# A Collection of Scattered Articles and Letters of Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Lingkai Kong

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KARL-MARX
VERLAG
A Collection of Scattered Articles and Letters of Proudhon

Author: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Editor: Lingkai Kong

Copyright @ Karl-Marx Verlag 2024

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any
part may take place without the permission of Karl-Marx Verlag.

ISBN: 978-3-9825536-2-7 (paperback)

Front cover image by Spotii Media

Type set in Palatino Linotype & Times New Roman

Printed in Paris, France / Potsdam, Germany

Published by Karl-Marx Verlag

Burgstraße 23

14467 Potsdam, Germany
A Collection of Scattered
Articles and Letters of
Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Edited by
Lingkai Kong

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

KARL-MARX
VERLAG
[This page intentionally left blank.]
*A Collection of Scattered Articles and Letters*
*of Proudhon*
[This page intentionally left blank.]
Content

Content ................................................................................... I

Acknowledgement .................................................................... IV

1837 .................................................................................. 1

Application for the Suard Pension ................................. 2

1839 .................................................................................. 12

The Celebration of Sunday ........................................ 13

1840 .................................................................................. 101

Letter to the Members of the Academy of Besançon 102

1842 .................................................................................. 106

Explanations Presented to the Public Minister on the

Right of Property .................................................... 107

Letter to Bergmann .................................................... 137

1845 .................................................................................. 140

My Testament: or, Society of Avengers ...................... 141

1846 .................................................................................. 150

Proudhon To Marx .................................................... 151

1847 .................................................................................. 154

On the Jews ............................................................ 155

1848 .................................................................................. 157

Letter to Jeanne Deroin ............................................ 158

The Malthusians, the Representatives of the People 161

Toast to the Revolution ............................................ 171

1849 .................................................................................. 186

God is Evil, Man is Free ............................................ 187

In Connection with Louis Blanc: The Present Use and
Future Possibility of the State ................................ 211

Interest and Principal: A Loan is a Service .............. 224
<table><tr><td>Interest and Principal: Arguments Drawn from the Operations of the Bank of France</td><td>234</td></tr><tr><td>Interest and Principal: The Origin of Ground Rent</td><td>243</td></tr><tr><td>Interest and Principle: The Circulation of Capital, Not Capital Itself, Gives Birth to Progress</td><td>249</td></tr><tr><td>Letter to Pierre Leroux</td><td>256</td></tr><tr><td>Parliamentary Isolation</td><td>267</td></tr><tr><td>The Coming Era of Mutualism</td><td>268</td></tr><tr><td>The Nature and Destination of Government</td><td>271</td></tr><tr><td>The State: Its Nature, Object, and Destiny</td><td>282</td></tr><tr><td>What is Government? What is God?</td><td>308</td></tr><tr><td>1850</td><td>319</td></tr><tr><td>Dilemma: Red or White</td><td>320</td></tr><tr><td>1851</td><td>326</td></tr><tr><td>Letter to A. M. Boutteville</td><td>327</td></tr><tr><td>Letter to Langlois</td><td>332</td></tr><tr><td>1852</td><td>336</td></tr><tr><td>The Extremes</td><td>337</td></tr><tr><td>The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d'Etat of December 2, 1851</td><td>340</td></tr><tr><td>Unanimity: Universal Consent</td><td>346</td></tr><tr><td>1855</td><td>350</td></tr><tr><td>New Propositions Demonstrated in the Practice of Revolutions</td><td>351</td></tr><tr><td>Propositions: To Leave Behind Abstractions, Utopias, Systems, Doctrines, Theories and Empiricisms of the Parties Schools and Sects</td><td>356</td></tr><tr><td>1857</td><td>363</td></tr><tr><td>Letter to Villiaumé</td><td>364</td></tr><tr><td>1861</td><td>366</td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td>Relation of the State and Liberty, According to Modern Right</td><td>367</td></tr><tr><td>The Theory of Taxation</td><td>374</td></tr><tr><td>1864</td><td>388</td></tr><tr><td>Letter to Several Workers in Paris and Rouen</td><td>389</td></tr><tr><td>Index</td><td>392</td></tr></table>
Acknowledgement

All articles in this collection are sourced from the list of
Proudhon on the online forum: www.marxists.org. In the
Proudhon list, Andy Carloff is credited with the role of
"Transcription/Markup" for all articles. The editor
expresses the highest respect and gratitude for his
contributions.

Gratitude is extended to the anonymous discussants who
contributed to the forum discussions, as well as to the
translators who rendered these texts from French into
English. For some works, translator information is
available, and I have listed the translator's name alongside
the titles of the works. For the majority of works,
translator information is not available.

This collection consolidates these scattered works of
Proudhon to provide researchers with citation sources in a
paper format. The editing of this collection is a non-profit
project. The price of the paper version will be set to the
minimum, just enough to cover the printing costs. The
editor pledges not to derive any profit from this book.
After the publication of the book, the electronic version in
PDF will be made public immediately.

Editor: Lingkai Kong
December, 2024. Istanbul, Turkey
# Application for the Suard Pension

Besançon, May 31, 1837.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Candidate for the Suard Pension

To the Gentlemen of the Académie De Besançon.

Gentlemen, I am a compositor and proofreader, son of a poor craftsman who, as the father of three boys, could never bear the cost of three apprenticeships. I knew evil and trouble early; my youth, to use a very popular expression, was passed through a fine sieve. Just so Suard, Marmontel, and a host of writers and scholars struggled with fortune. May you, gentlemen, upon reading this memoir, have the thought that between so many men famous for the gifts of intelligence, and the one who now seeks your votes, the community of misfortune is perhaps not the only point of resemblance.

First destined to a mechanical profession, I was, on the advice of a friend of my father, placed as a free day student at the Collège de Besançon. But what was the delivery of 120 francs for a family where food and clothing was always a problem? I normally lacked the most necessary books; I did all my Latin studies without a dictionary; after having translated into Latin everything that my memory supplied, I left blank the words that I didn't know, and, at the door of the school, I filled the empty spaced. I was punished a hundred for having forgotten my books, but the fact was that I did not have
them. All my off were filled by labor, either in the fields or
in the house, in order to save a day of labor; on holidays, I
went to the woods myself to seek the stock of hoops that
would supply the shop of my father, a cooper by
profession. What studies could I make with such a
method? What meager success I was able to obtain!

At the end of my ninth year [quatrième], my prize was Fenelon's *Démonstration de l'existence de Dieu*. That book seemed to suddenly open my mind and illuminate my thought. I was heard to speak of materialists and atheists: I was anxious to learn how they went about denying God.

I will admit, however, that the philosophy of Descartes,
embellished with the eloquence of Fénelon, did not
entirely satisfy me. I sensed God, and my soul was
permeated with him; captured from childhood by that
great idea, it boiled over in me and dominated all my
faculties. And in a book written to prove the existence of
the Supreme Being, I only encountered a shaking
metaphysics whose deductions had the appearance of a
more practical hypothesis, but did not resemble a certain,
scientific theory. Allow me, Gentlemen, to offer you an
example. The soul cannot perish, say that Cartesians,
because it is immaterial and simple. But why can
something which has begun to be not cease to exist? What
then? The soul, in its durations, would be infinite and
eternal on one side, but limited on the other? That is
inconceivable. — Matter, say the same philosophers, is not
the necessary Being, because it is obviously contingent,
dependent and passive. So it has been created. But how
are we to conceive of the creation of matter by mind,
rather than the production of mind by matter? One is a
inconceivable as the other. So I remained what I was, a
believer in God and the immortality of the soul, but, I ask
the pardon of philosophy for it, that was less because of
the evidence of its syllogisms than the weakness of the
opposing arguments. It seemed to me that from then on it
was necessary to follow another road to establish
philosophy as science, and I never came back to that
opinion of my youth.

I pursued my classics through the miseries of my family,
and all the aversions with which a sensitive young man
can be showered and the most *irritable* self-esteem. Apart
from sickness and the bad state of his business, my father
pursued a legal suit that completed his ruin. The very day
when the judgment was to be pronounced, I was to be
awarded with *excellence*. I came with a very sad heart to
that formality where everything seemed to laugh at me;
fathers and mothers embraced their laureate sons and
applauded their triumphs, while my family was in court,
awaiting the decision.

I will always remember it. — The rector asked me if I
wanted to be presented to some relative or friend, in order
to pour be crowned by their hand.

"I have no one here, Rector," I responded.

"Well!" he added, "I will crown and embrace you."

Never, Gentlemen, have I felt such a shock. I found my
family distressed, my mother in tears: our trial was lost.
That night, we all supped on bread and water.
I dragged myself along as far as rhetoric: it was my last year of secondary school. I had to provide for my own food and upkeep. — “Presently,” my father said to me, “you must know your trade; at eighteen, I earned my bread, and I did not have such a long apprenticeship.” — I found that he was right, and I joined a printing shop.

I hoped for some time that the trade of proofreader would allow me to resume my abandoned studies at the very moment when they demanded greater efforts and new activity. The works of Bossuet, the Bergiers, etc., would pass before my eyes; I learned the laws of reasoning and style with these great masters. Soon I believed that I was called to be an apologist for Christianity, and I read the books of its enemies and defenders. Must I tell you, Gentlemen? In the raging furnace of controversy, often being fascinated by imaginations and only hearing my inner feelings, I gradually saw my dear and precious beliefs disappear; I would successively profess all the heresies condemned by the Church and related by the dictionary of Abbot Pluquet; I detached from one only to sink into the opposite, until finally, from weariness, I stopped at the last and perhaps most unreasonable of all: I was Socinian. I fell into a deep despondency.

However, the political commotions and my private misery tore me from my solitary meditations, and I threw myself more and more into the whirlwind of active life. To live, I had to leave my city and homeland, take up costume and staff of the *compagnon* of the *tour de France*, and seek, from print shop to print shop, some lines to compose, some proofs to read. One day, I sold my school prize, the only library I had ever possessed. My mother cried; for me,
there remained the manuscripts extracts from my readings. These extracts, which could not be sold, followed and consoled me everywhere. I wandered part of France in this way, sometimes exposed to lack of work and bread for having dared tell the truth to a boss who, in response, brutally dismissed me. That same year, employed at Paris as a proofreader, I was almost once again the victim of my provincial pride; and without the support of my coworkers, who defended me against the unjust accusations of a foreman, I would perhaps have seen myself, urged by hunger, obliged to hire myself out to some journalist. Despite all the privations and miseries that I had endured, that extremity appeared to me the most horrible of all.

The life of man is never so suffering and abandoned that it is not strewn with some consolations. I had encountered a friend in a young man that fortune tormented, as much as myself, by the moral conflicts and the sting of poverty. He was named Gustave Fallot.<fnref n="1" /> In the depths of a workshop, I received a letter one day, inviting me to leave everything and go join my friend... — “You are unfortunate,” he said to me, “and the life you lead does not suit you. Proudhon, we are brothers: as long as I have bread and I room, I will share it all with you. Come here, and we will or perish together.” Then, Gentlemen, he himself addressed to you a memoir and present himself to you votes as a candidate for the Suard pension. Without saying anything about it to me, he proposed, if he obtained the preference over his friends, to abandon to me the enjoyment of that pension, reserving for himself the glory of the and the use of the

<footnote n="1">¹ M. Gustave Fallot was the first Suard resident.</footnote>
precious advantages that are attached to it. — “If I am appointed in the month of August,” he said to me, without explaining more, “our career will begin in the month of August.” I flew to his call, and arrived to find him, stricken by cholera, consume his last resources for me, and arrive at death’s door without it being possible for me to continue my care for him. The lack of money no longer permitted us to remain together; we had to separate, and I embraced him for the last time. Last January 25, I spent an hour meditating at his tomb.

Fifty francs in my pocket, a sack on my back, and my philosophy notebooks for provisions, I set out for the south of France... But, Gentlemen, it would be an abuse of your patience to detail for you here, in minute detail and in chronological order, all that I have suffered in my body and heart. What does it matter to you, after all, that I have been more or less shaken by fortune? It is not enough, to earn your choice, to have only poverty to offer, and your votes do not seek an adventurer. However, if I do not uncover my calamitous existence, who will recommend me to your attention? Who will speak for me? Such has been to this day, and such is still my life: living in the workshops, witness of the vises and virtues of the people, eating my bread earned each day by the sweat of my brow, obliged, with my modest wages, to assist my family and contribute to the education of my brothers; in the midst of all that, pondering, philosophizing, gathering the least of unexpected observations.

Fatigued by the precarious and miserable condition of being a workers, I wished in the end to attempt, together with one of my fellows, to organize a small printing
business. The meager savings of the two friends were put
in common and all the resources of their families cast in
that lottery. The treacherous game of business deceived
our hope: order, labo, economy, nothing served; the two
partners, one went to the corner of a wood to die of
exhaustion and despair, the other has no more to repent
than having cut into the last piece of bread of his father.

Pardon me once more, Gentlemen, if, instead of exhibiting
some real titles to your benevolence, I only show you my
misfortune. Unknown to the majority of you, I must, it
seems to me, tell you what I have been, what I am. It is
not, moreover, without some repugnance that I have
consented to recount to you some of the circumstances of
my life, and to disclose to you the habitual state of my
mind and character. Such confidences only appear to me
well put between equals and friends. — “Well!” a man
that I love and revere tells me, “Do you want to please the
Gentlemen of the Academy? Speak to them as friend.” —
Would he be deceived, and would my confidence lead me
to a bad end?

In 1836-1837, a long sickness having forced me to
interrupt my labor in the workshop, I returned to study.
Some fortunate enough attempts at criticism and sacred
philosophy had given a new impetus to my literary and
determined my penchant for philosophical speculations.
In the insomnia of fever and the leisure of a laborious
convalescence, I gave myself up to some researches on
grammar that appeared important enough to merit your
examination. Two copies of my work were addressed to
you; but the immense labors of your learned company
alone have, until now, I at least dare to presume, delayed
your judgment.

If, however, the weak composition that was submitted to
you could answer for the one that I am preparing; if the
presentation of my first glimpses sufficiently guarantee
the accuracy of the ideas that I elaborate; if you would
desire, Gentlemen, to see brought to the end new and
fertile studies, would it be allowed to the one who already,
since a year ago, has placed himself at your bench for trial,
to count a bit more on your indulgent benevolence than
on the doubtful hopes of his talent and the regard due to
the extreme modesty of his fortune?

To see new regions in psychology, new ways in
philosophy; to study the nature and mechanism of the
human mind in the most obvious and most perceptible of
his faculties, speech; to determine, according to the origin
and processes of language, the source and line of descent
of human beliefs; to apply, in short, grammar to
metaphysics and morals, and to realize a thought that
torments profound geniuses, that preoccupied Fallot, that
our Pauthier pursued: such is, Gentlemen, the task that I
would impose on myself if you would grant me the books
and time; the books above all! The time will never be
lacking to me.

After all the vicissitudes of my ideas and the long
parturition of my soul, I had to finish, I have finished by
creating for myself a complete, linked system of religious
and philosophical beliefs, a system that I can reduce to
this simple formula:
There exists, of superhuman origin, a primitive philosophy or religion, corrupted since before any of the historical eras, of which the cults of the different nations have preserved some authentic and homologues vestiges. The majority of the Christian dogmas themselves are only the summary expression of so many demonstrable propositions; and we can, by the comparative study of religious systems, by the attentive examination of the formation of languages, and independent of every other revelation, observe the reality of the truths that the Catholic faith imposes, truths inexplicable in themselves, but accessible to the understanding. From that principle can be deduced, by a series of strict consequences, a traditional philosophy the ensemble of which will constitute an exact science.

