Translation:Confessions of a Revolutionary/9
The idea of a sovereign power, initiator and moderator, constituted, under the name of Government, State or Authority, above the nation, to direct it, govern it, dictate laws to it, prescribe regulations to it, impose upon it judgments and penalties; this idea, I say, is none other than the very principle of despotism, which we combat in vain in dynasties and kings. That which makes the kingdom is not the king, is not heredity: it is, as we shall see below, in speaking of the Constitution, the accumulation of powers; it is the hierarchical concentration of all political and social faculties in a sole and indivisible function, which is government, whether this government is represented by a hereditary prince, or by one or more removable and elective mandataries.
All the errors, all the mistakes of democracy arise from the fact that the people, or rather the leaders of insurrectional bands, after having broken the throne and driven off the dynasty, believed that they revolutionized society because they had revolutionized the monarchic personnel, and in conserving the all-organized kingdom, they brought it back, no longer of divine right, but of the sovereignty of the people. An error of fact and of law, which in practice can never be established, and against which all revolutions protest.
On the one hand, the logic of events has constantly proven that in conserving for society its monarchical constitution, it was necessary sooner or later to return to the sincerity of monarchy; and it is absolutely true to say that democracy, for not having been able to define its own principle, has hitherto only been a defection towards the kingdom. We are not republicans; we are, per the words of Mr. Guizot, factious.
On the other hand, the politiques of divine right, arguing from the very constitution of the pretended democratic power, have demonstrated to their opponents that this power necessarily rested on a principle other than the sovereignty of the people, that it is dependent upon theocracy, of which, as I have said, monarchy is only a dismemberment. Governmentalism, note it well, is not the result of a philosophical doctrine, it is born of a theory of Providence. Among the moderns, as in antiquity, the priesthood is the father of government. We must first go back to Gregory VII, and then to Moses and the Egyptians, in order to retrieve the filiation of governmental ideals, and the origin of this disastrous theory of the competence of the State in matters of perfectibility and progress.
Moses, obstinate in making a society of deists of an idolatrous people, just out of anthropophage habits, succeeded only in tormenting it for twelve centuries. All the misfortunes of Israel came to her from her cult. A unique phenomenon in history, the Hebrew people present the spectacle of a nation constantly unfaithful to its national god, let us speak more justly, to its legal god, for Jehovah is Jewish only of adoption, — and to which it only commences to attach itself, when having lost its territory, having not a rock where it could raise an altar, it arrived at the metaphysical idea of God by the destruction of the idol. It was around the time of the Maccabees, and especially at the appearance of Christ, that the Jews took the Mosaic cult to heart: it was in the destiny of this race to be always lagging behind its institutions.
More than 2,000 years after Moses, almost in the same places and among the same people, another reformer was able to accomplish in one generation that which Moses and the priesthood he had founded to continue his work had been able to effectuate in twelve centuries. The deism of Muhammad is the same as that of Moses; the comments of the Arabs in the Quran seem to have come from the same source as the traditions of the rabbis. From whence comes this prodigious difference in success? It is that Moses had, as the Bible says, summoned Israel; whereas Muhammad had been called by Edom.
Following the example of Moses and the Aaronic priesthood, the popes, their successors, also wished to mold at the whim of their staunch Catholicism the naive populations of the Middle Ages. The reign of this initiating papacy was for the Christian races, as was the influence of the priesthood on the Jews, a long torture. I will cite, for the moment, this sole example: the peoples of the Middle Ages, in agreement with the lower clergy, were opposed to ecclesiastical celibacy; they supported married priests against the anathemas of the Church of Rome. But the celibacy of the priests was, for theocracy, a condition of existence. In marriage, the priest belonged more to the city than to the Church: Roman centralization was impossible. Perish democracy, perish humanity rather than the pope! The will of the pontiff bent the will of the people; the married priests were marked with infamy, their spouses treated like concubines, their children declared bastards. After a long struggle, spiritual authority prevailed; but the submission was not for long, and the reprisals were terrible. From the ashes of the Albigenses, of the Vaudois, of the Hussites, finally came Luther, that other Marius; Luther, less great for having abolished indulgences, images, sacraments, auricular confession, ecclesiastical celibacy, than for having struck Catholicism in the heart, and advanced the hour of universal emancipation.
