Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Prologue / Preliminary Address

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• New Proudhon Library (project page)

Readings:

• Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Prologue / Preliminary Address
• Text and Notes: Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Preliminary Address (concluded)

The title of the work, in its 1858 first edition translates to: On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: New Principles of Practical Philosophy, addressed to His Eminence Monsignor Mathieu, Cardinal-Archbishop of Besançon. For the “New edition, revised, corrected and expanded” of 1860, the subtitle became “Studies of Practical Philosophy,” with the same addressing.

The 1858 edition was issued in three volumes, each containing four Studies, for a total of twelve. The 1860 edition was issued in twelve installments, each numbered and identified with the series title “Essays for a Popular Philosophy.” The first installment also gained an 23,000-word introduction: “Popular Philosophy: Program,” which I will address elsewhere.

Perhaps because of the new material added in the 1860 edition, the “Prologue” of the 1850 edition was retitled “Preliminary Address” and the Latin title-page epigraph:

Misericordia et Veritas obviaverunt sibi ;
Justicia et Pax osculatæ sunt.
Psalm lxxxiv, 11.

was removed. The NRSV Bible identifies the verse as Psalms 85, 11 and translates it as:

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

[1858/1860]

PROLOGUE / PRELIMINARY ADDRESS

Under the name of an archbishop, I address these Studies to all the members of the French clergy.

As in the time of the Caesars, society is threatened with dissolution; and as in the time of the Caesars, the Church believes that it alone has the power to regenerate it.

The work you are about to read having as its aim to recognize the reality and intensity of the evil, to assign its cause, to discover its remedy and, above all, to demonstrate, from the point of view of justification, that is to say, of human perfectibility, the non-value of the ecclesiastical ministry, and to establish moral philosophy, outside of this influence, on its legitimate basis, the dedication belonged by right to the clergy.

In short, what should henceforth be, for the people, the organ of virtue, the Revolution or Religion? This is the object of my research. There is none greater or more meritorious.

Aside from the change in heading, the text is the same in both editions. The important keyword here is justification, to which we have to allow a full range of meanings, both secular and theological. — OED: “The action whereby human beings are freed from the penalty of sin and accounted or made righteous by God.”

We should probably also note the interest here in an “organ of virtue,” which resembles the notion of an “organ of justice,” which is so central to the Studies on Love and Marriage.

[1858]

1. — State of mores in the nineteenth century. Invasion of skepticism: social peril. Where is the remedy?

And first of all, what is there of truth in the current crisis?
If we cast our eyes on the progress of the century, it seems that, indeed, as the Church denounces it, the situation is very compromised.

France has lost its mores.

Not that the men of our generation are in fact worse than their fathers: the better known history of prior eras would strongly contradict that claim. The generations follow each other and improve: that is, on the whole, notwithstanding the incessant oscillations and deplorable gaps, what an attentive observation of the life of the peoples reveals to be most plausible thus far.

When I say that France has lost her mores, I mean something very different, that it has ceased to believe in its principles. It no longer has either intelligence or moral conscience; it does not even know what is meant by this word, mores.

We have arrived, moving from criticism to criticism, at this sad conclusion: that the just and the unjust, which we once thought we could discern, are terms of convention, vague and indeterminable; that all these words like Law, Duty, Morality, Virtue, etc., about which the pulpit and the schools make so much noise, only serve to cover up pure hypotheses, vain utopias, indemonstrable prejudices; that thus the practice of life, directed by who-knows-what form of human respect, by conventions, is fundamentally arbitrary; that those who speak most of Justice prove, moreover, by the supernatural origin that they assign to it, by the extra-worldly sanction that they give to it, by the sacrifice that they never hesitate to make of it to established interests, and by their own conduct, how much their faith is lacking in seriousness; that thus the true compass of the relations of man is egoism, so that the most honest man, the one whose commerce is most sure, is also the one who confesses his egoism most frankly, because at least such a man does not take you unawares, etc., etc.

[1860]

1. — State of mores in the nineteenth century. Invasion of skepticism: social peril. Where is the remedy?

And first of all, what is there of truth in the current crisis?
If we cast our eyes on the progress of the century, it seems that, indeed, as the Church denounces it, the situation is very compromised.

France has lost its mores.

Not that the men of our generation are in fact worse than their fathers: the history, better known today, of prior eras would strongly contradict that claim. The generations follow each other and improve: that is, on the whole, notwithstanding the incessant oscillations and deplorable gaps, what an attentive observation of the life of the peoples reveals to be most plausible thus far.

When I say that France has lost her mores, I mean something very different, that it has ceased to believe in its principles. It no longer has either intelligence or moral conscience; it has lost the very notion of mores.

