gallery must cease forever. Already the people begin to reason and reflect. Now, when the people reflect and reason, we no longer need to fear that they will revolt. For it is in the nature of science to stop the enthusiasm of the mind by the contemplation of its problems and mysteries; the difficulties show themselves more formidable as the intellectual develops, the imagination disciplines itself to the extent that the reason is enlightened, and consequently the furor of revolutions fades before the conditions of reform.

"But what are these conditions? Do they exist apart from active society and the power that directs it? Must we, finally, destroy in order to build?

"Here, Monsieur Minister, is my thought in that regard, a thought expressed more and more energetically in the series of my publications, and which I am about to demonstrate by the deepest and most certain proofs that economic science can offer.

"Society, like every organized and living being, develops continuously, without leaps or jolts, without interruption or substitution. *Interruption*, I said somewhere, *for society as for men, is death*. Thus we must not think to replace the present government and the institutions which serve as its cortège for others; but we must make it produce, by natural means, the government and the institutions that it contains potentially, as the animal and plant are contained in the germ. After that, a revolution would only be a grievous upheaval and a time of suffering for society, that the prudence of the men of state must seek to forestall.
"You sense now, Monsieur Minister, without me needing to press the argument further with a man as perceptive as you, how vain all these theories of equality, abolition of property, community, and phalantery are, if the authors do not prove that the reforms they propose and the systems of which they demand the application arise necessarily from accomplished facts and existing institutions; and, on the contrary, how advantageous they are to society if that correlation is true. Finally, you must see how easy it will be to turn them to the profit of the government, if, taking the radicals at their own principles, we knew how to make the form of government under which they live precious to them, and lead them to forcefully declare themselves conservatives,—I mean conservative in the sense implied by progress. Indeed, break the egg before the day fixed by nature for the hatching of the animal, and you will obtain only a miscarriage; kill the bird before the eggs are laid, and you will have no clutch; give the child ideas and tastes which are not for its age, and you will make it a depraved subject. Thus every social doctrine which cannot prove its direct and legitimate descent from the system in force, is by that fact alone a false doctrine, condemned in advance; every premature attempt at reform is an assassination. It was according to this principle, implicitly or explicitly accepted by all reformists, that I propose to develop this thesis soon, which seems so eminently paradoxical today: *The interest of the people, like the duty of every radical writer, is to attach themselves to the charter, and, provisionally, to the government of July.* That will be one of the most curious elements and, I hope, the most conclusive of my next work.
"What I have just outlined for Your Excellence, Monsieur Minister, explains sufficiently, it seems to me, the sometimes heated critiques that I have made of men and things, and the always increasing fear that I have helped, perhaps more than any other, to spread among the proprietors. Starting from an essentially different principle of property, since property is only one of its elements, and reasoning with an inexorable rigor, I should appear, and have been called, *demolisher*. All critique, by itself, is alarming, especially in matters of society; but also, in matters of society, it is far from critique to destruction. Moreover, how do we correct and heal ourselves, how do we know ourselves, without critique? On the other hand, the more the insights increase and spread, the more the disorder becomes apparent and grows in the imagination; the more the feeling of unease penetrates us, the more the vices of power seem to increase with the years: the more, consequently, the complaints and invectives become vehement. I have followed, like all the others, the universal practice: am I less excusable?

"I said on page 7 of my last book: *Is the government the most hypocritical, the most perverse, the most voracious, and the most anti-national that has ever been?*

"I must make more intelligible to you, or if you like, monsieur, more *tolerable* each of these epithets.

"The present government, with regard to its tendency (what in the individual we call *intention*), is better than those that came before; as to its present effects, it is still all that I just described. The uncertainty and the fear of the future; the shouts and the bad faith of the factions; the
ambition, venality, and flagrant corruption of several of
those who hold the tiller of affairs; a mass of general and
particular causes make the government what it is today,
and justify all the charges I make against it. If there is one
that I regret, though, and in which I have only just
perceived the ambiguity, it is that of being *perverse*, which
marks the depravity of the reason, reflected in crime: I
meant to say *perverted*.

"In short, I regard the vices of the government as engendered by its precarious and false position, not as the result of an abominable calculation.

"Yes, the government is *hypocrite*, because it is forced to use deception and cunning every day; to respect certain prejudices, whether aristocratic or popular; to yield before the errors of opinion, and transform itself by means of intrigues. And it becomes more hypocritical, as those who rise within it become more clever and more dishonest.

"The government is *voracious*: you know better than me, Monsieur Minister, what certain accessions cost it, and all the shameful necessities to which survival forces it to submit.

"The government is *perverted* by the bad passions of its adversaries, by the incomplete knowledge and the false prudence of its partisans, by the concessions that one rips from it, by its own distrusts, by the overwrought stubbornness inspired in it by the injustices and calumnies of the press, etc.
"The government is *anti-national*, because nothing suits the French character less than that rigmarole of ambition and cupidity, but especially because the present parliamentary form is the silliest, I mean the least French of all.<fnref n="11" />

"The government, finally, does not know itself, because it does not know where it comes from, nor where it is going, nor what it should do, nor how it should defend itself.

"From all that results a system of uncertain legislation, a hesitant and confused administration; an antagonistic magistracy and endless pains which make the poor patients cry and swear.

"For why, I ask, do we have a town hall, an institution from the Middle Ages, rivaled by a prefecture, a creation of the empire? Why a double parliament? Why one administrative jurisprudence and one civil; one procedure for the criminal, another for the civil, a third for commerce, a fourth, which will soon come, for the administration? Why these institutions placed side by side as enemies, these jurisdictions and these great bodies which have no common principle and do not understand one another, these incoherent, inharmonic judiciary formalities, when they should be unified, centralized, coordinated?"

That, gentlemen of the jury, is the series of my ideas on property.

<footnote n="11">¹¹ And what government in France was never called a *foreign government*?</footnote>
Metaphysics, right, economy, concluding with the
equality of fortunes.

Then comes history, which shows us society subject to the
metaphysical, jurisprudential and economic laws, even
when it has neither metaphysics, nor jurisprudence, nor
economy, and advancing instinctively for centuries
towards the realization of that equality.

Finally the constitutional charter itself implies equality;
equality is at the base of the representative system, it is the
consequence and result of all our institutions.

So it must be said with certainty:

> Those who do not want the charter do not want equality.

> Those who want more or less than the charter, want more
> or less than equality

> Those who want something other than the charter do not
> want equality with the shortest delay. The charter! There
> are people who believe that the charter is the work of one
> Abbe Montesquieu, reviewed and corrected by a Mr.
> Bérard: this is to attribute large effects to very small
> causes.

The charter is the ensemble of the principles elaborated n
French society since the establishment of the communes
under Louis the Fat, and successively brought to light by
the transient forms of feudalism, despotism, the republic
and the empire.
The charter is the symbol of the spirit of liberty and
equality which has tormented us for twelve centuries.

Doubtless the charter is incomplete and unfortunate in its
expression, in its composition, and it is the work of Bérard
and Montesquieu; but the core of the ideas belongs to the
nation, and it is that core that I am interpreting.

And because it seems to me that the men of power
brushed aside the charter, I have, as an egalitarian and
friend of the charter, opposed those ignorant governors.
Will they dare to claim that he who does not love them
does not love the charter? I await that aphorism from
them.

How then can the attorney general reproach me for *having appealed to the passions*? I have criticized violence, murder, riots, secret societies, and revolutions in twenty places in my brochure, in the very passages which serve as the basis for the accusation, so that I at first believed that it was a recording error on the part of the clerk. So much for the proletarians. As for those who, having the mission to instruct the people and see to their interests, only know how to insult and corrupt them, to cry out against the socialists and the theoreticians, I have not been able to stop myself from making reprisals towards them, and I boast of it. I would never hear a French citizen say in cold blood that all those who possess nothing are the enemies of the government; or a president of the parliament declare that the chambers do not have a mission to organize labor and to provide bread to the workers, but to make law; or some deputies and some journalists,
maintain that whoever only pays two hundred francs in
taxes is stupid and unfit.

But what am I saying? Yes, gentlemen jurors, I have
appealed to the passions; I have excited the passion for
liberty against the passion for privilege; the passion for
science against the passion for obscurantism; the passion
for labor against the passion for idleness. I have done like
the preachers, who excite the love of penitence against the
love of pleasure; but they are hardly heard.

You will soon judge, gentlemen, if, in arousing all these
passions against one another, I have acted like a good
citizen, or if I have given in to an evil inspiration, to a
destable instinct for disparagement.

The accused then discussed the last three charges. We
omit all that part of his defense, which keenly interested
the audience, but which only connected in a distant
manner to the great economic and social questions, alone
worthy, in our opinion, of the honors of publicity.

The floor was turned over to the defender of the accused.

M. Tripard began by recalling that Franche-Comté is the
region which, in our time, has produced the boldest
thinkers and most innovative minds. Thus, in the order of
the sciences, Cuvier; in the realm of letters, Victor Hugo;
in the social sciences, Fourier. It is to that family of free
thinkers that Proudhon seems to belong. The defense
attorney recalled the first two booklets on property, so
energetic in form, so bold in content, and remarks that in
each of them we see a maxim established: *Property is theft*.
However, no proceedings had been directed against them,
and the Minister of Justice himself, M. Vivien, had
decided that there was no cause for proceedings. Thus, M.
Proudhon had reason to hope for the same freedom for
this last booklet as for the first two. M. Tripard recalled
the movements that, in 1834 and 1835, soaked Paris and
Lyon in blood: the workers, armed and in the street,
demanded labor or death. In that era, all the dynastic
journals called serious minds toward that great question,
which so strongly interested the proletarians, the
organization of labor. Mr. Proudhon felt obliged to
respond to this call, and today when he announced the
results of his painstaking research, he is conveyed to the
assizes! The lawyer showed Proudhon researching in
history the principle of property and discovering beside
quiritary domain a world of slaves; beside fief, serfdom;
beside the *cens* or quitrent, the *censitaire* or sharecropper
and the trades; and free people nowhere. It is only in 1789,
when a transformation takes place in property, and
notably in the property in money, the loan at interest, that
liberty, and human equality are consecrated. Since that
time, the laboring classes have fallen again into the
malaise, ands M. Proudhon attributes this malaise to
property. *Property is robbery*, Mr. Proudhon has said: but
that is not the first time that property was attacked by
men of the highest merit. The lawyer cited Vattel and
Burlamaqui, who only considered property
as *temporary* and *incidental*; Beccaria, who called it a *terrible
right, though that right is necessary*; Pascal, who called
it *usurpation*, but usurpation that should be hidden from
the people, *if one does not want it to end soon*; finally
Considérant, who calls it a *fundamental spoliation*.
Usurpation, spoliation, these words have a great affinity
with robbery, and M. Proudhon has not even the credit of
the invention. M. Proudhon could be mistaken, but there
are some eminent men to cover his responsibility. In
addition, he asked, what does Mr. Proudhon mean by
property? He distinguishes *domain* from *possession*,
the right of use from the right of abuse. Property is
distinguished then from *possession* by the *domain* of the
man over the thing. And, he says, possession is according
to right, but property is against right. Possession, it is the
right to use; but the right to abuse, that privilege of the
right of property, he wants to destroy it by making of
property a vicegerency whose source is in the government.
According to this theory, property, it is robbery, because
property is the sum of the abuses or the right to abuse. If
the proprietor of a field which conceals ore does not want
to exploit it, or to sell it, said Mr. Tripard, the law
considers that this proprietor abuses his right to the
detriment of the public good, and constrains him to allow
the exploitation of the mine in exchange for an indemnity.
Well! Mr. Proudhon wants to generalize this principle of
the law, and make property an *administrative* matter. In
this way, the abuses of selfishness will disappear and
public utility will profit. The lawyer strove to point out
that, seen in that sense, the expression, *Property is robbery*,
loses its aggravating character and returns within the
conditions of the discussion permitted by the law. He
showed that the author always himself distinguishes
between property and the proprietor; that he is without
hatred against the proprietors, and, in support, he cited
this passage from the author: *Me, hate anyone, Good God!
You might as well say that the doctor hates the illness, because
he describes it!* As to the means of realizing his theory, the
advocate demonstrated, by numerous passages from the
brochure, that he wants neither riots, nor revolutions; that
everywhere, on the contrary, he considers *time, progress
and the government* itself as the necessary agents of his
reform.

The advocate recalled that in his brochure Mr. Proudhon
has created a large overview, and that one could not split
or divide it up, and grasp its true character. He set out to
respond to the offending passages with others passages
from the same brochure, in order to restore them to their
true sense. He then discussed successively the four
offenses of which the author is accused. In closing, he said
that in a similar time, ten years ago, a young man, a
Saint-Simonian, appeared in the Assizes of Paris, accused
of attacks against property and the family; he was
acquitted by the jury, and today he renders eminent
services to the country as a professor at the College de
France, as a member of the Council of State and editor of
the *Journal des Débats*.<fnref n="12" />

<footnote n="12">¹² Did Mr. Chevalier become conservative only in order to better serve equality? When we recall the old opinions of this famous publicist, opinions that he has never retracted; when we read the recent discourse of the College de France, and we think of the terrors he inspires, on the one hand, the retrograde movement of the men of power, on the other, the rapid disclosure of certain economic truths, we cannot help regarding Mr. Chevalier, egalitarian conservative, as a secret martyr to the reformist cause. Instead of listening foolishly, as we do, to these itinerant politickers who cry: *Democracy! democracy!* we would do better to inquire after the men who, among the auxiliaries of power, work, without encouragement or witness, to make the true principles of order and liberty penetrate into the highest social regions.</footnote>
The president, Mr. Béchet summarized the debates, and discharged this difficult task with a concision and an impartiality that everyone admired.

After an hour of deliberation, the jury pronounced a verdict of “not guilty.”

Conclusion

From this judgment and from the explanations that have just been read, and which seem to have motivated it, we can infer the following theoretical and practical consequences, which we will summarily express:

1. Every scientifically demonstrated proposition is outside the jurisdiction of the tribunals, and arises only for science itself. If the office of the magistrate is to watch over the novelties that threaten the established order, and to seek their authors, the duty of the jury, when the offending doctrine takes on a scientific character, is to abstain.

2. Every political reform, intended or unintended, being an inevitable result of the law of progress, and for that very reason always based on the system in force, taking from it its principle and its point of departure, the critique of institutions is a right, and their conservation with an eye to the future a duty.
3. The equality of conditions and of fortunes, final end of progress, resulting from the organic movement of institutions, as well as from the economic theories and the evidence of history, from now on radical writers must place themselves on legal terrain, taking hold of the charter, strengthening themselves within the representative system, and, from that unassailable position, putting outside the bounds of legality and conventional right the adversaries of progress, however highly placed they may be found to be.

Let us hope that the author of the *Memoirs on Property*, understanding the full extent of his work, will not be slow to give to you, in an organized form, that “official” (so to speak) demonstration of his doctrine. Misfortune then, three times misfortune to the mad fools who want to stop the revolutionary coach by lying down across the rails!...
Letter to Bergmann

Besançon, February 8, 1842.

To Frédéric-Guillaume Bergmann

My dear Bergmann, I have just been judged, and have
been absolved by the jury, on the four charges formulated
against me. I have presented a written defense, the
reading of which lasted more than an hour. As I intend to
print it, you will judge its worth. It is a sort of general
prospectus of my studies, by past and to come, and of
their object. I win and I lose all at once, as a result of this
trial. I win a small moment of celebrity, which does not
even extend very far, for, as you know, I don't have the
sympathies of the press; I win, which is more important to
me, and which no one realizes, the advantage of being
able to innovate, to analyze and reestablish at my leisure
principles, rights, beliefs and institutions. For that
judgment, acknowledging that I am a *man of meditation,
not of revolution*, aneconomist, not an anarchist, and that I
wish, according to the president's expression, *to convert the
government and the proprietors*, it follows that I can say
everything, like a teacher or a friend, and I am declared
outside the ranks of the conspirators. It is up to me to
preserve that magnificent position.

But I lose, in the sense that, in order to defend myself, I
have been forced to expose views and ideas that I only
wanted to give at an appropriate time; for example, that as
equality and non-property from the legislative
metaphysics, from economy and history, all the same that
are a necessary consequence of the Charter, and of all the
institutions that *accompany* it; so much, as I declared
elsewhere, that it is today only a question of *developing*,
not of *destroying*. That is magnificent for those who are
sympathetic and are in the habit of linking together their
ideas; but for the multitude of sots who make and unmake
reputations in an instant, it is excessively dangerous: for
several of them have already concluded that I have won
over power and that I have made so much noise only in
order to be paid more. To begin with *equality* and *the
abolition of Property*, in order to end with the acceptance
and development of the Charter, that routs all our
democrats, as in the audience it defeated the public
minister.

Yet is it as beautiful, as fruitful, as true; you will
understand it, I hope.

It remains for me to ask you for some news of a Mr. *Ferrari*,
a professor of political economy at your Strasbourg
Academy, who has just, I am told, been suspended by
order of the minister. I would like to know who the man is,
what he thinks, and what you think of him. Write to me as
soon as possible.

I remain at Besançon; I believe that I have written that our
mayor and his municipal council think to accommodate
me in order to assure me the rest and independence
necessary for study; I can do no better, I believe, than to
go along with these good arrangements. I have a hard
year to get through; but, I repeat, I think that it will be the
last, as to needs of the first order. I gain friends every day; I
nearly have them in the public prosecutor's office; I hope
that soon the powers-that-be, without accepting me, will
tolerate me. I know that they already respect and honor
me.

Farewell, my friend; I have just passed a phantasmagoric
day, as vain as all the others. All is vanity, said
Salomon, except to love God; let us add, and to understand
him.

Would it be an indiscretion to beg you to offer my
respectful regards to your young wife? You shall do it, or
not, at your pleasure.

All my best,

P.-J. Proudhon.
# My Testament: or, Society of Avengers

Summary of principles, facts, and complaints, against the exploiting caste.

Exhortation to the proletariat to organize and take action against their oppressors, by any sort of means, until the avengers take a hand, and justice is done.

To write slowly and in my own hand, 25 copies, to be distributed and disseminated after my death.

To write down clearly the principles of economic right.—Bring out above all those that make up the right of the masses and guarantee leveling;—collective force, gratuity of public services, determination of values;—assurances;—corporations; marriage; family; land-rent; state; taxation; general disarmament.—

Right of revendication, by secret judgment; and of execution.—

Recall the principles concerning war, penal law, regicide, and insurrection.