Such is today, Gentlemen, the compendium of my profession of faith.

Born and raised in the heart of the working classes, still belonging to it in my heart and affections, and especially through the sufferings and wishes, my greatest joy, if I gather your suffrages, would be, do not doubt it, Gentlemen, to be able to work from now on without rest, by science and philosophy, with all the energy of my will and all the powers of my mind, at the moral and intellectual improvement of those whom I am happy to call my brothers and companions; to be able to spread among them the seeds of a doctrine that I regard as the law of the moral world; and, while awaiting the success of my efforts, directed by your prudence, to already find myself, in some way, as their representative to you.
But, whatever your choice, Gentlemen, I submit to it in
advance and applaud it; followig the example of an
ancient, I would rejoice if you find one more worthy than
me: Proudhon, accustomed from childhood to sharpen his
courage against the adversity, would never had the pride
to believe himself a disdained and unsung genius...

P.-J. Proudhon.
1839
# The Celebration of Sunday

## Preface

The celebrated Sir Francis Bacon was called the reformer of human reason for having replaced the syllogism with observation in the natural sciences; the philosophers, following his example, teach today that philosophy is a collection of observations and facts. But, certain thinkers have said to them, if truth and certainty exist in *philosophy*, they must also exist in the realm of *politics*: thus, there is a social science responsive to evidence, which is consequently the object of demonstration, not of art or authority, not, that is, of arbitrary will.

This conclusion, so profound in its simplicity, so innovative in its consequences, has been the signal for a vast intellectual movement, comparable with that which manifested itself in the Roman empire, at the time of the establishment of Christianity. We have set ourselves to seek the *new science*; and as the investigation cannot begin with anything but critique, we have arrived methodically at the negation of everything that makes up and sustains society.

Thus we have asked: What is royalty? And the response has been: A myth.

*What is religion? — A dream of the mind.*

*What is God? — An eternal X.*
What is property? — It is theft.

What is community? — It is death.

Christianity signaled its entry into the world in absolutely
the same way; before positing its dogma, it said to itself:

What is Cesar? — Nothing.

What is the republic? — Nothing.

What is Jupiter? — Nothing.

What is nobility, philosophy, glory? — Nothing.

The negation that Christianity began against ancient
society was then pursued against Christianity itself; and
we told ourselves that the truth would appear to us only
after we had demolished everything. When will this be
accomplished? But, if the present and the past cannot give
us truth in its essential form, they contain it substantially,
since truth is eternal, and eternally manifests itself. It is
thus as much in the institutions that have been destroyed,
or are at the point of disappearing, as it is in the facts that
spring up anew each day, that we should seek truth in
itself, the face-to-face contemplation of the absolute, *siculi
est, facie ad faciem*.

Among the monuments of antiquity, the laws of Moses
are unquestionably those that have most occupied the
meditations of the savants. For ourselves, the sublimity of
the mosaic system would astonish us, perhaps, if we did
not know that by virtue of the laws of human
understanding, every primitive idea being necessarily
universal, every primitive legislation must have been a
summary of philosophy, a rudiment of knowledge. What
we have taken for profundity and divine inspiration in
Moses and the other legislators of antiquity was, at base,
only a general intuition and aphoristic conception; as for
its form, it was the living and spontaneous expression of
the first apperceptions of consciousness.

But how did the Sabbath become, in the thought of Moses,
the pivot and rallying symbol of Jewish society? Another
law of the intelligence will explain it to us.

In the sphere of pure ideas, everything is connected,
supported and demonstrated, not according to the order
of filiation, or the principle of consequences, but according
to the order of coexistence or coordination of relations.
Here, as in the universe, the center is everywhere and the
circumference nowhere; that is, everything is at once
principle and consequence, axis and radius. Moses, having
to formulate the totality of his laws by deduction, was free
to choose for the culminating point of his system whatever
economic or moral idea he wanted. He preferred the
weekly division of time, because he needed a sensible and
powerful symbol which constantly recalled to the hordes
of semi-savage Israel the feelings of nationality, fraternity
and unity, without which any subsequent development
was impossible. The Sabbath was like the common
meeting ground where all the Hebrews should gather
themselves in spirit, at the beginning of each week; the
monument that expressed their political existence, the link
that held together all their institutions. Thus, public and
civil right, municipal administration, education,
government, worship, customs, hygiene, family and city
relations, *liberty, public order*: the Sabbath supposed all
these things, fortified them and created their harmony.

The author of this discourse has been reproved for lending
to Moses views that could not have been his own, but this
reproach is unreasonable. Today, it is much less a question
of knowing what the individual who wrote them thought
of these laws, than it is to know the very spirit of his
legislation. Certainly Moses was not thinking of the
Catholics or protestants; however, the vigor of the
institution of the Sabbath was such, that the Jews passed it
on to the Christians and the Mohammedans; that from
them it extended around the globe; and that it will outlive
all the religions, embracing within its vast reach
prehistoric times and the most distant future ages.

We do not know who first imagined the division of time
into weeks. It doubtless sprung from that spontaneous
genius, a sort of magnetic vision, which discovered the
first arts, developed language, invented writing, created
systems of religion and philosophy: a marvelous faculty,
the processes of which elude analysis, and that reflection,
another rival and progressive faculty, weakens gradually
without ever being able to make it disappear.

Today, when the questions of labor and wages, of
industrial organization and national workshops, of
political and social reform, occupy public attention to the
highest degree, we believe a legislation based on a theory
*of repose*, if we can put it this way, could be useful.
Nothing comparable to the Sabbath, before or since the
legislator of the Sinai, has been imagined and put into
practice. Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, for which respect
seems to have diminished, will be revived in all its
splendor, when the guarantee of labor is won, with the
well-being that is its prize. The working classes are too
interested in the maintenance of the dominical holiday to
ever let it perish. Thus all will celebrate the day, even
though they don't attend the mass: and the people will see,
by this example, how it is possible that a religion be false,
and the contents of that religion be true at the same time;
that to philosophize about dogma is to renounce faith; to
transform a religion is to abolish it. The priests, with their
scientific tendencies, march toward that inevitable
conclusion: let them pardon us for having gone before
them, and not refuse us the final benediction, because we
have arrived first at the tomb of religion.

## The Celebration of Sunday

"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

"Six days shall thou labor, and do all thy work.

"But the seventh day is the rest of the Lord: in it thou shall not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.

"For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea,
and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: That is
why the Eternal has hallowed and blessed the day of
rest."
Such is the literal text of the fourth paragraph of the first
article of the Charter given to the Hebrews by Moses, and
known under the name of the DECALOGUE.<fnref n="2" />

It is a question of penetrating the spirit, the motives and
the aim of that law, or, to put it better, of that institution,
that Moses and the prophets would always regard as
fundamental, and to which we can find nothing
comparable among any of the peoples who have had a
written legislation; an institution the whole scope of
which even the most celebrated critics—Grotius, Cunéus,
Spencer, Dom Calmet, l'abbé de Vence, P. Berruyer,
Bergier, etc.—have not grasped; of which Montesquieu
has not even spoken, because he did not understand it;
that J.-J. Rousseau seems to have sensed, however far his
thought was from it; an institution, finally, which our
modern genius, with all its theories of political and civil

<footnote n="2">² In our catechisms, the division of Decalogue is different from that which is presented here. According to the Hebrews, the first commandment teaches the *unity* of God; the second forbids the *fabrication of images*; it is an artificial, political. These two commandments have been merged into only one. The third forbids *taking the name of God in vain*; that prohibition is at once political and religious, completely within the customs of antiquity. We recognize here that *Punic faith*, to which imprecations and oaths cost nothing; Moses ordained that the oath by Jehovah would be inviolable. That precept is for us the second; it commands, it is said, to avoid *foul words and swearing*. The fourth commandment concerns the Sabbath. The tenth (for us the seventh), concerning covetousness, has been divided in two, in order to preserve the number 10. It is, on the one hand, the prohibition against desiring one's neighbor's wife; on the other, the prohibition against coveting his ox or his ass, etc. But in Moses this distinction does not exist.</footnote>
right, with its niceties of constitutions and its vague
desires for liberty and equality, has never measured up to.
We know that, from the origins of Christianity, the weekly
celebration of rest was transferred from Saturday, or the
day of Saturn, to the following day, the day of the Sun;
and that, in the thought of the Apostles, there should not
exist, between the mosaic Sabbath and the Christian
Sunday, any difference but a delay of twenty-four hours.
The day of the observance was transferred for two reasons:
to honor the resurrection of Christ, and to radically
separate the two religions. Beyond that, neither the thing
nor its spirit were changed; the obligation and the purpose
of the precept remained the same. The intention of the
reformers, as faithful disciples of their master, was never
to abolish the ancient law, but to complete it. If then I
should succeed in establishing that the object of the Jewish
legislator, in that which concerns the holiday the seventh
day, was quadruple; that that object, at
once civil, domestic, moral and hygienic, was consequently
the most vast, the most universal that the thought of a
founder of a nation could embrace; if I could show
according to what principles of a philosophy unknown to
our age the fourth commandment was conceived, what its
sanction was, what its consequences should be for the
destiny of the people, I would have, I believe, satisfied all
the conditions of the problem put forward; and by
demonstrating the sublimity of the institutions Moses, I
would have plumbed the depths of the question that I
examine. It is nearly useless to caution that I contemplate
all the facts relative to the Jewish religion, as well as those
relating to Christianity, from a purely human point of view:
today one is no longer suspected of religiosity, because
they discover reasonable things in a religion.
I

It is rare that a law can be well understood and appreciated at its true value, if we limit ourselves to considering it separately, and independent of the system to which it is linked: that is a principle of legislative critique which no one contests, and suffers hardly any exceptions. How is it that this rule has been so badly followed with regard to the laws of Moses, that no one has yet thought to present them in their totality? I would not exempt from this criticism even Mr. Pastoret himself, whose work on the legislation of Moses seems to have been composed under the dictation of rabbis who wanted to mock their disciple. How is it, I say, that no publicist has even tried to sum up that governmental machine, to show its workings, to show the correlation of the parts with the whole, and the exact proportion between them? We have given ourselves up to minute researches on the laws of Lycurgus; for them, we have exhausted all the resources of erudition; by means of sagacity and critique, we have managed to give, if not a complete idea, at least an approximate, of the political state of the Lacedaemonians. The same work on Moses would be much easier; most of the materials exist; and, in order to reconstruct the edifice, it is a question only of arranging the scattered fragments.

We would hardly believe such an insufficiency on the part of the commentators, if the causes were not found recorded in their writings. According to the rabbis, it is not necessary to seek any reason in the Jewish laws other
than the autocratic will of God, no other motive than the
absolute, *sic volo, sic jubeo*, which allows neither
examination nor verification. It is an impiety to probe the
ways of the divinity. Obedience, in order to be meritorious,
must be blind. Submission to the law loses all its prize, as
soon as it is accompanied by science. That absurd opinion
is ever so ancient and so profoundly established among
them, that when a Pharisee, Saint Paul, came to proclaim
before the nation that heretical aphorism, *Rationabile sit
obsequium vestrum*, "Let your obedience be reasonable," a
revolution was accomplished in religion.

On the other hand, Moses had not prepared himself to
erect a dialectical monument; he did not want to make a
theory. He never explained his principles. The needs of
the people demanded a rule; Moses rendered an oracle. A
question of right presented itself to be resolved; he
dictated a law. But, despite that incoherence in the
redaction, we need not imagine that his plan of legislation
was as disordered as the collection of his decrees appears
to us today, and that he had not had constantly in mind
the archetypal idea of the simplest and most magnificent
system. The Decalogue is the reduced expression and like
the most general formula of that mass of detailed
ordinances scattered in the Pentateuch. The very number
of the commandments of the Decalogue and their
sequence is not at all fortuitous: it is the genesis of moral
phenomena, the scale of duties and crimes, based on a
wise and marvelously developed analysis.
<table><thead><tr><th>COMMANDMENTS</th><th>CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS</th><th>VIRTUES AND DUTIES</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th</td><td>1. Impiety.</td><td>1. Religion, homeland.</td></tr><tr><td>5th</td><td>2. Parricide.</td><td>2. Filial piety, obedience, discipline.</td></tr><tr><td>6th</td><td>3. Homicides, assaults, etc.</td><td>3. Love of the neighbor, of humanity.</td></tr><tr><td>7th</td><td>4. Luxury.</td><td>4. Chastity, modesty.</td></tr><tr><td>8th</td><td>5. Theft, rapine.</td><td>5. Equality, justice.</td></tr><tr><td>9th</td><td>6. Lies, perjury.</td><td>6. Truth, good faith.</td></tr><tr><td>10th</td><td>7. Concupiscence.</td><td>7. Purity of heart.</td></tr></tbody></table>

What a magnificent creed! What philosopher, what legislator has there been but this one who has established such categories, and who has known how to fill out this cadre! Seek in all the duties of man and citizen something which does not boil down to this, but you will not find it. On the contrary, if you show me somewhere a single precept, a single obligation irreducible to that measure, I am justified in advance in declaring that obligation, that precept, outside of conscience, and consequently arbitrary, unjust, and immoral. We have exhausted all the forms of admiration and praise with regard to the categories Aristotle; we have not said a word of the categories of Moses. I will not do the same.

Supported by these certain foundations, the work of Moses was raised like a creation of God: unity and simplicity in the principles, variety and richness in the details. Each of the formulas of the Decalogue could become the subject of a long treatise: I will not explore even one of them in depth. The ordinance on the Sabbath is only one section of the first law, of which it forms the fourth paragraph.
"It is necessary," said J.-J. Rousseau (*The Social Contract*),
"that there be fixed and periodic assemblies, that nothing
can abolish or defer, so that on the indicated day the
people will be legitimately called together by the law,
without there being need for any other formal
convocation."

What Rousseau asked, with the sole aim of forcing the
people to show itself from time to time in all of their
majesty, and thus to act as sovereign, Moses ordained, but
not to gather a deliberative assembly: — about what would
they deliberate? They have no right to claim, no privilege
to destroy: all affairs, private or public, should be dealt
with according to the constituent principles and by a sort
of casuistic algebra. The marvel of modern times, the
standing vote, taken on questions which could be resolved
only by science and study, the preponderance of
majorities, in a word, would then have appeared
absolutely absurd. The laws like the institutions, founded
on the observation of nature and deduced from moral
phenomena in the same manner as the formulas in a
treatise on physics are deduced from the phenomena of
bodies, were immutable; and there was a penalty of death
for whoever proposed to change or remove them. For
extraordinary cases, the ancients gathered themselves in
the public square: they did not wait for the Sabbath. The
government of the Hebrews was not, as some imagine,
a democracy in the manner of the *Social Contract*; neither
was it a *theocracy*, in the sense of a *government by priests*.
Moses, founding his republic by making the people swear
to be faithful to the *Alliance*, had not submitted his work to
the judgment of the multitude: that which is just in itself,
the absolute truth, cannot be the object of an acceptance or
a pact. Free, at his own risk, to obey the voice of his
conscience, man has not be called to compromise with it:
so the Jewish people were subject to the law. As for the
priesthood, we will see what it was later.

Moses knew that man, rather than being born for society,
is often dominated without knowing it by an unsociable
instinct which leads him to isolation; he knew that reason,
interest, even friendship, does not always suffice to
vanquish his natural sloth; that suffering and labor, far
from bringing him closer to his fellows, pushes him from
them, and that his somber sadness is increased by the
energy of his thought and his silent contemplations. Who
should be more disposed than the preacher of Mount
Horeb to absolve the reclusive man? For forty years, alone
with his genius, always lost in the infinite, conversing
only with the beasts, he had tasted all the delights and all
the rancors of meditation. His soul, exalted by continual
ecstasy, had made enthusiasm a habit. And suddenly the
anchorite of the desert said to himself: Man is not made to
live alone; he must have brothers. The interior life is not of
this world. On this earth, action was required. And he was
soon on his way: Israel had a liberator.