We have arrived, moving from criticism to criticism, at this sad conclusion: that the just and the unjust, which we once thought we could discern, are terms of convention, vague and indeterminable; that all these words like Law, Duty, Morality, Virtue, etc., about which the pulpit and the schools make so much noise, only serve to cover up pure hypotheses, vain utopias, indemonstrable prejudices; that thus the practice of life, directed by who-knows-what form of human respect, by conventions, is fundamentally arbitrary; that those who speak most of Justice prove, moreover, by the supernatural origin that they assign to it, by the extra-worldly sanction that they give to it, by the sacrifice that they never hesitate to make of it to established interests, and by their own conduct, how much their faith lacks in seriousness; that thus the true rule of the relations of man is egoism, so that the most honest man is also the one who confesses his egoism most frankly, because at least such a man does not take you unawares, etc., etc.

Most of the revisions in the “Preliminary Address” take the form of minor rewrites and are of limited scholarly interest. As a result, I will limit the parallel sections, moving forward, to a few instances where the tinkering is at least interesting. In a later phase of revision, there will also be an opportunity to compare the 1858 edition to manuscripts and proofs — both very partial — preserved among the digitized manuscripts. There are also manuscripts related to an earlier version of the work, but most of what has been preserved seems to related to the later studies — identified as “Letters” at that stage — which were quite different from those ultimately published. One of the things that I will be gradually exploring is the extent to which some of the apparent tension in the published editions may have resulted from that fairly significant midstream change of direction.

Strategies of translation and interpretation. — One of the most significant tasks to pursue during this phase of revision is the construction of a Glossary for the New Proudhon Library project. The design of that sort of research aid poses some interesting problems, thanks to Proudhon’s approach to questions of meaning in general and to the way that his specifically serial approach shapes the text of Justice.

Those who have followed my work will be familiar with the problem of “anarchy, understood in all its senses.” In The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, Proudhon used the term anarchy in quite a variety of senses, which John Beverley Robinson attempted to distinguish in his English translation. The problem is that there are at least two occasions in the work where Proudhon suggests that his intends the term to represent its full series of meanings, while Robinson’s well-intended efforts at clarification simply make that suggestion obscure.

It is a type of error that I would prefer to avoid.

Perhaps, ultimately, the best approach to coming to terms with Proudhon’s serial approach to meaning is the construction of something like Edouard Silberling’s Dictionnaire de Sociologie Phalanstérienne, a sort of combined dictionary and concordance, designed to serve as an introduction to the work of Charles Fourier. That sort of work would at least allow us to reconstruct the series of meanings for some of the most important and most protean terms. Short of that, however, we can probably identify a couple of fundamental tensions in Proudhon’s main terms, many of which seem, particularly in this work, to be shared or fought over in one way or another by the Revolution and the Church. More generally — anticipating similar tensions between governmental and non-governmental uses — let’s anticipate some general tensions between inherited absolutist senses and possible non-absolutist senses, including cases where it is the language of government or business that is subjected to serial usage. 

— Justification, as already noted, appears as one of these contested terms.

— Mores is another and appears as part of a cluster of related terms (mœurs, mores, customs, usages; moral, mental and emotional health; morale, morals, sometimes in the context of philosophical study; moralité, morality) which generally allow and encourage us to go beyond whatever definition first suggests itself to us. As a translator, I have often been slightly more literal in translating these terms, simply to maintain traces of Proudhon’s patterns of usage, except where that approach really seems to confuse things, introducing confusion through “false friends” and the like. In most cases, that approach, together with these general cautions about Proudhon’s approach to meaning, seem to serve best. In other cases, I have been as bold as the text seemed to call for.

This particular rhetorical strategy is not, of course, unique to Proudhon. Think, for example, of the sometimes rather amusing twists and turns in Bakunin’s “God and the State:”

We recognize the absolute authority of science, but we reject the infallibility and universality of the representatives of science. In our church — if I may be permitted to use for a moment an expression which I so detest: Church and State are my two bêtes noires — in our church, as in the Protestant church, we have a head, an invisible Christ, science; and, like the Protestants, more consistent even than the Protestants, we do not wish to suffer a pope, nor council, nor conclaves of infallible cardinals, nor bishops, nor even priests. Our Christ is distinguished from the Protestant and Christian Christ in this — that the latter is a personal being, while ours is impersonal; the Christian Christ, already fully realized in an eternal past, presents himself as a perfect being, while the fulfillment and perfection of our Christ, science, are always in the future: which is equivalent to saying that they will never be realized. Therefore, in recognizing no absolute authority but that of absolute science, we in no way compromise our liberty.

It is easy to suspect, in fact, that there is more than a bit of Proudhon’s Justice in the background of this particular passage, as there is in so much of Bakunin’s work. In any case, recognizing what Bakunin is up to here, perhaps a little bit clumsily, may help to prepare you for the much subtler play of meanings in Proudhon’s work. 

