Citizens, you are the masters of your destiny; with your support behind them, the representatives you have just chosen will repair the disasters caused by the outgoing authorities. Industry in jeopardy, work suspended, commercial transactions paralysed, all are to be given a vigorous boost. This very day we have had the long-awaited decision on rents and tomorrow it will be the turn of payments due.
All public services restored and streamlined.
The National Guard, once the city’s only armed force, reorganised without delay. These are our first steps.
For the triumph of the Republic to be copper-fastened, all that the people’s elected representatives ask is the reassurance of your trust. As for them, they will do their duty.
March 1871
PARIS TODAY IS FREE AND IN POSSESSION OF HERSELF AND THE PROVINCES ARE IN SLAVERY
ONCE A FEDERATED France comes to understand Paris, Europe will be saved.
Today, my appeal goes out to the artists and I call upon their brains, their feelings, their gratitude. Paris has nurtured them like a mother and given them their genius. In the present hour, every effort of the artists (and there is a debt of honour at stake here) should be geared towards the reconstitution of her morale and the restoration of the arts which are her treasure. As a result, the museums must be reopened as a matter of urgency and serious thought given to a forthcoming exhibition; so let everybody, starting here and now, set to work and the artists of friendly nations will answer our call.
Vengeance has been wrought and genius must have is day, for the real Prussians were not the ones who initially attacked us. By causing us to perish of hunger, they have helped us regain our moral life and elevated every single individual to the dignity of a human being.
Ah, Paris, the mighty city of Paris, has just shaken off the dust of all vassalage. The most heartless Prussians, the exploiters of the poor, were in Versailles. Her revolution is all the more equitable in that it springs from the people. Its apostles are workers, her Christ has been Proudhon.
For the past eighteen hundred years, men of heart have faced death with a sigh, but the heroic people of Paris will defeat Versailles’s bamboozlers and torturers, man will have the run of himself, federation will be understood and Paris will have a lion’s share of a glory unprecedented in history.
And now I say it again: let everyone set to work selflessly. This is a duty we all owe to our soldier brethren, these heroes who face death for us. They have right on their side. The criminals have set their courage aside for the blessed cause.
Yes, with the genius of everyone given free rein, Paris will double her importance and the international European city will be in a position to offer the arts, industry, commerce and intercourse of all sorts and visitors from around the globe an imperishable order. A pledge given by her citizens, one that cannot be broken by the monstrous ambitions of monstrous claimants.
Our era is about to begin and by a strange coincidence next Sunday is Easter Day! Will our resurrection come on that day?
So long to the old world and its diplomacy!
Gustave Courbet
Journal Officiel
April 5th, 1871
DECLARATION
TO THE FRENCH people:
In the painful and terrible conflict that again threatens Paris with the horrors of a siege and bombardment; that causes French blood to flow, sparing neither our brothers, our wives nor our children; crushed beneath cannonballs and rifle shot, it is necessary that public opinion not be divided, that the national conscience be clear.
Paris and the entire nation must know the nature, the reason, and the goal of the revolution that is being carried out. Finally, it is only just that the responsibility for the deaths, the suffering, and the misfortunes of which we are the victims fall on those who, after having betrayed France and delivered Paris to the foreigners, pursue with a blind and cruel obstinacy the ruin of the great city in order to bury, in the disaster of the republic and liberty, the dual testimony to their treason and their crime.
The Commune has the obligation to affirm and determine the aspirations and wishes of the populace of Paris, to define the character of the movement of March 18th, misunderstood, unknown and slandered by the politicians seated at Versailles.
Once again, Paris works and suffers for all of France, for whom it prepares, through its combats and sacrifices, the intellectual, moral, administrative and economic regeneration, its glory and prosperity.
What does it ask for?
The recognition and consolidation of the Republic, the only form of government compatible with the rights of the people and the normal and free development of society.
The absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all localities in France and assuring to each one its full rights, and to every Frenchman the full exercise of his faculties and abilities as man, citizen and producer.
The only limit to the autonomy of the Commune should be the equal right to autonomy for all communes adhering to the contract, whose association shall insure French unity.
The inherent rights of the Commune are:
The vote on communal budgets, receipts and expenses; the fixing and distribution of taxes; the direction of public services; the organisation of its magistracy, internal police and education; the administration of goods belonging to the Commune.
The choice by election or competition of magistrates and communal functionaries of all orders, as well as the permanent right of control and revocation.
The absolute guarantee of individual freedom and freedom of conscience.
The permanent intervention of citizens in communal affairs by the free manifestation of their ideas, the free defence of their interests, with guarantees given for these manifestations by the Commune, which alone is charged with overseeing and assuring the free and fair exercise of the right to assemble and publish.
