Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d’État of December 2, 1851, by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Proudhon’s 1852 work, The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d’État of December 2, 1851, has been neglected by many readers due to its reputation as a work written in support of Louis-Napoleon’s coup and regime. However, a careful reading of the text reveals that Proudhon had been predicting events similar to the coup for some time and that the events of December 1851 had as much to do with broader historical movements as they did with the new Emperor. Proudhon argues that the people are indifferent to governmental forms as long as their interests are served, and he calls this indifference revolutionary. The work concludes with the famous line “Anarchy or Caesarism,” in which Proudhon addresses the question of whether he would support the new government. He responds by saying that he holds himself apart from government and instead joins himself with the party of labor and progress, accepting as its goal and motto “the Education of the People.” Proudhon also expresses his love for France and his belief that the unity of the human race is the unity of his homeland.

• I. Why I Engage in Politics.
• II. Situation of France on February 24, 1848.
• III. Desiderata of the Revolution on February 24.
• IV. Universal Prejudice Against the Revolution, on February 24th. Republicans Withdraw.
• V. December 2nd.
• VI. Louis-Napoléon.
• VII. Seven Months of Government.
• VIII. The Horoscope.
• IX. Don’t Lie to the Revolution.
• X. Anarchy or Caesarism. – Conclusion.

“I don’t know how it will happen, but it will happen, because it is written.”
(General idea of the 19th century Revolution, p. 195.)

I. Why I Engage in Politics.

“I do not write against those who can proscribe,” said Camille Desmoulins at the end of ’93, when all-powerful Robespierre was saving society, and the Republic no longer existed!…

I adopt this maxim. I renounce, since it was desired, the veto that the February Revolution had armed the press against the government, and I begin by declaring that I have nothing to say against the coup d’état of December 2nd, nothing against the authors, co-operators, and beneficiaries of this coup d’état; nothing against the vote that absolved it by 7,600,000 votes; nothing against the Constitution of January 15th and the powers it organizes; nothing even against the tradition that it seems to want to revive, that adores its vestiges, and that has remained in the heart of the people as its last religion.

I do not complain, I do not protest, I do not accuse anyone. I accept the accomplished fact…, like the astronomer who fell into a cistern accepted his accident.

Does it follow, Republicans, that through all these changes on the political stage, whose end may not be near, we have no conservative act to perform; and because our convictions are offended, our hopes disappointed, our faith wounded, that we must languish in this moral prostration worse than crime? Does it follow that we have only to curse the victor, awaiting the late hour of reparation, and to deserve thus, by a stupid and guilty inertia, our bad fortune?

God forbid! We have too many interests engaged in power, in whatever hands it falls; we are too little assured of the present and the future, for us to be permitted, for a single moment, to cancel ourselves in a so-called virtuous abstention, which would only be cowardly. Even if I am accused by the energetic of having failed in republican pride, because once again, in writing, I have bent to the exigencies of the day, I will say what I think about affairs; I will affirm anew, in its fullness, against all monarchy and theocracy, the revolutionary principle; while dynasties prepare their return, I will predict its triumph; I will try, as much as I can, and without failing the conditions that the current government imposes on me, to give the nation a sense of its state, to raise it in its own esteem and in the eyes of foreigners; to take precautions, in this time of sudden catastrophes, against a potentially counter-revolutionary substitution; to restore to ideas a perspective, to interests a direction, to courage the spring, to the proscribed the intelligence and the calm. I will make, in a word, in the most delicate of situations, despite my antecedents, my sympathies, and my wishes, politics for the use of all, of the victors, the indifferent, and the vanquished.

After that, if the power, such as it is, that I may have served by revealing it to itself and to others, takes advantage of my information, I do not fear for my religion; I will be happy, if necessary, for progress. I, who in history recognize only governments in fact, who theoretically repudiate them all, who did not want any for my contemporaries, ask for nothing better than to see the one I pave modify itself and march according to my principles. And who does not already see how much the government of December 2nd, as strong and wise as it thinks it is, needs its most mistreated adversaries to show it the way? Can’t you see, I say, that if republican reason, discouraged by so many outrages, abandons this government, still without roots and as surprised by its own existence as the nation is, to its perfidious suggestions, with the public spirit collapsing more and more, the Revolution will regress ten degrees?

It is a sad state of human societies, which should particularly give food for thought to democrats, that a people cannot separate itself from its rulers under any circumstances, and that unless it crushes them in its revolt, which it cannot always do, it is condemned to straighten them out, even when it hates them the most!…

But what am I saying? What we are tempted to take as a fatal and regrettable support is nothing other than the eternal absorption of power into freedom. And in this intimate solidarity between the citizen and the state, in this close and indissoluble obligation of our interests with the government, can we fail to recognize, where we stand now, the symptom of an impending revolution?

Isn’t it, in fact, the triumph of the revolutionary idea that political power is now so linked to the exercise of every professional faculty – science, literature, commerce, manufacture, trade – that the political mechanism, depending on a million sovereigns, becomes impossible, that whoever engages in a branch of general production or consumption thereby participates in the management of power, has a deliberative and disruptive voice in the state, and that thus industrial initiative is constantly transforming into political initiative, inevitably converting authority into an-archy?

It was thought that to suppress democratic terror, it was necessary, by an extreme concentration of power, to take away the country’s sovereignty, sequester the masses from politics, and forbid any writer who did not fall under the ministry’s jurisdiction from dealing with political matters. The suspension of political faculty, everywhere and always: this has been the counter-revolution’s watchword. “What government would be possible, in fact,” they said, “with the constitutional right to discuss the government? What religion could survive with free examination?… December 2nd is only applying, to the best of its abilities, this powerful theory, apparently unaware that in every society the sovereign legislates and the prince executes only from an abundance of opinion, and imagining that the best way to make the brain think is to practice nerve ligation and block the senses!

Now, behold the result. The more one tries to restrain speech, the more Protestant thought reacts and overflows, taking as its organs those who had applauded the most fiercely the repression of speech and thought.

What do gentlemen from the Academy like to talk about in their solemn speeches? Politics. Without politics, they would not know what to say most of the time. And our lords the bishops, so quick to accuse the rebellious spirit that characterizes the century, what do they treat with the most predilection in their mandates? Politics. It is true that it is for the good of the thing, and the intention justifies everything; but it is up to the parishioners to reflect in turn on the instructions of their pastors! And our serious magistrates, how do they compensate, in their mercurials, for the long and tedious boredom of the judiciary? By discussing politics. They too feel obliged to bring their observations to the system! Not a lesson given to the people, with the consent of authority, which is not the development of a political thesis. Bourgeois who valued the government so cheaply, as long as it gave you the material order, the security of the street, do you know why the confidence does not come back to you? It is because all of you, for an infinity of reasons, all more decisive than the others, cannot help but talk politics. Politics, indeed, in this ambiguity where you have been living since 1830, is the alpha and omega of all your speculations, all your interests, all your ideas. It is not Robespierre or Rousseau who tells you this: it is the necessity of things, the inexorable economy of society. You are, willingly or unwillingly, political men; what is worse, you are in opposition. A man of letters, you propose to write history? Be careful, it will be a treatise on politics. Economist, you examine the sources of taxation, the composition of the budget, the cost price of a soldier, the fragmentation of property, the influence of protection on circulation, etc.? You can dance on the tightrope of distinctions and juggle with words, your political economy will still be politics, always politics. Philosopher, you seek the principles of law, the conditions of society and morality? Politics. Industrialist, merchant, farmer, the nature of your enterprises puts you in permanent contact with the domain, the management, the administration, the customs, the octroi: all of this is politics. You cannot make a claim, address a complaint, propose a reform, without stirring up the foundations of the state, touching the secrets of the police and diplomacy. At the end of a transit question, there is the European balance. You are an assignee, concessionaire, state annuitant? Who more than you has the obligation, therefore the right, to be concerned about politics? As much as the government is worth, as much as your registration is worth: this is the ABC of the stock exchange. Let workers associate for the common exploitation of their industry: the contract they form among themselves seems to you to be only subject to civil and commercial codes; the police, not without reason, will discover a political tendency. Let an individual open a counter for these workers’ discounts: Bank of the People! Immediately, there will be a home visit, paper searches, seals affixed. The alleged counter is a political center.

From the top of society down to the bottom, everything that occurs, moves, and is consumed, is tied to political action and can be considered a function of the government. Each individual who works, sells, and buys is, in a certain sense, a representative of the state; they participate in the government, which cannot do anything without their free cooperation and consent. It would be strange in a country where, through centuries of progress, the government is no longer, in reality, anything more than the interplay of interests, to claim to exclude interests from the government, and to govern the nation in the manner of the autocrat of Russia or the sultans of Babylon. How constrained and humiliated these so-called statesmen must be, who, on the faith of the Jesuits, have accepted political prohibition as a curative means and taken authority as a dogma, only to find themselves, at every moment, in all their actions, subject to the inevitable control of interests, forced to back down before it, and that barely escaping distrust! And how they must regret that golden age of authority, when work was little or not specialized, trade and industry without interlocking, science null, philosophy deemed demonic, each poor family housed in its little cottage and living solely from the product of its small field, firewood, and communal grass, the government, that is to say the Church, having no other policy than to collect tithes and send the superfluous population to the Holy Land, hovering above the obedient groups like a cloud over the desert!…

Therefore, please cease with vain delicacy and false scruples. Politics, already subordinated by the economy, but stubbornly maintaining a distinct, superior position, impossible: this is the secret of our situation and what compels me, a socialist, after four years of political denial, to engage in politics. Here, form triumphs over substance, and when the house is on fire, it is not the time to determine whether one is on good or bad terms with the doorman. For three years, a foolish reaction preached the restoration of authority, the absorption of individual liberties into the state. Louis-Napoleon is only the first term in this counter-revolutionary sequence, I would say his first dupe. Others will bring charges against the author of the coup d’état, recount the Mysteries of December 2, speak of ruthless orders, the multitude of suspects, the names of the victims. As for me, to whom exile, and I thank the prison that protected me from its walls, does not grant such franchises, I obey other duties. I will not allow, without first expressing my reservations, the mystical and holographic will of December 2 to be opened, the preparation of a surreptitious restoration abroad, or the organization in the shadows of a second attempt at constitutional corruption. In solidarity, willingly or unwillingly, as a citizen, as a writer, as a worker, and head of a family, with the acts of a power that I did not want; convinced, moreover, that in the event of December 2, there is something else besides a plot; having no guarantee, far from it, that democracy, a real democracy, will return to power in time, or that another palace revolution will give us a more complete regime of freedom; not trusting any notability, princely or popular, with the care of general interests and public liberties: I resume the course of my publications. In accordance with the law, I use what remains of my initiative; I address my fellow citizens, and through them, the President of the Republic, my reflections on the causes that led to the recent events, and on the results that, in my opinion, they must produce; and I shamelessly implore Louis-Napoleon to take action as soon as possible because, truly, for himself and for us, I dare say that there is urgency!

First of all, for him. It is said that, like the Emperor, he believes in his star. If such is his superstition, far from mocking him, I congratulate him on it. No glasses are needed to discover that star, nor a logarithm table to calculate its movement. It can be seen with the naked eye, and anyone can say where it is going.

On February 24, 1848, a revolution overthrew the constitutional monarchy and replaced it with a democracy; on December 2, 1851, another revolution substituted this democracy with a ten-year presidency; in six months, perhaps, a third revolution will oust this presidency and restore the legitimate monarchy on its ruins.

What is the secret of this adventure? The same proposals, expressed in different terms, will reveal it to us.

What Louis-Philippe was unable to predict and prepare for caused him to lose power and brought about the Republic; what the republicans did not dare to undertake caused them to fail and led to the success of Louis-Napoléon; what Louis-Napoléon will not be able to execute in turn will lead to his downfall, as well as that of any successors who may come after him, assuming that the country agrees to indefinitely bear the costs of these unfaithful vocations.

Thus, since 1848, and I could go back even further, a fate has been cast upon the political leaders of France: this fate is the problem of the proletariat, the end of politics, the social idea. That is why the mission of Louis-Napoléon is no different from that of Louis-Philippe and the republicans, and those who come after him will have no other mission in turn. In politics, one is not the heir of a man, but the bearer of an idea. The one who best realizes it is the legitimate heir.

So what does it matter if the social idea no longer sparks heated debates in the press, if it has ceased to captivate the masses, if the capitalist thinks he is freed from the nightmare, if Louis-Napoléon’s commissioners congratulate him in their reports for having defeated the monster, as those medals struck in the likeness of I no longer know which Caesar glorified him for having abolished the Christian name, nomine Christianorum deleto; what does all that matter, I ask, if in seeking to strike at socialism one has only amplified its venom; if the idea that was wandering on the surface has already penetrated the noble parts; if the power that was supposed to crush it only expresses, in result, through its institution, its needs, despite its official protests and its secret proscriptions, socialism, the absorption of politics into economics; if Louis-Napoléon, in the most important of his decrees, manifests the irresistible tendency that drives him towards social revolution?

No, socialism is not defeated, since it is not resolved; since it has encountered only insults and bayonets so far; since the government of December 2, after having proscribed it, had to position itself as its interpreter; borrowing its popularity, drawing inspiration from its solutions, seeming restrained only by the desire to reconcile existing interests with those it would like to create; since in a word, according to certain reports to which it is permitted to lend some credence, Louis-Napoleon would be the worst, read if you will, the first of socialists, the last of statesmen! Is it then Louis-Napoleon who will abolish politics and make the social revolution? Is it the grandson of Charles X, that of Louis-Philippe, or anyone else you please? For truly we can no longer say in the evening by whom we will have the honor of being governed in the morning. What does it matter to us, once again, the name of the person? The same star governs them all, and our right vis-à-vis them remains the same. Bystanders, who asked in ’48 when this would end! who gave up everything, Constitution, Liberty, Honor, Country, so that it would end, here you are launched into another adventure! You thought you were reaching the landing, but you were only at the station. Do you hear the whistle of the locomotive? Believe a man whom your favorite newspaper, the Constitutionnel, has patented a prophet: let the train go, arrange yourself in your corner, drink, eat, sleep and don’t say a word! For, I warn you, if you continue to cry out and rage, the least that can happen to you will be to be thrown under the wagon.

If such is the condition of power in France, that if he who holds it does not know, cannot or will not serve the revolution, and does not get rid of himself, he is balanced by it, what better course of action do we, socialists and non-socialists, radicals and moderates, have than to relentlessly study the immense problem, to seek the reconciliation of our ideas, and, without waiting for more beloved leaders to arrive, to exercise legitimate and constant pressure on power, whoever holds it, through science and law? Let Louis-Napoléon, since he is in line, become, if he wishes, greater than the Emperor by virtue of the revolutionary mandate he gave himself on December 2nd, let him accomplish the work of the nineteenth century; above all, let him have the pride of leaving nothing for his successor to do, and let the nation, once again self-governed, strongly constituted in its economy, no longer have to fear, from a party, a sect, or a prince, either usurpation, restoration, or dictatorship; let it bid farewell to politics, and I, for one, will not detract from Louis-Napoléon. I will list his offenses against democracy as his services are rendered; I will forgive him for his coup d’état, and I will thank him for giving socialism certainty and reality.

Why am I always talking about socialism? I wish this counter-revolutionary nickname, which the people accepted in ’48 just as they accepted the sans-culotte in ’93, and which just as poorly represents the idea of the century, had run its course. The period of agitation it expressed is over, and the question it raised so posed that no agenda will ever push it aside again. Without the persecution it is a pretext for, I might abandon this watchword of economic revolution that reactionary writers, great publicists, like to use for their calumnies and deny the reality of the movement even in the midst of revolutionary progress. While the peddlers occupy the fair, soldiers of the vanguard, tireless pioneers, let us not allow study to weaken and public opinion to fast. The history of humanity is the history of armies, said the Emperor’s nephew:

Forward the thirty-second, The thirty-second forward!

II. Situation of France on February 24, 1848.

There are people who, in reference to December 2nd, commenting on the Decadence of the Romans, tell you most seriously: The French nation is corrupt, degenerate, cowardly. It has betrayed its providential mission, renounced its glory. There is nothing more to expect from it: let another take its place, and receive its crown!

Many French people repeat these foolishnesses, so quick they are to speak ill of themselves!

Others, affecting a hypocritical air, accuse socialism. It is socialism, they claim, that has lost democracy. The people, of their own accord, were full of common sense, pure, virtuous, devoted. But their soul has been materialized by the preachers of socialism, their disinterested heart of public affairs, turned away from action. It is through the influence of these lethiferous ideas that they could have been mistaken about the meaning of the coup d’état, applauding the violation of the Assembly, the arrest of the generals. They had been taught to despise their representatives: they failed to heed their call, and in the ambush of December 2nd, they saw only the restoration of their right, universal suffrage.

Citizen Mazzini, the archangel of democracy, has become the publisher of this opinion.

Here are still, on the same event, other variations:

It was the left that ensured the success of the coup d’état by voting, on November 17th, against the proposal of the questors.

It was the press of the Elysée that frightened the bourgeoisie with its stories and held back their indignation.

It was the army, ferocious and venal, whose attitude had despaired the patriotism of the citizens.

It is this, it is that!…

Always the great events explained by small causes! Thus the foreigner, taking note of these miserable defeats, not understanding how a mass of 36 million men could be deceived and muzzled in the same day, jeers at our nation, and in turn proclaims it fallen. Those who do not know us, who do not know of what revolution France is in labor, or who, having vaguely heard of this revolution, judge it as absurd as our conservatives, throw sarcasm at this race, chosen above all, and devote it to shame. The Englishman, disguising his joy poorly, devouring our territory in advance, blushes at our adventure; the American, with his insolence of a freedman, spits on our name; the metaphysical German, the feudal Hungarian, the bigoted Italian, one after the other, put us on the pillory. While the Holy Father makes us kiss his mules, here is the prophet Mazzini who presents us with the sponge of gall, and pronounces on us the Consummatum est! What a triumph, throughout Europe, for envy! and what a lesson to posterity! France of 1848, the daughter of 92 and 1830, well! This emancipatory France, for a moment adulterous, gives birth to socialism; and immediately betrays nationalities, assassinates republics, kneels before the corpse of the papacy, embraces the phantom of tyranny, and dies!…

Oh! If only I had to answer to ignorant pedants! If it were only a matter of once again chastising these mystagogues, sycophants of revolutions they did not foresee and which surpass them! But a more serious duty commands me. I must justify my nation before history, remove from it this weight of infamy, which its rivals hope to crush it with. A single day of remorse for France! That is a hundred thousand times more than the passion of the Man-God… Let us forget, if possible, our grievances; let us reason calmly, review the facts and causes. May history, showing us in our errors the causes of our defeats, finally teach us to repair them. May parties and sects disappear among us in the fire of adversity; may intolerance be condemned, and may only freedom be valued!

On February 24, 1848, a handful of republicans, going beyond the limits of bourgeois protest, overthrew the throne and said to the people: Be free!

It was daring, it would have been sublime, if, with less moderation and honesty – as I will show shortly – with less regard for the prejudices of the country, with less democratic religion, the authors of this coup d’état, taking more account of their position than of their principle, had wanted to take advantage of their success to entrench the Revolution. Let them all know, nevertheless, that in recalling their timidity here, I do not reproach them for it, and may they themselves not feel any more regret than I do! Instead of presuming, like others, the national will, they preferred to wait for it; their first act was to put into practice the theory they had just triumphed with, at the risk of soon losing all the fruit due to the incapacity of the masses: no blame can be attached to them. And if, in the face of the facts that followed, one sometimes regrets that popular leaders pushed political faith so far, these same facts, necessary for national education, only highlight their virtue even more.

What did that vast word, ”Be free,“ mean in the mouths of the men of February, addressed to the people? What were the chains we had to break, the yoke we had to break, the oppression we had to disperse? In short, what did this effusion of freedom that was announced signify?

Because every revolution is, by its very nature, negative: we will even see that it can and should never be anything else. That of ’89, in what was decisive, real, and acquired, was not anything else. Was there, then, material for us to negate in February? Was there anything left to abolish, or did we only need to improve? In the first case, why did the Provisional Government abstain? In the second, why did we overthrow Louis-Philippe, and what did the Republic mean? Either the leaders of Democracy betrayed their mandate by maintaining the status quo, or they acted without a mandate, and they should only be seen as usurpers: it seems impossible to escape this dilemma.

This is where the martyrdom of the founders of the Republic begins: for how can we suppose that they were ignorant of the purpose of their enterprise? But they did not dare, they could not dare!… Hence, the appeal to the people and its sad results.

There existed in France, as of February 24:

1. An organized clergy, comprising approximately 50,000 priests and as many individuals of both sexes distributed in religious houses; possessing 300 million properties, not counting churches, curial goods, incidental revenues, indulgences, collections, etc.; a presumed indispensable organ of public and private morality, exercising as such an occult influence over the entire country, all the more formidable for this reason, and in many cases irresistible.

2. An army of 400,000 men, disciplined, alienated, without relations with the national guards, whom they were taught to despise, and entirely devoted to the government, the only one considered capable of guarding and defending the country.

3. An administrative centralization, master of the police, public education, public works, taxes, customs, and domains; employing over 500,000 officials, paid by municipalities and the state; directly or indirectly dependent on it, owning all property, all industry, all mechanical or liberal arts; everywhere holding sway over persons and things; governing everything and leaving taxpayers only the trouble of producing and paying taxes.

4. A highly hierarchical judiciary, extending its inevitable arbitration over social relationships and private interests: Court of Cassation, Court of Appeal, Courts of First Instance and Commerce, Justices of the Peace, Councils of Industrial Relations, etc.: all in perfect harmony with the church, the administration, the police, and the army.

5. This immense organism, serving both as a motor and an instrument of collective action, constantly attracting to itself the strength and wealth of the country, was contested by three major parties, jealous of providing the happiness of the nation and disturbing, tearing its bosom with their ardent competition. These were: the legitimist party, representing the elder branch of Bourbon and to a certain extent the old regime; the Orléanist party, representing constitutional ideas; the republican party. These three parties were in turn subdivided into several nuances: outside of them, the Bonapartist party, which was about to reappear, and finally the socialist party, which was to draw the curse of all the others upon itself.

6. As for the NATION, which was perfectly homogeneous from a legal standpoint, it was divided, in terms of interests, into three main categories, which we will try to define as follows:

The Bourgeoisie. I place in this class everything that lives off the income of capital, property rent, office privileges, employment status, and sinecures, rather than actual labor products. The modern bourgeoisie, understood in this way, forms a kind of capitalist and landed aristocracy, similar in numerical strength and nature of its patronage to the old nobility; almost sovereignly controlling banking, railways, mines, insurance, transportation, large industry, high commerce, and with a public debt as its operational base, hypothecary, chirographic, and limited, ranging from 20 to 25 billion.

The Middle Class. It consists of entrepreneurs, bosses, shopkeepers, manufacturers, farmers, scholars, artists, etc., who, like proletarians, but unlike the bourgeoisie, live much more off their personal product than off their capital, privileges, and properties, but are distinguished from the proletariat in that they work, as they say vulgarly, for themselves, that they have the responsibility for the losses of their status as well as the exclusive enjoyment of the profits, whereas the proletarian works for wages.

Finally, the Working Class or Proletariat. This is the class that, living like the previous one more off its work and services than off its capital, has no industrial initiative, and deserves in all respects the qualification of mercenary or salaried. Some individuals in this class, through their talent and ability, rise to a condition of ease that entrepreneurs and patent holders often do not achieve, just as among the latter, some obtain profits that far exceed the average income of the bourgeoisie. But these inequalities, although individual and almost anomalous, do not affect the masses; and just as the middle class, composed in general of the most skilled and energetic producers, remains well below the bourgeoisie in terms of security and guarantees, so the proletariat is composed of a poor, if not miserable multitude; whose dream of well-being is their whole life; who barely know, in many places, how to use wheat, meat, and wine; who wear clogs, dressed in cotton or linen all year round, and many of whom cannot read. Economists have portrayed, in moving terms, the misery of the proletariat; they have proved, to the point of evidence, that in this misery lies the cause of the weakening of public morality and the degradation of the race. France is the country in Europe with the greatest gap between civilization and barbarism, where the level of education is the lowest. While Paris, the center of luxury and enlightenment, is rightly considered the capital of the globe, there are many localities in the departments where the people, barely emancipated from serfdom and already corrupted by wage labor, seem to have regressed to the Middle Ages.

The country has over 36 million inhabitants. Its annual product is approximately 9 billion, of which a quarter is used to pay for state, church, and other functions called unproductive or parasitic; another quarter belongs as interest, rent, rent, dividend, agio, commission, profit, etc., to owners, capitalists, and entrepreneurs; leaving for the working class, including those in the middle class who do not make a profit, and that is the majority, an income or wage that can be estimated at 41 cents per head per day, and in extreme cases is below 15.

This was, in brief, the balance sheet of the French nation as of February 24.

It follows that the strength of this nation, apart from its territory and number of inhabitants, which constitute its importance as an organ and function in humanity, comes solely from its feudal and bourgeois government. The people, the servile mass, exploited but not organized, is without political value. Its role is, for the most part, that of slavery among the ancients. Suppose for a moment the hierarchy that contains and implements it destroyed; the power destroyed, in its personnel and its jobs; the bourgeoisie exterminated, its wealth shared; suppose this multitude, indigent and illiterate, barbarous if you will but not vile, became master by a revolutionary stroke, passing the level over the Church and the state, and realizing in its own way the parable of Saint-Simon, as it could have very well done after February 24: immediately, and until new organization, France, stripped, like Samson by Delilah, of its hair, is nothing more than an inert mass, in a chaotic state; there is indeed a social matter, but there is no longer a society.

Thus, the French people, in its deep masses, with the centralization that surrounds it, the clergy that preaches to it, the army that watches over it, the judiciary that threatens it, the parties that tug at it, the capitalist and mercantile feudalism that possesses it, resembles a criminal thrown into the hulk, kept under constant surveillance, with a coat of mail, a straitjacket, chains, a pillory, a bundle of straw for a bed, black bread and water for nourishment. Where and when has a population been more fettered, squeezed, hampered, put on a stricter diet? The Americans, who have neither clergy, nor police, nor centralization, nor army; who have no government, in the sense that the old world attaches to this term; who do not know what to do with their cattle, their flour, and their lands, speak of us quite easily! We have borne, for centuries, a burden that in less than a generation would have crushed any other race; and such is our misery that if this burden is removed from us, we momentarily cease to live; if it is preserved, we cannot exist!

Certainly, never did a more beautiful opportunity present itself to revolutionaries. Everyone, even the bourgeoisie, felt it. It is repugnant for society to be nothing more than the systematic immolation of the majority to the smallest, when this majority is composed of individuals of the same blood, endowed with identical aptitudes, capable, finally, of becoming in their turn, by education and work, as learned, as artistic, as powerful inventors, as great captains, as deep statesmen, as their cousins of the ruling and bourgeois class.

I have no desire to rekindle extinguished discords. I know that I am not writing an article for the Representative of the People, that there is no longer a multitude reading me, and that I would be stirring up in vain this hearth that is only ash. The largest and poorest class, this great army of universal suffrage, which we have tried to emancipate by its own initiative, has given twice, on December 10, 1848, and December 20, 1851, an answer that corresponded to the state of its soul, the poetry of its memories, and the naivety of its sentiments. The French people, for some time yet, want to be governed, it costs me nothing to admit it, and they are looking for a strong man! They have entrusted their sovereignty to the name that represented strength to them: what an idea to have wanted to make a sovereign out of this child! What a lamentable fiction in the already so long series of our fictions!… I will not contest this plebiscite, which puts me at ease, and I do not in any way intend to invalidate the vote of December 20. The people, if not by reason, at least by instinct, know what they are doing; only what they know is not up to what we, the middle class and the bourgeois, know. It is not the acts of the people, perfectly authentic, despite what is said, and too easy to predict, that I am discussing. I ask myself: How did the leaders of democracy, on February 24, resign their powers into the hands of such a people; and how did this people, in turn, deceive the hopes of the democrats?

This question, which contains the secret of subsequent events, and which, after all that has been said and written in the last four years, is still brand new, I hope to deal with with a certain diligence.

III. Desiderata of the Revolution on February 24.

The education of peoples, says Lessing, is like that of individuals. Each progress achieved in this education leads to the suppression of an educating organ, and results for the subject in increased independence and cessation of discipline.

The economic and anti-governmental revolution, for which the constitutional monarchy had been overthrown, called ten million French people to exercise political rights, and created the greatest anarchy that history has ever seen. This revolution, already so full of preparations, could therefore only consist, on the one hand, in the partial or total, in any case progressive, repeal of the great organizations which at the origin of societies served to tame the rebellious nature of peoples; secondly, in the extinction of debts, the spread of well-being, the transformation of property, the annihilation of parties, and finally, and to put it all in one word, the social and egalitarian education of the masses.

Thus religion, symbolic of society, has always been the first intellectual manifestation of the people; the priesthood, its first master.

Without the revolution showing the slightest hatred for the cult, it was necessary to ask, in 1848, whether, according to the principle of religious freedom and the progress of public reason, it was necessary to continue, at the expense of the nation, a body as formidable as the clergy; whether the time had not come for French society to begin renouncing the cult, considered as a principle of morality and an instrument of order; whether it was not appropriate at this time, in the interest of morals themselves, and without dogmatizing in any way, to transfer religious authority to the father of the family, as political authority had just been transferred to the citizen; to teach the masses that prayer is only a supplement to reflection, for the use of children and the simple-minded; the sacraments and mysteries, an allegory of social laws; the cult, an emblem of universal solidarity; to tell them, finally, that the man who has no private virtue, no fidelity to commitments, no devotion to his country, except through fear of God and fear of the executioner, far from being a saint, is simply a villain?

For, if one were to continue to think, along with some, that the people cannot do without worship; that if they no longer go to mass, they will devastate the countryside, burn barns, and loot stores; that even admitting, as is well known, the decline of Catholicism, the only consequence to be drawn from this fact would be to replace the official religion with another more in line with the needs and ideas, not at all to abandon such a serious matter to the arbiter of consciences; that in the meantime it was good policy to call on the priests to bless the flags of liberty and the funerals of its martyrs; if, I say, such were to be the judgment of democracy on the importance of cults, then it was wrong to drive out the Orleans dynasty; it was necessary to stick to the reform demanded by Mr. Duvergier de Haurane, simply to support MM. Odilon Barrot and Thiers. The democratic theory of freedom is incompatible with the theological doctrine of grace: one must choose between Augustine and Pelagius, two masters who exclude each other. No revolution in the Church, no republic in the state.

As for me, I had such faith in the morality of the people, despite the deleterious influence of pauperism, that I would not have hesitated to support the fullest freedom, and while respecting individual beliefs, to definitively remove religion from the state, that is, first and foremost, from the budget. And certainly, the opinion of the leaders of democracy on the ultimate importance of religious ideas cannot be a doubt for anyone either: their principle forbade them from having such a degrading opinion of the people.

But they did not dare to assume the responsibility of such a serious decision; they thought they should refer it to the nation. We are not the sovereign, they thought; religion is one of its properties; it is not for us to prejudge the disposition of its conscience, still less to attract upon democracy the reproach that has always been attached to atheists!… The people, the National Assembly, will decide.

Thus, the bloody and obscene memories of the Hébertists stopped the republican party on the slope of liberty. The past of the Revolution was crushing the present: now, with the question referred to popular judgment, the Church was sure of victory.

The same thing was bound to happen to the government.

What is government in society? The onesie, so to speak, of a people in the cradle; after religion, the main organ of mass education; in times of antagonism, the armed expression of collective strength.

Already in ’89, the problem of reducing power at the center had been posed. Half solved by the spontaneous formation of the National Guard and provincial federations, it made possible the days of July 14, October 5 and 6, and August 10. Under the influence of this principle, France as a whole was revolutionized during the years 89, 90, 91, 92, and until May 31, 93; volunteer battalions were formed, and the people rose en masse under the Reign of Terror. Affirmed, though obscurely, by the Girondin party, fought at once by the royalists of the Assembly and by the Mountain, it succumbed in the civil war ignited by the day of May 31. It can be said that from that time on, France was once again erased from the list of free nations; in changing its government, it only changed its tyranny. Disorganized, disarmed, muzzled, without rallying points, without cohesion of interests, elsewhere than in the state; recognizing no authority other than that of the center; accustomed to following it like a soldier follows his file leader, it has lost even the notion of its independence and its rights. For sixty years she has witnessed the tragedies of her government, reduced, for any initiative, to pursue her masters in turn with her wishes and her curses. All independent action is taken away from her; any attempt to reclaim it that is not supported by at least one of the constituted powers is instantly and ruthlessly repressed.

This can be judged from the picture of our revolutions during the last sixty-four years.

ANNALS OF FREEDOM, IN FRANCE, from January 24, 1789 to February 24, 1848.

1789 – January 24 to May 4 – Convocation of the Estates-General, drafting of the cahiers. The nation is called to political life, makes an act of will for the first time, expresses its intentions, and appoints its representatives.

June 20 – Tennis Court Oath: the Assembly of representatives declares itself sovereign, and superior to royal prerogative.

July 14 – The people support their representatives; the monarchy is subordinated; the national guards federate.

1790 – July 14 – Great Federation; the king swears allegiance to the nation; the nation swears by the Revolution.

1791 – July 14 – New Federation. The nation forgives the king: She commands, He executes.

1792 – August 10 – The monarchy unable to bear its inferior condition, conspires against national sovereignty. It is defeated: the nation forms a Convention to establish a Republic.

1793 – May 31 to June 2 – Reaction of the idea of authority against the idea of freedom. State reason, under the name of the one and indivisible Republic, triumphs over the reason of the Country, accused of federalism. The people support unity: the nation is put under the yoke by the Jacobins. The terror begins.

Here ends the period of freedom inaugurated by the convocation of the Estates-General.

1794 – February 24 to April 5 – Elimination of the Hébertistes and Dantonistes by the faction of Robespierre. Power becomes increasingly concentrated.

July 27-28 (9 Thermidor) – The power inclines towards the dictatorship of one person. A palace revolution, where Robespierre is defeated by his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety. At first, the population does not dare to trust it, and the triumph of the Convention appears doubtful, so much had the triumvirate managed to extinguish the political faculty in the masses. Gradually the Parisians pronounce themselves; Robespierre is guillotined, and the country, having escaped from this tyranny, falls back under that of the Thermidorians.

1795 – April 1 to May 20 (12 Germinal-1st Prairial) – Insurrection of the people of Paris against the thermidorian reactionaries. Suppressed by the Convention authority.

October 5 (13 Vendémiaire) – Disaffection is at its peak. If the elections remain free, the royalists will be appointed in the majority, and it will be the end of the Republic. A law, known as the law of 13 Fructidor, therefore orders that two-thirds of the representatives will be chosen from among the members of the Convention. Sections revolt: crushed by Bonaparte.

1797 – September 4 (18 Fructidor) – New elections bring a royalist majority. Coup d’état of the Directory, supported by the army and the Jacobins. The constitution is violated, representation mutilated, and the Republic immolated for the second time by its defenders.

1799 – November 9 (18 Brumaire) – A palace revolution, to the advantage of Bonaparte. The nation, which was not consulted, remains silent or applauds.

1814 – April – A palace revolution, to the advantage of the Bourbons, who returned with the foreigner. The nation greets its princes, whom it no longer knew.

1815 – March – Military conspiracy and palace revolution. Part of the nation applauds the return of the Emperor.

July – Second restoration of the Bourbons, by foreign favor. The other part of the nation, which had remained silent during the hundred days, takes revenge with applause, and proscriptions begin.

1830 – July – A conflict arises between the great powers of the State; the people of Paris support the 221; Marshal Marmont withdraws the troops. Palace revolution, in favor of Louis-Philippe.

1832-1836 – Republican and Carlist riots: defeated by the government.

1839 – Parliamentary coalition: a secret society tries to take advantage of the situation to call the people to arms. The crown yields: ministerial revolution.

1848 – February 22-24 – Conflict between the ministry and the opposition, supported by the National Guard. Louis-Philippe flees, leaving the place to the Republicans.

No, those who were surprised by France’s attitude on December 2, 1851, do not know its history. They have only remembered the major parliamentary and military dates, taking the action of power and parties for that of the nation three-quarters of the time.

Let it be known once that France has not had five years of national existence for sixty-four years. It lived its own life from January 24, 1789, the date of the convocation of the Estates-General, until May 31, 1793, the date of the expulsion of the Girondins. During this short evolution, we see the country subordinate, divide, and reduce power; local and individual liberties form; and if the situation is far from happy, spirit and will arise from everywhere in the social body. After May 31, the relationship is reversed: power, as under the kings, subordinates the country; the nation is no longer anything but an integral part of the state; the container is included in the content. In the centralization advocated by the Jacobins, we recognize the influence of the popular instinct, more easily grasped by the simple notion of power than by the complicated idea of the social contract. As political faculty absorbs more and more into the superior agents of authority, citizens lose one by one all their freedoms, and do not even retain the security of their correspondence. Society has disappeared: it is a domain, with its managers, its employees, and its tenants.

Certainly, one cannot deny that the various governments that succeeded each other in France after the death of Louis XVI sometimes achieved great things; that, either through their initiative or their reaction, they produced vivid sparks. But all this, once again, is a matter of state history; it is not the history of the people. Now, if the word democracy means something, if it was through it and for it that the February Revolution took place, in 1848, it was the case to put an end to a monstrous anomaly, and if one did not dare to go as far as anarchy, which like any principle rather indicates an ideal than a reality, one could not at least refuse a general simplification of the political institution.

Was the people therefore declared out of tutelage and sui juris? Centralization, this vast field of pride, had to be immediately attacked, and citizens sent into possession of themselves. The management of their affairs, the care of their police, the disposition of their funds and their troops were restored, except for the transitions to be managed, to the departments and municipalities. On what grounds could individuals appointed by their peers claim to know better in Paris what suited the provinces than the electors themselves?… To make French people, the first condition was to make citizens, that is to say, in our language, people of their country, which can only be achieved through decentralization. The army was founded in the urban guards; the choice of arbitrators, the form of procedures, and the authority of solutions were left to conflicting interests…

On the contrary, did one think that in this democracy without a dictator, without a senate, without factotums and without informers, order would not last eight days; that the people needed, according to Rousseau’s style, a prince as they needed a god; that otherwise, individuals would fight among themselves, the weak would be at the mercy of the strong, the rich exposed to the envy of the miserable; that force was necessary for the Republic to contain bad passions, punish crimes, and give honest people security?

Then, since the system had to be preserved, it was hypocrisy to speak of revolution, and one was guilty of an attack by overthrowing the dynasty. By proclaiming the people sovereign, one betrayed it doubly; first, because it was only supposed to enjoy a fictitious sovereignty; second, because in the hypothesis, it was unworthy of exercising it. Just the attribution of the right to vote to this reputedly ignorant people, capable of the most scandalous aberrations and the most irreparable cowardices, even if that vote was only to be given every five years, was a crime against progress and humanity.

