R. Owen the work done was little and bad, but amusements were abundant; in 1826 the Duke of Saxe-Weimar was dazzled by the music and the balls (Dolléans, Robert Owen, pp. 247-268).
G. de Molinari appears to believe that a natural religion like that of J. J. Rousseau or Robespierre would suffice. We know to-day that such means have no moral efficacy.
Renan is complaining that the corporative associations dominate society too much. It is clear that he had none of the veneration for the corporative spirit that so many contemporary idealists display.
He did not foresee that his son-in-law would agitate violently against the army in the Dreyfus affair.
Renan, Feuilles détachées, p. 14.
Renan, Historie du peuple d’Iraël, vol. v. p. 421.
Renan, loc. cit. p. 420.
The essence of democracy is concentrated in the mot attributed to Mme. Flocon. “It is we who are the princesses.” The democracy is happy when it sees a ridiculous creature like Félix Faure, whom Joseph Reinach compared to the bourgeois gentilhomme, treated with princely honours (Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus, vol. iv. p. 552).
Parliamentary Socialism is very keen on good manners, as we can assure ourselves by consulting Gérault-Richard’s numerous articles. I quote at random several specimens. On June 1, 1903, he declared in the Petite République that Queen Nathalie of Servia should have been called to order “for having listened to the preaching of P. Coubé at Aubervilles, and he demands that she be admonished by the police commissary of her district.” On September 26 he is roused to indignation by the coarseness and the ignorance of good manners exhibited by Admiral Maréchal. The socialist code has its mysteries; the wives of socialists are sometimes called ladies and sometimes citizenesses; in the society of the future there will evidently be disputes about the order of precedence as there were at Versailles. On July 30, 1903, Cassagnac makes great fun in the Autorité of his having been taken to task by Gérault-Richard, who had given him lessons in good manners.
Griffuelhes, who had been a shoemaker, was at one time secretary of the Confédération du Travail; he was remarkably intelligent; cf. a pamphlet by him entitled Voyage révolutionnaire.
[Rouanet was Malon’s principal disciple; he was for some time a deputy, very much opposed to the Marxists, naturally a great adversary of the Confédération du Travail, a type of socialist politician who occupies a considerable place in journalism and in Parliament, but who does not count at all intellectually.—Trans.]
Renan, op. cit. vol. iv. p. 267.
Renan pointed out one symptom of decadence, on which he did not insist enough and which does not seem to have particularly impressed his readers; he was irritated by the restlessness, the claims to originality, and the naïve rivalry of the young metaphysicians; “But, my dear fellows, it is useless to give oneself so much headache, merely to change from one error to another (Feuilles détachés, p. 10). A restlessness of this kind (which puts on nowadays a sociological, socialist, or humanitarian air) is a sure sign of anæmia.
Renan, Feuilles détachées, pp. 17-18.
Brunetière addressed this reproach to French literature: “If you wish to know why Racine or Molière, for example, never attained the depth we find in a Shakespeare or a Goethe . . . cherchez la femme, and you will find that the defect is due to the influence of the salons, and of women” (Évolution des genres, 3rd edition, p. 128).
Questions de morale (lectures given by several professors) in the Biblio-thèque des sciences sociales, p. 328.
I must call attention to the extraordinary prudence shown by Ribot in his Psychologie des sentiments in dealing with the evolution of morality; it might have been expected that, on the analogy of the other sentiments, he would have come to the conclusion that there was an evolution towards a purely intellectual state and to the disappearance of its efficacy; but has not dared to draw this conclusion for morality as he did for religion.
I refer to an article published in the Gazette de Lausanne, April 2, 1906, from which the Libre Parole gave a fairly long extract (cf. Joseph Reinach, op. cit. vol. vi. p. 36). Several months after I had written these lines Picquart was himself the object of exceptionally favourable treatment; he had been conquered by the fatalities of Parisian life, which have ruined stronger men than he.
Nietzsche, Généalogie de la moral, trad. franç., pp. 57-59.
Nietzsche, op. cit. p. 43.
Nietzsche, op. cit. pp. 78-80.