I resume my story.
Finally, albeit a little late, universal suffrage had been demanded. The National Assembly was brought together, the Provisional Government had resigned its powers, the executive commission was installed, and still nothing was done, nothing was prepared. The State, immobile, remained, so to speak, at arms.
The governmental democrats resolved to make a new effort. This time, they had proved to be more skillful: they spoke neither of socialism nor of dictatorship; the question was exclusively political. They addressed the most dear sentiments of the Assembly. The emancipation of Poland was the pretext for the third day. A question of nationality for a friendly people, formerly the bulwark of Christianity against the Ottomans, and not so long ago again of France against the hordes of the North; a question of democratic propaganda, and therefore of governmental initiative for socialism, the emancipation of Poland, supported by the suffrage of the people, was to raise the sympathies of the representatives, and promise the success of all ideas of reform. Whether the Assembly declared Poland free (which meant war with Europe, as was the wish of democratic politiques), or organized labor, as socialism demanded, was, for fifteen minutes, absolutely the same thing. The speeches of Citizens Wolowski, Blanqui, Barbès and Raspail have proved it.
The situation rendered the thing still more palpable. To tell the government to take the initiative of the emancipation of nationalities was to say to it in other words: For three months you have done nothing for the Revolution, nothing for the organization of labor and the liberty of peoples, two absolutely identical things. Twice you have rejected the initiative which belongs to you, and the work does not resume, and you know not what to do with all those proletarians who ask you for work or bread, who will soon ask you for bread or lead. Make these men an army of propaganda, until you can make them an industrial army; ensure by war the government of democracy in Europe, until you can remake the economy of societies. You are politicians, you say; you do not want to be socialists: take a political initiative if you do not dare to take a social initiative.
War, in a word, as a means to escape temporarily from the question of labor: such was, on 15 May, the policy of the advanced faction of the republican party.
The moment had been admirably chosen. The agenda called for the interpellations of Citizen d'Aragon on the subject of Poland: it seemed that the orators of the Assembly were in concert with those of the clubs, to organize the escalation of government. At the moment when Citizen Wolowski, one of the warmest partisans of Polish emancipation, ascended the rostrum, the head of the petitioning column penetrated into the court of the Assembly. Citizen Wolowski, one of the most moderate and conservative of the Assembly, friend of Mr. Odilon Barrot, brother-in-law of Mr. Léon Faucher, on that day, had unwittingly and unintentionally made himself the advocate of Jacobinism, the orator of the insurrection. Such examples should open the eyes of men who call themselves politicians, and make them comprehend how odious and stupid is the revenge of reactions.
Citizen Wolowski begins by summarizing, as a true clubist, the commonplaces that have been laid down for the last eighteen years concerning Poland.
“Citizen representatives, never perhaps has a more grave and solemn question been raised before you: it can carry with it peace or war.
“I will not conceal from myself the difficulties of the problem, and yet I bring it with confidence before you: for I believe that all ideas are in unison on this great question. I will not do anyone in this chamber the injury of supposing that he is not entirely devoted, strongly devoted to the cause of Poland.
(We hear outside the cries of the People: Long live Poland!)
“France, citizens, is the heart of nations: it feels in it the pulsations of all humanity. And that is especially when it comes to a nation to which has rightly been given the name of the France of the North, when it is a question of a people in which all ideas and tendencies are common with the people of France; when it comes to a people who have always supported the same cause, who have always shed their blood with you on the field of battle, for whom I am certain to encounter here the most vivid, the most profound sympathies. The sole question which seems to me to be agitated is that of the means to realize what we want by a unanimous accord, in order to realize more promptly the restoration of Poland.
(The cries outside redouble: Long live Poland!)
“France does not fear war; France, with her army of 500,000 men, with the National Guard, which is the whole people, does not fear war; and it is for this reason that it can maintain with nations a firm language; it is for this reason that it can impose its thought, its ideas, without resorting to that which was to be the final reason of monarchy.
“France, by her strength, which no one can contest, France will use this truly republican policy, which, above all, has confidence in the power of ideas, in the power of justice.
(New cries are heard: Long live Poland!)