I do not need to say what the opinion of the provisional government was on this point, as well as on the other. No one had a higher regard for the people, and if it had depended on their sentiments, they would undoubtedly have cut the cords instantly. But for the second time, they did not dare! They were restrained by general prejudice and fear of the unknown, which troubles even the greatest minds. Far from advising the demolition of authority, some advised seizing the dictatorship: why bother if one did not want to abolish the cult, reduce the state, and did not agree on industrial improvements?… The impossibility of recognizing the dictator, and above all respect for the democratic principle, considerations of principle, put a veto on the execution’s desires. The political question, like the ecclesiastical question, was devolved to the National Assembly; it could then be foreseen that it would be buried there. There, it was implied that since the people were minors, they could not be left to their own counsel; government was maintained with even more energy; all that was required was to give the new constitution the qualification of democratic, which, judging from the wording published on November 4, 1848, was perhaps less true than the 1830 Charter…

I will not dwell on the economic question, the most serious of all. Stated in its true terms, it does not seem to me any more susceptible to contradiction than the two preceding ones.

As previously mentioned, the nation can be divided into three natural categories, one of which has the formula: Opulence and unproductive consumption; the second, Industry and free trade but without guarantees; the third, absolute subjection and progressive poverty. The problem for the Revolution was to solve the first and third classes in the second, the extremes in the mean, and thereby to ensure that everyone, without exception, had capital, work, outlets, freedom, and comfort in equal proportion. This is the great operation of the century, and the goal, still so little understood, of socialism. History and the analogy of principles show that this solution is the true one.

What socialism has named exploitation of man by man, namely the landlord’s rent, the capitalist’s interest, the priest’s tithe, the tribute of the state, the entrepreneur’s and merchant’s agio, all these forms of prerogative of authority over labor, brought back to their origins, to the earliest times of human production, are a corollary of government and religion, one of the forms of primitive initiation. Just as man was originally disciplined only by religious terror and fear of power, he only engaged in labor forced and constrained. To obtain daily labor from him, he had to be subjected to daily restraint: in reality, rent and interest are only the instruments of this energetic education.

Currently, the people of our cities and countryside, whose average salary is 41 cents per day per person; could this people be capable of bearing a greater share of wealth without falling into debauchery and insolence? Was it to be feared that by increasing their well-being, instead of doubling their activity and raising them up to virtue, they would be precipitated into idleness and vice? Was it necessary, more and more, to hold them in check with hard work, meager wages, and, as Christ, the apostles, and the monks of the Middle Ages practiced on themselves, to leave the proletarian no hope but in another life?

Asking these questions was solving them. The difficulty for the Provisional Government was not in the goal, it was in the means. How to guarantee work, open up outlets, balance production and consumption, increase wages, attack rent and interest, without making credit disappear and stopping the formation of capital?… The emancipation of the proletariat appeared to some minds as the dispossession of the bourgeoisie; the projects varied endlessly, an inexhaustible source of slander for the Republican Party. In short, they did not dare, they could not dare! When it comes to fortune and public freedom, no one in particular has the right to take on reform. Huber agreed with me, in Doullens, that in pronouncing the dissolution of the Assembly on May 15, he had committed an act of usurpation. The Provisional Government would have been in the same position, by ruling on its own on the necessity of worship and government, and on the organization of work. Opinion not being formed, it was not up to them to anticipate it. After all, the people’s misery is still a lesser evil than arbitrary power. The right to work, decreed in principle by the Provisional Government, was referred back to the Constituent Assembly for organization, where the opponents could not fail to be in the majority. So, do you believe that the representatives of threatened interests would, in such conditions, dedicate themselves to the emancipation of the proletariat!…

Thus democracy, no matter its will or faith, found itself facing questions without bottom or shore. From all sides, the tradition of 1789 led to the unknown. One could not step back, one dared not move forward. To all, it seemed that public morality had risen, wealth increased, principles of order and well-being multiplied in every direction; therefore, it was just, reasonable, and useful to develop public freedoms, give more impetus to individual liberty, emancipate consciences, and give the people a larger share in social happiness. The revolution of 1789 left us to fill these gaps; it was because we shied away from this work that the July monarchy, hypocritical and corrupt, was overthrown. Then, when one wanted to get to work, all this mirage of freedom, equality, and republican institutions vanished. Instead of a land of promise, dotted with groves, vineyards, harvests, running waters, and green valleys, we discovered only an arid, silent, limitless plain! ...

History is only the result of situations. The situation of France, as it existed in 1848, every nation, through the progress of its ideas, the play of its institutions and interests, will arrive there. That is why the history of France is the history of all peoples, and its revolutions are the revolutions of humanity.

Let peoples learn from our history! What prevented the democracy of 1848 from taking a revolutionary initiative? At first glance, respect for its principle and horror of dictatorship; upon closer examination, the embarrassment of solutions; and, as we will try to show, in the final analysis, a prejudice.

IV. Universal Prejudice Against the Revolution, on February 24th. Republicans Withdraw.

Tracing the course of social manifestations back to their causes, it seems to me that what has been misleading nations for four centuries, what has placed obstacles in the way of the human mind, what has caused all the evils of the first revolution and frustrated the movement of 1848, is the generally prevailing prejudice concerning the nature and effects of progress. Things happen in society in a certain way; we conceive of them in another, to which we strive to bring them back: hence a constant contradiction between the practical reason of society and our theoretical reason, hence all the revolutionary turmoil and upheaval.

The reader will kindly follow me for a few moments in this discussion, which I will try to make as short and clear as possible.

We derive our conception of progress from science and industry. There we observe that one discovery is constantly added to another, one machine to another, one theory to another; that a hypothesis, initially accepted as true and later shown to be false, is immediately and necessarily replaced by another; so that there is never a void or gap in knowledge, but rather accumulation and continuous development.

We apply this conception of progress to society, meaning the great organisms that have served as its forms up to now. Thus we want every political constitution to be an improvement on the previous one; that every religion presents a doctrine that is richer, more complete, and more harmonious than the one it replaces; and even more so, that every economic organization realizes a more expansive, comprehensive, and integrated idea than the previous system. We cannot conceive of society advancing on one point while regressing on another. And the first question we ask the innovators who speak of reforming society, of abolishing one or another of its institutions, is to say to them: What do you put in its place?

Men who deal with government, minds preoccupied with religious ideas, those who are passionate about metaphysical constructions and social utopias, and the common people who follow them, cannot imagine that reason, conscience, and society do not have their ontology, their essential constitution, whose affirmation, always more explicit, is the perpetual creed of humanity. When one system is destroyed, they look for another; they need to feel their minds in universals and categories, their freedom in prohibitions and licenses. Astonishingly, most revolutionaries, like the conservatives they fight, only think of building prisons for themselves; they resemble the companion who goes from inn to inn, from workshop to workshop, amassing a few coins, perfecting his craft, until finally, returning home, he falls… into marriage!

Nothing is more false than this conception of social progress.

The first task of any society is to create a set of rules, essentially subjective, the work of speculative minds, accepted by the common people without discussion, justified by the necessity of the moment, honored from time to time by the skill of some just prince; but which, having no foundation in the life of the species, degenerates sooner or later into oppression. Immediately, a work of negation begins against power, which never stops. Freedom, taken for control, tends to occupy all the space: while the politician strives to reform the state and seeks the perfection of the system, the philosopher realizes that this so-called system is nothingness; that the true authority is freedom; that instead of a constitution of created powers, what society seeks is the balance of its natural forces.

The same is true, moreover, of all things that proceed from pure reason. At first, these constructions seem necessary, endowed with the highest degree of positivism, and the question appears to be solely to grasp them in their absolute form. But soon, analysis seizes hold of these pure products of the understanding, demonstrates their emptiness, and leaves in their place only the faculty that made them all rejective, critique.

Thus, when Bacon, Ramus, and all free thinkers had overturned the authority of Aristotle and introduced, along with the principle of observation, democracy into the school, what was the consequence of this fact?

The creation of another philosophy?

Many believed it, and some still do. Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Malebranche, Wolf, aided by new insights, began to rebuild systems on this blank slate. These great minds, all of whom claimed to follow Bacon and looked down upon Aristotelianism, did not understand that Bacon’s principle, or rather practice, of direct and immediate observation belonged to everyone, the field in which it was exercised was infinite, and the aspects of things were countless. There was no more room in philosophy for a system than for an authority. Where facts alone are authoritative, there is no more authority; where the classification of phenomena is the whole of science, the number of phenomena being infinite, there is only a chain of facts and laws, increasingly complex and generalized, never a philosophy, neither first nor last. Instead of a constitution of nature and society, the new reform left only the improvement of criticism to be sought, of which it was the expression. This meant that, with the inalienable and unchallengeable control of ideas and phenomena, the faculty of constructing systems to infinity was equivalent to the nullity of the system. Reason, the instrument of all study, falling under this criticism, was democratized, and thus shapeless and headless. Everything it produced from its own resources, apart from direct observation, was a priori shown to be empty and vain; what it once affirmed, and could not deduce from experience, was ranked among the idols and prejudices. It itself, existing only through science, merging its laws with those of the universe, had to be considered inorganic: it was, in essence, a blank slate; reason was a being of reason. Complete and eternal anarchy, where philosophers and theologians had affirmed a principle, an author, a hierarchy, a constitution, first principles and second causes: that was to be philosophy after Bacon, and that was, with little difference, Kant’s critique. After the Novum Organum and the Critique of Pure Reason, there can be no system of philosophy: if there is a truth that should be considered acquired, after the recent efforts of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, eclectics, neo-Christians, etc., it is that. True philosophy is knowing how and why we philosophize; in how many ways and on what subjects we can philosophize; what all philosophical speculation leads to. There is no system, there can be no system, and it is a proof of philosophical mediocrity to seek a philosophy today.

Let us cultivate, develop our sciences; seek their relationships; apply our faculties to them; work constantly to perfect the instrument that is our mind: that is all we have to do, philosophers, after Bacon and Kant. But systems! The search for the absolute! It would be pure folly, if not charlatanism, and the beginning of ignorance.

Let us move on to another topic.

When Luther denied the authority of the Roman Church and with it the Catholic constitution, and established the principle that every Christian has the right to read the Bible and interpret it according to the light that God has placed in him in matters of faith, when he thus secularized theology, what was the conclusion to be drawn from this resounding claim?

That the Roman Church, hitherto the mistress and instructress of Christians, having erred in doctrine, it was necessary to assemble a council of true believers who would seek the evangelical tradition, restore the purity and integrity of dogma, the first need of the reformed church, and establish a new chair to teach it.

Indeed, this was the opinion of Luther himself, of Melanchthon, of Calvin, of Beza, and of all the men of faith and science who embraced the Reformation. The subsequent events showed what their illusion was. The sovereignty of the people, under the name of free examination, introduced into faith as it had been in philosophy, there could be no religious confession or philosophical system. It was in vain that one would try, by the most unanimous and solemn declarations, to give a body to Protestant ideas: one could not, in the name of criticism, engage in criticism: negation had to go on to infinity, and everything that was done to stop it was condemned in advance as a derogation from the principle, an usurpation of the right of posterity, a retrograde act. The more years passed, the more the theologians divided, the more the churches multiplied. And precisely in this lay the strength and truth of the Reformation, there was its legitimacy, its power of the future. The Reformation was the ferment of dissolution that was to gradually lead the peoples from the morality of fear to the morality of freedom: Bossuet, who made a grievance of the variations of the Protestant churches, and the ministers who blushed at them, all proved thereby how little they understood the spirit and scope of this great revolution. Doubtless they were right, from the point of view of priestly authority, the uniformity of the symbol, the passive belief of the peoples, the absolutism of the law, of everything that the critical movement, determined by Bacon, was going to demonstrate as untenable and vain. But popery, by denying the right to think and the autonomy of conscience; Protestantism, by wanting to avoid the consequences of this autonomy and right, equally misunderstood the nature of the human spirit. The former was frankly counter-revolutionary; the latter, with its perpetual transactions, was doctrinal. Both, though to a different degree, were guilty of the same offence: to assure belief, they destroyed reason; what a theology!…

Will we finally understand it? Since the day when Luther publicly burned the Pope’s bull in Wittemberg, there has been no more confession of faith, no more catechism possible. The Christian legend is now only the vision of humanity, as presented in turn, after Kant and Lessing, by Hegel, Strauss, and most recently Feuerbach. This is the glory of the Reformation; it is by this that it has earned the gratitude of humanity, and that its work, by taking up that of Christ, already betrayed by the constituents of Nicaea, surpasses that of its author.

Just as all philosophy since Bacon reduces to this rule, observe with accuracy, analyze with precision, generalize with rigor; likewise, all religion since Luther reduces to this precept formulated by Kant, Act in such a way that each of your actions can be taken as a general rule. Instead of dogmas, instead of a ritual, what we now want, for reason and conscience, is a rule of conduct. Let us therefore abandon this mania for substitutions: neither the Augsburg nor the Geneva church, nor any brotherhood of Quakers, Moravians, Mommers, Freemasons, etc., will ever replace the Roman Church. Everything that would be undertaken in this regard would be contradictory and retrograde; there is no new religious edifice at the bottom of human thought: negation is eternal.

From religion, let us come to politics.

When Jurieu, applying to temporal affairs the principle that Luther had invoked for spiritual matters, opposed the divine right of government with the sovereignty of the people, and transferred democracy from the Church to the state, what conclusion should the publicists who took on the task of spreading this innovation have drawn from it?

That the forms of monarchical government should be replaced by the forms of another government that was assumed to be completely opposite to the former, and that was called, in anticipation, a republican government?

Indeed, this was the idea of Rousseau, the Convention, and all those who, after the death of Louis XVI, out of conviction or necessity, attached themselves to the Republic. After demolishing, one had to rebuild, it was thought. What society could survive without government? And if government is indispensable, how can one do without a constitution?

Well! here again, history proves, and logic agrees with history, that these political reformers were mistaken. There are not two kinds of governments, there is only one: the hereditary monarchical government, more or less hierarchized, concentrated, balanced, according to the law of property on the one hand, and the division of labor on the other. What is called aristocracy here, democracy or republic there, is nothing but a monarchy without a monarch; just as the Augsburg Church, the Geneva Church, the Anglican Church, etc., are papacies without popes, just as Mr. Cousin’s philosophy is absolutism without an absolute. Now, once the form of royal government is undermined by democratic control, whether the dynasty is preserved as in England or abolished as in the United States, it does not matter, it is necessary that this form perish completely from degradation to degradation, without the void it leaves behind ever being filled. In the matter of government, after royalty, there is nothing.

Certainly, the transition cannot be made in one day; the human mind cannot leap from something to nothing in a single bound; and public reason is still so weak! But what matters is knowing where we are going and what principle is leading us. Let the Feuillants, the Constitutionals, the Jacobins, the Girondins, the Plaine, and the Montagne reconcile themselves; let the National and the Reform join hands, they are all equally anarchists: the sovereignty of the people means nothing more than that. In a democracy, there is ultimately no need for a constitution or a government. Politics, about which so many volumes have been written and which is the specialty of so many profound geniuses, reduces itself to a simple contract of mutual guarantee, from citizen to citizen, from commune to commune, from province to province, from people to people, variable in its articles according to the subject, and revocable ad libitum, infinitely…

A philosophy, or a priori theory of the Universe, of Man and of God, after Bacon; a theology, after Luther; a government, after the sovereignty of the people has been established as a principle: triple contradiction. Without doubt, once again, it was not in the nature of philosophical genius to recognize and proclaim its own downfall immediately after the publication of the Novum Organum; and that is why, after Bacon, and up to our own day, there have been systems of philosophy. Without doubt, it was also repugnant to the religious conscience, moved by the accents of Luther, the most religious man of his century, to admit to being anti-Christian and atheist; and that is why, after Luther, and even under the republic of February, there was so much religious fervor. Finally, the governmental spirit, even in the very thought of those who cried the loudest against despotism, could not at first accept its resignation; and that is why since ’89 we have had our eighth constitution. Humanity does not deduce its ideas with such promptitude, and does not make such great leaps: it costs me nothing to recognize this.

But what is also certain is that this philosophical, political, and religious movement, which has been taking place in the opposite direction for four centuries, is a symptom not of creation, but of dissolution. Philosophy, by increasingly relying on positive sciences, loses its a priori character and only retains its originality by critiquing itself; in the nineteenth century, philosophy was the history of philosophy. On the other hand, religion, shedding its dogmatism, merges with aesthetics and morality: if the study of religious ideas has acquired such powerful interest in our day, it is only as natural history of the formation and first developments of the human mind, and we cannot too strongly criticize the authors of the new Encyclopedia for their tendency towards a reconstitution of religious ideas. Religion, for us, is the archaeology of reason. As for politics, the work of negation that devours it is no less visible; I only need to point to the Constitution of 1848, which itself posits, at the beginning of its articles, its own perfectibility, and at the end determines the conditions of its revision!…

Thus progress, concerning the oldest institutions of humanity, philosophy, religion, and the state, is a continuous negation, I do not say without compensation, but without possible reconstitution. Allow me to cite, from this movement so little understood, one last example, the most important for our time.

When, in the night of August 4th, after abolishing feudal rights, the Constituent Assembly also abolished the guilds and corporations and established the principle of free labor and free trade, what further conclusion was there to be drawn from this democratization of industry, agriculture, and commerce for the economy of society?

That the previous institutions having been destroyed, they had to be replaced by others; that the old organization of labor had to be supplemented by a new organization?

Many thought so, and this opinion is still the most widely followed today. Malouet, a constituent who was the first to speak of the right to work; in the Convention, Saint-Just and Robespierre; Babeuf, after Thermidor; M. Royer-Collard, under the Restoration; the entire socialist movement since 1830; and the provisional government in 1848, all adopted this idea. When thrown into the masses, it was sure to gain immense popularity; it received a start of realization in the national workshops and led to the June rebellion.

As for me, I have not hesitated to say it: the organization of workers, conceived in the sense of and as an improvement upon the institutions of Saint Louis, is incompatible with the freedom of labor and exchange. On this point, as in the question of religion and the state, the denial is perpetual; progress is not the constitution of the group, which remains eternally spontaneous and free, but the exaltation of the individual.

How many times have I heard this wish expressed in popular meetings: Ah! If the leaders of the schools could only agree! If they could, for once, agree on a plan, a program, as simple as possible; on a certain number of organic articles that would become the creed of workers!… No more divisions, then, no more rivalries: democracy would be united, and the Revolution saved!

The Revolution would have been lost if the socialists had agreed.

There is no agricultural-mercantile-industrial system in the economic order, there never will be; just as there is no philosophical system for free thought, theology for conscience, or government for freedom. It is a waste of time, ignorance, and folly to search for it; it is counter-revolutionary. The economic perfection lies in the absolute independence of the workers, just as political perfection lies in the absolute independence of the citizen. Since this high perfection cannot be achieved in its ideal form, society approaches it more and more through a continuous movement of emancipation. To reduce indefinitely the burdens that weigh on production, the deductions made from wages, the restrictions imposed on circulation and consumption; to diminish the fatigue of work, the difficulties of labor, the obstacles to credit and market, the slowness of apprenticeship, the upheavals of competition, the inequalities of education, the hazards of nature, etc.; by a contract of guarantee and mutual assistance: that is the whole Revolution in the order of wealth, that is progress. Social economy is not a constitution, like feudalism or the castes of India, or a system like the utopias of Fourier and the Saint-Simonians. It is a science whose object is to solve, by a special method of equation, the various problems engendered by the notions of labor, capital, credit, exchange, property, tax, value, etc., etc. There is nothing to substitute for the old guilds of arts and trades: it is freedom that teaches us this; it is the Revolution, progress, and economic science that attest to it.

Thus, contrary to what reformers and revolutionaries generally suppose, Humanity, in regard to its primitive forms and preparatory organization, is not moving towards reconstitutions; it tends towards complete disentanglement, if I may use that term. No ontology, no pantheism, idealism, or mysticism: the mind, purged by the Baconian method, does not admit of any a priori conception, either small or great, about God, the world, and humanity. No more dogmatic religions, governmental constitutions, industrial organizations; no more utopias, either on earth or in heaven. Conscience, freedom, and work, just as reason, do not suffer authority or protocol. It implies that reason prejudges itself in an a priori, even if that a priori is its own work: it would no longer be reason; – that conscience receives its criterion from an external source: it would no longer be conscience; – that freedom is subordinated to a pre-established order: it would no longer be freedom, it would be servitude; – that work is hitched up in a supposed superior organism: it would no longer be work, it would be a machine.

Neither consciousness, reason, freedom, nor work, pure forces, first and creative faculties, can, without perishing, be mechanized, become an integral or constituent part of any subject or object: they are, by nature, without a system and outside the series. Their reason for being is in themselves, and they must find their reason for acting in their works. This is what the human person consists of, a sacred person, who appears in their fullness and radiates all their glory at the moment when, rejecting all feelings of fear, all prejudice, all subordination, all participation, they can say with Descartes, Cogito ergo sum; I think, I am sovereign, I am God¹ ...

If the members of the Provisional Government had been convinced of the truth of these ideas, how much lighter the Revolution would have been for them! With what calm, what security, they would have approached their task! And with what disdain they would have greeted that clamor that was beginning to rise against democracy, and which, remaining unanswered, would only raise embarrassed, shameful protests, and soon engulf it: “What! Always deny! Always destroy! Always ruins! Always nothingness! Is that what progress and freedom are called! ...”

God forbid that I should accuse here men who, acting within the limits of their knowledge, obeyed their conscience and did not believe they could assume the responsibility of such great things. I have been able to argue against almost everyone’s opinions: I have never doubted the probity and devotion of any. They left power, their hands pure of rapine and blood. The only one whose virtue seemed suspect at the time, Armand Marrast, has just died poor, leaving nothing to pay for his funeral. Their only ambition, after exercising a power for two months to which nothing but their conscience set limits, was to hand over to the new legal country the care of its destiny and to render, as faithful employees, accurate accounts. Pursued by the memories of ’93, which calumny was already evoking against them, and full of the idea that the Republic had more to found than to destroy; not wishing to be regarded as demolishers, nor to usurp national sovereignty, they limited themselves to maintaining order and reassuring interests. They spoke to the people only of fraternity, tolerance, and sacrifice. They would have considered it a breach of their mandate to depart from legal channels and to throw the people into revolution from their precarious authority.

People were shouting around them that religion was under threat. They called for the Church’s blessing on the Republic, and introduced the clergy into the National Assembly.

It was spread that the Revolution would disorganize the State, that democracy meant anarchy. They repudiated the tradition of Hébert and took as their motto the sacramental words: Unity, indivisibility of the Republic, separation of powers, Constitution.

Socialism was accused of preaching plunder and agrarian law. They saved the Bank by giving forced currency to its notes, consolidated the floating debt, with enormous profits for the holders of Treasury bonds and depositors of the Savings Bank. Rather than resorting to summary, extralegal means against the rich, they preferred, in the urgent need of the Republic, to ask the people for their last penny, and to cut their own salaries. Everywhere they put honesty in place of politics, turning away with disgust from princely hypocrisies and the violence of demagogy.

And yet, what pretexts, what examples, could they not invoke!

Throughout history, the masses have believed that morality did not oblige those who held power, and that what they did was right, as long as it was profitable to them. The Roman Senate obeyed this sentiment of the plebeians when it placed Caesar above the law and declared him the possessor of all women. The Roman Catholic Church and the Reformed Church expressed the same license, the former by canonizing the polygamous Charlemagne and the latter by exempting the Landgrave of Hesse from fidelity to his wife. The much-criticized morality of the Jesuits is nothing more than the systematization of this principle, which, under certain conditions, elevates strength above the law and genius above rules! In the eyes of the people, power exempts virtue: this is precisely the theory of the Quietists, which Bossuet fought against in Fénelon.

The members of the Provisional Government made the Republic synonymous with Morality. They were pious, modest, full of honor and scruples, quick to devote themselves, incorruptible guardians of democratic modesty, and above all, true. They elevated republican heroism to great heights. Of all the things they could have done in the direction of the Revolution, their religion dared to allow only one, and it turned out that this thing, commanded by principle, was too advanced from the point of view of the cause, and supremely impolitic: universal suffrage!…

Now, with the Revolution having been signaled but not yet made, and the Provisional Government having abstained from it due to a kind of horror of the void, what could come out of the situation?

It is easy to understand.

The essence of any revolution is to displace the mass of interests, to bruise some, to create a much greater number. By this very fact, any revolution has as its natural adversaries the interests that it disturbs, just as it has as its supporters those that it cares for.

According to this law of historical experience and common sense, the Republic, charged with the destinies of the Revolution, would therefore have as enemies all representatives of the interests it threatened, enemies all the more implacable as they would have seen the danger up close, and as the Revolution, deceived in its expectations, would struggle with greater rage against the abstention that was imposed upon it as a law. Who holds, holds, but he who asks too much is frivolous! The Revolution having taken nothing, nothing would be granted to it. A coalition was formed against democracy of all those who, rightly or wrongly, had been afraid: property owners, manufacturers, commerce, the Bank, the clergy, the peasants, the constituted bodies, the staffs, two-thirds of the country, in short. On May 15 and June 24, the revolutionary democracy attempted to take back command: its own law, universal suffrage, was used against it, and it was crushed. Then the duel shifted to the ground of the new Constitution, but whatever that Constitution might be, alas! it was the guarantee of the retreat of the democrats.

For myself, I do not hide it. I have pushed with all my might for political disorganization, not out of revolutionary impatience, not out of love of vain celebrity, not out of ambition, envy or hatred; but out of the foresight of an inevitable reaction, and in any case out of the certainty that in the governmental hypothesis in which it persisted to hold itself, democracy could not accomplish anything good. As for the masses, however poor their intelligence, however weak their virtue, I feared them less in full anarchy than at the ballot box. In the people, as in children, crimes and offenses are more a matter of the mobility of impressions than of perversity of soul; and I found it easier for a republican elite to complete the education of the people in political chaos than to make them exercise their sovereignty, with some chance of success, through electoral means.

New facts have rendered this desperate tactic useless, for which I long defied public animadversion; and I wholeheartedly rally to the honest men of all parties, who, understanding that democracy is demopedia, the education of the people; accepting this education as their task, and placing above all else Liberty, sincerely desire, along with the glory of their country, the well-being of workers, the independence of nations, and the progress of the human spirit.

V. December 2nd.

Given the situation, events will follow.

While the wealthy class swears hatred to the republic; while the republican party, having fallen into constitutionalism, withdraws, Louis Bonaparte, carried by five and a half million votes, becomes the voice of the revolution. Thus goes the logic of things, which the competition of parties, the crossfire of intrigues, and the liveliness of personalities do not allow us to understand.

Whatever the elected person of December 10th was, a product of a revolutionary situation, they were forced to become, under penalty of swift downfall, the voice of the revolution. The coalition of the reactionaries, by supporting Louis Bonaparte, acted as if, by securing the man, they could prevent the thing;— democracy, for its part, by persisting in opposition too well justified after the election, too often forgot that its cause could not depend on the good pleasure of the one whom the revolution had just chosen as its leader. Contradiction on both sides, which was to lead to many others.

I insist on this principle that I have already had the opportunity to recall: the head of state, even if hereditary, does not represent a party, does not inherit a property; they represent a situation, they inherit a necessity. The kings of France of the third race, who, with very different temperaments, all pursued the same work, the abolition of feudalism; in our time, Robert Peel, who, as the leader of the Tories, never ceased to combat the policy of the Tories, are fine examples of this.

Louis Bonaparte, independently of the popular sympathies that had elevated him to power, was therefore, after December 10th, the representative of the revolution; by his alliance with the leaders of the old parties, on the contrary, and by the opposition of the republicans, he was the leader of the counter-revolution. This reversal of roles, which put everyone in a false situation, almost cost the new president dearly. He was ruined without resources, if he had not disavowed the policy of the majority, more or less directly and formally, from the end of 1849; if especially this majority had not spared him a branch of salvation in the law of May 31, 1850…

Let us skip over the years 1849, 50, 51, and go straight to December 2nd.

The emergence of democracy in government had produced only one result, which was to popularize, at least for a time, universal suffrage, by presenting it to the people as the infallible instrument of social revolution. However, the law of May 31, which reduced universal suffrage by one third and distorted it through the system of exclusions, and democracy, on its side, making the maintenance of this law a casus belli for 1852, was a decisive opportunity for Louis Bonaparte. His re-election depending on his popularity, and his popularity on the conduct he would adopt regarding the restoration of universal suffrage, the whole question for him was whether, by supporting the law voted by his ministers, he would become the Monck of a new restoration or, by joining the republicans, he would become once again the visible leader of the revolution. With the royalist majority, Louis Bonaparte would step down from the throne, like Cincinnatus, Monck, Washington, or whoever you want, not even taking a retirement pension; joined with the democrats, that is to say, with the democratic principle, he would be at the head of a superior force, with no possible rival. The constitution gave him leave, no doubt; but the people would recall him! Therefore, Louis Bonaparte, by virtue of his initiative, proposed the repeal of the law of May 31, thus putting the cause of universal suffrage under his protection: all his popularity would immediately return to him; he became ipso facto, and despite everything, the master of the position.

Firstly, he gained two immense advantages from this conduct: the first was to make the left vote with him, for him, no matter how reluctant they were, and thereby show himself to the people as the leader of the revolution, since he agreed with the revolutionaries; the second was to place the majority in the sad dilemma of either being entirely subordinated and discredited if it followed the President, or of giving the signal for civil war if it persisted. He had the good role, and she had the odious character. The latter option was the worst, since the majority, by pronouncing in favor of maintaining the law, sacrificing all the chances of its cause to a question of dignity, and the President refusing to support its decrees in this conflict between monarchy and democracy, Louis Bonaparte appeared at once to the people as the defender of their right and to the bourgeoisie as the protector of their interests.

However, the majority chose this option. History will condemn these decrepit intelligences, these impure consciences, who preferred the risk of liberties to reconciliation with the left, and who, in such a clear situation, able to annul Bonaparte’s fortune with a single word, worked with all their power and trickery for the triumph of the man they hated.

From November 4 to 30, 1851, the action proceeded with military speed. The Élysée proposed, in its message, the recall of the law of May 31: the Mountain supported it. The Élysée abstained from voting on the municipal law: the Mountain imitated it. The Élysée, seizing on the abstention system, recommended to voters not to present themselves at the Parisian comices: democracy, engaged by its precedents, also abstained. Finally, the Élysée rejected the proposal of the questors: the Mountain voted like him. The Mountain and the Élysée made common cause, and the fusion appeared complete.

The recent vote by the Mountain party has been criticized: in my opinion, it is unjust. They were already dominated and absorbed, and a reversal by the majority would have only made the situation more complicated and perilous, without taking away any of the advantages from the President.

Through the proposal for recall, let us not forget that Bonaparte had become the armed defender of universal suffrage; at this moment, the people’s favor for him was at the level of December 10, 1848. To remove his command of the army and give it to General Changarnier, the counter-revolution, was an inconsistency for the Mountain that was undoubtedly explained by the man’s hatred, but inexcusable before logic. Now, logic leads affairs; sentiment is only a cause of disappointment. It has been said that if the President had been overthrown, the Mountain would have had an easy time with an unpopular majority. Perhaps: December 2 showed how the army observes discipline, and Changarnier, armed with a decree from the Assembly, would have done no less work than Saint-Arnaud. But who doesn’t see that if the Mountain had turned against the President, the President, resolved not to yield, would have risen in the name of universal suffrage against the Assembly, that the people would have joined with whoever carried the banner of their rights; that the Mountain could not have followed through with the consequences of its vote, and would have ended up rallying behind Bonaparte: then, its inconsistency would have been exposed in broad daylight; and that, victorious or defeated in the company of the Elysée, it would have lost, along with its dignity, the fruit of its tactics?

For me, I fully share the opinion expressed by Michel (de Bourges) and Victor Hugo. They could not, as they said, arm the law of May 31st, the counter-revolution; they could not, without abandoning the politics of principles for that of personalities, put their conduct so much in opposition to their words. The rejection of the recall of the law of May 31st and the proposal of the questors were two linked acts that common sense defended against splitting. As much as, by the proposal of the Élysée, one was returning to the Constitution, as much as, by that of the questors, a true trickery, one was leaving it. To vote today for universal suffrage was to commit to voting tomorrow against the establishment of a dictatorship in opposition to the presidency: all the misfortune of the Mountain, in this occasion, was not to embrace resolutely the situation that was made for it, to accept, as it was, its alliance of the moment with the Élysée, and to pursue until the end the consequences of it.

But the passions too animated, the resentments too bitter, left no room for reflection. From November 17th, the roles were completely reversed, to the detriment of the majority, and without benefit for the Mountain. Instead of subordinating the first, the Élysée dragged the second behind it, and as it was the ally of neither, it dominated them both. The left perfectly understood the harm its attitude did to it: its speakers and newspapers spared nothing to establish their independence, to separate from presidential politics, etc. These recriminatory apologies were, in the circumstances, quite useless, and therefore they were one more mistake. The democrats, following their habit, lost themselves by excess of scruples. In politics, especially when one operates on the limited intelligence of the masses, when the multiple and complex questions tend to be summarized in a simple formula, only the facts count, the merit of the individuals is zero. The Mountain fell into the trap where the majority had been caught. Instead of making a completely personal opposition to Louis Bonaparte, it had only to be silent and be ready to share with him the fruit of victory. Was it not better, I reason here, like Themistocles or Machiavelli, from the point of view of the useful, that Michel (de Bourges) be a state minister or prime minister on December 4th, rather than going to Brussels, in a gloryless exile, to mourn the error of the “invisible sovereign”? I know well that the people, sarcastic and mocking, were starting to call the Montagnards “senators,” and that they could not, without contradicting themselves, tolerate such injurious suppositions. Their sensitivity will be one more trait of the good nature of our era. Caesar cared little about his soldiers’ jokes. Stay home, virtuous souls; give your wives and children the daily example of modesty and perfect love; but do not meddle in politics. It takes, ask those of 93, a broad conscience, that is not frightened at the occasion by an adulterous alliance, public faith violated, the laws of humanity trampled underfoot, the Constitution covered with a veil, to do the work of revolutions…

If the idea of February 24 was incomparably more grandiose, generous, and elevated than the inevitability of December 2, it is far from carrying with it such a profound lesson. That a government collapses under public disgust; that a democracy shows itself at its peaceful, conciliatory beginning, free from violence, lies, and corruption; that it pushes delicacy to the point of minutiae; the respect for people, opinions, and interests, to the point of sacrificing itself: all this, the product of an already advanced civilization, material for poetry and eloquence, as Horace said, “Ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias,” very good to report in “Moral Action,” has nothing serious for the mind, nothing philosophical.

But that a man, in the state of dilapidation into which Louis-Napoleon had fallen before December 2, as a departing president, having absorbed only what his ministers covered since his election, having done nothing to assert his person, opposed, contradicted, abandoned by his faithful; watched by all parties, with no recommendation other than that of an uncle dead on the islands, thirty-two years ago! that this man, I say, alone and against all odds, with known means, and the help of two or three previously deeply obscure confidants, attempts a coup d’etat and succeeds: that is what, better than any event, shows the strength of situations and the logic of history. That is what we, as Republicans, must deeply reflect on, and which should warn us for the future against any subjective and arbitrary policy.

No matter how many times it is repeated that December 2 was a trap, an act of brigandage, where the army showed itself ferocious, the people cowardly, the power villainous: all this does nothing but confuse the enigma. Certainly, one had to be a bit of the man from Strasbourg and Boulogne to accomplish December 2; but granting to the event all the characteristics that are given to it, there still remains to be explained this: How the one who failed so miserably at Boulogne and Strasbourg, in circumstances that, according to our insurrectionary customs, could only have earned him a certain esteem, succeeded in Paris in odious conditions; how at the right time, the soldier, so sympathetic to the worker, under the pretext of discipline, showed himself merciless; how the people were cowardly, more cowardly than the government overthrown by them in 1848; how, one morning, they became filled with hatred for liberty, contempt for the Constitution, and adoration for force!

It is certain, whatever may have been said about the courage of the army on December 2nd, that this courage was greatly stimulated by the complete defection, or rather the formal adhesion, of the people. It is certain that for a moment, on the 3rd and 4th, a handful of insurgents were enough to cast doubt on the success of the coup d’état, and that if, at that time, the people had filled the streets and magnetized the soldiers, the odds would have turned against Louis Bonaparte.

It must be admitted that the masses, both high and low, were complicit in the coup d’état of December 2nd, either through their inaction, their applause, or their effective cooperation. I have seen it, and a thousand others, who are just as little suspected of Bonapartism, have seen it too: it was not the armed forces, but the people, indifferent or rather sympathetic, who decided the movement in favor of Bonaparte.

The battle was won before it was fought. For three years, the revolution, unrecognized, insulted, and endangered, called for a leader, by which I mean not a writer or an orator, for it had plenty of those, but a man in a position to defend it. Bonaparte had only to say these two words: “Here I am!” Well, he said them, and in politics, intentions count for nothing and actions count for everything; and as Bonaparte had been acting like a revolutionary for a month, the revolution took him at his word. It gave him victory, except later on when it would have to deal with him.

How, you may ask, did the people, instead of shouting “Long live the King” or “Long live the League,” not shout “Long live myself?” How, by supporting universal suffrage with Bonaparte on one hand, did it not defend the constitution against him on the other? “How?” You know little of the multitude; history has not initiated you into its psychology.

At bottom, nothing is less democratic than the people. Its ideas always lead it back to the authority of one; and if antiquity and the Middle Ages have transmitted to us the memory of some democracies, we find, on closer inspection, that these democracies resulted much more from the difficulty of setting up a prince than from a genuine understanding of liberty.

In Athens and throughout Greece, the annals of democracy hardly present anything other than a series of usurpations, which, never managing to legitimize themselves, to establish kingdoms (basiléïas), as in the East, were called tyrannies, dominations.

In Rome, when the ancient institution of patronage and clientele had been annihilated, and the plebs, under the leadership of the tribunes, had triumphed over the patricians, no one thought to understand that what remained to be done to ensure freedom was, after an agrarian law and another on usury, an institution of guarantee against the accumulation and centralization of powers. Such an idea was premature for the time; humanity was reserved for other destinies. Julius Caesar, heir to the Gracchi, was therefore created perpetual dictator; and the same dignity continued, under the name of the Principal, to Octave and his successors, the constitution of the republic was replaced by the imperial constitution. The people had bread and circuses; but freedom was gone…

Eighteen centuries have passed since that revolution, when the French people, having abolished their feudal institutions, found themselves in the same situation as Rome. What do the popular leaders do then? Always full of the same prejudice, they decree, under the name of the “one and indivisible Republic,” a government more savvily concentrated than the old one, and which made the emigrants say: “The monarchy still exists in France; it only lacks the king.” So the monarchy did not have to wait long: after a few years of agitation, power fell, to the acclamations of the crowd, into the hands of Napoleon…

In 1848, the centralization created by the republic, the empire, and the constitutional monarchy tended to dissolve, when suddenly democracy found itself once again mistress of things. Then, as if the analogy of situations had to perpetually bring back the same antinomies, the influence returned to the people had as a result, not to fulfill the wish of the middle classes, by pushing for decentralization, but to awaken the thought of a dictatorship. The days of March 17, April 16, and May 15 had no other purpose; finally, in the June days, the dictatorship was instituted in the person of General Cavaignac, the man who wanted it the least, against those who wanted it the most. The example, covered by the pretext of public safety, was not lost: in 1849, a new attempt at dictatorship, and still against democracy, which from that moment on, preparing its revenge for 1852, no longer cherished any other idea.