P. de Rousiers observes that everywhere in America approximately the same social environment is found, and the same type of men at the head of big businesses; but “it is in the West that the qualities and defects of this extraordinary people manifest themselves with the greatest energy; . . . it is there that the key to the whole social system is to be found” (La Vie américaine: ranches, fermes, et usines, pp. 8-9; cf. p. 261).
De Rousiers, La Vie américaine: l’education et la société, p. 325.
De Rousiers, La Vie américaine: ranches, fermes, et usines, pp. 303-305.
J. Bourdeau, Les Maîtres de la pensée contemporaine, p. 145. The author informs us on the other hand that “Jaurès greatly astonished the people of Geneva by revealing to them that the hero of Nietzsche, the superman, was nothing else but the proletariat” (p. 139). I have not been able to get any information about this lecture of Jaurès; let us hope that he will some day publish it, for our amusement.
It is always necessary to remember that the resigned Jew of the Middle Ages was more like the Christians than his ancestors.
Epistle to the Ephesians, v. 25-31.
Proudhon is alluding sarcastically to the frequently very comic nullifications of marriage, pronounced by the Roman courts, for physiological reasons. Proudhon, op. cit. vol. vi. p. 39. We know that the theologians do not like curious people to consult ecclesiastical writings about conjugal duty and the legitimate method of fulfilling it.
Proudhon, loc. cit. p. 212.
Proudhon, Œuvres, vol. xx. p. 169. This is extracted from the memoir he wrote in his own defence, after he had been condemned to three years in prison for his book on Justice. It is worth while noting that Proudhon was accused of attacking marriage! This affair is one of the shameful acts which dishonoured the Church in the reign of Napoleon III.
Aristotle, Politics, book i. chap. vii. 4-5.
Aristotle, op. cit. book i. chap v. 13, 14.
Xenophon, who represents in everything a conception of Greek life very much earlier than the time in which he lived, discusses the proper method of training an overseer for a farm (Economics, pp. 12-14). Marx remarks that Xenophon speaks of the division of labour in the workshop, and that appears to him to show a middle-class instinct (Capital, vol. i. p. 159, col. 1); I myself think that it characterises an observer who understood the importance of production, an importance of which Plato had no comprehension. In the Memorabilia (book ii. p. 7) Socrates advises a citizen who had to look after a large family, to set up a workshop with the family; J. Flach supposes that this was something new (Leçon du 19e avril 1907): it seems to me to be rather a return to more ancient customs. The historians of philosophy appear to me to have been very hostile to Xenophon because he is too much of an old Greek. Plato suits them much better since he is more of an aristocrat, and consequently more detached from production.
Aristotle, op. cit. book i. chap. v. 9 and 11.
Karl Kautsky, La Révolution sociale, French translation, p. 153.
The managers of manufactories would constantly be busying themselves with how to ensure the success of the government party at the next election. They would be very indulgent to workmen who were influential speakers, and very hard on men suspected of lack of electoral zeal.
We might ask if the ideal of the relatively honest and enlightened democrats is not at the present moment the discipline of the capitalist workshop. The increase of the power given to the mayors and State governors in America seems to me to be a sign of this tendency.
This history has also been burdened by a great number of adventures, which have been fabricated by imitating real ones, and which are very like those which later on The Three Musketeers rendered popular.
Jaurès, Études socialistes, pp. 117-118.
[The battle of Fleurus, won in 1794 by General Jourdain, was one of the first decisive triumphs of the revolutionary army. The Chant du Départ was written by J. M. Chénier shortly before this battle.—Trans.]
When we speak of the educative value of art, we often forget that the habits of life of the modern artist, founded on an imitation of those of a jovial aristocracy, are in no way necessary, and are derived from a tradition which has been fatal to many fine talents. Lafargue appears to believe that the Parisian jeweller might find it necessary to dress elegantly, to eat oysters, and run after women in order to be able to keep up the artistic quality of his work (i.e. in order to keep his mind active; the artistic quality of his work, destroyed by the wear of daily life in the workshop, will be reconstituted by the gay life he leads outside) (Journal des économistes, September 1884, p. 386). He gives no reasons to support this paradox; we might moreover point out that the mentality of Marx’s son-in-law is always obsessed by artistocratic prejudices.
