These great equitations of principles, these enormous shifts in mores, they also have their laws, not at all arbitrary, no more left to chance than the practice of revolutions.
But what, in the end, is that practice?
Suppose that the statesmen we have seen in power since February 24th, these short-sighted politicians of small means, of narrow and meticulous routines, had been in the place of the apostles. I ask you, citizens, what would they have done?
They would have fallen into agreement with the innovators of the individual conferences, in secret consultations, that the plurality of gods was an absurdity. They would have said, like Cicero, that it is inconceivable that two augurs could look at one another without laughter; they would have condemned slavery very philosophically, and in a deep voice.
But they would have cried out against the bold propaganda which, denying the gods and all that society has sanctified, raised against it superstition and all the interests; they would have trusted in good policy, rather than tackling the old beliefs, and interpreting them; they would have knelt before Mercury the thief, before impudent Venus and incestuous Jupiter. They would have talked with respect and esteem of the Floralia and the Bacchanalia. They would have made a philosophy of polytheism, retold the history of the gods, renewed the personnel of the temples, published the prices of sacrifices and public ceremonies, according, as far as it was in them, reason and morality to the impure traditions of their fathers, by dint of attention, kindness and human respect; instead of saving the world, they would have caused it to perish.
There was, in the first centuries of the Christian era, a sect, a party powerful in genius and eloquence, which, in the face of the Christian revolution, undertook to continue the idolatry in the form of a moderate and progressive republic; they were the Neo-Platonists, to whom Apollonius of Tyana and the Emperor Julian attached themselves. It is in this fashion that we have seen with our own eyes certain preachers attempt the renovation of Catholicism, by interpreting its symbols from the point of view of modern ideas.
A vain attempt! Christian preaching, which is to say revolutionary practice, swept away all the gods and their hypocritical admirers; and Julian, the greatest politician and most beautiful spirit of his time, bears in the histories the name of apostate, for having been madly opposed to evangelical justice.
Let us cite one more example.
Let us suppose that in ’89, the prudent counsellors of despotism, the well-advised spirits of the nobility, the tolerant clergy, the wise men of the middle class, the most patient of the people—let us suppose, I say, that this elite of citizens, with the most upright vision and the most philanthropic views, but convinced of the dangers of abrupt innovations, had agreed to manage, following the rules of high policy, the transition from despotism to liberty. What would they have done?
They would have passed, after long discussion and mature deliberation, letting at least ten years elapse between each article, the promised charter; they would have negotiated with the pope, and with all manner of submissiveness, the civil constitution of the clergy; they would have negotiated with the convents, by amicable agreement, the repurchase of their goods; they would have opened an investigation into the value of feudal rights, and on the compensation to be accorded to the lords; they would have sought compensation to the privileged for the rights accorded to the people. They would have made the work of a thousand years what revolutionary practice might accomplish overnight.
All of this is not just empty talk: there was no lack of men in ’89 willing to connect themselves to this false wisdom of revolution. The first of all was Louis XVI, who was as revolutionary at heart and in theory as anyone, but who did not understand that the revolution must also be practised. Louis XVI set himself to haggle and quibble over everything, so much and so well, that the revolution, growing impatient, swept him away!
Here then is what I mean, today, by revolutionary practice.
The February Revolution proclaimed the right to work, the predominance of labour over capital.
On the basis of that principle, I say that before overriding all reforms, we have to occupy ourselves with a generalising institution, which expresses, on all the points of social economy, the subordination of capital to labour; which, in lieu of making, as it has been, the capitalist the sponsor of the worker, makes the worker the arbiter and commander of the capitalist, an institution which changes the relation between the two great economic powers, labour and property, and from which follows, consequently, all other reforms.
Will it then be revolutionary to propose an agricultural bank serving, as always, the monopolisers of money; there to create a certified loan office, monument to stagnation and unemployment; elsewhere, to found an asylum, a pawn-shop, a hospital, a nursery, a penitentiary, or a prison, to increase pauperism by multiplying its sources?
Will it be a work of Revolution to finance a few million, sometimes a company of tailors, sometimes of masons; to reduce the tax on drink and increase it on properties; to convert obligations into losses; to vote seeds and pick-axes for twelve thousand colonists leaving for Algeria, or to subsidise a trial phalanstery?
Will it be the word or deed of a revolutionary to argue for four months whether the people will work or will not, if capital hides or if it flees the country, if it awaits confidence or if it is confidence that awaits it, if there will be separation of powers or only of functions, if the president will be the superior, the subordinate or the equal of the national assembly, if the first who will fill this role will be the nephew of the emperor or the son of the king, or if it would not be better, for that plum job, to have a soldier or a poet; if the new sovereign will be named by the people or by the representatives, if the outgoing ministry of reaction merits more confidence than the ministry of conciliation now coming in, if the Republic will be blue, white, red, or tricolour?