“The Polish question is not merely, as one would have us suppose, a chivalrous question. On the question of Poland, reason confirms that which the heart inspires. The people, with an admirable instinct, were right to the crux of the question; they understood perfectly that in the restoration of Poland there will be found the firmest foundation for the peace and liberty of all Europe.
(The cries increasing in intensity. The orator is interrupted. He resumed:)
“I say that popular thought has admirably grasped the crux of the question, and resolved it by linking the idea of the resurrection of Poland to the idea of liberty.
“The restoration of Poland is the sole guarantee of a lasting peace and the definitive emancipation of the peoples.
“The world has understood what has always been the glorious destiny of Poland, the mission to which it has always devoted itself. When it was alive, Poland was the shield of civilization and Christianity; and when, after the partition was believed to have killed it, it was not dead, it was sleeping...”
(A terrible rumor interrupted the orator: the people invaded the room.)
(Excerpt from Le Moniteur Universel.)
On 22 February 1848, I made my way along the Quai d'Orsay, on the side of the Chamber of Deputies. Paris had stood up like a man, the bourgeoisie in the vanguard, the people in the rear. The opposition was quivering, the ministry trembling. What! Italy had awakened, the Sonderbund was defeated, the treaties of 1815 torn, the Revolution had resumed in Europe its glorious march. Only, France demonstrated that it was reactionary!... Remember, said Mr. Thiers, that if we are for the July monarchy, we are above all for the Revolution! An indictment was to be filed by Mr. Odilon Barrot against the ministers. At this moment I came across Mr. Wolowski.—“Where are we going?” I said to him, “and what does Mr. O. Barrot allege?”...—“That is precisely,” replied Mr. Wolowski, “what I asked him just now: My dear Barrot, where are you taking us?”...
Eighty days later, Citizen Wolowski had taken over the role of Mr. Barrot. Would I not have the right to say to him: My dear Wolowski, where are you taking us?
We know the rest. The National Assembly was literally removed, thrown into the street. For an hour, Paris thought it had changed the government. But we do not know as well what caused the demonstration to be aborted: that is what it is important to publicize.
Already, on the very foundation of the Polish question, the republicans of power and their friends had been singularly cooled. Intervention in favor of Poland, or what amounted to the same as war with Europe, seemed to them to be, in effect, universal socialism, the Revolution of Humanity by the initiative of governments. Like all newcomers to things, they had felt their chivalrous sentiments vanish before the sad reality of the facts. At the same sitting on 15 May, one of the most honorable men of the party, Mr. Bastide, then minister of foreign affairs, declared that in the eyes of the Executive Commission, the emancipation of Poland was a question of European sovereignty on which the French Republic had no standing to pronounce alone; and that to appeal to arms on a matter of this nature was to undertake an inextricable war, and to recommence, for the benefit of a nation, that which the Holy Alliance had done in 1814 for the benefit of a dynasty.
Thus, on the very question which served as a pretext for the demonstration, democracy was divided; what would happen, if one were to see that it was not only Poland, but Europe? that the European and social revolution was the goal, and the intervention in Poland the means? The petitioners' cause was lost in advance: it was sufficient, in order to determine an irresistible reaction, that the thought of the movement should manifest itself in all its truth. This was not long in coming.
The demonstration, spontaneous in origin, and organized, it seems, against the wishes of the clubs' leaders, had ultimately led the popular notables. Blanqui showed himself: frightened spirits see him as the moderator, what say I? the future beneficiary of the movement. Barbès, in order to ward off this menacing dictatorship, and believing that everything had already been lost, threw himself into the revolutionary tide. He took the stand: It is in your best interest, he cried to those who protested against his vehemence. I ask that we give the floor to the delegates of the clubs to read their petition. The petition was read. Blanqui took the floor. He demanded the punishment of the bourgeois guard of Rouen, spoke of labor and a multitude of things foreign to Poland. That was the conclusion of Wolowski's speech. Barbès raised Blanqui, and proposed a billion in income taxes on the rich. Finally, Huber, by a sudden inspiration, of which he claims for himself alone all the responsibility, pronounced the dissolution of the Assembly, and decided the game in favor of Barbès. The representatives retired themselves: Barbès and his friends went to the Hotel de Ville; Blanqui and his followers did not appear. What followed was only a scandal: the national guards, scarcely remembered, encountered no resistance. The people had passed like a rainstorm. Apparently finding that those who spoke so much of acting were only talkers like the others, and not expecting anything from all these governments, which were turned over like cobblestones, they had gone, the Assembly was dissolved and the meeting adjourned, relaxing the emotions of the day.