Such acts are never good in themselves: on the contrary, they are only rendered excusable in certain cases. The political offense, so casually dealt with, is an offense: but it can be the case that the provocation being such, the greatest part of the fault is with the prince, or [ ], and the right is with the rebel, or tyrannicide.
So repeat this phrase often: What you will do, by acting as I recommend to you, will not be pleasant; but yours will be a case of legitimate defense, legitimate vengeance; you can be excused.

This:

1. Exposition of the facts: situation of the laborer and the privileged; social iniquity in economics, politics, taxation, etc., etc.

2. Exposition of the rights: what may be. Forms of redress to be carried out, reforms indicated, practical, simple, and forbidden.

3. Theory of revendication by force: war, insurrection, tyrannicide, and secret vengeance.

The time has come to organize those things.

By the fact of the publication of this Testament, the Society of Avengers exists. Never gather. No need of secret meetings, rolls, papers, or offices. You have principles, a law, a faith, a hope, wrongs to avenge, the world to save, and your dignity to safeguard.

Your right, invincibly established, clearer than the precepts of the Decalogue, is confirmed by the refusal of discussion, la proscription directed against the writer who, for twenty, 30, or 50 years, has wanted to proclaim it.
Today, all politics tends to the glorification of immorality, to impunity for theft.

There is no more remedy; it is necessary to strike.

To distinguish the innocents from the guilty...

To limit oneself to a single sort of communication between supporters: that the principles are true, that the right is certain, that the oppression is flagrant, and the vengeance excusable.—Certain that these ideas exist, the strong and heroic man, who feels he has the power to cut down an enemy, has only to seek some endorsers, some accomplices: when he has them, let him act.

Never strike any but public, notorious crooks; principal agents of the system, bigwigs...

To commence operations when the Testament has been read everywhere.

Collect and classify a mass of misdeeds and crimes, and show in what sense it is systematic.

Atrocious [] of the worker; degeneration of the races.—Corruption of women and girls.—Strike down all these great culprits.

The sensual, selfish, obscene life of the exploiting aristocracy.
Games, dances, concerts, spectacles, feasts [ ] to all tastes;
rest, pleasure, the seven deadly sins and all their progeny;
that is what they cultivate. The institutions have
committed them to the guard and management of an
immense capital, [ ]; ils ne domptent qu'à la [ ]. Like [ ],
whom I cite in my notebook, they only exist for [ ] and [ ].
Their maxim is that of Sardanapalus: Drink, eat, play and
f...

It is necessary to exterminate [ ]. They are fattened for the
sacrifice, said [ ]. It is time;--whoever adheres in their
heart to the principles contained in this Testament, is part
of the Society of Avengers; they are [ ].

Also, do not forget the reprisals.

Every culprit struck should be a notorious enemy of the
Revolution, and bear on their corpse a sign that indicates
that they have been sacrificed by an avenger.

Every prosecution directed against an individual as a
suspect of having, for this reason, struck a great criminal,
will give rise, if it ends in a conviction, in reprisals.

If the killer has been seized in flagrante delicto, and if it is
proven that the individual is an avenger, he should be
released under penalty of reprisals practiced as much
against the judges, imperial prosecutors, public
prosecutors, examining magistrates, as on the jurors.

-- Some will rail against the society.—Let them rail.—The
grievances are there; let them refute them.—The principles
are there;—let them recognized them.—The reforms are
there; and [manuscript breaks here.]

Overview of the innovations and reforms

Main points, easy to remember, on which the Revolution
must first of all undertake and finish in less than three
months.

1. Public debt.—bankruptcy of ½; reimbursement of the ruined, interest reduced to ½ %.

2. Expropriation of Grandes Compagnies.—Liquidation, on the same principle.—[ ] of the great [ ].

3. Bank.—Reduction of interest to ½ — 1%.—Confiscation du capital.

4. Dette hypothécaire.—Reduction of 50%.—[ ] like the debt.

5. Rente foncière.—reduction of land tax: 1/3 of the rente of property; 1/3 to [ ] ; 1/3 to the State. Domain congéable.

6. Loyers.—reduction de 50 p.%.—Organization of its maconnieres.

[7 more points ; to be transcribed]
By what sign shall we recognize that an individual who has been struck has been struck by the society of avengers: if notorious depraved, or corrupt, or criminal, or villain; if an enemy of the people; if of a political importance that corresponds to their criminality; if a sign is left on the corps; if they are not stripped or robbed; if no author of the murder can be assumed from self-interest, rivalry, etc.

All these signs may exist together, or only exist in part.

-- Classification of persons to be harmed.

In the government, the administration, the police, the magistracy, the clergy, finance, industry, commerce, property, the army, la [ ].

Ten or twelve classes in all.

-- How, in each class, to choose the subjects to strike.

There are men of good faith everywhere.

We must not forget that a provisional order is necessary to society; we can suppose that every public functionary who only fulfills their duty according to the [ ] is inoffensive, and consequently innocent.

The same in property, etc.—Inequality is universal; all have wished it; lui [ ] the [ ] liberals, good people.

But add them, the [ ], the impious, the enemies of morals and liberty, devoted as [to] infernal gods.
The vengeance will stop when political liberties are established, and the Right [ ] unique [ ] (in seven or eight articles.)

## Order and distribution

Legitimate complaints of the proletariat, starting from the birth of the socialist schools; bloody reaction, of the bourgeoisie; massacres, despotism, tyranny, transportation, crimes; under the Empire as well as under the Presidency and Cavaignac.

General economic principles, in the name of which we make our demands.

(Critique of the principle of property;

Law of collective force;

Theory of interest, discount, credit, taxation, and international exchange.

Church, army.

Principle of Human right, immanent.

Series of reforms, to be accomplished immediately.

Means of constraint.
Around one hundred pages, at most. Autographic reproduction, with 25 or 50 copies (25 to my friends as gifts; 25 to reliable people, who will reproduce it.)

Results of that economic revolution: Everything is renewed from top to bottom. Customs changed; poverty abolished; true liberty, internal and external, established; equality created; labor organized.

Justice

The just man has a right of life and death over the criminal, the father over the rebellious child, the husband over the adulterous wife and her accomplice, the brother over the immodest sister and her seducer, the citizen over the traitor and usurper.

Every citizen is a censor of customs, a guardian of peace and order.

—à fonder : Federations;

Universal suffrage;

The mnémosyne ;

The judiciary.

(The mnémosyne pour le cas dû pas d'autorisation.)

Thus, we will make a monthly column for politics and political economy.
It will be weekly for everything else.

Do not forget the courts.
Proudhon To Marx

Lyon, 17 May 1846

My dear Monsieur Marx,

I gladly agree to become one of the recipients of your
correspondence, whose aims and organization seem to me
most useful. Yet I cannot promise to write often or at great
length: my varied occupations, combined with a natural
idleness, do not favour such epistolary efforts. I must also
take the liberty of making certain qualifications which are
suggested by various passages of your letter.

First, although my ideas in the matter of organization and
realization are at this moment more or less settled, at least
as regards principles, I believe it is my duty, as it is the
duty of all socialists, to maintain for some time yet the
critical or dubitive form; in short, I make profession in
public of an almost absolute economic anti-dogmatism.

Let us seek together, if you wish, the laws of society, the
manner in which these laws are realized, the process by
which we shall succeed in discovering them; but, for
God's sake, after having demolished all the *a priori* dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of
indoctrinating the people; do not let us fall into the
contradiction of your compatriot Martin Luther, who,
having overthrown Catholic theology, at once set about,
with excommunication and anathema, the foundation of a
Protestant theology. For the last three centuries Germany
has been mainly occupied in undoing Luther’s shoddy
work; do not let us leave humanity with a similar mess to
clear up as a result of our efforts. I applaud with all my
heart your thought of bringing all opinions to light; let us
carry on a good and loyal polemic; let us give the world
an example of learned and far-sighted tolerance, but let us
not, merely because we are at the head of a movement,
make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not
pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the
religion of logic, the religion of reason. Let us gather
together and encourage all protests, let us brand all
exclusiveness, all mysticism; let us never regard a
question as exhausted, and when we have used our last
argument, let us begin again, if need be, with eloquence
and irony. On that condition, I will gladly enter your
association. Otherwise — no!

I have also some observations to make on this phrase of
your letter: *at the moment of action*. Perhaps you still retain
the opinion that no reform is at present possible without
a *coup de main*, without what was formerly called a
revolution and is really nothing but a shock. That opinion,
which I understand, which I excuse, and would willingly
discuss, having myself shared it for a long time, my most
recent studies have made me abandon completely. I
believe we have no need of it in order to succeed; and that
consequently we should not put forward *revolutionary
action* as a means of social reform, because that pretended
means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness,
in brief, a contradiction. I myself put the problem in this
way: *to bring about the return to society, by an economic
combination, of the wealth which was withdrawn from society
by another economic combination*. In other words, through
Political Economy to turn the theory of Property against
Property in such a way as to engender what you German
socialists call *community* and what I will limit myself for
the moment to calling *liberty* or *equality*. But I believe that I
know the means of solving this problem with only a short
delay; I would therefore prefer to burn Property by a slow
fire, rather than give it new strength by making a St
Bartholomew's night of the proprietors...

Your very devoted
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
# On the Jews

Translated by Mitchell Abidor<fnref n="13" />

December 26, 1847: Jews. Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Demand its expulsion. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It's not without cause that the Christians called them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. H. Heine, A. Weill, and others are nothing but secret spies; Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, Fould, wicked, bilious, envious, bitter, etc. etc. beings who hate us. The Jew must disappear by steel or by fusion or by expulsion. Tolerate the elderly who no longer have children. Work to be done – What the peoples of the Middle Ages hated instinctively I hate upon reflection and irrevocably. The hatred of the Jew like the

<footnote n="13">¹³ Translator's note: Though some twentieth century writers have maintained that Proudhon was not an anti-Semite, we find in his notebooks proof of the contrary. In this selection from his notebooks Proudhon's anti-Semitism goes far beyond that of Marx at approximately the same time, calling not for the end of what Jews represent, i.e., capitalism, but of the Jews as a people. Proudhon's privately expressed thoughts were elaborated on in the same year as this entry by his follower Alphonse Toussenel in his "Les Juifs, Rois de l'Epoque," The Jews, Kings of the Era. After reading the passage translated here it can come as no surprise that the founder of the royalist group Action Française, the Jew-hater Charles Maurras, drew inspiration from Proudhon.</footnote>
hatred of the English should be our first article of political
faith. Moreover, the abolition of Judaism will come with
the abolition of other religions. Begin by not allocating
funds to the clergy and leaving this to religious offerings.
– And then, a short while later, abolish the religion.
Letter to Jeanne Deroin

Madame.

You have understood me perfectly: what I pursue under
the name of the abolition of usury and of property, is the
restoration of the family, it is the advent of the man-king,
and of the woman-queen.

Until this great reform is accomplished, men and women
will not love one another: cupidity will infect their union,
and behind cupidity comes brutality of the senses.
Libertinism replaces love, and murder, finally, takes its
place at the domestic hearth, and chases off devotion,
sanctity and decency. I say nothing to you of my religious
opinions: that is too grueling and difficult a text. But what
does that matter to you, if I want everything that is,
according to you, desired by the Divinity?

But it is not enough, Madame, to discuss these things: it is
necessary to put them into practice, and do what will not
be done by the men on whom the destinies of France, at
this moment, depend.

Poverty increases, winter approaches and if we do not
bring about a quick and efficacious remedy for the
growing pauperism, the industrial and financial disorder,
we run the risk, in a few months, of finding ourselves like
the castaways of the Medusa, obliged to commandeer
everything, put ourselves on rations and live in
community until we decide to live in liberty, equality and
fraternity, under the law of labor and devotion.

Thus it is appropriate that the citizens, both male and
female, who take to heart the interests of the People and
the Revolution, seek to put themselves in a position to
oppose these calamitous times, to which I still do not see
an end several months from now and which will
inevitable worsen

We must, in a word, organize, if not labor, at least aid and
charity.

Let women sustain one another, let them create relief
funds; in addition, let them continue to labor, even at a
reduced price, for it will be better to gain five cents than to
do nothing; let them solicit the return of work by this
decline; finally, let them engage in a sort of mutual
and fraternelle association until we escape from poverty.

Let us not remain spectators to the fire that consumes us:
let us work at the pumps, and try to extinguish the flames.
Let us resign ourselves for awhile to a sort of division of
goods; but at the same time let us strive to use our time,
and, since one part of our brethren must be fed by the
other, let us occupy the first with something, make it labor,
even if that labor must be given for nothing.

It is with this thought, Madame, that I would pray you to
welcome the visit that I have enlisted a poor widow, Mme
Gueyffier, to make you: being absolutely unable to occupy
myself with private distresses, in this moment when I
have to uphold the question of the general poverty, and to
defend myself against the enemies of the Republic and
their cowardly auxiliaries.

I am, Madame, your very humble servant.

P.-J. PROUDHON.

P. S. – Madame, I would receive with pleasures any communications that you would make to me in the name of the meeting where you preside regarding the organization of mutual aid that I have proposed to you. It is by organization, by labor, that we will vanquish the enemy. To date, we have spoken too much, but we have done nothing.

Mme Jeanne Dervin,

Rue Miromesnil, 4.
The Malthusians, the Representatives of
the People

Dr. Malthus, an economist, an Englishman, once wrote the
following words:

"A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders..."<fnref n="14" />

As a consequence of this great principle, Malthus recommends, with the most terrible threats, every man who has neither labor nor income upon which to live to take himself away, or at any rate to have no more children. A family, — that is, love, — like bread, is forbidden such a man by Malthus.

Dr. Malthus was, while living, a minister of the Holy Gospel, a mild-mannered philanthropist, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen, believing in God us firmly as any man in France. He died (heaven grant him peace) in

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Tucker supplies a slightly different version of this passage, having translated Proudhon's quotation of Joseph Garnier's French translation of Malthus back into English. This passage, which Malthus struck from subsequent editions of his *Essay on the Principle of Population*, appears in the 1803 edition. From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
1834. It may be said that he was the first, without doubt, to reduce to absurdity all political economy, and state the great revolutionary question, the question between labor and capital. With us, whose faith in Providence still lives, in spite of the century's indifference, it is proverbial — and herein consists the difference between the English and ourselves — that “everybody must live.” And our people, in saying this, think themselves as truly Christian, as conservative of good morals and the family, as the late Malthus.

Now, what the people say in France, the economists deny; the lawyers and the litterateurs deny; the Church, which pretends to be Christian, and also Gallican, denies; the press denies; the large proprietors deny; the government which endeavors to represent them, denies.

The press, the government, the Church, literature, economy, wealth, — everything in France has become English; everything is Malthusian. It is in the name of God and his holy providence, in the name of morality, in the name of the sacred interests of the family, that they maintain that there is not room in the country for all the children of the country, and that they warn our women to be less prolific. In France, in spite of the desire of the people, in spite of the national belief, eating and drinking are regarded as privileges, labor a privilege, family a privilege, country a privilege.

M. Antony Thouret said recently that property, without which there is neither country, nor family, nor labor, nor morality, would be irreproachable as soon as it should cease to be a privilege; a clear statement of the fact that, to
abolish all the privileges which, so to speak, exclude a
portion of the people from the law, from humanity, we
must abolish, first of all, the fundamental privilege, and
change the constitution of property.

M. A. Thouret, in saying that, agreed with us and with the
people. The State, the press, political economy, do not
view the matter in that light; they agree in the hope that
property, without which, as M. Thouret says, there is no
labor, no family, no Republic, may remain what it always
has been, — a privilege.

All that has been done, said, and printed today and for the
last twenty years, has been done, said, and printed in
consequence of the theory of Malthus.

The theory of Malthus is the theory of political murder; of
murder from motives of philanthropy and for love of God.
There are too many people in the world; that is the first
article of faith of all those who, at present, in the name of
the people, reign and govern. It is for this reason that they
use their best efforts to diminish the population. Those
who best acquit themselves of this duty, who practice
with piety, courage, and fraternity the maxims of Malthus,
are good citizens, religious men, those who protest against
such conduct are anarchists, socialists, atheists.

That the Revolution of February was the result of this
protest constitutes its inexpiable crime. Consequently, it
shall be taught its business, this Revolution which
promised that all should live. The original, indelible stain
on this Republic is that the people have pronounced it
anti-Malthusian. That is why the Republic is so especially
obnoxious to those who were, and would become again,
the toadies and accomplices of kings — *grand eaters of men*,
as Cato called them. They would make monarchy of your
Republic; they would devour its children.

There lies the whole secret of the sufferings, the agitations,
and the contradictions of our country.

The economists are the first among us, by an
inconceivable blasphemy, to establish as a providential
dogma the theory of Malthus. I do not reproach them;
neither do I abuse them. On this point the economists act
in good faith and from the best intentions in the world.
They would like nothing better than to make the human
race happy; but they cannot conceive how, without some
sort of an organization of homicide, a balance between
population and production can exist.

Ask the Academy of Moral Sciences. One of its most
honorable members, whose name I will not call, — though
he is proud of his opinions, as every honest man should
be, — being the prefect of I know not which department,
saw fit one day, in a proclamation, to advise those within
his province to have thenceforth fewer children by their
wives. Great was the scandal among the priests and
gossips, who looked upon this academic morality as the
morality of swine! The *savant* of whom I speak was none
the less, like all his fellows, a zealous defender of the
family and of morality; but, he observed with Malthus, at
the banquet of Nature there is not room for all.

M. Thiers, also a member of the Academy of Moral
Sciences, lately told the committee on finance that, if he
were minister, he would confine himself to *courageously and stoically passing through the crisis*, devoting himself to the expenses of his budget, enforcing a respect for order, and carefully guarding against every financial innovation, every socialistic idea, — especially such as the right to labor, — as well as every revolutionary expedient. And the whole committee applauded him.

In giving this declaration of the celebrated historian and statesman, I have no desire to accuse his intentions. In the present state of the public mind, I should succeed only in serving the ambition of M. Thiers, if he has any left. What I wish to call attention to is that M. Thiers, in expressing himself in this wise, testified, perhaps unconsciously, to his faith in Malthus.

Mark this well, I pray you. There are two millions, four millions of men who will die of misery and hunger, if some means be not found of giving them work. This is a great misfortune, surely, and we are the first to lament it, the Malthusians tell you; but what is to be done? It is better that four millions of men should die than that privilege should be compromised; it is not the fault of capital, if labor is idle; at the banquet of credit there is not room for all.