What Moses wanted then for his young nation, was not
associations or musters, nor was it rallies and fairs. It was
not only the unity of government, nor the community of
usages. All of that is consequence, rather than principle; it
is the sign, not the thing. What he desired to create in his
people was a communion of love and faith, a fusion of
intelligences and hearts, if I may put it that way. It was
this invisible link, stronger than all material interests, that
forms among souls the love of the same homeland, the
worship of the same God, the same conditions of domestic
happiness, the solidarity of destinies, the same memories,
and the same aspirations. He wanted, in short, not an
agglomeration of individuals, but a truly fraternal society.

But, in order to sustain the social sentiment that he
desired to give rise to, something tangible was needed.
For the symbol to be efficacious, it would be necessary to
bring together consciences. On the day of the Sabbath, the
children asked their fathers: "Why these celebrations,
these ceremonies, these mysteries, that Jehovah our God
has instituted?" And the fathers responded to their
children: "We were slaves of an Egyptian Pharaoh, and
Jehovah took us from Egypt by the strength of his arms!
He led us to this land that he had sworn to give to our
fathers. That is why he instituted all these solemnities,
testimony to our gratitude and token of our future
prosperity." Let us note these last words. While the
common Jew saw in the Sabbath only a commemoration
of his deliverance, the legislator made it the *palladium* to
which the salvation of the republic was attached. And
how is that? Because every system of laws and institutions
needs to be protected by a special institution that
encompasses and sums it up, which is its crown and its
basis; because the Sabbath, suspending the rude labors of
an almost entirely agricultural population, and connecting
minds through the connection of persons, a day of public
exaltation, national mourning, popular instruction and
universal emulation, stopped the speculations of interest
and directed the reason towards a more noble object. It
softened manners by the charm of a rest that was not
sterile, aroused a mutual goodwill, developed the national
character, made the rich more liberal, evangelized the
poor, and excited the love of the homeland in every heart.
Let us examine some of these consequences.

Every man in Israel was required to read and meditate all
his life, and copy with his own hand the text of the law.
Some sentences drawn on the doors of houses and even
on clothing, constantly recalled to memory that sacred law.
Now, as there were no public schools, and as the entire
week was filled by labor in the fields, it was during the
rest of the Lord that the first writing lessons were given,
and it was the BOOK which provided for this pious
exercise. The first result, and the most important, of the
sabbatical law, was instruction, and what instruction?
That of religion, politics and morals. The teaching of the
synagogue later developed the spirit of the letter that *kills*;
the Levites and the prophets learned to sing it. "Such
were," said Fleury, "the schools of the Israelists, where
they taught not curious sciences, but religion and manners,
and where on instructed, not children and some
individual idlers, but all the people." Religion means, to
express myself in our language, the science of government,
political and civil right, the knowledge of duties, the
principle of authority, obligation of discipline, the
conditions of order and equilibrium, the guaranties of
liberty, equality, or more accurately the original
consanguinity. Our catechisms are, I cannot help noticing,
a quite a ways from all that.

It is that spirit of religion that Saint Paul, so learned in the
Hebraic traditions, tried hard to create among the
Christians converted among the Gentiles. Already in his
time, the pride of wealth and the luxury of sensual
pleasures had crept in even among the *agapes*, or love
feasts, which were taken in common. The wealthy did not want to eat with the poor, or eat the same food. "Each of you, St. Paul reproached them, brings home what pleases him: one gets drunk, the other dies of hunger." And he cried out indignantly: "Can you not stay in your houses to eat and drink? And do you come to the meeting (in *church*) only to insult those who have nothing?" How much these merchants of Corinth must have made the apostle miss the brothers of Palestine, so fervent, so disinterested, so pure! But they had been prepared by the Jewish religion, while the others had forsworn from paganism only the worship of multiple gods. The same social tendency shows itself in the famous Apology of Saint Justin. We see there that the principle exercises of Sunday were, after the catechesis, acts of charity and mercy, that part of religion which could then be reconciled with the secular power and with the obedience that one believed due to it.

A people, it is said, must have spectacles. I am far from contesting it; but since in everything we encounter evil alongside good, the question is to know what spectacles it is suitable to give to the people. For that, it is necessary to consult the times, the places, and the men. The representations of Aristophanes would have been an abomination to Orientals; the fierce Roman preferred the butchery of the circus to the pomp of the theaters; our fathers, in the Middle Ages, interrupted the offices of the church in order to perform the mysteries in the presence of the bishop and his clergy; and I would dare say that after two centuries of admiration, our Greek tragedies begin to seem a bit too distant from us. Besides, we don't even have spectacles: among us there exist only curiosities—more or less amusing, and more or less
costly—in which nine-tenths of the people do not
participate.

It has been said that the Sunday vespers were the comedy
of servants: that disparaging phrase, cast on the
ceremonies of worship, and a thousand times more
insulting to the people than to religion, shows better than
anything I could say how much the mania for distinction
stifles the spirit of society, and how little we in France
respect divine or human things. What's more, the priests,
by a deplorable emulation, try to justify that mocking
definition; the opera music introduced into the church, the
theatrical effects, the taste for charms and incantations, the
search for unknown devotions and new saints, all that, we
must say, invented or foreseen by the priests, degrades the
majesty of Christianity more and more, and manages to
destroy the little bit of religious faith in the nation that
escaped the libertinage of the eighteenth century.

What more beautiful spectacle than that of a whole people
assembled for the rites of its religion, for the celebration of
the great anniversaries? Such a spectacle suits the taste of
all men; no nation ever did without it. “The feasts of the
Israelites, says the same Fleury, were true feasts, real
rejoicings. They were not profane spectacles, and
contented themselves with some religious ceremonies and
the mechanism of sacrifices. All men were obliged to be in
Jerusalem at the three great solemnities of Passover,
Pentecost and Tabernacles; and women were permitted to
come. The assembly was thus very numerous: each
appeared clothed in the best that they had. One had the
pleasure of seeing parents and friends again; one attended
the prayers and sacrifices, always accompanied by music.
After that, in the magnificent temple, followed the feasts where the peaceful victims were eaten. The same law commanded rejoicing, and united sensible with spiritual joy... It need not astonish us then that it was agreeable news that the festival approached, and that one would soon go to the house of the Lord; so, to go there, one traveled in great troupes, singing and playing instruments..."

These solemnities were rare, it is true; but each week brought their abbreviated image, and maintained their memory. The ceremonies of the synagogue finished, the fathers and elders gathered at the gates of the town; there they talked of labor, of the opening of the harvests, of the approach of the sheep-shearing, of the best methods for working the land and raising herds. There was also talk of the affairs of the country and of relations with the neighboring peoples. The young men, to the approving cheers of the women and girls, engaged in martial exercises: they held races, learned to draw a bow, tried to show strength and flexibility by lifting heavy loads, and by handling weights intended for that purpose. Sometimes they even competed in wit and subtlety, by riddles and apologues. We find traces of all these customs in the Old Testament; for we need not believe that prior to the migration in Babylon, the observation of the Sabbath was carried to that point of superstitious fastidiousness that Jesus Christ criticized in the Pharisees when he said to them: *The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.* One of the most unfortunate effects of the sojourn of the Jews in Chaldea was to give them a taste for metaphysical reveries and a narrow, petty critique, a passion for disputes, a hunger for vain curiosities in
speculation and refinement in practice. When we compare
the Jews of the restoration of Cyrus with the Hebrews of
the time of Samuel, Solomon and Hezekiah, we would
think we see two different races. The greatness and
simplicity of the Israelite genius has given place to the
fault-finding, persnickety and false spirit of the rabbis; the
good sense of the public seems eclipsed, and the nation
has fallen. Between *Horace* and *Attila*, the distance is
undoubtedly great; but between the Prophets and the
Talmud, the contrast is monstrous. In general, we
shouldn't seek the truth of the usages of the Hebrew
people in the Talmudic traditions.

With regard to the government, the people should gather
on the seventh day, not to make laws or vote on anything:
I have already said that, according to Moses, all matters of
legislation and politics are the object of science, not of
opinion. The *legislative power* belongs only to that supreme
reason that the Hebrews worshiped under the name
of *Jehovah*: consequently all law, in order to be holy,
should be marked with a character of necessity; all
jurisprudence consisted of a simple exposition of
principles, the knowledge of which was no one's privilege.
To attribute to an official personage the right of *veto*, or
of *sanction*, would have appeared to Moses as the height of
absurdity and tyranny. Justice and legality are two things
as independent of our consent as mathematical truth: to
compel, it is enough for them to be known; to let
themselves be seen, they demand only meditation and
study. But, —and this will appear unprecedented,— the
assembled people, whom Moses did not recognize as
sovereign, in the sense that the will of the people makes
law, formed the *executive power*. It was to the people,
gathered in its families and tribes that the charge of
watching over the law was confided; it was for this great
and sublime function that the legislator had wanted them
to gather for a full week, judging that the people alone
have a right to constrain the people, because they along
can protect themselves.

What then was the legislator himself? A man inspired by
God, which is to say a saint, a philosopher, a poet.
Interpreter of that wisdom that founded the law, he was
still, by his enthusiasm and his virtues, its herald and
reflection. He commanded nature, conjured heaven and
earth, ravished imaginations with the magic of his songs;
but he spoke to the people in the name of God—in the
name of *truth*. That is why he referred the guardianship of
the law to the entire nation, why he allowed it that
guarantee against the audacity of impostors and tyrants,
the obligation to gather on a set day to oversee itself and
its agents. Every citizen can affirm: This is true, this is just;
but his conviction obliges no one but himself. The nation
alone has the right to say: *We command and require...*

Such would be the institution of Sunday, if fatal
circumstances, which did not exist for Moses and which
time has not caused to disappear, had not stopped the
development. In the cities, Sunday is hardly anything but
a holiday without motive or aim, an occasion for parades
for the women and children, for consumption for the
restaurateurs and wine-merchants, of degrading idleness,
and increased vise. On Sunday, the tribunals are closed,
the public courts recessed, the schools vacant, the
workshops idle, the army at rest: and why? So that the
judge, casting off his robe and his gravity, can freely
attend to concerns of ambition and pleasure, the scientist
can cease to think, the student stroll, the worker stuff
themselves, the grisette dance, and the soldier drink or
just be bored. The trader alone never stops. If all of that
was honest and useful, the aim of the institution would
still be missed, and for two reasons: one, that all these
amusements are without relation to the general good; the
other, that they foment selfishness even in the connecting
of persons.

In the countryside, where the people yield more easily to
religious sentiment, the celebration of Sunday still
preserves some of its social influence. The appearance of a
rustic population, gathered as a single family to listen to
their pastor, prostrate in silence contemplation before the
invisible majesty of God, is touching and sublime. The
charm works on the heart of the peasant: on Sunday, he is
more gracious, more loving, more affable; he is sensible of
the honor of his village, and he is proud of it; he identifies
with the interests of his commune. Sadly, that happy
instinct never produces its full effect, for lack of sufficient
culture; for if religion has not lost all its influence on the
heart, it has long since ceased to speak to the reason. And
I do not intend this as a reproach: religion is immobile by
its nature; it only modifies its discipline at long intervals
and after endless delays. Moreover, the brusque changes
that have occurred in our mores and social relations have,
so to speak, taken it unawares. It has still not had time to
adapt itself to the new order of things, or to harmonize
itself with it. The people understand nothing of the
ceremonies; the dogmas have no relation to their
understanding. The prayers are not translated; and if
sometimes they are recited in their language, the object of
these prayers no longer interests them. Placed between the
spiritual and the temporal, accustomed by their education
to separate them, how would they grasp the connection?
They believe that on entering the church they pass from
one world to another, and rarely do they abstain, on that
occasion, from sacrificing a present interest to some
obscure and uncertain one. The priest teaches morals, but
does he speak of the conditions of the social order, of the
equality which should reign here below between the
different classes of citizens, as it reigns among the orders
of the blessed in the times that he heralds? Does he speak
of the duties of the government, of the majesty of the
sovereign nation, of the independence of reason, which
alone can legitimate respect for the earthly powers and
faith in God? Does he speak of progress, of the incessant
transformation of religious dogmas and political
institutions? No, the priest does not speak of these things.
The mayor and the bishop forbid it; he could not do it
without kindling revolt and incurring the blame for
himself.

*Incedo per ignes*: I have touched on a revolutionary
question, resolved in the eyes of all parties, but on which I
dare to battle the common opinion, and defend the
paradox which forms the basis of my discourse: *I mean the
identity of religion and politics*.

The separation of powers, consummated in the era of
Constantine and Theodosia, goes back to Jesus Christ
himself, who did not make a dogma of it, but tolerated it:
it is the result of certain metaphysical oppositions which
should resolve themselves harmonically in a higher form,
but which the routine of the legalists, as much as the
fanaticism of the devout, has claimed to render eternal. Since the world has become Christian, paganism has always existed in the civil life: at the very center of Christianity, the state has not entered into the church, nor the church into the state. The monarch of Rome and the pope are two different things. Some attempts were made in the middle ages, sometimes by the sovereign pontiffs, and sometimes by the bishops, to reestablish the unity of government among the people, which is not the same thing as universal monarchy, to which the vulgar accuse Gregory VII of having dared to pretend. It is no longer priestly theocracy, for religion is no more the supremacy of the priest, than the law is the government of the judge; but it is necessary to believe that this idea of unity, or, to put it better, of synthesis, fair and true in itself, was premature, since it has ended by collapsing under a unanimous disapproval. The declaration of 1682, composed by Bossuet, sanctioned the distinction of powers, and nearly made it an article of faith. I will return to this question.

## II

What I have said of the civil effects of the Sabbath sufficiently explains the importance that the legislator attached to it, when he made the stability of the State depend on it. But that institution itself had need of safeguards: it demanded to be defended against the negligence of some, against the ill will of others, and against the ignorance and barbarity of all. Now, it is from the guarantees with which Moses surrounded it that we have seen born the influence of the Sabbath on family
relations. For such is the admirable economy of the Mosaic system, and the close connection of all its parts, that in studying it one seems to follow an exposition of physics rather than a combination of the human mind. It is of the legislation of Moses that we can truly say, that in it *all converges, all conspires, all consents*. Pull just one of its stitches, and the whole thing unravels.

Moses would not have believed in the solidity of his edifice, if it had not concerned all classes of people. Beyond the accomplishment of certain religious duties, such as attendance at the ceremonies, participation in the sacrifices, etc., he demanded that on the day of the Sabbath every sort of servile labor be suspended, and he accepted no pretext or excuse. *You shall not*, says Deuteronomy, *do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the stranger within your gates*. That means: You will not labor, either by yourself or through another. The law allows no exceptions; it is the prerogative of all. The father of the family, representing in his person all those subordinated to him by birth, by natural domain, or by a consensual dependency, alone enjoyed certain civil privileges, such as those of sitting in council, to render justice, carry arms, etc. But there are some basic necessities that he cannot claim for himself alone, and rest after labor is among that number. Also Deuteronomy, or the second exposition of the law, adds: *So that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do. Remember that you have also been a slave*.