On the date of December 2nd, the masses, tired and as incapable of deliberation as they were of initiative; the worried bourgeoisie, loving to rely on a complacent leader to guard its interests; all parties were prepared for this grand measure, from which decisive results were hoped for. On the side of the Republicans, what distinguished “men of action” from “sleepers” was that the former wanted to proceed by an energetic dictatorship, while the latter claimed that one should confine oneself, even so, to the constitution.

Let us add that the monarchic ideas, reproduced every day with insulting propaganda, greatly aided the march of dictatorial opinion. The principle of authority accepted by royalists as necessary, by democracy as transitory, the thought at this time was one: they only differed on words. On both sides, personal power, the authority of one, appeared as a logical organ and indispensable means of solution. Also, at the end of 1831, there was no longer any question of reforms, creations, or any improvements. It was a matter, above all, of fighting. All parties armed themselves, manufactured gunpowder, and courted the favor of the military. For some, the future dictator was Changarnier, for others Ledru-Rollin or anyone else. The situation, which everyone had created, but with which no one counted, wanted it to be Bonaparte.

On the morning of December 2nd, a proclamation posted in the night informed Parisians barely awakened, “that the National Assembly is dissolved, universal suffrage restored, the people summoned to their comitia to declare, by yes or no, whether they adhere to the coup d’état, and whether they authorize Louis-Napoleon to make a Constitution on the basis of that of the year 8, and according to the principles of 89.” All supported by a number of cannons and a respectable armed force. Such is the substance of the proclamation. The rest can be considered as verbiage, court holy water, phrases of circumstance, sometimes even ill-considered. The recall of the Constitution of the year 8, for example, betrayed a personal preoccupation and blemished the picture. But are there not spots on the sun? And then, what did the people care about the Constitution of the year 8, rather than that of the year 2, rather than that of the year 3? Does society write its constitutions? asked Mr. de Maistre. The people do not read them either.

Now, see how all of this falls into place:

Bonaparte dissolves the Assembly by force: Here is the man of action, the dictator!

Bonaparte appeals to the people: Here is UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE!

Bonaparte refers to the ideas of ’89: Here is the REVOLUTION!

The people are logical, not like philosophers who distinguish and argue; they are logical like the cannonball that comes out of the cannon, like the clock’s hammer, like Vaucanson’s automaton. Could he alone have opposed Louis Bonaparte’s enterprise? He would have had to, like Sganarelle, distinguish between one bundle of sticks and another, accept universal suffrage with one hand, reject the Constitution of the year 8 with the other; applaud with his heart the defeat of the reactionary majority, and support with his vote the principle of national representation: subtle operations of which the masses are incapable.

This is not all. The President had previously become known for his socialist writings: his conservative friends had almost asked forgiveness for him from the country. The people, who judge men according to themselves, know that they can betray and sell themselves, but they do not change. He said, the word is historic: “Barbès asked the rich for a billion for us; Bonaparte will give it to us!” Generosity! like in the time of kings. This is the entire socialism of the people.

Soon it is learned that the generals Changarnier, the terror of the suburbs; Cavaignac, so hateful since the June days; Bedeau, Lamoricière, Colonel Charras, have been taken from their homes, locked up in Mazas, and from there directed to Ham. The people enjoy the satisfaction given to their hatreds; they recall Changarnier’s word to the representatives: “Deliberate in peace!” and laugh.

A meeting of representatives, led by Messrs. Berner, O. Barrot, Creton, Vitet, etc., is formed in the 10th arrondissement. It is taken by the troops and led, between two ranks of soldiers, to the quai d’Orsay. The citizens, on the passage of this fallen power, uncover: the people, cruel like children, without generosity, insult their disaster: “They wanted it!” In vain they invoke the Constitution! The Constitution, says the people, you were the first to knowingly violate it. It’s a rag in a basket.

But the Mountain! Its most popular members, Greppo, Nadaud, Miot, are also arrested. This was the commentary on certain passages of the proclamation where the President, addressing selfishness of another order, offered himself as savior of society against the threats of the Reds, while presenting himself to the multitude as the prosecutor of the Revolution. The people, ungrateful, unfaithful to friendship, find only ignoble ridicule in this news about the loss of 25 francs. The Montagnards were depopularized, do you know why? because they were compensated. The people, who accept without flinching a civil list of 12 million, as they say that it makes commerce go, look at the indemnity of their representatives as a theft from their purse. 25 francs per day! Democrats! ... Democracy is envy.

There was not even the boldness of the raid that did not amuse the people. It was charming to have taken these men who the day before spoke of putting Bonaparte in Vincennes and ending the republic while they were in bed. “Bravo! well done,” said the faubouriens. No victory of the Emperor impressed them more deeply.

However, the act of December 2nd remained an attack first and foremost against the constitution and the assembly, and thus against the republic itself. The appeal to the people could not cover it: an individual’s appeal to the people cannot prevail over the written law of the people. For the appeal to the people to be taken into consideration, it would have been necessary to first restore things to their former state. From a legal point of view, Bonaparte was therefore guilty, liable to Article 68 of the Constitution. It was true that this Constitution had been violated many times by those who now spoke of defending it. But it was still the law, the monument of the revolution and freedom; far from tearing up the pact, democracy had no support other than that.

The people did not want to hear anything. The people are always for whoever calls them, and just because Bonaparte submitted to their decision, he was certain to be absolved.

The future will tell, in view of Louis-Napoleon’s actions, whether the coup d’état of December 2nd was, I will not say legitimate, as there is no legitimacy against the law, but, from the point of view of the public good, excusable. All that is incumbent upon me is to search for its elements, its significance, its inevitability; it is to do justice to those who armed themselves to fight it, to save national honor.

La Montagne nobly did its duty. It sealed a just but desperate cause with its blood. This blood, that of several thousand citizens, and the mass proscription of the democratic party, cleansed the fatherland and regenerated the revolution. The Emperor on Saint Helena said, speaking of the Spanish: “My policy required that Spain enter into my system: the change of its dynasty was necessary. The Spanish people rose up; it was a matter of honor for them: I have nothing to say.” Allow me at this moment to seize upon the words of the Emperor. The salvation of the fatherland, I want to believe, and the policy of Louis-Napoleon, a policy of progress, no doubt, required that he obtain, at any cost, a prorogation and extension of authority. The republicans could not, without cowardice and perjury, allow this usurpation. They immolated themselves: honor to them! Let their principle be rejected, their theories condemned, their persons proscribed, by all means! Let the sycophants of the tribune, the press, and the pulpit receive the reward of their calumnies: it is their due. Posterity will render a pious justice to the defeated, France will cite their names with pride.

After the heroic Baudin, after Miot, who alone among his colleagues retained the privilege of deportation, among the most energetic Protestants are mentioned Victor Hugo, the great poet; Michel (de Bourges), the profound orator; Jules Favre, the republican Cicero; Charamaule, Madier-Montjau, Victor Schoelcher, Marc Dufraisse, Colonel Forestier, the editorial staff of the National, the newspaper that specifically represented the Constitution of 1848, was not to survive: why did the animosities it raised not stay with it under the barricade?…

Let the foreigner, better informed about the state of our country, the question asked in February, the degree of intelligence of the masses, the game of situations, the march of parties, now condemn us if he dares! The French nation, which has already accomplished such great things, has not reached its majority. Persistent prejudices, a superficial education given by civilized corruption rather than by civilization; romantic legends instead of historical instruction; fashion instead of customs; vanity instead of pride; proverbial silliness, which served Caesar’s fortune as much as the courage of his legions nineteen centuries ago; lightness that betrays childishness; the taste for parades and the enthusiasm of demonstrations replacing public opinion; the admiration of strength and the cult of audacity supplementing respect for justice: such is, in brief, the portrait of the French people. Of all the civilized nations, it is still the youngest: what will this child who has become a man do!… We have always followed our masters, and our schoolboy quarrels dividing us into a multitude of bands, we have always succumbed in our protests against authority when we have not had an authority fraction as an ally.

On December 2nd, after a 30-month campaign by the Legislative Assembly against the institutions it was supposed to defend, the executive power, master of the army, supported by the clergy, the bourgeoisie, and a considerable part of the middle class, who were afraid of the eventualities of ’52, attempted a coup d’état. Like Charles X on July 25th, 1830, the government shared the national representation and the upper classes: only the people remained. But while Charles X, by violating the Charter, attacked the Revolution; Bonaparte claimed to be of the Revolution, and did not tear the pact, he said at least, that he was trying to achieve the royalist party! From that moment on, the multitude, if it was not entirely for him, remained neutral. The blouses of Saint-Antoine clearly refused to march: the Montagne found them playing billiards and could not even obtain asylum to deliberate. On the boulevard, near the town hall of the 5th arrondissement, a post was taken by insurgents, who were attacked by a group of workers and forced to use their weapons against these strange allies of the government. In the Saint-Marceau district and Rue Mouffetard, a bad party would have been attracted just by removing a pavement. Elsewhere, the people fraternized with the troops against the riot and provided them with food: they seemed like accomplices of the coup d’état. Bourgeoisie, ragpickers who had succeeded, were shot by drunken soldiers in their homes but still applauded the repression of the “brigands,” whose sinister exploits were told to them by the “Constitutionnel” and “Patrie”. In some departments, according to official reports, the movement was more serious: this was due to the long-prepared regimentation by secret societies. In some places, peasants had descended on the city with their wives and bags: wouldn’t one say the men of Brennus? But as soon as the news spread that the Reds were losing in Paris, the peasants withdrew and declared themselves for Bonaparte. “The true Amphitryon is the Amphitryon where we dine!” There are no people more at ease in critical moments than our Gallic doppelgängers.

After that, do not be surprised by the 7,600,000 votes given on December 20 to Louis-Napoleon. Oh! Louis-Napoleon is truly the people’s chosen one. You say the people were not free! the people were deceived! the people were afraid! Vain pretexts. Do men fear? Do they make mistakes in such a case? Are they lacking in freedom? It is we, republicans, who have repeated it on the basis of our most suspect traditions: “The voice of the People is the voice of God.” Well! The voice of God has named Louis-Napoleon. As an expression of the popular will, he is the most legitimate of sovereigns. And who did you want the people to give their votes to? We have entertained this people with 89, 92, 93: it still knows only the imperial legend. The Empire has erased the Republic from its memory. Does it remember Count Mirabeau, Mr. Robespierre, his friend Marat, “Father Duchesne”? The people only know two things, the Good Lord and the Emperor, just as in the past they knew the Good Lord and Charlemagne. If the manners of the people have undoubtedly softened since 89, their reason has remained at almost the same level. In vain have we explained to this beardless monarch the “Rights of Man and Citizen”; in vain have we made him swear by this adage, “The Republic is above Universal Suffrage.” He still takes his slippers for his shoes, and he thinks that the one who beats the most is the one who is most right.

Will we finally understand that the Republic cannot have the same principle as the monarchy, and that taking universal suffrage as the basis of public law is implicitly affirming the perpetuity of the monarchy? We are refuted by our own principle; we have been defeated because, following Rousseau and the most detestable rhetoricians of 93, we did not want to recognize that the monarchy was the direct and almost infallible product of popular spontaneity; because, after abolishing the government “by the grace of God,” we pretended, with the help of another fiction, to establish the government “by the grace of the People”; because, instead of being the educators of the multitude, we have become their slaves. Like them, we still need visible manifestations, palpable symbols, and trinkets. The dethroned king, we put the rabble on the throne, without wanting to hear that it was the root from which a royal stem would sooner or later emerge, the onion from which the lily would sprout. Barely delivered from an idol, we aspire only to make another one. We resemble the soldiers of Titus, who, after the capture of the Temple, could not get over their surprise at finding in the Jews’ sanctuary neither statue, nor ox, nor donkey, nor phallus, nor courtesans. They could not conceive of this invisible Jehovah: it is the same with us, we cannot conceive of Liberty without procurers!

Please forgive these bitter reflections from a writer who has played the role of Cassandra so many times! I am not condemning democracy any more than I am denying the suffrage that renewed Louis-Napoleon’s mandate. But it is time for this school of false revolutionaries, who, speculating on agitation rather than intelligence, on coups d’état rather than ideas, believe themselves to be all the more vigorous and logical as they flatter themselves with better representing the lower layers of the populace, to disappear. And do you really believe that it is to please this barbarism, this poverty, and not to fight it and cure it, that we are republicans, socialists, and democrats? Courting the masses, it is you who are obstructing the revolution, secret agents of the monarchies that are swept away by liberty and that are lifted up by universal suffrage.

Who appointed the Constituent Assembly, full of legitimists, dynastics, nobles, generals, and prelates? – Universal suffrage.

Who made December 10, 1848? – Universal suffrage.

Who produced the Legislative Assembly? – Universal suffrage.

Who gave the blank check of December 20? – Universal suffrage.

Who chose the Legislative Body of ’52? – Universal suffrage.

Can it not also be said that it was universal suffrage that began the reaction on April 16; that disappeared behind Barbès’ back on May 15; that remained deaf to the call of June 13; that watched the law of May 31 go by; that crossed its arms on December 2?…

And I repeat, when I thus accuse universal suffrage, I do not in any way intend to attack the established Constitution and the principle of the current power. I myself have defended universal suffrage as a constitutional right and a law of the state; and since it exists, I do not ask that it be abolished, but that it be enlightened, organized, and made to live. But it must be permitted to the philosopher, to the republican, to note, for the understanding of history and the experience of the future, that universal suffrage, in a people whose education has been as neglected as ours, with its materialistic and heliocentric form, far from being the organ of progress, is the stumbling block of freedom.

Poor and inconsistent democrats! We have delivered diatribes against tyrants; we have preached respect for nationalities, the free exercise of the sovereignty of peoples; we wanted to take up arms to support, against all odds, these beautiful, indisputable doctrines. And by what right, if universal suffrage were our rule, did we assume that the Russian nation was not at all hindered by the tsar; that Polish, Hungarian, Lombard, Tuscan peasants were sighing for their deliverance; that the Lazzaroni were full of hatred for King Bomba, and the Trasteverini of horror for Monsignor Antonelli; that Spaniards and Portuguese blushed at their queens Doña Maria and Isabella, when our own people, despite the call of their representatives, despite the duty written in the Constitution, despite the blood shed and the ruthless proscription, out of fear, stupidity, constraint or love, I leave you the choice, gave 7.6 million votes to the man whom the democratic party hated the most, whom it flattered itself to have worn out, ruined, demolished, by three years of criticism, incitement, insults; when he makes this man a dictator, an emperor?…

VI. Louis-Napoléon.

I had no part in the formation of the current government: I wish that all its adversaries, both royalists and democrats, could say the same. I have always fought against the various elements that were inevitably leading to it, both within and outside of the republic. I can wash my hands of this spontaneous creation like Pilate: God knows what I dared to do to stifle its germ! Even before there was a President of the Republic, I foresaw that the sovereignty of the people would be like the Jerusalem of Ezekiel, which swooned with love for the Assyrian and the Egyptian, and I thundered against the madness of modern Ooliba. As always, the voice of the prophet was lost in the wilderness, and fornication was accomplished. Since it is useless to speak either for or against, let me at least reason ON!… To the powerful belong the powerful truths. It is their right and our duty, provided there is no perfidy or offense, Absque dolo et injuriâ! I want to tell Louis-Napoléon his fortune. I make only one reservation for my predictions; it is that he remains perfectly in control, at his own risk, of making me a liar and of deceiving the irrevocable destiny. The decree is inflexible: but man has the freedom to disobey, at the cost of his soul! For, as the Law of the Twelve Tables, interpreter of eternal Providence, said, “Whosoever shall break the law” shall be sacred, “that is to say, in ancient language later imitated by the Church, devoted to the infernal gods, anathema. Qui secus faxit, sacer esto!

How many, in the last sixty years, have been thus devoted, for their ignorance as well as for their rebellion! Louis XVI, Sacer esto! Napoleon, Sacer esto! Charles X, Sacer esto! Louis-Philippe, Sacer esto! And among the republicans, the Gironde, Danton, Robespierre, Ledru-Rollin, Cavaignac, each with their own. Nothing could save them, neither their eloquence, nor their energy, nor their virtue. Whether they did not want to or did not understand, the verdict was the same: Sacri sunto!

Louis-Napoleon also has his mandate, all the more imperative because he seized it by force. Does he know it? In the opening speech of the Legislative Body, he suggested that if the parties were not wise, he could become emperor, otherwise, he would be satisfied with the title of President. What! Prince, you do not know exactly what you represent, the Empire or the Republic! Barely entering the labyrinth, you have lost your way! How then do you hope to defeat the Minotaur? Beware that the blood of the martyrs of December 2nd does not rise against you: Sacer esto! It would be possible, and I must still warn him, that while following his star, Louis-Napoleon would succumb before completing his work. It is the ordinary destiny of initiators to seal their initiation with their blood. They too are expiatory victims: the vengeance of old interests and old ideas pursues them to death. The people they serve do not rise to save them: the more they conquer well-being, the less gratitude they keep. In this tough job of revolutionary apostleship, one must work for free, often even give one’s blood with one’s fortune. But which is better for a head of state, to perish by Ravaillac’s sword or by Guillotin’s? to die the death of martyrs or of reactors? Sacred for glory or sacred for shame, Bonaparte, that is what I read in your star: Sacer esto!

To cast the horoscope of a man, two conditions are necessary: to know his historical and functional significance, and to ensure his inclinations. The destiny of this man will be the result of these two elements.

A man, in all the circumstances of his life, is never anything but the expression of an idea. It is through it that he strengthens or loses himself, according to whether he provides its manifestation or goes against its influence. The man in power, especially because of the general interests he represents, can have no will, no individuality, other than his very idea. He ceases to belong to himself, he loses his free will, to become a serf of destiny. If he pretended, in personal views, to deviate from the line traced by his idea, or if he deviated from it by mistake, he would no longer be the man of power, he would be an usurper, a tyrant…

So, first of all, what is Louis-Napoleon’s historical significance? That is the first question we must answer. As I have already said: Louis-Napoleon, like his uncle, is a revolutionary dictator, but with the difference that the First Consul came at the end of the first phase of the revolution, while the President opens the second.

The historical series has already demonstrated this.

Do those who declaim against revolutionary ideas reflect that the role of the kings of France during the third race is the revolution; that the Estates-General, under Saint Louis, Philip the Fair, Charles V, Louis XI, Louis XII, Charles IX, Henry III, Henry IV, and Louis XIII, is the revolution; that the wise Turgot, the philanthropist Necker, the virtuous Malesherbes, is the revolution?

Let us pass over the Estates-General of Louis XVI, by which, after a despotism of 175 years, the nation resumed its traditional constitution to reform and develop it; let us pass over the Constituent, the Legislative, the Convention, and the Directory, which after all only reconnected this chain of times broken by the kings. But the Emperor, who recalled the nobles and priests and yet did not return their property; who reopened churches by sanctioning the constitution of the clergy and the secularization of the cult, is the revolution; but the Charter of 1814, which gave birth to those of 1830 and 1848, is the revolutionary pact. And he who, for the first time, was elected President of the Republic by virtue of this pact; who, relying on this same pact, even though he tore up its last seal, and citing monarchist plots, has just been re-elected for ten years as the leader of this same Republic; he, I say, renouncing his principle, his right, if I may say so, his own legitimacy, would be a man of counter-revolution! – I challenge him on this.

Now, not only does Louis-Napoleon bear on his forehead and shoulder the revolutionary stigma, he is the agent of a new period, he expresses a superior formula of the Revolution. For history does not stand still or repeat itself, any more than life in plants or movement in the Universe. What is this formula whose time seems to have come, and which Louis-Napoleon represents, on pain of nonsense?

Is it this Republic, honest and moderate, wisely progressive, reasonably democratic, which prevailed after February 24? – But Louis-Napoleon overturned its monument; he pursues its defenders everywhere. If he only wanted this Republic, why did he need to arrest General Cavaignac at his home on December 2nd? He should have told him: General, you handed me the helm of the Republic three years ago. I am now placing it in your civic hands, after having chased away the royalists. Convene the High Court, I will be accountable for my actions before it.

The constitutional and bourgeois monarchy?

Then, I will say to Louis-Napoleon, “withdraw”: it is not for you to spend this civil list, it is for the Count of Paris. Since you have violated the contract only to restore the status quo, go away. The bourgeoisie intends to manage its affairs; it wants power for itself; it recognizes no authority in the head of state other than the one it has measured for itself. Its maxim is known: The King reigns and does not govern. Certainly, you will not lack recruits like the honorable Mr. Devinck, a monarchist opposition candidate before December 2nd, now an adherent of the Elysée, who will find everything good in your system. These people, by swearing for you, misunderstand the spirit of their caste. The bourgeoisie shuns you; it separates from you more and more: it would be absurd for you to represent it.

The so-called legitimate monarchy? – Then make way for the Count of Chambord! You are not the King, you are the Usurper. Henri V makes this clear enough when he urges his faithful servants and subjects to lend you their support in everything you do against the revolution, and at the same time recommends that they refuse you the oath.

The empire? They say it, the government seems to believe it. Perhaps it would incline towards this idea! But, I will say again, be careful. You are confusing your domestic tradition with your political mandate, your baptismal certificate with your IDEA. A tradition, no matter how popular it may be, when it relates only to the dynasty and does not merge with the trends of an era, far from being a living force, is a danger. It can be used to climb to power: it is useless to exercise it. That is why in history, tradition constantly appears defeated: faith of our fathers, royalism of our fathers, customs, prejudices, virtues and vices of our fathers, you are finished forever! And you, sublime Emperor, stay on your column too: you would lose your height if you descended from it.

Caligula may be the son of the great Germanicus and the virtuous Agrippina, but Chéréas stabs this empty tradition without respect. In vain does Commodus recommend himself from the Antonines, Heliogabalus from Mammea and Severus: these sons of a family, who assert nothing of themselves but their heredity, raise an impatient world. Talent and virtue, no less than debauchery and crime, are powerless to sustain an idea passed on as tradition. Julian, a sort of pagan Chateaubriand who became a Caesar, who wrote the genius of polytheism during the Christian revolution, a great man of war and a great statesman, a stoic soul; Julian undertakes to resurrect the idolatrous tradition, the true imperial tradition. He is defeated by the Galilean! What did the Stuarts, the legitimate kings of Scotland and England, die of? Their fidelity to tradition. Why won’t Henri return to France? It is because he is and always wants to be only the monument of a tradition; it is because he has lost the thread of Ideas, has no historical function, no mandate. This descendant of Hubert the Fort only knows his ancestors by their coat of arms: he does not know that for nine centuries they were the leaders of the Revolution; he does not know that his ancestor Hugh Capet, the starting point of the national Constitution and the decline of feudalism, was a truly legitimate king, whatever anyone may have said; while Louis XIV and Louis XV, who interrupted the constitutional movement, and Charles X, who tried to obstruct it, lost legitimacy. Henri V! It is the French monarchy in its final impenitence.

And then, with what to make and support an empire? It is said, with the army. However, with all due respect to the soldier, modern society is averse to this influence. Napoleon, who was only emperor because of the army, who maneuvered so many legions with such success, experienced it himself. “They want nothing more!” he said towards the end of his career. In fact, with the best will in the world, we could not take it anymore… Now the causes of weakening the warrior spirit, which had defeated the Emperor even in the most favorable circumstances and in the most warlike nation, have intensified; and without sharing the illusions of the Peace Congress, one can doubt that Napoleon himself, if he lived in our time, would be anything other than a Lamoricière or a Changarnier. France, as much and perhaps more than the rest of Europe, with its myriad of separate industries, its fragmented property, its hardworking population, living day by day, seeking work, unable to distract itself from its labors even for a single moment, even for the defense of public liberties, has become refractory to the profession of arms. The bourgeoisie, the middle class, the people themselves, are increasingly unsympathetic to the uniform: only the priest fraternizes with the soldier. The country counts the cost, and only waits for an opportunity to recall these children, armed for the defense of order and the maintenance of its dignity, to their homes. Whoever can prove the uselessness of this military protection will have conquered the empire, so little chance does the country leave for this hypothesis of government!

Empire, constitutional and legitimate monarchy, moderate and virtuous republic: none of these provide a reason for the existence of the government of December 2, nor explain the role of Louis-Napoleon. Therefore, it must be concluded, as it has resulted for us from the situation of France on February 24, the gaps left by the first revolution, the questions raised by socialism, the eviction of democrats, the proclamation of December 2, the people’s adherence to the promises contained in this proclamation, that December 2 is the signal of a march forward on the revolutionary path, and that Louis-Napoleon is its general. Does he want it? Does he know it? Can he sustain this burden? This is what the future will teach us. As for now, it is a matter for us, I repeat, not of the subject’s inclinations and abilities, but of his significance. Now, this significance of December 2, history demonstrates, is the “Democratic and Social Revolution”…

But perhaps this demonstration, which is all about chronology, is flawed at its base; perhaps a higher science, by revealing to us both the principle of societies, the destination of governments, the cause of revolutions, would make us perceive the vice of historical data, and prove that the goal of December 2nd, and the providential role of Louis-Napoléon, is, on the contrary, to stop the revolutionary torrent in a motionless sea, itself escaped from a higher ocean through the fissures of a disrupted terrain.

No doubt, we will be told that every government rests on an idea of which it is the agent, and which at the same time constitutes its strength, they are given to each other; they produce each other: their action is reciprocal and their existence is shared. Thus the religious idea is at once the principle and product of authority: it is what made the power of Numa, Constantine, Charlemagne, the Caliphs and the Popes. Thus also political centralization, which has been mystically called “divine right” because of its spontaneity, is the product and principle of authority: it is what determined the formation of ancient monarchies, which in democratic Greece ensured the preponderance of the kings of Macedonia, which in France illustrated the third race of kings; which, after January 21st, used the regicides themselves to re-compose the monarchy.

But how do you know that the governmental or social idea, as you will, must be modified indefinitely until it leaves Humanity, raised to the highest degree of civilization, without political forms? How do you know that any power that replaces another is therefore a power of revolution, condemned to serve a new revolution, which would inevitably have the upper hand? Finally, how can you say that a government cannot, from a higher point of view, escape what you please to call its historical “reason”, and without going back through the centuries, return to the source of all government, which is found at the bottom of all traditions, and which constitutes the general destiny?…

To this objection, the ultramontane doctrine was recognized. Essentially, it is the negation of progress and the slander of humankind. It is also the entire science of the Jesuits, sworn enemies of reason, falsifiers of history, and supporters of bad morals based on religious principles. According to them, the only legitimate period in human history is between the year 1073, the date of the accession of Gregory VII, and the year 1309, the date of the transfer of the Holy See to Avignon. Even this period, full of revolts by both princes and peoples against the authority of the popes, is not entirely blameless in the eyes of the Jesuits. Everything before and after this period is considered, according to Mr. Donoso-Cortés, as reprobate. The Church, devoid of temporal power until Charlemagne, is reprobate. The feudal Church of the emperors is reprobate. The Church separated from the state is reprobate. Finally, the Church salaried by the state, threatened with losing its property and salary, is reprobate, an abomination of desolation. What the Jesuits want is the Church dominating the state, flogging the kings and peoples, dispensing rights and duties, work and reward, pleasure and love. According to them, this is what constitutes truth, justice, and peace for nations. Only under these conditions can society return to order and enjoy unalterable stability. To achieve this goal, the Jesuits advise the kings of Europe, particularly Louis-Napoleon, to definitively place the throne in each state under the protection of the altar and to lie down with their armies across history, in which, they say, and not without reason, there is salvation only for revolutionaries.

According to the Jesuits, therefore, it would be necessary to reject as apocryphal and conducive only to an illegitimate science the 99% of history; to take the ecclesiastical government, as it manifested itself from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII, as the only formula for order in humanity. And since true authority is where the true formula is, the Pope would once again become, as in the Middle Ages, the supreme leader of princes, the spiritual and temporal arbiter of all governments. The restoration of the Church, therefore, is the true revolution, they say; theocracy is the true socialism. Like that street preacher who saw his audience abandon him for a Punch and Judy show set up in front of his pulpit, they cry out, waving their bronze crucifixes: “Ecco, ecco il vero pulcinello!”

So much has been done for the clergy, for all the clergy, for the past four years, that rightfully each of the faiths that the state subsidizes has been able to conceive the hope of a resurrection. The very weakening of morals that history signals in times of transition, and the confusion of ideas, assist the theocratic utopia. In the indecision of beliefs, everyone turns to the Church for a remedy for corruption, or a preventative against social revolution. The bourgeoisie, what a happy symptom! after a century of indifference, suddenly becomes fervently religious. It realizes that religion can be useful to its interests: immediately it demands religion, a lot of religion. A consortium has been organized within it, for the restoration of religious ideas. Christ was called upon to help the bourgeois gods, Mammon, Plutus, Porus and Foenus. Christ did not respond; but the Church, orthodox and reformed, hastened to arrive. After the famous little books of the rue de Poitiers, we had the councils of Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, the mandates of the bishops, the sermons of the priests, the preachings of the ministers. One day they sang for the Republic; the tide turning, they declared, in perfect conscience, against the Revolution.

Thus the old society is founded on theocracy. The fatal dilemma always returns, Catholicism or Liberty. The Jesuits know this, and it is what makes them alone strong in the church, as the socialists are alone strong in the Revolution. In vain are the Jesuits disavowed by the bishops: do not trust these Gallicans, doctrinaires of the ecclesiastical state, more Jesuitical in this than the Jesuits. The papal theocracy, I tell you, is the last resort of the counter-revolution.

Could the Church, called upon by the state, therefore provide it with the mother idea, irreformable, the aliquid inconcussum that all powers pursue, and whose mobile image, like those nocturnal fires that mislead the traveler, attracts them one after the other to the depths of the abyss?

I deny it. On the contrary, I maintain that the principle of all government is identical and adequate to its historical data, and my reason is conclusive: it is that, apart from the very law of movement, everything is mobile in nature and humanity, religion, consequently the Church, like everything else. What is called rest, station, immobility, is purely a relative state: in reality, everything weighs, everything moves, everything is in perpetual change.

In order to stay on my topic and to enlighten my readers on this crucial question of the mutability of religious ideas, I will record here the exact words of an old priest, as learned as he was orthodox, whom I asked for his opinion on the movement of society and the supposed immobility of the Church. If, as I pointed out to him, civilization, like all organisms, undergoes constant metamorphosis, how can the immobility of faith be reconciled with it? And if faith is carried along in the same movement, how can we believe in its celestial origin? Where is its truth, its authenticity, its certainty? As changing beings, what do we need with an allegedly immutable institution? As servants of a law that is transient like us, on the contrary, what authority do we need to follow it? My transition is my revelation; and everything I assert, within the circle of this movement, is sufficiently legal and divine. There is a contradiction between the destiny of man and what you claim to be his rule; in two words, between revolution and religion. From which I conclude that humanity, being able to exist only in perpetual motion, religion, supposed to be eternal and immutable, is not made for it: if this religion is true, humanity does not exist; and, conversely, if humanity is not a chimera, religion is impossible.

Such was my very pressing question, and here is the answer of my interlocutor. He did not admit, of course, in his capacity as a priest, that Christian revelation was subject, like human thoughts, to the law of progress: for him religion existed for all eternity, like God. But this faculty of evolution, which he rejected in Christianity, he admitted in society, and it was by the very real movement of the latter, he admitted, that he accounted for the apparent movement of the former. Humanity was thus only passing through revelation and immersing itself, in passing, in the blood of Jesus Christ. As for reconciling the perpetuity and indefectibility of the Church with its transient reign, he did so with the help of the theory of grace applied to the plurality of worlds, thus understanding, from the whole Universe, what in Scripture and the Fathers seems to be said only of the earthly habitation, πασής οίΧουμενής.

Christianity, he said, is eternal and immutable, like its author. But humanity is evolutionary and changing, like all living beings. That is why it was only capable of receiving Christian revelation in a relatively advanced age; that it expressed it gradually afterwards; that, struggling under this supernatural teaching, it seemed to produce it itself, and that today, by an incomprehensible decree of providence, the sense of faith closing in on it, like hearing in the elderly, it seems on the verge of detaching itself from it. Christianity, having risen, like the sun, on the horizon of societies for a certain number of centuries, appeared to us for a moment at its zenith; then it began to decline, and as humanity aged, corrupted or changed always, I do not examine it, it began to extinguish itself under various horizons. At this hour, for the majority of France, it has ceased to exist. This revolution of society, under the light of Christianity, is easy to demonstrate, with the annals of the Church in hand.

Thus, continued this priest, regarding the hierarchy, we know through tradition and scripture that the Church has passed through four different states: the inorganic fraternity, or pure democracy; the government of priests or elders; the episcopal federation, and the papal monarchy. Moreover, the Church, after establishing itself exclusively in the spiritual sphere, ended up encompassing the temporal: just as the apostles avoided encroaching on Caesar’s right, the popes of the great era claimed to submit peoples to their authority. Since the 13th century, a reverse movement has emerged. The temporal has distracted itself from the spiritual; the state has split from the Church; princes have wanted to become independent of the pontiffs, to hold their rights solely and directly from God. Around the same time, councils put themselves above the popes, and in fact, the episcopal federation was once again recognized. Bishops, appointed by princes who had become the representatives of the people, were only approved by the pope. Therefore, the primacy of the Holy See is now, as far as the hierarchy is concerned, only a symbol, and as far as faith is concerned, only a sort of ecclesiastical court of appeal. The movement did not stop there, and although it was constantly disguised, repressed, and denied by ecclesiastical power, its reality only emerges more brightly. The principle of free examination, recognized by the states as they emerged from the Church’s fold, impossible to deny in itself, turned against the Church; the faculty of examination became a faculty of decision, and this is what invincibly brought Christianity back to its starting point, to democracy, to dissolution.

Why this movement of ascent and decline, which according to your way of speaking, you attribute to Christianity, but which in reality belongs only to human nature? The holy Scriptures give us the only reason we can conceive: Propter duritiam cordis eorum; and again, Non potestis portare. Just as Jesus revealed only gradually to his disciples the depths of his doctrine because of the weakness of their souls, so it is to a pathological state of our nature that we must attribute this weakening of faith, in which philosophers believe they find proof of the natural origin and corruptibility of religion. A decrease in capacity for things of faith in men’s hearts is no more difficult to admit in the time we live in than an increase in that capacity from the time when Our Lord appeared until the Church manifested its power through the crusades. The divine harmony that Pythagoras already believed he heard has not ceased; the eternal Hosanna has not weakened: it is we who, after being momentarily cured of our deafness, lose our spiritual hearing again. Everything passes, in other words, humanity is constantly changing: God’s order is immutable.

On the side of doctrine, there is a similar evolution of the human spirit, and for the destiny of religion, a similar result.

The Christian dogma, obscure, indecisive, and even contradictory in the writings of the apostles, gradually emerges from the clouds amassed by the Eastern sects and converted philosophers. At Nicaea, it obtains its first constitution. For more than a thousand years, it develops, it purifies itself, that is to say, the Christian universe conceives it better and better in the fullness of its essence, through continual heresies, schisms, and the anti-Christianism of Mohammed. Aristotle’s philosophy, so popular in the Middle Ages, was one of the instruments Providence used to produce in us this glorious intuition. Finally, at the Council of Trent, truth shone with all its rays: then, despite Luther’s protest, it can be said that faith, in terms of knowledge, was complete.

From this memorable assembly onwards, the attitude of the Church becomes entirely negative. It had nothing more to give its children in terms of doctrine: after having taught them everything, it could only fight the eternal contradicter, the one who, according to the Bible, always says no, the Satan of unbelief. The Word of God, entering the world through hearing, fides ex auditu, may well be produced in parts: it implies that it reforms itself, it is not susceptible to either increase or decrease. The character of the Church is therefore to maintain the status quo. But human reason is tireless in its investigations; and the more its points of view multiply, the more it becomes restless, disobedient, concerning the object of religion. There is the stumbling block of our faith. We would like to accommodate it to our philosophy, to enlighten it with our new lights, whereas it can have nothing in common with them. Quid mihi et tibi est, mulier? says Christ to Mary, symbol of our humanity. Thus, it is with profound inconsistency that certain minds, more zealous than prudent, have tried to evolve, as they say, the monument of the completed genius of Christianity. As if the Christian genius were anything other than the immutable idea of God! But the Church, with wonderful inspiration, did not follow them. Bossuet, Fénelon, disciples of Descartes, try in vain to philosophize about faith: the example of Malebranche and the Jansenists soon demonstrates to them the impossibility of subjecting the things of faith to the measures of reason. As much as a century later, we saw the clergy rebel against its supposed civil constitution, as much as the dogma it defends shows itself rebellious to philosophy. Could language taste the flame, and the file bite the diamond?… Nowadays, certain empiricists have wanted to give back to this dogma what they call its vitality; they have gone so far as to say that Christianity is the religion of progress. Such a proposition was the most absurd thing one could imagine in theology. The Church has given no approval to this school: the thought of M. de Maistre has decidedly prevailed. Let humanity turn, turn, carried away in its endless civilization! Christianity affirms itself as infinite, eternal, immutable, absolute; it can have no other reason than its absolutism, no other life than its eternity. What Christianity demands, if it is permitted to suppose that man, withdrawing from God, seeks him, is that the ecclesiastical hierarchy be re-established, in the spiritual and temporal realms, on the level of Gregory VII; what it demands is that all philosophy, under pain of anathema, be confined within the limits of Tridentine prescriptions; what it proposes is not to follow humanity in its joyous adventures, but to fix it, in ash and sackcloth, at the foot of its monument.

That humanity, a lost comet, may one day return to its sun and settle into a regular orbit around it, is what we all should desire, but nothing guarantees us that certainty. On the contrary, humanity seems, by virtue of its own nature, to be increasingly moving away, and Christianity is progressively dying in its eyes; and while the priest, with eyes opened by theology, contemplates it in its splendor and immensity, it no longer appears to the common people, through the telescope of history, except as a dead star, without apparent diameter and without parallax…

“What!” I exclaimed, almost frightened. “You, a priest of Christ, interpret the promises in this way! Humanity would permanently lose its religion and live separated from its God! You don’t even admit the possibility of conversion! But what do you think of this resurgence of religious ideas that has manifested itself so strongly since the installation of the Republic, and of this violent condemnation that is erupting throughout Europe against atheists?”