[1860]

To sum things up in one word, it is skepticism that, having devastated religion and politics, has descended on morals: this is what the modern dissolution entails. The case is not new in the history of civilization: it already presented itself in the times of Greek and Roman decadence; I dare say it won’t present itself a third time. Let us therefore study it with all the attention of which we are capable; and since we could not escape this last invasion of the scourge, let us at least know what we should expect from it.

Under the desiccating action of doubt, and without crime having perhaps become more frequent or virtue more rare, French morality, in its heart of hearts, is destroyed. There is nothing more that remains: the rout is complete. No thought of justice, no esteem for liberty, no solidarity between citizens. Not one institution that we respect, not one principle that is not denied, flouted. No more authority, either in the spiritual or the temporal realm: everywhere souls are driven back into themselves, without a point of reference, without light. We no longer have anything to swear to or by which to swear our oaths are senseless. The suspicion that strikes principles attaching itself to men, we no longer believe in the integrity of justice, in the honesty of the power. With the moral sense, the instinct of self-preservation itself seems extinguished. The general direction given over to empiricism, a stock-market aristocracy hurling itself, in its hatred of the partageux, on the public fortune; a middle class dying of cowardice and stupidity; a plebeian class sinking into poverty and bad advice; women feverish with luxury and lust, youth immodest, childhood quaint, the priesthood, finally, dishonored by scandal and vengeance, no longer having faith in itself and barely troubling the silence of public opinion with its stillborn dogmas: such is the profile of our century.

The less timorous sense it and worry about it:

“There is no respect any more,” said a businessman to me. “Like that emperor who felt he was becoming a god, I feel that I am becoming a rogue and I wonder what I believed in when I believed in honor?”

“I am overcome with spleen,” confessed a young priest. He who, by his functions, by his faith and by his age, should have been sheltered from this English evil, felt the moral life in his heart collapsing. Is that a life? Wouldn’t it rather be called an expiation? The bourgeois atones, the proletarian atones, the Power itself, reduced to governing only by force, atones.

“The mind of man,” says M. Saint-Marc de Girardin, “has lost its clarity; the heart feels no more joy. We feel that we are in a fog, we stumble trying to find our way, and that makes us sad. Cheerfulness is rare these days, even among youth.”

“That nation has no principles,” Lord Wellington said of us, in 1815. — We notice it at this hour. With what an increase of horror would Royer-Collard, were he witness to our failure, repeat his words of the same period:

“Society is dust. All that remains are memories, regrets, utopias, follies, despair.”

Nevertheless, the doubt regarding Justice and the demoralization that it drags along in its wake not adding appreciably to the sum of misdemeanors and crimes, the statesman, for whom the external respect of the law suffices, would not need to worry about it up to this point. Statistics in hand, he would show that crime is proportional to pauperism, and he would demand that precious morality, which conscience no longer supports, from the combinations for finance and insurance. The religion of right and duty would thus be succeeded by the religion of interests, and all would be said. Order maintained in the street, force remaining in the law, the statesman could rest on his laurels and one would only have to repeat the proverb: The world moves by itself.
Sadly, history shows that if the safety of persons and property cannot be seriously affected by moral doubt, it is not the same for the family and society.

To form a family, so that the man and the woman find in it the joy and calm to which they aspire — qualities without which, brought together by desire, they will never be more than incompletely united — a conjugal faith is necessary. I mean thereby an idea of their mutual dignity, which, raising them above the senses, makes them still more sacred than dear to each other, and makes of their fruitful community a religion sweeter than love itself. Without this, marriage is no more than a costly society, full of disgust and troubles, soon and necessarily replaced by free love.

Likewise, to form a society, to give the interests of individuals and families the security that is their first need — without which work is refused, the exchange of products and values becomes a fraud, and wealth becomes an ambush for he who possesses it — requires what I shall call a juridical faith, which, raising souls above selfish appetites, renders them happier in the respect of the rights of others than in the respect of their own fortunes. Without this, society becomes a free-for-all where the law of the strongest is replaced by the law of the most deceitful, where the exploitation of man succeeds primitive brigandage, where the last word of war is servitude and the guarantee of servitude is tyranny.

Once again, to form a state, to confer support and stability to the power, a political faith is needed, without which the citizens, given over to the pure attractions of individualism, cannot, whatever they do, be anything other than an aggregate of incoherent and repulsive existences, which the first breath will disperse like dust. Haven’t we seen, since the Revolution, enough defections and recantations? How could a power subsist when contempt has invaded souls, when ministers, senators, magistrates, generals, prelates and functionaries, the army, the bourgeoisie and the plebs are as indifferent to the changing of their princes as to the furnishings of the crown?

Through skepticism, the purely moral attraction of marriage, of generation and the family,  and the attractions of work and society being lost, the social being dissolves and the population itself tends to die out. This is the serious side of the present immorality.