They are courageous, they are stoical, these statesmen of the school of Malthus, when it is a matter of sacrificing workers by the millions. Thou hast killed the poor man, said the prophet Elias to the king of Israel, and then thou hast taken away his inheritance. *Occidisti et possedisti*.<fnref n="15" /> To-day we must reverse the phrase, and say to

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ 1 Kings 21:19. From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
those who possess and govern: You have the privilege of labor, the privilege of credit, the privilege of property, as M. Thouret says; and it is because you do not wish to be deprived of these privileges, that you shed the blood of the poor like water: *Possedisti et occidisti!*

And the people, under the pressure of bayonets, are being eaten slowly; they die without a sigh or a murmur; the sacrifice is effected in silence. Courage, workers! sustain each other: Providence will finally conquer fate. Courage! the condition of your fathers, the soldiers of the republic, at the sieges of Genes and Mayence, was even worse than yours.

M. Leon Faucher, in contending that journals should be forced to furnish securities and in favoring the maintenance of taxes on the press, reasoned also after the manner of Malthus. The serious journal, said he, the journal that deserves consideration and esteem, is that which is established on a capital of from four to five hundred thousand francs. The journalist who has only his pen is like the worker who has only his arms. If he can find no market for his services or get no credit with which to carry on his enterprise, it is a sign that public opinion is against him; he has not the least right to address the country: at the banquet of public life there is not room for all.

Listen to Lacordaire, that light of the Church, that chosen vessel of Catholicism.<fnref n="16" /> He will tell you that socialism is

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Abbé Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861), who, together with Lamennais, was one of the leading lights of nineteenth-century</footnote>
antichrist. And why is socialism antichrist? Because socialism is the enemy of Malthus, whereas Catholicism, by a final transformation, has become Malthusian.

The gospel tells us, cries the priest, that there will always be poor people, *Pauperes semper habebitis vobsicum*,<fnref n="17" /> and that property, consequently in so far as it is a privilege and makes poor people, is sacred. Poverty is necessary to the exercise of evangelical charity; at the banquet of this world here below there cannot be room for all.

He feigns ignorance, the infidel, of the fact that *poverty*, in Biblical language, signified every sort of affliction and pain, not hard times and the condition of the proletarian. And how could he who went up and down Judea crying, *Woe to the rich!* be understood differently? In the thought of Jesus Christ, woe to the rich means woe to the Malthusians.

If Christ were living today, he would say to Lacordaire and his companions: "You are of the race of those who, in all ages, have shed the blood of the just, from Abel unto Zacharias. Your law is not my law; your God is not my God!..." And the Lacordaires would crucify Christ as a seditious person and an atheist

Almost the whole of journalism is infected with the same ideas. Let *Le National*, for example, tell us whether it has

Catholic liberalism. From Andy Carloff.

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Loose quotation of the Latin version of the famous phrase repeated, with variations, in Matthew 26:11, Mark 14:7, John 12:8. From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
not always believed, whether it does not still believe, that pauperism is a permanent element of civilization; that the enslavement of one portion of humanity is necessary to the glory of another; that those who maintain the contrary are dangerous dreamers who deserve to be shot; that such is the basis of the State. For, if this be not the secret thought of *Le National*, if *Le National* sincerely and resolutely desires the emancipation of workers, why these anathemas against, why this anger with, the genuine socialists — those who, for ten and twenty years, have demanded this emancipation?

Further, let the Bohemian of literature, today the myrmidons of Journalism, paid slanderers, courtiers of the privileged classes, eulogists of all the vises, parasites living upon other parasites, who prate so much of God only to dissemble their materialism, of the family only to conceal their adulteries, and whom we shall see, out of disgust for marriage, caressing monkeys when Malthusian women fail, — let these, I say, publish their economic creed, in order that the people may know them.

*Faites des filles, nous les aimons*, — beget girls, we love them, — sing these wretches, parodying the poet. But abstain from begetting boys; at the banquet of sensualism there is not room for all.

The government was inspired by Malthus when, having a hundred thousand workers at its disposal, to whom it gave gratuitous support, it refused to employ them at useful labor, and when, after the civil war, it asked that a law be passed for their transportation. With the expenses of the pretended national workshops, with the costs of
war, lawsuits, imprisonment, and transportation, it might
have given the insurgents six months income, and thus
changed our whole economic system. But labor is a
monopoly; the government does not wish revolutionary
industry to compete with privileged industry; at the
workbench of the nation there is not room for all.

Large industrial establishments ruin small ones; that is the
law of capital, that is Malthus.

Wholesale trade gradually swallows the retail; again
Malthus.

Large estates encroach upon and consolidate the smallest
possessions: still Malthus.

Soon one half of the people will say to the other:

> The earth and its products are my property.

> Industry and its products are my property.

> Commerce and transportation are my property.

> The State is my property.

> You who possess neither reserve nor property, who hold
> no public offices and whose labor is useless to us, TAKE
> YOURSELVES AWAY! You have really no business on the
> earth; beneath the sunshine of the Republic there is not
> room for all.
Who will tell me that the right to labor and to live is not
the whole of the Revolution?

Who will tell me that the principle of Malthus is not the
whole of the Counter-Revolution?

And it is for having published such things as these, — for
having exposed the evil boldly and sought the remedy in
good faith, that speech has been forbidden me by the
government, the government that represents the
Revolution!

That is why I have been deluged with the slanders,
treacheries, cowardice, hypocrisy, outrages, desertions,
and failings of all those who hate or love the people! That
is why I have been given over; for a whole month, to the
mercy of the jackals of the press and the screech-owls of
the platform! Never was a man, either in the past or in the
present, the object of so much execration as I have become,
for the simple reason that I wage war upon cannibals.

To slander one who could not reply was to shoot a
prisoner. Malthusian carnivora, I discover you there! Go
on, then; we have more than one account to settle yet. And,
if calumny is not sufficient for you, use iron and lead. You
may kill me; no one can avoid his fate, and I am at your
discretion. But you shall not conquer me; you shall never
persuade the people, while I live and hold a pen, that,
with the exception of yourselves, there is one too many on
the earth. I swear it before the people and in the name of
the Republic!
# Toast to the Revolution

October 17, 1848

Citizens,

When our friends of the democratic republic, apprehensive of our ideas and our inclinations, cry out against the qualification of *socialist* which we add to that of *democrat*, of what do they reproach us? — They reproach us for not being revolutionaries.

Let us see then if they or we are in the tradition; whether they or we have the true revolutionary practice.

And when our adversaries of the middle class, concerned for their privileges, pour upon us calumny and insult, what is the pretext of their charges? It is that we want to totally destroy property, the family, and civilization.

Let us see then again whether we or our adversaries better deserve the title of conservatives.

Revolutions are the successive manifestation of justice in human history. — It is for this reason that all revolutions have their origins in a previous revolution.

Whoever talks about revolution necessarily talks about progress, but just as necessarily about *conservation*. From this it follows that revolution is always in history
and that, strictly speaking, there are not several revolutions, but only one permanent revolution.

The revolution, eighteen centuries ago, called itself the gospel, the Good News. Its fundamental dogma was the *Unity of God*; its motto, the *equality of all men before God*. Ancient slavery rested on the antagonism and inequality of gods, which represented the relative inferiority of races, in the state of war. Christianity created the rights of peoples, the brotherhood of nations; it abolished simultaneously idolatry and slavery.

Certainly no one denies today that the Christians, revolutionaries who fought by testimony and by martyrdom, were men of progress. They were also conservatives.

The polytheist initiation, after civilizing the first humans, after converting these men of the woods, *sylvestres homine*, as the poet says, into men of the towns, became itself, through sensualism and privilege, a principle of corruption and enslavement. Humanity was lost, when it was saved by the Christ, who received for that glorious mission the double title of *Savior* and *Redeemer*, or as we put it in our political language, conservative and revolutionary.

That was the character of the first and greatest of revolutions. It renewed the world, and in renewing it conserved it.

But, supernatural and spiritual as it was, that revolution nevertheless only expressed the more material side of
justice, the enfranchisement of bodies and the abolition of
slavery. Established on faith, it left thought enslaved; it
was not sufficient for the emancipation of man, who is
body and spirit, matter and intelligence. It called for
another revolution. A thousand years after the coming of
Christ, a new upheaval began, within the religion the first
revolution founded, a prelude to new progress.
Scholasticism carried within it, along with the authority of
the Church and the scripture, the authority of reason! In
about the 16th century, the revolution burst out.

The revolution, in that epoch, without abandoning its first
given, took another name, which was already celebrated.
It called itself philosophy. Its dogma was *the liberty of
reason*, and its motto, which follows from that, was *the
equality of all before reason*.

Here then is man declared inviolable and free in his
double essence, as soul and as body. Was this progress?
Who but a tyrant could deny it? Was it an act of
conservation? The question does not even merit a
response.

The destiny of man, a wise man once said, is to
contemplate the works of God. Having known God in his
heart, by faith, the time had come for man to know him
with his reason. The Gospel had been for man like a
primary education; now grown to adulthood, he needed a
higher teaching, lest he stagnate in idiocy and the
servitude that follows it.

In this way, the likes of Galileo, Arnaud de Bresce,
Giordano Bruno, Descartes, Luther — all that elite of
thinkers, wise men and artists, who shone in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries as great revolutionaries — were at the same time the conservatives of society, the heralds of civilization. They continued, in opposition to the representatives of Christ, the movement started by Christ, and for it suffered no lack of persecution and martyrdom!

Here was the second great revolution, the second great manifestation of justice. It too renewed the world — and saved it.

But philosophy, adding its conquests to those of the Gospel, did not fulfill the program of that eternal justice. Liberty, called forth from the heart of God by Christ, was still only individual: it had to be established in the tribunal. Conscience was needed to make it pass into law.

About the middle of the last century then a new development commenced and, as the first revolution had been religious and the second philosophical, the third revolution was political. It called itself the social contract.

It took for its dogma *the sovereignty of the people*: it was the counterpart of the Christian dogma of *the unity of god*.

Its motto was *equality before the law*, the corollary of those which it had previously inscribed on its flag: equality before God and equality before reason.

Thus, with each revolution, liberty appeared to us always as the instrument of justice, with equality as its criterion. The third term — the aim of justice, the goal it always pursues, the end it approaches — is brotherhood.
Never let us lose sight of this order of revolutionary
development. History testifies that brotherhood, supreme
end of revolutions, does not impose itself. It has as
conditions first liberty, then equality. It is as if just said to
us all: Men, be free; citizens, become equal; brothers,
embrace one another.

Who dares deny that the revolution undertaken sixty
years ago by our fathers, and which the heroic memory
makes our hearts beat with such force that we almost
forget our own sense of duty — who denies, I ask, that
that revolution was a progress? Nobody. Very well, then.
But was it not both progressive and conservative? Could
society have survived with its time-worn despotism, its
degraded nobility, its corrupt clergy, with its egotistical
and undisciplined parliament, so given to intrigue, with a
people in rags, a race which can be exploited at will?

Is it necessary to blot out the sun, in order to make the
case? The revolution of '89 was the salvation of humanity;
it is for that reason that it deserves the title of revolution.

But, citizens, if our fathers have done much for liberty and
fraternity, and have even more profoundly opened up the
road of brotherhood, they have left it to us to do even
more.

Justice did not speak its last word in '89, and who knows
when it will speak it?

Are we not witnesses, our generation of 1848, to a
corruption worse than that of the worst days of history, to
a misery comparable to that of feudal times, an oppression
of spirit and of conscience, and a degradation of all
human faculties, which exceeds all that was seen in the
epochs of most dreadful cruelty? Of what use are the
conquests of the past, of religion and philosophy, and the
constitutions and codes, when in virtue of the same rights
that are guaranteed to us by those constitutions and codes,
we find ourselves dispossessed of nature,
excommunicated from the human species? What is
politics, when we lack bread, when even the work which
might give bread is taken from us? What to us is the
freedom to go or to become, the liberty to think or not to
think, the guarantees of the law, and the spectacles of the
marvels of civilization? What is the meager education
which is given to us, when by the withdrawal of all those
objects on which we might practice human activity, we are
ourselves plunged into an absolute void; when to the
appeal of our senses, our hearts, and our reason, the
universe and civilization reply: *Néant! Nothing!*

Citizens, I swear it by Christ and by our fathers! Justice
has sounded its fourth hour, and misfortune to those who
have not heard the call!

— Revolution of 1848, what do you call yourself?

— I am the *right to work!*

— What is your flag?

— *Association!*

— And your motto?
— *Equality before fortune!*

— Where are you taking us?

— *To Brotherhood!*

— *Salut* to you, Revolution! I will serve you as I have served God, as I have served Philosophy and Liberty, with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my intelligence and my courage, and will have no other sovereign and ruler than you!

Thus the revolution, having been by turns religious, philosophical and political, has become economic. And like all its predecessors it brings us nothing less than a contradiction of the past, a sort of reversal of the established order! Without this complete reversal of principles and beliefs, there is no revolution; there is only mystification. Let us continue to interrogate history, citizens.

Within the empire of polytheism, slavery had established and perpetuated itself in the name of what principle? In the name of religion. — Christ appeared, and slavery was abolished, precisely in the name of religion.

Christianity, in its turn, made reason subject to faith; philosophy reversed that order, and subordinated faith to reason.

Feudalism, in the name of politics, controlled everything, subjecting the laborer to the bourgeois, the bourgeois to
the noble, the noble to the king, the king to the priest, and
the priest to a dead letter. — In the name of politics
again, '89 subjected everyone to the law, and recognized
among men only citizens.

Today labor is at the discretion of capital. Well, then! The
revolution tells you to change that order. It is time for
capital to recognize the predominance of labor, for the tool
to put itself at the disposition of the worker.

Such is this revolution, which has suffered sarcasm,
calumny and persecution, just like any other. But, like the
others, the Revolution of 1848 becomes more fertile by the
blood of its martyrs. *Sanguis martyrun, semen christianorum!* exclaimed one of the greatest
revolutionaries of times past, the indomitable Tertullien.
Blood of republicans, seed of republicans.

Who does not dare to acknowledge this faith, sealed with
the blood of our brothers, is not a revolutionary. The
failure is an infidelity. He who dissembles regarding it is a
renegade. To separate the Republic from socialism is to
willfully confuse the freedom of mind and spirit with the
slavery of the senses, the exercise of political rights with
the deprivation of civil rights. It is contradictory, absurd.

Here, citizens, is the genealogy of social ideas: are we, or
are we not, in the revolutionary tradition? It is a question
of knowing if at present we are also engaged in
revolutionary practice, if, like our fathers, we will be at
once men of conservation and of progress, because it is
only by this double title that we will be men of revolution.
We have the revolutionary principle, the revolutionary dogma, the revolutionary motto. What is it that we lack in order to accomplish the work entrusted to our hands by Providence? One thing only: revolutionary practice!

But what is that practice which distinguishes the epochs of revolution from ordinary times?

What constitutes revolutionary practice is that it no longer proceeds by technicality and diversity, or by imperscriptible transitions, but by simplifications and enjambments. It passes over, in broad equations, those middle terms which suggest the spirit of routine, whose application should normally have been made during the former time, but that the selfishness of the privilege or the inertia of the governments pushed back.

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 24, that 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 payments for
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 counselors 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 practiced. Louis XVI set himself to haggle and quibble over everything, so much and so well, that they revolution, growing impatient, swept him away!

Here then is what I mean, today, by revolutionary practice.

The revolution of February proclaimed *the right to work*, the predominance of labor over capital.

On the basis of that principle, I say that before overriding all reforms, we have to occupy ourselves with a generalizing institution, which expresses, on all the points of social economy, the subordination of capital to labor; which, in lieu of making, as it has been, the capitalist the sponsor of the laborer, makes the laborer the arbiter and commander of the capitalist, an institution which changes the relation between the two great economic powers, labor and property, and from which follows, consequently, all other reforms.

Will it then be revolutionary to propose an agricultural bank serving, as always, the monopolizers 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 millions,
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
subsidize a trial phalantery?

Will it be the speech or act 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 the
powers will be divided or only the 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 good use, to have
a soldier or a poet; if the new sovereign will be named by
the people or by the representatives, if the ministry
of reaction which goes out merits more confidence than
the ministry of *conciliation* which comes, if the Republic
will be blue, white, red, or tricolor?

Will it be revolutionary, when it is a question of returning
to labor 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 organize 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 centralization 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 Revolution of
February 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 maneuvers 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
you discipline, that you are politicians. From now on you
will prove, by your acts, that you are organizers. 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 civilization and advance humanity!
# God is Evil, Man is Free

Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur

## Introduction by Shawn P. Wilbur

Proudhon was fond of scandal and provocation — and it got him, and his friends, into hot water. In his *System of Economic Contradictions*, he wrapped his already provocative thesis about the evolution of institutions around a scandalous narrative about “the hypothesis of God.” Proudhon was fascinated with Christianity, and wrote about it from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of tones, but he is probably best remembered for writings like his “Hymn to Satan” and the final chapter of the first volumes of the *Economic Contradictions*, where he worked himself up to a sort of declaration of war against the very idea of God:

> "If God did not exist" — it is Voltaire, the enemy of religions, who says so, — "it would be necessary to invent him." Why? "Because," adds the same Voltaire, "if I were dealing with an atheist prince whose interest it might be to have me pounded in a mortar, I am very sure that I should be pounded." Strange aberration of a great mind! And if you were dealing with a pious prince, whose confessor, speaking in the name of God, should command that you be burned alive, would you not be very sure of being burned also? Do you forget, then, anti-Christ, the Inquisition, and the Saint Bartholomew, and the stakes of Vanini
and Bruno, and the tortures of Galileo, and the martyrdom of so many free thinkers? Do not try to distinguish here between use and abuse: for I should reply to you that from a mystical and supernatural principle, from a principle which embraces everything, which explains everything, which justifies everything, such as the idea of God, all consequences are legitimate, and that the zeal of the believer is the sole judge of their propriety.

"I once believed," says Rousseau, "that it was possible to be an honest man and dispense with God; but I have recovered from that error." Fundamentally the same argument as that of Voltaire, the same justification of intolerance: Man does good and abstains from evil only through consideration of a Providence which watches over him; a curse on those who deny its existence! And, to cap the climax of absurdity, the man who thus seeks for our virtue the sanction of a Divinity who rewards and punishes is the same man who teaches the native goodness of man as a religious dogma.