[This is an allusion to a play by Octave Mirbeau with that title.—Trans.]
See the chapter in Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture entitled “Lamp of Truth.”
It must not be forgotten that there are two ways of discussing art; Nietzsche attacks Kant for having “like all the philosophers meditated on art and the beautiful as a spectator instead of looking at the esthetic problem from the point of view of the artist, the creator” (op. cit. p. 178). In the time of the Utopists, esthetics was merely the babbling of amateurs, who were delighted with the cleverness with which the artist had been able to deceive the public.
Marx, Capital, French translation, vol. iii., first part, p. 375.
P. Bureau has devoted a chapter of his book on the Contrat de Travail to an explanation of the reasons which justify boycotting of workmen who do not join their comrades in strikes; he thinks that these people merit their fate because they are notoriously inferior both in courage and as workmen. This seems to me very inadequate as an account of the reasons which, in the eyes of the working classes themselves, explain these acts of violence. The author takes up a much too intellectualist point of view.
Lafaille, Mémoires sur les campagnes de Catalogue de 1808 à 1814, p. 336.
The charlatanism of the followers of Saint Simon was as disgusting as that of Murat; moreover, the history of this school is unintelligible if we do not compare it with its Napoleonic models.
General Donop strongly insists on the incapacity of Napoleon’s lieutenants who passively obeyed instructions that they never tried to understand, and the fulfilment of which was minutely overlooked by their master (op. cit. pp. 22-29 and 32-34). Napoleon’s armies were valued in proportion to the exactitude with which they carried out the orders of their master; initiative being little valued, it was possible to estimate the conduct of the generals like the ability of a good pupil who has learnt his lessons well; the Emperor gave pecuniary rewards to his lieutenants, proportionate to the measure of merit he recognized in them.
Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française, vol. iv. pp. 42-43. This does not contradict what we read in the article “Architect.” From that we learn that the builders often inscribed their names in the cathedrals (vol. i. pp. 109-111) ; from that it has been concluded that these works were not anonymous (Bréhier, Les Eglises gothiques, p. 17), but what meaning had these inscriptions for the people of the town? They could only be of interest to artists who came later on to work in the same edifice and who were familiar with the traditions of the schools.
Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël, vol. iv. p. 191. Renan seems to me to have identified too readily glory and immortality: he has fallen a victim to a figure of speech.
This appendix was added in 1910 to the second edition.
Physiologists so manage that their experiments do not disturb the regular course of phenomena to the extent that the animal may be said to be sick.
Cournot observes, as opposed to Comte, that, “there is nothing clearer to the human intellect, nothing which less imposes the additional burden of a new mystery of a new irreducible principle, than the explanation of the social process. “Who does not see,” he says, “that in passing from the phenomena of life to social facts, one is in the process of passing from a relatively obscure region to a relatively clear one?” (Matérialisme, vitalisme, rationalisme, p. 172).
Edmond Perrier, Colonies animales, xxxii.
Taine, Le gouvernement révolutionnaire, p. 126. Cf. Hegel, Philosophie de l’esprit, French translation, vol. II, p. 254.
Dom Leclerq says that the regime of the Spanish church, at the time of the Visigoths, provides us with a case in which the unitary conception of the “classical civitas” survived in Christianity (L’Espagne chrétienne, xxxii-xxxiii).
Aristotle, Politics, Bk. II, Chap. I, 7.
Aristotle, op. cit., Bk. III, Chap. VIII, 1 and Chap XI, 12.
Tyall, Etudes sur les moeurs religieuses et sociales de l’Extrême Orient, French translation, pp. 42-48.
In the second edition there was a passage relative to the antimonies of Kant which I have removed, because I have treated this question more fully in the Révue de métaphysique et de morale (September, 1910) and because I expect to return to it again elsewhere.
Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, Chap. IV ad finem.—There is a great similarity between the formula cited here and the subtitle of the Esprit des lois: “Concerning the relation which laws must have to the constitution of each government, to mores, to climate, to religion, and to commerce.”
Cf. Renan, Marc-Aurèle, pp. 22-29.
The history of the persecutions presents evidence of considerable value: the ancient Romans, so cruel, would not have dreamed of condemning virgins to the lupanar (Edmond de Blant, Les persécuteurs et les martyrs, Chap. XVIII). The decision taken by Marcus Aurelius against the martyrs of Lyon seems to me to mark a retrogression toward barbarism (G. Sorel, Le système historique de Renan, p. 335).
I use the word progress because I find it in current usage for speaking of changes which are not always very desirable.
Taine, Le régime moderne, Vol. II, p. 108. Cf. pp. 106 and 109.
Cf. Brunetière, Questions actuelles, p. 33. This idea had been expressed in the celebrated maxim of Jesus: “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew v, 48); the evangelical life was confined to the monasteries after the triumph of the Church (Renan, op. cit., p. 558); modern philosophy is inspired by the Reformation, which aspired to unify the entire Christian world on the monastic model.
Not able to find English equivalent—perhaps Sorel coined it. [Ed.]
G. Sorel, op. cit., p. 421.
Renan compares the bishop of the Third century with the Greek or Armenian bishops of contemporary Turkey (Renan, op. cit., p. 586).
Tertullian was indignant that the Church could in this way mitigate the persecutions (Tertullian, de fuga, 13).
The Germans seem to have learned the lessons of the Church with great profit. When we notice the resignation with which they accept inequality, the strict discipline which they keep, in their associations, as in the army and in the factory, the tenacity which they show in their enterprises, we cannot but compare them to the ancient Romans. Luther’s Reformation has protected them for a long time against the invasion of Renaissance ideas and has prolonged for them the influence of Roman education.
Some contemporary Catholics go into ecstasies on this subject of the democratic spirit of the Church; the theologians have only followed the doctrine of the imperial jurists who had ascribed to the emperors a delegation of authority from the Roman people (Taine, loc. cit., p. 133).
Gregory VII was inspired by very old Christian ideas when he denounced the power of the princes as having had at its origin the character of brigandage, which permitted associating it with the action of the devil, “the prince of the world” (Flach, Les origines de l’ancienne France, Vol. III, p. 297).
Renan, op. cit., p. 621 and pp. 624-625.
In the first half of the Eighteenth century Vico believed that England was destined to become a pure monarchy (Michelet, Oeuvres choisies de Vico, p. 629).
Huysman assures us that from the “point of view of the comprehension of art, the Catholic public is a hundred feet below the secular public” (La cathedral, p. 19). This inferiority is not confined to art!
It was observed in France that the protestation contained in the letter of June 29, 1901, against the law of associations was singularly mean. Compare this vague literature to the dispatches of June 1 and 8, 1903, relative to the journey of Loubet to Rome; Leo XIII was really conscious of the significance of the Italian action, which wounded his pride, after having believed that the French acts were not of great significance, because he based his most peculiar hopes on the consequences which ought to follow his general diplomacy.
The juridical causes would not be the same, even though the results might be similar; Renan does, in fact, point out that, “liberty is definitely a creation of modern times. It is the consequence of an idea which antiquity did not have, the state guaranteeing the most diverse modes of human activity and remaining neutral in matters of conscience, of taste, and of sentiment” (Histoire du peuple d’Israël, vol. IV, p. 82).
Renan, loc. cit., p. 81.
Renan places this book before the second Temple; I agree with Isidore Loëb who seems to me to be more reasonable.
Judaism shows, in its literature following the fall from independence, such singular indifference for the state that Renan marvels at it as something of a paradox: “All the monkeries are there,” says he, “The Catholic Church, so scornful of the State, could not know how to live without the State (op. cit., vol. III, p. 427).
For example, the famous academic neutrality has only been a stratagem designed to lull the vigilance of Catholics; today the official representatives of the government declare that the great aim to pursue in the primary school is the suppression of religious faith (Cf. the address delivered before the Ligue de l’Enseignement in 1906 at Angers by Aristide Briand).