The laws of Moses, if we pay attention to them, are all, with regard to form, expressed in personal style, by the
second person singular of the future tense. Now, as the expression always remains the same, whether it is a question of duties common to all individuals, or whether the law refers only to the heads of families, who alone were counted for some things, and as we might be able to quibble about the generality of the text, Moses added to the fourth commandment of the Decalogue, following the standard formula— *Thou shall not work* — the commentary that we have just read, in order to remove all means of bickering from inhumanity and avarice.

Four-fifths of the population were thus interested in the rigorous observation of the Sabbath. The servants, recognizing for a day their dignity as men, put themselves back on the level of their masters; the women displayed the luxury of their households, the elderly the gravity of their lessons, their children, in their noisy joy, learned early some polite social habits. One saw the young girls sing and form dancing choruses, where they unfolded all the grace of their movements and the taste of their ensembles. Attractions formed and led to happy marriages. With such festivities once known, what father, what husband, what master would have thought to deprive their own of them? What domestic authority would have triumphed over an institution so sweet, transformed by the legislator into a religious precept? No, if paternal despotism had had the courage, it would not have succeeded.

What could I add to this quick description, that I have not already said? Sunday is the day of triumph for mothers and daughters. Bright with health and youth, beautiful from the expression of her conscience, accepted in the
parish mass among all her companions, what village
woman, once in her life, would not believe herself the
kindest, most diligent or most wise? What wife, on a
Sunday, does not give her household a certain air of
celebration or even of luxury, and does not willingly
receive, in a more affectionate mood, her husband's
friends?... The joy of Sunday spreads over all: sorrows,
more solemn, are less poignant; regrets, less bitter. The
sick heart finds an sweetness unknown to its stinging
troubles. Sentiments are uplifted and purified: husbands
find a lively and respectful tenderness, maternal love its
enchantments; the piety of sons gives in more docilely
under the tender care of the mothers. The domestic, that
furniture in human form, born enemy of the one who pays
him, feels himself more devoted and faithful; the master
more benevolent and less hard. The farmer and the
worker, stirred by a vague sense of equality, are more
content with their condition. In all conditions man regains
his dignity, and in the boundlessness of his affections, he
recognizes that his nobility is too great for the distinction
of ranks to be able to degrade and damage it. In all these
regards the spirit of Christianity gets the upper hand over
the Jewish spirit, always marked with a coarse sensualism.
The religion of Moses is scarcely contemplative. Much
given to demonstration, it speaks to the senses rather than
the soul, as its law was addressed more to the mind than
to the heart. Christianity is more unctuous, more
penetrating, more expansive: incomparable especially
when you want to astonish crime, terrify the conscience,
break the heart, temper pride, and console the unfortunate.
Why has the effective virtue of its dogmas not yet
triumphed, in the political order, over human obstinacy?
The most dangerous adversary that Moses could meet, in
instituting a weekly holiday, was greed. How was he to
tear the rich farmers from multiple and pressing labors,
manufacturers from the demands of the practices, traders
from their indispensable operations? What could the
Levite, charged with announcing with this horn that the
rest of the Lord had begun, respond to these sophisms of
interest: "Will you add a day to the week, or will you take
responsibility for loading the harvest and working the
fields?... What compensation do you offer us if we
withdraw this order, if we miss this investment?... Make
your sacrifices anyway, and pray for us in the synagogue:
we do not have the leisure to go there, our occupations do
not permit it." What are we to say, once more, to people
constantly alleging necessity, imminence, and
unrecoverable occasions?

This is the stumbling block for all the adversaries of
Sunday, ancient and modern. In order to give all possible
strength to their reasons, I am going to quote the
observations and calculations of a political man of the last
century, of a man of the church, the abbot of Saint-Pierre,
who, enjoying a fine abbey and having nothing to do, was
perhaps not absolutely wrong to find the obligation to rest
on Sunday unreasonable.

"It would be a great charity and a good work, more
agreeable to God than a pure ceremony, to give to poor
families the means to meet their needs and those of their
children, by seven or eight hours of labor, and the means
to instruct themselves and their children in the church,
for three or four hours in the morning...
"To understand what a solace the continuation of their labor would be to the poor, we need only consider that of the five million families which are in France, there are at least a million who have almost no income except from their labor, who are poor; and I call poor those who do not have 30 Tours pounds of income, that is to say the value of 600 metric pounds of bread.

"These poor families could gain at least 5 sous each half-day of festival, one after another, during the 80 or so festivals and Sundays in the year. Each of these families would thus gain at least 20 francs per year more, which would make, for a million families, more than 20 millions of pounds. Now, wouldn't an annual charity of 20 millions be quite a hand-out, spread proportionally among the poorest?

"If, when the first canons on the cessation of labor had been made, the bishops had seen some of the cabarets and games established, if they had foreseen all the disorders that idleness can cause, they would have limited themselves to the hearing of the mass and the instructions of the matins." (Tome VII, page 73).

All these speculations are very nice, and the principle of this charity is very commendable; it only lacks a little good sense. For, as Bergier remarked, it is absurd to recognize, on one hand, that Sunday is instituted to give rest to the people, and to pretend on the other that this rest is itself harmful to them. In wanting to provide for the subsistence of the poor, we must have regard for the measure of their strength as well as their moral and intellectual needs. Our philanthropist is a cassock wanted
to make the poor work seven to eight hours each Sunday, plus three a four hours of mass and sermon, which makes in all eleven to twelve hours of exercise on the day when others rest. And that five sous piece earned on Sunday, that fruit of an excessive labor, that wage of a people at bay, he charitably calls *alms*! Moses meant things in a rather different manner; his legislation had provided for all, and if the modern nations have not followed its windings, that was not the fault of the councils, which we would defend against the reproach of lack of foresight leveled against them by the abbot of Saint-Pierre.<fnref n="3" />

The Israelites, Fleury remarked, could not change place, nor enrich or ruin themselves excessively. The reason is easy to discover: among them the fortunes in real estate were equal, at least as much as the division flowing from successions and unforeseen accidents could allow. A law, called *levirate*, had even been made to prevent the goods of one family from passing to another; and it was subject to various applications, as we see from the example of

<footnote n="3">³ Here is the portrait that J.-J. Rousseau has drawn of the Abbot of Saint-Pierre: "A famous author of this century, whose books are full of grand projects and small views, had, like all the priests of his communion, desired to have no wife of his own; but, finding himself more scrupulous that the others with regard to adultery, it is said that he opted to have pretty servants, with which he repaired as best he could the affront to his species made by that bold commitment. He regards it as a duty of a citizen to give others to the homeland, and with the tribute he paid of this sort, he peopled the class of artisans..." If the Abbot of Saint-Pierre had the population so much at heart, why didn't he go, like another Vincent de Paul, to the Hospital for Foundlings? For, according to the same Rousseau, in order to have men, it is less a question of procreating than of providing for those children who exist.</footnote>
Ruth and of the daughters of Salphaad. From the beginning, the lands had been subject to an equal partition: a sort of general cadaster had been executed by Joshua, in order that in certain cantons the natural sterility of the soil was compensated by a greater extent of territory or by other equivalents. According to the law, no immovable good could be alienated in perpetuity; the legislator exempted from that measure only houses in towns surround by walls. And the motive for that restriction is blindingly obvious; while promoting the growth of the people, he wanted them to spread uniformly over the territory, instead of crowding and corrupting themselves in large cities. He found there as well a guarantee of independence and security for the nation: we know that the lure of the wealth of Jerusalem was the perpetual cause of the invasions of the kings of Egypt and Babylon, and, in the end, of the ruin of the whole people.

Every child of Abraham was thus obliged to preserve his patrimony. Each should be able, in the general prosperity, to eat beneath his own vine and fig tree. There were no large farms, no great domains. The unfortunate or insolvent Israelite could stake his inheritance, the legacy of his father, as he could hire out his person and his strength, but in the year of the Jubilee all the properties were freed of debt and returned to their masters, all the servitors were freed. It followed from this that property sales, being subject to repurchase, were negotiated with an eye to the greater or lesser proximity of the year of Jubilee; that debts were difficult for the same reason, which made lenders cautious; that the passion to acquire was arrested at its source, and that labor, activity, diligence, were inevitably maintained among the citizens. It also resulted
from it, relative to the Sabbath, that the exploitable
materials, or the patrimonial soil, not being able to be
extended, could not be increased for anyone; consequently,
that no one could add a surcharge to his own fatigues, and
hence, that it was easy to rule in advance the distribution
of the labors of the week and even of the whole year,
setting aside the Sabbaths and other feasts. And in cases of
necessity, such as the approach of an enemy tribe, a fire or
a storm, we must believe, in honor of the human spirit
and of the Jewish nation, that the high priest who
successor of Aaron was no more embarrassed to grant
exemptions than the least curate in our villages.<fnref n="4" />

As for the merchants, artisans and foremen, the effect of
the suspension was such for individuals of all conditions,
that a delay caused by the Sabbath was not a delay,
because that day no longer counted. No debt, no delivery
of merchandise, no repayment of labor was due on that
day. It is thus that, according to our laws and commercial
practices, every commercial paper whose maturity took
place on Saturday evening was only protestable on
Monday.

Equality of conditions and fortunes was so much in the
thought of Moses, that the majority of his civil laws and
reforms were made with that aim. The right of the eldest
had existed under the patriarchs: Moses abolished it, and

<footnote n="4">⁴ During the war of the Maccabees, a troop of Jews having been attacked on the Sabbath day, they thought it better to let themselves be massacred than to defend themselves, for fear of breaking the law. Mathathias then made an ordinance that allowed the people to defend themselves on the Sabbath if they were attacked.</footnote>
only granted a bonus to the eldest. Among the Hebrews, it
was the husband who made up the dowry, and not the
parents of the wife, because the goods could never leave
the family. Mr. Pastoret calls that *buying a wife*; today, it is
the fathers who *buy the husbands* for their daughters.
Which of the two is preferable? If a daughter found herself
sole inheritor, without male children, she could only
marry within her tribe, and, as much as possible, in her
bloodline; and in that case, the goods that she brought
were not dowry, but paraphernalia. The language itself
enshrined that principle of all good society, the equality of
fortunes: the words *charity, humanity, and alms* are
unknown in Hebrew; all of that was designated by the
name of JUSTICE.

But here an objection presents itself. Could Moses
legitimately, and without injuring the right of free
development of individual fortune, limit the right of
property? In other words, is the equality conditions a
natural institution? Is it equitable? Is it possible? On each
of these points, I dare to answer in the affirmative.

Let me reassure you; I have no desire to warm over the
theories from the famous discourse on *the inequality of
conditions*; God forbid that I should here reclaim as an
underpinning the ill-conceived thesis of the philosopher
of Geneva! Rousseau has always appeared to me to have
not understood the cause that he wanted to defend, and to
have embarrassed himself in some of his baseless à priori
arguments, when it was necessary to reason according to
the relations of things. His principles of civil organization
were like those of his politics, they were flawed at base: by
founding right on human conventions, by making the law
the expression of wills,—in short, by submitting justice
and morals to the decision of the greatest number and the
opinion of the majority,—he turned in a vicious circle: he
sunk more and more into the abyss from which he
thought to depart, and absolved the society that he
accused. Not being able, at this moment, without leaving
the scope of my discourse, to give myself to a deep
discussion of this matter, I will content myself with
submitting to the judgment of the reader the following
propositions, urged solely by fraternity and solidarity,
and whose necessary conclusion will be the same as
Moses derived. Moreover, if I do not disavow the agrarian
law, neither do I cast myself as its defender; I only want to
prove to all the monopolizers of labor, exploiters of the
proletariat, autocrats or feudal lords of industry, hoarders
and triple-armored proprietors, that the right to work and
live, given to a crowd of men who do not enjoy it,
whatever one says, will be on the part of the beneficiaries
not a bonus, but a restitution.

1. The man who comes into the world is not a usurper and intruder; a member of the great human family, he is seated at the common table: society is not a master to accept or reject him. If the fact of his birth does not give him any right over his fellows, neither does it make him their slave.

2. The right to live belongs to all: existence is the taking of
possession of it; labor is its condition and means.

3. It is a crime to monopolize livelihoods; it is a crime to
monopolize labor.
4. When a child is born, none of its brothers have a right to contest the newcomer's equal participation in the father's goods. Similarly, there are no junior members of a nation.

5. All the brothers have an equal duty to support the family: the same thing is true between the citizens.

6. After the death of the father, none can demand a share of the estate proportional to his age, to his strength, to the talent that he has been given, or to the services he says he has rendered: unequal division is essentially contrary to the spirit of the family. To accommodate one is to deny the other. — Just as the city recognizes neither preeminence, nor privileges of duties and employments: it accords to all the same favor and reward.

7. Man is a transient on the earth: the same soil which feeds him has fed his father and will feed his children. The domain of man, no matter is object, is not absolute: the enjoyment of goods must be ruled by the law.

8. We punish the man who burns down his house or puts fire to his crops; in this we do not have in view only the security of the neighbor and guest, but we also want to make it understood that, the man always receiving more from society than he could give back to it, what he produces no longer belongs to him. The artisan, the writer, and the artist, each in that which concerns his work, must be subject to that law.

A moment will suffice to appreciate what distance there is between such a doctrine and that of Jean-Jacques: the one established the respective rights of the citizens on the
familial regime; the other on conventions and contracts,
which always carry a germ of the arbitrary, and give rise
to all sorts of despotism.

What pity they inspire in me, these makers of tear-stained
homilies, these *friends of the people*, these *friends of the
working class*, these *friends of the human race*,
these *philanthropists* of every sort, meditating at their ease
on the evils of their fellows, who suffer, in a feeble
idleness, because the poor have only six days of toil, and
never conclude anything from the insufficiency of their
wages, except: "You must work! You must save!" Like
that doctor who, treating a patient with scrofula,
constantly applied a new patch to a new ulcer, and only
neglected to try to purify the mass of the blood, these
doctors always have on hand some topical of recent
invention and rare effectiveness: nothing is forgotten by
them, except one thing with which they hardly troubled
themselves, which is to turn to the source of the evil. But
let us not fear that they will engage in that search, which
would infallibly lead them where they never want to look,
at themselves. With their capital, their machines, their
privileges, they invade all, and then they become
indignant that one takes labor from the laborer. As much
as they can, they leave nothing for anyone to do, and they
cry that the people waste their time; all magnificent in
their flourishing idleness, they say to the journeyman
without work: "Work!" And then, when the canker of
pauperism comes to trouble their sleep with its hideous
visions, when the exhausted sufferer writhes on his pallet,
when the starving proletarian howls in the street, then
they propose some prize for the extinction of begging,
they give dances for the poor, they got to the show, they
throw parties, they hold lotteries for the indigent, they
take pleasure in giving alms, and they applaud
themselves! Ah! If the wisdom of modern times is
exhausted for such lovely results, such was not the spirit
of all of antiquity, nor the teaching of Jesus Christ.

We know the parable related in Matthew, Chapter 20, in
which Jesus Christ proposes as a model the head of a
family who had risen early in the morning to send out
laborers to his vineyard. He paid one denier per day. As
he had occasion to pass through the place several times
during the day, each time that he saw some daylaborers
without work, he brought them to his vineyard. When
night came, he gave everyone one denier. There were
murmurs and protestations: We have carried the burden
of the day and heat, said some, while those have done
almost nothing, and they are treated like us!—My friend,
said the householder to one of the malcontents, I have
done you no wrong: didn’t you agree with me on one
denier? Take then what is due to you, and go your way: if
it pleases me to give to one as to another; can’t I do what
seems good to me, and must I cease to be human because
you are envious? With me the last are like the first, and
the first like the last.