He replied, with a sense of deep faith mixed with irony:

Christ said to us: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”… I believe that the Word illuminates, in turn, in each sphere of the heavens, all humanity; thus, I believe that religion never dies in the infinity of worlds. This is where we must seek the perpetuity and universality of the Church; just as it possessed our earth, it possesses, in their time, all the globes of the heavens, in accordance with what is said about the eternity of the Word and its universal illumination. But I also believe that the capacity or faculty to receive faith in every living soul is limited; that if grace is free, it nevertheless has its measure; and that in every sphere, just as there is an hour for revelation, there is also one for apostasy and judgment…

Shall I tell you something now? What makes people believe in a resurgence of Christianity in their souls and the impending triumph of the Church is the stirring of that religious faculty which I spoke of to you. This faculty is entirely human and is not religion itself, but rather the psychological condition of religion, just as the eye is the physical condition, that is to say, the organ of sight, and the nose is the organ of smell. This faculty, which Voltaire’s criticism had not entirely atrophied, and which Rousseau and the Romantics subsequently irritated, was felt anew in 1848 on the occasion of socialism, much like an amputee sometimes experiences a sensation at the end of the limb he has lost under certain atmospheric influences. A religious politics that does not believe in itself takes advantage of this hiccup of mysticism to evoke ancient faith and make itself an ally of the Church, even though the Church has already fallen below the horizon for our people. Priests, humiliated by the abjection of the sanctuary and disconcerted by the decline of faith, lend themselves to this sacrilegious politics, affect high patronage over the state, interfere in the affairs of municipalities, and flatter themselves that they can revive a Christianity dead of natural death through education. This macabre exhibition can deceive no one, least of all true Christians and the indifferent. The dignity of the Church, the honor and security of the priesthood, can only be compromised by this. Here, it is no longer a question of faith, only of psychology.

The propaganda of the encyclopedists had dried up the sources of faith. Then a revolution came, which stripped the Church, long a vassal of the state, of its properties, abolished the convents, and reshuffled the episcopate. Part of the lower clergy, who believed they had returned to the time of the primitive Church, and some prelates, adhered to this reform, imposed on the priesthood by philosophical hands. The intellectuals of the time, the Christians à la Jean-Jacques, imagined that the priest, thus freed from worldly interests, removed from the temptations of luxury and avarice, would harmonize with the century and march with it. One could be religious and skeptical at the same time, dine with one’s priest and mock communion! What a moment for a restoration, isn’t it? And how faith, in agreement with reason, will bloom again under the sun of liberty!… As if it were not the height of impiety to restore the work of God! As if the priest could bend his character to these accommodations! No, the Church, as a Church, could not consent to its dispossession, any more than Boniface VIII could obey the summons of Philip the Fair; and if later, in the Concordat of 1801, Pius VII recognized the conquest of the Revolution, this forced act must be seen as a new elongation of Christianity. Let us weep over the schism that devastated the Gallican Church from 1789 to 1801: this schism was inevitable. The revolution could not abstain, without a doubt; but neither could the Church yield: for the maintenance of canon law, the sworn priests had to be excommunicated by their refractory colleagues. From that moment on, discord, ignited by us, ran through the towns and countryside, separating husband from wife; the people’s conscience was troubled, torn between heresy and counter-revolution. The priest posed a dilemma to liberty: either respect for ecclesiastical property or atheism. And liberty brought death to the priest and became atheist. What do you think of this first attempt at religious restoration?…

Finally, the revolution is consummated. Triumphant through politics and weapons, it imposes itself on the Church as a last resort. The “fait accompli” covers God’s will. The nation and the priesthood forget their mutual insults: the priest is also a man! and peace, like misery, reconciles everything. Then, after the festivals of Reason, after the worship of the Supreme Being and the banquets of the Theophilanthropists, the poorly-antidoted religiosity of the masses turns back to the old cult. Christianity appears in the twilight more grandiose; one is passionate about its relics; one would swear an apparition of the old faith. Such is the attraction of the soul to divine things; and then,

One day does not make a Catholic mortal An implacable atheist, an anarchist torch.

The First Consul satisfied this return of youth by signing the Concordat. It was, in the general opinion, a signal service rendered to the holy cause, and of a completely different significance, considering the circumstances, than the reinstallation of Saint Genevieve in the Pantheon. But does God accept the services of men? Does he care about their politics and their apologies? My name is on their lips; “but their heart is far from me!” Neither the Concordat nor the publications of Messrs. de Chateaubriand, de Bonald, de Maistre, etc., could restore to the Church an influence now acquired by other ideas. The priesthood condemned to remain in its discipline and in its faith, its return appeared to the revolutionary generation only what it truly was, an all-human transaction, a matter of sacristy and reliquary. Piety soon weakened, and rapidly: barely fifteen or sixteen years had passed since the reopening of the churches when Abbé de Lamennais sounded his famous cry of alarm, “Indifference!”

Indifference! That was the state of the country at the return of the Bourbons. The Emperor had believed he was restoring worship; he had only replaced intolerance with indifference, enveloping Christianity and all religion in the same sentiment. This aptitude of the heart, the first gift of grace, which had brought about the conversion of the pagan and the barbarian; which had briefly sighed in the deist works of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and had motivated the Concordat, now it was completely extinguished. There was no longer room in souls for faith, and while in 93, under the Terror, the pages of “Indifference” might have frightened, in 1820 they appeared only ridiculous.

At this voice, however, which revealed the depth of incredulity, there was a shudder in the Church. An apostolic crusade was organized, under the auspices of the new power, against philosophy and revolution. The year 1825 was the great epoch of missions, followed in 1826 by the jubilee. Well! What did this overexcitement of consciences produce! Some debauchees, without ideas or shame, some decrepit Jacobins, for whom nothing had worked since Robespierre, stuck by the words of our young missionaries: these are the striking conversions with which the annals of faith were enriched at that time. Moreover, the same phenomena that had erupted in the bourgeoisie in 1801 reappeared in the people in 1825. It was the turn of the people to bid farewell to the religion of their fathers. I have witnessed, in my bigoted town, this access of intermittent devotion, and I have been able to observe all the symptoms. I have seen men, women, young men, and young women cross each other, confess, and pour out the excess of their tenderness at the foot of the altars. Because they were in love, they thought they were faithful. But it was only a flash in the pan, serving as a heater for sensuality, as it appeared in the intrigues of pretty singers with worldly vicars. The missionaries, by a pious seduction, had the idea of composing their hymns to the tunes of the Revolution. Strange way to make it forget! In 1829, the revolutionary spirit was blowing everywhere; libertinage had resumed its rights; the people and the middle class, shaken by the mission, had learned to know each other: this was seen in the elections of 1830, where the clergy exhausted its influence and decided the July catastrophe. With the throne, the religion collapsed. The missionaries’ cross-bearers, who had become national guards, everywhere began to destroy, to the tune of the “Marseillaise,” the monument of their piety: now trust the conversion of a revolutionary race!

What’s more? Progress is the belief of the century. Humanity is running, in a frantic race, and you want me to believe in the resurrection of Christianity!… Would Christ have to endure two passions for the salvation of men?… During the reign of Louis-Philippe, thanks to the protection of the Sicilian Marie-Amélie, who believed she was doing as much good for religion in her pious gossip circles as her libertine husband was doing harm to public morals, the clergy silently worked to regain their position, if not their favor. Their faith became more bitter: they sought revenge, and the more they involved themselves in the agitations of the century, the more they showed that the century was gaining ground on them. They knew well the movement of the “Idea” and would not engage with it again. But through what powerful works, what strong studies, what founding words, would they capture the attention of the multitude, redeem their past nullity, rejuvenate the faculty of belief, and combat the folly of progress? What counterweights would they oppose to this fatal attraction that was stealing civilization from the Church and humanity from its God? O adorable Providence! The priest sought religion, and found superstition; he fled from novelty, and fell into senility. Devotion to Saint Philomena and to the heart of Mary, the miraculous healings of Mr. de Hohenlohe, “God and the Purest Love,” books of piety in the fashionable style, passionate, voluptuous or nauseating: these were the creations of this Word, which once produced Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, Hildebrand, Bernard, and Thomas! The great work of the modern Church is that of Abbot Desgenettes, the pastor of Notre-Dame des Victoires, founder of a society in honor of the Virgin, whom he claims to have had a revelation from while saying his mass. For a penny a week, each brother and sister participates in the society’s suffrages; and this penny, it is said, produces millions for Mr. Desgenettes. Why not make him Minister of Finance! Now “ab uno disce omnes.” Measure, according to the exercises of Mr. Desgenettes, the power of inspiration of Christianity in our clergy. Calculate its influence on a century ten times more learned than that of Constantine, and ten times more proud of its science; and then count on the height of doctrine, on the authority of the prophetic gift, to restore the Church to the government of modern societies. The priesthood is collapsing, I tell you, and religion, having taken flight, returns to the heaven from which it came.

A revolution breaks out: all the writers have predicted it; only the priest has said nothing. A republic is proclaimed: before knowing it, he offers it his prayers. Sectarians propose their theories: he does not know whether to applaud or condemn them. There are socialist priests and anti-socialist priests. Finally, the bourgeois, the rich, those whom Brydayne called “the oppressors of suffering humanity,” reveal to him that socialism, which does not believe in Malthus, does not believe in the Church either; and to save the Church, the priesthood becomes Malthusian. They denounce socialism as atheistic, on the denunciation of those misers who never knew God, and who mistake the glitter of their coins for the sun of religion!

No, there is no longer any priesthood, there is no longer any faith. Christianity now only holds on to that phosphorescent instinct, whose continuous extinction I have pointed out to you since Voltaire, which is maintained, under the pretext of art, by a sensualist literature; which nymphomaniac Heloises adore, and which Robespierre, the man whose intelligence never conceived of anything, whose heart never loved anything, defined as the Supreme Being.

Do you know anything more foolish than this Supreme Being, who resembles a god as much as the order of your doctrinaires resembles a policy, as the confidence of speculators resembles an economy? Talk to me about Allah, Jehovah, Baal, Brahma, Pan, Osiris, Venus, Thor, Zeus, that Spirit which in all theogonies fertilizes Virgins, and which the Greeks personified in Priapus; take, if you will, the animals and vegetables of the Egyptians: these are living and significant gods, more or less crude symbols, preparatory revelations of the Christian God. But the Supreme Being, Bone Deus! of what religion was he ever the Supreme Being?

And yet it is this ghost whose popularity, revived by the impure flame of politics and interests, keeps Christianity alive with a last breath. Remove the Supreme Being, remove this dialectical absolute, theomorphized by the Jacobins, the Romantics, and a few communalists; and the idea of God will have disappeared from society, there will be no more religion.

And you ask me if I believe in a second mission of the Christian Church? if I believe that this Church, thus restored, can provide a principle of duration and strength to the state that denies it? if it is to this mannequin, surrounded by Catholic banners, that the new France will say, as the Roman bride said to the young Roman her fiancé, Be my Caïus, and I will be your Caia; give me your hand, and I will give you my heart?… Sons of the crusaders, children of Loyola, descendants of that illustrious nobility, whose Orders, armed for the extermination of idolatry and heresy, made the law for princes and embraced the faithful world in their network; whoever you are, Christians of the last and most unhappy of eras, do not try to deceive the Revolution: it would be lying to the Holy Spirit. All flesh is revolting, and hates us. We are hated with an endemic, inveterate, constitutional hatred; a hatred that is reasoned and grows every day from the understanding of its principle and our opposition. After the death of Cambyses, the Magi, successors of Zoroaster and representatives of the ancient Aryan religion, hoping at once to restore their cult to its purity and their own institute to its power, entered into the conspiracy of a certain Smerdis, who claimed to be the son or nephew of Cyrus the Great, and in this capacity reigned for a time over the Persians. But soon the reaction of the Magi raised the great and the people against it, Smerdis was dethroned; all the Magi, all, were massacred; and a feast, the greatest feast of the Persians, was instituted in perpetual rejoicing for this massacre, the Magophonia. Every religion is founded by blood; every religion disappears in blood. Let us worship the designs of Providence, and let events take place! Our faith would be very poor if we made it depend on the number of the elect; our hope would be very weak if it needed temporal guarantees; our charity would be very small if it needed the approval of men! Christ came, Christ withdraws: may He be glorified forever by those who, not having seen Him, have received His love, and who attest His word!…

That religion can thus distinguish itself from humanity, as this priest understood it; that it is the latter that changes, while the former remains immutable; or that both, confounding their existence, religion, like the state, being only one of the forms of society, the same movement carries them both away; the result for us is absolutely the same. Louis-Napoleon cannot separate himself from the society of which he is the leader: therefore Louis-Napoleon represents revolutionary impiety, impiety that dates not only from an era, but from six centuries. What is this impiety? the leveling of classes; the emancipation of the proletariat, free labor, free thought, free conscience; in short, the end of all authority. Louis-Napoleon, leader of socialism, is the ANTICHRIST!…

In politics, as in economics, one only lives from what one is and what one creates: this aphorism is more reliable than all of Machiavelli’s. Therefore, let Louis-Napoleon boldly take his fatal title; let him display, in place of the cross, the Masonic emblem, the level, the square, and the plumb line: this is the sign of the modern Constantine to whom victory is promised, “in this sign you will conquer!” Let December 2nd, emerging from the false position created by the tactics of the parties, produce, develop, organize, and without delay, this principle that must make him live, anti-Christianity, that is to say, anti-theocracy, anti-capitalism, anti-feudalism; let him tear from the Church, from the lower life, and create as men these proletarians, the great army of universal suffrage, baptized children of God and the Church, who lack both knowledge, work, and bread – that is his mandate, that is his strength.

To make citizens out of serfs of the land and the machine; to turn dazed believers into wise men; to produce an entire people from the finest of races; and then, with this transformed generation, to revolutionize Europe and the world: either I myself am as alienated from civilization as the Christian god, or there is enough to satisfy the ambition of ten Bonapartes.

VII. Seven Months of Government.

I have said what the 2nd of December was by the necessity of things: it remains to be seen what it claims to be by its will.

I call will, in a government, not the intention, which is exclusively understood of people, and can always be presumed good; but the impersonal and collective tendency that its actions accuse. However despotic a government may appear, its actions are always determined by the opinions and interests that group around it, which hold it in their dependence much more than it holds them in its, and whose opposition, if it tried to defy them, would inevitably bring about its downfall. In fact, the sovereignty of one does not exist anywhere.

But if will, in power, is impersonal, it nevertheless does not exist without motives; it is based on considerations, true or false, which, adopted by the government, and introduced into history, become in turn, by the impulse of consequences, a second necessity. Hence it follows that for every government, in which the will is not identical and adequate to the reason for being, there are two kinds of necessitating causes, one objective, resulting from the historical data; the other subjective, and based on more or less interested considerations that govern it.

As an impartial historian, free from any party resentment, I have noted, to the advantage of December 2nd, the historical, objective, and fatal reason for its existence. I will do the same, without malice or indiscretion, always keeping to pure philosophy, and delve into the soul of this power, searching for the secret of its decisions, a secret that it itself, I would almost dare to affirm, does not know. Polemics and satire are forbidden to me: I have no regret about it. May my readers, in turn, confess that I have lost nothing by it!

What is the trend of the new power, since it alone, after the chain of events, matters to history, and counts in politics? What is the secret, spontaneous reason that, perhaps without its knowledge, directs the Elysée? While its historical significance assigns it the goal of revolution, or pushes it, with a common effort, its attractions and influences? Where is it going, finally?

TO THE EMPIRE! Such is the uniform response. And with a solution that only touches the surface of things, the opinion stops, waiting, with more concern than sympathy, for this imperial manifestation.

The empire, it serves no purpose to deny it, is seen in the household train, in the style and etiquette of the Elysée. It appears in the restoration of emblems, the imitation of the form, the commemoration of ideas, the imitation of means, the more or less disguised ambition of the title. But all this rather suggests a memory than a principle, a willingness than a spontaneity. We seek, we are shown the symbol. The empire would be proclaimed tomorrow, and I would still ask how and by virtue of what the empire exists, especially since restoring a name is not recreating a thing. Let Louis-Napoleon be crowned on December 2nd, by the Pope, in Notre-Dame church: he will no more be the emperor than Charlemagne, acclaimed in 800 by the Roman people, was Caesar. Between Napoleon emperor, and Louis-Napoleon president of the Republic, too many things have happened for the latter to become the pure and simple continuator of the former. Just as there was nothing in common between the first and second Roman empires, there would also be nothing in common between the first and second French empires, nothing, I say, except perhaps despotism: and it is precisely this despotism that we would ask to see, in the conditions of the time, the origin, the reason.

The impulses to which December 2nd obeys, which constitute what I will call its own reason or will, as opposed to its historical reason, all have their starting point in the way in which it understands delegation.

For him, as well as for the common people, the elected representative of the people is not, like the Roman dictator, the organ of the necessity of the moment, confined within a circle of historical, economic, strategic, etc., conditions that define his mandate. The elected representative of the people, in the thinking of the Elysée, is freed from all circumstantial considerations; he acts with absolute independence of his inspirations. He does not receive the law from external facts; he produces it from the depths of his prudence. Instead of seeking, as we have done, through tireless analysis, the necessity of each day in order to convert it into law and to ensure its execution, he creates for himself an ideal that each of his actions aims to achieve, and that he applies, with authority, to the nation. Thus, the Catholic Church, by virtue of the mission it attributes to itself from on high, constantly seeks to bring society back to its type, without taking into account any data from economics, philosophy, or history. Such is humanity according to faith, it says; nothing less, nothing more. The December 2nd regime follows exactly the same course. It moves within a sphere of ideas of its own; it governs according to a certain spontaneity of reason that makes it accept or reject the teaching of facts, depending on whether it deems them conformable or contrary to its own design. In short, December 2nd behaves with the country as if the country had said to him: “I was not very satisfied with the Restoration system, nor with that of Louis-Philippe, and I have not benefited much from that of the republicans. I now charge you with applying your own system. Command, I obey. My trust creates your right; my freedom will be in my submission.”

This is what I call subjectivism in power, as opposed to objective law, which reveals the generation of facts and the necessity of things. Subjectivism is common to all parties, to democrats as well as to dynastic ones; its action is more intense in our country than in any other people. It is from it that we get this mania for strong governments, and these demands for an authority that, the more it seeks itself in such a path, the less it is able to achieve.

The first fruit of subjective politics, in fact, is to raise as many resistances as there are ideas and interests, consequently to isolate power, to make it constantly need restrictions, prohibitions, censures, and ultimately, to throw it, through discontent and hatred, into the paths of despotism, which are arbitrariness, violence, and contradiction.

On this subject, I cannot help but draw a comparison between the subjectivity of December 2nd and that of the provisional government, which already carries its own lesson.

While the provisional government, driven by democratic beliefs, refrained from taking action, tried to unite the parties and interests, only succeeded in raising them all, and wore itself out in insignificance; we see the Elysée Palace aspiring to dominate them, striking them one after the other, issuing decrees from the right and the left, displaying an irritating energy, DARING, but in daring, compromising itself through the too apparent personality of its politics. The provisional government, with its bulletins, accomplished nothing; December 2nd, with its terror, caused a tipping point. All things considered, one does not advance much more than the other; the same difficulties, accompanied by the same oppositions, persist. The provisional government, ignoring the revolution, allowed it to fall; December 2nd wants to have a part in it, submit it to its views, and in fact, makes it disappear. The provisional government has gone away; December 2nd already relies solely on force. But force that only knows how to coerce instead of creating generates hate, and hate is the saltpeter that makes governments explode. May Louis-Napoleon not experience this at his own expense and at our expense!…

1. Opinion of December 2 on its own situation.

Louis Bonaparte’s proclamation referred, as we have seen, to the principles of 1789. It accused the old parties, spoke out against royalty, demanded the promised improvements, and finally appealed to revolutionary sentiments. Was this language supported? Yes and no, in turn, depending on whether the politics of the moment deemed it appropriate to advance or retreat.

At first, the dissolution of an assembly that was three-quarters royalist, and the arrest of the main leaders of dynastic parties, seemed to testify to a perfect agreement between the views of the Elysée and the revolutionary fact. But eight days had not passed when the newspapers of the government, cooperators in the coup d’état, spoke in another style. It was to save religion, to restore the principle of authority, to defend property and the family, that Louis-Napoleon had put an end to a situation that was too tense; it was, finally, to muzzle the revolution. L’Univers religieux dared to write, and was not contradicted, that these appeals to the revolution and the principles of 1789 were phrases of circumstance, which no one could be fooled by; that in fact, the coup d’état was directed against the principles, spirit, and tendencies of the revolution. And the decrees concerning the jury, the national guard, the suppression of the motto “Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité,” the substitution of the name of Louis-Napoleon for that of the republic in public prayers, all supported the insolent interpretation of l’Univers.

The constitution of January 15 reproduced the thought of December 2. “It recognizes,” says article one, “confirms and guarantees the great principles proclaimed in 1789, which are the basis of the public right of the French.” How did it apply these principles? This is what we will examine below. But, two days after its promulgation, l’Univers, returning to the attack, wrote again:

“We are not alarmed by the declaration made in honor of the principles of 1789, although this formula in itself is always somewhat worrying; there are several principles of 1789: those of the cahiers, of the king’s declaration, those of the Constituent Assembly. What the cahiers wanted, what the king accepted, everyone wants or accepts: it was the constitutive foundation of the French monarchy. There is no theory, no matter how firm, that does not yield to the accomplished facts in this regard. The 1789 of the Constituent Assembly, the true revolutionary 1789, is antipathetic to the national character. It is the dogma of philosophers, parliamentarians, and levellers; it is the abuse of Liberty. Far from consecrating these alleged principles, the new constitution is their negation.”

Was it l’Univers that lied, or the Constitution of January 15?

If we followed the acts of power step by step, they would answer us, questioned one after the other: It is l’Univers; – It is the Constitution; – It is l’Univers; – It is the Constitution; – It is l’Univers..., without us being able to arrive at a positive answer. Where does this uncertainty come from? From a very simple fact, which partially restores the good faith of the Constitution of January 15, and takes away from the Jesuits of l’Univers the honor of one more lie. It is that Louis-Napoleon, according to the way he interprets the delegation given to him by the people, evidently accepts the revolution only under benefit of inventory and to the extent of his own thoughts; it is that instead of subordinating himself to it, he tends, by an exaggerated opinion of his powers, to subordinate it to himself; it is finally that having all the parties against him and not being able, not knowing, or not daring, to pronounce himself for any of them, or to create a new one that is his own, he finds himself obliged to divide his adversaries, and to invoke the revolution and the counter-revolution in turn to maintain himself. This may pass for prudence or skill in a certain world, but I call it utopia, misunderstanding of the mandate, treason to fortune, and infidelity to his star. The head of state in place of the reason of state, man substituting himself for the nature of things, there is no longer any unity of views, sincerity, or strength in the government. He believes he is safe, but he fumbles; intelligent, and he does not know what he is doing or where he is going. He calls himself Bonaparte or Napoleon, and he cannot say what his nature and title are. Abandoned to himself, he wanders in the maze of his conceptions. Let him continue on this path, without glory and without issue, and I dare predict to Louis-Napoleon that he will not even reach the height of M. Guizot, the doctor of governmental subjectivity, the theoretician of the pivot; of M. Guizot, who made corruption a “great policy,” intrigue naive, and violence virtue; of M. Guizot, the last of the statesmen, if he had not been the most austere… ”

2. Acts of December 2nd relating to the clergy.

On December 7th, while the battle over certain points in the departments was still ongoing, a decree from the President of the Republic restored the Pantheon to worship. It was natural… from a subjective point of view!

Since 1848, the clergy, while pursuing its own designs, had only rendered good services to Louis-Napoleon, whose origin, tradition, and reason it nevertheless repudiated. The election of December 10th had been an opportunity for the clergy to campaign against the infidels; the expedition to Rome, carried out for its benefit, had not found it any less fervent; and in the coup d’état that crushed socialism, it saw a manifestation of Providence. With this providential system of interpretation, the Church serves whom it wishes, as much as it suits it; it is never embarrassed in its panegyrics and anathemas. It sings for all powers, according to whether they contribute to its designs, swears by all principles, today affirming the sovereignty of the people, Vox Populi, tomorrow divine right, Vox Dei. It alone has the privilege of swearing without engaging its conscience, as well as giving, to whoever it wishes, the good God without confession. Its subjectivity elevates it above all law. The President of the Republic, whose faith undoubtedly does not exceed that of a coal miner, did not consider the intention: he showed gratitude. After the Pantheon, he delivered the colleges to the clergy, declared the cardinals full members of the Senate, reinstated chaplains in the regiments, abolished, to the satisfaction of the Jesuits, the chairs of philosophy, the normal school, nurseries of ideologues; assigned a retirement pension to the old vicars on the property of Orléans, etc. Could he do less for his loyal allies?… Let us be just, and although philosophy is prohibited, let us consider things philosophically.

Certainly Louis-Napoleon, in giving the clergy such conspicuous marks of his gratitude, wanted nothing else but to preserve, in the face of hostile parties, an auxiliary that penetrates and crosses them all. He was also flattering the fervor, so suddenly awakened after February. Not everyone can be the inventor of a religion. – The reaction shouted, “The people need a religion!” – Louis-Napoleon finds Catholicism at his fingertips; he seizes Catholicism. If this is not transcendent genius, it is at least an easy practice; and for my part, I unreservedly praise Louis-Napoleon for not dogmatizing on matters of faith.

However, by engaging with the clergy, Louis-Napoleon has engaged in purely individual politics, and as clever as this policy may be, it nevertheless compromises the true principle, which is revolution. The priestly party, since Charles X, no longer existed. The President’s decrees have resurrected it. Louis-Napoleon himself understood this; and as his intention, apparently, in making the clergy an instrument of power, is not to grant it more than the Emperor had done, he has imposed in advance a limit on the encroachments of the Church in this regulation of studies that frees scientific education from literary conditions and reserves for the state a right of high inspection over ecclesiastical schools. Part to religion and part to science; part to faith and part to free thought; part to the Church and part to the state: this is the principle of balance, the glory of the old doctrine that Louis-Napoleon followed after having, half out of gratitude, half out of need, revived the priestly party.

It is already a serious matter that in a republic the leader’s conveniences can thus be substituted for those of the nation. But, as the proverb says, one evil never comes alone, and here is what is much more worrying for us. With the Church, there is no balance: December 2nd will be pushed further than he wanted. It is not in the character of the Church to suffer limits to its apostolate; it does not accept sharing; it wants everything, ask l’Univers. The right of inspection, among others, deeply offends it. By this right, indeed, it is constituted in dependence on the state; the divine authority, which it invokes, revelation, scriptures, councils, all of this is denied. Barely restored by the secular arm, the Church therefore aspires to dominate it; the antagonism of the two powers, spiritual and temporal, begins again: one can predict what will come out of it.

Suppose the current establishment has a certain duration. Of two things, either it will move closer to democracy and re-enter the revolutionary movement, the first act of which will be to erase Catholicism from the country’s institutions; or it will persist in its initiative system, and in this case, having only the Church, along with the army, to oppose the hostile action of the parties, it will be led from concession to concession to sacrifice to its ally everything that remains of the liberties maintained by the constitution.

Then Voltaire’s cry, “Crush the infamous!” will resonate once again against the Church… Then the clergy will respond to free thinkers with reprisals of intolerance; the respects, out of mere convenience, that the law recommends in favor of religions, will turn into an obligation of ostensible practice, and any profession of disbelief, manifest or tacit, will be pursued as an outrage to religion and scandal for morals. It would be strange for the recklessness of a Labarre to be punished by execution, while there would only be rewards for the writings of a Dupuis and a Volney! The inquisition, which already looms invisibly over the bookstore, will halt any philosophy in its tracks. Under the principle that the child belongs to the Church before belonging to the family, it will meddle in the household, sit at the domestic hearth, discover the secret of the unbelieving father, whom it will then denounce as a traitor to his God, his country, his children, and hand over to the secular arm. These days of triumph for the Church are not so far away, perhaps. Does it not possess public education, with which it intends to remake the generation? Has there not been talk of making the sanctification of Sunday compulsory? And who would assure me that in the immense roundup that followed December 2nd, the crime of disbelief was not for many citizens the primary cause of transportation and banishment?…

Well! Let the government, let the Church receive my profession of faith here.

I stick to the principles of 1789, guaranteed by the constitution of January 15th. Since the war in Rome, I have broken with the Church, for myself and for my own, and I proclaim my free will loudly. Let the priest lavish his services on those unfortunate beings, still neighbors to the brute, vicious through the excess of their animal nature, who need an infernal sanction to practice justice: I praise this charity, which no institution has yet been able to replace; and if, in assisting the weakness of my brothers, the priest respects my conscience, I thank him in the name of humanity. But as for me, I believe I have no need for these mystical formulas; I reject them as injurious to my dignity and morals. The day when I am forced, by law, to recognize the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion as the religion of the state; to make an appearance in church and at the confessional, to send my children to baptism and the holy table, that day would have sounded my last hour. Defenders of the family, I would show you what a father of a family is! I fear nothing for myself: neither prison nor the galleys would extract from me an act of latria. But I forbid the priest to lay a hand on my children; otherwise, I would kill the priest…

3. Acts of December 2 towards the Republicans.

I understand what is meant by the assimilation of the will of man to the law of things, which is called reason of state. I know that politics is no more charitable than morals, and I admit that a party leader who undertakes to bring peace to his country and reform its institutions by seizing power through a coup d’état subsequently ensures the inaction of his opponents by arresting them. “The end justifies the means”: once outside the law, this principle knows no limits. And that is why I am opposed to dictatorship and all kinds of coup d’état.

But even on this immoral ground of force, I still say that for the dictator there are considerations that govern the exercise of his power and dominate his subjectivity. Arbitrariness, in a word, is not true, even in the service of arbitrariness: how could it be made a principle of government for a day?

Louis-Napoleon had proposed to extinguish the parties: one could judge what difference he made between them, and with what unequal measure he treated the dynastics and the republicans. Let us establish the facts first.

Since 1848, Louis-Napoleon, with the help of conservative parties and the opposition of republican nuances, who opposed him in the presidency, such as MM. Cavaignac, Ledru-Rollin, Raspail, had become, in fact, the ally, the leader of the reaction. This position, obviously false, and which, I confess for my part, gave hope to the republicans until December 2, should not have lasted beyond the electoral period. Other counsels directed the Élysée: as, as a pledge of good agreement, he had adopted the policy of the reactors, he asked them for his ministers. The day of June 13, the elections of March and April 1850, the law of May 31, etc., by tightening every day more and more the ties that united the President to the counter-revolution, dug the abyss that separated him from the republic.

In 1851, the split began which was to free him from the majority and lead to the coup d’état. Louis-Napoleon, thus returning to the truth of his role, one could logically expect that, while he would be under attack from the majority, he would be supported by the republican left. But the evolution that had just taken place in the Assembly was far from carrying the country with it. While majority and minority became increasingly hostile to Bonaparte, conservative masses, as unhappy with the majority as the republican party was with the Mountain, and above all frightened of 1852, continued to rally around the President. It was in these dispositions that the coup d’état found the country. On December 2, when the republicans rose to defend the constitution, the conservatives rose against the republicans. The coup d’état was thus diverted, like the election of 1848, to the benefit of those it threatened: after starting with an invocation to the revolution, it ended with a St. Bartholomew’s Day of revolutionaries.

Since we were in a dictatorship, it was up to the dictator, while taking his precautions against men, to make a final statement on things. Why didn’t he say, now that nothing could hinder him, and in a way that could be heard: “I am the revolution, and democracy, and socialism!” How, barely escaped from the trap of the questors, did he let himself go a second time to the fatal impulse of the reaction? Certainly, one cannot attribute to Louis-Napoleon these funeral tables, drawn up by military commissions, which have survived the state of siege. Does he know one in a thousand of the proscribed individuals? Does he know the names of all these citizens, workers, farmers, vine growers, industrialists, lawyers, scientists, owners, who were struck by the December terror? No. So he let it happen: why? What does this contradance mean where the revolution is invoked as a principle and means, and the revolutionary personnel proscribed; where the dynastic principle is denied, and the supporters of dynasties taken as advisers and auxiliaries? ...

God forbid that I should come to sow new seeds of hatred in my country. But how can we restore harmony, without which there will never be freedom for us, if we do not learn to understand the fatal mechanism that arms us against each other and pushes us to exterminate ourselves? It was the terrorized of ’52 who suddenly became terrorists in ’51; it was Bourbon, it was Orleans, who, while Louis-Napoleon threw them out of Paris through the windows, lent a hand in the departments to his soldiers. It was the men of the old monarchies, who, even before December 10, 1848, filling the administrations, the tribunals, the staffs, owners, capitalists, large entrepreneurs, frightened by the threats of a few madmen, trembling for their fortunes and their lives, directed the arrests, the searches, the executions, and decided, by the outburst of their selfishness, the victory of the coup d’état against their own leaders.

Now what is the situation? Louis-Napoleon boasts of having destroyed the dynastic parties by taking their place and ruining their princes: these parties, for their part, consider it a success to have obtained from the Elysee, as their share of the loot, the proscription of the democrats. Who has won, who has lost, in this campaign of counter-revolution? It is easy to take stock of it.

Now that the Republic appears crushed, the population purified, the country placed under such a strong power that the old monarchies can already be seen in the perspective, with a veneer of liberalism (see the speeches of MM. de Kerdrel and Montalembert in the Legislative Body), the supporters of the dynasties are separating from Louis-Napoleon. Two acts have sufficed to bring about this movement and place the Elysee in a critical position: one is the letter from the Count of Chambord, which prohibits royalists from taking the oath; the other, the opposition formed by the princes of Orleans to the decrees of January 22, 1852. Liberty-Property, that is the motto of the royalists, no longer against democracy, but against Louis-Napoleon. As for the coup d’état, although they accept its fruits, they declare themselves innocent of it. They did not advise it, far from it, they fought against it. Did not MM. Berryer, Vitet, Vatimesnil, etc., sign the declaration of deposition of Louis-Bonaparte and his outlawry? Are not MM. Thiers, Duvergier de Haurane, Baze, Changarnier, proscribed? Undoubtedly, they say, by thundering against democracy and socialism, Louis-Napoleon has rendered an immense service to society; but by usurping power that should have been freely awarded, by imposing on his own a constitution that was neither discussed nor accepted, that is null and void, whose application is a daily outrage to the liberties and traditions of the country, Louis-Napoleon played with public faith and declared himself an enemy of the French.

The Emperor, too, had the weakness of these perfidious alliances. His domestic policy was nothing but a series of concessions to the emigrants and the priests towards the patriots. When the royalists launched an infernal machine at him, he sent a hundred republicans to Madagascar. How many, on the battlefields of Leipzig and Waterloo, betrayed by the Saxon army and by Bourmont, abandoned, like Roland at Roncevaux, by Grouchy, did he regret those 35,000 old soldiers of the Republic, whom his mistrust sent to perish uselessly in Santo Domingo! Ah! exclaimed the brigands of the Loire, returning to their homes, if he had not recalled the nobles! If he had not restored the priests! If he had not sent Josephine away! For the soldiers of the empire, Josephine was the goddess of the revolution. If he had not married the Austrian! Ah! Ah! Ah!…

4. Acts of December 2nd regarding the economic class.

To merge the bourgeoisie and the proletariat into the middle class; the class that lives off its income and the one that lives off its salary, into the class that properly speaking, has neither income nor salary, but invents, undertakes, valorizes, produces, exchanges, and alone constitutes the economy of society and truly represents the country: that is, we have said, the true question of February.

Here, as in several other circumstances, I like to acknowledge that December 2nd did not fail in intention. It is even in the acts relating to the resolution of classes that Louis-Napoléon showed best how much he understood his mandate. But here again purely subjective considerations diverted December 2nd from its true purpose, and neutralized its good intentions. Where the President of the Republic should have recruited thousands of adherents every day, his foundations almost went unnoticed by the middle class and the people, and aroused mistrust and discontent on the side of the bourgeoisie. Others will praise this policy of supposed moderation and insensitive progress, which alienates influential classes and leaves the masses indifferent: I complain about it in the name of public safety and the Revolution.

Nothing is easier, when one wishes it, than to accomplish, without the slightest shock, the social revolution, whose anticipation paralyzes France and Europe.

It is immediately understood that with regard to the most numerous and poorest class, the Revolution consisting of guarantees of work, increased well-being, development of knowledge and morality, no opposition to revolutionary measures can arise from this side. The proletariat having everything to receive, will never oppose a revolution that aims to give it everything.

As for the middle class, it must be considered at the same time as an active, giving, and receiving part: in total, its account of revolution, if I may speak thus, must be balanced in its favor by an increase in business, profits, power, popularity, and security. It is the people’s monitor in this mutual teaching of the revolution, and the driving force of progress: for the government, it is only a matter of getting it in line, by setting an example, and then letting it do its thing. There is no resistance to fear, no difficulty.

All the trouble comes from the bourgeoisie, whose existence needs to be transformed, and who must be brought, through the conviction of necessity and the care of its interests, to voluntarily change the use of its capital, if it does not prefer to risk consuming it in unproductivity, and thus quickly arriving at total ruin.

How was this conversion of the bourgeoisie, no doubt more difficult to achieve than that of the 5 0/0, attacked? It only required justice: invective and softness were used.

Since, according to the Elysian newspapers, who have not yet finished exploiting this miserable theme, the coup d’état was directed solely against the “reds,” the “socialists,” the “shareholders,” the “brigands,” the “Jacques”; that thus the beneficiaries of the 2nd of December were capitalists, rentiers, property owners, privileged people, monopolists, sinecure holders, everything that is BOURGEOIS, in short, the consequence seemed to be that they should be left with this illusion for as long as possible. Politics, at least that of the court, prescribed to spare this resentful class, to make it more and more complicit with the government, to engage it, first through its vanities, prejudices, and fears, and then through the authority of its first steps, in the new reforms.

The policy adopted was that of Louis XIV and Mazarin. They were willing to push back the new feudalism, but not destroy it, only to the extent that it could contradict the power: to serve the people, but without elevating them above their condition… At least, that’s what I gather from the acts of December 2nd.

As the need for popularity was felt more strongly, especially as the bourgeoisie brought more zeal to the reaction, they lacked measure, and were outrageously dismissed. Reminding them of the service rendered by the coup d’état, they almost reproached them for making it necessary due to their governmental incapacity and revolutionary spirit. L’Univers, la Patrie, le Constitutionnel, following in the footsteps of la Gazette, declared it harshly. The bourgeoisie, according to these newspapers, was anarchy. It was the bourgeoisie, they said, who caused the death of Louis XVI, sacrificed the Girondins, Danton, Robespierre; who conspired against the Directory. It was they who, after the disasters of Moscow and Leipzig, dared to demand accounts from the Emperor, and twice plunged him into the abyss. It was they who dethroned Charles X, abandoned Louis-Philippe, compromised General Cavaignac for his competitor, whom they would betray tomorrow. The bourgeoisie! It is Voltaire and Rousseau, Lafayette and Mirabeau! It is the liberalism of 15-year-olds, the opposition of 18! And they would claim to reign!…

Thus, December 2nd opposed its subjectivity to bourgeois subjectivity!… With public opinion thus prepared, the actions followed. Without going into too much detail, regarding the bourgeoisie, we will mention the decrees of January 22nd concerning the Orleans family, the institution of real estate credit, the reduction of the discount rate, the conversion of rent, later completed by the motion of interest on treasury bills; regarding the proletariat, a certain development given to public utility works, notably in Paris, the creation of mutual aid funds, circulars from the ministers of the interior and police in favor of the working classes, the withdrawal of bills on dogs, horses, paper, etc.