As long as we are stung by moral doubt, all of us who have acquired the consciousness of our solitude feel, through this weakness of Justice within us, diminished in the best part of ourselves and stripped of our dignity, which means our social potentiality.

One of my most persistent concerns, in this phase of close revision and annotation, will be to begin to clarify the connections and tensions between these early sections of Justice and the Studies on Love and Marriage. This passage on the conjugal faith, for example, seems to present Proudhon’s conception of marriage in its most favorable light, while also giving clues to how the theory of marriage relates to other parts of his social analysis. 

The construction of intimate relations on the basis of an idea of “mutual dignity” is perhaps a promising start. The elevation of that idea, given a broadly “religious” turn, over the affections may raise more questions — although we are still far, I think, from what we are led to expect and what will indeed appear in the “Catechism of Marriage” and related writings. The concern with “free love” is perhaps a bit cranky. The notion of love-driven union as a société onéreuse — probably best understood as a costly business deal — introduces the issue of “venal and non-venal” things, which seems to play a key role in the gendering of Proudhon’s world.

It is hard to say, at this stage, what to do with any of these individual elements, but it is arguably worth marking how potentially rich even these briefs remarks are.

[1858]

Is it not in fact decline, this ferocious sensualism, which makes us loathe marriage and generation, but drives us through love to the annihilation of the species? The number of abortions and infanticides has doubled in 1856, according to the latest report on Criminal Justice. The height of pleasure is in sterility. We will have no children, these young spouses tell you coldly!… Is this the wish of nature and of society?

Is it not decline, this lack of faith in the virtue of our neighbor and in our own virtue, which, keeping us in a state of latent war, makes us, whether we like it or not, indifferent to society, to the homeland, and careless regarding the general interests and posterity?…

[1860]

Is it not in fact decline, this ferocious sensualism, which makes us loathe marriage and generation, but drives us through love to the annihilation of the species? The number of abortions and infanticides has doubled in 1856, according to the latest report on criminal justice. The height of pleasure is in sterility. We will have no children, these young spouses tell you coldly!… In Paris, in 1858, the number of births, according to the statistics published by the newspapers, was 35,000: of this number, 11,000 were illegitimate. We will have children, if we can’t prevent it. So be it! But not marriage, not at all. This is our century. Is it the wish of nature and of society? Is it even the wish of love?

Is it not also decline, this lack of faith in the virtue of our neighbor and in our own virtue, which, keeping us in a state of latent war, makes us, whether we like it or not, indifferent to society and to the homeland, and careless regarding the general interests and posterity?

[1860]

The certainty of right and, with it, the religion of duty abolished in the hearts of men, society therefore expires. As no one can be honest when privately convinced of their own villainy, just so no society can persist with the now general opinion that it is composed from top to bottom of rabble.

Science and consciousness of Justice, as one learned professor said, that is what we lack, and the deprivation makes us die slowly, ignominiously. And that is what the Revolution had promised us, what it would have given us long ago, if the misfortune of the times and the weakness of souls had not delayed its glorious and definitive manifestation.

Yes, this juridical, sacramental faith, this science of right and duty, which we seek everywhere in vain, which the Church never possessed and without which it is impossible for us to live, I say that the Revolution has produced all of its principles; that these principles, without our knowledge, govern and sustain us, but that, while affirming them from the bottom of our hearts, we reject them through prejudice, and that it is this infidelity to ourselves that creates our moral poverty and our servitude.

For sixty-three years the Revolution has been repressed by us, disguised, slandered and handed over to the enemy, whose banner we have taken up. And our immorality has grown as we have drawn closer to the principle against which our fathers had risen, but which they could not deny.

“Science et conscience de la Justice” — The French conscience, which means both conscience and consciousness, is another of the terms that has to be allowed a bit of play in Proudhon’s analysis. Similarly, the connection here between science and conscience seems like the sort of thing that Proudhon, with his love of language and etymological connections, would have been drawn to.  Regarding the latter, the OED gives us a secondary definition of science: 

Theoretical or intellectual understanding, as distinct from moral conviction. Paired or contrasted with conscience. Obsolete.

[1860]

2. — The Counter-Revolution: Its Powerlessness.

France, and Europe in its wake, is in full counter-revolution; both are, at the same time, in full decadence. This fact is worth dwelling on, as those who complain the most about it are far from suspecting its agents and causes.

Everything that emerged from the Revolution, from its beginnings, successively turned against it and, by fighting the Revolution, served the dissolution: Democracy, Empire, Restoration, July Monarchy, Republic of 1848, Representative System, Centralization, [Concordat,] Philosophy, Political Economy, Industrial Progress, institutions of Credit, Socialism, Literature.

Let us note, in a few short pages, this astonishing phenomenon.