This is the moral tale which has so revolted the equitable
reason of the philosophers, and of which I have not
always thought without outrage, though I ask pardon for
it from the divine wisdom of the author of the Gospels.
What truth is taught to us in that lesson of the
householder? The very same truth of which I have just
presented, in the form of a proposition, the principal
corollaries: that every inequality of birth, of age, of
strength or ability, vanishes before the right of the
individual to produce their subsistence, which is
expressed by the equality of conditions and goods; that
the differences of aptitude or skill in the workers, and of
quantity or quality in the execution of the work, disappear
in the social labor, when all the members have done
their best, because then they have done their duty; in short,
that the disproportion of power in individuals is
neutralized by the general effort. Here again is the
condemnation of all those theories of division in
proportion to merit or capacity, increasing or decreasing
according to capital, labor or talent, theories whose
immorality is flagrant, since they are diametrically
opposed to the familial right, basis of the civil right, and
since they violate the liberty of the laborer and ignore the
fact of collective production, the unique safeguard against
the exaggeration of every relative superiority; theories
founded on the bases of sentiments and the vilest of the
passions, since they only turn on selfishness; theories,
finally, which, to the shame of their magnificent authors,
contain, after all, only the rejuvenation and rehabilitation,
under perhaps more regular forms, of the same
civilization that they denigrate while imitating it, a
civilization which is worth nothing, but which they
resuscitate. Nature, said these sectarians, shows us
inequality everywhere: let us follow its indications. — Yes,
responds Jesus Christ, but inequality is the law of the
beasts, not of men. — Harmony is the daughter of
inequality. — Lying sophist, harmony is equilibrium in
diversity. — Remove this balance, you will destroy the
harmony.
I halt myself, for I would not dare pursue this sacrilegious
colloquy further. When Jesus Christ, explaining to the
people the different articles of the Decalogue, taught them
that polygamy had been permitted to the ancients because
of the rudeness of their intelligence, but that it had not
been thus in the beginning; that a bad desire is equal to a
fornication consummated; that insult and affront are as
reprehensible as murder and blows; that he is a parricide
who says to his poor father: "This morning I have prayed
to God for you; that will benefit you." He said nothing of
the 8th commandment, which concerned theft, judging the
hardness of heart of his audience still too great for the
truth that he had to speak. After eighteen centuries, are
we worthy to hear it?

Equality of conditions is in conformity with reason and it
is an irrefutable right. It is in the spirit of Christianity, and
it is the aim of society. The legislation of Moses
demonstrates that it can be attained. That sublime dogma,
so frightening in our time, has its roots in the most
intimate depths of the conscience, where it is mixed up
with the very notion of justice and right. Thou shall not
steal, says the Decalogue, which is to say, with the vigor of
the original term, *lo thignob*, you will divert nothing, you
will put nothing aside for yourself.<fnref n="5" /> The expression is
general, like the idea itself: it forbids not only theft
committed with violence and by ruse, fraud and
brigandage, but also every sort of gain acquired from
others without their full agreement. It implies, in short,
that every violation of equality of division, every

<footnote n="5">⁵ The verb gandb means literally *to put aside, to hide, to retain, to divert*.</footnote>
premium arbitrarily demanded, and tyrannically collected,
either in exchange, or from the labor of others, is a
violation of communicative justice, it is a
misappropriation. It is that depth of meaning that Jesus
Christ had in mind in his parable of the workers in the
vineyard, veiling by design some truths that it would have
been dangerous to leave too uncovered, but that he did
not want his disciples to be unaware of. Yes, he would
have told them in his sublime language, if he had thought
it useful to express himself without veils, he would have
said to the ancients: "Thou shall not steal. And I say unto
you: Whoever imposes a tax on the field, the bullock, the
ass or the coat of his brother, is a robber." Did he foresee
that, despite the feeble attempts that have been made after
his death, his doctrine would be unable to find its
application for so long, and did he only want to entrust to
his church a seed of salvation, which would be discovered
again under more opportune circumstances? This is a
possibility to which we cannot refuse our support, when
we relate his thought to the anxious times in which we
live.

Indeed, what do we see all around us? Here are some men,
bored and discontented in the midst of opulence, and
poor despite their wealth; there are some maneuvers
which destitution prevents their reason and their soul
from even dreaming of,—so that they are happy even
when they find themselves working on Sunday! The
excess of selfishness provokes general horror, some
sophists indoctrinate the multitude, but a providential
instinct still preserves us from their unintelligible systems,
and, in the midst of all that, Christianity, finger resting on
the Decalogue, and without explaining more, upholds the
celebration of the day which renders us all equals by
making us all brothers. Does it not tell us clearly enough:
there is a time to work and a time to rest.. If some among
you have no rest, it is because others have too much
leisure. Mortals, seek truth and justice; return to
yourselves, repent, and reform...

Thanks should be given to the councils which, better
advised than the abbots of the eighteenth century, have
ruled inflexibly on the observation of Sunday: and may it
please God that the respect for that day should still be as
sacred for us as it has been for our fathers! The evil that
gnaws at us would be more keenly felt, and the remedy
perhaps more promptly perceived. It is up to the priests in
particular to awaken spirits from their sleep: let them
courageously grasp the noble mission which is offered to
them, before others grasp it. Property has not yet made its
martyrs: it is the last of the false gods. The question of the
equality of conditions and fortunes has already been
raised, but as a theory without principles: we must take it
up again and go into it in all its truth. Preached in the
name of God, and consecrated by the voice of the priest, it
would spread like lightning: one would believe in the
coming of the son of man. For it will be with that doctrine
as with so many others: first it will be booed and loathed,
then it will be taken into consideration, and discussion
will be established; then it will be recognized as just at
base, but ill-timed; then finally, despite all the oppositions,
it will triumph. But straight away a problem will present
itself: *To find a state of social equality which would be neither
community, nor despotism, nor allotment, nor anarchy, but
liberty in order and independence in unity*. And this first
problem being resolved, there remains a second: *to indicate*
*the best method of transition.* That is the whole problem of humanity.

The equality of goods is a condition of liberty. Like liberty, the right of association, and the *republic*, are conditions of every civil and religious celebration: I need, in order to treat my subject thoroughly, to dwell on all the considerations which came before.

The firmest rampart of the institution of the Sabbath, and its most vigilant guardian, was the priesthood. The Levites did not form a congregation placed apart from the republic and completely foreign to civil society. On the contrary, they were the grand spring, the king-pin of the State. Their Hebrew name, *cohanim*, means ministers or functionaries. Thus, besides the multiplying duties they fulfilled at the sacrifices, in the synagogues, the majority of the civil employments were entrusted to them. "Justice," says Fleury, whom I always cite because I can think or speak no better, "was administered by two sorts of officers, *sophetim* (judges), *soterim* (bailiffs, sergeants, archers, executioners). These charges were given, there was no distinction between the tribunals; the same judges decided case of conscience and closed civil or criminal trials. Thus, only a few different offices were needed, and few officers, in comparison with what we see today. For it is shameful for us to be a simple individual... everyone wants to be a public figure."
The Levites, like the *fetials* among the Romans,<fnref n="6" /> made the declarations of war and called the people to arms. In the army, they marched in the first rank, sounded the trumpet, and led the combatants. It was good that the same men who in times of peace served as counsels and teachers, led the citizens into combat. Thus we have seen in the most heroic century of our history, when the armies of the kings invaded the homeland, more than one schoolmaster armed with a rifle, harangue his students, and, all together, singing the hymn of war, rush off to the field of batter, and conquer or die for liberty. Why shouldn't our priests emulate them?

The Levites alone administered nearly all the medicine, which was nearly limited to dietetics and hygiene. They were charged with the policing of lepers and all the legal impurities, which necessitated on their part some rather extended theoretical studies, and a painstaking diagnose. We can see in Leviticus the details of the prohibited foods, and the precautions taken to recognize the appearance of that formidable malady, leprosy.

After all that, one could believe that the preponderance of Levites in the body of the State was immense, and that it would constantly threaten the independence of the tribes: this was not the case at all. Among the Hebrews, there were no castes; or if you prefer, each tribe was the caste within the range of its territory. The Levites were the only cosmopolitans in the country and spread all through the

<footnote n="6">⁶ *Fetials*, that is *denuntiatores*, heralds. This word comes from the verb *facere*, taken in the sense *to speak*, just as the Hebrew *dabar* means at once *to do* and *to say, speech and action*.</footnote>
nation according to the needs of their service. Having had
no share in the division of the lands, they possessed no
land of their own; they were only allowed to raise some
herds on the margins of the towns where they lived. Their
whole subsistence came from the people, by way of
sacrifices and offering; these were the salaries that Moses
had assigned to his public servants in a time and place
where money was little used. The accuracy of their
payment was only guaranteed by the Sabbath. Such was
also the origin of the casuel paid to our own village priests.
"The legislator, by entrusting the Levite to the generosity
of the other families, wanted to increase the union of all.
On his part, the child of Levi naturally clung to the law by
which he held his means of living, to the peace and public
abundance which brought abundance and peace to him.
Even from self-interest, he had to respect that law in order
for others to respect it; from self-interest, he had to
publish it, so that no one forgot the precepts which
sanctioned his right; finally, from self-interest, he had to
oversee its full execution." (SALVADOR, *Institutions de
Moses*.)
But, since Moses did not permit castes or
privileges, why assign one entire tribe to public functions,
and exclude all the others? Why, introducing a necessary
order into the State, did he not leave it to that order to
recruit for itself from among all the people? First, it is not
true that the priests were the only public functionaries:
there existed in each town a communal council composed
of all the heads of families, which chose from its own
ranks a large number of public officers. There was besides
a sort of senate or elected national representatives for each
tribe. Finally, the nation had at its head a supreme
assembly, called the Sanhedrin, formed of the deputies of
all the people. But by giving guardianship of the laws and
such a great part of the executive power to the priesthood,
Moses acted in conformity with the usages and opinions
of his times. Everywhere, the priesthood was the privilege
of certain families: India and Egypt are famous examples
of this. Another reason for this conduct is that Moses
desired the preservation of his work. After dividing the
land between the eleven tribes, he had ordained that the
Levites, salaried by the State, would have no place in
Israel, because the principle of equality which was the
basis of the constitution was incompatible with the
accumulation of properties and places. To admit into the
priestly order an individual capable of inheriting, would
be to introduce property into public service public and to
destroy the national equilibrium.—But, it is said, could
Moses ordain that anyone who becomes a priest loses the
ability to be an heir? I do not believe that this objection
would be made by a jurist. The forethought of a legislator
aims to make absolute laws and to avoid all qualification.
I believe that these quick reflections will not be regarded
as beyond the scope of the work, since, taken in the
context of our Sunday celebration, they encourage
reflection, much more than a special discourse would, on
the close affinity which unites the occupation of the priest
with the happiness of the families. I will dispense then
with making any comparison between the ancient and
modern priesthood, and emphasize the common links,
which we all know. It is on Sunday that the character of
the priest, in its conciliatory and apostolic aspects, shines
in all its brightness. The visit of the parish priest is the joy
of the rural family. Sickness relieved, the poor rescued, the
unfortunate soothed, hatred quelled, enemies reconciled,
spouses reunited, and all through the work of the parish
priest!... Now the priest, especially in the country, does
not have much time at his disposal. He must seize the
moments as they pass, and it is on Sunday that his duties
multiply, his works bear the most beautiful fruits; it is on
Sunday that he discovers all the good that he can do.

III

I approach what is perhaps the most difficult part of my
subject, because of the pitfall that it seems to cover: moral
utility. What is the influence, on the morals of individuals
and of society, of the observation of Sunday considered in
itself, independent of the force that religion lends to it,
and setting aside faith in dogmas and mysteries? Such is,
at least, the manner in which I take up the question, and I
do not think, I admit, that one could understand it
otherwise. It is not a question of launching oneself into the
vast field of religious opinions, to demonstrate the utility
of public worship by the benefits of religion. All these
questions are pointless and even, with regard to truth,
trivial. It is not a homily on the effectiveness of Sunday as
a source of divine favors that is called for, it is the
indication of the relations that can exist between a
conspicuous, public ceremony and the affections of the
soul. Thus, it is necessary to separate the material from the
spiritual, the nominal from the abstract, the human from
the revealed, and say that what one practices apart from
society, isolated, still preserves some moral utility; for the
thought of the founder had to have been that every
religious observance has its natural as well as its
theological reason.
Another distinction is still necessary. The moral effects of Sunday are either *mediate* or *immediate*. By *mediate* effects, I mean those which rise from the circumstances which accompany the Sunday celebration; such are the relations of family and city, with which I will not concern myself further; and by *immediate* effects I understand those that Sunday produces by its own special action, independent of every social or domestic influence. This distinction, relatively unimportant in practice, has the advantage of better specifying my point of view, and sparing me repetitions.

"Nature has placed within man the feelings of pleasure and sadness, which force him to avoid the physical objects that seem harmful to him, and to seek those that suit him. The chief work of society will be to create in him a rapid instinct for moral affairs, which, without the tardy aid of reasoning, would lead him to do good and avoid evil. For the individual reason of man, lead astray by his passions, is often only a sophist who pleads their cause, and the authority of the man can always be attacked by his love of self. Now, what produces or replaces that precious instinct, what makes up for the insufficiency of human authority, is the sentiment that nourishes and develops the compulsory exercise of worship; it is this respect mixed with fear that inspires for the moral precepts the full spectacle and majesty of the solemnities which consecrate and celebrate them."<fnref n="7" />

<footnote n="7">⁷ Session of the National Convention for 18 Floréal, Year II, Carnot presiding. Report of Robespierre in the name of the Committee of Public Safety.</footnote>
The thought expressed in this passage is ingenious and beautiful; what's more, it is perfectly true. That quick instinct, that second conscience, if I dare put it thus, has been created in the heart of the Israelite by the Sabbath, and Sunday lifts it to a higher degree than it does the soul of the Christian. Moses spared nothing to deeply instill respect for the Sabbath: ablutions, purifications, expiations, abstinences, absolute prohibitions, and strict injunctions. He multiplied, almost to excess, anything that could inspire the idea of the highest sanctity, and carry the veneration almost to the point of terror. On imaginations more passioned because they are less cultured, the opinion of a more present divinity is all-powerful. The majesty of the sanctuary seems to forbid the approach of crime, and more than once we have seen great culprits, seized by a divine panic, flee frantic and shaking from a refuge where their crimes would no longer find themselves safe. Moses transported that horror of sacrilege from space to time: he rendered certain days inviolable, as he had consecrated certain objects and certain places. And vise, surrounded on all sides by the forces of religion, had no rest, no longer knowing where to hide itself.

But this charm that Moses had cast on the Sabbath, this new sort of scarecrow by which he warded off evil spirits, took all its virtue from a rather vulgar accessory, scarcely worthy of respect or fear: it was, if I dare make use of this withering word, (which is, thank heavens, not from our language,) it was the far niente, doing nothing. A philosopher would not have been aware of it, but Moses seized it.
The ancients, greater observers than we like to believe,
perhaps because we don't observe the same things, had
remarked very well the effects of solitude on the morals of
man. In solitude, the feeling of the infinite touches us, the
passions fall silent; reason, clearer and more active,
deploys all its strength and gives birth to miracles:
character is strengthened and developed, imagination
increases, the moral sense responds to the urgings of
Divinity. The temples and oracles were placed by
preference in remote places, planted thickly with trees,
whose shadows invited meditation and contemplation.
The wise, returned from the world and the passions, the
lovers of the muses and nature, the legislators themselves,
as well as the seers and poets, fled, sometimes in
agreeable retreats, sometimes in frightening solitude, the
indiscreet regard of the profane, who believed them to be
in commerce with the gods. Solitude, when it is not the
effect of a savage humor or a proud misanthropy,
appeared to them the purest image of heavenly beatitude,
and the fondest wish of a great soul would have been that
all mortals know how to enjoy it and make themselves
worthy of it. But if such is truly the highest destiny of man
on the earth, in what sense is it sociable? How will its
narrow residence suffice for a multitude of anchorites?