And for my part I say: The first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to our nature, and we do not depend at all upon his authority. We arrive at knowledge in spite of him, at comfort in spite of him, at society in spite of him; every step we take in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity.
Let it no longer be said that the ways of God are
impenetrable. We have penetrated these ways, and
there we have read in letters of blood the proofs of
God's impotence, if not of his malevolence. My
reason, long humiliated, is gradually rising to a level
with the infinite; with time it will discover all that its
inexperience hides from it; with time I shall be less
and less a worker of misfortune, and by the light that
I shall have acquired, by the perfection of my liberty,
I shall purify myself, idealize my being, and become
the chief of creation, the equal of God. A single
moment of disorder which the Omnipotent might
have prevented and did not prevent accuses his
Providence and shows him lacking in wisdom; the
slightest progress which man, ignorant, abandoned,
and betrayed, makes towards good honors him
immeasurably. By what right should God still say to
me: Be holy, for I am holy? Lying spirit, I will answer
him, imbecile God, your reign is over; look to the
beasts for other victims. I know that I am not holy
and never can become so; and how could you be holy,
if I resemble you? Eternal father, Jupiter or Jehovah,
we have learned to know you; you are, you were, you
ever will be, the jealous rival of Adam, the tyrant of
Prometheus.

So I do not fall into the sophism refuted by St. Paul,
when he forbids the vase to say to the potter: Why
hast thou made me thus? I do not blame the author of
things for having made me an inharmonious creature,
an incoherent assemblage; I could exist only in such a
condition. I content myself with crying out to him:
Why do you deceive me? Why, by your silence, have
you unchained egoism within me? Why have you
submitted me to the torture of universal doubt by the
bitter illusion of the antagonistic ideas which you
have put in my mind? Doubt of truth, doubt of justice,
doubt of my conscience and my liberty, doubt of
yourself, O God! and, as a result of this doubt,
necessity of war with myself and with my neighbor!
That, supreme Father, is what you have done for our
happiness and your glory; such, from the beginning,
have been your will and your government; such the
bread, kneaded in blood and tears, upon which you
have fed us. The sins which we ask you to forgive,
you caused us to commit; the traps from which we
implore you to deliver us, you set for us; and the
Satan who besets us is yourself.

You triumphed, and no one dared to contradict you,
when, after having tormented in his body and in his
soul the righteous Job, a type of our humanity, you
insulted his candid piety, his prudent and respectful
ignorance. We were as naught before your invisible
majesty, to whom we gave the sky for a canopy and
the earth for a footstool. And now here you are
dethroned and broken. Your name, so long the last
word of the savant, the sanction of the judge, the
force of the prince, the hope of the poor, the refuge of
the repentant sinner, — this incommunicable name, I
say, henceforth an object of contempt and curses,
shall be a hissing among men. For God is stupidity
and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God
is tyranny and misery; God is evil. As long as
humanity shall bend before an altar, humanity, the
slave of kings and priests, will be condemned; as long
as one man, in the name of God, shall receive the oath
of another man, society will be founded on perjury;
peace and love will be banished from among mortals.
God, take yourself away! for, from this day forth,
cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with
hand extended to heaven, that you are only the
tormentor of my reason, the specter of my conscience.

Naturally, this riled folks up. And Proudhon wasn't the
only to feel the heat. The perception was that his friends,
and socialism in general, were getting a black eye from his
provocative writing. So he was under some pressure to
clear things up. But Proudhon wasn't always real good at
giving the people what they wanted, so his reply (le Peuple,
May 6, 1849) may not have exactly smoothed things over.
But it's a lot of fun...

God is Evil

My friends beg me, in the interest of our common ideas,
and to remove any pretext for slander, to make my
opinion known on the divinity and Providence, and at the
same time to explain certain passages from the *System of
[Economic] Contradictions*, that the reactionary tartuffes
have for a year constantly exploited against socialism with
simple and credulous souls.

I surrender to their solicitations. I will even say that if I
have for so long let the *Constitutionnel* and its consorts
make of me a Vanini even more ferocious that the original,
attacking at once God and the Devil, — the family and
property, — I had my reasons for that. First I wanted to
lead certain schools, up to then considered enemies, to
confess themselves their perfect resemblance; I wanted, in
a word, it to be demonstrated to the eyes of all that
doctrinaire and Jesuit, it is all one. Also, as a
metaphysician by profession, I was not unhappy to take
advantage of the circumstances in order to judge, by a
decisive test, where our century really is with regard to
religion. It is not given to everyone to engage in such
experiments in social psychology, and to examine, as I
have for six months, public reason. Few men are in a
position for that; and besides, it is too costly. Thus I was
curious to know if, among a people such as our own, who,
for two centuries, have banished religious disputes from
among them; who have posited in principle the absolute
liberty of conscience, that is to say the most determined
skepticism; who, through the mouthpiece of the present
head of the ministry, M. Odilon-Barrot, have put God and
religion beyond the law; who salary all the faiths existing
in their territory, while waiting for them to fade away;
among a people where one no longer swears but
by *honor* and *conscience*; where education, justice, power,
literature and art, everything, finally, is religious
indifference, if not atheism, the minds of the citizens were
on a level with the institutions.

There is, I said to myself, a man who exactly fulfills his
civic duties; who, above all things, respects the family of
his fellow man; who keeps himself pure for the good of
others; who makes a rule of never disguising his thoughts,
even at the risk of his respect; who has sworn himself to
the improvement of his fellows; well! What could it matter
to the people to know if this man is or is not an atheist?
How could that modify their opinion? Especially if one
considers that the word *atheist* is as poorly defined, as obscure, as the word *God*, of which it is the negation.

For a mind enamored with philosophical and social trifles, the question deserves to be examined deeply.

Now, I have seen that, thank God! — if you’ll excuse the expression — the bulk of the people in France have been stirred very little by the transcendent interests of the supreme being, and that there remains hardly anyone but the *Constitutionnel* and the Jesuits, M. Thiers and M. de Montalembert, to take up the cause of the divinity. Here, in order to conceal nothing, is all that I gathered from my researches.

1. Four petitions have arrived at the National Assembly, holding thirty to forty signatures, and demanding my expulsion from the Assembly for cause of atheism. As if I did not have the right to be atheist!... If the National Assembly ever occupies itself with these petitions, my honorable colleagues will laugh about it like the gods.

2. I have received two anonymous letters in which I have been warned, with plenty of biblical citations in support, that if I continue, as I have, to blaspheme, the heavens will strike me. — OK! I say, If the heavens intervene, I am a goner!

3. Finally, here is the Constitutionnel, number of May 3, which tells me to beware, that *if I push Providence too far, she will chastise me*, delivering me up to the delirium of my pride. — Indeed, merely to be
occupied with her, that is good reason to become mad.

That is all that I have been able to gather of the indignation of the devout; the rest, the immense majority of the French people, jeer at the Providence of Constitutionnel and of the good God of the Jesuits, like an ass with a fistful of nettles.

However, it is time that the comedy finishes; and, since my friends wish it and our colleagues in socialism desire it, I will address to them my profession of faith. God and the people pardon me! What I am going to say is a serious thing; but such is the sacrilegious hypocrisy of my adversaries, that I am almost ashamed of my action, as if I had just taken the holy water.

## Man is Free

There is my first proposition. Liberty is thought; I only translate the *Cogito, ergo sum*, of Descartes. I am free, therefore I am. All the propositions that will follow, follow from that one, with the rigor of a geometric demonstration.

By virtue of his liberty, man adheres to or resists the *divine order*, which is nothing but the order of *nature* delivered to itself.

By his adhesion to the divine order, as by the modifications that it imposes on him, man enters into a share of government of the universe. He becomes himself,
like God, of whom he is the eternal reflection, *creator* and *revealer*; he is a form of the divinity.

All that which does not come to modify the free action of
man falls exclusively under the law of God.

Reciprocally, all that which surpasses the force of nature is
the proper work of the will of man.

God is *eternal* reason; man is *progressive* reason.

These two reasons are necessary to one another; they
complete one another.

Their *agreement* constitutes what I call the government of
Providence.

Providence is not, then, like God and man, whose
convergence it represents, a simple idea; it is a complex
idea. — It is the harmony between the order of nature and
the order of liberty, a thing that the popular proverb
expresses by saying: *Help yourself, heaven will aid you!*

All that man does on encountering the divine law
is *arbitrary*; all that happens without man's knowledge, or
despite it, is a matter of *fatality*.

Depending on whether Humanity is more or
less *autonomous*, that is to say mistress and legislator of
itself; whether its share of initiative is more or less great
and reasoned, and the course of events more or less freed
from the unconscious laws of nature, the amount
of *good* increased or diminished in the world. So that order,
in its highest expression, or, as the ancient philosophers said, the Sovereign Good, results from the perfect accord between the two sovereign powers, God and man, and the extreme wretchedness of their complete scission.

The *progress* in Humanity can then be defined, the incessant struggle of man with nature, eternal opposition, producing and eternal conciliation.

Everywhere where man misunderstood the law of nature where it is lacking, it is inevitable that nature and society fall into dissolution. The perfection of the physical world is linked to the perfection of the social world, and *vise versa*. A God, a world, without humanity, is impossible; a Humanity-God is a contradiction. Confusion, exclusion, there is (the) evil.

God, eternal and infinite, is *everywhere*, Humanity, immortal and progressive, is *somewhere*.

Neither can the divine order be fully absorbed in human law, nor can free will resolve itself entirely in fatalism. These two orders should develop in parallel, sustain one another, harmonize, not blend: the *antinomy* between man and God is unsolvable.

The *absolute* is a conception necessary for the reason, not without reality. In other terms, God, considered as the synthesis of the faculties of the finite and infinite, does not exist. From yet another point of view, man is not the *weakened* image, but the *reversed* image of God.
The *equality* of relations between God and man; the
distinction and the *antagonism* of their natures; the
obligatory *convergence* of their wills; the progress of their
agreement, are the fundamental dogmas of the *democratic*
*and social philosophy*.

Christianity has been the *prophecy*, and socialism is
the *realization*.

*Atheism* is the negation of Providence, as it results from
the agreement between the inflexible laws of nature and
the incessant aspirations of liberty, and as I have
attempted to define it.

Atheism is, in general, the doctrine that, in an infinite
variety of forms, materialism and spiritualism,
Catholicism and paganism, deism, pantheism, idealism,
skepticism and mysticism, etc., denies by turns equality, la
contemporaneity, the necessity of the two powers, God
and man, their distinction, their solidarity, tends
continually either to subordinate one to the other, or to
isolate them, or to resolve them.

God, eternal and inevitable reason, not being conceivable
without man; and man, progressive and free reason, not
being conceivable without God; and that duality being
inconvertible and insoluble, every theory that detracts
from it is atheism.

Thus, atheism is the opposite of *anti-theism*, which is
nothing other than socialism itself, which is to say the
theory Providence, or, as St. Augustine would have said,
the organization of the City of God.
After that, the vulgar who relate everything to a superior
will, to a Supreme Being, of which man will only be the
 creature and plaything, profoundly religious as to
consciousness, is atheist in beliefs. The supremacy of God
is a mutilation of Humanity: it is atheism.

It is as true today to say that the world does not know
God, as it was at the birth of Jesus Christ.

Bossuet, in his *Discours sur l'histoire universelle*, where he
glorifies the creator to the detriment of humanity,
attributing everything to God, and making man the
passive instrument of his designs, Bossuet, without
wanting or knowing it, is an atheist.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an atheist, when, after having
misanthropically denied civilization, that is, the
participation of humanity in the government of the
universe, he prostrates himself before nature and returns
civilized society to the savage state. The philosopher of
Geneva has not seen that the knowledge of God is
progressive like society, that it is really because of the
progress of that society.

And as in every state of civilization the political form has
for point of departure the theological or metaphysical idea,
— as in society *government* is produced according to the
example of religion, — we constantly see the varieties of
atheism become so many varieties of *despotism*.

Thus Bossuet, after having made the theory of divine
absolutism in his *Discours sur l'histoire universelle*, has been
carried by the force of his principle to make the theory of
monarchical absolutism in his *Politique tirée de l'Écriture
sainte*. Thus Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the theoretician of
deism, a kind of compromise between reason and faith,
can be considered as the father of *constitutionalism*, an
arbitrary transaction between monarchy and democracy.
Rousseau is the predecessor of M. Guizot: besides,
the *Social Contract* is only a contradiction on the part of the
philosopher of Geneva. And as deism is the worst of
hypocrisies, constitutionalism is the worst of
governments.

The present society, finally, a society without energy,
without philosophy, without an idea of God or of itself,
living from day to day on some extinct traditions, rejecting
every intervention of free will in its industrial economy,
awaiting its salvation only from the fatality of nature, as it
awaits the sun and rain, is profoundly atheist.

And the most detestable of atheists, although they do not
cease to claim to follow God and Church, are those who
envy the people liberty and knowledge; who make them
march at the points of their bayonets, who preach
resignation and renunciation to them, the respect of
parasitism and submission to the foreigner. — It is those
who say to them: Make love but do not make children,
because you cannot feed them; labor, but save, because
you are not certain that you can always work.

It is time that we knew them, these detractors of divine
and human Providence, who pose as defenders of religion,
and who always deny one of the faces of the infinite; who
award themselves the title of *party of order*, but who have
never organized anything but conspiracies...

The readers of the *Peuple* understand at present why, in a
recent article, where I brought out the deep and incurable
powerlessness of these men, I called their tyrannical
domination the *reign of God*! Aren't they fatalists, indeed?
Don't they oppose every effort of liberty! Don't they want
us to relate it exclusively to the force of things? Don't they
have, as maxims, these simple phrases:

*Laissez faire, laissez passer!*

*Chacun chez soi, chacun pour soi!* [Every one for his home,
every one for himself]

*Qui vivra verra!* [Time will tell!]

and a thousand others, which are so many acts of despair,
so many professions of atheism?

Similarly, the readers of the *Peuple* will understand how,
in a work where I will proceed to the determination of
the socialist dogma by the analysis of the contradictions, I
have successively been able to make the critique of God
and Humanity, and to show that, either by one, or by the
other, the order in society, or what I today call *Providence*,
was impossible: the convergence of both is required. I
showed on that occasion that the God of the deists and of
the Catholics, the God of the *Constitutionnel* and
the *Univers*, is as impossible, as contradictory and
immoral as the man of Rousseau or Lamettrie; that such a
God would be the negation of God himself, and would
deserve to be called *Satan* or *Evil*. In what sense have I failed my principles? How have I offended the intimate belief of Humanity?

One has so often cited, in horror of socialism, that passage of the *Economic Contradictions*, that the readers of the *Peuple* will be grateful to have me explain it. The true ideas could not be spread about too much or too early: it is the remedy against atheism, against superstition, oppression and exploitation in all its forms.

The author of the *Economic Contradictions* begins by positioning himself in the catholic hypothesis, namely that God's reason is like that of man, although infinitely superior, and he addresses this question to his adversaries:

> Would God be guilty if, after having created the world according to the laws of geometry, he had put it into our minds, or even allowed us to believe without fault of our own, that a circle may be square or a square circular, though, in consequence of this false opinion, we should have to suffer an incalculable series of evils? Again, undoubtedly.

> Well! that is exactly what God, the God of Providence, has done in the government of humanity; it is of that that I accuse him. He knew from all eternity — inasmuch as we mortals have discovered it after six thousand years of painful experience — that order in society — that is, liberty, wealth, science — is realized by the reconciliation of opposite ideas which, were each to be taken as absolute in itself, would
precipitate us into an abyss of misery: why did he not
warn us? Why did he not correct our judgment at the
start? Why did he abandon us to our imperfect logic,
especially when our egoism must find a pretext in his
acts of injustice and perfidy? He knew, this jealous
God, that, if he exposed us to the hazards of
experience, we should not find until very late that
security of life which constitutes our entire happiness:
why did he not abridge this long apprenticeship by a
revelation of our own laws? Why, instead of
fascinating us with contradictory opinions, did he not
reverse experience by causing us to reach the
antinomies by the path of analysis of synthetic ideas,
instead of leaving us to painfully clamber up the
steeps of antinomy to synthesis?

The reasoning is this: If God is such as the theists claim,
sovereignly good, fair and provident, how has he not
prevented evil? That is the standard argument of the
materialists. Now what with the conclusion of the author
be? It is here that he completely separates himself from his
precursors.

If, as was formerly thought, the evil from which
humanity suffers arose solely from the imperfection
inevitable in every creature, or better, if this evil were
caused only by the antagonism of the potentialities
and inclinations which constitute our being, and
which reason should teach us to master and guide,
we should have no right to complain. Our condition
being all that it could be, God would be justified.
But, in view of this willful delusion of our minds, a
delusion which it was so easy to dissipate and the
effects of which must be so terrible, where is the
excuse of Providence? Is it not true that grace failed
man here? God, whom faith represents as a tender
father and a prudent master, abandons us to the
fatality of our incomplete conceptions; he digs the
ditch under our feet; he causes us to move blindly:
and then, at every fall, he punishes us as rascals.
What do I say? It seems as if it were in spite of him
that at last, covered with bruises from our journey,
we recognize our road; as if we offended his glory in
becoming more intelligent and free through the trials
which he imposes upon us. What need, then, have we
to continually invoke Divinity, and what have we to
do with those satellites of a Providence which for
sixty centuries, by the aid of a thousand religions, has
deceived and misled us?

What does that argumentation mean? Nothing but this:
Reason, in God, is constructed otherwise than
it *becomes* each day in man; apart from that, God would be
inexcusable. — Note that the author guards himself well
from concluding after the manner of the atheist
materialists: Providence is unjustifiable; thus there is no
God. He says on the contrary: If God and Providence are
not justified, it is because we do not understand them; it is
because God and Providence are different than the priests
and philosophers say that they are.

The discussion continues on this terrain, and soon we see
that not only does reason, in God, not *resemble* that of man,
but that it is precisely the *inverse* of man's intelligence.
When the theists, in order to establish their dogma of Providence, cite the order of nature as a proof, although this argument is only a begging of the question, at least it cannot be said that it involves a contradiction, and that the fact cited bears witness against the hypothesis. In the system of the world, for instance, nothing betrays the smallest anomaly, the slightest lack of foresight, from which any prejudice whatever can be drawn against the idea of a supreme, intelligent, personal motor. In short, though the order of nature does not prove the reality of a Providence, it does not contradict it.

It is a very different thing with the government of humanity. Here order does not appear at the same time as matter; it was not created, as in the system of the world, once and for eternity. It is gradually developed according to an inevitable series of principles and consequences which the human being himself, the being to be ordered, must disengage spontaneously, by his own energy and at the solicitation of experience. No revelation regarding this is given him. Man is submitted at his origin to a pre-established necessity, to an absolute and irresistible order. That this order may be realized, man must discover it; that it may exist, he must have divined it. This labor of invention might be abridged; no one, either in heaven or on earth, will come to man's aid; no one will instruct him. Humanity, for hundreds of centuries, will devour its generations; it will exhaust itself in blood and mire, without the God whom it worships coming once to illuminate its
reason and abridge its time of trial. Where is divine
action here? Where is Providence?

What, then, is the progression of this discussion?