What is the legalist who came up with the idea of motivating the decrees of January 22 on a feudal principle that the revolution of ’89 had abolished, that it was the duty of Louis-Napoleon, amending and correcting the acts of previous governments in virtue of his dictatorial authority, to definitively remove? As Mr. Dupin had shown in the session of the Chamber of Deputies on January 7, 1832, the principle of devolution is a corollary of the feudal organization. The abolished fief, property constituted as the Code has made it, the monarchy assimilated by the establishment of the civil list to a public function, the return to the prince’s property of the goods he receives when crowned can no more be claimed than that of the patrimonial properties of a prefect or a justice of the peace… It was also too naive to invoke, as a precedent, a law of 1815, passed in favor of the Jean-sans-Terre of the Restoration. One can understand that the community must have had its charms for the Bourbons, who were exiled precisely for having rejected division, and who, returning naked in 1814, had only one thought, that of refashioning the entire nation as their property, following the policy of Louis XIV and feudal law. But that in 1832 an inconsistent opposition tried to revive this ancient right, and that twenty years later Louis-Napoleon in turn invoked it: this is what must appear illogical, especially counter-revolutionary, to all those who follow the tradition of ’89.

Moreover, it must be believed that Louis-Napoleon, in issuing the decrees of January 22, had no other intention than to rectify the fraudulent subtraction committed on August 7, by Louis-Philippe, to the detriment of the state: this act of high justice appearing to him in all respects preferable to the somewhat Machiavellian process that I mentioned earlier. It is from this point of view that many republicans have taken the matter, and have not hesitated to express their satisfaction. In my view, Louis-Napoleon, without realizing it, has harmed the principles of ’89; and of all the acts emanating from his free will, there is none that contains, in its letter, more formidable consequences.

If it is accepted that the assets of the head of state, both patrimonial and apanage, possessed before or acquired after his accession, are automatically merged with the crown’s domain, then over time:

• The law that orders the merger of apanages implies the ability to create them.
• Consequently, the head of state, as administrator and usufructuary of state-owned lands, can, through the budget, his civil list, his credit, his high influence, and by private transactions, increase, amplify, and extend them in a continuous progression, and also grant them in the form of apanages, fiefs, majorats, etc., under any condition of return, royalty, obedience, homage, service, mainmorte, etc., that he may set.
• Thus, through the expansion of the principle and the acquisitions and incorporations of the prince, a new feudal organization will be reformed from the lands of the state and those of individuals who, willingly or forcibly, with or without compensation, recognize their suzerainty, and whose great officials will be the first and principal members.
• Following this, the mass of properties, caught up in the same movement, will gradually be deemed a dismemberment of the public domain and a concession of the state, in accordance with feudal law and Robespierre’s definition.
• The same principle applying to commerce and industry, feudalism will become universal.
• The prince, by virtue of his suzerain authority, will have the right to limit the possession of his vassals, revoke it, change the conditions of tenure, and declare the sufficiency of revenues.
• Finally, the enjoyment of some land or privilege may be attached to each military, civil, or ecclesiastical position as compensation. The prince declares the incompatibility of free ownership with the exercise of public functions and accordingly orders devolution.

In this way, the old regime would be completely rebuilt: the bourgeoisie would become the nobility, the middle class the third estate, the proletarian a serf of the land, coal, iron, cotton, etc.; all to the applause of the Church, which would see its power return to its glorious days, and of the ultra-communists, enemies of the family and free labor, who would recognize in this backward march a progress towards their ideas.

Is the execution of this plan a chimera? The political centralization, which has been increasing for sixty years; the 1810 law which organized mineral property almost on the same principles; the abuse of patents and factory model deposits; the concessions made in the past six months to the clergy and industrial companies; the easy and broad manner in which work bids are issued; the creation of dignitaries with salary increases; the civil list and property acquisitions of the President of the Republic; the communist and feudal tendencies of the multitude, and so many other facts that it would be too long to list, have paved the way. In ten years, it would be possible to push this revolution so far, to make it so profound, to create so many and such powerful interests that it could defy all democratic and bourgeois rages. The people are so poor at the moment, the middle class in such a precarious situation, the hierarchical prejudice so strong, that this system, skillfully supported, could be considered, relatively, as a blessing. Would it be long-lasting? That is another question. But even if it lasted less than the empire, the restoration, or the July monarchy, it would still be enough for the honor of the enterprise, always too much for that of the nation.

Certainly, by deducing these consequences from the decree of January 22nd, I am not slandering Louis-Napoleon. He surely neither wanted nor foresaw them, and I am convinced that he would energetically reject them. But the life of man is fragile, while principles, once introduced into history by facts and logic, are inexorable. Such is the misfortune of personal government, that even by following its most virtuous inspirations, it almost never produces the good it seeks, and often accomplishes the evil it does not want…

Do financial decrees offer wiser provisions?

I would be lying to my entire life, my most intimate and cherished convictions, if I blamed either the principle, the purpose, or the opportunity of these decrees. I prefer to associate myself with them and claim my share of initiative, as far as it is permitted to a citizen whose ideas, long controversial, finally obtain, more or less, the sanction of the public and the government.

I will not dwell further on the amount of the reductions. – Why, one might ask, did they not immediately reduce the discount rate to 2 or 1 percent? Is not the reserve of 600 million represented by such a sum of circulating notes national property? Does the nation need to pay interest to the Bank’s shareholders for its own funds?… And the conversion of the rent: why, instead of making it 4 1/2, was it not made 4, or even 3?…

These criticisms, however well-founded they may be, would lack accuracy here. One may regret the moderation of the legislator, who did not respond to the impatience of the revolution, and incompletely serves the general interests. But he can answer that he prefers slow progress to radical measures, and the matter thus reduced to a question of measure, on which the government has the right to follow its opinion, there is nothing to reply.

What I criticize about the decrees concerning discounting, annuities, and real estate credit is their incoherence, the lack of coordination that is felt there, and which still betrays, in the events of December 2nd, all subjective concerns.

Since the government had the very commendable intention of reducing discount rates, converting annuities, and organizing real estate credit, the first thing it had to do, before setting the amount of reductions, was to seek the relationship between the different values, in order to then operate in a way to obtain a desired result. For example, if one wanted to divert capital, which flows to the stock market, towards commerce and industry, one had to weigh more heavily on annuities, in order to offer capitalists the lure of a stronger income on commandite than on debt. The opposite happened: here I have the right to ask why?

Real estate credit companies were authorized, and the bases of their constitution established. But it is one thing to authorize credit, and another thing to provide credit. The decree of February 28th undoubtedly opened the floodgates, but the canal is dry. How could it not have been seen that to bring capital to real estate credit companies, it was necessary to expel them from the stock market, better yet, to decree the reduction of interest on all mortgage claims, and at the same time extend all repayments from 2 to 5 years?

One might say that it was an attack on contracts and property rights. We no longer agree. Wasn’t Louis-Napoléon, after December 2nd, vested with dictatorship, all legislative and executive authority, as Mr. Granier de Cassagnac demonstrated? Could he not abolish or resurrect the law, just as he pleased? Did he not use this power for the seizure of the Orleans’ property, the declaration of a state of siege, the suspension of individual freedom, the reform of the constitution, the suppression of the press, etc., etc.? If he could reduce the discount from 4 to 3, he could and should have generalized the measure; because in legislation, as in logic, any idea that is not generalized is false and unjust. He should have followed in the footsteps of the Emperor and declared that the interest on capital, which was usurious above 5% according to the 1807 law, would now become so above 4, 3, 2, 1, ad libitum, and this for all kinds of capital and without distinction of loans. He should, therefore, confirm the existing contracts and order that all interests stipulated according to the old rules be proportionally reduced according to the new law. In two words, what should occupy the religion of power was that the reduction, made general and affecting all kinds of values, could not be accused of inequality by anyone; and that even those who would suffer, as capitalists, from the reduction of their income, would find, as consumers, compensation for this deficit in the decrease of their expenses.

The power in France will do nothing solid, the budget will not cover its deficits, Louis-Napoléon in particular will not overcome the bourgeois opposition and will not bring the people real relief, or the middle class real guarantees; the nation, finally, will only succeed in defeating foreign competition and reducing its tariffs when the power, through its laws on interest, forces capital to demand the profits that public debt and mortgage offer. Louis-Napoléon has the authority: let him use it by accepting the authority of necessity, and he will have nothing to fear from the judgments of history, any more than from conspiracies. When the reason of state is nothing more than the reason of things, the state, whatever its constitution, is as sovereign as it is free, and citizens are like it.

These principles of true politics were entirely disregarded by the Élysée, not out of a spirit of tyranny, but out of a spirit of companionship. While it reduced the discount rate, it extended the Bank’s privilege and left the obligation of the three signatures intact; while it decreased the annuity, which could have been considered simply as a tax, it offered reimbursement, while secretly taking measures to ensure that no one would actually request it; while it organized credit companies, it left them, out of respect for privilege, in such conditions that serious borrowers will be even less inclined to seek funds from them, and lenders less inclined to invest their capital. In fact, beyond an interest rate of 2 1/2 to 3 percent and a commission of 1/4, repayment by annuities is more expensive than 5 percent interest with the ability to pay off the loan at will: the institution is impracticable.

As a result, the financial reforms of December 2, conceived on purely personal considerations, corporate conveniences, and arbitrary transactions, have not produced the desired results. The treasury gains 18 million from the annuity, but this does not prevent the expected deficit on January 1, 1853, from being 720 million. The merchants admitted to the Bank earn 1 percent on their discounts, but the portfolio is emptying day by day, for it is not enough to circulate money; one must first produce, and credit, while easy for discounting, is inaccessible for production. The principle of annuity was established in contradiction to interest, but without any possibility of serious application. All this is arbitrary, more or less judicious and estimable, but it is not legislation, it is not government.

I will say only a word about the considerable development given to public works. From the standpoint of the circumstances, and as a satisfaction given to the workers, the works of railways, embellishment of the capital, etc., cannot be blamed. Why did not the provisional government do the same? Engaging finances in such cases is not only good policy, but necessary. However, I cannot help but observe that state works, mostly works of luxury and progress, and, what is worth less, instruments of popularity, must come as a complement, never as the initiation of general work. Only a Mehemet-Ali can command his subjects to work; in France, work, like the assessment of government acts, is free. Also, despite the provocations of the Élysée and thanks to the incoherence of the financial decrees, the government’s example is mediocrely followed; while it embarks on enterprises, producers, who see no plan or outcome, work exclusively on orders, and the nation lives day by day!…

3. Acts of December 2nd concerning political institutions: Press, Oath.

The mandate of Louis-Napoleon aims to bring about revolution or counter-revolution: I do not believe that anyone contests this alternative. In either case, his power, obtained and organized with a view to this mandate, is dictatorial: it is not the control, as such, of the Council of State or the Legislative Body that could invalidate this second proposition.

I call dictatorship the power conferred by the people upon a single man for the execution, not of that man’s particular projects, but of what necessity commands in the name of public safety. Thus dictatorial power, unlimited in terms of means, is essentially special in its object: everything outside this object is likewise exempt from the authority of the dictator, whose powers cease as soon as he has fulfilled his mission.

I have already said how repugnant to me is dictatorship, so familiar to the Romans, and whose abuse ultimately engendered Caesarist autocracy. I regard it as a theocratic and barbarous institution, threatening in all cases to liberty; all the more reason do I reject it, when the delegation it presupposes is indefinite in its object and unlimited in its duration. The dictatorship then is no longer for me anything but tyranny: I do not discuss it, I hate it, and if the opportunity arises, I assassinate it…

Louis-Napoleon, I willingly admit, in taking on the dictatorship, did not desire tyranny. He regulated the conditions and set the limits of his power, through a constitution. As if he had said to the country: “France has a revolution to accomplish, a revolution which, in the present state of division of men’s minds, cannot emerge regularly from an assembly, and which requires, for perhaps a whole generation, the command of a single man. I assume the burden of this revolution, with the consent of the people, and here are my powers.”

In fact and in law, the constitution of January 15th is nothing else but this pact.

So just as I understand the raison d’état, which I would nonetheless like to keep muzzled, I also understand dictatorship, which I do not like despite the examples history provides. And since universal suffrage so wished it in 1851, I have nothing fundamental to object to regarding the constitution of January 15th: my observations are purely formal.

I wonder why the constitution of January 15th, which had to organize a dictatorial power, essentially transitory, legislates as if this power were definitive; why its object being exclusively revolutionary, it affects a general understanding; why it defines nothing, neither on the reforms to be carried out, nor on the institutions to be introduced, nor on the country’s relations with foreign countries, its borders, its colonies, its trade, nor on the set of means required to carry out such a mandate? When Camille was invested with the dictatorship, it was to drive out the Gauls; when Fabius succeeded him, it was to stop Hannibal; when Caesar himself was appointed dictator for life, the motive, at least apparent, was known: it was the end of the civil wars, the triumph of the plebs over the patriciate, the restoration in another form of the ancient authority of the kings. The constitution of January 15th, with few restrictions of little importance, organizes a quasi-hereditary dictatorship, since the President of the Republic has the right to secretly designate his successor: for what purpose is this dictatorship? One does not know. I maintain, with history, that it is for the revolution; l’Univers, with its proscription lists in hand, maintains that it is for the counter-revolution. How many years, how many centuries, will this dictatorship last? The constitution of January 15th explains no more.

I have given too much evidence of my constitutional indifference to attribute more importance to the January 15th act than it deserves, and to make it a text for attacking the government of December 2nd. I know as well as anyone that a government does not live by the constitution that defines it any more than a manufacturer survives by his patent: a government lives by its actions, just as a manufacturer lives by his products. The value of actions determines the value of the government. However, I have the right to seek whether there is or is not agreement between the established power and the idea it serves, since this agreement, more or less observed, testifies to the intelligence that the power has of its reason. I am told that the constitution of January 15th is modelled on that of year 8! But, with the author’s permission, I reply that year 8 has nothing to do with it, no more than year 40: it is a question of revolution or social counter-revolution.

At this moment when passions are silent, when society is suspended, justice must be done to the thinkers who since ’89 have laid the foundations of all our political constitutions. They had the deep feeling of this law of appropriateness between power and its idea, when they said that an act of government is not good because it is useful, but because it is proportionate; that in politics, what makes legitimacy is not profit, but competence; consequently, what needs to be considered above all in the acts of power is not the substance but the form; that without this, the republic is given over to arbitrary rule, and freedom lost.

It was according to these principles that they conceived the theory of representative government.

Assuming that a society requires government centralization, the law of this centralization is that power should be divided and balanced in all its parts. Thus the Church will be separated from the state, therefore ecclesiastical officials cannot be members of either the assemblies or the ministry; – the executive will be distinct from the legislative, therefore the king will not have a veto; – if the nation is naturally divided into two classes, as in England, it would be good for each to be represented: hence the theory of the two chambers. – All agents of the executive power will be responsible, the leader excepted, because the responsibility of the latter subjecting him to the other power, would bring back indivision.

Progress being the law of all societies, and the security of the people forbidding the authorities from undertaking adventures, the ministers, representatives of the conservative principle, will be chosen from the majority; progress will be represented by the opposition, which, growing every day, will become, at the right time, the majority in turn and the government.

Such was the system inaugurated in 1830, and which, through the bad faith of the prince and the scandal of the schemers who directed it, led, long before the time when it should naturally have ended, to the catastrophe of February. According to the law that formed its basis, this regime of progressive freedom tended, through democracy, towards the continual reduction of the political organism, and its absorption into the economic organism. This tendency, inherent in any free government as much as the separation of powers, the quarrels of the parties, the derisions of the platform, the encroachments of central authority, and the shames of the reign made it lose sight of its objective. Disgusted, people turned to utopia, and with the help of novelists, they became passionate about feudalism or universal and direct suffrage, the Committee of Public Safety or the Empire, Plato or Panurge. It was in this state of opinion that the republic appeared, and in less than four years, France has been able to enjoy two constitutions.

What did December 2nd want? To serve the revolution and, for this purpose, to organize a dictatorial power under popular control? The constitution of January 15 says nothing about this: it only reveals, under the guise of representative theory, the excess of presidential prerogatives without giving the slightest reason for this excess. To establish a regular state, an expression of the middle class, with the aim of developing all the country’s faculties and educating the people peacefully? In this case, a reform of the January 15th constitution is essential. To live its normal life, cultivate its soil, exploit its mines, exchange its products, France does not need to be kept on a war footing, led in silence from the platform and the press, as if it were a departure for Madrid, Wagram or Moscow. The powers of the president are out of proportion to his duties: it is no longer the idea that reigns, it is the man. Why this “Senate” alongside this “legislative body,” if the government of December 2nd expresses the resolution of the parties, the fusion of classes? Why, contrary to the principles of ’89, and through a reversal of all feudal ideas, does the head of state arrogate to himself the initiative of the Law, while representatives only have the veto? How, in the Napoleonic democracy, has control, once a guarantee of order, become a danger? How can representatives of the people not question the government, ask it what it has done with its treasures and children? How can these representatives, deliberating without publicity, although not without witnesses, not be accountable to the people for how they have fulfilled their mandate?… Everything seems to be against the grain, for lack of sufficient explanation, in the constitution of January 15. And since public reason is based only on what is expressed, not on what is implied, sooner or later this machine, poorly constructed for the office it must fulfill, will betray the mechanic: he will be balanced, like that king of Babylon who, invested with all the oriental despotism and not responding by his actions to the greatness of his power, was found too light, “Et inventus est minus habens!”…

What shall I say about the oath? One more inconsistency.

The supporters of legitimacy, on the advice of the Count of Chambord, refuse to take the oath: they are right, and thereby demonstrate loyalty. In royalist thought, the oath is an act of vassalage that unilaterally and personally binds the one who takes the oath to the one who receives it. But I confess that I cannot accept this delicacy from a republican, and the reasons of MM. Cavaignac and Carnot have not convinced me. The oath, for a republican, is only a simple recognition of the sovereignty of the people in the person of the head of state, and therefore a synallagmatic contract that equally and reciprocally binds the parties. The royalist swears on the Gospel, the republican on the revolution: which is very different. This is how Garnier-Pagès, Lamartine, and Ledru-Rollin swore allegiance to Louis-Philippe. Would Louis-Napoleon understand it differently? What is certain is that he would not dare to say so. Therefore, I believe that republican representatives, after participating in the elections under the regime of December 2, should also participate in the work of the legislative body and condition their oath on their opposition. There was no perjury or mental reservation there: it was to agree with oneself and affirm the republic. But subjectivity blinds us all: in our opinions, we see only men; in our opponents, only men; in the events that press upon us, only men, and always men. Louis-Napoleon, Henri V, and the Count of Paris are not the only ones who reign over France: as for the republic, the homeland, the country, honest terms under which each party leader disguises their autocracy, each supporter their servility…

It would be tedious to prolong this analysis: the reader can recall, in detail, the politics of December 2 and generalize.

What cannot be denied to Louis-Napoleon is the decisive merit, in times of revolution, of having dared; it is to have touched everything in a few weeks, shaken everything, put everything in question, property, rent, interest, immovability, office privileges, bourgeoisie, dynasty, constitutionalism, church, army, schools, administration, justice, etc. What socialism had attacked only in opinion, December 2nd proved, through its actions, amidst the chaos of its ideas, the confusion of its personnel, the contradiction of its decrees, the projects launched, withdrawn, denied, how fragile its structure was, how poor its principles and superficial its stability. These old institutions, these sacred traditions, these supposed monuments of national genius, he made them dance like Chinese shadows; thanks to him, it is no longer possible to believe in the necessity, or the duration, of any of the things that have been the subject of parliamentary discussions for thirty years, and whose defense, misunderstood, has cost the Republic so much blood and tears. Let democracy, defeated in December, return when it wants: it will find minds prepared, the road open, the plow in the furrow, the bell on the neck of the beast; it can still add, as in 1848, to the merit of radicalism, that of moderation and generosity.

With all this, it is impossible to hide:

That in the acts of December 2nd, the reason of man, instead of hiding under the reason of things, is essentially distinguished from it, and sometimes obeys it, sometimes subordinates it.

That this subjective tendency stems from the way in which December 2nd, like the multitude it represents, the legitimists who refuse the oath, and even a fraction of the republicans, understands delegation;

That the goal of this tendency, the meaning it gives itself, is ultimately nothing other than itself, authority for authority’s sake, art for art’s sake, the pleasure of commanding 36 million men, of making their ideas, interests, and passions, alternately excited, serve fanciful views, much like those Egyptian kings who spent twenty years of their reign, all the forces of the nation, to erect a tomb for themselves and believed themselves immortal.

Thus December 2nd, born in the history of men’s mistakes and the necessity of the times, after trying some useful reforms, abandons itself, like its predecessors, to the arbitrariness of its conceptions, and falls back, without perhaps realizing it, without knowing how or why, from social reality into personal emptiness. History demonstrates, however, that societies only function and governments only last as long as there is unity, perfect agreement of interests and views, between the prince and the nation. Under the early Capetians, Louis the Fat, Philip Augustus, Louis IX, Philip the Fair, everyone wanted the commune, the separation of Church and State, the preponderance of the crown. The people and the king understand each other; the peasant and the bourgeois shout together: “Down with the Dominican! Down with the Franciscan! Down with the Templar!”…

Under Charles V, Charles VI, and Charles VII, there was only one thought: to drive out the English. What would have become of the Valois without Joan of Arc, without that intimate union of the prince with the people?

Louis XIV wanted to reign alone. Apart from the additions of Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Flanders, commanded by sound policy, his enterprises had no reason other than the whims of the man. He broke the European balance through the succession of Spain; he withdrew the promise given to Protestants by his ancestor Henry IV; he exhausted France, oppressed reason and conscience, and finally arrived at the Treaty of Utrecht, more shameful and more disastrous for France than those of 1815. After his death, the people insulted his corpse, and it is from him that the traditional hatred for the Bourbons dates, to which Louis XVI, Louis XVII, Charles X, and Henri V were devoted in turn.

But if there is an example that should strike the current government, it is that of Napoleon…

VIII. The Horoscope.

We are on the day after 18 Brumaire.

We reflect on the causes that, from one downfall to another, have led to this deplorable solution, in which public liberties, the respect for the nation and laws, all perish, and which gives a soldier a blank check for government. We have no difficulty in discovering these causes, first, in the political and intellectual habits of the masses, who, liberated from ecclesiastical and noble oppression, incapable of understanding constitutional theory and the conditions of freedom, were invincibly drawn to the power of one; secondly, in the series of events that, after bringing political concentration and the discrediting of parliamentary leaders to the highest degree, made the despotism of a military man inevitable at a time of continual wars.

We then try to pierce the veil that covers the future of this leader, whose destiny is now inseparable from that of the country. And such are our conjectures about this disturbing future.

“Bonaparte is a volunteer, beyond all volition. Impatient of restraint, he allows no sharing of power, no contestation of authority. He revealed himself from his first campaign, by his resistance to the orders of the Directory; in the campaign of Egypt, undertaken under the sole guarantee of his name and designs; and finally in the way he left his army to come to Paris, a disobedient and fugitive general, seizing the government.”

Every vice, said a philosopher, stems from foolishness: every despotism arises from weakness of mind. Bonaparte, a man of will and domination, unfamiliar with great studies, has no political genius. Educated in a military school, accustomed to camp life, unmatched in commanding armies, he believes that people can be led like soldiers. He is incapable, by his ideas, of presiding over the destinies of a state. His intelligence, wonderful for execution, needs authority to direct him, and he rejects all advice, he resists all authority. Far from anticipating his century, he barely knows his era; he grasps neither its true spirit nor its secret tendencies. A Jacobin with Robespierre, moderate under the Directory, he followed the ebb and flow of the revolution with the ardor of his character. Today, as the First Consul, he views his mandate, like the most insignificant practitioners, as a substitution of his immense views for the practical necessities of the situation and time. Because he has no idea, he hates the ideologues. He now caresses the old regime, seeking in the past analogies that serve as his principle: when he thinks he is original, he is merely an imitator. As he spoke the revolutionary language, he will speak the monarchical language. His logic, narrow and rigid, posing the dilemma between pure democracy and despotism, he will see nothing beyond, nothing above; he will be an autocrat by reason and in good faith! Always superior in execution, he will remain mediocre and false in politics, barely covering the poverty of his concepts with the charlatanism of his victories and the inflation of his style. Like prince, like people. Under the influence of his government, literature and art seem asleep, philosophy collapsed. To the intellectual movement outside, France, drunk with powder, suffocated under its laurels, will respond only with stillborn works. Besides, he will not succeed, no matter how many successes he achieves, in any of his endeavors: his past answers for his future. He is covered with immortal glory in the campaign in Italy, carried out in service of the republic, under the inspiration of the homeland and the revolution to defend. He failed in the campaign in Egypt, proposed by him, granted at his solicitation, and which could hardly have had any other result than to maintain the common people’s view of his fame, while he seized power.

Now he is the master, almost absolute master. His role, as indicated by history, would be, after avenging France and completing the revolution, to establish the constitutional order and the regular exercise of public liberties: he does not want this. What he wants is to rule alone, and in his own way. France is not his adviser or authority: it serves him as an instrument. However, since he cannot have any value as a statesman unless he becomes the minister of public destiny, and acts under the cover of the loyal representation of the national will, it is inevitable that he will lose himself and us with him. His military talents, his powerful faculties, will serve him to prolong a useless struggle against necessity. But the more heroism he displays in this struggle, the more gigantic his madness will be: so that finally, seeing him cornered by absurdity, we will wonder if the life of this conscienceless man is anything other than the somnambulism of Alexander or Caesar. Thus we are delivered to the whims of a soldier of fortune, invincible when he is the man of his country, insane when he listens only to his pride.

And now, let’s look at the story.

Firstly, Bonaparte realizes perfectly well how much he needs to be absolved after his escape from the Egyptian army and his seizure of power. The goal of the failed expedition by the destruction of the fleet at Aboukir and the lifting of the siege of Jaffa was traced by his own words: it was to return, as great as the ancients! By what right did he abandon his soldiers on a distant beach? By what right did his ambition, deceived in its calculations and having nothing more to do in Egypt, come, solitary, to take charge of the destiny of the republic? If the Directory had done justice, Bonaparte would have been brought before a military council and shot. The cowardice of the directors and the bewilderment of the nation gave him power: so be it. But popular absolution is not enough; a reparation is needed, and in matters of penance, reparation means good deeds in the absence of punishment.

Bonaparte knows this better than anyone: that’s why he starts by identifying himself with the republic, which he is determined to revive both internally and externally. Besides, he is well aware that his services will count double, first to get himself pardoned, and then to obtain an extension of his power. Nothing is as beautiful as this period in Bonaparte’s life. For two years, supported by all the military, administrative, financial, etc. notabilities who saw him as the man of the country, the government of the first consul marks each of its days with a success. Let us cast an eye over this chronology.

CONSULAR CALENDAR.

1800

January 18th – Generals Brune and Hédouville defeated the Chouans and pacified the Vendée.

February 11th – Constitution of the Bank of France.

March 8th – Formation of the reserve year of 60,000 men.

March 14th. – Election of Pius VII, Barnabe Chiaramonte. The sky seems to applaud the Republic governed by Bonaparte. Pius VII, being bishop of Imola, had made himself noticed for his democratic sympathies: his accession was, for the time, what that of Pius IX, Jean Mastai, would be 15 years later.

March 20th. – Victory of Heliopolis, won by Kleber, followed by the recapture of Cairo.

April 6-20. – Massena, with Soult and Oudinot, supports the Austrians in a series of heroic battles and withdraws to Genoa.

May 3-11. – Battles of Engen, Moeskirch and Biberach, won by Moreau. Taking of Memmingen by Lecourbe.

May 16-20. – While Massena occupies the Austrians, the first consul crosses the St. Bernard, renewing Hannibal’s enterprise.

May 29th. – Occupation of Augsburg by Lecourbe.

June 2nd. – Bonaparte in Milan: the occupation of this city compensates for the surrender of Genoa, carried out by Massena after an immortal defense.

June 9th. – Battle of Montebello, won by Bonaparte. Lannes has the greatest part in it.

June 14th – Victory of Marengo, won by the first consul. It is due to the arrival of Desaix, who found a glorious death there, and to the charge of the young Kellerman. The 5% that was at 11 francs and 30 centimes the day before 18 Brumaire is quoted at 35 francs.

June 19th. – Victory of Hochstedt, won by Moreau, followed by the occupation of Munich by Decaen.

July 14th. – Taking of Feldkirch by Lecourbe and Molitor.

September 30th – France and the United States unite by a treaty of commerce and friendship.

October 18th – Departure of Admiral Baudin for a voyage of discovery. Everything progresses simultaneously, science, arts, politics and war.

December 1st – Macdonald, chief general of the army of Grisons, equaling the audacity of the first consul, crosses the Tyrolean Alps and communicates with Brune, general of the army of Italy.

December 3rd – Victory of Hohenlinden, won by Moreau. – Followed on the 9th by the passage of the Inn; on the 15th, the capture of Salzburg, by Lecourbe; on the 19th-20th, the crossing of the Traun and occupation of Linz.

December 20th-27th – Battle of Pozzolo, won by Brune, and where Suchet, Davoust, and Marmont distinguished themselves; crossing of the Mincio.

January 9th – Treaty of peace of Lunéville, between France and Austria. The coalition is broken, the revolution victorious, England repulsed with its own weapons.

May 21st – Treaty between France and Spain.

May 28th – Treaty between France and Naples.

July 5th – Naval combat of Algeciras, fought by the admiral [uncertain]. The advantage remains with the French fleet.

August 15th – Nelson attacks the flotilla gathered at Boulogne. He is repulsed each time.

September 29th – Treaty between France and Portugal.

October 8th – Treaty with Russia, signed in Paris.

October 9th – Peace with the Ottoman Porte.

1802

March 25th. — Peace is signed in Amiens, between France and England. — October 5th is listed at 53 francs.

The Napoleonic legend has retained from this brilliant period only memories of Saint-Bernard and Marengo: everything else has remained more or less in the shadow, as if, in this concert of all patriotic forces, there was only one goal, one glory, one existence, that of Bonaparte. However, it follows from the facts and conditions of this entire war that the campaign opened in Italy has a necessary counterpart in Germany; that June 14th, when the glory of the First Consul suffered a momentary eclipse, is only the first half of the task accomplished at Hochstedt and Hohenlinden; that the crossing of the Saint-Bernard is the correlative of that of the Tyrolean Alps, executed under perhaps more difficult conditions; and finally, that the treaties of Lunéville and Amiens are the product of a double effort, conducted, ex aequo, by the two most renowned warriors of the time, Moreau and Bonaparte. But such is the privilege of power, that any success obtained by the subordinate benefits exclusively the superior, or is considered null and void by the legend. Bonaparte is the leader: that is enough. In the midst of the republic, unjust renown subordinates his companions to him, and the people, in their monarchic instinct, become accomplices to this partiality, which they will soon pay dearly for.

After the treaty of Amiens, the dictatorship of Bonaparte was over. He had only to lay down the fasces after having inaugurated, on new bases, the constitutional regime. He certainly understood this; hence, his measures were taken well in advance, and six weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Amiens, he had himself appointed Consul for ten years! A year later, peace was broken with England, and the power of Bonaparte no longer encountered any opponents or obstacles.

Let us recall, in a few dates, this much less remarkable part of the consulate, where the hero, who undoubtedly had the weakness of believing himself necessary, exposes nakedly the work of his ambition and his seesaw game.

1799

November 11th (19 Brumaire). Deportation and internment of 62 republicans opposed to the coup d’état.

December 20th. Proclamation of the Constitution of the Year 8, entirely to the advantage of the First Consul. Cambacérès, regicide, second consul; Lebrun, former private secretary to Chancellor Maupéou, third consul: Bonaparte is like Christ between the two thieves!

1800

January 5. Deportation of 133 republicans.

January 17. Law against the press, suppression of newspapers.

February 13. Law in favor of emigrants. Patriots are deported, nobles are recalled.

September 26. Law in favor of the lottery: the passion for gambling maintained at the expense of public spirit.

December 2. – Explosion of the infernal machine. The police proves that the culprits are royalists: the first consul condemns 130 republicans to deportation.

1801

February 7. – Creation of special criminal courts in the departments.

March 21: – By the Treaty of Madrid, Bonaparte, former Jacobin, Consul of the French Republic, makes Louis de Bourbon, former Prince of Parma, King of Italy.

January 1. – The blacks of Saint-Domingue give themselves a constitution. Their leader, Toussaint-Louverture, appointed governor for life, writes to Bonaparte with this protocol: “The first of the blacks is the first of the whites?” The comparison hurts Bonaparte and determines his policy towards the colony.

July 15. – Signing of the Concordat. Bonaparte raises the priestly party, who called him the New David, and returns in blessings what he receives in money and influence.

September 7. – Opening of the Helvetic Diet: the first consul of the French Republic, natural protector of the independence of nations, intervenes in the affairs of another republic.

December 10. – Expedition to Saint-Domingue. A crowd of former soldiers, especially officers, educated in the school of the republic and whose opinions were troublesome, are removed.

1802

January 26th. — Bonaparte has himself named President of the Italian Republic. An unjustifiable accumulation of power for a republican head of state, from the point of view of international law as well as French liberty. Bonaparte wanted a throne: failing to obtain one in France, he secured Italy.

April 26th. — General amnesty in favor of emigrants. The Jacobins will remain in Madagascar.

May 8th. — Bonaparte is appointed consul for ten years. “He would have liked, he said, to end his political career with peace. But the Senate judged that he owed the people this sacrifice; he will comply with the will of the people!” – So true is it that with the peace of Amiens, the mission of the First Consul expired, and that the influences of his entourage, combined with the ambition of the man, alone determined this new alienation of sovereignty in his favor.

May 18th. — Call-up of 120,000 men. In 1800, when France was facing the whole coalition, only 60,000 men were called up; today, in peacetime, recruitment is doubled. It is evident that war is one of the conditions of the new government.

May 19th. — Establishment of the Legion of Honor, vigorously opposed by the tribunate. “To republics, virtue; to monarchies, honor,” said Montesquieu.

May 20th. — Despite promises made to the population to preserve their political rights, slavery is reinstated in all the Antilles. The reforms of the negroes are abolished by the whites!

June 10th. — Kidnapping of Toussaint Louverture, despite the capitulation: he is taken to Fort Joux.

August 2nd. — Bonaparte is appointed consul for life, by 3,568,885 yes, against 8,374 no. The spontaneity of the people is in unison with the First Consul. He says, “Content to have been called, by the order of Him from whom all emanates, to bring order and equality to the earth, I will hear the first hour without regret, as without concern for the opinion of future generations.”

August 4th. — Reform of the Constitution of Year V. It was incompatible, in fact, with the consulate for life, due to its still too democratic, too liberal forms. Henceforth, the reign of consular subjectivity is assured: Who wants the end, must justify the means.

August 10th-September 1st. — The island of Elba and Piedmont are joined to the territory of the French Republic. Infringement of the principle of nationalities, and of the principles of public law on European balance. Who would have said then that this union was impossible would have earned the scorn of the prince and the nation. Twelve years will not pass before this impossibility becomes an axiom.

October 9th. — Occupation of the states of Parma by order of the First Consul. Bonaparte no longer disguises his plans for expansion in Italy.

1803

February 19th. — Act of Mediation rendered by Bonaparte to put an end to the disputes between the Swiss cantons. This act is supported by an army of 80,000 men, who, since October 21st of the previous year, had begun to penetrate into Switzerland, under the orders of General Ney.

February 26th. — Bonaparte reportedly secretly proposes to Louis XVIII to cede his rights to the throne of France. “I do not confuse,” Louis XVIII responds, “Mr. Bonaparte with those who preceded him. I appreciate his value, his military talents; I am grateful to him for some administrative acts. But he is mistaken if he thinks he can persuade me to renounce my rights; far from it, he would establish them himself, if they could be disputed, by the steps he is taking at this moment.” Is this not already Henri V, thanking Louis-Napoleon for what he has done against the revolutionaries, and urging his followers to refuse the oath?

March 25th. — Raising of 120,000 men in anticipation of the rupture with England.

April 30th. — Louisiana is sold to the United States for the sum of 81,300,000 francs: an anticipated consequence of the cessation of peace.

May 13th. — The English ambassador receives his passports: preparations are being made for war.

Was this rupture inevitable? Politicians have argued for and against it: there is no need for so much research. What is established, by chronological demonstration and by facts, is that a head of state, in Bonaparte’s position, could, at will, through some concessions, make peace or war; that the pretexts alleged on both sides were rather within the scope of diplomacy than of armies; that if, for example, England did not want to give up (the island of Malta:, Bonaparte still wanted to take (the island of Elba, Piedmont, the state of Parma); that while the interests of Great Britain were obviously compromised by the prolongation of peace, war was only useful to Bonaparte on the French side; that he had anticipated this war, that he was ready for it, that he had long acted as if it had been declared; that as much as France found advantages in drawing on all diplomatic means, transactions, compensations, etc., before fighting, England, for whom the situation was quite different, was interested in causing the conflict to arise, and seeking a solution through the use of arms.

England, in fact, wanted the empire of the Ocean, which then, as today, was difficult to take away from it. To balance this maritime domination, France had only two means: either to close the European continent to England, as it itself closed the Ocean to us, which would lead, if Europe refused to enter into this system, to the necessity of conquering it, an impossible thing; or to fight its rival with its own weapons, through industry, commerce, navigation, alliances, etc.: sure means, but slow, incompatible with the recent constitution of power, and which were neither in the genius of the First Consul, nor in the nature of his command.

Thus, in the struggle with England, the policy of exclusion, that is to say, of conquest, dreamed up by the men of the Convention, notably Barère, an absurd policy from the point of view of the interests and liberties of the country, but indispensable to the preservation of an excessive power; a policy without purpose, since to aim at everything is to aim at nothing; this personal policy, which, reduced to its simplest expression, would never have been tolerated, prevailed in the councils of the nation, thanks to the brilliance of recent victories, the skillfully colored pretexts of diplomacy, and the excitement of national rivalries. From that moment on, it was easy to predict, down to the dates and places, the twists and turns of the struggle, and to predict the outcome.

Internally, Bonaparte, appointed consul for life, free from all constitutional constraints, can only maintain his authority by concentrating it more and more, and by occupying the nation with enterprises that absorb his energy and divert attention from him. This plan is already contradictory: the stronger the power, the more it is attacked; public opinion, as soon as it does not recognize itself in it, turns against it. The fatal day will come when compressed freedom, offended national tendencies, will react against the despot: then the nation, at least the thinking part, the only one that counts, will separate from its leader, and from this split will inevitably result either the fall of one or the degradation of the other, perhaps the ruin of both.

Externally, England, mistress of the sea, protected by its insular position, subsidizing kings, stirring up peoples, holding the French nation, so to speak, in a state of blockade through the universality of its commerce; England forces Bonaparte, in order to break out of this blockade, to turn it against her, that is to say, to seize successively all the states of Europe, to dethrone one king after another, to change dynasties, and to abolish nationalities. In two months, England drives Bonaparte, willingly or not, to universal monarchy. If he stops for a single day, he loses the fruit of his victories: France demands its constitution back from him, the peoples their freedom. Conspiracies are also there to tell him: March, march; otherwise, abdicate!