If Moses had had the power, he would never have had the
thought to transform his farmers into effective hermits; he
only wanted to make them men, to accustom them, by
reflection, to seek the just and the true in everything. Thus
he strove to create around them a solitude which would
not destroy the greatest affluence, and which preserved all
the prestige of a true isolation: that was the solitude of the
Sabbath and the feasts. Constrained, under terrible
penalties, to cease their labors for these solemn days, the
Israelites submitted to the yoke of an unavoidable
meditation; but, incapable by themselves of directing their
attention and occupying their thought, they found
themselves delivered up to the mercy of circumstances
and the first comer: it was there that their teacher awaited
them. I have already said what occupations had been
assigned by Moses to the Sabbath day. That great and
holy man had wanted all the Hebrews, from the children
to the elderly, to be able to walk, by his example, with the
Lord, and to live in a permanent communication with him.
That is demonstrated, indisputably, by a passage in the
book of *Numbers*, where it is related that Moses having
chosen seventy men to aid him in the details of
government, these men were animated with the same
spirit as him and prophesied. And when Joshua came to
say: "Master, there are still two men who prophesy in the
camp; stop them.—"May it please God," he responded,
"that all the people should prophesy!" Let us say, in a
slightly more human language, that nothing seemed more
desirable to him than to maintain in the intelligence that
tempered enthusiasm which produces knowledge of the
good, the contemplation of ourselves and of the spectacle
of nature.

The last night of the week is passed; the sun begins again
its daily course; all the vegetation blooms and salutes the
father of the day. Faithful to their instinct, the animals do
not stop any more than the plants: the dormouse digs its
burrow, the bird builds its nest, the bee collects pollen
from the flowers. Nothing that lives suspends its labor:
man alone stops for one day. What will he make of his
long and drifting thoughts? He will hardly have roused
himself from slumber, and already his inactivity will weigh on him: the evening arrives, and the day appears to him to have lasted for two days.

For frivolous spirits, Sunday is a day of unbearable rest, of frightening emptiness: they complain of the ennui which weighs them down. They blame the slowness of these unproductive hours, which they do not know how to spend. If they flee, in polite visits and worldly conversations, from the emptiness of their thoughts, they only add the void of the thoughts of others. From that arise the inventions of debauchery and the monstrous joys of the orgy.—Let those blame only themselves for the numbness that makes them stupid, the inconstancy of heart and understanding that exhausts them, and the dull paralyzes that gnaws at them. When its partner lies idle, the spirit only goes more quickly: be careful, if you don't know how to feed its all-consuming activity, that it does not consume itself.

Happy is the man who knows how to shut himself us in the solitude of his heart! There he keeps company with himself; his imagination, his memories, and his reflections respond to him. Let him promenade then along the crowded streets, let him stop in the public squares, let him visit the monuments; or, more happily, let him wander across the fields and meadows, and breathe the air of the forests; it matters little. He meditates, and he dreams. Everywhere his heart, happy or sad, elegant or sublime, belongs to him. It is thus that he judges everything soundly, that his heart is detached, that his conscience is invigorated, that his will is sharpened, and that he feels virtue bound up in his chest. It is thus that he begins with
God himself, and that he learns from him, in
conversations that none will repeat, what it is to LIVE, and
what it is to DIE. Oh! Then, as all things are reduced to
their just value, how little worthy it appears that for their
sake we hold onto life, or that for them we would seek
death! We ask fearfully what the best remedy would be
for the epidemic of suicide which multiplies its victims
every day. That remedy, which we have sought
everywhere except where it was to be found, was
furnished by homeopathy. Make life contemptible, and we
will no longer want to leave it; we only esteem it if we
find it to be a burden. The stoic who, in prosperity, knows
how to sacrifice his existence, also knows how to bear pain;
he even denies that it is an evil. The disciple of Epicurus,
lazily in love with life, curses it as soon as it no longer
offers him pleasure. It is among the tombs, a skull in his
hand, that he must preach against suicide.

What heroic self-sacrifices and heart-rending sacrifices
were consummated internally in these inexpressible
monologues of the holy days! What high thoughts,
magnificent conceptions, descend into the soul of the
philosopher and the poet! What generous resolutions
were made! Hercules, at the end of adolescence, offered a
sacrifice to Minerva. Standing before the altar, after
having made some libations and singing hymns to the
goddess, he waited, immobile and silent, until the flame
had consumed the offering. Suddenly he saw two women
appear, two immortals, Pleasure and Virtue, who,
displaying their charms, demanded his homage. Pleasure
flaunted all her seductions. Virtue offered labors and
perils with an incorruptible glory. The young hero chose
Virtue. Woe unto those who do not have the same vision!
Great woe unto those who do not choose as did the son of
Jupiter!

According to the preceding observations, the same cause
suffices to explain both the energy that the moral sense
can acquire, and the excesses where libertinism is plunged
as a result of the observation of Sunday: that cause is the
increase of activity given to the mind by the rest of the
body. It is up to those charged with the protection of the
customs, the education of the young and the direction of
the public amusements, to turn to the advantage of morals
an institution which, after religion itself, is the most
precious remainder that we have preserved of the ancient
wisdom, and the excellence of which is demonstrated by
the very debaucheries for which it furnishes the occasion.

Among the upper classes, Sunday is no longer recognized;
the days of the week all resemble one another. For those
only occupied with speculations, intrigues and pleasures,
it hardly matters what day it is; the intervals marked for
rest no longer mean anything. The people sometimes
holds back its passions for a week; the vises of the great
are not deferred. Is the impiousness of the rich,
established in their habits, incurable? The people, more
faithful to its traditions and less open to attack in their
character, are always under the hand of religion. I would
even dare to suggest that with respect to Sunday the last
glimmer of poetic fire is extinguished in the souls of our
rhymers. It has been said: without religion, no poetry. It is
necessary to add: without worship and without holidays,
no religion. But since poetry, becoming *rationalist*, has
raised the veils that covered the Christian *myths*, since it
has left the *allegories* and *symbols* to raise itself up to
the *absolute*, it is true to say that it has killed its
foster-mother, and with the same blow committed suicide.
Among the people, on the contrary, the lack of devotion
does not exclude every religious idea. They can detest the
priest, but never hate religion. They blaspheme against the
dogmas and mysteries, and they prays at the graves and
kneel at the blessings. And when faith no longer resonates
for them, the poetry of Sunday still thrills.

Blond Marie was loved by the young Maxime; Marie was
a simple working woman, and in the naïveté of a first love;
Maxime, a hard-working artisan, combined reason with
youth. Nature seemed to have predestined these lovers to
happiness, by blessing both with simplicity and modesty.
Diligent at work every day of the week, Maxime tried
hard to increase his savings; Marie braided in silence her
wedding crown. They only saw each other on Sundays;
but it was beautiful, it was solemn for them, this day
when it was sung in heaven: *Love is stronger than death!* It
spread the influence of religion and innocence over their
mutual affection! True lovers are never sacrilegious: full of
a loving respect, what would the young man have dared?
What would the girl have allowed, beautiful in her
modesty and the joy of the Sabbath? Alone with their love,
they were under the protection of God. The revolution of
July came suddenly to destroy such bliss. Maxime was
told to provide for himself: no more work, no more joy.
He resolved to move away for awhile and make for the
capital. On the eve of his departure, a Sunday evening, he
took Marie's hand, and, without speaking to her, led her
to the church.—"If I remain faithful, how shall I find you,
Marie?" —"Do as you say, and you may count on my
faithfulness." — "Will you promise me before God?" She
promised. They went out; the night was fine; Maxime,
according to the custom of lovers who part ways, showed
Marie the polar star and taught her to recognize its
position.—"Your eyes will no longer meet mine," he said
to her; "but every Sunday, at the same hour, I will look in
that direction. Do the same, so that at a single instant, as
our hearts are united, our thoughts will merge. That is all
that I ask, until I see you again." He left. Paris did not
always give him work; his days of unemployment became
fatal to him. At the instigations of some friends, Maxime
joined a republican society. An invincible melancholy took
hold of his soul and altered his character. "Do you know,"
he wrote to Marie, "why you are so poor, when so many
shameless sorts live in luxury? Why I can't marry you,
when so many men throw themselves into debauchery?...
Do you know why I sometimes work on Sunday, when
others play or indulge their boredom all week long?... God
has allowed the good to be the first to suffer from the vises
of the wicked, to teach them that it is up to them to prune
society and make virtue flower again. If the just were
never to complain, the wicked would never mend their
ways; the contagion would always spread, and the world,
soon all infected, would perish... Pray to God for me,
Marie; that is all that a weak woman can do. But there are
a million young men, virtuous and strong, all ready to rise
up, who have sworn to save the nation... We will triumph
or we will know how to die." Maxime was killed behind a
barricade during the June days. From that time, his lover
wore mourning. Orphaned from a young age and no
longer having a mother, she attached herself to the aged
mother of her fiancé. Her days were passed in labor and in
the cares of a tender devotion. Every Sunday she was seen,
in the dark chapel where she promised Maxime her heart
and faith, assisting in the divine office. It is there that her
heart, calm and resigned, was strengthened and purified
in an ineffable love. And at night, after her prayers, heart
full of the last words of Maxime,— *until I see you
again*,— the sad Marie gazed sighing at the polar star.

IV

It remains to examine the importance of the Sunday
celebration with regard to public hygiene. This text will
perhaps appear rather petty after the serious subjects that
I have treated; and I do not know if, by reversing the
order of the question proposed, I could reasonably flatter
myself that I had fulfilled the law of progression so
recommended by the rhetoricians. However, I do not
despair of succeeding: the reader will decide if my
boldness has been felicitous.

There is no doubt that Moses, in establishing the law of
the Sabbath, had in mind the health of the people and the
healthiness of their homes; and if he did not invoke this
motive in the Decalogue, it is because he avoided with the
most extreme circumspection allowing human motives to
appear in his laws. He had observed that where the
mysterious and impenetrable did not exist, reason, too
soon satisfied, is uncontrollable, faith vanishes, and
obedience slackens. Moses thus prescribe nothing in
particular for the Sabbath with regard to hygiene,
judiciously awaiting the effects of his institutions and of
the numberless guarantees with which he surrounded
them, which he would certainly have had more trouble
obtaining by a rule regarding property. If he was not
mistaken in his predictions, things should develop by
themselves; he had only to command that which would
produce by itself the zeal for religion and competition in
propriety. Don't we see every day the most laudable
efforts of authority fail before the indifference and
idleness of individuals? The walls are covered with
immense placards on the public roads, the cleaning of the
sewers, the removal of refuse, the care of trees, etc.; what
effect results from all this prefectorial eloquence? The
people allow themselves to be eaten away at by
gangrenous humors and infected by miasmas, rather than
remove what poisons them. The insects eat them and they
do not stir. But let opinion, the point of honor or passion
be mixed in, and the people will work miracles: they will
drain lakes, move mountains, exterminate swarming
breeds; after which, not being able to believe in the
prodigies that its strength gives birth to, they will glorify
heroes and geniuses for it. That contradiction of the
human mind, which accuses in such a conclusive manner
the preponderance of sentiment over reason, and which
the makers of passional theories have explained so little,
Moses made the most powerful spring of his policy, and it
is to that fact that we are still indebted for the only
hygienic habits which triumph over popular apathy. I will
linger no more on this section; for, if I exhausted all the
reflections that the metamorphosis of the malign Sunday
would suggest, if I countered in a thousand ways that
vulgar thesis, I would not depart from this same idea. I
would fatigue the attention without enlightening the mind.
We must see the thing from higher up. Let us eliminate all
pointless discussion.

*Rest is necessary to health;*
*Now, Sunday commands rest;*

*Thus Sunday is beneficial to health.*

Thus would an inattentive observer reason, concluding
too quickly from coexistence to likeness. This syllogism
lacks precision, because rest is not linked to the
celebration of Sunday in such a way that, the latter being
suppressed, the former would be irrevocably lost. Where
Sunday is no longer respected, it is clear that one does not
labor more—and perhaps one will labor less. In the
second place, the argument misses the question; for it is
not here a question of rest in itself, an excellent thing,
which has few detractors. Rest is the father of movement,
generator of strength and companion of labor. Rest, taken
moderately and at useful times, sustains courage, enlivens
thought, fortifies the will, and makes virtue invincible. But
all that has nothing to do with our subject: it is not as the
sanction of rest that Sunday exerts an influence on
hygiene.

What matters is this fixed and regular periodicity, which
cuts, at equal intervals, into the succession of works and
days. Why this constant symmetry? Why six days of labor,
rather than five or seven? Why the week, rather than a
period of ten days? What statistician first observed that in
ordinary times the period of labor should be to the period
of rest in a ratio of 6 to 1, and according to what law?
That the two periods should alternate, and why?

Doubtless no one expects me to respond to these questions:
they are the despair of all science and modern erudition,
and I pity whoever, facing this same matter, does not
perceive that abyss. The origin of the week is unknown: as
for the law of proportion between the duration of labor
and that of relaxation, we don't even suspect the reason,
and I do not believe that it has excited the attention of the
economists and physiologists. Our ignorance is complete
on all these things. Excuse me, then, if, lacking positive
documents, I find myself reduced to giving some reports
on that ancient philosophy, which, in the times of Moses,
already bore the same fruits.

"Going back to the first days of humanity, we see the men
who cultivated wisdom occupied particularly with three
principal objects, directly relative to the perfecting of
human faculties, of morals, and of happiness. 1) They
studied man, healthy and ill, in order to know the laws
which rule him, and to learn to preserve him and bring
him health. 2) They tried to draw up some rules to direct
their minds in the search for useful truths, and laid out
their lessons, either on the particular methods of the arts
or on philosophy, whose more general methods embrace
them all. 3) Finally, they observed the mutual relations of
men, but in that determination they included as necessary
data some more mobile circumstances, such as time, place,
governments, and religions; and from them arose for them
all the precepts of conduct and all the principles of
morals."

I would observe in passing that it is this linking of the
moral and physical in the mind of the ancient legislators
which has contributed everywhere to the assumption of a
primitive pantheism, or worship of the soul of the world.
Pythagoras was the first who applied mathematical calculation to the study of man. He wanted to subject the phenomena of life to mechanical formulas; he perceived between these periods of feverish activity, of development or decline in animals, and certain regular combinations or recurrences of numbers, relations that the experience of the centuries seems to have confirmed, and the systematic exposition of which constituted what we call the *doctrine of crises*. From that doctrine followed not only several indications useful in the treatment of illness, but also some important considerations on hygiene and the physical education of children. It would perhaps not be impossible to still draw from it some views on the manner of regulating the labors of the mind, of seizing the moments when the disposition gives it the most strength and lucidity, to conserve all its freshness, by wearying it inappropriately, when the state of remission commands it to rest. Everyone can observe in themselves these alternations of activity and languor in the exercise of thought: but what would be truly useful would be to restore its periods to fixed laws, taken in nature, and from which one could draw some rules of conduct applicable, by means of certain individual modifications, to the diverse circumstances of climate, temperament, age, in short, to all the cases where men can be found...