It is: 1° that before an error, invincible and that it was so
easy to dissipate, the inaction of Providence (as the
catholic atheists understand it) is not justified; 2° that from
this it is necessary to conclude, not that God does not exist,
but that we do not understand God; 3° that in fact, the
reason that has presided over the order of nature is
obviously otherwise, the reason that presides over the
development of human destinies is otherwise. Soon we
will see, and that will be the conclusion of the chapter,
that reason in God is different from that in man, not in
its *extent*, but it is *quality*; from which this consequence,
that God and man, necessary to one another,
contemporary with one another, at once inseparable and
irreducible, are in a state of perpetual antagonism, so that
the supreme perfection in the one is adequate to the
supreme infirmity in the other, and that the destiny of
man is, by unceasingly studying Divinity, to resemble it as
little as possible.

Here is the passage where that consequence is found
developed, and which has so scandalized the devout:

And for my part I say: The first duty of man, on
becoming intelligent and free, is to continually hunt
the idea of God out of his mind and conscience. For
God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to our nature,
and we do not depend at all upon his authority. We
arrive at knowledge in spite of him, at comfort in
spite of him, at society in spite of him; every step we
take in advance is a victory in which we crush
Divinity.

Let it no longer be said that the ways of God are
impenetrable. We have penetrated these ways, and
there we have read in letters of blood the proofs of
God's impotence, if not of his malevolence. My
reason, long humiliated, is gradually rising to a level
with the infinite; with time it will discover all that its
inexperience hides from it; with time I shall be less
and less a worker of misfortune, and by the light that
I shall have acquired, by the perfection of my liberty,
I shall purify myself, idealize my being, and become
the chief of creation, the equal of God.

It is impossible to better bring to light, on the one hand,
the progressivity of human reason, and, on the other,
the *immobility* of divine reason. How have some serious
men been able to see, in all that, only an atheistic
declamation, in the style of those by Diderot or the Baron
d'Holbach?

A single moment of disorder which the Omnipotent
might have prevented and did not prevent accuses
his Providence and shows him lacking in wisdom; the
slightest progress which man, ignorant, abandoned,
and betrayed, makes towards good honors him
immeasurably. By what right should God still say to
me: *Be holy, for I am holy?* Lying spirit, I will answer
him, imbecile God, your reign is over; look to the
beasts for other victims. I know that I am not holy
and never can become so; and how could you be holy,
if I resemble you? Eternal father, Jupiter or Jehovah,
we have learned to know you; you are, you were, you
ever will be, the jealous rival of Adam, the tyrant of
Prometheus.

So I do not fall into the sophism refuted by St. Paul,
when he forbids the vase to say to the potter: Why
hast thou made me thus? I do not blame the author of
things for having made me an inharmonious creature,
an incoherent assemblage; I could exist only in such a
condition. I content myself with crying out to him:
Why do you deceive me? Why, by your silence, have
you unchained egoism within me? Why have you
submitted me to the torture of universal doubt by the
bitter illusion of the antagonistic ideas which you
have put in my mind? Doubt of truth, doubt of justice,
doubt of my conscience and my liberty, doubt of
yourself, O God! and, as a result of this doubt,
necessity of war with myself and with my neighbor!

Is there need at present to warn the reader that this does
not really fall on God and Providence? — How, if the
author was atheist, would he reproach God for having
made him *doubt him*, and then to have made him fall into
sin! That would not make sense. Under the names of God
and Providence, it is Catholicism and deism, principles of
Malthusian economy and of the constitutional theory, that
the writer attacks. The catholic papers are not mistaken.
The lines that follow, and which are the paraphrase of the
Sunday oration, could not in that regard leave them in
doubt.
That, supreme Father, is what you have done for our
happiness and your glory (Ad majorent Dei gloriam!);
such, from the beginning, have been your will and
your government; such the bread, kneaded in blood
and tears, upon which you have fed us. The sins
which we ask you to forgive, you caused us to
commit; the traps from which we implore you to
deliver us, you set for us; and the Satan who besets us
is yourself.

On the one hand, capital, authority, wealth, science; on the
other, poverty, obedience, ignorance: that is the fatal
antagonism that it is a question of bringing to an end; that
is Malthusian fatalism, that is Catholicism! That is all that
socialism has sworn to lay waste. Listen to his oath:

You triumphed, and no one dared to contradict you,
when, after having tormented in his body and in his
soul the righteous Job, a type of our humanity, you
insulted his candid piety, his prudent and respectful
ignorance. We were as naught before your invisible
majesty, to whom we gave the sky for a canopy and
the earth for a footstool. And now here you are
dethroned and broken. Your name, so long the last
word of the savant, the sanction of the judge, the
force of the prince, the hope of the poor, the refuge of
the repentant sinner, — this incommunicable name, I
say, henceforth an object of contempt and curses,
shall be a hissing among men. For God is stupidity
and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God
is tyranny and misery; God is evil.
As long as humanity shall bend before an altar,
humanity, the slave of kings and priests, will be
condemned; as long as one man, in the name of God,
shall receive the oath of another man, society will be
founded on perjury; peace and love will be banished
from among mortals. God, take yourself away! for,
from this day forth, cured of your fear and become
wise, I swear, with hand extended to heaven, that you
are only the tormentor of my reason, the specter of
my conscience.

It is useless to prolong this citation, the sense of which can
no longer be in doubt.

A few weeks ago, at the news of the liquidation of the
Bank of the People, the *Constitutionnel* let out a cry of joy
and nearly presented me as a huckster. — I responded by
producing my resources and my accounts: the
Constitutionnel was silent.

Some time after, I published in the *Peuple* a plan for a *Code de la résistance*; and *Constitutionnel* cried out that this was the organization of social disorganization. I then demonstrated that the organization of the resistance, the right of insurrection and conspiracy was the pure spirit of the constitutional system: the *Constitutionnel* was silent.

The other day, I proved, by a review of the year 1848, that
all the evil that has been produced from February 22 until
May 1, 1849, was due to the providential theory, current in
the world of the Catholics and doctrinaires.
The *Constitutionnel* accused me on that occasion of atheism,
and found nothing better, to justify its dire, than to cite a
passage were I had intended precisely to establish that the
true atheism is Catholicism, the religion of the *Univers* and
the Constitutionnel.

Will the *Constitutionnel* deign just once, instead of always
slandering, to seriously discuss the Bank of the People,
doctrinaire theory, and the Catholic faith?
In Connection with Louis Blanc: The
Present Use and Future Possibility of the
State

There is something odd about the fate of the writer of
these lines. No matter how little he may be tempted to
take pride in an all but unprecedented situation, he would
be compelled to believe that, just at the moment,
everybody, excepting only himself, has taken leave of
their senses; or that he himself, through some inexplicable
freak, has gone mad, albeit a madness of the most erudite,
considered, thought out, conscientious, philosophical sort
and (in terms of its principle, its purpose, its deductions)
the sort that conforms most closely to pure science and
common sense.

But God forbid that we should mentally entertain this
presumptuous alternative: and would do better to
investigate whether the contradiction currently existing
between public belief and the views we hold might not be
the effect of some sort of misunderstanding. Every idea
delivered into this world for the very first time, even
though it may be derived from the universal
consciousness, is a deduction from previous tradition and,
at the moment it first appears, is nonetheless regarded, by
the one who articulates it, as his own personal creation
and for that reason he assumes sole responsibility for it.
At which point the notion appears to sit outside of the
general belief and is dubbed a *paradox*. But in next to no
time that paradox is acknowledged; little by little common
sense overtakes it. The idea is absorbed into the public
mind which then grants it credibility and leave to circulate. There is not one of us who has not witnessed such a shift in public consciousness at least once in our lives. So might we not, today, be witnessing just such a shift?

What have we been saying since February? What has *La Voix du Peuple*, founded to carry on the work of its older siblings, *Le Peuple* and *Le Représentant du Peuple*, been saying for the last three months?<fnref n="18" />

That the Revolution in the nineteenth century has a dual purpose:

1. In economic terms, it seeks the utter subordination of capital to labor, the assimilation of worker and capitalist, through democratization of credit, the abolition of interest, and the reduction of all dealings relating to the instruments of labor and products to equal and honest exchange. In this sense, we were the first to point out and remark that henceforth there are but two parties in France: the party of labor and the party of capital.

2. In political terms, the object of the Revolution is to absorb the State into society, which is to say, to put paid to all authority and do away with the entire machinery of government through the abolition of taxes, simplification of administration, and the separate centralization of each and every class of function, or, to put this another way, the organization of universal suffrage. In which regard we

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ All three of these papers were suppressed by the state, as was its next incarnation *Le Peuple de 1850* (Editor)</footnote>
say that now there are but two parties in France: the party of freedom and the party of government.

There, summed up in two articles, you have our declaration of social and political faith.

Yes, the future requires that the worker aspect and the capitalist or proprietor aspect of every producer be made equal and clear. Just as in a bygone age the serf was bound to the land, so today, by an inversion of relationships, capital should be bound to the worker. There you have the most positive pledge and most authentic tendency of the Revolution. Socialism and democracy are of like mind with us on this count.

Yes, freedom and authority must be equal in every citizen: otherwise, there would be no equality and equality would be compromised; and the sovereignty of the people, vested in a small number of representatives, would be a fiction. Here again we have the pledge as well as the irrepressible and irresistible tendency of the Revolution, even though opinion has yet to wake up entirely to the way in which this parity between freedom and authority is to be established. In this respect, let the bourgeoisie look to tradition: let it cast its mind back to its own long exertions against despotism, its deep-seated hatred of government; let those who were the first on February 22nd to bellow *Long live Reform!* and who, even before Ledru-Rollin himself, laid the first foundation stone of universal suffrage, let them answer for us: let them say whether we have truth on our side!
Now, this double pledge, this trend, detected and acknowledged, is what we are still affirming! What is the loftier and definitive conclusion we afford the Revolution?

That between labor and liberty, like capital and government, there is a kinship and identification: so that instead of four parties such as we had in the land but recently, placing us in turn in the economic point of view and in the political point of view, there are really only two: the party of labor or liberty and the party of capital or government. And these two propositions — *abolition of man's exploitation of his fellow-man and abolition of the man's government of his fellow-man* — amount to one and the same proposition; that finally the revolutionary IDEA, despite the dualism in its formula, is one and indivisible, as is the Republic itself: universal suffrage implying negation of capital's preponderance and equality of wealth, just as equality of wealth and the abolition of interest are implicit in negation of government.

We need not spell out the identity of these ideas for any logical mind to acknowledge and embrace it; it represents the point of transition between the capitalist, governmental age which is nearing its end and the era of freedom and equality which is just beginning. And, so to speak, history's apogee and the humanitarian equator.

Our entire opposition, our polemic, our revolutionary science flows from this fact: just as, further along, all philosophical advancement, every manifestation of religion — should society still need to manifest itself in this manner — will flow from it. With all of our might we are striving for, on the one hand, the abolition of interest
and for lending to be free and, on the other, the obliteration of government. *La Voix du Peuple* has no other reason for its existence.

Now, this is what has befallen us.

As a result of one of those contradictions so frequent during times of great intellectual endeavor, it turns out that at present the laboring class, that which resists capital, and for whose benefit the Revolution is primarily made, is unwittingly sliding, due to a communism in its thinking and thanks above all to the ineptitude of its leaders, into the preservation of authority: the old monarchist instinct is still around, in the form of Dictatorship, Convention or whatever, to delude the people; whereas the middle class, or bourgeoisie, eternally hostile to authority, having baptized itself the liberal party, is tilting, as a consequence of its economic routine and the servility of its interests, towards perpetuation of capitalist and proprietary exploitation.

So that we who, in the name of the Revolution and of the principle invoked by every single one of the parties who stand for it, are also and simultaneously striving for the abolition of capital and of the State, at a time when we should be rallying every opinion, find ourselves at odds with each of them and upbraided and opposed by all of the very people whose cause we serve! Politics! If you want to get surely to power then refrain from being in the right against everybody.

And so the Revolution that the middle class and the proletariat, by virtue of their shared ideas and needs,
seemed to be competing to accomplish, has been stopped
in its tracks by the short-sighted, illogical parting of the
ways between their views and their interests. Since 26th
February, when it looked as if everyone was agreed upon
giving it a formidable forward thrust, the Revolution has
been faced with the entire nation split into two
antagonistic camps — those who, with Messieurs
Dunoyer, Frédéric Bastiat, etc., following in the footsteps
of J.-B. Say, were ready to surrender the State, were
championing capital; and the rest, who, together with the
provisional government, Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux and
the entire democratic and utopian tradition, were bent on
turning the State into the creator of freedom and order.

For, and we can say this without fear of misquotation and
calumny, it was in all seriousness that Pierre Leroux who
rejects man's governance of his fellow man, or so he
assures us, nevertheless craves, in the name of the Triad
and the consent of each one, to establish over all the
sovereignty of THE FEW. The draft for a Triadic
Constitution published by Pierre Leroux, which we will
some day make time to examine, reeks of its author's
governmental tendencies. And it was also with the utmost
seriousness that Louis Blanc, for all his celebrated dictum
about going "from the master-State to the servant-State",
wants an authority formed, as all authorities are, through
deblegation by the citizenry; a State that is the organ and
representative of society: in short, a government that may
be to the people as the head is to the body, which is to say,
master and sovereign.

This is the contradiction which we are striving with all the
vigor of our consciousness and all the might of our reason
to banish. Whilst the political thinking by which the middle class is prompted and the economic rationale pursued by the people should, through mutual complementation, resolve into one and the same notion that would thus encapsulate the Revolution's past and its future and reconcile those two classes, these two ideas are at war with each other and by virtue of their clash, stopping movement and jeopardizing public safety.

And this also lies at the root of the recriminations that our polemic has sparked every time that, contrary to one of the half-baked ideas competing for influence, it falls to us to expand upon one of the great principles of February. On our right we find the old liberalism, inimical to the authorities, but protective of interest and exclusive property; on our left, the governmentalist democrats, inimical, like us, to man's exploitation of his fellow man, but full to the brim with faith in dictatorship and the omnipotence of the State; and in the center ground stands absolutism, its banners emblazoned with the two faces of the counter-revolution; and, bringing up the rear, the moderates whose phony wisdom is always ready to compromise with all shades of opinion.

Each party ascribing its own contradictions to us, we are simultaneously accused by the democratic socialists of treason; by the liberal economists, of frivolity; by the moderates, of exaggeration. The first take us to task for preaching individualism after having opposed property. They tell us: you see only one term in the republican equation of *Liberty, Equality, Fraternity*; this AN-ARCHY of yours is Monsieur Dupin's *every man for himself, each to his*
own; what you attack under the name of government is
the core idea of the age, association.

The economists, in turn, ask us how it is that, rejecting
State initiative, we could nonetheless look to the initiative
of the people; they contend that putting society in the
place of government through the organization of the free
interplay of wills and interests, still amounts to going
around in the same circles and to opposing freedom.

The moderates acknowledge the correctness of our
reasoning: they give their blessing to our principles; but
they refuse to follow us all the way to our conclusions.
Following a principle through to its every consequence is,
they say, tantamount to sacrificing truth on the altar of
logic and venturing beyond the target one wishes to reach
and going astray through exaggeration.

As for the absolutists, they are, of all our adversaries, the
ones who best understand us. They level no charges
against us and do not slander us; they take the line that
we are playing into their hands by making our *reductio ad absurdum* of all of the notions shared by public opinion,
democracy, constitutional monarchy, economism,
socialism and philosophism; and, bedazzled by their
illusions, they gravely wait for us to be converted and
repent our errors. However, the situation must become
clear and this already too long-lived error must come to its
end.

Who, then, is contradicting himself, us, or the
governmental socialists whose noxious tendencies we
have been denouncing these past twenty months and
whose every defeat we have foretold? Us, or the liberal
economists whose errors we have been refuting these past
ten years? Us, or the pig-headed doctrinaires whom we
are forever telling that their alleged moderation is nothing
but impotence and arbitrariness? Who is it that needs to
win his adversary over — we who have kept to the broad
thoroughfares of progress all the way, or the supporters of
absolutism, as rigid as milestones, at the furthest
extremity of the horizon?

All doubts will be dispelled and the public spared many a
discussion if, just the same way as we agree in
acknowledging, on the one hand, the bourgeoisie's liberal
inclinations and, on the other, the proletariat's egalitarian
tendencies, we might yet agree that they are one and the
same.

Is it true that socialism, an expression of the proletariat, is
at war for all eternity against capital, indeed, against
property? — Yes.

Is it a fact that liberalism, an expression of the middle
class, has, since time immemorial, been resisting the
factiousness of government, the ventures of the authorities,
the prerogatives of the State? — Again, yes.

Those two points made, what say we?

That what, in politics, goes under the name of *Authority* is
analogous to and synonymous with what is termed, in
political economy, *Property*; that these two notions overlap
one with the other and are identical.
That an attack upon one is an attack upon the other.

That the one is incomprehensible without the other,
and *vise versa*.

That if you do away with the former, you still have to do
away with the latter, and *vise versa*.

That where capital is stripped of all interest, government
is rendered useless and impossible; and, on the other hand,
capital, in the absence of a government to support it, cloak
it with its prerogatives and guarantee it the exercise of its
privileges must, of necessity, remain unproductive and all
usury unfeasible.

Finally, that Socialism and Liberalism are the two halves
of the wholesale opposition that Liberty has, ever since the
world began, mounted against the principle of
AUTHORITY as articulated through property and
through the State.

Are we wrong now, are we being frivolous, disloyal to our
cause and treacherous to our principles when we
champion this grand, magnificent conclusion? Is it our
fault if the proletariat and the middle class, divided right
now by the selfishness of their respective tendencies, are,
in essence, of one mind on principles as well as on aims
and on means?

And just because self-styled revolutionaries, capitalizing
upon hatred, service this factious antagonism for the
benefit of their own despicable ambitions are we
supposed to stay silent about our ideas, the same ideas as
February? Should we cravenly shy away from the risk of calumny and unpopularity?

But, they tell us, you are forever mistaking civilization's *trends* for its *laws* and this is where you go astray: that is the origins of the contradictions, inconsistencies and exaggerations of which the entire people accuses you.

Thus one socialist says, it is correct, and we were delighted to welcome this truth, that capital and products should circulate free of charge and that use of the instruments of labor should be guaranteed for all at no cost other than what covers the costs of depreciation. This, indeed, is one of the laws of society: and you yourself have demonstrated it mathematically. But, by the same token, it is not true that society can and should dispense with government. In the absence of government, in the absence of the State, who would then extend loans to the worker, organize commerce and ensure that everyone gets education and work?