In this European autocracy, how many chances were there for Bonaparte? Not a single one. How many for England? All of them. The Treaty of Westphalia, by harming nationalities in more than one place, had introduced the idea of a European federation and laid the foundations for the balance of power, the perfection of which is one of the most authentic data in history and will be the superior work of the revolution. A little earlier or a little later, Bonaparte, in contradiction with universal destiny, would have all of Europe armed against him, with exhausted France murmuring behind him. If he did not fall in the first shock, which was still a possibility, it was inevitable that at the supreme hour of the peoples’ uprising, his fall would become the pledge of general peace and the prize of England’s efforts. It would take ten years, perhaps, to determine this great armament; it could cost Europe six million men killed on the battlefield and a debt of 30 billion: even at this price, English policy could not back down. Since 1789, the French Revolution had not cost much less: for its maritime preponderance, for the honor of its diplomacy, for the pride of its race, England would not refuse an equal sacrifice.

The whole imperial epic is in the play of this game, whose outcome appears from afar with the certainty of fate, but which Bonaparte, full of his projects, fearing above all to diminish himself, does not perceive the danger and the machiavellianism. The great strategist, caught in the trap of his utopia while pursuing the ideologues, is condemned from this moment on. He, superstitious and fatalistic, does not perceive the misfortune attached to the enterprises he conceives and directs alone. Neither the surrender of Malta to the English (September 5, 1800, bitter fruit of the expedition to Egypt; nor the surrender of Alexandria (August 30, 1801), the last post occupied by our soldiers; nor the revolt of the blacks (September 14, 1802), can pull him out of his illusions. He rushes with insane joy down the path where the enemy calls him, seeming to take point by point his predictions.

But how hard it will be to reduce this man! What a pain, for the providence of nations, to be right about this Briarée! What prodigies of intelligence, activity, seduction, and audacity, accomplished by this antagonist of fate, to sustain an impossible claim! The history of Emperor Napoleon, a true aside in the history of humanity, simple in its motif like the Iliad and the Aeneid, has rightfully become a legend, a myth for the people. Few writers have untangled its organic reason, if it is permissible to apply the style of the character here. Moreover, no one has known less about the secret of his destiny, the causes of his greatness and his decline, than Napoleon. He remained ignorant until the end. In seeing, in the meditations of Saint Helena, the wandering of this proud spirit, who until the last moment protests against defeat because he cannot understand it, one would say it is a star that, pushed far from its orbit, no longer sees its path in the dazzle of its rays, and runs aimlessly through the Empyrean.

I believed that, for the understanding of contemporary events and the confirmation of the principles we have established on the generation of history, it was necessary to present here a chronological summary of the imperial period. Truth, obscured in the length of dissertations and narratives, appears in pure chronology, with evidence that is only found in mathematics. Once the starting point is understood, the inevitable filiation of facts, the increasingly apparent impossibility of Napoleon’s policy, and the futility of victories will be seen. By comparing the richness of means, the power of faculties, with the absurdity of the goal, one will have the true measure of the man.

IMPERIAL EPHEMERIDES.

1803

May 20. – Commencement of hostilities against England. Since the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens, there is only one individual who thinks and acts for the nation, and that is Bonaparte. Delegated by the people, equipped with their blank check, he believes himself exempt from taking any advice from now on, and while following no reason other than his own reason, he does not consider himself a despot. Those who helped him organize the consular government have become the clerks of his will, his comrades-in-arms, the servants of his empire. France, alienating its sovereignty, is at the service of this citizen, who soon marched hand in hand with the kings, making his individual authority an article of faith, and his delirium a manifestation of providence.

May 22. – The First Consul orders the arrest of all Englishmen travelling in France, and declares them prisoners of war. Like Brunswick, in his famous manifesto, he is no longer waging war only against the British government, but against the nation!

June 3. – Invasion of Hanover by General Mortier.

September 27. – Censorship is established, to ensure, according to the decree, freedom of the press.

November 30. – Evacuation of Saint-Domingue, the first fruit of Bonaparte’s policy. The garrison, reduced to 5,000 men, including 800 officers, is taken prisoner of war. 50,000 Frenchmen have perished in this expedition: as many had already been lost in the Egyptian campaign. Thus fails Bonaparte’s second personal enterprise.

December 20. – Senate decree regulating the form of sessions of the legislative body. Freedom does not pass, either on the platform or in the press. In fact, for the exercise of power, in the terms of the plebiscite of August 2, 1802, and for the career we have to pursue, freedom is too much.

1804

February 15. – Conspiracy against the First Consul, Liberty protests! Moreau is arrested.

February 25. Establishment of the united rights.

February 28. – Arrest of Pichegru. Blessed Kléber, Desaix, Hoche, Marceau, Joubert! They had neither the time to betray the revolution nor to conspire against the tyrant. They died for the country: from now on, one will only die for the emperor!

March 9. – Arrest of Georges Cadoudal. What was this oddball doing? France had an experience to follow with its emperor: after him, the Bombons!

March 21. – The Duke of Enghien is shot in Vincennes. Royalist or republican, everything that resists is crushed.

March 24. – Enrollment of 60,000 conscripts.

April 28. – Proclamation of Dessalines to the Haitians: War to the death to tyrants! Freedom, Independence! It sounds like the cry of 92. The revolution, halted in Europe, takes a turn among the Indians.

May 4. – Bonaparte is appointed hereditary Emperor. The motion is made to the Tribunate, adopted by the Conservative Senate, “in order to ensure to the French people their dignity, independence, and territory, and to prevent the return of despotism, nobility, feudalism, servitude, and ignorance, the only presents that the Bourbons could make to the people if they ever returned.” This Senate decree is ratified by 3,521,675 yes, against 2,579 no.

May 19. – Creation of marshals: undoubtedly intended, according to the wishes of the Tribunate, to fight feudalism and nobility.

May 27. – Oath-taking. – The clergy compare Napoleon to Josaphat, Mathathias, Cyrns, Moïse, Caesar, Augustus, Charlemagne. God said to him, “Sit at my right hand, sede at dextris meis. The government belongs to him, submission is due to him: such is the order of Providence!” These priests would say, if they used it, that the Eternal, having deceived Laetitia, had had Napoleon.

June 10. – Trial and banishment of Moreau: Pichegru strangles himself in prison, Georges Cadoudal is shot.

July 10. – Establishment of the Ministry of Police.

October 2 – A flotilla is assembled in Boulogne for the landing in England. The English try unsuccessfully to destroy it.

October 5. – The black man Dessaline takes the title of Emperor. Toussaint-Louverture’s irony passes to his successors: it is written that Saint-Domingue will be Napoleon’s nightmare.

December 2. – The Emperor is crowned at Notre-Dame. The expenses of the coronation, according to the empire’s newspapers, amount to only six million!

December 3. – Alliance of England with Sweden. While the conqueror prepares, England works on governments and peoples on its side.

1805

January 17th. – Enlistment of 60,000 men.

January 29th. – Foundation of Napoleonville or Bourbon-Vendée.

March 18th. – The Emperor declares to the Senate that he accepts the crown of Italy, according to the wish expressed by the Italian population. As if a secret voice protested within him against the fate that drives him, he says: ”… The genius of evil will seek in vain for pretexts to put the continent at war: no new power will be incorporated into the French state!”

April 5th. – Pope Pius VII, who had hoped, by coming to Paris to crown the Emperor, to recover the old domains of the Church, returns empty-handed, to the whistles of Europe.

April 8th. – Treaty of alliance between England and Russia.

May 8th. – The emperor of Haiti, Dessalines, decrees an imperial constitution.

May 26th. – Napoleon is crowned in Milan, Eugene Beauharnais declared viceroy of Italy. Feudalism, despite the wish of the Tribunate, thus begins again, through Napoleon’s family.

June 4th. – Reunion of Genoa with France.

June 23rd. – The republic of Lucca is transformed into a principality, and given to Elisa, Napoleon’s sister.

July 21st. – Reunion of Parma with France. Thus are justified the grievances of England, thus continues, despite the inner light that illuminates it, the anti-providential career of the Emperor. Was he lying when he declared on March 18th that no province would be incorporated into France? No: the force of circumstances crushed him. For every alliance made by England, he responded with an enlargement of territory, that’s all.

July 22nd. – Naval battle off Cape Finisterre (Spain) between the Franco-Spanish fleet and the English. The advantage remains with the latter.

August 9th. – Austria adheres to the treaty of April 8th, between Russia, Sweden, and England.

September 5th. – 3rd coalition against France. If reflection could arise in Napoleon’s heart, he would feel at this moment what the anomaly of his position is. He would see that this anomaly results from his system of government, which in turn has its source in the idea that he, like the common people, has of the political mandate. He would then say to himself that victories, in the service of a wicked cause, are as much to be feared as defeats, and from now on he would fight only for the status quo and for peace. The evil genius prevails: forward!

Passage of the Inn river by the Austrian general Klénau.

September 9th. — Reinstatement of the Gregorian calendar. As Bonaparte is pursued by the old regime, he returns to the institutions of the old regime. All the acts of his government, perfectly interconnected moreover, are contrary to his mandate.

September 25th. — Senatus consultum ordering the levy of 80,000 conscripts, activating those from 1801, 2, 3, 4, 5; orders the reorganization of the national guards. — Mandates of bishops, which order public prayers and spread their blessings on the Anointed of the Lord, sent from heaven to visit the earth.

So where is the truth in France? where is reason? Is it not true that under this avalanche of adulation which he is the subject of, the most sincere of all, the most honest, is still Napoleon?

October 8-20. — Battles of Vertingen, Guntburg, Langenau; occupation of Augsburg, Munich; capitulation of Ulm. In 15 days, the enemy lost 50,000 prisoners.

October 21st. — Battle of Trafalgar, won by Nelson over the French admiral Villeneuve. What had been Aboukir to the Egyptian expedition, Trafalgar will be for the entire imperial period. Napoleon, without a navy, is irrevocably condemned to seize the continent. This is what will be called the Continental System or Blockade. At Trafalgar, as at Aboukir, Napoleon is therefore defeated, and without mercy, since the position which is made for him is such that defeated in Germany, he loses everything; victorious, he is more and more compromised. All his victories are struck in advance with sterility, and turned into defeats.

October 25th. — The king of Prussia joins the coalition.

November. — On the 2nd, Masséna, commanding the army of Italy, forces Archduke Charles to retreat; on the 4th, battle of Amstetten, occupation, capture of Vicenza; on the 7th, occupation of Innsbruck; on the 9th, battle of Marienzell; on the 11th, battle of Dürnstein; on the 13th, occupation of Vienna; on the 14-24, occupation of Trento, Pressburg, Brno, Döbling: on the 28th, junction of the army of Italy and the Grande Armée.

November 4th. — Naval battle, in sight of Cape Villano, Galicia. Four French ships, having escaped the disaster of Trafalgar, are forced to surrender after an 8-hour action.

December 2nd. – Victory of Austerlitz, won by the Emperor.

December 26th. – Peace of Pressburg with Austria. There’s one down; what will Napoleon do with him?

The rule of war is to weaken the defeated enemy: the states of Venice, Dalmatia, and Albania are annexed to the Kingdom of Italy; the Elector of Bavaria and the Duke of Wurttemberg, already devoted to the Emperor of the French, are enlarged at the expense of Austria and take the title of kings. Thus, what he cannot yet incorporate into his states, he divides and gives to subordinates, whom he makes his allies against the coalition. As a result of this treaty, Neuchâtel, Berg, and Clèves are annexed to France, and Napoleon is declared Protector of the Helvetic Confederation.

1806

January 23rd. – Upon hearing of the defeat of Austerlitz, Pitt is struck by apoplexy and dies. His rival Fox takes over the ministry: negotiations for peace are initiated.

January 28th. – The Senate awards Napoleon the title of grand: a monument is decreed in his honor. The nation, intoxicated, shares the blindness of its leader, whose downfall it will also share.

February 6th. – Naval battle in the Bay of Saint-Domingue between a French fleet and a British fleet: ended in the enemy’s favor.

February 8-15. – Invasion of the Kingdom of Naples, in retaliation for the king Ferdinand’s poorly guarded neutrality. Constantly beaten at sea by the English, Napoleon has only the recourse to expel them from the continent: after Italy, he continues with Naples.

March 30th. – The Emperor appoints his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, king of the Two Sicilies.

June 5th. – Napoleon restores the feudal system for the preservation of his conquests. He appoints Murat, his brother-in-law, grand duke of Berg and Clèves; gives Talleyrand the Principality of Benevento as an immediate fief of the crown; and further declares another of his brothers, Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland. Sensing the danger of conquests, he would like to limit himself to changes of dynasties. But this method is worse than the other: the kings of Napoleon’s creation will give him more trouble than the natives would have done.

July 6th – General Régnier is defeated by the English at Sainte-Euphémie in Calabria. The people rise up against the French, assassination is organized against them: a prelude to what will happen a few years later in Spain.

July 12th – Confederation of the Rhine, under the Protectorate of Napoleon. This treaty, which binds fourteen German princes to the empire, provides France with a contingent of 60,000 men against the coalition. Such princes would have deserved the rope, if the people had the intelligence of their interests: they were let off, after the retreat from Moscow, with one more betrayal.

August 20th – In the face of Napoleon’s enlargements, Russia refuses peace, dragging Prussia into its orbit.

October 6th – 4th coalition. Nothing is conquered as long as there is still something to conquer, says England. Let’s conquer, answers the Emperor.

October 9-10 – Battles of Schleitz and Saalfeld: the Prussians are defeated.

October 14-31 – Victory at Jena: capitulation of Erfurt, occupation of Leipzig, Halberstadt, Brandenburg, Berlin, Warsaw, etc. Capture of Spandau and Stettin.

November – Capture of Anklam, Kustrin, Lubeck; occupation of Hesse-Cassel, Hamburg, Bremen, surrender of Magdeburg; capitulation of Hameln, entry of Murat into Warsaw.

November 21st – Imperial decree, dated Berlin, regarding the Continental System. The British Isles are placed under blockade; any Englishman seized and French is declared a prisoner of war, any merchandise from this nation is prohibited. Provisionally, Prussia is condemned to a war contribution of 150 million. And two. With England, Russia and Sweden remain.

Thus Napoleon not only makes war on states, he makes war on peoples; not only does he make war on men, he makes war on things. Will this last long?… Let’s continue.

1805

December 15 – Mobilization of 80,000 men. At the same time, the Emperor orders the national guards to prepare for active service.

December 23-26 – Battles of Golymin, Nasielsk, Nidzica, and Soldau against the Russians. The French gain the advantage everywhere.

January – Military operations continue: capture of Breslau and Brieg on the Oder.

February 8-26 – Bloody battle of Eylau; battles of Ostrolenka and Braunsberg, where generals Bernadotte and Ney cut the enemy to pieces.

April 7 – Mobilization of 80,000 men, 1808 class. The Emperor, to maintain his armies and deal with affairs, anticipates his recruitment. His weakness is already evident.

June 5-14 – Battles of Spanden, Deppen, Guttstadt, Heilsberg, where the French are constantly victorious. Finally, the victory of Friedland, followed by the capture of Königsberg and Neisse, the surrender of Glatz and Kassei, forces Russia to seek peace.

July 7-9 – Peace of Tirana. The coalition is defeated. It will be defeated as long as powers, instead of massing their forces, act separately, and as long as people do not believe they are interested in the dispute.

Prussia loses half of its territory, which goes partly to France, partly to Saxony. Poland, which had been of great help to Napoleon, is forgotten or rather sacrificed by him to the friendship of the czar. It learns, to its detriment, that the antagonism of princes never goes so far as to make them serve the emancipation of peoples.

August 16 – The war on the continent is over: Napoleon returns triumphant to Paris. Enthusiasm is at its height. But this enthusiasm would soon turn into consternation if anyone at this moment could guess that all these victories are so many insults to the star of Bonaparte, misdeeds that only exacerbate fate against France and against him. How can we not condemn the hero, how can we not pity him, on the contrary, when we see how low the stupidity of his audience stoops? “He is beyond history,” exclaims President Séguier, “instead of admiration, he can only be equaled by love!” Madness and pity!

August 18 – Formation of the kingdom of Westphalia: Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme, aged 27, will be its holder. Universal applause.

August 19 – The Tribunal is abolished: there were indications of opposition! The imperial constitution, so often revised, is modified again. Is it not logical, necessary? Gird your loins for battle, O warrior! For the more triumphs you win, the more opposition you create, and the more work you have to do; therefore, the more you will need, like an athlete, to gather strength!

September 1 – Organization of the Ionian Republic as an integral part of the French Empire. Napoleon, having missed England through Egypt, regains it through Greece! The European Union will soon no longer contain him!

September 2 – The King of Prussia joins the Continental System.

September 7th. Capture of the island of Rügen by Marshal Brune: Sweden recalls its troops.

It is at this moment that the English, blinded by greed and hatred, bombard Copenhagen, the capital of a neutral state. The motive for this odious aggression is the refusal of the King of Denmark to participate in the coalition. One could, without crime, fail to understand a policy that the English themselves served so poorly: thus, this act of vandalism did more harm to England than all of Napoleon’s victories. For a moment, the powers separated from it, and Napoleon almost, out of hatred for his rivals, became the accepted arbiter of Europe.

September 9th. The King of Denmark forbids his people from communicating with the English.

October 14-16. Napoleon, adopting the ideas of Barère, declares that he will oppose any alliance of the princes of the continent with England. The arrogance of this casus belli is matched only by its foolishness. But such is the clamor against the English at this moment, that the czar joins Napoleon, and in turn accedes to his Continental System.

Thus a political mistake, a crime against the law of nations, seems for a moment to bend destiny! This moment was the most critical for Great Britain in its struggle with Napoleon: but the doubt did not last long. The intemperance of the Emperor quickly brings back to the English those whom their barbarism had momentarily detached.

November 13th. First expedition to Portugal. The court of Lisbon, fearing England, which threatened its possessions in America, could not enter the Continental System. Napoleon issues a decree stating that the House of Braganza has ceased to reign in Europe, and charges General Junot with its execution. Thus, it suffices that the English set foot in a state, for that state to become an enemy of the Emperor!

November 30th. Capture of Lisbon by the French. A contribution of 100 million is imposed on Portugal. – What do you say about this retaliation for the bombing of Copenhagen, O wise Alexander?…

December 10th. Reunion of the Kingdom of Etruria with France: the French year takes possession.

December 17-18. The Emperor issues decree after decree regarding the Continental System. The King of England responds with a declaration stating that Great Britain is the only bastion of the liberties of Europe.

1808

January 1st. — State of the English navy: 253 ships of the line, 29 of 50 cannons, 261 frigates, 299 sloops, 258 brigs: total of 1,100 warships, not including cutters and other smaller vessels.

State of the French navy: zero.

The question is asked which of the two powers, France or Great Britain, is holding the other in a state of blockade?

January 3rd. — Spain, at the instigation of Napoleon, frightened by the fate of Portugal, enters the Continental System.

January 21st. — Reunion of Kehl, Cassel, Wezel, and Flessingoe into French territory. Raising of 80,000 men.

February 2nd. — Rome is occupied by the French: Continental System.

February 17-29 — Occupation of Pampelune, Barcelona, Eiguière, Saint-Sébastien, by continental measures. Over 10,000 French spread out in the Peninsula.

March 19th. — Following court intrigues, in which Napoleon’s hand is seen, Charles IV, king of Spain, abdicates in favor of his son.

April 2nd. — Imperial decree annexing the provinces of Ancône, Urbin, Camerino, Macerata, to the French empire, Continental System.

May 5th. — Treaty of Bayonne, by which Ferdinand VII restores the crown to his father Charles IV, who transfers it to Napoleon. At this news, an insurrection breaks out in Madrid: the dissatisfied are shot by Murat’s soldiers.

All historians blame Napoleon’s conduct towards Spain as artificial, immoral, and unjust. What we need to point out here is that it is the reduction to absurdity of Napoleon’s System. How strong England must have felt, seeing this leader of a great state constantly remaking and undoing the political map of Europe, depersonalizing peoples and governments, constantly enlarging his territory, like an individual rounding out his property, and recognizing in the constitution of states only an artificial work that he can produce and destroy.

May 27-30. — Napoleon’s policy, or rather the policy imposed on Napoleon by England, bears fruit. Spain rises up in its entirety: the war of peoples begins against the Emperor.

June 6th – Napoleon can no longer retreat. Imperial decree proclaims Joseph Bonaparte, older brother of the Emperor, as King of Spain.

June 14th – Insurgents in Cadiz seize the remains of the French fleet, the last remnants of Trafalgar: 5 line ships, 1 frigate, 4,000 sailors.

June 16th – Portuguese insurrection. The fire is lit throughout the Peninsula, fueled by England. Fortune begins to turn. Let the peoples of the North follow the example of those in the South, and it is done for Napoleon.

June 22nd – Surrender of Baylen: 13,000 French soldiers and officers lay down their arms and are sent to Cadiz on pontoons.

July 29th – King Joseph, frightened by the progress of the insurgency, abandons Madrid after a residence of eight days.

July 31st – An English army lands in Portugal. War is certain, in friendly territory, against the foreign oppressor.

August 10th – The Spanish general la Romana, serving in Denmark at the Emperor’s service, escapes with 22,000 men and returns to Spain to help the insurgency.

August 21st – Battle of Vimiero, between Junot and Wellington. The French, outnumbered, withdraw in good order.

August 30th – Convention of Cintra: the French evacuate Portugal and return to France, transported on English ships. Wellington wages war as a merchant: he only risks himself with superior forces, and does not care about the honor of a capitulation, as long as the French leave! Thus, for three months, the Emperor has suffered a series of setbacks in the Peninsula, which make the impossibility of his plans increasingly evident. While the insurgency is rampant, smuggling abounds: Napoleon is defeated by the popular masses, in his person and in his politics.

September 8th – Convention of Paris, for the settlement of affairs with Prussia. Attracted to Spain by the danger of the South, the Emperor hastens to negotiate in the North with the coalition.

September 10th – Enrollment of 80,000 conscripts, class of 1810: recall of 80,000 others, from the classes of 1806, 7, 8, 9: total 160,000 men, rendered necessary by the war in Spain. France does not flinch!

October 12 – Erfurt meeting between Napoleon and Alexander. The two sovereigns send a collective letter to the King of England urging him to make peace! Napoleon, on Saint Helena, referred to Czar Alexander as the Greek of the Las Empire. It is certain that this Greek committed an act of great stupidity in the circumstance. If, at that moment, instead of complacently serving Napoleon’s views, he had supported England, Portugal, Spain, the King of Naples, the Pope, he could have hastened the imperial debacle by four years. This mistake will cost the coalition dearly.

November 11 – The Emperor, confident in the intentions of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, enters Spain with 80,000 men withdrawn from the fortresses of Germany.

November 10-23 – Battle and capture of Burgos; battles of Espinosa and Tudela won by the French.

December 11 – Surrender of Madrid by the insurgents. The Emperor addresses a threatening proclamation to the Spaniards. “No power,” he says, “can exist on the Continent influenced by England!… I will drive the English out of Spain, and their adherents will be enveloped in their ruin.”

December 5-16-21 – Capture of Roses in Catalonia; battles on the Llobregat, at San Felice, and at Molino del Rey, fought by Gourion Saint-Cyr. The Spaniards, constantly defeated in open battle, take revenge as guerrillas. The triumphs of the French army will pass into posterity; its extermination in detail escapes history.

1809

January. – The impossible work continues. Battles of Priéros, Taraçona, and Corunna; taking of Ferrol. The Spaniards are still defeated; but the French are wearing down!

February 21. – Taking of Saragossa, new Numance! by Lannes.

February 10. – Surrender of Martinique to the English, by Villaret-Joyeuse.

March 12-29. – A second expedition is directed against Portugal, under the orders of Marshal Soult. – Battle of Lanhozo, battle and taking of O-Porto.

April 9. – 5th coalition. The example of the peoples ends up dragging the kings. Austria, impatient under the yoke, paid by England, breaks the peace. Crossing of the Inn and Salza by Archduke Charles: rational, but insufficient diversion in favor of Portugal and Spain. Is there anything more stupid than these so-called coalitions?

April 12. – New maritime disaster suffered by France, at the island of Aix. Since Trafalgar, our sailors no longer venture onto the ocean; they are taken, burned in their anchorages. At the island of Aix, 13 ships and frigates are destroyed.

April 15-16. – Battles of Pordenone and Sacile, on the Tagliamento. The French, commanded by Prince Eugene, are at first beaten by the Austrians.

April 19-22. – Battles of Pfafîen-Hoflén and Tann, fought by Oudinot and Davoust; battles of Abensberg and Eckmuhl: the French win everywhere.

April 23. – Raising of 30,000 men, class of 1810; plus 10,000 to be taken from those of 1806 to 1809.

May 4. – Attack on the fort of Ebersberg, where 5,000 brave men perish, needlessly sacrificed by the generals. In contrast to work, war, by becoming deadly, demoralizes: a priori proof that with civilization it must disappear.

May 10-18. – Marshal Soult, having lost part of his artillery and his equipment, evacuates Portugal. The second expedition against this country fails like the first. What Napoleon obtains in advantages on one side, he loses on the other. – “I would have to be everywhere,” he exclaims. “Well! of course, invincible Emperor, and that is why your system is worthless.”

May 13 – Occupation of Vienna.

May 17 – Imperial decree that unites the Roman states with the French empire. Napoleon revokes Charlemagne’s donations and assigns a revenue of two million to the Pope. The system continues.

May 21-22 – Very bloody Battle of Essling. The Emperor is pushed back to the right bank of the Danube and establishes himself on Lobau Island.

May 26 – The army of Italy, after a series of successful actions, joins the army of Germany.

June 11 – Pope Pius VII, who had not thundered against the continental system, now stripped of his state, fulminates against Napoleon. The former demagogue of Imola now speaks like Gregory VII. As ridiculous and interested as this demonstration of the Holy See may seem, it nonetheless has an effect on the Christians of the new empire, whose faith had been so ill-advisedly revived by the Concordat.

July 5-6 – Victory at Wagram. Austria, which still had a fine army and could have prolonged the struggle, throws itself at Napoleon’s feet. Emperor Francis will pay a war contribution of 238 million as a preliminary. The rout of the coalition, noted by all publicists since ‘92, saves the Emperor once again, as it had saved the Revolution.

On the same day, Pius VII is abducted by order of Murat, transferred to Grenoble, and from there to Savona, where he is kept under guard.

July 28 – Battle of Talavera on the Tagus, where Marshal Victor is beaten by Wellington.

August 15 – Surrender of Flushing to the English by General Monnet. Ominous omen: the loss of Flushing is the counterpart of the capitulation of Baylen.

October 5 – Raising of 36,000 men, distributed among the classes of 1805, 7, 8, 9, 10.

October 11 – Peace of Vienna between France and Austria. The Illyrian provinces are united with France. Important territorial concessions are made to the German Confederation, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and Russia. The continental system continues: the war continues with Portugal, Spain, and England.

— New maritime disaster experienced by the ships and two frigates, commanded by Admiral Baudin, are stranded or burned on the coast of Hérault. Against the eagle, there is no beak or nails: cut its wings. Such is the tactic of the English.

19-20 – Battle of Ocaña, fought by Mortier.

22 – Battle of Alba de Tormes, by Kellermann. The Spaniards are routed, and the French are consumed.

16 – Napoleon sees a new way to consolidate his empire, which is to give himself an heir. The divorce is pronounced between him and Josephine.

1810

January 6 – Sweden makes peace with France and joins the Continental System. Thus, at the beginning of this year, the entire North is silent before Napoleon. But while governments bend, the force of events conspires against the Emperor. Smuggling annuls treaties; what the sword has bound, commerce loosens; even in the imperial palace, England opens up outlets. The war in the Peninsula is only the eruption, in one place, of this underground, universal struggle.

February 2 – Seville is occupied by the French: the insurrectional junta takes refuge in Cadiz.

February 6 – Guadeloupe surrenders to the English. France will soon no longer have a single station on the globe. What are the laurels of Wagram, Friediand, Jena, Austerlitz, the forced additions of territory, the dynasties enthroned despite the peoples, compared to this maritime isolation, which breaks, so to speak, all relations of France with the rest of the world?

February 7 – Marriage between Napoleon and Marie-Louise, celebrated in Vienna, by proxy. The French nation has always regretted this alliance, impolitic, proud, which made Napoleon the nephew of Louis XVI, the cousin of all despots, the ward of the counter-revolution. But it must be admitted that it is no better understood on the side of Austria, which, instead of remaining in a mute protest, made a pact with the devourer of its states, the future master of Europe!

March 9 – Napoleon realizes the fable of the Sun who gets married: the more he begets, the more he burns. Beware of frogs!

By imperial decree, eight state prisons are established, in favor of suspects of political offenses who it would not be appropriate to bring before the courts or to release! The regime of lettres de cachet is starting again. Historians can only blame despotism: but where is the cause of despotism? Delegation, delegation, I tell you! Any nation that no longer thinks is devoted to despotism.

March 16 – The 5 percent is at 88.90 francs. This rate is the highest that public funds will reach under the imperial period.

May 6-13 – Capture of Astorga and Lérida by Generals Junot and Suchet.

June 5 – Capture of Méquinenza: the French hold the walls, the population does not surrender. All these captures of cities do not advance the conquest in any way, and only serve to fill the generals’ wagons with booty.

July 1-9 – Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, acknowledges the impossibility for his states to observe the Continental System. A honest but powerless sovereign, he resigns. Holland is incorporated into the French Empire. Thus, the system wears out and cracks: three years of peace, in case of a general submission, would be enough to do justice to it. – This fact, little noticed, is one of the most serious symptoms that should have struck Napoleon.

July 7-8 – Capture of Bourbon Island by the British.

July 10 – Third expedition to Portugal: Masséna against Wellington. Capture of Ciudad-Rodrigo by Marshal Ney.

August 5-27 – Decrees relating to the Continental System. Colonial commodities are subject to high tariffs; English goods are condemned to be burned.

August 21 – Bernadotte is elected King of Sweden. – “Go,” Napoleon said to him with a sigh, “and let the destinies be fulfilled!...”

Here, another flaw in the continental system is revealed. When countries deprived of their dynasties, such as Sweden, give as their leaders Napoleon’s generals, the empire is immediately dissolved, France is brought back to its just limits. The recent conduct of Louis Bonaparte, and later of Murat, proves it. Feudalism is so repugnant to modern nations!

August 27 – Capture of Almeida in Portugal by Masséna.

September 27 – Battle of Bussaco, where Masséna is repulsed by Wellington.

October 18 – Establishment of provost courts for the repression of smugglers and their accomplices! The Emperor seems to ignore that the more dangerous the smuggling, the higher the premium, and therefore, the more the protection becomes immoral. The Continental System is turning into madness: neither the Emperor nor France realize it.

December 3 – Capture of the island of Mauritius by the British.

December 13 – Reunion of the Hanseatic cities and Valais to the French Empire. The Emperor compensates himself, on the continent’s states, for the losses that the English cause him on the ocean. We no longer have colonies: but Italians, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, Savoyards, Illyrians, Greeks, are French! The Mediterranean is a French lake: it is true that we no longer have a single ship there. Everything is French!…

Levy of 160,000 men, class of 1811, for the continuation of the war in Spain and the Continental System. “Continue, sire,” exclaimed the Senate, “this sacred war, for the honor of the French name and the independence of nations!”

1811

What did Napoleon do during the year 1810? From the bottom of the Tuileries, he guarded the Continental System, cracking down on smugglers, and waiting day by day for the submission of the Peninsula. What will he do during this year 1811? He will continue his guard, momentarily cheered by the birth of his son, the King of Rome, and always sending new troops into Spain, whose people, crushed in a hundred battles, decorate the armies and do not surrender. Napoleon’s spirit is awake: he does not rest day or night. But this life is that of a sleepwalker; this life is not history, it is a dream of Ossian.

2-20 January – Capture of Tortose by Suchet: occupation of Olivenza.

February 19 – Battle of Gebora, won by Soult over the Spaniards.

February 28 – Reunion of the Duchy of Oldenburg with France, without any other motive or pretext than the interest of the Continental System. This incorporation leads to a break with Russia.

March 5-12 – Battle of Chiclana, capture of La Línea, Battle of Redinha. The generals Victor, Mortier, and Soult distinguish themselves against the Spaniards and the English.

March 20 – Birth of the King of Rome. This child comes too late. It would have been better, following the example of the ancient Caesars, to associate oneself with a fully formed man, Prince Eugène.

April 4 – Masséna retreats before Wellington: he is replaced by Marmont.

May 10 – Evacuation of Almeida: the expedition to Portugal fails for the third time.

May 16 – Battle of Albuera, neither the Anglo-Spaniards nor the French are masters of the terrain. They invest Badajoz.

June 3 – Henri-Christophe, known as Napoleon’s Black Monkey, is anointed with cocoa oil by a Capuchin named Brell, King of Haiti. The constitution given by this new leader is entirely modeled on the Napoleonic constitution. In 1830, it would have been said that this Mephistophelean figure was paid by the English to taunt the Emperor!

June 11 – Opening of a council in Paris, called to regulate the institution of bishops, to whom the Pope refuses to send bulls. Poor Emperor! he has fallen into theology: he will not wake up!…

June 28 – Capture of Tarragona, after 2 months of siege and 5 assaults. General Suchet is made Marshal.

September 20 – The Pope, a prisoner in Savona, approves the decrees of the Council of Paris; the papal court refuses to ratify this approval. From all sides, the spiritual and the temporal, excommunication and smuggling, rise up against Napoleon.

October 25 – Battle of Sagunto, won by Suchet, followed by the surrender of the city.

December 20 – Enlistment of 120,000 conscripts, class of 1812. Another year has passed: the dream does not end! The nation is under the Emperor’s influence.

1812

January 9-19. – Valence is taken by Suchet, and Ciudad-Rodrigo is taken by Wellington. It’s a balance! ..

Imperial decree allocating 100,000 hectares of land to the cultivation of sugar beets. Napoleon seeks ways to replace colonial products with indigenous products his subjects cannot do without. One day, his efforts will bear fruit: for now, and in the idea that preoccupies him, they only show the absence of his reason.

January 26. – Imperial decree that unites Catalonia. Why not, since we are in the process of uniting the entire peninsula? It’s because Napoleon, not wanting the originality of his century, can only be an imitator. Catalonia was part of Charlemagne’s states, and it will be part of Napoleon’s states.

February 24. – The hour marked by fate approaches. It was inevitable that Napoleon, after the treaties of Tilsitt and Vienna, forced by the Continental System, the only means of defense he had against England, to always expand, would eventually push all the powers to the fight again, and that war would break out, even more general. The incorporation of the Duchy of Oldenburg had been the cause of Russia’s discontent, which was to lead to a rupture. In anticipation of this event, Napoleon hastens to conclude a treaty with Prussia, which Marshal Oudinot supports with an army corps. Prussia, therefore, renews its commitment to support the Continental System; in case of war with Russia, it will provide 20,000 men.

March 13. – Senate consultation that organizes the national guard. It is divided into three bans, the first of which, initially formed by a hundred cohorts of 971 men each, is placed at the disposal of the Emperor.

March 14. – Treaty between France and Austria signed in Paris. Austria will provide a contingent of 30,000 men.

March 24. – 6th Coalition. Treaty between Russia and Sweden (Bernadotte!) to which England hastens to adhere.

April 7. – Badajoz is taken by assault by the English: General Philippon is taken prisoner with 3,000 men.

May 9. – Opening of the campaign in Russia: Napoleon leaves Paris, followed by the worried looks of the populations. At this time, the French empire, successively increased by impolitic conquests, but made inevitable by the war against England and the Continental System, consists of 132 departments, not including Catalonia, together forming a population of 52 million inhabitants. On the other hand, the states subject to Napoleon’s indirect and more or less real domination number no less than 44 million. It is therefore 86 million souls, half of Europe, who are commanded by the Emperor of the French. With this immense territory, without a navy, driven from the ocean, he suffocates… The army he leads in Russia is 500,000 strong, dragging 1,200 artillery pieces. Everything indicates that the decisive moment has come: it is a matter of knowing whether the monarchy of Europe, of the globe, will be constituted, for the glory of Napoleon and the confusion of England. Napoleon knows this: but the illusion of his mind shows him things the other way around from the truth. Fate drives events, he says, that we are experiencing.

June 28th. – Entry of the Emperor into Vienna.

July 22nd. – Battle of Arapiles, where Marshal Victor is defeated by Wellington. The empire advances in the north, retrogrades in the south: it is the web of Penelope.

August 12-14. – Occupation of Madrid by Wellington: the French garrison surrenders. It is fatal: it is clear that if, while Napoleon invades Russia, the French are forced to evacuate Spain, nothing is done for Napoleon.

August 17th. – Battle of Smolensk won by Napoleon. But the war is nationalized in Russia as in Spain, and the question is no longer whether the armies will falter, but whether the peoples are able to provide the sacrifice demanded, to finish this army of 500,000 men, commanded by Napoleon.

September 1st. – Raising of 120,000 conscripts, class of 1813; plus 17, to replace the national guard.

September 7th. – Battle of Moscow: 20,000 French dead in combat; 30,000 Russians killed, wounded or captured. Kutusoff proclaims himself the winner: perhaps he did not lie as much as has been said. For if the French are 500,000, and the Russians 1,000,000, and the former lose 500,000 men, killed or wounded, and the latter, 750,000: nothing is done on either side, and it is the French who are defeated. The war in Spain and the campaign in Russia are all in this calculation.

September 14th. – Occupation of Moscow. The inhabitants were warned to evacuate the city, which fanaticism delivers to the flames. The Emperor is terrified: the tactics of the warrior feel impotent in the face of barbaric fury.

October 11-18. – Napoleon is in Moscow, waiting for Alexander’s submissions. In the meantime, he is attacked from behind by Russian generals, who have come from all parts of the empire. Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr barely resists them at Polotsk; Murat is completely defeated at Winkowo by Kutusoff, the defeated of the Moskowa; the Bug is taken from the Austrians by Tschitchagoff, who threatens the Emperor’s communications with Warsaw.

October 23rd. – Conspiracy of General Mallet in Paris: a frightening symptom of the country’s disaffection and the Emperor’s isolation. If Mallet succeeds in seizing the prefect of police and the minister of the interior, France is lost to Napoleon in one fell swoop. What a policy that has laid such miserable foundations!

October 25th. – Napoleon orders the retreat. Thus, he has obtained nothing, the campaign is lost; and however honorable he may be from the point of view of military honor, half of his army will have perished. And yet he has always been victorious!

November 7th. – Arrival at Smolensk, 100 leagues from Moscow, after a retreat marked by daily fighting, where the army, always victorious, nevertheless weakens. Glory and greatness of soul of Marshal Ney.

November 14-16. – The French army evacuates Smolensk. Nature comes to the aid of the Russians: the thermometer drops to 25 degrees. All the horses perish, from famine as much as from cold: those of the Cossacks were able to recover. – Capture of Minsk and French stores by the Russians.

November 28th. – Crossing of the Berezina (180 leagues west of Moscow), the most dreadful day of the retreat. It is there that Marshal Ney receives the name of Brave of the braves.

December 5th. – Napoleon, learning of Mallet’s attempt, immediately takes the lead and leaves the army at Smorgony.

December 10-11. – Evacuation of Wilna (218 leagues from Moscow), where the French army had hoped to recover. General despair, complete rout, massacre of soldiers by the inhabitants.