Democracy. — No one would dare to deny that the object of the Revolution was to emancipate the masses and ensure the preponderance of labor over property. The Revolution is essentially democratic, to such an extent that the monarchy itself, transformed by the Revolution, had to call itself — and calls itself every day — democratic.

And I too, despite my disdain for popular ballot boxes, I belong to the democracy; I do not separate myself from it, and no one has the right to exclude me from it. Am I therefore a traitor or a splitter, because I say that the democracy is poisoned, and that more than anyone it has served the counter-revolution?

By taking the utopia of Jean-Jacques as its ideal, by substituting the politics of instincts for that of principles, by modeling its government on that of absolutism, the democracy ended in the suicide of 93, the mystical atrocities of 94, the defections of Thermidor and Brumaire, the too-forgotten elections of 1800 and 1804,  and those of 1848, 1851 and 1852, which I hope will not be forgotten. Where is the democrat of good faith who dares at this hour to affirm the steadfastness, the high wisdom, the infallible reason of the multitude? And if you forsake the multitude; if after having made it vote, come what may, guiding its eyes and hands, you return it to tutelage, what is your democracy?

The democracy, since it became a power, a fashion, has successively espoused all of the ideas most contrary to its nature. Faithful, above all, to the religious principle, but feeling, there as elsewhere, the need to innovate, it has made itself by turns paleo-Christian and neo-Christian, Protestant, deist, pantheist, metempsychosist, druidic, magical, mystical, fanatical, incorporating every available material. In economics, it is whatever you like, communist and feudalist, anarchic, monopolist, philanthropist, free trader, anti-egalitarian; — in politics, governmental, dictatorial, imperial, centralizing, absolutist, chauvinistic, Machiavellian, doctrinaire, disdainful of right, sworn enemy of all local and individual liberty; — in philosophy and literature, after denying Voltaire and the classics, Condillac, Diderot, Volney, all the Fathers and Doctors of the revolution, it has made itself transcendentalist, eclectic, apriorist, fatalist, sentimentalist, idealist, romantic, gothic, whimsical, gossipy and bohemian. It has taken on all the systems, all the utopias, all the charlatanisms, having been unable to discover anything in the thought that had produced it. February 1848 arrives. The democracy finds itself without genius, without virtue, without breath. Tell me why?

Empire. — We have said it until we can say it no more; we have said it all too often among a combative people: the empire was the sword of the Revolution, outstripping the work of the pen throughout Europe. That was its legitimacy and that will be its significance in the face of history. As a power, the empire remained without originality, because it was, like the democracy from which it had emerged, without an understanding of the Revolution. Was that the Emperor’s fault? He had all the genius that the nation’s thought contained, as much wit as everyone else and perhaps more virtue. What a fervor for royalty among the heroes emerging from Jacobinism! After the four Bonaparte brothers, who became kings, here is Bernadotte a king, Murat a king, Eugène Beauharnais a viceroy, and Soult, and Masséna, and the insane Junot, who also wanted to be kings! Duke or prince was not enough for these sons of artisans, who had become haughtier than the Rohans. According to them, one earns a royal position just as one earns a pension. Speak then, after that, of universal suffrage! Say that the people have been deceived, that they have been frightened!… They had earned. Vox populi.

Restoration. — It rises at first, through the Charter, above even imperial glory. The Charter was the return to revolutionary life. But soon the Crown thinks it notices, it notices that the Revolution is leading it where it does not want to go; it conspires with the Church, the soul of the counter-revolution, and falls, after having made everything that the Revolution most abhors and detests, after the sword, multiply under its wing: Jesuitism, [eclecticism,] romanticism, Saint-Simonism, Malthusianism, etc.

July Monarchy. — It was the crowning glory of the bourgeoisie; it could be, precisely because of this, the most legitimate of powers. A mass of common people to be emancipated presupposes a class of initiators: this is the fundamental fact of the Revolution. Louis-Philippe rejected this program. As Napoleon had tried to remake the ancien régime with his soldiers, he conceived the idea of remaking it with his bourgeois. He governed neither by religion, nor by force, nor by instincts; he governed by interests. Under Louis-Philippe the industrial feudalism that currently reigns was formed. We can say of this prince what has been said of Voltaire: He has not seen everything he made, but he made everything we see. He himself boasted of it in his letters to the leaders of the Holy Alliance; and Napoleon III, who stripped the Orleans family of its privileges, would not dare to revoke, without indemnity, the great concessions, the variety of fiefs with which his royal predecessor had flanked the System.

Parliamentary system. — From 1789 to 1799, from 1814 to 1851, the rostrum was the glory of French genius; its silence is our shame: I agree. But, by betraying all parties, by pleading all causes, by giving the spectacle of the most shameful reversals, by serving truth less than intrigue, by sending, in turn, to the scaffold and to exile the monarchy, the Girondes, the Cordeliers, the Jacobins, the Thermidorians, the Clichyans and the Socialists, has it not refuted itself? Has it not caused the people to say that the voice of the Revolution was a voice of lies and iniquity: Mentita est iniquitas sibi?