But, responds an economist from the liberal school, that is the very opposite of what is true. The abolition of governments is what societies dream about; and the elicitation of order by means of the boundless spread of freedom is their law. As for reducing interest, the phenomenon of social economics should be seen as a mere tendency rather than as a principle of amelioration. Rent on capital dwindles as capital proliferates; this is a fact. But it is nonsensical to claim that interest ever falls to zero; in that case who would be willing to make loans? Who would save? Who would work? Discard your political and
egalitarian mirages, therefore, socialist, and follow
freedom's banner: the banner of 1789 and 1830!

THE SOCIALIST: You do not want a social Revolution! You support usury! You actually advocate man's exploitation of his fellow man! There is enough intelligence, initiative and patriotism within the people for it to be able to complete the Revolution on its own. It will be able to do without a suspect alliance: it will never tag along behind the bourgeoisie.

THE ECONOMIST: Liberty is indebted to the bourgeois for all its gains; it is to it that the laboring class is beholden for the welfare and the rights that it enjoys, Thus far, it is this valiant and disciplined bourgeoisie that has, all unaided, shouldered the burden of Revolution: it will never allow itself to be overtaken, nor dragged along. It will never be carried along in the wake of the proletariat.

Now, now, citizens. If you cannot see eye to eye with one
another, then at least try to see eye to eye with common
sense. How can you fail to see that every tendency points
to a law? That tendency is law itself, not in the form of a
latency, but in the form of action? Aristotle used to teach
that the first cause of motion is the intelligible heavens, by
which he meant pure Idea, Reason, Law. Thus what we
describe in bodies as attraction, or in man as love or passion,
is in society, tendency or progress; in organized
creatures, life; in the universe, destiny. All of which is
nothing more than a manifestation of the Idea, the Law,
the Intelligible Heavens, commanding the creature,
nurturing it, shaping it and magnetically commanding
obedience...
But let us put psychology, ontology and metaphysics to
one side. Let us turn to facts and evidence. For as long as
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in their mutual
suspicion, hold each other in check, the Revolution,
instead of growing peaceably, will do so in fits and starts;
and at every step society will be in danger of a general
dislocation. Let us show them both, therefore, that their
principle is one and the same, their tendency one and the
same and their pride one and the same: that whatever the
one might do in the pursuit of its own interests would
amount to a realization of the wishes of the other, just as
the victory of the one over the other would spell the
suicide of them both.

Odd, is it not, that, in order to break through universal
ostracism, we should now need to effect a universal
reconciliation?
Interest and Principal: A Loan is a Service

On the one hand, it is very true, as you have unquestionably established, that a loan is a *service*. And as every service has a *value*, and, in consequence, is entitled by its nature to a reward, it follows that a loan ought to have its *price*, or, to use the technical phrase, ought to *bear interest*.

But it is also true, and this truth is consistent with the preceding one, that he who tends, under the ordinary conditions of the professional lender, does not *deprive* himself, as you phrase it, of the capital which he lends. He lends it, on the contrary, precisely because the loan is not a deprivation to him; he lends it because he has no use for it himself, being sufficiently provided with capital without it; he lends it, finally, because he neither intends nor is able to make it valuable to him personally,—because, if he should keep it in his own hands, this capital, sterile by nature, would remain sterile, whereas, by its loan and the resulting interest, it yields a profit which enables the capitalist to live without working. Now, to live without working is, in political as well as moral economy, a contradictory proposition, an impossible thing.

The proprietor who possesses two estates, one at Tours, and the other at Orleans, and who is obliged to fix his residence on the one which he uses, and consequently to abandon his residence on the other, can this proprietor claim that he deprives himself of anything, because he is
not, like God, ubiquitous in action and presence? As well
say that we who live in Paris are deprived of a residence
in New York! Confess, then, that the privation of the
capitalist is akin to that of the master who has lost his
slave, to that of the prince expelled by his subjects, to that
of the robber who, wishing to break into a house, finds the
dogs on the watch and the inmates at the windows.

Now, in the presence of this affirmation and this negation
diametrically opposed to each other, both supported by
arguments of equal validity, but which, though not
harmonizing, cannot destroy each other, what course shall
we take?

You persist in your affirmation, and say: "You do not wish
to pay me interest? Very well! I do not wish to lend you
my capital. Try working without capital." On the other
hand, we persist in our negation, and say: "We will not
pay you interest, because interest, in social economy, is a
premium on idleness, the primary cause of misery and the
inequality of wealth." Neither of us is willing to yield, we
come to a stand-still.

This, then, is the point at which Socialism takes up the
question. On the one hand, the commutative justice of
interest; on the other, the organic impossibility, the
immorality of interest; and, to tell you the truth at once,
Socialism aims to convert neither party--the Church,
which denies interest, nor the political economy, which
supports it--especially as it is convinced that both are right.
Let us see, now; how it analyzes the problem, and what it
proposes, in its turn, that is superior to the arguments of
the old moneylenders, too vitally *interested* to be worthy of
belief, and to the ineffectual denunciations uttered by the
Fathers of the Church.

Since the theory of usury has finally prevailed in Christian
as well as in Pagan countries; since the hypothesis, or
fiction, of the productivity of capital has become a
practical fact among nations--let us accept this economic
fiction as we have accepted for thirty-three years the
constitutional fiction, and let us see what it results in
when carried to its ultimate. Instead of simply rejecting the
idea, as the Church has done --a futile policy--let us make
from it a historical and philosophical deduction; and,
since the word is more in fashion than ever, let us trace
the evolution.

Moreover, this idea must correspond to some reality; it
must indicate some necessity of the mercantile spirit; else
nations never would have sacrificed to it their dearest and
most sacred beliefs.

See, then, how Socialism, entirely convinced of the
inadequacy of the economic theory as well as of the
ecclesiastical doctrine, treats in its turn the question of
usury.

First, it observes that the principle of the productivity of
capital is no respecter of persons, grants no privileges; it
applies to every capitalist, regardless of rank or dignity.
That which is legitimate for Peter is legitimate for Paul;
both have the same right to usury as well as to labor.
When, then,--I go, back to the example which you have
used,--when you lend me, at interest, the plane which you
have made for smoothing your planks, if, in my turn, I
lend you the saw which I have made for cutting up my
lumber, I also shall be entitled to interest.

The right of capital is alike for all; all, in the proportion
that they lend and borrow, ought to receive and pay
interest. Such is the first consequence of your theory,
which would not be a theory, were not the right which it
establishes universal and reciprocal; this is self-evident.

Let us suppose, then, that of all the capital that I use,
whether in the form of machinery or of raw material, half
is lent to me by you; suppose also that of all the capital
used by you half is lent to you by me; it is clear that the
interests which we must pay will offset each other; and, if
equal amounts of capital are advanced, the interests
canceling each other, the balance will be zero.

In society, it is true things do not go on precisely in this
way. The loans that the producers reciprocally make to
each other are not always equal in amount, therefore the
interests that they have to pay are also unequal; hence the
inequality of conditions and fortunes.

But the question is to ascertain whether this equilibrium in
the loaning of capital, labor, and skill, and, consequently,
equality of income for all citizens, perfectly admissible in
theory, is capable of realization in practice; whether this
realization is in accordance with the tendencies of society;
whether, finally and unquestionably, it is not the
inevitable result of the theory of usury itself.

Now, this is what Socialism affirms, now that it has
arrived at an understanding of itself, the Socialism which
no longer distinguishes itself from economic science,
studied at once in the light of its accumulated experience
and in the power of its deductions. In fact, what does the
history of civilization, the history of political economy, tell
us concerning this great question of interest?

It tells us that the mutual loaning of capital, material, or
immaterial, tends more and more towards equilibrium,
owing to the various causes enumerated below, which the
most conservative economists cannot dispute:--

*First*--The division of labor, or the separation of industries,
which, infinitely multiplying both tools and raw material,
multiplies in the same proportion the loans of capital.

*Second*--The accumulation of capital, an accumulation
which results from diversity of industries, producing
between capitalists a competition similar to that between
merchants, and, consequently, effecting gradually a
lowering of the rent of capital, a reduction of the rate of
interest.

*Third*--The continually increasing power of circulation
which capital acquires through the use of specie and bills
of exchange.

*Fourth*--Finally, public security.

Such are the general causes which, for centuries have
developed among producers a reciprocity of loans tending
more and more to equilibrium and consequently to a more
and more even balance of interests, to a continual
diminution of the price of capital.
These facts cannot be denied; you yourself admit them;
only you mistake their principle and purport, by giving
capital the credit for the progress made in the domain of
industry and wealth, whereas this progress is caused not
by capital, but by the circulation of capital.

The facts being thus analyzed and classified Socialism
asks whether, in order to bring about this equilibrium of
credit and income, it is not possible to act directly, not on
capital, remember, but on circulation; whether it is not
possible so to organize this circulation as to inaugurate, at
one blow, between capitalists and producers (two classes
now hostile, but theoretically identical) equivalence of
loans, or, in other words, equality of fortunes.

To this question Socialism again replies: Yes, it is possible,
and in several ways.

Suppose, in the first place, to confine ourselves to the
present conditions of credit, the operations of which are
carried on mainly through the intervention of
specie--suppose that all the producers in the republic,
numbering more than ten millions, tax themselves, each
one, to the amount of only one percent of their capital.
This tax of one percent upon the total amount of the
capital of the country, both real and personal, would
amount to more than a thousand million of francs.

Suppose that by means of this tax a bank be founded, in
competition with the Bank (miscalled) of France,
discounting and giving credit on mortgages at the rate of
one-half of one percent.
It is evident, in the first place, that the rate of discount on
commercial paper, the rate of loans on mortgages, the
dividend of invested capital, etc., being one-half of one
percent, the cash capital in the hand of all insurers and
moneylenders would be immediately struck with absolute
sterility; interest would be zero, and credit gratuitous.

If commercial credit and that based on mortgages--in
other words, if money capital, the capital whose exclusive
function is to circulate--was gratuitous, house capital
would soon become so; in reality, houses no longer would
be capital; they would be merchandise, quoted in the
market like brandy and cheese, and rented or sold--terms
which would then be synonymous--at cost.

If houses, like money, were gratuitous--that is to say, if
use was paid for as an exchange, and not as a loan--land
would not be slow in becoming gratuitous also; that is,
farmrent, instead of being rent paid to a non-cultivating
proprietor, would be the compensation for the difference
between the products of superior and inferior soils; or,
better, there no longer would exist, in reality, either
tenants or proprietors; there would be only husbandmen
and wine-growers, just as there are joiners and machinists.

Do you wish another proof of the possibility of making all
capital gratuitous by the development of economic
institutions?

Suppose that instead of our system of taxes, so complex,
so burdensome, so annoying, which we have inherited
from the feudal nobility, a single tax should be established,
not on production, circulation, consumption, habitation,
etc., but in accordance with the demands of justice and the
dictates of economic science, on the net capital falling to
each individual. The capitalist, losing by taxation as much
as or more than he gains by rent and interest, would be
obliged either to use his property himself or to sell it;
economic equilibrium again would be established by this
simple and moreover inevitable intervention of the
treasury department.

Such is, substantially, Socialism's theory of capital and
interest.

Not only do we affirm, in accordance with this theory
(which, by the way, we hold in common with the
economists) and on the strength of our belief in industrial
development, that such is the tendency and the import of
lending at interest; we even prove, by the destructive
results of economy as it is, and by a demonstration of the
causes of poverty, that this tendency is necessary, and the
annihilation of usury inevitable.

In fact, rent, reward of capital, interest on money, in one
word, usury, constituting, as has been said, an integral
part of the price of products, and this usury not being the
same for all, it follows that the price of products,
composed as it is of wages and interest, cannot be paid by
those who have only their wages, and no interest to pay it
with; so that, by the existence of usury, labor is
condemned to idleness and capital to bankruptcy.

This argument, one of that class which mathematicians
call the *reductio ad absurdum*, showing the organic
impossibility of lending at interest, has been repeated a
hundred times by Socialism.

Why do not the economists notice it? Do you really wish
to refute the ideas of Socialism on the question of interest?
Listen, then, to the questions which you must answer:--

1. Is it true that, though the loaning of capital, when viewed objectively, is a *service* which has its value, and which consequently should be paid for, this loaning, when viewed subjectively, does not involve an actual sacrifice on the part of the capitalist; and consequently that it does not establish the right to set a price on it?

2. Is it true that usury, to be unobjectionable, must be equal; that the tendency of society is towards this equalization; so that usury will be entirely legitimate only when it has become equal for all,--that is, nonexistent?

3. Is it true that a national bank, giving credit and discount *gratis*, is a possible institution?

4. Is it true that the effects of the gratuity of credit and discount, as well as that of taxation when simplified and restored to its true form, would be the abolition of rent of real estate, as well as of interest on money?

5. Is it true that the old system is a contradiction and a mathematical impossibility?

6. Is it true that political economy, after having, for several thousand years, opposed the view of usury held by
theology, philosophy, and legislation, comes, by the
application of its own principles, to the same conclusion?

7. Is it true, finally, that usury has been, as a providential institution, simply an instrument of equality and progress, just as, in the political sphere, absolute monarchy was an instrument of liberty and progress, and as, in the judicial sphere, the boiling-water test, the duel, and the rack were, in their turn, instruments of conviction and progress?

These are the points that our opponents are bound to
examine before charging us with scientific and intellectual
weakness; these, Monsieur Bastiat, are the points on
which your future arguments must turn, if you wish them
to produce a definite result. The question is stated clearly
and categorically: permit us to believe that, after having
examined it, you will perceive that there is something in
the Socialism of the nineteenth century that is beyond the
reach of your antiquated political economy.
Interest and Principal: Arguments Drawn
from the Operations of the Bank of France

It is not true--and the facts just cited prove beyond a
doubt that it is not--that the decrease of interest is
proportional to the increase of capital. Between the *price* of
merchandise and *interest* of capital there is not the least
analogy; the laws governing their fluctuations are not the
same; and all your dinning of the last six weeks in relation
to capital and interest has been utterly devoid of sense.
The universal custom of banks and the common sense of
the people give you the lie on all these points in a most
humiliating manner.

Now, would you believe, sir,--for indeed you do not seem
to be well-informed about anything,--that the Bank of
France, an association composed of honest people,
philanthropists, God-fearing men, utterly incapable of
compromising, with their consciences, continues to charge
four percent on all its discounts without allowing the
public to derive the slightest bonus therefrom? Would you
believe that it regulates the dividends of its stockholders,
and quotes its stock in the money-market, on this basis of
four percent on a capital of four hundred and thirty-one
millions not its own? Say, is that robbery, yes or no?

But we have not reached the end. I have not begun to tell
you of the crimes of this society of stock-jobbers, founded
by Napoleon for the express purpose of supporting
parasitic officials and proprietors and sucking the nation's
life-blood. A few millions, more or less, are not sufficient
to affect dangerously a population of thirty-six millions of men. That portion of the robberies committed by the Bank of France which I have exposed is but a trifle: only the results are worthy of consideration.

The fortune and destiny of the country is today in the hands of the Bank of France. If it would relieve industry and commerce by a decrease of its rate of discount proportional to the increase of its reserves; in other words, if it would reduce the price of its credit to three-fourths of one percent, which it must do in order to quit stealing,--this reduction would instantly produce, throughout the republic and all Europe, incalculable results. They could not be enumerated in a volume: I will confine myself to the indications of a few.

If, then, the credit of the Bank of France, when that bank has become a National Bank, should be loaned at three-fourths of one percent instead of at four percent, ordinary bankers, notaries, capitalists, and even the stockholders of the bank itself, would be immediately compelled by competition to reduce their interest, discount, and dividends to at least one percent, including incidental expenses and brokerage. What harm, think you, would this reduction do to borrowers on personal credit, or to commerce and industry, who are forced to pay, by reason of this fact alone, an annual tax of at least two thousand millions?

If financial circulation could be effected at a rate of discount representing only the cost of administration, drafting, registration, etc., the interest charged on purchases and sales on credit would fall in its turn from
six percent to zero,--that is to say, business would then be transacted on a cash basis: there would be no more debts. Again, to how great a degree, think you, would that diminish the shameful number of suspensions, failures, and bankruptcies?

But as in society *net* product is undistinguishable from *raw* product, so in the light of the sum total of economic facts capital is undistinguishable from product. These two terms do not, in reality, stand for two distinct things; they designate relations only. Product is capital; capital is product; there is a difference between them only in private economy; none whatever in public economy.

If, then, interest, after having fallen, in the case of money, to three-fourths of one percent,--that is, to zero, inasmuch as three-fourths of one percent represents only the service of the bank,--should fall to zero in the case of merchandise also, by analogy of principles and facts it would soon fall to zero in the case of real estate: rent would disappear in becoming one with liquidation. Do you think, sir, that that would prevent people from living in houses and cultivating land?

If, thanks to this radical reform in the machinery of circulation, labor was compelled to pay to capital only as much interest as would be a just reward for the service rendered by the capitalist, specie and real estate being deprived of their reproductive properties and valued only as products,--as things that can be consumed and replaced,--the favor with which specie and capital are now looked upon would be wholly transferred to products; each individual, instead of restricting his consumption,
would strive only to increase it. Whereas, at present, thanks to the restriction laid upon consumable products by interest, the means of consumption are always very much limited, then, on the contrary, production would be insufficient: Labor would then be secure in fact as well as in right.

The laboring class, gaining at one stroke the five thousand millions, or thereabouts, now taken in the form of interest from the ten thousand which it produces, plus five thousand millions which this same interest deprives it of by destroying the demand for labor, plus five thousand millions which the parasites, cut off from a living, would then be compelled to produce, the national production would be doubled and the welfare of the laborer increased four-fold. And you, sir, whom the worship of interest does not prevent from lifting your thoughts to another world,--what say you to this improvement of affairs here below?

Do you see now that it is not the multiplication of capital which decreases interest, but on the contrary, that the decrease of interest multiplies capital?

But all this is displeasing to the capitalists and distasteful to the bank. The bank holds in its hand the horn of plenty which the people have entrusted to it: that horn is the three hundred and forty-one millions of specie accumulated in its vaults, which testify so loudly to the power of the public credit. To revive labor and diffuse wealth everywhere, the bank needs to do but one thing; namely, reduce its rate of discount to such a figure that the sum total of the interest it receives shall be equal to
four percent of ninety millions. It will not do it. For the sake of a few millions more to distribute among its stockholders, and which it steals, it prefers to cause an annual loss to the country of ten thousand millions. In order to reward parasitism, remunerate crime, satisfy the intemperate cravings of two millions of officials, stock-jobbers, usurers, prostitutes, and spies, and preserve this leper of a Government, it will cause, if necessary, thirty-four millions of men to rot in poverty. Once more, I ask, is that robbery? Is that rapine, plunder, premeditated and willful murder?