Will it be revolutionary, when it is a question of returning to labour the fictive production of capital, to declare the net revenue inviolable, rather than to seize it by a progressive tax; when it is necessary to organise equality in the acquisition of goods, to lay the blame on the mode of transmission; when 25,000 tradesmen implore a legal settlement, to answer them by bankruptcy; when property no longer receives rent or farm rent, to refuse it further credit; when the country demands the centralisation of the banks, to deliver that credit to a financial oligarchy which only knows how to make a void in circulation and to maintain the crisis, while waiting for the discouragement of the people to bring back confidence?
Citizens, I accuse no one.
I know that to all except for us social democrats, who have envisioned and prepared for it, the February Revolution has been a surprise; and if it is difficult for the old constitutionals to pass in so short a time from the monarchical faith to republican conviction, it is still more so for the politicians of the other century to comprehend anything of the practice of the new Revolution. Other times have other ideas. The great manoeuvres of ’93, good for the time, do not suit us now any more than the parliamentary tactics of the last thirty years; and if we want to abort the revolution, you have no surer means than to take up again these errors.
Citizens, you are still only a minority in this country. But already the revolutionary flood grows with the speed of the idea, with the majesty of the ocean. Again, some of that patience that made your success, and the triumph of the Revolution is assured. You have proven, since June, by your discipline, that you are politicians. From now on you will prove, by your acts, that you are organisers. The government will be enough, I hope, with the National Assembly, to maintain the republican form: such at least is my conviction. But the revolutionary power, the power of conservation and of progress, is no longer today in the hands of the government; it is not in the National Assembly: it is in you. The people alone, acting upon themselves without intermediary, can achieve the economic Revolution begun in February. The people alone can save civilisation and advance humanity!
THE
CONSTITUTION AND THE PRESIDENCY
no date (No 2)
Le Peuple
Translation by Barry Marshall
SINCE Le Représentant du Peuple CEASED TO APPEAR 70 DAYS AGO,483 ONLY two facts have been accomplished: one in the social world and another in the political world. It will not take long to recount, just a few lines will suffice for us to relate the chain of events from August 21st to October 31st.
The first of these facts is the invasion of social ideas across all points of the civilised world. The idea of economic revolution is gaining ground throughout the land, [including] into our least advanced departments. In the more despotic states abroad, it spreads with the speed of a forest fire. All the ideas of the day before [the revolution], alleged political, are forced to bow in front of the social idea and borrow its flag to still be something.
The social revolution, inaugurated in Paris on the 25th of February, baptised in blood in the funeral days of June, the revolution of labour and capital is unstoppable from now on—in both France and the rest of Europe. The revolution had been slanderously portrayed to the population as a ruination of liberty and the destruction of the family, but now, enlightened by discussion, by the slander itself, they welcome the social revolution as the guarantor of freedom and the saviour of the family. Seeing the triumphant march of this idea, we can predict that it will not need armed struggle [to succeed]; social revolution will soon only have to present itself, along with the mass of its partisans, in order to command respect and establish itself officially in all its authority.
Only a few more weeks of suffering, workers, and you will have changed the face of the Earth more quickly than the Christian religion.
The second thing to discuss is the vote on the constitution.
On October 23rd, the National Assembly ended its consultation, the least of which concerned the new constitutional act. This act will re-establish, in four articles:1. The right to work.
2. Universal suffrage.
3. Separation of powers.
4. The option to amend the constitution itself.
The right to work, rejected after long debates while discussing Article 8, has been reproduced in more or less explicit terms in Article 13.
Indeed, what is this but the right to assistance, recognised by the constitution in all cases where work is found to be lacking, but unemployment benefit? And what else is the promise of job creation by credit institutions, by the organisation of public workshops, if not the guarantee of work within the scope of human capability, of social capabilities?
As for universal suffrage, it does not say much other than declare it. It organises nothing. Universal suffrage, applied as one has just done, and we have seen and know from experience, is an excellent institution to talk down to the people, not to know what they think but what one wants of them. With universal suffrage, defined as it is in the constitution, the people will vote by turns for monarchy and republics, religion and atheism, freedom and servitude, equality and privilege. This is how the patriotic mean to run everything!
The separation of powers is a hangover from what we call POLITICS, something that is only the eternal deception of liberty. It is the division of what is, moreover, more radically indivisible, of that whose division implies contradiction, the will of the sovereign. In society, as in man, functions are diverse but the will is essentially one: the National Assembly is not arranged in this way. The fear of despotism has thrown it into antagonism, into chaos.
But after having sown division into the state and confusion into universal suffrage, the National Assembly had to make the best of all this by reserving for itself the right to amend the constitution. Thanks to this ability, we are from now on able to realise all social, political and legislative reforms, without conflict or catastrophe.
The constitution voted upon, what remained was to determine the time of its implementation. This is what has made the National Assembly fix the election of the President for the 10th of December. Such is what pre-occupies all opinions and weighs on all minds right now, what is the cause of all intrigue, what seems to keep alive the breathlessness of the Revolution: the PRESIDENCY!