Renan, Marc-Aurèle, p. 337.
Renan, op. cit., p. 558.
In the discussion which occured December 21, 1906 in the Chamber on the circumstances in which Cardinal Richard had been expelled from his palace, Denys Cochin performed the role of dupe of the comedy with great authority.
On November 9, 1906, Aristide Briand declared to the Chamber that if the Catholic deputies had refused to concern themselves with the laws of Separation, he would not have succeeded in working out the project. The utility of parliamentarians clearly appears here!
The socialist congresses are not, any longer, sparing in declarations devoted to the execration of the bourgeoisie.
The republicans do not appear disposed to pardon Pius X for having frustrated their maneuvers: Aristide Briand has complained several times in the Chamber of the conduct of the Pope; he has even insinuated that it may have been instigated by Germany: “We were disposed to accept the law. What happened? I do not know. Has a related situation influenced the decisions of the Holy See? Does the current situation in this country become the ransom for a better situation in another country? . . . It is a problem which poses itself and which I have the right and the duty to place before your consciences.” (Session of November 9, 1906.) Joseph Reinach consoles himself for the wickedness of Pius X by proclaiming that the latter has only, “the learning of a country priest,” and that he does not understand the importance of the results of the Reformation, of the Encyclopedia, and of the Revolution. (Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus, vol. VI, p. 427).
De Rousiers, Le trade-unionisme en Angleterre, p. 93.
The Socialist party has become a democratic mob, since it contains, “officers, the decorated, rich, great stockholders, and great employers” (Cf. an article of Lucien Roland in the Socialiste of August 29, 1909).
Renan, op. cit., p. 627.
A sentence of Macaulay has often been cited on this question, observing that if Wesley had been Catholic, he might have founded a great religious order. (Macaulay, Essais philosophiques, French trans., p. 275; Brunetière, op. cit., pp. 37-38).—America appears to have utilized more effectively than England the zeal of the sectarians.
An all the more ridiculous pretention when these parties are lacking in ideas which are their own.
This appendix was added in 1913 to the third edition.
This appendix was added in 1919 to the fourth edition.
On page 130, we read: “Proletarian violence, exercised as a pure and simple manifestation of the feeling of class struggle, has the appearance of something very beautiful and very heroic.” It is likely that the correspondent of the Journal de Genève used an old edition; I have not verified the reference.
I have, however, very strongly criticized in my book the frequently bloody tyranny of the French Revolution.
It is not just to impute to Marxism all the practices of German Social Democracy, which was far more under the influence of Lassalle than under that of Marx. Charles Andler said, in 1897, of Lassalle: “It is in order to give strength to ideal justice that he demands universal suffrage for the job of emancipation of the proletariat. But he immediately is seized with distrust and, as if he sensed his error, he appeals to the existing state, though military and monarchial, to introduce his practical reforms. From the oscillation between the two systems was born a curious constitutional conception: a military monarchy, tied to universal suffrage and working with it, in a collaboration frought with conflict, to achieve a social emancipation. That is really the German Empire of today.”
(Les origines du socialisme d’Etat en Allemagne, pp. 60-61.)
The Bolshevik revolution took place November 7, 1917.
In the same fashion the Zionists call the Jews who naturalize themselves in our country, stamped paper Frenchmen.
The author is evidently threatening his compatriots with an intervention of the Entente. Under the regime of the peaceful Louis Philippe, Switzerland was twice under the threat of a French invasion: in 1838, because it would not expel the future Napoleon III, who was a burgher of the canton of Thurgau, and in 1848, because after the affair of the Sonderbund it wanted to reform its constitution in a more unitary sense. During the last war, the engagements which the Entente made in support of Swiss neutrality were hardly explicit; General Brialmont had written that France would probably invade Germany through Switzerland; the Swiss general staff was frequently attacked with violence by the press supporting the Entente, because it took the ideas of the great Belgian Engineer seriously.