Have I told all?--No; that would require ten volumes, but I must stop. I will close by considering a stroke which seems to me a masterpiece of its kind, and to which I ask your undivided attention. A defender of capital, you are not acquainted with its tricks.

The amount of specie, I will not say existing, but circulating in France, including the bank's reserve, does not exceed, by common estimation, one thousand millions.

At four percent interest--I am reasoning on the supposition of paid credit--the laboring people should pay forty millions annually for the use of this capital.

Can you, sir, tell me why, instead of forty millions, we are paying sixteen hundred millions--I say *sixteen hundred millions*--as the reward of this capital?

"Sixteen hundred millions! One hundred and sixty percent! Impossible!" you exclaim. Did I not tell you, sir, that you
knew nothing about political economy? This is the fact,
though to you, I am sure, it is still an enigma.

The amount of mortgages, according to the most reliable
authorities, is twelve thousand millions; some put it at
fourteen thousand millions;

We will say: 12,000 millions.

Amount of notes of hand, at least: 6,000 millions.

Amount invested in sleeping partnership, about:
2,000 millions.

To which should be added the public debt: 8,000
millions.

Total: 28,000 millions.

which agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, in a
word, labor, which produces everything, and the State,
which produces nothing and is supported by labor, owe to
capital.

All these debts--note this point--arise from money loaned,
or said to have been loaned, at four, five, six, eight, twelve,
and even fifteen percent.

Taking six percent as the average rate of interest on the
first three items, which amount to twenty thousand
millions, they would yield twelve hundred millions. Add
the interest on the public debt, which is about four
hundred millions, and we have altogether sixteen
hundred millions of interest *per annum* on a capital of one thousand millions. Now, then, tell me, is it in this case also the scarcity of specie that causes the enormous amount of interest? No, for all these amounts were loaned, as we have seen, at an average rate of six percent. How, then, has an interest, stipulated at six percent, become an interest of one hundred and sixty percent? I will tell you.

You, sir, who regard all capital as naturally and necessarily productive, know that this productivity is not possessed by all kinds of property in the same degree; that it belongs mainly to two kinds, the kind known as real estate (land and houses), if we have a chance to lease them (which is not always easy or always safe), and the kind known as money. Money, money especially! that is the capital *par excellence*, the capital which is lent, which is hired, which is paid for, which produces all those wonderful financiers whom we see maneuvering at the bank, at the stock exchange, and at all the interest and usury shops.

But money is not, like land, capable of cultivation, nor, like houses or clothes, can it be consumed by use. It is only a *token of exchange*, receivable by all merchants and producers, and with which a shoemaker, for example, can buy him a hat. In vain, through the agency of the bank, does paper, little by little and with universal consent, get substituted for specie: the prejudice sticks fast, and if bank paper is received in lieu of specie, it is only because the opinion prevails that it can be exchanged at will for specie. Specie alone is in demand.
When I lend money, then, it is really the power to exchange my unsold product of today or of the future which I lend: money, in itself, is useless. I take it only to expend it; I neither consume nor cultivate it. The exchange once consummated, the money again becomes transferable, and capable, consequently, of being loaned anew. Thus it goes on, and as, by the accumulation of interest, money-capital, in the course of exchange, always returns to its source, it follows that the new loan, always made by the same hand, always benefits the same persons.

Do you say that, inasmuch as money serves to facilitate the exchange of capital and products, the interest paid on it is a compensation not so much for the money itself as for the capital exchanged; and that, thus viewed, the sixteen hundred millions of interest paid an one thousand millions of specie represent really the reward of from twenty-five to thirty thousand millions of capital? That has been said or written somewhere by an economist of your school.

Such an allegation cannot be sustained for one moment. How happens it, I ask you, that houses are rented, that lands are leased, that merchandise sold on credit bears interest? Just because of the use of specie; specie, which intervenes, as a fiscal agent, in all transactions; specie, which prevents houses and lands from being exchanged instead of loaned, and merchandise from being sold for cash. Specie, then, intervening everywhere as a supplementary capital, as an agent of circulation, as a means of security,--this it is precisely that we pay for, and
the remuneration of the service rendered by it is exactly
the point now in question.

And since in another place we have seen from an
explanation of the workings of the Bank of France and the
consequences of the accumulation of its metallic reserve,
that a capital of ninety millions of specie, having to
produce an annual interest of four percent, admits of a
rate of discount of three, two, one, or even three-fourths of
one percent, according to the amount of business
transacted by the bank, it is very evident, further, that the
sixteen hundred millions of interest which the nation pays
to its usurers, bankers, bondholders, notaries, and
sleeping-partners are simply the rent of one thousand
millions of gold and silver, unless you prefer to
acknowledge with me that these sixteen hundred millions
are obtained by robbery.
Interest and Principal: The Origin of
Ground Rent

I said before that in ancient times the landed proprietor,
when neither he nor his family farmed his land, as was the
case among the Romans in the early days of the Republic,
cultivated it through his slaves: such was the general
practice of patrician families. Then slavery and the soil
were chained together; the farmer was called *adscrpitus
gleboe*, joined to the land; property in men and things was
undivided. The price of a farm depended (1) upon its area
and quality of its soil, (2) upon the quantity of stock, and
(3) upon the number of slaves.

When the emancipation of the slave was proclaimed, the
proprietor lost the man and kept the land; just as today, in
freeing the blacks, we leave the master his property in
land and stock. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of
ancient law as well as of natural and Christian right, man,
born to labor, cannot dispense with the implements of
labor; the principles of emancipation involved an agrarian
law which guarantees them to him and protects him in
their use: otherwise, this pretended emancipation was
only an act of hateful cruelty, an infamous deception, and
if, as Moses said, interest, or the yearly income from
capital, reimburses capital, might it not be said that
servitude reimburses property? The theologians and the
law-givers of the time did not understand this, and by an
irreconcilable contradiction, which still exists, they
continued to rail at usury, but gave absolution to rent.
The result was that the emancipated slave, and, a few centuries later, the enfranchised serf, without means of existence, was obliged to become a tenant and pay tribute. The master grew still richer. I will furnish you, he says, with land; you shall furnish the labor; and we will divide the products. It was a reproduction on the farm of the ways and customs of business. I will lend you ten talents, said the moneyed man to the workingman; you shall use them; and then either we will divide the profits, or else, as long as you keep my money, you shall pay me a twentieth; or, if you prefer, at the expiration of the loan, you shall return double the amount originally received. From this sprang ground-rent, unknown to the Russians and the Arabs. The exploitation of man by man, thanks to this transformation, passed into the form of law: Usury, condemned in the form of lending at interest, tolerated in the *contrat a la grosse*, was extolled in the form of farm-rent. From that moment commercial and industrial progress served to make it only more and more customary. This was necessary in order to exhibit all the varieties of slavery and robbery, and to establish the true law of human liberty.

Once engaged in this practice of *interesse*, so strangely understood, so improperly applied, society began to revolve in the circle of its miseries. Then it was that inequality of conditions seemed a law of civilization, and evil a necessity of our nature.

Two ways, however, seemed open to laborers to free themselves from exploitation by the capitalist: one was, as we said above, the gradual balancing of values and
consequently a decrease in the price of capital; the other
was the reciprocity of interest.

But it is evident that the income from capital, represented
mainly by money, cannot be totally destroyed by
decreasing it; for, as you well say, sir, if my capital
brought me nothing, instead of lending it I should keep it,
and the laborer, in consequence of having refused to pay
the tithe, would be out of work. As for the reciprocity of
usury, it is certainly possible between contractor and
contractor, capitalist and capitalist, proprietor and
proprietor; but between proprietor, capitalist, or
contractor, and the common laborer, it is utterly
impossible. It is impossible, I say, as long as in commerce
interest on capital is added to the workingman's wages as
a part of the price of merchandise, for the workingman to
repurchase what he has himself produced. To live by
working is a principle which, as long as interest exists,
involves a contradiction.

Society once driven into this corner, the absurdity of the
capitalistic theory is shown by the absurdity of its
consequences; the inherent iniquity of interest results from
its homicidal effects, and while property begins and ends
in rent and usury, its affinity with robbery will be
established. Can it exist under other conditions? For my
own part, I say no: but this is an inquiry entirely foreign to
the question now under discussion, and I will not enter
upon it.

Look now at the situation of both capitalist and laborer,
resulting from the invention of money, the power of
specie, and the established similarity between the lending of money and the renting of land and houses.

The first,--for it is necessary to justify him, even in your eyes,--controlled by the prejudice in favor of money, cannot gratuitously dispossess himself of his capital in favor of the laborer. Not that such dispossession is a sacrifice, for, in his hands, capital is unproductive; not that he incurs any risk of loss, for, by taking a mortgage as security, he is sure of repayment; not that this loaning costs him the slightest trouble, unless you consider as such counting the money and verifying the security; but because, by dispossessing himself for ever so short a time of his money,--of this money which, by its prerogative, is, as has been so justly said, *power*,--the capitalist lessens his strength and his safety.

This would be otherwise, if, gold and silver were only ordinary merchandise; if the possession of coin was regarded as no more desirable than the possession of wheat, wine, oil, or leather; if the simple ability to labor gave a man the same security as the possession of money. While this monopoly of circulation and exchange exists, usury is necessary to the capitalist. His motives, in the light of justice, are not reprehensible: when his money leaves his own vault, his safety goes with it.

Now, this necessity, which is laid upon the capitalist by an involuntary and widespread prejudice, is, as respects the laborer, the most shameful of robberies, as well as the most hateful of tyrannies, the tyranny of force.
What are, indeed, the theoretical and practical consequences to the working-class, to this vital, productive, and moral portion of society, of lending at interest and its counterpart, farm-rent? I today confine myself to the enumeration of some of them, to which I call your attention, and which hereafter, if agreeable to you, shall be the subject of our discussion.

And first, it is the principle of interest, or of *net* product, that enables an individual really and legitimately to live without working: that is the conclusion of your last letter but one, and such, in fact, is the condition to which every one today aspires.

Again: If the principle of *net* product is true of the individual, it must be true also of the nation; for example, the capital of France, both real and personal, being valued at one hundred and thirty-two billions, which yields, at five percent, an annual income of sixty-six hundred millions, at least half of the French nation might, if it pleased, live without working; in England, where the amount of accumulated capital is much larger than in France, and the population much smaller, the entire nation, from Queen Victoria down to the lowest hanger-on of the son of Liverpool, might live on the product of its capital, promenading with cane in hand, or groaning in public meetings. Which leads to this conclusion, evidently an absurd one, that, thanks to its capital, such a nation has more income than its labor can produce.

Again: The total amount of wages paid annually in France being in the neighborhood of six thousand millions, and
the total amount of revenue yielded by capital being also
six thousand millions, making the market value of the
annual product of the nation twelve thousand millions,
the producers, who are also consumers, can and must pay,
with the six thousand millions of wages allowed them, the
twelve thousand millions which commerce demands of
them as the price of its merchandise, and without which
the capitalists would find themselves minus an income.

Again: Interest being perpetual in its nature, and never
being regarded, as Moses wished, as a repayment of the
original capital, and further, it being possible to place each
year's income at interest in its turn, thus forming a new
loan, and consequently giving rise to a new income, the
smallest amount of capital may, in time, yield sums so
enormous as to exceed in value a mass of gold as large as
the globe on which we live. Price demonstrated this in his
theory of liquidation.

Again: The productivity of capital being the immediate
and sole cause of the inequality of wealth, and the
continual accumulation of capital in a few hands, it must
be admitted, in spite of the progress of knowledge, in
spite of Christian revelation and the extension of public
liberty, that society is naturally and necessarily divided
into two classes--a class of exploiting capitalists and a
class of exploited laborers.
Interest and Principle: The Circulation of Capital, Not Capital Itself, Gives Birth to Progress

Thus it is with interest on capital, legitimate when a loan was a service rendered by citizen to citizen, but which ceases to be so when society has acquired the power to organize credit gratuitously for everybody. This interest, I say, is contradictory in its nature, in that, on the one hand, the service rendered by the lender is entitled to remuneration, and that, on the other, all wages suppose either a production or a sacrifice, which is not the case with a loan. The revolution which is effected in the legitimacy of lending originates there. That is how Socialism states the question; that, therefore, is the ground on which the defenders of the old regime must take their stand.

To confine one's self to tradition, to limit one's self to saying a loan is a service rendered which ought, therefore, to be compensated, without entering into the considerations which tend to annihilate interest, is not to reply. Socialism, with redoubled energy, protests, and says: I have nothing to do with your service,--service for you, but robbery for me,--as long as it is possible for society to furnish me with the same advantages which you offer me, and that without reward. To impose on me such a service in spite of myself, by refusing to organize the circulation of capital, is to make me submit to an unjust discount, is to rob me.
Thus your whole argument in favor of interest consists in
confounding epochs,--I mean to say, in confounding that
which is legitimate in lending with that which is
not,--whereas I, on the contrary, carefully distinguish
between them. I will proceed to make this intelligible to
you by an analysis of your letter.

I take up your arguments one by one. In my first reply I
made the observation that he who lends does
not *deprive* himself of his capital. You reply: What matters
it, if he has created his capital for the express purpose of
lending it?

In saying that you betray your own cause. You acquiesce,
by those words, in my *antithesis*, which consists in saying:
The hidden reason why lending at interest, legitimate
yesterday, is no longer so today, is because lending, in
itself, does not involve privation. I note this confession.

But you cling to the intention: What matters it, you says if
the lender has created his capital for the express purpose
of lending it?

To which I reply: And what do I care, indeed, for your
intention, if I have really no need of your service, if the
pretended service which you wish to do me becomes
necessary only through the ill-will and incapacity of
society? Your credit resembles that which the pirate gives
to his captive, when he gives him his liberty in return for a
ransom. I protest against your credit at five per cent,
because society is able and ought to give it to me at zero
per cent; and, if it refuses to do so, I accuse it, as well as
you, of robbery; I say that it is an accomplice, an abettor,
an organizer of robbery.

Comparing a loan to a *sale*, you say: Your argument is as valid against the latter as against the former, for the hatter who sells hats does not *deprive* himself.

No, for he receives for his hats--at least he is reputed to receive for them--their exact value immediately, neither *more* nor *less*. But the capitalist lender not only is not deprived, since he recovers his capital intact, but he receives more than his capital, more than he contributes to the exchange; he receives in addition to his capital an interest which represents no positive product on his part. Now, a service which costs no labor to him who renders it is a service which may become gratuitous: this you have already told us yourself.

After having recognized the *non-privat ion* attendant upon a loan, you admit further "that *it is not theoretically impossible that interest*, which today constitutes an integral part of the price of commodities, *may become the same for all*, and thereby be *abolished*." "But," you add, "for this other things are needed than a new bank. Let Socialism endow all men with equal activity, skill, honesty, economy, foresight, needs, desires, virtues, vises, and chances even, and then it will have succeeded."

So that you enter upon the question only to immediately
avoid it. Socialism, at the point which it has now reached,
justly claims that it is by means of a reform in banking and
taxation that we can arrive at this balance of interests.
Instead of passing over, as you do, this claim of Socialism,
stop here and refute it: you will thereby demolish all the utopias of the world. For Socialism affirms--and without this affirmation Socialism could not exist, it would be a nonentity--that it is not by endowing all men with equal "activity, skill, honesty, economy, foresight, needs, desires, virtues, vises, and chances even" that we shall succeed in balancing interest and equalizing incomes; it maintains that we must, on the contrary, begin by centralizing credit and abolishing interest, in order to equalize faculties, needs, and chances. Let there be no more robbers among us, and we shall be all virtuous, all happy! That is Socialism's creed. I feel the keenest regret in telling you of it, but really your acquaintance with Socialism is so slight that you run against it without seeing it.

You persist in attributing to capital all social progress in the domain of wealth, while I, for my part, attribute it to circulation; and you say that here I mistake the cause for the effect.

But, in maintaining such a proposition, you unwittingly refute your own argument. J. B. Say has shown--and of this fact you are not ignorant--that the *transportation* of a value, be that value called money or merchandise, is a value in itself; that it is as real a product as wheat and wine; that consequently the service of the merchant and banker deserves to be remunerated equally with that of the husband-man and wine-grower. It is on this ground that you stand when you claim wages for the capitalist who, by lending his capital, the return of which is guaranteed him, performs the office of transportation, of circulation. In lending, you said in your first letter, I render a service, I create a value. Such were your words,
which we have admitted: in this respect we both agreed
with the master.

I am justified, then, in saying that it is not capital itself, but
the circulation of capital,--that kind of service, product,
merchandise, value, or reality, which political economy
calls *movement* or *circulation*, and which, indeed,
constitutes the whole subject-matter of economic
science,--that causes wealth. We remunerate all who
render this service; but we affirm that, as far as capital,
properly speaking, or money is concerned, it is society's
duty to render it to us gratuitously; that if it does not do
so, there is fraud and robbery. Do you now understand
the real point on which the social question turns?

After having expressed your regret at the division of
capitalists and laborers into two hostile classes,--which
surely is not the fault of Socialism,--you take the very
useless trouble of showing me by illustrations that every
laborer is in some degree a capitalist, and does a work of
capitalization,--that is, usury. And who, pray, ever
dreamed of denying it? Who has told you that what we
recognize as legitimate once in the capitalist, we condemn
at the same time in the laborer?

Yes, we know that the price of all merchandise and service
may be analyzed at the present day as follows:--

1. Raw material;

2. Compensation of tools, and incidental expenses;

3. Wages of labor.
### 4. Interest of capital.

Thus it is in all kinds of business,--agriculture, industry, commerce, and transportation. These are the fourches caudines of every one who is not a parasite, be he capitalist or laborer. You need not enter into long details upon this subject, very interesting though they are and clearly delightful to your imagination.

I repeat: The problem of Socialism is to make this fourth element which enters into the price of commodities--interest on capital--equal for all producers, and consequent nugatory. We maintain that this is possible; that, if this is possible, it is society's duty to procure gratuitous credit for all; that, failing to do this, it will not be a society, but a conspiracy of capitalists against laborers, a compact for purposes of robbery and murder.

Understand then, once for all, that it is not necessary to show us how capital is formed, how it accumulates through interest, how interest enters into the price of products, how all laborers are themselves guilty of the sin of usury: we have long known all these things, just as we are convinced of the personal honesty of annuitants and proprietors.