The demonstration on 15 May, all parliamentary at the outset, raised, apart from the question of labor, which dominated everything, two other very serious questions: a constitutional question, namely, whether, in a Republic, the right to make peace and to declare war belonged to the government; a political question, whether, in the particular circumstances of the French Republic, three months after the February Revolution, it was useful or not for the country to wage war?
The demonstration of 15 May, by a double error, resolved these two questions affirmatively. By pushing the government to war, in order to serve the wishes of the democratic minority, the men of 15 May justified in advance the expedition to Rome, undertaken by the government to serve the interests of the conservative majority.
As for the very cause which was intended to be served, on 15 May, by a war of propaganda, the truth is that this cause would have been more promptly, more surely lost by intervention than by peace. The July government could have, with infinitely more advantages than the February Republic, helped Poland; its armies would not have dragged behind them this formidable social question, by which the republican government was so miserably embarrassed. A State has no power abroad but that which it draws from within: if the domestic life is lacking, it is in vain that it will endeavor to act abroad; its action will turn against itself. After the February Revolution, the domestic question was everything: the republican party did not understand it, nor did it understand the gravity of its own position. The government was without money, without horses, without soldiers; the discussions of the Constituent Assembly revealed that the army available after February was not 60,000 men. Commerce cried for mercy, the workman was without work; we did not have, like our fathers in '89 and '93, 45 billion in national assets at hand: and we were talking of making war!
Let us suppose that, in spite of all these difficulties, the Executive Commission and the National Assembly, obedient to propagandist inspiration, had thrown an army beyond the Alps, another upon the Rhine, which they had supported, provoked insurrection on the Peninsula, brought about German democracy, rekindled the flame of the Polish nationality. At the same time the social question had been posed in Italy and throughout the Germanic Confederation. And this question was not understood and resolved anywhere, the conservative reaction began immediately, and after a European February, we would have had a European 17 March, 16 April, 15 May, and June Days. Do we believe that Hungary, which, at the end of 1848, by a very culpable egoism of nationality, offered itself to Austria to march on Italy, do we believe, I say, that Hungary, once satisfied, would have supported the democratic movement? It would have been the same everywhere: the liberal, but not yet socialist, portion of the countries which we would have wished to free would have rallied to the governments: and then what would have been our situation! It is painful to say: it would have been exactly the same vis-a-vis the whole of Europe as that which we have just taken up in the affairs of Rome, with the difference that here we are vanquishers, and there we would have been infallibly vanquished.
For my part, convinced of the inutility even more than of the impotence of our arms to the success of the revolution, I had not hesitated to pronounce myself, in the Représentant du Peuple, against the demonstration of 15 May. I did not believe that France, embarrassed by the fatal question of the proletariat, who could not, would not, should not suffer a postponement, was in a position to shirk the solution and wage war anywhere whatsoever. Besides, I looked at the means of economic action, if we knew how to employ them, as far more effective vis-a-vis the foreigner than all the armies of the Convention and the Empire, while armed intervention, complicated by socialism, would have raised against us all the bourgeoisies, all the peasants of Europe. Finally, as to the nationalities we were to safeguard, I was convinced that the attitude of France would be the best safeguard for them, the most powerful auxiliary. Rome, Venice, Hungary, succumbing one after the other, to the news that democracy was defeated in Paris, are proof of this. The election of 10 December was for the insurgent peoples like the loss of a great battle; the day of 13 June 1849 was their Waterloo. Ah! if at this moment liberty succumbs, it is not because we have not succored it, but because we stabbed it. Let us not seek to justify our faults by our misfortunes: democracy would be triumphant over all parts of Europe, if instead of wanting her to be a queen we wanted her to be a plebeienne.
Despite my publicly-expressed opposition to the demonstration of 15 May, I was appointed, to the Hotel de Ville, to be part of the new government. I do not know to whom I was indebted for this perilous honor, perhaps my unfortunate compatriot and friend, Captain Laviron, who went on to consume in Rome his martyrdom. But I cannot help thinking that if, on the morning of 15 May, I had published a quarter of Mr. Wolowski's speech, I would have been infallibly arrested that evening, taken to Vincennes, brought before the court at Bourges, and then confined to Doullens, to teach me to have exact ideas on the policy of intervention and neutrality. Oh political justice! retailer with false weights! there is infamy under the plateau of your balance!