Centralization. — “The sense of men nowadays has been so perverted,” said Michelet; “our friends have so lightly swallowed the gross blunders thrown at them by our enemies, that they believe and repeat that the Protestants prepared to dismember France, that all Protestants were gentlemen, etc. From that point on, see the beauty of the system: Paris and Saint-Barthélemy saved unity; Charles IX and the Guises represented the Convention.” (Guerres de religion, p. 305.)

In a meeting of Republicans that took place after December 2, where they lamented the inertia of the departments, awaiting the signal from the capital, someone having asked the question whether it would have been better to save the Republic, at the price of decentralization, than to preserve unity by undergoing the coup d’état, the majority decided for the second opinion, federalism appearing incompatible with the Republic. So do not be surprised that on this root-stock of Jacobinism the monarchical bud is still flourishing. Our republicanism is above all a matter of words. We abhor monarchy; but unity, that is something else!

Do we at least possess that centralizing unity, the installation of which cost France fourteen months of terror and the Girondins their heads? Alas! No. Centralization presupposes parties grouping together under a law of series, but always for the benefit of their liberty and their initiative. Paris and its government, its administrations, its companies, its monopolies, its pleasures, its parasitism, Paris, which has become the inn of Europe, absorbs and devours France: that is centralization!

The Democracy. — Démocratie not only refers to a political system, but also to parties or less formally organized groups that manifest “democratic principles” to some degree. In Proudhon, we find the term used alongside similar, like “the Power,” and we should probably understand these constructions as relating to collective beings. Where it seems clearly a question of abstract systems, I have left off the leading article, but those instances seem to me to be comparatively rare.

This is a consideration of some importance when these texts are brought into the context of debates over the relations between anarchy and democracy. 

The suppressed passage from the 1858 edition:

Concordat. — What protests the civil constitution of the clergy aroused on the part of the priests!… Overcome by necessity, they nevertheless resign themselves. The Concordat brings back the Church, which the men of 93 had proscribed, while imposing the civil constitution on it. God rest the soul of the old emperor! Behold, today, after fifty-three years, the Concordat is the providential act by which He who reigns in heaven and who governs all empires has substituted, in France, ultramontanism for the Gallican Church. O Louis XIV, O Bossuet!

Philosophy. — A social revolution supposes, with a new government, a new philosophy. To establish Justice, to develop the humanitarian thought of Clootz, symbolized by the Cult of Reason, a critique of that same reason was essential. For that to continue, by elevating and clarifying it, the movement of the eighteenth century was enough: there was no need to appeal to the Germans, the Scots, the Platonists, and, under the pretext of materialism, to give the signal for a reaction, as Royer-Collard did. Did the worshipers of matter, since matter there is, ever cause a philosopher to be outlawed or a pyre to be lit, or set up as a principle the ignorance of the people and the stupefaction of humanity? Quite different, certainly, is the religion of the mind. For forty years, university spiritualism, rival or ally of the Church, delivered up intelligences to it. It was spiritualism that, in 93 and 94, sent the Revolution to the guillotine: it would do it again. The festival of 20 Prairial [Feast of the Supreme Being, Year II], of which the Law of the 22nd made a veritable auto-da-fé, was a call to the priestly party, and a sort of evocation of neo-Christianity and all the sects that were to infect the Republic in 1848.

Socialism. — Its root is in 89: its object, to be considered only from the point of view of material interests, is the inversion of the relations between labor and capital. It is Justice, in its application to matters of the economy. Falling into the hands of dreamers, haranguers, gastrosophists and androgynes, socialism, instead of the justicier that the Revolution wanted it to be, has become sentimental, evangelical, theocratic, communist, eroto-bacchanalian, omnigamous; it has been all that the reaction could wish it to be, for its own profit and our shame: it was socialism that, after December 2, undertook to initiate Europe into the mysteries of the Bankocracy.

Political Economy. — The creation of an economic science, based at once on the analysis of industrial phenomena and on justice, is the last word of revolutionary thought. Terrible to feudalism, hostile to the Emperor, surly with the Bourbons, haughty with the Orleans, enemies of all governmental initiative and concentration, swearing only by liberty, the economists, much more than the Jacobins, could pass for the true representatives of the Social Republic. Only one thing was asked of them: it was to finally construct this science, the shapeless and contradictory materials of which they had been collecting for a century. Instead of responding, they went on to boast about free trade, moral restraint, laissez-faire laissez-passer and all the juggling and turpitude to be found on both sides of the Channel. They preached the reason of chance, the sovereignty of antagonism, respect for parasitism, the necessity of poverty; they supported, with all their strength, against the democracy and against the Power, the prepotence of the big companies, and by their desperate defense of monopoly, served as godfathers to the new feudalism. Then, when they saw themselves denounced as schemers, hypocrites, enemies of the people and foreign agents, they cried “Wolf!” against the Revolution.