"Such is the data from which the different founders of religious orders began, who, by hygienic practices more or less happily combined, strove to adapt minds and character to the sort of life of which they had conceived the plan." (Cabanis, *Relations of the Physical and the Moral*.)
It is through an error of memory or attention that Cabanis proclaims Pythagoras *the first who applied mathematical calculation to the study of man*. Long before that philosopher, the secrets of numbers were known. What he knew of it himself was very little, and came to him from elsewhere. His glory is to have been their initiator and promoter in Magna Graecia. Nearly a thousand years before Pythagoras, Moses made use, in his legislation, of all the science of the Egyptians; and that science, already old in that period, appears to have consisted above all in a sort of metaphysics of rhythm and number, of which it is perhaps easier to conceive the general reason than to find the principles and facts. The Greeks retained something of it, which they expressed by the name of mousiki, which included aesthetics, moral science, poetry, oratory, and grammar, and which we properly call music. But the relations of the physical and the moral, those of religion and politics, the multitude of relations between all the parts of intelligent, living and animated nature, the analogies between the various branches of human knowledge, that the numerical operations served to calculate and formulate, all of that was excluded from their music, and philosophy itself has retained hardly any of it. Some have sought, in our own times, to recall attention to these objects of antique curiosity; but up to the time in which I write, they have only succeeded in giving caricatures or puerile allegories. It is not with the imagination, but with observation and fact, that we will create such a science. It will not be guessed. We must infer it from phenomena. Moreover, what renders it so difficult for us is the unequal development of the sciences: in order for a synthesis to be able to occur, there must be one single
intelligence which embraces all the parts, which presumes
either all the infinite sciences, or their parallel progress.

But were the sciences more advanced in Egypt, four
thousand years ago, than they are in France in the
nineteenth century? I will not speak about matters whose
nature is foreign to me: perhaps the Egyptians had
discovered methods and sciences of which we are
unaware, as they were necessarily unaware of ours. In any
event, according to Chainpollion, the arts and sciences
appear to have been in decadence in Egypt from the reign
of Senusret, 2,000 years before Christ. And I will add that,
to judge by all of the propositions that one could extract
from the most ancient Hebrew books, modern philosophy
still lags behind its inspiration.

It was by a sort of methodical materialism analogous to
the doubt of Descartes, that the ancient sages theoretically
raised themselves to the knowledge of God and the soul,
and let them deduce the persistence of the self beyond the
tomb, and the eternally active and conservative
personality of the Great Being. Very different in this
regard are the modern spiritualists, who, always alarmed
by the progress of a pretentious physiology, want to
isolate it from psychology, and, to insure the subjective
reality of thought, reduce all the phenomena of organic
life, and even the determinations of the sensibility, to a
crude mechanics. They knew, these first observers of
nature, that the notion of God and of a future existence
had been revealed in the beginning to the conscience of
man by a mysterious utterance, and that it is still by an
immediate transmission from person to person that this
notion is preserved in society. But they also thought that,
reason having been given to us to contemplate the
effable ways of the Divinity, no less than to admire his
works, that reason extends his domain over that which is
above him and that which is below; that he is within his
rights to reduce the study of God and the world to one
unique point of view, to subject that double study to a
single mode of development, and to imitate the
cosmogonic succession of beings in the synthesis that they
exhibit. The universe, in their eyes, was an immense
pyramid of which the visible substance formed the base,
the phenomena that this substance proved made up its
various tiers, and at the summit of which appeared the
Spirit.

"Matter, said the Hierophant, is extended and impenetrable. These two properties, which signify for us only indestructibility, are essential to matter; without them we could not conceive of it. Considered with regard to solidity and surface, it gives rise to the science of number and measures, an infinite science, capable of absorbing the life of the man. The dimensions of matter will be sufficient for the exercise of the created intelligence.

"It is a fact that mass will rush towards a center; bodies seek one another, and matter is drawn towards matter: why is this? But while this tendency is general and constant, it does not appear essential to bodies; for we can conceive of them perfectly without gravitation, something that we cannot say of extension or impenetrability. What is more, there is, in this propensity of bodies to join, a circumstance quite contrary to their nature: they are limited and circumscribed, while their sphere of attraction is infinite. The intensity of that attraction is increased or
diminished in certain proportions; it is never extinguished. If there had existed only two molecules of matter, they would have been drawn towards one another across all possible space: the subject is without proportion to the attribute. Bodies finally according to the relations of their masses, and by their resilience or expandability, halt, transmit or reproduce movement; they do not create it. There is an external force, distinct from the bodies, that moves and directs them. The science of quantities can calculate the apparent proportions formulate the laws of that force, but it is unable to explain the principle. The knowledge of the effects of bodies, considered as acting on one another by their mechanical power, namely, their movement and their weights, gives rise to a new science, *physics*.

"You think you know something already: enter into the laboratory of nature, and all that you know will vanish like a dream, and leave you only the feeling of your ignorance. What produces between this inert masses this mutual penetration, these sudden metamorphoses, these aversions and preferences, these loves and hates? This is the second incorporation of force. An uncontrollable and certain power presides over all the combinations, and, varying its laws according to the variety and quantity, awaits before acting only contact or repose. See these products so different from their elements; admire the complex geometry of this precipitation. The snow, like a crystallization of transparent flowers, floods with its symmetrical flakes the heights of Mount Lebanon and the Caucasus, father of rivers: what paintbrush has ever drawn figures more regular, and more elegantly varied? But here, the more the intelligence sparkles, the more
illusive the cause becomes: science is nothing but a series
of names and phenomena. Each fact recorded by the
observer blurs his classifications; each discovery is a
refutation of his systems; and the deeper you penetrate
into this labyrinth, the more its detours increase and
entwine. There is still no chemistry.

"Who has examined the sources of life? Who has discovered the principle of the sensibilities? Who has seen the lighting of the torch of instinct? Tell me by what virtue plants and animals assimilate their nourishment; from whence comes the autonomy that preserves and guides them?... Oh, mystery! All living beings are armed for reproduction; individuals die, but species are indestructible. Before these marvels, what is the science of the chemist or the physician? What is it that gross matter can teach you about living matter? Gravitation, the attraction of cohesion, the elective affinities, soon find the end of their action. The elementary combinations, once carried out, remain fixed. The spring released, the machine stops and everything returns to rest. There is no resurgence, no internal development, no perpetuity, and no center of operations. You will never explain life by weights and resistances, by molecular attractions or atomic combinations. We need, for this new order of phenomena, a new mathematics, a new physics, and a new chemistry. You may, if you like, call that science physiology.<fnref n="8" />

<footnote n="8">⁸ “[A]ll the efforts of philosophers have not yet been able to discover matter in the act of organization, either of itself or by any extrinsic cause. In fact, life exercising upon the elements which at every instant form part of the living body, and upon those which it</footnote>
"But, Fate! What can physiology do for the theory of intelligence? Are ideas acquired as the organs grow? Are judgments formed by a digestion of the brain! Is it the nervous system or the vascular system that produces metaphysicians and geometers? You speak of organic predispositions, natural appetites, temperaments, etc.; that is to say that an organism is necessary as a *substratum*, or place of exercise, for thought, but not that it engenders the thought, just as matter is necessary to the production of force, and is not force; to the development of life, but is not life. No one knows the genesis of the soul. No one has sounded the abyss of his faculties.

"What use will man make of that light which illuminates his instinct? Isn't it to be feared that he will put it in the service of his selfishness, at the expense of all those around him?... A brake is imposed on his fierce greed; an inner voice warns him of what is allowed, of the rights he must respect, and of the punishments that await if he disobeys. Well! You will succeed in knowing this invisible legislator, whose dictates arrest the appetites of the nature, this reason to act independent of speculative reason, no better by reducing it physiology, than you have by attempting to reduce it to sensibility, to reduce sensibility to attraction, or weight to expanse. We require *morals*: who will give them to us?

<footnote>attracts to it, an action contrary to that which would be produced
without it by the usual chemical affinities, it is inconsistent to
suppose that it can itself be produced by these affinities." G. Cuvier.
*Introduction to the Animal Kingdom*</footnote>
"The sciences we have just enumerated form so many systems, which are distinct but do not contradict one another. The facts proper to each being varied, but not opposed, can only give rise to different laws: the expression of one of these laws is not the negation of the other. On the contrary, the object of the second and the third of these sciences being the object of the first, plus a new element, *force*; the object of the fourth being the object of the first three, plus another element, *life*; the object of the fifth being the same as that of the previous ones, plus a third element, *reason*; the object of the sixth, finally, being the object of five others, plus a last element, *justice*, it follows that they form an ascending gradation, along the whole extent of which the mathematical formulas must find their application. There is thus a science of sciences, a philosophy of the universe, of which *number*, which is to say *rhythm*, series, is the object.

"Thus, all the sciences demonstrate one another, and serve reciprocally as cross-check and criterion. If, for example, the succession of days of rest, instead of corresponding to the arithmetic progression 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, 36, etc., had the relation: 1, 6, 14, 25, 29, 39, 47, you could conclude, with no other demonstration, and by that fact alone, that the numbers 1, 6, 14, 25, 29, 39, 47, did not form a regular period, that such a distribution of holidays is contrary to hygiene, morals, and liberty.

"A living, intelligent and moral creature, a creature of both mind and matter, man is subject to the laws of life, thought and science; shape, force and number are the bases of his intelligence as was as his being. To understand something of this microcosm, you must have
observed all of nature; to aspire to direct it, you must know all the orders of phenomena and the secret of their balance. Of all the studies, the study of man is the largest; of all the arts, that of governing him is the most difficult.

"When you raise a building, you use the plumb and lever to assure that the centers of gravity of all the stones meet in a single perpendicular plane; for you know by statistics that by neglecting that precaution you compromise the solidity of the structure. Likewise, you have observed that, to farm successfully, it is necessary to observe the times of grafting, germination, flowering and maturity, the advantages of the season and the soil, and all the rules of vegetable life. You can accelerate and multiply the development of that life, but you can only do it by virtue of its own laws: to act on it, you need a pressure point, and it is in that pressure that you will find it. Thus, the eagle that plane in the sky triumphs over gravity by the use of gravity itself.

"What! Man is order and beauty, and you will abandon his education to chance! His will is free, and, instead of directing him, you will impose chains on him! His conscience raises him towards his maker, and you will render that conscience impious! Under the pretext of emancipating reason, you will proclaim your republic without God! To build up the flesh and blood, you will recommend passion and deny duty! Legislator of swine, your barn will not stand: the conscience, the will and the intelligence will react against a blind tyranny, and since you have not been able to rule them, and you have been afraid to destroy them, you will see them burst out in a frightful confusion, until finally, exhausted by their
excesses and obeying their nature, they return to their
legitimate ordination and harmonize themselves in an
eternal society."

I would like now to be able to say how, with that powerful
method of induction, the ancient philosophy escaped the
reef, so common today in a certain kind of shipwreck, of
speculative and practical pantheism; how it resolved the
subsequent problems of the destiny of man, of the origin
of evil, of the principle of our knowledge and of the
foundations of certitude. But I have not been initiated in
the sanctuaries of Heliopolis and Jerusalem, and I have
not inherited the mantle of Elijah. Moreover, such a
reconstruction, not being made of special fragments, but
only inferred from the general spirit of the beliefs and
institutions, would always preserve an arbitrary character,
and however plausible one makes the ensemble and the
details, they will attest less to the exactitude of the
doctrine than the spirit of the critique.

Moses, having thus to rule in a nation the works and day,
the feasts and holidays, the labors of the body and the
exercises of the soul, the interests of hygiene and morals,
political economy and the subsistence of persons, had
recourse to a science of sciences, to a *transcendent harmonic*,
if he will permit me to give it a name, that embraces
everything: space, duration, movement, minds and bodies,
the sacred and the profane. The certainty of that science is
demonstrated by the very fact with which we concern
ourselves. Reduce the week by a single day, labor is
insufficient in comparison with rest; add the same
quantity, and it becomes excessive. Establish a half-day of
rest every three days, and the fragmentation multiplies
the loss of time, and by splitting the natural unity of the
day, you break the numerical balance of things. Grant, on
the contrary, forty-eight hours of rest after twelve
consecutive days of effort, you kill the man with inertia
after having exhausted him with fatigue. I omit, for the
sake of brevity, the mass of similar considerations that
might suggest the inversion of relations in the family and
city, and which would bring to light other disadvantages.
How then did Moses calculate so well? He did not invent
the week, but it was, he believed, the first and only thing
that would serve for such a great purpose. Would he have
adopted that proportion, if he had not calculated in
advance its whole impact? And if it was not the effect of a
theory he held, how are we to explain such a prodigious
intuition! Moreover, as for supposing that chance alone
had thus favored it, I would rather belief in a special
revelation that had been made to him about it, or the fable
of a sow writing the Iliad with its snout.

We rightly mock the foolish mania of those people who
exalt the ancients beyond measure, and who discover the
vestiges of the most sublime knowledge where the
judicious observer only perceives the mark of good sense.
But when the facts are multiplied and clarified by each
other, when several monuments render a common
testimony, the probability increases as the doubt
diminishes. We have seen at the beginning of this memoir
the septenary number figure in the categories of duty; the
same number is present in the cosmogony of Moses and in
a multitude of other circumstances, for example, in the
symptomatology of the leper; finally, we have cited the
reflections of Cabanis on the relations of numbers: were
all these laws recorded by the ancients, or just dreamed
up at random? The response would presume the very
science of which I have spoken—and spoken too long,
since I don't even know the name it bears.

V

If I have accomplished the task that I imposed on myself
in beginning these researches, it remains certain and
proven:

1. That the institution of the Sabbath was conceived
on the principles of a higher politics, the greatest
secret of which consisted in making the means arise
from the end;

2. That this institution, analyzed in the circumstances
of its origin and its reform, supposes liberty, equality,
supremacy of religion and the laws, executive power
in the people, absolute dependence of the
functionaries, means of subsistence the same for all;

3. That its effects, mediate and immediate, is summed
up in the following: highly developed sociability,
perfect morality, health of the body and mind,
constant happiness, always capable of increase and
variety, according to ages and characters;

4. That it was eminently conservative of the social
order, which conserved it in its turn.

It remains for me to clarify some difficulties.
If it is true that the plan of Moses was such as I have tried to describe, how did he let nothing of that plan appear? Why do we not find a word of it in the motives that he alleged, and he cited everywhere only to the absolute will of God? Why, instead of these fine political teachings, did he always resort to promises and threats?

Moses spoke to his century so that he could be understood by it; he explained himself as he had to. The law of the Sabbath was not the only one in which the name of Jehovah took the place, outwardly, of every motive and every sanction: the other laws, whether political, civil or criminal, as well as the detailed ordinances, were in the same position. It is always the same formula—I am the Lord— which is the supreme reason. Sometimes the benefit of deliverance is recalled, in order to add the sweeter bond of gratitude to the motive of fear. But everywhere the true spirit of the law is concealed: Moses seems to have wanted that knowledge to be reserved for the faithful, for it to become the prize of perseverance and meditation. Sometime he only half expressed it, and sometimes he wrapped his thought in a symbolic and figurative style, leaving to the attentive reader the task of penetrating the sense of his words. Never, however, did he deign to anticipate a *why* or a *how*, or to forestall a single objection.

Moses instituted a *Sabbath year*, that is he forbade the cultivation of the soil each seventh year, declaring that the Lord wanted it thus, and promising on his part a triple harvest for the sixth. Mr. Pastoret finds that it is not easy to justify that law. He even remarks that the triple harvest was always lacking. However, that law is nothing but an
agricultural precept, and the abundance promised for the
sixth year is the natural result of a renewed fertility. With
more knowledge, the Israelites would have glimpsed the
aim of the legislator, and they would have ordained that
the Sabbath of the land would have taken place each year
in one-seventh of the lands, so that at the end of seven
year the whole territory would be rested. The law dictated
that they content themselves, during the seventh year,
with the products of the herds: it was an invitation to
convert the fields into artificial prairies. Don't we know
today that his mode of farming rests the earth and
enriches the laborer?