December 18th. – Arrival in Paris of the 29th bulletin of the Grand Army, dated Malodeczno (200 leagues west of Moscow). The consternation is immense. Two days later, on the 20th, the Emperor arrives in Paris: he is congratulated by the Senate. “Common sense,” says the grand master of the University, Fontanes, “common sense stops respectfully before the mystery of power and obedience. It leaves it to religion, which made princes sacred, but making the image of God himself.” – “Ah! Sire,” exclaims the first president in turn, “the imperial authority will never have a firmer support than the magistrates, who are the dearest guarantees of respect for the rights of sovereignty. We are ready to sacrifice everything for your sacred person and the prosperity of your dynasty. Please receive this new oath: we will remain faithful to it until death.”

December 30th. – Defection of General York, commander of the contingent of 20,000 men provided by Prussia (see above February 20th). This defection is provoked by the Tugendbund (Society of Virtue), which already fills all of Germany, and preaches the crusade against Napoleon.

1813

January 11 – Call-up of 150,000 men from the 1813 class; recall of 100,000 conscripts from the 1809, 1810, 1811, and 1812 classes. The Emperor, according to the Senate, has only spent the surplus of the population.

January 25 – The Emperor tries to reconcile with the Pope, who mocks him. A concordat is signed at Fontainebleau and rejected by the court of Rome.

February 1 – Proclamation of Louis XVIII to the French. He has thought about it. He has seen the mistakes of Louis XVI and Napoleon: he proposes to restore freedom based on the foundations of ‘89, that is to say, a constitutional charter. Thus, Napoleon is attacked on the way he interpreted and fulfilled his mandate; his trial is being conducted in public opinion: is it clear?

February 10-22 – Proclamation of Emperor Alexander. All roles are reversed: the leaders of the coalition call on the peoples to take up arms, as the Convention did in ‘92, and invite them to shake off the yoke of Napoleon. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s prefects continue to congratulate him on having triumphed over feudalism and anarchy.

March 11 – 7th coalition. Treaty between Prussia and Russia. Everything is coming together to crush the Emperor: Bernadotte writes to him and heaps reproaches on him. This other Jacobin, now a legitimate king, dares to speak of ambition!

April 3 – Senate decree which places at the Emperor’s disposal, in addition to the call-up of January 11: 90,000 men, 1814 class; 80,000, recall of 1806, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12; 10,000 cavalry honor guards, equipped at their own expense; in all, 150,000 men.

April 15 – Departure of Napoleon; opening of the campaign in Saxony. French forces in Germany at this time amount to 166,000 men; the Allies count 225,000.

March 20th-21st – Battles of Arcis-sur-Aube. The Emperor exposes himself as a soldier: the allies enter Lyon.

March 25th-26th – Battles of Fère-Champenoise and Saint-Dizier. Marshals Mortier and Marmont are defeated in the first; Napoleon is victorious in the second.

March 29th – The 5% is lowered to 45 francs.

March 30th – Battle of Paris. The defense is abandoned by Clarke, Lacuée, Savary, Baron Pasquier, and King Joseph, who refuse to arm the people. After the most heroic defense, Marshals Mortier and Marmont evacuate the capital. The next day, March 31st, Paris surrenders; the 5% rises by 2 francs.

April 1st – The Senate institutes a provisional government, the municipality publishes a proclamation to the French against the “Usurper,” and invites them to return to their legitimate kings. The 5% is at 51 francs.

April 2nd – Napoleon is declared by the Senate to be deposed from the throne; the right of inheritance abolished in his family; the people and the army released from their oath to him.

The conscripts of the last levy are sent home.

April 5th – Convention of Chevilly: Marshal Marmont, more citizen than soldier, rallies to the provisional government, the soldier abandons his general for his country: the ruin of the Emperor is consummated. The 5% is at 63 francs and 75 cents; an increase of 18 francs and 75 cents in 7 days. The same stock market flood that welcomed the First Consul now accompanies the Emperor.

April 6th – The bases of a constitution are decreed by the Senate, to be proposed to Louis XVIII: the nation takes up the white cockade.

April 10th – Battle of Toulouse. Wellington, who knew of the surrender of Paris, wants, before laying down his arms, to give himself the honor of a victory and attacks Marshal Soult in his entrenchments. He is repulsed with shame and enormous losses.

April 11th – Abdication of the Emperor.

May 3rd – Louis XVIII enters Paris to the acclamations of the inhabitants.

Napoleon Bonaparte, who was a consul for ten years, a consul for life, and an emperor, was provided with a total of 2,473,000 conscripts for the service of his personal politics from May 18, 1802, to November 15, 1813. This figure does not include voluntary enlistments, customs officers, the surplus of recruits due to deserters and refractory individuals, the National Guards of Paris, Strasbourg, Metz, Lille, etc., who provided active service in the last campaign, and the mass levy organized at the beginning of 1814 in several departments. Let us add 100,000 men, soldiers and sailors, sent to Egypt and Saint-Domingue, and let us recall that this youth, once regimented, was lost to the country or returned only mutilated. This will be a total of 2,573,000 men consumed in enterprises that lacked the inspiration of the country, the knowledge of the times, and the intelligence of things.

With this armed force of 2,573,000 men, unlimited and unchecked power, with the training of France and the enthusiasm of the soldiers, Napoleon failed in all enterprises that relied solely on his genius. He failed in Egypt, Saint-Domingue, Portugal, Spain, and Russia. After the retreat from Moscow, the general defection of his allies, protected and feudatories, Prussia, Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, Holland, the Hanseatic cities, the Confederation of the Rhine, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy, where his brother-in-law Murat commanded and was carried away by the torrent, proved that at the very moment when he was flattering himself that he had succeeded in his European concentration projects, he had, on the contrary, completely failed. The fact that the people, as much as the kings, impatiently bore his yoke, his protection, his mediation, and his alliance. And the result, after twelve years of struggles that the singers of Greece and India would have regarded as fabulous, is the expulsion of the man, his family, and his dynasty, and the reduction of France to its limits as they existed on January 1, 1792. Not even the conquests of the republic were preserved by Napoleon.

Now, to explain this profound fall after such a sudden rise, should we rehash the banal reasons of ambition and pride, the fire of Moscow, the 25-degree cold, the false maneuvers of the leader, the treason of peoples and kings, accuse France and Europe, or insult the hero? All of this is absurd.

The principle of failure is not in the accidents of nature and war, any more than in the crime and cowardice of men; it is entirely in the falsehood of political conceptions. Napoleon was fighting against the reason of the people supported by the reason of things: he was therefore defeated in advance and infallibly, defeated, I say, not only after Moscow and Leipzig, but from Austerlitz, from the day when this dispute of pre-eminence began with England, in which Napoleon is seen, without realizing it, led by the raison d’état that he had created, to a continuity of despotism and conquests that were obviously absurd. In war as in politics, as in history, it is the general reason, the reason of the people and the reason of things, that ultimately triumphs: Napoleon does not seem to have realized that this reason, whose understanding makes statesmen, was of a quality other than his own. Because he had more genius in his profession than most of his contemporaries, especially those whose birth made them princes, he believed that this very special genius would suffice to ensure his triumph always and everywhere. He forgot one thing, however, beyond his reach and which he himself called his star, that is, his mandate, predetermined without him, without any consideration of his person, by the necessities of history and the force of situations.

Thus, from his departure for Egypt, Bonaparte no longer knows where the century is going, and what partly excuses him in the eyes of posterity, his contemporaries know no more than he does. To fight England, a mercantile and industrial nation, Bonaparte knows only war: he militarily goes to take his rival from behind, seeking a passage that could only be obtained half a century after him, by steam and railways. At the first blow, the English render this singular strategy ineffective by destroying Bonaparte’s means of transport, and trapping him like a mouse. What do the victories of the Pyramids, Mount Tabor, etc. mean then? What does it matter that Bonaparte compensates himself on the Mamelukes, Arabs, and Turks for the irreparable setback of Aboukir? He triumphs over barbarism; he is defeated by civilization. All these feats of arms can only have an influence on the crazy imaginations of the French and Orientals: as for the enterprise, nothing.

The Continental System is only a variant of the Egyptian expedition. The original idea does not belong to the Emperor: according to Barère, it seems to have come to the Committee of Public Safety in the heat of ’93, and at a time when the laws of economics were generally unknown. Since it was impossible to reach Pitt and England across the ocean, it was thought that the only way was to close Europe to them, and with their goods left as losses, England would be ruined. What folly!… But to keep Europe safe from the visit of the English, a navy ten times larger than that needed to land on their shores would have been required along its vast coastline. In the impossibility of obtaining such a fleet, the only recourse against the trade of these islanders was voluntary or forced abstention from the continent. Such is the theory of the continental blockade. It is almost as if, to deprive the government of December 2nd of the revenue from indirect taxes and to push it more quickly towards bankruptcy, citizens suppressed wine, beer, spirits, salt, sugar, tobacco, etc. from their consumption!… Strange as the idea may seem today, Bonaparte took charge of its execution. He does not see for a single moment that by excluding the English from Europe in this way, he is going to sequester Europe itself from the rest of the world, secure the monopoly of the globe for the English, and ultimately sign the preponderance of Great Britain, the inferiority of the continent, and his own incapacity. The Emperor’s mind is closed, blocked, on all things: where would he know, moreover, that the method of mathematicians cannot be applied to things of pure reason, and that an idea designated by A in its elementary expression, pushed to its ultimate consequence, becomes Z, that is, a contradiction?… For ten years, the Continental Blockade, the counterpart of the political centralization also inherited from the Jacobins – two contradictory ideas, two antinomies! – that is, outside and inside, the whole foundation of imperial policy; that is, what becomes, in the personality of a man, the genius of the revolution!

Ten years of struggles had depressed all intelligence: the political genius of ’89 had fallen successively from Babeuf’s fanaticism to the platitudes of the theophilanthropists. The mother idea of the great era, REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT, a machine of social investigation rather than a true institution, this idea, I say, betrayed by the old monarchy, discredited by the scenes of the Constituent, the Legislative, the Convention, denied by the coups d’état of the Directory, was obscured. It would have taken no less, in ’99, than the genius of Mirabeau and the arm of Bonaparte to bring it back afloat in public opinion and restore its brilliance: the man of 18 Brumaire had only half the talents required for that role.

Bonaparte, treating politics exactly like strategy and governing people as he commanded armies, his entire career, so glorious for a bard, is no longer in the eyes of the publicist anything but a perpetual violation of the elementary laws of history. He compared himself to famous conquerors, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne; and certainly, considering only his military conquests, he could still be considered modest. But he ignored or forgot that these famous men represented the idea, the tendential necessity of their century; that in them, people recognized their own incarnation, their genius; that thus Alexander was the Hellenic Confederation and its preponderance over the East; that Caesar was the leveling of Roman classes and the political unity of nations grouped around the Mediterranean, unity which would one day imply the cessation of slavery; and finally, that Charlemagne was the education through Christianity of the races of the North, and their substitution in humanitarian initiative for the races of the South.

Now, what idea did Napoleon represent in the 19th century? The French Revolution? That is what his Senate told him, and what he also glimpsed at times. But it is clear that in the eyes of the Emperor, the revolution was nothing more than a dead letter, a protested and unpaid bill, passed by profits and losses, which he used, if necessary, to justify his title, but whose origin he repudiated.

The goal of the French Revolution was:

1. To finish the monarchical work, followed from Hugues Capet to 1614 with as much intelligence as the state of minds allowed, and diverted after the last convocation of the Estates-General for despotism, by Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV;
2. To develop the philosophical spirit signaled by the eighteenth century and formulated by Condorcet in one word, progress;
3. To introduce the economic idea into the government of nations, called to gradually eliminate that of authority, and to reign alone, like a new religion, over peoples.

Napoleon was not up to this standard: neither a statesman, nor a thinker, nor an economist, only a soldier, and nothing but a soldier, there were three times more of them than he could carry. Everything in him rose up against such data. Historical tradition, he denied it, looking for it where it was not. A rival of Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander in battles, he copies Charlemagne in politics. He composes an empire cut on the same pattern as that of the Frankish chief, extending at the same time over Gaul, Spain, Helvetia, Lombardy, and Germany. He does not know that since the Treaty of Westphalia, the public law of Europe has had as an indestructible basis the balance of states and the independence of nationalities. As for philosophy, economy, and representative government, a necessary transition to industrial democracy, he rejects them equally. The ideologues are as suspicious to him as the lawyers and do not enjoy any consideration under his reign; he assimilates the economists to the ideologues and persecutes them on occasion. It is known how he treated the democrats, made so odious under the name of Jacobins. Mirabeau was no more; Sieyès, by revealing his venality, had finished discrediting the constitutional system; J.-B. Say kept himself apart; Saint-Simon pursued, unknown, the course of his observations on humanity and prophesied to a few friends the end of the military and governmental regime; Fourier, a simple clerk, dreamed in the back of a store; Chateaubriand continued in his way the reaction of the old regime and laid the foundations of the restoration. Napoleon remained alone, having found neither his Aristotle nor his Homer, a character of antiquity endowed with all the qualities that make a hero but which, in him, could only serve to mask the weakness of the statesman.

The most real monument of the imperial period, the one to which Napoleon’s pride seems to be mostly attached, is the drafting of the codes. However, who today does not see, especially since December 2, that this compilation of centuries of jurisprudence, which was supposed to forever establish the foundations of law, is just another utopia? Three or four decrees of Louis-Napoleon were enough to invalidate the legislative work of the Emperor and deal a severe blow to his glory. The Napoleonic code is as incapable of serving the new society as the Platonic republic: in a few more years, with the economic element everywhere substituting the relative and mobile law of industrial mutuality for the absolute right of property, it will be necessary to rebuild this cardboard palace from the ground up!

Certainly, Napoleon was a great virtuoso of battles and victories: his entire life is an epic, in the taste of the people and the ancients. An incomparable hero, fighting against gods and men, so deep in his calculations that he can defy fortune, and defeated only by the inflexible destiny: there is enough in this career to compose a poem twenty times as long as the Iliad, a Mahabharata. This is how the people understand and love Napoleon. The raison d’état of the revolution rejected the Emperor; popular spontaneity gives him asylum: the election of December 10 is itself only a protest of this poetry of the masses against inexorable history. As a political action, the life of the Emperor does not require one hundred pages, and if one wants to follow the chronological lineage for greater clarity, no more than twenty-five are needed. All this series of battles, which has earned us so many trophies, which has cost us so much treasure and blood, is reduced to a military trilogy, whose first act is called Aboukir, the second Trafalgar, and the last Waterloo.

A word only on this last exploit.

Napoleon, after the farewells of Fontainebleau, did not think it was over. His reason accepted the chance of battles, the consequences of defeat: it could not conceive of the restoration of the Bourbons. Naturally, he laughed at their legitimacy, their divine right: but by what talisman had these princes, forgotten for 25 years, disdained by the coalition, odious to the French nation, regained their crown? How, in one day, without an army, without a budget, without prestige, could these émigrés supplant him, the conqueror of 20 years, the elected one of 5 million votes? Intrigue alone, even with Talleyrand and Fouché, did not work these miracles. It was therefore a surprise, shameful, ridiculous, of which France would sooner or later want to have justice, and of which he himself, the old Emperor, would be called to do justice.

There was much noise about the Charter. But could he believe, after what he had seen of all this parliamentary business, and under the Constituent, Legislative, Convention, and under the Directory; could he believe that France had given itself to the Bourbons for this scrap of paper? ... The more he thought about it, the more the restoration must have seemed to him miserable and irrational.

Yet it was there, in the Charter, that the key to the enigma was to be found. What had determined the fall of the Emperor was the political and social idea of ’89, abandoned by him, drowned in the lists of conscription and the constitutions of the empire. What made the fortune of the Bourbons was this same idea of ’89, affirmed by them, after 25 years of resistance, under the name of the Charter. Nothing was more logical than this expulsion and restoration; nothing more legitimate, on this condition, than Legitimacy. Thus goes the revolution.

The ex-emperor had time to convince himself of this, during the ten months he spent on the island of Elba. He was able to follow the proceedings of the Congress of Vienna, which resumed the basis of the Treaty of Westphalia; the first debates of the chambers of the Restoration; to observe the rise of industry, literature, and French philosophy under a regime of peace and yet very modest freedom.

What lesson does Napoleon draw from all these facts?

In the Congress of Vienna, he sees diplomatic intrigues, unjust reshuffles; in the government of the Bourbons, he grasps ridicules and clumsiness. In all things, his mind stops at the surface, judges, and appreciates only the bad. And it is on these data that he immediately builds the plan of his return!

Napoleon believes that a historical role can be repeated and he imagines that in a new attempt he will succeed better than the first time. He uses the example of the Bourbons to argue his point, but he doesn’t even suspect that in this so-called “restoration,” only a handful of individuals have been restored, that the principle they once defended has been renounced by them, and that their at least apparent metamorphosis was a sine qua non condition for their return. He does not see the revolution in this much despised Charter, which will soon be set in motion by constitutional practice, forcing his representatives to follow it or expelling them again. “A throne for a Charter!” Napoleon says to himself. “I’ll give them a Charter too, to which I’ll swear allegiance!” Just as in 1799, a simple man of war, after seeing so many governments and ministries parade by, he naively believed himself as capable, and more capable than so many others of steering the ship of state; he doubted no less in 1815 that he was as fit, if not more so than the Bourbons, to make a constitutional monarch. In comparison to others, he had the advantage, but it was the THINGS that mattered, and Napoleon never thought about them.

Thus the Emperor is in the wake of the king! To the error of restorations, to the chimera of his own resipiscence, he adds the disadvantage of constitutional imitation, a race to the steeple of popularity, and pushing the copy to the point of foolishness, he writes at the top of his new contract: “Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire”. This means that, just as Louis XVIII counted nineteen years of reign when he signed the Charter, Napoleon counted fourteen years of constitutionality in his Additional Act!… A funny plagiarism!

After triumphing at Ligny and Quatre-Bras, the emperor succumbs at Mont-Saint-Jean: his irrevocable destiny confirms his fate. There, undoubtedly, he could have still won, as has been repeated ad nauseam, without Grouchy’s immobility, without Bourmont’s betrayal, without Blücher’s arrival, without Ney’s uncertainties, without the covered path, without the lack of nails to put out of service, after each charge of the cuirassiers, the English cannons. Then it would have been Wellington’s turn to say: “I would have won, without the delay of the Prussians, without the arrival of Grouchy, without this, without that!...” What would have followed? a second invasion, a second campaign in France, and most likely a second abdication. For, who does not see here that the accidents of war, taken in detail, are for everyone; considered as a whole, are for logic? Waterloo, a fateful day in the annals of France, is legitimate in the course of the revolution and the destiny of the Emperor.

Moreover, Napoleon, superstitious and fatalistic, believing in his star and saying of himself, “I am the child of circumstances,” and only mistaken about the meaning of his role and the articles of his mandate, was even closer to the truth than his contemporaries. He felt driven and worried, not knowing where he was going! Who then could have told him? No one in his time had that understanding of history which provides reason against the momentary success of a false policy. Until the arrival of the 29th bulletin (December 18, 1812), France was in a state of dazzlement. Even abroad, it was hard to come to terms with it. For a moment, after the bombardment of Copenhagen, England was abandoned. Alexander was a friend, Francis gave his daughter. Fox had already negotiated for peace. Pitt himself had acted out of hatred more than a just appreciation of things. The rest went along like sheep. Everywhere, the thread of tradition was broken, historical consciousness faded under the prestige of events. Only the Spanish people opposed their self to the imperial self. But no one believed that French armies would be devoured by guerrillas, and Wagram had made despair of Spanish nationality. Since only the surface was considered, an undermined building was considered indestructible, when, with a little more attention, its end could have been calculated with chronological precision.

Thus, among his astonished contemporaries, Napoleon remains superior still, thanks to the mystical feeling he has of his destiny; which is to say that the ignorance of peoples and their leaders made three-quarters of his glory. How much faster the great man would have disappeared if, as nowadays, the spirit of analysis had been wise enough to compute the elements of his reign and draw his horoscope! “Tell me where you come from, and I’ll tell you where you’re going!”… The history of the establishment of power, by giving the measure of its mandate, is one more guarantee of the freedom of peoples.

IX. Don’t Lie to the Revolution.

All of history is figurative; all its epochs are fateful and serve as announcement and correction to one another. And social destiny is also nothing but a long myth, in which the infinite Spirit plays, preluding the creation of some new humanity…

I have told the imperial legend: I will now show the reality of contemporary facts. Hoc est somnium, et hœc est interpretatio ejus.

As Nebuchadnezzar dreamt of Cyrus, the Emperor prophesied Louis-Napoleon. Apart from the opposition already noted, namely that the Emperor came to close a revolution while Louis-Napoleon opened another, an opposition which in the historical series is another resemblance, we find between the two figures, between their situations and their epochs, the most constant analogy.

The first Bonaparte is not happy with anything he undertakes on his own initiative: he has success only under the guise of the nation. Let popular Ossians keep their eternal battles: they are generally well designed, brilliantly played, supremely won, or brilliantly lost. It is not a question here of the individual in his hero’s profession; it is a question of the politician. It is as political conceptions that we must judge the expeditions to Egypt and Saint-Domingue: they failed because public inspiration was completely lacking in the first, and such a large undertaking should have sprung exclusively from national reason; because, moreover, revolutionary breath had failed in the second, and it was absurd and criminal to put the Haitians back in chains, in virtue of the declaration of the rights of man.

Despite this double failure, despite its administrative and police flaws, already too apparent, the first Consul nonetheless succeeded; and until the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens, his reparative and pacifying government, strong in general support, was fruitful and prosperous. But the Emperor, freed from the tutelage of public opinion and constitutional limits, fell from one mistake to another, and soon from one failure to another. The chronology has made us understand the reason for this: that Olympian head, impatient of public opinion, and wanting to think alone, ended up thinking nothing at all!…

Reduced to its true terms, the comparison between the two Bonapartes can therefore be followed. It is true that Louis-Napoleon did not win battles: who knows if he would not win them? Put two armies, two generals in front of each other. One of the two will necessarily be victorious, the other defeated; the first a hero, the second a coward, as Paul-Louis said. And then a victory can be bought, like everything else… it’s just a matter of putting the price on it. Putting aside triumphs and laurels, leaving the field of war and its hazards to place ourselves on that of politics, I say, without flattery or irony, that the uncle and the nephew are equal, and even that their destinies follow and resemble each other, as in a metempsychosis. In Strasbourg and Boulogne, Louis-Napoleon fails, like Bonaparte in Egypt and Santo Domingo. He succeeds on December 10, with the same elements, when instead of surprising, in an impromptu conspiracy, national sympathies, he presents himself under regular conditions to the people’s suffrage. He is still successful on December 2, despite the violation of the pact, as his uncle had been on 18 Brumaire: I believe I have sufficiently explained how, in this circumstance, the fate of the situation covered the anomaly of the form.

But if in both men, will, judgment, political conception, the alternation of successes and failures, seem in all respects similar and for the same reasons, the parity of circumstances is much more striking.

The opponents of the Emperor were, on one hand, the feudal aristocracy, represented by the émigrés, the priests, and the coalition; on the other hand, the financial and mercantile aristocracy, represented by England. These two aristocracies joining forces and combining their means, it was a combination of similar means that the Emperor had to fight against. As we have seen in the chronology we have drawn up of the Consulate and the Empire, how Bonaparte, instead of organizing the economic forces of the nation against the enemy, and then bringing the continent of Europe into the same movement under the pressure of French liberties, became entangled and perished in his saber policy, in the maze of a police force resurrected from the Terror, and finally, in the necessity of endless conquests and the absurdity of his Continental System.

Louis-Napoleon also has opponents on one side, the old feudalism, represented by the Holy Alliance, the legitimist and ultramontane party; on the other, the capitalist aristocracy, represented by the high bourgeoisie and by England. As in 1805, these aristocracies understand each other, coordinate, and merge. To defeat them, it is necessary, without neglecting military force, to use a combination of means borrowed from the practice of interests, from economic science; above all, it is necessary to embrace the revolutionary idea strongly and frankly. However, already, fatal analogy! Already, by the false measures of December 2nd and the declamations of its newspapers, the revolution is abandoned; hostile aristocracies present themselves under the cover of general interests and public freedoms; a little more, and as in 1809 and 1813, the peoples themselves, at the voice of their nobles, their priests, their exploiters, and their despots, will cast anathema, run after Louis-Napoleon.

I could, as a prophet of misfortune, delve more deeply into the mystery of the future and mark the phases of this struggle whose symptoms are already emerging from the recent elections in England; show the revolution, invoked, rejected, as under the Consulate and the Empire, finally abandoning December 2nd, and Louis-Napoleon, betrayed like his uncle by his personality, once again giving the example of the revenge of Destiny: “Learn justice, being warned, and do not despise the gods!”

I prefer, for the education of my country, for the edification of its present and future teachers, and as a guarantee against factions which, with no more intelligence or goodwill than each other, are already devouring in their minds the succession of December 2nd, to demonstrate one last time, and with a new argument, the inviolability of revolutions.

No, I will say to the Elysée, you cannot continue this sad parody of the imperial epic with calm. And if, as some philosophers might be led to think, you are a new incarnation of your uncle, you have not returned to fall back into your former errors, but to make penance for them. You owe us the expiation of 1814 and 1815, which means, the ten years of imperial servitude; the expiation of legitimacy, which you have restored; the expiation of quasi-legitimacy, which you have made possible. Therefore, align yourself with your era and your country, because you cannot do it by yourself, any more than Italy of Mazzini, “Italia fara da se!”… Your star does not want it; the people do not want it; the moaning shade, not yet purified, of Napoleon, does not want it; and I, your volunteer astrologer, who, like so many others, only aspire to finish it, do not want it either.

What must be your starting point, first of all? I told you, the revolution.

The revolution, both democratic and social, is now for France, for Europe, a forced condition, almost an accomplished fact, what do I say? The only refuge left to the old world against an imminent dissolution.

As long as the patient has gangrene, he generates vermin. Similarly, as long as society is subjected to a random economy, it is inevitable that there will be exploiters and exploited, parasitism and pauperism, which gnaw at it with a rival tooth; – as long as society gives itself a concentric and strong power to support this parasitism and palliate its ravages, there will be parties that will dispute this power, with which the winner drinks from the skull of the vanquished, with which revolutions are made and undone; – as long as there are antagonistic parties and hostile classes, power will be unstable and the existence of the nation precarious.

Such is the genealogy of society, abandoned to stockbrokers, usurers, empirics, gendarmes, and factions! The vice of the economic regime produces inequality of fortunes, and consequently the distinction of classes; the distinction of classes calls for political centralization to defend it; political centralization gives birth to parties, with which power is necessarily unstable and peace impossible. Only a radical economic reform can extricate us from this circle: it is rejected. It is the conservatives who keep society in a revolutionary state.

France, a country of logic, seems to have given itself the mission of realizing, point by point, this a priori theory of misery, oppression, and civil war.

There exists in France, and as long as the revolution is not made in the economy, there will be: 1. a bourgeoisie that claims to perpetuate the ancient relations of labor and capital, although labor is no longer repelled as a servitude but demanded as a right, and the circulation of products can take place almost without discount, the capitalist privilege no longer has a reason to exist; 2. a middle class, within which the spirit of freedom lives and moves, which possesses the reason of the future, and which, repressed from top to bottom, by capitalist insolence and proletarian envy, nonetheless forms the heart and brain of the nation; 3. a proletariat, full of its strength, which socialist preaching has intoxicated, and which, rightfully so, is uncompromising on the matter of work and well-being.

Each of these classes disputing for power, the first, to repel a revolution that threatens its interests; the second, to moderate it; the third, to launch it full steam ahead, the division by classes changes into a division by parties, among which we distinguish: 1. the party of legitimacy, representing the Salic law and feudal traditions, alone capable, according to it, of stopping the revolution; 2. the party of constitutional monarchy, more bourgeois than noble, and which, at the moment, through the voice of Mr. Creton, reminds the country of the benefits and glories of 1830; 3. the party of moderate republic, which, very cautious about economic reforms, no longer wants either royalty, nobility, or presidency; 4. the party of the red republic, even more governmental than economist, and which has taken as its program the constitution of ’93; 5. the Bonapartist party, which tends to satisfy or deceive the proletariat’s appetite through war; 6. the priestly party, finally, which, perfectly informed about the march of the century, sees no way out for society, and for itself salvation, other than in the restoration of the spiritual and temporal omnipotence of the pope. I do not count the socialists as a party, although more republican and more radical than the reds, because in none of their schools, they are men of power, but men of science and solution.

Three classes and six parties, in all NINE major antagonistic divisions: this is France, under the regime of Malthusian economics and political centralization. This is the product of this “unity” of which we are so proud, which foreigners envy us for, and which should be symbolized by the head of Medusa and her snakes!

Now, I challenge any power that is not revolutionary, whether it be the power of Henri V or that of December 2nd, the theocracy as well as the bourgeoisie, to put an end to this division of parties and classes; and for the same reason, I challenge any power, given the state of things, to hold out against it. You can support yourself for a while on the antagonism of parties, like the lantern of the Pantheon on the flying buttresses of the dome: but this balance, which was the stability of Louis-Philippe, is precarious. Let the parties stop opposing each other for a moment, let the classes stop threatening each other, and the power falls. The suppression of freedoms, the restrictions on the press, the state of siege, the state prisons, the ostracism turned into an institution, all these instruments of old tyranny will do nothing. A government that has only force and millions of votes on its side will be obliged, like Robespierre, to keep purifying society until it is purified itself.

The Emperor believed he could stop the corrosion of parties by means of war: a detestable resource, which testifies less to man’s despotism than to the extremity to which he saw himself reduced, and his profound ignorance of revolutionary things. Well, the war has finally pronounced against the Emperor. And then, what war would Louis-Napoleon make? for what purpose? against whom? with what?… I ask these questions without pressing them: I would not say anything that had the slightest hint of a challenge or irony. So let us pass over the warlike policy, and since December 2nd is almost forbidden, except in the event that it takes up the cause of the revolution, to give the people this imperial poetry again; since it is condemned to make vile economic and social prose, let us tell it that ideas can only be fought with ideas; that, consequently, there is only one way to overcome the parties, and that is to form one that will swallow them all. I have explained elsewhere how, in the current situation, this party of absorption should be made up of the middle class and the proletariat: I refer to my previous indications.

Deny, in the current economy of society, the necessity of parties: impossible.

To govern with them, without them, or against them: impossible.

To impose silence on them by means of police, or to deceive them with war and adventures: impossible.

It remains that some one become the instrument of absorption of all: that is what is possible.

Therefore, let December 2, and what I say here for the passing government, be addressed to all who come; let December 2 frankly embrace its reason for being; let it affirm, without restriction or equivocation, the social revolution; let it say loudly to France, let it notify the foreigner of the content of its mandate; let it call to itself, instead of a body of mute men, a true representation of the middle class and the proletariat; let it prove the sincerity of its tendency by acts of explicit liberalism; let it purge itself of all clerical, monarchist, and Malthusian influence; let it transfer to the bodies of teachers and doctors, some in misery, others left to the chance of a shameful casualty, the 42 million thrown to the priests; let it drive from its society this band of intriguers, without faith or law, bohemians, spies for the most part, who cheat it; let it abandon to the condemnation of public opinion these literary gentlemen, whose venal, pestilential breath swells the sail of all tyranny; let it deliver to the frank judges of democracy the most purple of these renegades, court dramatists, police pamphleteers, anonymous consultants, sheep of prisons and taverns, who, after eating the dry bread of socialism, lick the greasy plates of the Elysée…

What then! Because democracy fought against the candidacy of Louis Bonaparte on December 10, I was there; because it made him retreat on January 29, I was there; because it rebelled against him on June 13, I would have been there without prison; because it defeated him in the elections of 1850, I was still there from the depths of the Conciergerie; because it rose against him on December 2, I can no longer say that I was there! ... Louis-Napoléon would feel obliged, out of a spirit of competition, to give his policy a personal meaning! He would be afraid to appear eclipsed if it were said of him that after having defeated the social republic, he took its ideas and put himself in its wake!

The Emperor once yielded to this childish self-love. He wanted to be something other than the republic, to do more than the republic, to think better than the republic. In the end, with all his titles, crowns, and trophies, he was nothing, did nothing, and never thought anything himself: he remained Napoleon. Shall we start this concert again with just one part of the great maestro?

Neither Galba, who replaced Nero, so regretted by the people; nor Vespasian, who refused Eponine’s tears the pardon of Sabinus; nor Nerva, who conspired against Donatien; nor Pertinax, who killed Commodus; nor Septimius Severus, who had Didius Julianus, the last and highest bidder for Caesarism, beheaded; nor Aurelian, who dragged the immortal Zenobia in his chariot: none of these emperors felt obliged to modify the imperial statute, a revolutionary statute at the time, because if they had taken it back from rival, sometimes unworthy hands, they would have felt dishonored by following it. Brutus, it is true, after expelling the Tarquins, abolished the title of king and proclaimed the republic. This is because the Tarquins, affecting the airs of Greek tyrants, failed in their moderating mission, which was to provide, through the patronage of the patricians, the emancipation of the plebs.

What are you talking about plagiarism and towing for, as if they were individuals, not destiny? Leave men alone, since defeat and their own dignity do not allow them to belong to you. Between Esau and Jacob, the supplanted and the supplanter, there may be peace, but never friendship or forgetfulness. For people with a heart, there are grievances that cannot be erased. I am willing, paying tribute to my opinions to my country, perhaps to contribute to enlightening a power that I had to stop fighting; I will not serve it. But precisely because Esau has lost his birthright, Jacob must be the leader of the people of good: otherwise, Esau, called Edom, the Red, will claim the inheritance, and punish his younger brother, suborned and unfaithful.

Do not play games with the revolution; do not try to turn it to your particular ends, opposing it to your competitors, while you would carve an emperor’s or king’s cloak from its scarf. Neither you nor any of those who aspire to replace you can conceive a valid idea, bring any enterprise to a conclusion, outside the data of the revolution. The revolution has foreseen everything, conceived everything; it has drawn up the estimate itself. Seek, and when you have found with a straight mind and a docile heart, do not meddle again, in common with the country, except in execution.

And what would be the high thought, the political and economic ideal, that the depositary of national sovereignty would create for himself, producing it from his own genius, and not receiving it either through the historical transmission of the parties that preceded him in the affairs, or through the analytical study of social facts and their generalization? What could he think of himself, as a man, that he should not receive from the opinion as head of state; against which all citizens would therefore have the right to protest if he pleased to impose his new idea by virtue of his title?

“Among so many religions that contradict each other,” said Rousseau, “only one is the true one, if there is such a thing.” Similarly, among so many political ideologies that the fancy of political parties and the presumption of statesmen produce, only one can be true: the one that, through its constant and harmonious conformity with the nature of things, acquires such a character of impersonality and reality that each of its actions seems like a decree of nature itself, and that in the Academy, in the workshop, in the public square, in a council of experts, wherever people gather to discuss together, it can be formulated as well as in an assembly of representatives and a council of state. Elevated to this degree of authenticity where it derives everything from things and nothing from man, politics is the pure expression of general reason, the immanent right of society, its internal order, in a word, its Economy.

This politics, you will not find it in Aristotle, nor in Machiavelli, nor in any of the masters who taught princes the essentially subjective art of exploiting their states. It emerges from social relations and the revelations of history. For me, the 19th century revolution must be its advent.

It is a principle, in this rational and real politics, that without work there is no wealth, and that any fortune that does not come from it is by that very fact suspect; that labor always increases and the price of things decreases; that thus the minimum wage and the maximum hours of work are unassignable; that if a hectolitre of wheat is worth 20 francs, no decree of the prince can make it sell for 15 or 25, and that any artificial increase or decrease, by authority of the state, is a theft; that under the regime of interest, the proportional tax, fair in itself, becomes progressive in the direction of poverty, without anything in the world being able to prevent it; that another corollary of this interest is customs protection, so that any attempt to abolish the latter without touching the former is a contradiction; that any tax that affects luxury items, instead of being borne by the consumer, will inevitably be borne by the worker, since consumption being optional and the price free, the producer of luxury goods always needs to sell more than the consumer needs to buy….”

What blunders by governments and their arbitrary policies could have been prevented; what vexations, sufferings, disappointments, and deficits could have been avoided; what fatal tendencies could have been stopped at their origins, if for the past sixty years these proposals, with their corollaries, had been established as demonstrated truths and articles of law in the general consciousness! With a dozen propositions of this kind, and a free press, I would like to stop the government of December 2 in all its flights. What! Would Louis-Napoléon reign only by the stupidity of the French? ...

There exist, regarding the relationships of people in society, regarding work, salary, income, property, loans, exchange, taxes, public services, worship, justice, and war, a host of similar truths, of which a simple extract, accompanied by examples, would exempt governments from any other policy, and soon exempt society from the governments themselves. This is our true constitution: a constitution that dominates all difficulties, that leaves nothing to the wisdom of princes, that mocks dictators and tribunes; whose theorems, linked together like a mathematics, lead the mind from the known to the unknown in social paths, provide solutions for all circumstances; and against which everything that is done, from whatever source, is null and can be deemed tyranny! The power that will teach citizens this constitution, and the thing is beginning to become possible, will have done more for humanity than all the emperors and popes: after it, revolutions of this kind will be like those of the planet, nothing will disturb them, and no one will feel them anymore.

On December 2, in the first heat of the coup d’état, repairing the long negligence of our assemblies, could decree one after the other concessions of railways, adjudications of works, extensions of privileges, reductions of discount, seizures of property, conversions of rents, continuations of taxes, etc., etc.; doing a host of things that, if society were aware of its true constitution, would have been done long ago, and done better, or would never have been done at all. The vulgar, who attribute everything to the will of the chief, more or less like Father Malebranche saw everything in God, admired this decretal fecundity, and parasites applauded this strong and active power! But soon the fever of reforms calmed down: more than once December 2 had to retract resolutions under pressure, withdraw projects that were already seized by the council of state, and one can predict that if it does not learn to read better in the book of eternal politics, it will soon appear as impotent, incapable, rash, and mad as its predecessors, not excluding the Emperor himself.

Anyway, and with the decrees issued so far on December 2 in the midst of universal abstention, and those that will be issued later from the depths of his prerogative, he will not make the maximization of fortunes cease to be a contradictory idea; that a sale can be deemed perfect before the parties have agreed on the thing and the price; that the mandate and the adjudication, in the same individual, are compatible terms; that the quasi-contract does not become quasi-tort, and even crime, when the office benefactor uses the benefit to enslave the beneficiary…

December 2 will not make the feudal system, defeated in the political and religious order, become a truth again in the industrial order, when the conditions of work and the laws of accounting oppose it; it will not, after its discount decree, issued in the name of public property, make the interest on capital anything other than an arbitrary and transitory tax; it will not, despite its concessions of ninety-nine years, make the country agree to pay 8, 10, and 14 cents to companies for transportation costs by rail and water, even if the cost of transporting one ton per kilometer can drop to one cent, out of love for industrial feudalism; nor, when the salary of the worker in all categories of services is continuously decreasing, should the salary of state officials increase.