[1858]

Literature. — As it had its metaphysics, its ethics, its economy, its jurisprudence, the Revolution must also have its literature. The movement begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, continues with Beaumarchais and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. The harangues of the Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the Convention raise it to the sublime; the Ruins of Volney are inspired by the same spirit. Its enemies themselves take up the same tune: the antithesis of the Revolution comprised all the genius of De Maistre. Suddenly, by one of those reversals so frequent in the march of the human mind, the new muse abandoned her flag. To the harsh but misunderstood realities of a nascent world, she prefers, as the subject of her songs, the vanquished ideal, and we have Romanticism. Has it done us enough harm? It was romanticism that, in 1848, on the eve of the December elections, rebuked the socialists, saying that if they became the masters they would demolish Notre-Dame and that pieces of the Column would bring big money… Now, romanticism, like economism, like philosophy, and like everything that served the reaction, is worn out, but the corruption they sowed, the servitude they prepared, the ruins they piled up, all this remains, and one wonders after so many defections, what the movement that led to it means?

[1860]

Literature. — As it had its metaphysics, its ethics, its economy, its jurisprudence, the Revolution must also have its literature. The movement begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, continues with Beaumarchais and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. The harangues of the Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the Convention raise it to the sublime. Its enemies themselves take up the same tune: the antithesis of the Revolution comprised all the genius of De Maistre. Suddenly, by one of those reversals so frequent in the march of the human mind, the new muse abandoned her flag. To the harsh but misunderstood realities of a nascent world, she prefers, as the subject of her songs, the vanquished ideal, and we have Romanticism. Has it done us enough harm? It was romanticism that, in 1848, on the eve of the December elections, rebuked the socialists, saying that if they became the masters they would demolish Notre-Dame and that pieces of the Column would bring big money… Now, romanticism, like economism, like philosophy, and like everything that served the reaction, is worn out, but the corruption they sowed, the servitude they prepared, the ruins they piled up, all this remains, and we no longer have literature.

[1860]

Isn’t it a surprising thing, a Revolution opposed, abrogated by all those whom it carried in its bosom, all those who had received its baptism? For ten years, I have followed the current of history with all the attention of which I am capable. As far as I could, I took cognizance of ideas and acts. Apart from a few strong characters, who are well-known, I found everyone hostile to the Revolution: people of letters, people of law, business people, people of the schools and people of the political parties; poets, historians, novelists, magistrates, speculators, shopkeepers, industrialists; academics, economists, eclectics, pantheists, constitutionalists, imperialists, democrats; Gallicans, Protestants, Jews, Neo-Christians; youth, women, the bourgeoisie, the multitude, the clerk, the soldier, the academician, the scholar, the peasant, the worker, like the priest.

And as if the Revolution, pulling away, pulled Justice with it, the more this world showed itself hostile, the more I found it corrupt.

The Democracy, through the mouth of Robespierre, asks the Supreme Being again for the sanction of human rights. Immediately the notion of right is obscured, and corruption, suspended for a moment, resumes its course. The Empire, the Restoration, the bourgeois monarchy show themselves more and more unfaithful to their origin; and the corruption advances. Philosophy and literature deny the tradition of the eighteenth century; and Platonism, Romanticism serve as an illumination for corruption. Political economy becomes Malthusian, and now women have a horror of housework and motherhood. The Church elevates the pious legend of an immaculate conception as an article of faith, and never have such suspicions hovered over the mores of the Priesthood.

If any life remains to us, if all honor is not lost, we owe it to that sacred flame of the Revolution, which no deluge can extinguish. Her conquests, her establishments, her organs, her liberties, her rights, her guarantees, all have perished: there remains to her only the collective soul, more and more made in her image; and from this inaccessible temple, she imposes her terror on the world, which waits for her to impose her law on it again. The Counter-Revolution knows it: If, she says, I can be mistress for two generations, my reign is forever assured! Two generations would be enough for her to remake the conscience and the understanding to the people. But the generations flee her: never was the Revolution more alive than since the last triumph of the Counter-Revolution. All bruised and broken, the Revolution possesses us; she rallies us, governs us, assures us; through her we hope and act, and all that remains to us of spontaneity and virtue belongs to her. So the conscience of the people, long abused, turns with love towards this Grand Orient, and on the day when a hundred men knowingly renew the oath of 93, Liberty—Equality—Fraternity, the Revolution will be established: she will reign.

From what precedes we draw a double consequence.