We say: The economic system based on the fiction of the productivity of capital, justifiable once, is henceforth illegitimate. Its inefficacy and malfeasance have been exposed; it is the cause of all existing misery, the present mainstay of that old fiction of representative government which is the last form of tyranny among men.
I will not detain myself with the purely religious considerations with which your letter closes. Religion, allow me to say, has nothing to do with political economy. A real science is sufficient unto itself; otherwise, it cannot exist. If political economy needs the sanction of religion to make up for the inadequacy of its theories, and if, in its turn, religion, as an excuse for the barrenness of its dogmas, pleads the exigencies of political economy, the result will be that political economy and religion, instead of mutually sustaining each other, will accuse each other, and both will perish.

Begin, then, by doing justice, and liberty, fraternity, and wealth will increase; even the happiness of another life will be only the surer. Is the inequality of capitalistic income, yes or no, the primary cause of the physical, moral, and intellectual poverty which today afflicts society? Is it necessary to equalize the income of all men, to make the circulation of capital gratuitous by assimilating it to the exchange of products, and to destroy interest? That is what Socialism asks, and it must have an answer.

Socialism, in its most positive conclusions, furnishes the solution in the democratic centralization and gratuity of credit, combined with a single tax, to replace all other taxes, and to be levied on capital.

Let this solution be verified; let its application be tried. That is the only way to refute Socialism; except that is done, we shall shout louder than ever our war-cry: *Property is robbery!*
Letter to Pierre Leroux

My dear Pierre Leroux,

I really must forgive you your incessant accusations, for
you do not know me and do not engage in debate.

For a start, you haven't read me, so you have a cheek
attacking me; next, I think you need telling and
everything that you have written over the past month is
there to prove it: you have absolutely no method. As a
result of rehashing your empty formulas, wallowing in
your sterile imaginings and focusing your thoughts upon
some world beyond the senses, you have rendered
yourself incapable of grasping other people's thinking; the
upshot being that, all unbeknownst to yourself, your
criticisms amount, I am sorry to say, to unrelenting
demonization.

On the basis of a few snatches of text quarried from my
books and utterly misconstrued, you have cast me as an
adversary of your own devising — anti-democratic,
anti-socialist, counter-revolutionary, Malthusian and
atheistic. This is the imaginary creature to which you
address your arguments, without in the least bothering if
the man you depict thus to proletarians fits the
description. Sometimes you credit me with saying things
that I never said, or you credit me with conclusions
diametrically opposed to my actual ones; at other times,
you take the trouble to lecture me on what no one living
in this century could honestly be ignorant of; all in order
to banish me benignly from the democratic and social
community.

Meanwhile, the well-intentioned readers who follow you,
and the malicious ones — and of the latter sort there is no
shortage — pick up on your accusations, passing
comment on them, inflating them and exploiting them. So
much so that, ultimately and thanks to you, today I find
myself the Satan of socialism, just as, as year ago, I was
the Satan of property. Socialism's main business at this
point in time is to demolish Proudhon, or so one of your
disciples, Madame Pauline Roland,<fnref n="19" /> is telling all who are
prepared to listen. How much more clear-sighted
socialism will be, won't it?, once this renegade Proudhon
has been cast down; whereupon Pierre Leroux's
tittle-tattle merchants, eaten up by hypochondria, will
take their seats among the denizens of the Assembly of
representatives of the People!

So, my dear Pierre Leroux, would you care to see this
controversy brought to an end? The crucial thing is that
the debate be kept on track, that, in each particular, we
deal first with one issue and then with the next, rather
than rant about them all, and then some, as you do in
every one of your articles; without this, our exchanges will
inevitably become a laughing-stock for the Malthusians
and scandalize the proletarians. As for myself, I will freely

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Pauline Roland (1805-1852), a Saint-Simonian socialist, feminist, and associate of Leroux, also wrote a column for Proudhon's *Le Représentant du peuple*, but was later to write a critique of Proudhon's antifeminism, *La femme a-t-elle le droit à la liberté? (Does Woman Have the Right to Liberty?*, 1851). From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
confess to you that I find it impossible to keep up such a
polemic, squandering my time and my paper on
relentlessly clarifying facts, reconstructing texts, clearing
up your misunderstandings, rebutting your whimsy and
translating your high-falutin' style into common parlance.

Thus you take me to task for having made a distinction
between the labor question and the question of the State,
two questions which are, at bottom, identical and
susceptible to one and the same solution.

If you were as eager to acknowledge the common ground
between your thoughts and mine as you are to highlight
where they differ, you wouldn't have had any difficulty
persuading yourself that, when it comes to the questions
of labor and the State, as well as on a host of other matters,
our two outlooks have no reason to feel jealous of each
other. When I state, say, that the capitalist principle and
the monarchist or governmental principle are one and the
same principle; that the abolition of the exploitation of
man by man and the abolition of the government of man
by man are one and the same formula; when, taking up
arms against communism and absolutism alike, those two
kindred faces of the authority principle, I point out that, if
the family was the building block of feudal society, the
workshop is the building block of the new society; it must
be as plain as day that I, like you, look upon the political
question and the economic question as one and the same.
What you upbraid me for not knowing on this score is
your own sheer ignorance of my own thinking and, what
is worse, it is a waste of time.
But does it follow from the fact that the labor question and
the State question resolve each other and are,
fundamentally, one and the same issue, that no distinction
should be made between them and that each does not
deserve its own resolution? Does it follow from these two
questions being, in principle, identical, that we must
arrive at a particular mode of organizing the State rather
than the State being subsumed by labor? Neither of those
conclusions holds water. Social questions are like
problems of geometry; they may be resolved in different
ways, depending on how they are approached. It is even
useful and vital that these differing solutions be devised
so that, in adding further dimensions to theory, they may
add to the sum of science.

And as to the State, since, despite this multi-faceted
character, the ultimate conclusion is that the question of
its organization is bound up with that of the organization
of labor, we may, we must, further conclude that a time
will come when, labor having organized itself, in
accordance with its own law, and having no further need
of law-maker or sovereign, the workshop will banish
government. As I argue and into which we shall look into,
my dear philosopher, whenever, paying rather more heed
to the other fellow's ideas and being a little less sensitive
about your own, you may deign to enter into a serious
debate about one or other of these two things, about
which you are forever prattling without actually saying
anything: Association and the State.

The government question and the labor question being
identical, you rightly remark that such identity is
articulated in the following terms: *The Question of the organization of Society*.

Now, read through chapter one of *Contradictions Économiques* and you will find it formally spelled out that it is incorrect to say that labor is organized or that it is not; that it is *forever* self-organizing; that society is an ongoing striving for organization; that such organization is at one and the same time the principle, the life and the purpose of society. So, my dear Pierre Leroux, be so kind as to think me somewhat less of an ignoramus and above all less of a sophist than I may seem to your frightened imagination: it will lay to rest three quarters of our quarrel.

There can be nothing easier than justifying the orthodoxy of this proposition as penned by me and upon which you seize so contemptuously and irrationally: "The February Revolution has posed two crucial questions: one economic, namely, the question of labor and property; and the other political, to wit, the question of government and the State." I merely needed to issue a reminder of the message implicit in all my words, that politics and political economy are one and the same science, the former being the more personal, arbitrary or subjective; the latter more substantial and positive. However, that interpretation of the February Revolution strikes you as *dry* and *narrow*: it lacks that certain something beyond the government and economics of societies, without which any idea looks satanic to you and every proposition fit for the pyre. That certain something is the sense of the divine, the theological and religious sense. Topped off with a quotation from some homily by Monsieur de Lamartine,
and one of your usual commentaries on God, religion, the
head of Christ, the Convention and the Republic.

At a time of your choosing, my dear Pierre Leroux, I shall
give you such a sermon on God, his Spirit and his Word,
as will draw tears from socialism's blue-stockings and
their concierges; I can play that instrument every bit as
deftly as you and Monsieur de Lamartine. But permit me
not to throw theology into the pot with Political Economy,
or, as the proverb has it, serve up *God with plums*. Such
abuse of religiosity is one of the mystifications of our age
and one that it behooves socialism to purge from its
literature and press. Talking religion to men when the task
in hand is to lay the foundations of social, mathematical
and objective science amounts to a muddying of minds;
and to perpetrating against the People the very same
crime as the notorious Mazarin<sup>20</sup> was accused of having
committed against the person of the young Louis XIV.

What is your God?

What is your religion, your ritual, your dogma?

What is the meaning of this constant invocation of Christ
and Church?

<footnote n="20"><sup>20</sup> Jules Mazarin (1602-61) was an Italian cardinal who served as the chief minister of France from 1642 until his death first under King Louis XIII and then Louis XIV. As the later was only five years old when he became King, Mazarin functioned essentially as the co-ruler of France alongside the queen. From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
You do not know the first thing about these things; you
cannot see a single drop of them in your own thinking and
all this other-worldly lyricism is nothing but a cover for
the wretchedness of your alleged faith and the nullity of
your means. You only prattle so much about God, of
whom you, the anti-Christian, know nothing, to spare
yourself the need to talk about matters here below, *non ut
aliquid dicatur sed ne taciturn.*<fnref n="21" />

Yes, I tell you, the February Revolution (and I am sticking
to my formula precisely on account of its concrete
simplicity and its very materiality), the February
Revolution has posed two questions; one political and the
other economic. The first is the question of government
and freedom; the second that of labor and capital. I defy
you to express bigger issues in fewer words. So leave the
Supreme Being to heaven and religion to conscience, to
the household, a matter for the mother of the family and
her offspring.

Let me add — and there is nothing in me to validate your
entertaining doubts, the way you do, about my feelings on
this score — that once those two major issues have been
resolved, the republican catch-cry, *Liberty, Equality, Fraternity*, is a reality. If this is what you refer to as *God's kingdom on earth*, let me say to you, indeed, that I have no
quarrel with that. It is a real comfort to me to find out at
last that the kingdom of God is the kingdom of liberty,

<footnote n="21">²¹ A slight misquotation of St. Augustine’s *De Trinitate*: “Dictum est tamen tres personae, non ut aliquid diceretur, sed ne taceretur” (“We shall speak of [God as having] three persons, not in order to say anything, but in order not to be silent”). From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
equality and fraternity. But could you not express yourself
in everyday language?

You have me saying, and I really do not know where you
could have found this, that ownership of the instruments of
labor must forever stay vested in the individual and remain
unorganized. These words are set in italics, as if you had
lifted them from somewhere in my books. And then, on
the back of this alleged quotation, you set about
answering me that society, or the State that stands for it,
has the right to buy back all property assets, that it has a
duty to pursue such buy backs and that it will do so.<fnref n="22" />

But it does not follow at all from my speaking on the basis
of socialism in order to reject the buy back of such assets
as nonsensical, illegitimate and poisonous that I want to
see individual ownership and non-organization of the
instruments of labor endure for all eternity. I have never
penned nor uttered any such thing: and have argued the
opposite a hundred times over. I make no distinction, as
you do, between real ownership and phony ownership:
from the lofty heights of righteousness and human destiny,
I deny all kinds of proprietary domain. I deny it, precisely
because I believe in an order wherein the instruments of
labor will cease to be appropriated and instead become
shared; where the whole earth will be depersonalized;
where, all functions having become interdependent

<footnote n="22">²² The French word translated here as *buy back* and *buyback*, "rachat,"
can also have a theological dimension, as in the English
words *redeem* and *redemption*: the phrase "redeemed by the blood of
Jesus Christ," in French, is "rachat par le sang de Jésus-Christ."
From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
[solidaires], the unity and personhood of society will be articulated alongside the personality of the individual. True, were I not familiar with the candor of your soul, I should think, dear Pierre Leroux, that such misrepresentation of my meaning and my words were done on purpose.

But how is such solidarity of possession and labor to be achieved? How are we to make a reality of such personhood of society, which must result from the disappropriation, or de-personalizing of things?

That plainly is the issue, the big question of the revolution.

Together with Louis Blanc, you make noises about *association* and *buy back*: but association, such as it must emerge from fresh reforms, is as much a mystery as religion, and all the attempts at association made by the workers before our very eyes and more or less modeling themselves on the forms of companies defined by our civil and commercial codes, can only be deemed transitory. In short, we know nothing about association. But, besides its requiring the acquiescence of all property-owners, by all the citizenry — which is an impossibility — buying back assets is a notion of mathematical nonsensicality. What is the State supposed to use to pay for assets? Why, assets. An across-the-board buyback amounts to universal expropriation without public utility and WITHOUT COMPENSATION. Yet your sense of caution, Pierre Leroux, has no misgivings about being compromised by fostering such claptrap!
There is a more straightforward, more effective and infinitely less onerous and less risky way of transferring ownership, of achieving Liberty, Equality and Fraternity: that way is, as I have indicated many times, to put an end to capital's role in production by the democratic organization of credit and a simplification of taxation.<fnref n="23" />

Capital having been divested of its power of usury, economic solidarity is gradually created, and with it, an equality of wealth.

Next comes the spontaneous, popular formation of groups, workshops or workers' associations;

Finally, the last to be conjured and formed is the over-arching group, comprising the nation in its entirety, what you term the State because you invest it in a representative body outside of society, but which, to me, is no longer the State.

That, dear philosopher, is how I see the Revolution going; this is how we should shift from Liberty to Equality and thence to Fraternity. Which is why I so forcefully insist upon the importance of economic reform, a reform that I have given this makeshift designation: *Free credit*.

<footnote n="23">²³ The term Proudhon uses, “la productivité du capital,” is literally “the productivity of capital” but such a literal translation unfortunately implies that he simply wishes to end returns to capital. Rather, he wants to achieve production without the mediation of capital and the chosen translation reflects this. From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
And that too we might have scrutinized methodically, and
have thrashed out item by item, had you but once
managed to stand back from your amorous ecstasies and
turn your attention to the sordid practice of loans and
discounts. But you deemed it more purposeful, more
urgent to have it out and repeat everywhere that I am a
foe of Socialism, a foe of Democracy, a foe of Revolution, a
hidden disciple of Malthus, determined to
preserve *bourgeoisism* and *proprietarism*.

Hang on, Pierre Leroux: do I need to tell you what I think
of your role and mine in this mammoth drama of the
nineteenth century? I am the thresher of the February
Revolution: the proletarians who are listening to us will be
the millers and the bakers and you, with your triad,<fnref n="24" /> and
the rest with their tub-thumping claptrap, all of you are
merely pastry cooks.

Yours, etc.,

P-J PROUDHON

<footnote n="24">²⁴ In Leroux's philosophy the fundamental principle was that of what he called the “triad” – a triplicity which he finds to pervade all things, which in God is “power, intelligence and love,” in man “sensation, sentiment and knowledge.” In society, he pointed to the division of the human race into three great classes, philosophers, artists and industrial chiefs, to be paid according to their capacity, labor, and capital. From Andy Carloff.</footnote>
Parliamentary Isolation

I entered the National Assembly with the timidity of a child, with the ardor of a neophyte. Assiduous, from nine o'clock in the morning, at the meetings of bureaux and committees, I did not quit the Assembly until the evening, and then I was exhausted with fatigue and disgust. As soon as I set foot in the parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses; because I was absorbed by my legislative work, I entirely lost sight of the current of events. I knew nothing, either of the situation of the national workshops, or the policy of the government, or of the intrigues that were grow-ing up in the heart of the Assembly. One must have lived in that isolator which is called a National Assembly to realize how the men who are most completely ignorant of the state of the country are almost always those who represent it... Most of my colleagues of the left and the extreme left were in the same perplexity of mind, the same ignorance of daily facts. One spoke of the national workshops only with a kind of terror, for fear of the people is the sickness of all those who belong to authority; the people, for those in power, are the enemy.
The Coming Era of Mutualism

If I am not deceived, my readers must be convinced at
least of one thing, that Social Truth is not to be looked for
either in Utopia or in the Old Routine; that Political
Economy is not the Science of Society, and yet that it
contains the elements of such a science, even as chaos
before creation contained the elements of the universe;
and finally, that in order to arrive at the definitive
organization which would appear to be the destiny of our
race upon this globe, it is only necessary to make a general
equation of all our contradictions.

But what shall be the formula of this equation?

Already we have been enabled to perceive, that it must be
a Law of Exchange, a theory of Mutualism, a system of
Guarantees, which dissolves the old forms of society civil
and commercial, and satisfies all the conditions of
efficiency, progress and justice, which criticism has
pointed out; a Society no longer merely conventional, but
real, which substitutes for the present piecemeal divisions
of property a scientific distribution; which abolishes the
servitude [of] machinery, and prevents the crises
engendered by new inventions; which converts
competition into a benefit and makes of monopoly a
pledge of universal security; which by the power of its
principle, instead of demanding credit for capital and
protection for the state, subjects both capital and the state
to the uses of labor; which by the truthful honesty of the
exchanges produces a real solidarity among nations;
which without interdicting individual enterprise and
without prohibiting domestic expenditure, incessantly
restores to society the wealth that private appropriation
diverts from it; which by the rapid turning over, the
outflux and influx of capital, insures the political and
industrial equality of citizens, and by a grand system of
public education produces, —while constantly elevating
the general level,—an equality of functions and an I
equivalence of skill; which regenerating human
conscience by justice, well being and virtue, ensures
harmony and the equilibrium of generations; a society, in
a word, which being at once organized and transitional,
avoids what is merely provisional, guarantees all, yet
leaves the way open for improvement.

This theory of Mutualism, that is to say of exchange in
kind, of which the simplest form is the loan of articles of
consumption is, when the collective being of society is
regarded, a synthesis of the two ideas of appropriation
and of communism; a synthesis as ancient as the elements
of which it is composed, inasmuch as it is only a return
of society to its primitive practices, across a labyrinth of
inventions and systems, the result of six thousand years of
meditation upon this fundamental proposition, A equals
A.

All is prepared to day for this solemn restoration; every
thing announces that the reign of delusions is ended, and
that society is about to return to its natural sincerity.
Monopoly has swelled to a world-wide size; and
monopoly embracing the world can not remain exclusive;
it must either popularize itself or explode and disappear.
Hypocrisy, venality, prostitution, robbery, form the very
foundations of the public conscience, and unless humanity learns to live upon that which is its bane, we must believe that the era of justice and expiation draws nigh.

Already Socialism, feeling the unsatisfactoriness of Utopian dreams, applies itself to realities and facts; laughs at its own follies in Paris; plunges into discussions in Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, Breslau; rages in England; thunders from across the Atlantic; stands ready for martyrdom in Poland; makes governmental experiments at Berne and Lausanne. Socialism, penetrating the masses, has become transformed; the people care little for the honor of particular schools; they demand work, knowledge, well-being, equality. Little reck they of systems, if only the end they seek is gained. When the people have set their will upon a certain good, and the only question is how to obtain it, we have not long to wait before it comes; prepare to see the grand masquerade break up and vanish.—Translated for *The Spirit of the Age*.