The Emperor, with his political concentration, his continental blockade, and his perpetual incorporations of states, created a hundred impossibilities, each of which could destroy him over time. Louis-Napoleon, who has not done a quarter of the work of his uncle, with his only constitution renewed in year VIII, creates a thousand of them: so much have the elements resistant to authority developed since the fall of the Emperor!…

On December 2nd, the clergy was granted an almost exclusive teaching license. But this license, completely free, contains no more government guarantee than the thousands of licenses and diplomas it issues every year, for a fee, to students and industrialists. Even if it were to combine the authority of the state with that of holy scripture, this license would not cause work, considered by theology as the atonement for original sin, In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane tuo, to become a servile state again; the one who redeems themselves from misery, ignorance, and slavery through work will not conceive of redeeming themselves from sin and guilt through the same means. The religious spirit, maintained by the priests, will not thus be balanced by industrial genius; poverty will again be deemed a virtue, and the progress of well-being and luxury will not have as its corollary the development of reason, the emancipation of conscience, the absolute reign of freedom, in place of Christian humility, detachment, and passivity.

On December 2nd, out of philanthropy as much as interest, the improvement of the lot of the poor classes is a concern. His ministers’ circulars repeat it; the President’s caresses testify to it; several of his acts imply it; the confidences of his friends and the growing hostility of the parties make it quite probable.

But how does he propose to effect this improvement? He cannot rule over modern France as a caliph; seize production and commerce in the name of the public interest; put 27,000 square leagues of land, 27 million properties, factories, and trades under regulation; convert 36 million producers of all ages and sexes, more or less free, and who aspire to become more so every day, into wage earners. One cannot swallow more than oneself, and if December 2nd thinks it can swallow the nation, it is he who will burst.

Let’s suppose that on December 2nd, while pursuing the solution to the economic problem, an attempt is made to reconstitute the nation according to the system we have identified as a consequence of the decree on the property of the Orleans family. There is no other system outside of progressive freedom, as indicated by history, and the community of equals, which is fundamentally adopted by all utopians. Firstly, on December 2nd, it is necessary to interest a part of the country in its views; with that, it must conquer the rest, and as it intends to reserve the initiative, it cannot consent to any division of its authority. It can only offer its auxiliaries and adherents pecuniary rewards, concessions of land, mines, etc., or commercial and industrial privileges. Thus, this association for the organization of work and the eradication of misery, based on the principle of military and governmental hierarchy, must offer its associates, in economic faculties, sufficient compensation for renouncing their political rights.

However, here is where the contradiction would soon appear. December 2nd would soon learn, from its own experience, these truths above all government: that work and commerce are synonymous with freedom; that industrial freedom is inseparable from political freedom; that any restriction imposed on the latter is an impediment to the former, consequently, a hindrance to work and a prohibition of wealth; that exchange, lending, wages, and all acts of the economic order are free contracts that are incompatible with any hierarchical condition. As for the central power, it would see, and it is already up to it to see, that the affairs of individuals prosper only to the extent that they have confidence in the government; that the only way to give them this confidence is to make them themselves active members of the sovereign; that excluding them from the government is tantamount to driving them out of their industries and properties; and that a nation of workers, like ours, governed without the perpetual control of the platform, the press, and the club, is a nation on the verge of bankruptcy, already in the hands of the gendarmes…

All the commonplaces about the democratic nature of taxes and the nation’s right to fix them freely have been exhausted. December 2nd knows this like everyone else: the constitution of January 15th was kind enough to recognize it. So why don’t the same representatives who are called upon to vote on the TOTAL amount of taxes have the right to discuss the details and make such reductions as they deem useful? France and its government, according to the voting system followed for taxes in the legislative body, are like a commercial house formed by two individuals who are supposedly associated in a collective name, and one of whom is responsible for paying on their products, upon presentation of invoices, and without being able to demand an account, the expenses of which the exclusive privilege of fixing belongs to the other. Where did December 2nd get this mode of society and especially of accounting?…

Everything has also been said about the public servant. The public servant, from the supreme head of state to the last city servant, is the representative of the nation, the employee, the delegate of the people. The constitution of January 15th, like its predecessors, recognizes this democratization of the state personnel. So why is it only the head of state who has the right to appoint to positions, to set their duties and salaries? Why do the 500,000 state employees form a separate caste, a nation as it were, dependent exclusively on the head of state? In this respect too, France resembles an estate whose exploitation has been changed by the steward into a personal servitude, established for his benefit, with the faculty for him, not only to transact in the name of the owner, but to compromise. Where did December 2nd get this notion of mandate and property? It is not in the Napoleonic code…

I do not want my observations to degenerate into attacks, and that is why I express them in legal style, limiting myself to showing, with a few comparisons and in the most concise forms, how the exercise of authority, so often demanded today by lawyers without science, publicists without philosophy, and statesmen equally devoid of practice and principles, has become incompatible with the most elementary notions of economics and law. Whichever way you look at it, December 2nd – and when I say December 2nd, do I need to constantly repeat that I understand any other dictatorial or dynastic form? – the government, I say, is cornered between anarchy and pleasure, forced to choose between the natural tendencies of society and the arbitrary actions of man! And that arbitrariness is the perpetual violation of rights, the negation of science, rebellion against necessity; it is war against the spirit and work! Impossible.

After touching on the impossibilities from within, I will not finish without saying a word about those from outside.

If there is one thing that December 2nd must have at heart, it is surely to repair the disasters of 1814 and 1815, to raise the influence of our nation in the European concert, to make it rise to the rank of first-rate powers, supporting this legitimate claim by force of arms if necessary.

Can December 2nd do this in the equivocal situation it has placed itself in, between revolution and counter-revolution?

Rumours have circulated and still find believers, about plans to invade England, to invade Belgium, to incorporate Savoy, etc. These rumours have been denied by order: in fact, these are things that one does not believe without having seen them, and when one has seen them, one still does not believe them.

The people, who know of war only through battles, who do not understand its reason or politics, can feed on these chimeras, waiting for the President, having defeated the English, Prussians, Austrians, Russians, and returning laden with treasure, to reduce the roles of contributions accordingly. Everywhere else but at the tavern, it is known that war is the struggle of principles, and that any war that does not aim to triumph with a principle, such as the wars of Louis XIV and the Emperor, is a condemned war, and lost in advance.

Where is the principle, the great national and humanitarian interest that Louis-Napoleon can invoke at this moment to be entitled to declare war to anyone?

The abolition of the treaties of 1815?

Those who have been talking about these treaties for the past twenty years mostly do not know what they are talking about. The treaties of 1815, the work of the Holy Alliance, are the product of the Napoleonic wars: in this regard, they take their place in history, following the Westphalia treaty. Their purpose is to perpetuate a crusade between the powers of Europe against any state which, like France from 1804 to 1814, would try to exceed its natural or prescribed limits and incorporate portions of foreign territory. France, whose successive encroachments over ten years were the occasion of these treaties, was treated worse than the other powers: she was pushed back beyond the Rhine, stripped, and opened up. Such was the right of war and the benefit of victory for the allies. We wanted to expand, we were defeated, we must pave the way and provide even more assurances! Nothing can invalidate these treaties, nothing, I say, except the consent of the parties or war, but war supported by a new principle.

So, I repeat my question: Where is this principle for December 2nd?

Until now, Louis-Napoleon has only served the Holy Alliance by striking democracy and revolution; far from being able to protest against the treaties of 1815, in fact, he adheres to them. It would be childish for him to expect, as a reward from his allies, the Rhine border. The only reward Louis-Napoleon can obtain from the Holy Alliance is that it tolerates, supports, and protects him as the guardian and tamer of the revolution until circumstances become favorable for the allies to restore our legitimate princes to us for the third time. The Holy Alliance would be illogical, certainly, in contradiction with itself, it would lie to its goal and its principles, if, by making war on the revolution, it recognized in Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte a dynast of essentially revolutionary origin, and even more so if it granted him a territory of five to six million inhabitants, with the most formidable strategic line in the world, for his joyful accession.

Now that Louis-Napoleon, using his prerogative, calls for arms; that, serving the counter-revolution with one hand and swearing by the revolution with the other, he engages the country in a war with the Holy Alliance for the Rhine border, he is the master. But he should also know that in a claim thus posed, public opinion would not follow him: it would see in his policy only a conquering fancy, a national or domestic point of honor without moral character, and by abandoning him, it would paralyze his efforts. So true it is that there is something legal in the treaties of 1815, which can only be undone by a higher legality.

The revolution in the 19th century is about legality. Remember what was said earlier: Louis-Napoleon, like the Emperor, had as his main adversary capitalist feudalism represented outside France by England. The real way to fight England is not to attack it in Egypt, Australia, or India, nor to cross the Channel. It is to strike the enemy at home, in the relations between labor and capital.

Even before the revolution of ’89, England had begun the conquest of the globe. How? By the force of arms? No, she leaves this system to the French. By the accumulation of her capital, the power of her industry, and the extension of her commerce. Success has not failed her: there is no country today where she does not reap benefits. We ourselves pay tribute to her workers, engineers, and capitalists; and already, through the property acquisitions made by English subjects in our country, Great Britain is preparing for the return of its preponderance on our territory. Free trade, to which its bourgeois invites peoples, by crushing all competition, is the last blow it prepares to strike at the freedom of nations.

Thus England proceeds: no conquests by armed force, no incorporations of territories, no nations encompassed, no dynasties deposed: it permits none of these violences. It does not seek to govern peoples, as long as it pressures them, witness Portugal: the Balance of trade, brought to its maximum power under the name of Free trade, is England’s artillery.

Therefore, in response to a war of capital, we must first and foremost respond both domestically and abroad with a credit system that cancels out the superiority that England derives from its capitalized masses: then we can talk to the Holy Alliance. Already, through its financial decrees, December 2nd marked the goal: let it finish, let it not wait until more urgent necessities force it to. Whether it intends to negotiate or prepare for war, let it first make itself economically strong. Let it dare to accomplish in six months what these newspapers hint at in a perspective of 50 years; let it change in their entirety the relations between labor and capital by the combined reduction of rents and interest to mere commission expenses; let it cut, if I may say so, the nerve of bourgeois feudalism, and then let it declare to England, no longer the Continental blockade, a delusional madness, but free trade; finally, let it abolish customs around it… Once this is done, here is the situation in which France would find itself vis-à-vis itself and foreigners.

Domestically, production increases by a quarter… It is an economic rule, one of the best demonstrated theorems of science, that the income of capital, like taxes, is produced by labor; that in the inventory of society, this income should not be added to the product, but deducted from the product, like taxes; that thus what is taken from income, as from taxes, benefits labor by as much, which, by consuming it, recreates it, since there is no unproductive consumption but that of the capitalist and the state; so that if, on an annual production of nine billion, four billion is levied for capital and taxes, this levy being hypothetically abolished, at the same time that the consumption of producers doubles, their production will rise, ipso facto, from nine billion to thirteen. Let December 2nd render this distinguished service to the working classes, and it can boast, at the national banquet, of not eating the shameful piece! Its 12 million civil list will be counted as a commission, on the surplus of business it will have procured, at 1/2 or 1/4 per 100…

Outside, Belgium, Savoy, a part of Switzerland and Piedmont, gravitate, with all the power of their industrial interests, towards France, a free market of 36 million consumers, consuming, according to what has just been said, as much as 45! Credited by French circulation and their exchanges, these states in turn carry out the liquidation of their capitalist and land-owning aristocracy, whose shattered confidence becomes everywhere the signal of public prosperity: they fall within the circle of attraction of France. Do not then ask them if, with their economic revolution, in solidarity with ours, with our language, our currencies, our codes, our trade, they want to be French! Do not offer them police inspectors or prefects: let them govern themselves as they wish, retain their franchise, and enjoy first of all that civil and political independence that will have to be granted sooner or later to each of our provinces. Content yourselves, with these co-interested parties, with an offensive and defensive alliance that allows you, in common peril, to count on their soldiers and their fortresses, as on your own. This policy of reserve, soon understood, assures you immense success. When conquest had for its object tribute, as in the time of Eastern monarchies, conquest, though brutal, was at least rational. Today pillage has ceased, for states as well as for individuals, to be a means of fortune. The true conquests are those of commerce: the example of England, for a century, proves this beyond doubt. How is it that, when the spirit of nations has changed, the forms of their diplomacy are just at the level of those of Cambyse and Ninias!…

After Belgium, Savoy, French Switzerland, and Cisalpine Piedmont, neighboring countries, comes Italy. Rome, a center of eruption, projects its national flames to the north and south of the Peninsula. Tell it, President of the humanitarian republic, that we want it to live by and for itself, and it will live. With a word you will have resurrected this nationality, slaughtered by you within the walls of Rome, after being betrayed on the battlefield of Novarre!

Poland will have its turn; and the King of the Seas will not escape you, caught in the democratic and social net…

With revolutionary France, foreign policy is easy to follow. The European center of gravity is shifting, the new Carthage is yielding to the new Rome, and if it is necessary to fight, the war is holy and victory is certain. But where then would Louis-Napoléon, abandoning the revolutionary idea, find a pretext to make the slightest demonstration on the continent in the name of France? A volunteer and free jailer of democracy, accomplice and dupe of the counter-revolution, he does not even have the right to express a wish. He has received compliments from the czar: what would he have to demand for Poland? In concert with the Jesuits, with the soldiers of Austria and Naples, he waged the campaign of Rome: with everything restored to the status quo by him, what does he have left to say in favor of the Italians? Thanks to his powerful diversion, reaction is the master everywhere in Europe, on the Po, on the Rhine, on the Danube: what principle would the family of the Emperor represent in the eyes of Neapolitans, Romans, Lombards, Dutch, and Westphalians? Does it think it is sought after for its nobility, and do Messrs. Louis, Jérôme, Napoléon, Pierre, Charles, Antoine, Lucien Bonaparte, and Murat think they are the clay from which sovereigns by the grace of God, legitimate princes, absolute kings, and valets are made?…

Yes, citizens or gentlemen, you bear the greatest of modern names; you belong, by flesh and blood, to the one man who best knew how to fanaticize the masses and bend them under his yoke. Remember, however, that he succeeded in controlling them for only a few years because he represented armed Revolution to their eyes, and that he perished, pitiful thing, under his own unreason, leaving to the Homers of the future, if the future produces any Homers, the richest and most gigantic canvas, and almost nothing to history, because he did not know how to be great through peace and liberty, as he had been through command and war, and because he had put his free will in the place of the destiny that his star showed him.

The Revolution cannot be deceived, even if one is the Emperor, living and victorious; when it is silent, when everyone is ignorant of it, when no one speaks for it, when all the prejudices it combats are in honor and encounter no contradiction, while the interests it serves forget themselves or sell themselves.

And would one imagine that to overcome the revolution it will suffice to have this imperial ash brought back from exile, now that the people no longer believe in ghosts, now that the revolution speaks at all hours, that men swear in its name, that young girls sing it, that little children repeat it, that the exiles carry it on all corners of the globe; now that absolute power, because of it, keeps watch with weapons day and night, and capital writhes under its violent grip!

Impotence, impotence, impotence!… But could the Élysée tell me how long a government stripped of prestige and reduced to the daily routine of impotence can last in the face of a growing revolution?…

X. Anarchy or Caesarism. – Conclusion.

If there is a fact that attests to the reality and strength of the revolution, it is undoubtedly the 2nd of December. Let France hear it, and let Europe be informed: after the days of February and June 1848, those of December 1851 must count as the third eruption of the volcano.

Let us understand this shock which, more than any other, has made the revolution take a decisive step.

France, throughout its history, through the Romans and the Franks, through Charlemagne and the Capetians, marches, in a continuous manner, to 89; by 89, it leads to 1848.

In 1848, as in 1789, everything, IN THINGS, calls for a revolution. But unlike 1789, in 1848, there is nothing, or little, in ideas, that determines it. The situation is ripe, the opinion is lagging behind. From this disagreement between things and ideas, all the incidents that followed arise…

First, socialist preaching.

The revolution, imposing itself as a necessity, and opinion mistrusting it because it did not know it, the first task had to be to reveal to the country the social revolution. While the provisional government, the executive commission, General Cavaignac, are busy maintaining order, socialism, with the energy commanded by the circumstances, organizes its propaganda. It has been reproached for having scared people, it is still accused today of having compromised, lost the republic with its extravagances! Yes, socialism scared people, and it boasts about it! People die of fear like any other disease, and the old society will not recover from it. Socialism scared people! Should we have kept quiet ourselves just because others were doing nothing, could do nothing? Should we, by muting our drums, have let the idea fall with the action?… Socialism scared people! Mighty geniuses, to whom socialism scared, and who did not tremble before universal suffrage!…

However, since socialism, frightening at first sight (any idea that manifests itself for the first time is frightening), could not pass without raising violent contradiction; as however, it was in the data of history and institutions, it had to happen, on the one hand, that socialism would grow under a general reaction; secondly, that it would expose the inconsistency of all its opponents, from the mountain climbers to the dynastic ones, and by this revelation of their illogicality, would precipitate them one after the other from power, which they used against him.

Not a fact that attests to the progress of socialism, which does not show at the same time the successive, inevitable rout of its adversaries.

Why, from February to December 1848, are republicans of all shades successively evicted? because they stay outside of socialism, which is the revolution; because outside of the social revolution, the republic no longer has any meaning, it seems like a middle ground, a doctrine, an arbitrariness.

But why do the republicans, worshippers of ’93, stay out of the movement in 1848? because they perceive from the outset that the social revolution is the negation of all political and economic hierarchy; that this void is horrible to their prejudices of organization, to their habits of government; and that their mind, stopping at the surface of things, not discovering under the nudity of form the intelligible link of the new social order, recoils at this aspect, as before an abyss.

Thus, even as negation, as blank slate or rather as emptiness, the revolution already exerts a power on the surrounding environment; it is a force of attraction, a finality, a goal, since in denying it, the republicans seem to renounce themselves and lose themselves!

On December 10, Louis Bonaparte obtained preference over General Cavaignac, who, however, had “well deserved of the fatherland”, whose civic-mindedness, disinterestedness, and modesty will be highlighted by impartial history. Why this injustice of the election? because General Cavaignac, fate! had to fight, in the name of order and law, the revolution in socialism; because then he presented himself, in the name of the revolution, as an opponent of dynastic parties, and frankly republican because, finally, faced with this constitutional and republican rigidity, the name of Bonaparte rose for the masses as a hope for a faster revolution, for the partisans of the altar and the throne who pushed them as a hope for counter-revolution. Revolution, counter-revolution, yes and no, what does it matter? it is always the same passion that agitates, the same idea that directs.

Who is Rome at war with later? Against Mazzini? Come on! Those who decreed the war on Rome were just as democratic as Mazzini. Like Mazzini, like Rossi, they carried written on their flag: “Separation of the spiritual and temporal! Secular and free government!” The revolution in Rome was made against the social revolution.

Against whom is the May 31st law voted? Against the revolution.

How did the elected representative of five and a half million votes lose popularity in 1849 and 1850? Through his alliance with the reactionaries. How did he then regain his popularity? By affirming universal suffrage, which was presumed to be the voice of the revolution. In 1851, the people received Louis Bonaparte with repentance: like the father of the prodigal son, without listening to the observations of the wise son, he forgave the repentant son.

Here we must no longer judge events from the point of view of legality and morality, the regular exercise of power, respect for the constitution, or the religion of the oath. History will pronounce on the morality of actions: what belongs to us is to note their fatal side. Constitution, oath, laws, everything sank in the midst of the ardent competition: the bad conscience of one unchained that of the other, and when royalty proclaims itself on the platform, why wouldn’t the empire rise in the public square? The constitutional faith trampled underfoot by the majority, only the brute, immoral action of ambitions and parties remains, blind instrument of fate.

So this is the situation of the antagonistic forces in November 1851: the revolution is represented by the Republican left, and incidentally by the Elysée, which joins it in calling for the repeal of the May 31st law; – the counter-revolution has the majority as its organ, and incidentally also the Elysée, which joins it for everything else, against the Republican party.

The Elysée, an equivocal element without meaning in itself, is at this moment fought by the two parties, which strive with equal ardor to eliminate it. The question is, will France be for the revolution or the counter-revolution? What is Mr. Bonaparte, that he should come and say, “Neither one nor the other; France will belong to me”?…

However, at the sight of this closed field where his fate will be played out, what does the country think? The country is reluctant to regress, but it fears the revolutionaries. It is no longer just socialism that scares it: it is a Montagnard reaction, it is the reprisals of democracy!… This disposition of minds, which equally repels, on one hand, the principle of reaction, and on the other, the men of revolution, makes the fortune of the Elysée. The same reason that could have crushed it between the two armies, earns it the triumph over both: it affirms the revolution, and it protects the conservatives! A bilateral and contradictory solution, but logical nonetheless, given the state of public opinion, and which circumstances almost made inevitable.

The significance of December 2nd, the idea it represents, is therefore, truly revolutionary. The rest is a matter of individuals, that is to say, party intrigues, coterie transactions, private vengeance, autocratic demonstrations, measures for public safety and reasons of state. It is the margin left to governmental discretion by the law of revolutions.

But this ambiguity cannot last: every principle must produce its consequences, every power must unfold its idea. We are at that point: what will Louis Napoleon do?

I have reported the main acts of December 2nd; I have highlighted its inspiration, half real, half personal, and the constant uncertainty. And we have been able to see that up to this point, the new power, arrested by the void of public opinion, left to its own inspirations, rather guided, in the midst of universal contradiction, by the prudence of the man than by the reason of things, instead of abandoning the double face that gave it victory, tended rather, by virtue of the idea it has of delegation, and according to its domestic traditions, to continue its game of seesaw, and to transform, probably without realizing it, the current institutions into a feudalism of fantasy.

I then showed, through the example of the Emperor, the vanity of any political conception outside of social synthesis, the reason of history, the indications of the economy, and the revolutionary data. And the analogy of the times authorizing me, I reminded Louis Bonaparte of his true mission, defined by himself, at the time of his first advent, the end of parties: a definition which is translated into this other one, the end of Machiavellian or personal politics, that is to say, the end of authority itself.

The negation of authority, and therefore the disappearance of any governmental organization, could still have seemed in 1849 an obscure idea;² after December 2, there remains not the slightest cloud. December 2 has brought out the contradiction between governmentalism and economy, between the state and society, in present-day France; what we could only guess at four years ago through the rules of logic, the facts – infallible interpreters – make palpable today: the paradox has become a truth.

Let us summarize these facts and prove by their analysis the truth of this triple proposition, which represents the entire movement of the last 64 years:

Personal or despotic government is impossible;
Representative government is impossible;
Government is impossible.

The principles upon which French society has rested since ’89 – let us say, any free society – principles that are prior and superior to the very idea of government, are:

1. Free property, that which was called in Rome quiritaire, and among the invading barbarians allodiale. It is absolute property, at least as much as anything can be absolute among men; property that belongs directly and exclusively to the owner, who manages, leases, sells, gives, or pledges it at his pleasure, without accounting to anyone.

Property must undoubtedly be transformed by the economic revolution, but not insofar as it is free; it must, on the contrary, constantly gain in freedom and guarantee. The transformation of property concerns its balance: it is something analogous to the principle introduced into international law by the treaties of Westphalia and 1815.

2. Free labor, with all its dependencies – free profession, free trade, free credit, free science, free thought, and free religion – which means the absolute right, a priori, without restriction or control, for every citizen to work, manufacture, cultivate, extract, produce, transport, exchange, sell, buy, lend, borrow, transact, invent, educate, think, discuss, popularize, believe or not believe, etc., to the extent of his means, without any other condition than that of fulfilling his obligations, as well as not hindering anyone in the exercise of the same right.

Work also needs to be revolutionized, like property; but as for its guarantees, not at all in terms of its initiative. Taking corporative organization as a guarantee of work would be to repeat the work of the Middle Ages, the eradication of slavery by feudalism.

3. The natural, egalitarian, and free distinction of industrial, commercial, scientific, and other specialties, based on the principle of the division of labor, and outside of any caste spirit.

Such are the principles of ’89, the subject of the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” united by the latest constitution; and such have been the foundations of our society since that time.

Now, since the government must be the expression of society, according to the expression of Mr. de Bonald, one wonders what can be the government of a society established on such bases?

It cannot be a territorial feudalism, since property is free; nor an industrial, commercial, or financial feudalism, since work is free, commerce is free, credit is free, or at least manifestly capable of becoming so; nor a caste system, since professional specialties, according to their economic principle, are free; nor a theocracy, since conscience is also free. Will it be an absolute monarchy? No, since the faculties of man and citizen, work, exchange, property, etc., converted into rights, being free, and their exercise free, there is nothing left that can serve as a motive or object for any authority, and that the sovereign, formerly visible, personal, incarnation of divine right, has become an abstraction, a fiction, namely, the people.

If, therefore, in the society thus constituted a government is formed, this government can only result from a delegation, convention, federation, in short, a free and spontaneous consent of all the individuals who make up the people, each of them stipulating and pooling their resources for the guarantee of their interests. So that the government, if there is a government, instead of BEING the AUTHORITY, as before, will represent the RELATIONSHIP of all the interests engendered by free property, free labor, free commerce, free credit, free science, and will consequently itself have only a representative value, like paper money, which has value only in relation to the coins it represents. Essentially, the representative government is symbolized and perhaps defined by an “assignat.”

Thus the democratic and representative nature of the government stems from the essentially free nature of the interests it indicates the relationship of; given these interests, any appeal to any authority becomes meaningless. For the government to cease being democratic, in a society thus made, and for authority to reappear, the declared free faculties would have to cease to be free; property would no longer be property, but rather a fiefdom; commerce would no longer be commerce, but rather an excise; credit would no longer be credit, but rather servitude, corvée, tithe, and dead hand: which is against the hypothesis.

Do I need to repeat what everyone knows, that the thought of ’89, that of all the constitutions that have come out of it, was to organize the government in such a way that it was the representation of the free interests on which society rests, and that this is still the pretension of December 2nd? December 2nd, like all the powers that preceded it since ’89, is proud to represent by excellence the relationship of interests recognized as free by nature and a priori. Neither he nor any of his predecessors ever suspected what it means for a government, which otherwise aims for authority, to be a representation, the representation of a relationship, of a relationship of interests, and free interests!!!

Thus, the government exists today only because of what it represents. It does not enjoy, as the school says, aseity; it does not pose itself, it is the product of the good pleasure of liberties, of the convenience of interests. Is such a government possible? Is there not a contradiction between all these terms: Government, representation, interests, freedom, relationship?… Instead of engaging in a discussion of categories on this point, keeping the reader immersed in metaphysics, let us turn to history.

Suppose that, in the order of political knowledge, as in any other order of knowledge, abstract ideas gradually take the place of concrete ideas, and the government, instead of being considered as the representation or personification of the social relationship, which is only a materialistic and idolatrous conception, is conceived as being this relationship itself, which is perhaps less poetic, less favorable to the imagination, but more in line with the habits of logic: the government, no longer distinguishing itself from interests and liberties, as they relate to each other, ceases to exist.

For a relationship, a law, can be written, like an algebraic formula, but cannot be represented in the governmental and scenic sense of the word, cannot be embodied, cannot become an entire army of actors, charged with playing before the people the Relationship of interests! A relationship is a pure idea, which is recorded in a book, a treaty, a contract, in a few numbers, characters, signs, or words, but which has only the reality of the objects themselves that are in relationship.

Well! The most positive result, the only positive one, of all the governments that have passed over France since 1789, has been to highlight this simple truth like a definition, obvious like an axiom: Government is the relation of liberties and interests.

And with this first proposition given, the consequences follow: that now politics and economics are the same thing; that for there to be a relation of interests, the interests themselves must be present, answering, stipulating, obliging, and acting; that thus the social reason and its living emblem are one and the same thing; ultimately, that with everyone being government, there is no longer any government. The negation of government thus arises from its definition: whoever says representative government says relation of interests; whoever says relation of interests says absence of government.

And, in fact, the history of the last sixty years proves that with representative government, no more than with despotic government, are interests either free or in relation; that for them to maintain themselves in the conditions of their declaration, which are those of their existence, they must treat directly with each other, according to the law of their solidarity, and without intermediaries. Beyond that, property becomes a fief again, work servitude, commerce a toll, corporations are reformed, philosophy is at the discretion of the Church, science, in the hands of Cuvier and Flourens, only says what pleases theology and the pope: there are no more libels or interests!

In their famous Declaration, interests had said that conscience would be free. – The representative of interests declares, in 1814, that the Catholic religion is the religion of the state; in 1830, that it is the religion of the majority, which, for practical and financial purposes, amounts to the same thing. In fact, in 1852, Catholics, under the pretext that they are the majority, remove dissidents from public education, take away chairs, and close schools to Protestants and Jews. So that every citizen, whether he has a belief interest or not, pays, first of all, for all religions, and if he has the misfortune of being Jewish or Protestant, is excommunicated, not as a Jew or Protestant, but as part of the religious minority, by the Catholics. Where is the freedom? Where is the relation?

Interests wanted, in the same Declaration, that thought be free. – The representative of interests, of the relation of interests, claims, on his side, that he cannot fulfill his mandate in the presence of this freedom; that he needs interests not to speak, write, or read; because if they looked too closely, if they gave an opinion, their security and that of the state would be compromised. The Emperor suppresses newspapers, the Restoration creates censorship, the July Monarchy makes the laws of September, the September Republicizes newspapers, December 2nd gives them “warnings”. Where is the freedom of interests? Where is their relation? And what a strange way to represent interests by reducing them to silence…

In anticipating their interests, war was supposed to be the last resort the nation would resort to in order to maintain peace. Outside of the case of war, the maintenance of a permanent army seemed like an anomaly to them, which the institution of national guards aimed to put an end to. However, the representative of interests, commander of the army and navy, always finds some reason to justify his title. And when he is not at war, he keeps his armies at full strength under the pretext that without it, he cannot guarantee internal order and maintain peace between interests! Therefore, interests are not in proportion, or rather this proportion is not represented, since the representative can only keep them at peace through force.

Interests demand a low-cost government, moderation in taxes, their fair distribution, savings in expenses, and debt repayment! To this, the representative of interests responds that to be well-governed, one must pay well; that a strong budget is a sign of wealth and strength, and an enormous debt a condition for stability. And the budget with the debt doubles in 50 years! Is this not the mystification of interests?

The vine is one of the main sources of the country’s wealth. To encourage its cultivation, wines and brandies need to be assured of the outlet they need by eliminating at least three-quarters of the taxes on beverages, which would also give great pleasure to the people who deprive themselves of wine. What does the representative of interests say about this? That taxes on beverages are the most important category of his revenue, the most beautiful jewel in his crown, that replacing them is impossible, and that eliminating them would push him into bankruptcy. To top it off, he closes down taverns! So if the interest of the vineyard is not repressed, crushed, or sacrificed, the other interests cannot be represented! Where is the freedom for the vine? Where is its relationship with other cultures, industry, and commerce?…

But what! It is not only the vineyard that complains: agriculture demands salt; the worker demands meat, sugar, tobacco, coal, leather, cloth, and wool. The worker is naked and starving. The representative of the suffering interests, and these interests are all interests! makes his newspapers and orators say that it is not true that salt is essential to agriculture and livestock, as if he knew that better than farmers! as if it were his, the representative’s, decision to make!… That, moreover, he would be happy to fulfill Henry IV’s wish, the “chicken in every pot”: but that the interest of French breeders, that of indigenous sugar manufacturers, etc., etc., does not allow for the introduction into the country, duty-free, of the cattle, sugar, coal, etc., that the people need for their consumption. So that interests are sacrificed, by their own representative, to the ratio of interests, and that, according to the representative’s testimony, the nation could not become rich without being instantly ruined! What is the government for then? Is it not clear here that the representation of the ratio represents only one thing, which is that the ratio does not exist?

For twenty years, the interests demanded credit institutions, without being able to obtain them. Finally, a decree of December 2nd organizes the land credit: that’s all it can do. But since it has no funds, the institution is only a cash box, which will remain empty until it pleases the interests to fill it. Is it clear, despite what the famous Law, quoted by Mr. Thiers, has said, that the state does not give credit but receives it on the contrary: which means that the representative of the interests is in an absolute inability to act in credit matters, if he is not himself represented by the interests he represents!

The interests report shows that the canals must be delivered to the boatmen for free. The representative of the interests establishes a tariff on the canals, and leases them. Why? Because it obliges his friends, and provides him with income. The representative of interests, therefore, has other interests than interests!

The interests report demands that posts, railways, all instruments of public utility, be operated at the lowest price, and without interest on capital. The representative of interests charges the transport of letters, people and goods as much as he can; individuals do not even have the security of their correspondence. Until now, it had been believed that it was up to the principal to show trust in the agent: not at all, it is the agent who says he does not trust his principals!

The interest of families, a universal and absolute interest without possible contradiction, wants instruction to be given to the child by men who have the father’s confidence, and according to principles that he agrees with. The representative of the interest of the family, the most binding expression of paternal power, hands over instruction to the ignorant and the Jesuits; and this, under the pretext that he does not represent only the fathers, but also the children!… What do you say, fathers of families, about this conscientious representation?…

On all points, the representative of liberties and interests is in contradiction with freedom, in revolt against interests: the only relationship he expresses is their common servitude!

What will it take, then, sheep-like race, to prove to you that a relationship, an idea, is not represented as you please to understand it; that freedom, even more so, is not represented either; that to represent it is to destroy it; and that from the day our fathers made, before God and before men, the Declaration of their Rights, they laid down in principle the free exercise of the faculties of man and citizen, that day, authority was denied in heaven and on earth, and government, even by delegation, made impossible?

Come back, if you will, to feudal customs, to theocratic faith, or to Caesar’s piety; go back ten, twenty, forty centuries, but do not speak anymore of represented freedoms, rights and interests: because freedoms and interests, in their collectivity and relationship, are not represented, and the representative of a nation, as well as the representative of a family, a property, an industry, can only be its leader and master. The representation of interests is the reconstitution of authority!

Anarchy or Caesarism, Mr. Romieu told you; the Jesuits tell you, and for the hundredth time I repeat it to you. Don’t look for any more loopholes, no more middle grounds. For sixty years they have all been exhausted, and experience has shown you that these middle grounds are, like Dante’s purgatory, only a sphere of transition, where souls, in the agony of conscience and thought, are prepared for a higher existence.

Anarchy, I tell you, or Caesarism: you won’t get out of there anymore. You didn’t want an honest, moderate, conservative, progressive, parliamentary, and free republic; now you are caught between the Emperor and the Socialists! Decide for yourself what you prefer: because, truly, Louis-Napoleon, if he falls, will fall, like his uncle, only through revolution, and for revolution; and the proletarian, whatever happens, will be less tired than you. Isn’t it for him that the revolution will be made; and, in the meantime, isn’t he Caesar’s friend?…

But Caesarism! Has the joyful counselor of the Elysee thought about it? Caesarism became possible among the Romans, when the conquest of the world was added to the victory of the plebeians over the patricians, as a guarantee of subsistence. Then Caesar could reward his veterans with the lands taken from abroad, his praetorians with the tributes from abroad, feed his plebeians with the products from abroad. Sicily, Egypt, supplied grain: Greece, its artists; Asia, its gold, perfumes, and courtesans; Africa, its monsters; the barbarians, their gladiators. The plunder of nations organized for the consumption of the lazy, fierce, hideous Roman plebeians, and for the security of the Emperor: that is Caesarism. It lasted, for better or for worse, for three centuries, until the coalition of foreign plebeians, under the name of Christianity, filled the empire and conquered Caesar.

Today, it’s about something else entirely. We have lost our conquests, both those of the Emperor and those of the Republic. We don’t receive a centime from abroad that we can give as charity to the last of the Decemberists, and Algeria costs us a hundred million, give or take, every year. To triumph over the bourgeoisie, capitalist and property-owning; to restrain the middle class, industrious and liberal, and to rule by the plebeians, it’s no longer a matter of sustaining them with the spoils of defeated nations; it’s a matter of making them live off their own product, in short, making them work. How will Caesar go about it? That’s the question. However he goes about it, whether he turns to Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Cabet, Louis-Napoleon, etc., we are in full socialism, and the final word of socialism is, with non-interest, non-government!.....…

“Do you believe,” an indiscreet curiosity will ask me at this hour, perhaps maliciously, “that December 2 accepts the revolutionary role in which you confine him, like in the circle of Popilius? Do you have faith in his liberal inclinations? And on this necessity, so well demonstrated by you, of Louis-Napoleon’s mandate, will you rally to his government as the best or least bad transition?” That’s what people want to know, and where they’re waiting for you!…

I’ll answer this somewhat tricky question with another:

Do I have the right to assume, when the ideas I’ve been defending for four years have had so little success, that the head of the new government will adopt them soon and make them his own? Have they taken on, in the eyes of public opinion, that character of impersonality, reality, and universality that imposes them on the state? And if these still young ideas are not much more than one man’s ideas, where would my hope come from that December 2, who is also a man, prefers them to his ideas?..…

I write so that others may reflect in turn, and if necessary, contradict me. I write so that the truth, elaborated by opinion, may manifest itself, the revolution, with the government, without the government, or even against the government, may be accomplished. As for men, I readily believe in their good intentions, but even more in the misfortune of their judgment. It is said in the Book of Psalms: “Do not put your trust in princes, in the children of Adam,” that is to say, in those whose thinking is subjective, “because salvation is not with them!” I believe, therefore, and to our misfortune, that the revolutionary idea, poorly defined in the minds of the masses, poorly served by its popularizers, still leaves the government the entire option of its policy; I believe that power is surrounded by impossibilities that it does not see, contradictions that it does not know, traps that universal ignorance conceals from it; I believe that any government can endure, if it wants to, by affirming its historical reason, and placing itself in the direction of the interests it is called to serve, but I also believe that men rarely change, and that if Louis XVI, after launching the revolution, wanted to withdraw it, if the Emperor, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe preferred to perish rather than follow through with it, it is unlikely that those who succeed them will soon and spontaneously become its promoters.

That is why I stay outside of the government, more inclined to pity it than to wage war against it, devoted only to the country, and I wholeheartedly join this elite of workers, the head of the proletariat and the middle class, the party of labor and progress, of liberty and ideas: who understand that authority is nothing, that popular spontaneity has no resources; that freedom that does not act is lost, and that interests that need an intermediary to represent them are interests sacrificed. They accept as their goal and motto the “Education of the people.”

Oh country, French country, country of the eternal revolution’s singers! Country of liberty, because despite all your servitudes, nowhere on earth, neither in Europe nor in America, is the spirit, which is all of man, as free as with you! Country that I love with the accumulated love that a growing son has for his mother, that a father feels growing with his children! Will I see you suffer for a long time yet, suffering not only for yourself but for the world that pays you with envy and insults; suffering innocently, just because you do not know yourself? It seems to me at every moment that you are in your final trial! Wake up, mother: neither your princes, your barons, and your counts, nor your prelates can do anything for your salvation, nor can they comfort you with their blessings. Keep the memory of those who did well if you want, go pray at their monuments sometimes: but do not look for successors for them. They are finished! Begin your new life, oh the first of the immortals; show yourself in your beauty, Venus Urania; spread your perfume, flower of humanity!

And humanity will be rejuvenated, and its unity will be created by you: for the unity of the human race is the unity of my country, just as the spirit of the human race is only the spirit of my country.

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1. We will find this theory of progress developed further in a pamphlet that will be published very soon.↩

2. See “Confession of a Revolutionary,” section XVI, 3rd edition.↩