The rabbits of the Union sacrée are more afraid of the Bolsheviks than of the Germans, and that is saying a great deal, for a defeated Germany, humiliated and crushed with the cost of the war frightens peculiarly enough, many of our patriotic head stuffers. To give their clientele a little courage, the editors of the great newspapers ordinarily speak of Russian revolutionaries with a blustering tone, the impudence of which is matched by the terror that convulses their entrails.
The word “to force” is used here in a sense which is similar to that employed by gardeners.
In 1888, the Russian Moniteur Juridique published a note found among the papers of Marx, according to which the author of Das Kapital was very far from believing that all economies must follow the same lines of development. He did not believe that Russia was obliged in order to achieve socialism, to begin by the destruction of its ancient communal agriculture, in order to transform its peasants into proletarians; it seemed possible to him that she could, “with experiencing the tortures of the [capitalist] regime, appropriate all of its fruits while developing her own historic situation.” This note of Marx is reproduced by Nicholas-On in his Histoire du développement economique de la Russie depuis l’affranchissement des serfs, French translation, pp. 507-509.—In a preface written in 1882 for a Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, Marx expressed the following hypothesis: “If it should happen that the Russian Revolution should give the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West, in such a manner that the two revolutions complement each other, the agrarian communism of Russia, the present day mir, will become the point of departure for a communist development.” (Manifeste communiste, translated by Charles Andler, vol. I. p. 12). These citations suffice to show that true Marxism is not as absolute, in its previsions as many of Lenin’s enemies would have it.
Cf. a speech by Lenin, translated in the Humanité, September 4, 1919.
Very probably in the pay of the Entente.
Custine, La Russie en 1839, 2nd ed., vol. II, p. 46. On page 41 this writer calls him, “the Louis XIV of the Slavs.”
Custine, loc. cit., pp. 209-211.
Custine, op. cit., vol. III, pp. 271-273.
If Finland and Estona remain separated from Russia, the capital would find itself poorly located at the mouth of the Neva.
The Journal de Genève of September 27, 1918 reports a speech by Lenin, in which he opposes the general proscriptive measures decreed following an attempt to assassinate him at the beginning of the month. It seems that it is some Jews who joined the revolutionary movement who are especially responsibly for the terroristic regulations blamed on the Bolsheviks. This hypothesis appears to me to be all the more reasonable since the intervention of the Jews in the Hungarian Soviet Republic has not been happy.
Our compatriots, who fancy themselves the most alert men in the world, have accepted, like fools, the most absurd calumnies that some impudent journalists have invented with the purpose of dishonoring the Bolsheviks.
On September 3, 1918, the Petit Parisien, an organ dear to our Joseph Prudhommes, published an article of a frenzied enthusiast in honor of Dora Kaplan, who had attempted to assassinate Lenin.
A correspondent of the Journal de Genève asks if the Russian counterrevolutionaries had not counted greatly on the assistance of criminal elements, for they had distributed proclamations inviting, “the population to massacre the youpins and the revolutionaries” (October 14, 1917). In many cases the Red Guards could very well believe that by suppressing the enemies most determined to exterminate them in case of victory, they were acting in legitimate defense.
The politicians who maintain with Clemenceau that the French Revolution forms a bloc, are hardly justified in their harshness toward the Bolsheviks; the Bloc, admired by Clemenceau, was responsible for the death of at least ten times as many people as the Bolsheviks, denounced by the friends of Clemenceau as abominable barbarians.
A French writer who has seen the Bolsheviks at work speaks of the “stubborn and inspired mysticism” of Lenin (Etienne Antonelli, La Russie bol-sheviste, p. 272). This expression is not very clear.
Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israel, vol. IV, p. 267.
In concluding the Réflexions sur la violence, I pay a final tribute to the one to whose memory this book has been dedicated; it was while thinking of a past filled with labor that I wrote: “Happy is the man who has known a devoted wife, strong and proud in her love, who will always keep ever present his youth, who will keep his soul from ever being satisfied, who will never fail to make him mindful of the obligations of his task, and who will even, at times, reveal to him his genius.”