There is something strong in the Revolution that dominates opinions and masters interests, by which she imposes herself on her adversaries and triumphs over all resistance; — as there is also something that arouses against her the prejudices of caste, of party, of school, of profession, of education, of communion, something of which the reason of the masses has not yet been able to rid itself.

What gives life to the Revolution is a positive element, an expression of the universal conscience, which the Revolution aims to determine and build, for the salvation and glory of humanity: it is Justice.

What makes the Revolution suspect can only be a negative element: it is the negation of the principle on which Justice, which must exist by itself, has relied to this date, a principle incompatible with the revolutionary element, but still living in souls, of which the Church is the organ.

Thus, two powers fight for the world: one born yesterday, which has all the harshness of green fruit, and only asks to grow; the other, having reached maturity, which only stirs to die. What checks life in the first is the same as what suspends death in the other. What is this thing? To understand this, let us first know by what incident the Church, mother and rival of the Revolution, came to be in this state.

As a translator, it has been something of a relief to find that many of the French terms most likely to present difficult choices have been used in ways that make my main task one of simply underlining the question. Things are not so simple, however, when it comes to the question of French as a gendered language and the possible instances of personification in the text. The difficulties are made even greater by the real importance of understanding Proudhon’s own gendering of the elements of society, as we try to come to terms with the problems posed by the Studies on Love and Marriage. 

Certain elements in the account lend themselves to intentional personification. The Revolution and the Church — Marianne and the Bride of Christ — are among the most obvious, and there are perhaps reasons to push things in that direction, some of which might reinforce Proudhon’s own gender-scheme and some of which might serve as provocative counterpoints. For now, my strategy is only to resort to that sort of personification where it is most obviously in play and where its use in the translation serves to underline elements of Proudhon’s gendered understanding of things. This is one of the elements of the translation that I expect may lag others just a bit on the way to a really finished state.

[1858]

3. — The Church: why, despite its perpetual defeats, does it still persist?

The existence of the Church is no less marvelous in its long duration than that of the Revolution in its beginnings. Always beaten, it has survived all the defeats; it has grown through humiliation, and it has fed, so to speak, on its very adversity.

It is a surprising thing, which no one seems to have noted, that the Church, which loves to talk so much about its triumphs, has in reality lost as many battles as it has fought. It has succumbed in all its struggles: from Jesus Christ to Pius IX, it counts its years by its disasters.

So what gives it life? How can we explain the problem of this strange existence?

The problem of the Church is the same as that of the Revolution, but in an opposite sense: the persistence of one and the embarrassments of the other stem from the same cause.

Formed by a combination of circumstances that will be explained in these Studies, the Church of Christ is nourished, fortified and fattened by the detritus of other churches, the dissolution of which is incessantly brought about by other causes. But it does not triumph over these churches, any more than the tree triumphs over the corpse buried beneath its roots. It cannot, I repeat, boast of having conquered a single one. A church, whatever it may be, never allows itself to be defeated. That is against its nature. It dissolves by itself, or sometimes it merges, or else it is exterminated.

Thus the Church succumbed in its struggle against Judaism: the book of Acts contains the formal admission.

“Since you reject the word,” said Paul and Barnabas to the heads of the Synagogue, “we turn to the Gentiles, convertimur ad gentes.”

[1860]

§ III — The Church: why, despite its perpetual defeats, does it still persist?

The existence of the Church is no less marvelous in its long duration than that of the Revolution in its beginnings. Always beaten, it has survived all the defeats; it has grown through humiliation, and it has fed, so to speak, on its very adversity.

It is a surprising thing, which no one seems to have noted, that the Church, which loves to talk so much about its triumphs, has in reality never triumphed over anyone. It is a storm-tossed ship, which from time to time picks up a soul fallen overboard, but which has never sunk nor forced to surrender, by the power of its doctrine, another church. Between religious societies, such a victory is impossible.

So what gives the Church life? How can we explain the problem of this strange existence?

The problem of the Church is the same as that of the Revolution, but in an opposite sense: the persistence of one and the embarrassments of the other stem from the same cause.

Formed by a combination of circumstances that will be explained in these Studies, the Church of Christ is nourished, fortified and fattened by the detritus of other churches, the dissolution of which is incessantly brought about by other causes. But the Catholic Church does not triumph over these churches, any more than the tree triumphs over the corpse buried beneath its roots. It cannot, I repeat, boast of having conquered a single one. A church, whatever it may be, never allows itself to be removed by another church. That is against its nature. It dissolves by itself, or sometimes it merges, or else it is exterminated.
Thus the Church, formed from the dismemberment of Judaism, could not manage to incorporate it: the book of Acts contains the formal admission.

“Since you reject the word,” said Paul and Barnabas to the heads of the Synagogue, “we turn to the Gentiles, convertimur ad gentes.”