Official candidates are posing in front of the nation and in open parliament. The others more modestly in the narrow shadows of the bourgeoisie, leading families and the people.
The names doing the rounds right now are those of citizens: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, son of Louis Bonaparte and nephew of the emperor; Napoléon Bonaparte, son of Jerome Bonaparte, nephew of the emperor. And why not Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte, son of Lucien Bonaparte and nephew of the emperor?
General Cavaignac: head of the executive.
General Bugeaud: conqueror of Isly.
De Lamartine: member of the provisional government.
Ledru-Rollin: member of the provisional government.
Dufaure: Minister of the Interior.
Molé: president of the council under Louis-Phillipe.
Thiers: president of the council under Louis-Phillipe.
We do not need to speak of Messrs. the Duke of Chambord and the Prince Joinville, as their candidatures are declared unconstitutional by law.
Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte presents, as his qualification for his candidacy, HIS NAME. We would have preferred that he presented something else; but since his NAME is enough for him, we declare, as for us, that logically and politically there is no reason to occupy oneself with this candidate. Reason and the Constitution both oppose that the heritage of a name could ever become, in France, an hereditary entitlement to a function in the Republic.
The second of the Bonapartes offers an even more remote resemblance to his uncle. Nevertheless of all the qualities to recommend him to the electorate, the greater is still his name, the name of NAPOLÉON.
When it comes to Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte, we can say of him that, just as the son of Louis is the ambitious one in the family, and the son of Jérome is the diplomat, so Pierre is their Hercules. Thus it is all back to the imperial heritage. Is this what makes a president?
General Cavaignac cannot count on the support of the working class. To be sure one does not accuse him, but the June Days Uprising inspired hatred for him, being to him what the massacre of the Champs de Mars was to Bailly and Lafayette. Let the bourgeoisie unite to elect Cavaignac: they owe him a debt of gratitude.
Marshal Bugeaud is in the same position as Cavaignac regarding the people. To the laurels of the Battle of Isly in Morocco, he adds the cypress of Transnonain.484 His candidacy is only of interest to the bourgeoisie, to whom, in its intemperance of language, the Marshal promised long ago, if he is elected, he will be the rue of the socialists.
M. de Lamartine is like the daughter of Rhampsinith,485 who used her father’s stone-built treasure store to lure each of her lovers. M. de Lamartine, if one renders justice to his innumerable contradictions, will be elected unanimously.
M. Ledru-Rollin must by his progressive spirit always be at the head of the most advanced opinions. He is the candidate designated for the extreme left and for the party of socialism.
M. Dufaure is the man of the decent people, who, making cheap parties and systems, requires above all a man of the State who works and who is honest. It was said of M. Dufaure that he was a minister of transition; he will be an irremovable minister when it is understood that history is a perpetual transition. We are still not revolutionary enough for that.
M. Molé is not canvassing for himself. He is canvassing for M. de Joinville, in other words, really for M. Thiers! We have lost the right to speak of him. We leave it for our readers to make up their own minds about this character.
And now, democratic republicans and socialists, who shall we choose from all these candidates? Do we even have a candidate? Must we vote? Should we abstain? On the one hand, the country has been keen to move on from this stop-gap; on the other hand, the parties are itching to be counted. Everyone wants to move forward. The status quo merely aggravates the nation. What should be our attit
ude?
This is for us the key question. We do not hesitate to reply and prove that:
The Presidency is the violation of revolutionary principles.
The Presidency is royalty.
The Presidency is the subordination of labour to capital.
The Presidency is the hood winking of the people.
The Presidency is the counter-revolution.
The Presidency is financial feudalism.
The Presidency is the conflict of power.
The Presidency is civil war.
We conclude that people should abstain, so that the National Assembly itself will be forced to name the president. Because if the presidency is named by the Assembly he is merely the organ of the Assembly, the head of the ministry formed by it. This will return us to the concept of the indivisibility of power.
And as it is to be supposed that the majority of the people, carried along by monarchical intrigues and reactionaries, will not abstain, it is necessary that the minority, using the right given to them under Article 109 of the Constitution, petition the National Assembly, demanding the Constitution be immediately revised and the part relating to the presidency removed.
This is how we think the people should respond to the question posed by the National Assembly.
In a future issue, we will further examine this imposing question.
ELECTION MANIFESTO OF LE PEUPLE
8th—15th November 1848
Le Peuple
Translation by Paul Sharkey
THE CENTRAL ELECTORAL COMMITTEE, COMPRISING DELEGATES FROM THE fourteen Seine arrondissements and designed to make preparation for the election of the president of the Republic, has just concluded its operations.
Citizen Raspail, the people’s representative, has been selected unanimously as the candidate of the democratic and social republican party.486
Property Is Theft! Page 48