The organisation of urban defence and the National Guard, which elects its chiefs and alone watches over the maintenance of order in the city.
Paris wants nothing else as a local guarantee, on condition, of course, of finding in the great central administration—the delegation of federated Communes—the realisation and the practice of the same principles.
But as an element of its autonomy, and profiting by its freedom of action, within its borders it reserves to itself the right to operate the administrative and economic reforms called for by the populace as it wills; to create the institutions needed to develop and spread instruction, production, exchange and credit; to universalise power and property in keeping with the needs of the moment, the wishes of those concerned and the facts furnished by experience.
Our enemies are fooling themselves or are fooling the country when they accuse Paris of wanting to impose its will or its supremacy over the rest of the nation and to pretend to a dictatorship, which would be a veritable attack on the independence and sovereignty of other communes.
They are fooling themselves or are fooling the country when they accuse Paris of pursuing the destruction of that French unity constituted by the Revolution to the acclaim of our fathers, who hastened to the Fete de la Fédération from all corners of the old France.
Unity, as it has been imposed on us until today by the Empire, the monarchy or parliamentarism is nothing but unintelligent, arbitrary or onerous centralisation.
Political unity, as Paris wants it, is the voluntary association of all local initiatives, the spontaneous and free concourse of all individual energies in view of a common goal: the well-being, the freedom and the security of all.
The communal revolution, begun by popular initiative on March 18, begins a new era of experimental, positive, scientific politics.
It is the end of the old governmental and clerical world, of militarism and bureaucracy, of exploitation, speculation, monopolies and privileges to which the proletariat owe their servitude and the Fatherland its misfortunes and disasters.
Let this beloved and great country—fooled by lies and calumnies—be reassure
d! The fight between Paris and Versailles is one of those that cannot be ended through illusory compromises. The end cannot be in doubt. Victory, pursued with an indomitable energy by the National Guard, will go to the idea and to right.
We call on France.
Apprised that Paris in arms possesses as much calm as bravery, that it supports order with as much energy as enthusiasm, that it sacrifices itself with as much reason as energy, that it only armed itself in devotion to the liberty and glory of all: let France cease this bloody conflict.
It is up to France to disarm Versailles through the solemn manifestation of its irresistible will.
Called upon to benefit by our conquests, let it declare itself in solidarity with our efforts. Let it be our ally in this combat that can only end in the triumph of the communal idea or the ruin of Paris.
As for us, citizens of Paris, our mission is the accomplishing of the modern Revolution, the largest and must fecund of all those which have illuminated history.
It is our obligation to fight and to win.
The Paris Commune
Journal Officiel
April 20th, 1871
PROPOSAL ON THE PRODUCTION OF GOODS
BY DECISION OF the Paris Commune:701
All the big workshops of the monopolists, their equipment, machinery, raw materials, agencies, premises, etc. are to be commandeered after an inventory has been made with an eye to compensation at a later date.
Said workshops are to be temporarily ceded to such workers’ associations as may make application and the assets of the Commune are to be transferred to said workers’ associations through the opening of a line of credit for those associations. The Louvre Workshops which churned out armaments were one instance of such requisitioning. The leaders of the workers’ council, the workshop heads, team leaders, etc., were chosen by the workers of each section and could be stood down at any moment.
Pierre Vésinier
May, 4th 1871
GLOSSARY
OF TERMS, PEOPLE, AND EVENTS
CERTAIN TERMS, PEOPLE AND EVENTS CONTINUALLY APPEAR IN PROUDHON’S work. Rather than footnote each occurrence, information on them is summarised here. As with many French writers he refers to revolutionary events by date (i.e., ’89 for the start of the Great French Revolution and so on). He also refers to Year I, Year II, and so on, which are from the French Revolutionary calendar that began on September 22nd, 1792, the date of the official abolition of the monarchy and the nobility.
TERMS
Agiotage: This refers to stock exchange business, especially stock-jobbing (i.e., dealing in stocks and shares). It includes speculative dealing in stock exchange securities or foreign exchange. It can also mean any form of speculation on goods and prices.
Agrarian Law: Laws passed for the redistribution of property in land (loi agraire). It usually referred to the breaking up of estates into parcels of land owned and worked by individuals. In Confessions d’un Révolutionnaire, Proudhon cautions that land reform of this kind can easily become a mere populist tactic in the hands of politicians, a route to dictatorship rather than equality.
Assignats: Notes issued as paper currency in France (1789–96) by the revolutionary government and secured by confiscated lands. They were usually blamed for the hyperinflation during the revolutionary period as there was little control over how many were printed.