Thus the reaction proceeded with the regularity of a clock, and became generalized at every convulsion of the revolutionary party.
On 17 March, it had commenced against Blanqui and the ultra-democrats, at the signal of Louis Blanc.
On 16 April, it had continued against Louis Blanc, to the drumbeats of Ledru-Rollin.
On 15 May, it continued against Ledru-Rollin, Flocon and the men who represented La Réforme, by Bastide, Marrast, Garnier-Pagès, Marie, Arago, Duclerc, who formed the majority of the government, and had for an organ Le National. The reaction had only struck, it is true, in the most ostensible manner, the most energetic democrats, having been seized pell-mell and confused in the same razzia: Barbès, Albert, Sobrier, Blanqui, Flotte, Raspail, General Courtais, and soon Louis Blanc and Caussidière. But if Ledru-Rollin and Flocon were not affected in their persons, their influence perished on 15 May, as Louis Blanc's had perished on 16 April. In political reactions, insurrection and the power under which it happens, are always solidary.
Soon we shall see the republicans of Le National, latest of the eve, fall in their turn and give way to the republicans of the morrow. After them will come the doctrinaires, who, seizing, by means of an electoral coalition, the government of the Republic, will think of themselves as recovering a usurped inheritance. Finally, reactionary fortune giving a final turn to the wheel, the government will return to its authors, the Catholic absolutists, beyond which there is no longer any retrogradation. All these men, obedient to the same prejudice, will fall by turns as martyrs and victims, until finally Democracy, recognizing its mistake, defeats in a single stroke of universal suffrage, all its adversaries, by choosing for its representatives men who, instead of demanding progress in power, will demand it in liberty.
15 May commences for the February Revolution the era of political vengeances. The provisional government had pardoned the attempt of 17 March, pardoned that of 16 April... The National Assembly, despite the warnings of Flocon, did not pardon that of 15 May. The vaults of the dungeon of Vincennes received these sad victims of the most execrable prejudice, Blanqui, Barbès, half of whose life had already passed in the prisons of the State! The most unfortunate of all was Huber, who, after fourteen years' imprisonment, having scarcely returned to the light, had returned to solicit a perpetual condemnation, in order to respond to a demagogic calumny. What was the crime of all these men?
In 1839, Blanqui and Barbès, acting in concert, and counting on the adhesion of the people, undertook, by a bold stroke, to put an end to the scandal of the war of the portfolios, which, in the first year of the reign, afflicted, dishonored the country. Were they wrong, these men, to appeal to the people, to the majority of citizens, to universal suffrage, in a word, from the shameful cabals of the regime at 200 fr.? The appeal could not be heard: ten years of imprisonment made to atone for the two conspirators their attack on monopoly.
In 1848, Blanqui, the indefatigable initiator, carried away by one of those flashes of the multitude which the most influential tribunes do not resist, made himself, before the hesitant National Assembly, the organ of a thought which everything said to be that of the people, which had divided for eighteen years the majority of the bourgeoisie. Barbès, whom terror misleads, is opposed to Blanqui in exaggerating his propositions, and, for the third time in three months, became a reactor to save his country from an imaginary dictatorship. Suppose for a moment these two men would have agreed; suppose that the dissolution of the National Assembly, pronounced unexpectedly by Huber, would have been prepared, organized in advance, who can say where the Revolution, where Europe would be today?....
These are those whom the fright of the countryside imagines to be malignant genii unleashed on earth to set fire to the world; these are the men whom the constitutional system has made for eighteen years its expiatory victims, and who must not be the last. Mr. Lamartine, in one of his poetic hallucinations, has said, in the midst of the National Assembly, that he had once approached Blanqui, as the lightning-rod approaches the cloud to extract the exterminating fluid. By dint of dreaming of ogres and giants, Mr. Lamartine finished by taking himself for a little Poucet. But it is not entirely his fault that our history, since February, resembles a fairy tale. When will we stop playing to the throne and to the revolution? When will we truly be men and citizens?