Collective force: This is Proudhon’s term for the way in which individuals’ combined action can produce something greater than their mere sum. This concept entails:1. a critique of wage labour. In What Is Property?, Proudhon points out that while the labour of one person would be incapable of single-handedly raising a granite obelisk even in two hundred days, two hundred labourers are able to raise it in a single day. As the employer pays nothing for this extra labour-power produced by collective activity and co-operation, workers are exploited by capital;
2. a theory of “collective reason” for which the results of combined intellectual labour, no less than combined manual labour, can exceed the sum of the parts (anticipating certain theories of the social construction of knowledge—e.g., educator Paolo Freire’s);
3. a theory of political power as deriving from cooperative action or “social power” (reminiscent of Étienne de la Boëtie’s, and anticipating those of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault);
4. a concept of “collective being” that radically distinguishes Proudhon’s philosophy from any liberal or neoliberal conception (where a Margaret Thatcher could say that there is no such thing as society, only individuals, Proudhon contends that it is social relations that give individuals their reality, that freedom itself is a social relationship);
5. an explanation of the paradoxical relationship between freedom and determinism (while every being is determined by the forces that converge to constitute it, the “resultant” of these forces cannot be simply predicted from their origin—it is what postpositivist philosophers of science term an “emergent” property of the ensemble); and finally,
6. a theory of alienation or fetishism as the mistaking of effects for causes—e.g., taking money, which only has value by the force of collective agreement, for the source of value, or taking the leader, who only has power by the force of collective obedience, for the source of power.
Commune: A commune is the lowest level of administrative division in the French Republic. It can be a city of 2 million inhabitants (such as Paris); a town of 10,000; or just a 10–person hamlet. It appeared in the 12th century from Medieval Latin communia, which means a gathering of people sharing a common life (from Latin communis, things held in common).
Commutative: A commutative contract is one in which what is done, given or promised by one party is considered as equivalent to what is done, given or promised by the other. Proudhon rejects the “distributive” conception of justice (for which someone in authority—a judge, a boss, a sovereign, a God—decides what each person deserves) in favour of “commutative justice.” See synallagmatic.
Community: Proudhon usually termed the various schemes of authoritarian socialism he opposed “community” (la communauté). He had in mind radicals like Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux who thought of socialism as being organised around highly regulated (and usually hierarchical) communities.
Corporation: This was the term used in France to describe the producer organisations of Medieval times. Like a Guild in Britain, these gathered together craftsmen of the same profession and regulated it locally and nationally. They were abolished during the French Revolution as the new regime proclaimed that no intermediate body could interpose itself between the citizen and the state (the same law was used to ban trade unions and journeymen associations). The term was used by socialists in 19th century France to describe organisations of worker-run co-operatives. Proudhon (particularly after 1848) usually used it in this sense, namely a federation of co-operatives in a given industry. It should not be confused with modern corporations (i.e., stock issuing companies) which Proudhon opposed as being basically identical to state-communist associations.
Department: A department (département) is a French administrative division roughly analogous to a Scottish region, a United States county or an English district. In other words, an intermediary organisation between the commune and region, a sub-region.
Deputies: Deputies (députés) are elected representatives, such as Members of Parliament, National Assembly or Senate.
Doctrinaire: The Doctrinaires were a small group of French Royalists who hoped to reconcile the Monarchy with the French Revolution during the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830). As is often the case, their name was given to them in derision and by an enemy. Liberal royalists, they were in favour of a constitutional monarchy but with an extremely limited suffrage based on property restrictions. Such a system was implemented after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, with the new King presiding over a Chamber of Peers and a Chamber of deputies elected by around 100,000 wealthy Fren
chmen.
Eclecticism: The philosophy of “Eclecticism” espoused by Victor Cousin (1792–1867), which held that truth was to be found not in any one school of thought but “scattered here and there in all systems” (Cousin, in George Ripley, ed. and trans., Philosophical Miscellanies [Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1838], 102), was a frequent target of Proudhon’s criticism.
Force majeure: Force majeure (“superior force”) is a common clause in contracts which essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond their control occurs.
Garnisaire: Garnisaires (literally garrisons) were (sometimes ad hoc) soldiers billeted on households to force them to pay their dues to the state.
Girondist: The Girondists were a moderate republican political faction during the French Revolution, so called because the most prominent exponents of their point of view in the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention were deputies from the Gironde. Accused of federalism by the Jacobins and repressed during the Terror.
Guaranteeism: For Proudhon, Garantisme denoted a comprehensive system of social guarantees which conferring on citizens a series of economic rights and protections based on associations of joint interest and reciprocal guarantees. In short, the economy would be regulated by the producers and their organisations. The term originally referred to a system of association advocated by utopian socialist Charles Fourier which aimed to seek protection against socio-economic risk. In Fourier’s scheme, Guaranteeism (or semi-association) was the sixth order of society, a transitional stage before eventually reaching Harmony, the final stage of human evolution.
Property Is Theft! Page 106