Bestiality was punished with death; among us, that
infamy would hardly be judged worthy of the whip. The
wretch who soiled himself with it would excite more
disgust than blame from the tribunals. But that crime, in
the time of Moses, was part of idolatrous ceremonies; in
Egypt, women prostituted themselves in public to the
Goat of Mendes and to crocodiles, and similar customs
were to be seen elsewhere. It is that execrable superstition
that motivated the severity of Moses: none of that,
however is reflected in the law itself.

He declares abominable anyone who exchanges their
clothing for that of the opposite sex. Is it a question of
simple disguise? That would be to be a slave of the text.
Moses designated under an innocent surface the sort of
infamy for which Sappho was famous, which the Greeks
deified in Ganymede.

He forbade mixing any foreign seed in the vineyards, lest,
he said, the two plants harm one another and are ruined. This
is another law of public morality disguised under a rustic
image. Moses, in prohibiting a custom honored since
Sparta, which Plato wanted to introduce into his republic,
taught the people to care more for conjugal inviolability
than for the production of children.

It is a capital crime to imitate the composition of the holy
oil, *because*, said Moses, *such a counterfeit is sacrilege*. What
made that oil so precious? It is because the mark of the
clergy and royalty consisted in consecration; and what
Moses called *counterfeiting the holy oil* was nothing less that
aspiring to *tyranny*. It was primarily the crime of national
lèse-majesté.

Pythagoras said in the same style: "Don't stir the fire with
the sword. Don't sit on the bushel." He meant: "Don't
provoke an angry man. Avoid idleness."

When Moses instituted a clergy, he did not go out of his
way to explain to the people its nature and attributions; he
told them nothing of the functions of that order, or of its
prerogatives. He did not allow even a glimpse of the
reason why no property was allowed to the Levites, while
in Egypt the priests possessed a third of the land. He
made God say: *I have chosen the children of Le vi to serve in
my tabernacle; every intruder will be put to death*. And that
was done to Core and Dathan.

The successors of Moses acted in exactly the same way.

Under the judicature of Samuel, the people demanded a
king. What was the prophet's answer? Did he reason with
the deputies of the tribes? Did he consider whether
royalty is in itself a just and moral thing; if it is in the spirit
of the constitution; if it did not wound the rights of the
people; if it would not lead to a revolution in the State? No;
he said to them:

"This will be the right of the king who will command you:

"He will take your sons and make them man his chariots; he will make them horsemen, runners, tribunes and centurions, laborers for his lands, harvesters for his wheat, makers of arms and chariots." Samuel seemed to threaten the Hebrews with conscription.

"He will make your daughters his perfumers, his cooks and his bakers.

"He will take hold of your fields, your vineyards, your olive orchards, and give them to his servants.

"He will take a tenth of your harvests, to pay his eunuchs and his domestics.

"He will take your menservants and your maidservants, the strongest of your young men, and your asses, and put them to work at his chores; he will take a tenth of your livestock, and you will be his slaves."

Samuel did not enter into a discussion with the people; he did not return to principles; he invoked neither rights, nor morals, nor the constitution. Like the democrats of 93, he showed royalty with all its extravagances, its usurpations, its vises and its tyranny; he reviewed its odious cortege, and he cried: *There is your king!*
Thus, when Moses, establishing the Sabbath, said to the people: *Thou shalt sanctify the seventh day, because it is the rest of the Lord who has brought you out of Egypt*, it is not necessary to believe, with the Anglican Spencer and the Calvinist Benjamin Constant, that behind these words are not hidden other motives, more direct, more human, and more capable of satisfying the scruples of a formalist and positive politics. But we must recognize in that language the necessities of the age. Moses, forced to proportion his message to the intelligence of his freemen, chose, from among all the reasons he could have given to his commandments, the most impressive and formidable, and let us say it boldly, in the last analysis, the most true, the only true one.

But I sense that my paradoxes become more and more appalling.

What! Some indignant philosopher will doubtless cry: You dare to say that God rests, that he is concerned with our feasts, that he must observe the Sabbath because he gives the example for it! to set up some rules, useful if you like, on revelations and oracles, when one claims to have better reasons! To make Divinity intervene where only reasoning is admissible! To lead men astray, instead of instructing them, that is what will be called truth! What is your philosophy? What do you profess?

Unfortunate one, how will you understand me, if you refuse to see the trend of my thought? My profession is this: that Moses believed in his own God; that he believed in his soul and conscience, and that he was imbued with
that faith which alone established his authority and his
strength. He adored foremost, in spirit and in truth,
that Jehovah whose prophet he was. But his worship was
not of the common sort.

God, as Moses conceived him, is living Force, effective
Will, infinite Reason.

He is, he creates, and he commands.

As supreme being, he is the principle of all existence; as
action and life, he moves, animates and preserves; as
intelligence, he regulates all creation.

The extraordinary revolutions of the world, which are
always destroyed and always restored, announce the
eternity and immutability of his being; the constancy of
physical laws, the permanence of forms, and the
recurrence of movements attest to his inflexible will; the
sequence of causes and effects, the exact disposition of
each thing for a single end, demonstrates his wisdom.

The existence of God is not proven a priori, nor a
posteriori, because he has no before or after. We see that
existence and feel it. We think, speak, reflect and reason
about it. God is necessity; the alpha and omega, the
principle and complement of all. He is the Unique and the
Universal, embracing all truths in an infinite chain. We
grasp some links here and there, some more or less
extensive fragments of that chain, but the immensity of its
ensemble escapes us. Whoever expresses a thought, by that
alone names God; all our sciences are only partial or
unfinished expositions of the absolute science, which is
the *scitum* and *fatum* of God himself.

The organisms that God has created are predisposed by
him in such a way that, coming from his hands, they
accomplish their destinies by themselves. Thus, the
celestial orbs have each been weighted for the route that
they will travel. Thus the atoms find themselves formed
for all combinations. In the vegetable realm, the
assimilating power is never deceived: we have yet to see
the grapevine produce melons.

The animals are endowed with memory and imagination,
and capable of some experience: they enjoy nearly from
birth an entirely developed and innate intelligence, which
we call instinct. Their movements are spontaneous, and
their will is free; but that liberty only acts under a lawful
order, and only obeys a sort of impulse, that of physical
and sensible nature.

Compared with the animals, man has, with regard to
thought, more intelligence, which reflects, counts, judges,
reasons, combines, generalizes, classes and distinguishes;
with regard to sentiment, more conscience, which dictates
new laws to him, often contrary to the appetites of his
sensibility. The field of human liberty is double:
enlightened by reason, the masterwork of that liberty is to
harmonize all his acts; its greatest effort, to sacrifice
passion to duty.

The will of man, obeying two different impulses, has a
composite movement. It is thus prone to going astray. In
that case, man is at fault and always unhappy. The
direction of the will demands the most attentive
monitoring and the most discriminating temperament. It
is in the study of the relations between the physical, the
intellectual and the moral, that the best of mode education
for the will is to be discovered.

But man is born into society: it is thus also necessary to
study the relations between men, in order to determine
their rights and sketch out some rules for them. What
complications! There is a science of quantities which
forces assent, excludes willful objections, and rejects every
utopia; a science of physical phenomena, which rests only
on the observation of the facts; a grammar and a poetics
based on the essence of language, etc. There must also
exist a science of society, absolute and rigorous, based on
the nature of man and his faculties, and on their relations,
a science that he will not *invent*, but *discover*.

Now, admit that the principles of that science have been
fixed, with every application made by means of the
principles of deduction and causation, and we will
understand how Moses, starting from the absolute, found
as the ultimate reason for his laws only the commands of
God.

5 multiplied by 5 gives a product of 25. Why? It is
impossible to give any reason for it, if not that this is a fact,
that this is the logic of numbers, that our intelligence,
whose laws are the same as those of nature—or
God—make us understand the fact in this way.—Bodies
weigh on the earth. Why? Because of gravitation. And
what is gravitation? The order of God, said
Newton.—Nitric acid shows a stronger attraction to iron
than to copper. Why? That is perhaps the result of the
shape, the density, and the different arrangement of their
atoms. Why don't the atoms of all bodies resemble one
another? It is because God wills it. — The elements of
verse, in Latin, consist of prosody and measure; in French,
in rhyme or measure. Why this difference? Because of the
diversity of idioms. But, while the intelligence and organs
of man remain the same, where can this diversity come
from? From a multitude of causes which all amount to the
decree of destiny.

To govern men, it is also only a question of seeking God's
order. Everything that enters into that order is good and
just; everything that strays from it is false, tyrannical and
bad.

It is just to make, or to speak more precisely, to discover
and ascertain the economic laws, restrictive of property
and distributive of labor; Why? In order to maintain
equality in conditions. But why should conditions be
equal? Because the right to live and develop completely is
equal for all, and the inequality of conditions is an
obstacle to the exercise of that right. How is the equality of
rights proven? By the parity of penchants and faculties;
because God, in giving them to all, did not want them to
be stifled or subjugated in one for the benefit of another.
The equality of fortunes is the expression of the divine
will, which has reserved for rebellious societies a terrible
punishment, destitution. It is a question of knowing how
that equality will be realized: for it is not for us the object
of a restoration, but of an institution.
The command of an individual will only be counted for something to the extent that it conforms to reason: in this case, it is no longer the man who commands, it is reason. It is the law. It is God. Nobody has the privilege of interposing his will in the legal exercise of right, to suspend the law or sanction it. Thus all royalty is contrary to order; it is a negation of God. Everywhere royalty exists, even when subjected to some rules, even if it is beneficial and protective, it will only be an abuse that nothing can legitimate, a usurpation that no one can dictate. Its origin is always blameworthy. It is, if one will allow me this scholastic jargon, *ex ordine ordinando*, never *ex ordine ordinato*. —We must say as much of all aristocracy and democracy. The authority of some over all is nothing. The authority of the greatest number over the least is nothing. The authority of all against one is nothing, without the authority of the law, which alone cannot be contradicted.

It is good that some men be specially charged with instructing the others, with recalling them to their rights, warning them of their duties, teaching manners and religion, bringing up the young, settling contentions and disputes, cultivating the sciences and practicing medicine. These men are not masters, but teachers of the people, *demagogues*.<fnref n="9" /> They command no one; they say what should be done, and the people carry it out. They do not impose belief, but show the truth. They neither give nor sell religion, philosophy and the sciences, for they are not their property. They are only their physicians and

<footnote n="9">⁹ *Demagogue*, conductor or tutor of the people; as *pedagogue*, tutor of children; *mystagogue*, master of sacred ceremonies.</footnote>
guardians. Their doctrine is true: all that they announce is
the word of God.

It is necessary from time to time for men to rest, that they
even rejoice: the soul must be nourished and the body
repaired. What should the duration of labor be? What will
the intervals of rest be? Will the holidays be observed
simultaneously by all the citizens? How will hygiene,
morals, the family and the republic profit by them? Search
the will of God.

It is thus that, in their political foundations, all the
legislators and philosophers of antiquity would proceed.
Never would they enter into the spirit of separating the
rights from the man, of placing some under the protection
of a justice armed with a sword, and abandon the others
to the tutelage of religion. For them every moral
proscription was civil law, and all civil law was sacred.
With regard to religious rites, as those rights had for
principle a reasonable and useful object, the greatest men
submitted to them, conceiving no virtue and propriety
without a rule, as they did not conceive justification
without works.

From the unity of the law followed the unity of power: so
it happened that Jeroboam erected a temple in Samaria,
that Ozias wanted to award himself the censer, in Rome
the consuls were at the same time soothsayers and
supreme pontiffs, that the further one goes back into
antiquity, the more one finds that the chiefs of the peoples
brought together the three positions of king, priest and
prophet. But soon all those notions would be obscured.
The usurpations entered like a mob into the sanctuary and
the temple of the law. The kings and priests, each on their side, would make a patrimony of the government and the church, and sometimes quarreling, sometimes associating their interests, too often made the yoke of fanaticism and tyranny weigh on the people.

Moses wanted to spare the Israelites these fatal drawbacks. He founded a police which, confided to a more faithful race, would certainly have led to the highest degree of domestic felicity and national strength. But the people, not knowing how to be free, wanted a king. Now, the establishment of a royalty was something so contrary to all the ideas of the legislator, so eccentric to his plan, that the Jewish monarchs never believed that they could consolidate their power beside a law that they had not made and which troubled them in all their movements. That is what explains that dogged idolatry, that long apostasy into which the kings of Judah strove to lead the nation. And, indeed, to return to my subject, (which I have never abandoned, even when I seem to be diverting ever more from it,) what could have been more dreadful and odious for the sultans of Jerusalem, than these feasts and Sabbaths when the people were obliged by their religion to gather and to read the law, that law that taught them who they were and who was their sovereign? How could they bear those great solemnities of Passover and Tabernacles, which, gathering the whole nation as a single family, made them reflect on their strength and on the weakness of the corrupting and liberticidal tyrant? The schism of the ten tribes was accomplished in one of these great gatherings. Athaliah was cast down from the thrown during the feast of Pentecost. The Maccabees would use a Passover to rouse the people against the king of Syria, and
this was also the occasion when the revolt of the Jews
under Vespasian took place. According to the
prescriptions of Moses, the king could only be a president
of the republic. This was clearly the sense of the
instructions given to the king in Deuteronomy, of which,
until the time of Josiah, no one had been aware. To be king,
truly king, as the Hebrew melks understood it, and as one
always expects it to be, it is necessary to corrupt the
people and separate them from the institutions: that was,
it is true, what led to its loss and prepared the ruin of the
throne. No matter, the kings would not hesitate. The
seduction was accomplished, and it was total. It will last
as long as the monarchy itself, since, in the words of the
fourth book of Kings, it was an unheard of novelty that
the Passover was celebrated under Josiah and, according
to Ezra, the captivity had lasted seventy years, in order
that the earth had the time to *rest and celebrate its Sabbaths*.
As soon as a nation has right, even if granted [from above],
it is ungovernable by any will that wants to be the equal, if
not the ruler of the law; because, sooner or later, the
Charter, whether awarded or consented to, rebels against
the will which is not its own, and opposes it.

In it origins, religion was politics and science; the
priesthood were thus also magistracy and teachers. Every
social organization is contained in that trilogy. But it is
necessary that the priest becomes dogmatic and intolerant,
that the judge becomes violent and despotic, that the
philosopher, contemptuous of priests and kings, makes
himself their persecutor and curse; it is necessary that all
mankind should bear the penalty of their follies, to teach
us that the division of functions does not entail the
separation of powers, and that if there is a contradiction
between reason and conscience, between conscience and
the law, that contradiction comes from us. Today, peace is
on the verge of being concluded: the civil law recognizes
its insufficiency, and calls for the support of religion;
philosophy touches on the demonstration of the mysteries;
faith, without abandoning any of its doctrine and
traditions, offers rational explications. Who would dare to
say that something greater than the code, philosophy and
religion will not spring from these reciprocal concessions?

There was always, within the homeland, an elite of
citizens, the first in science and virtue. Let their functions
be to instruct, counsel and resolve. Let them form the
greatest and most glorious university. Let them give to the
people a perpetual example of equality and
disinterestedness. Let their reward be to hear themselves
called prudent as well as wise and fathers of the nation.

Let us abolish royalty without hatred and vengeance,
because with royalty we are all guilty. Let us reject it, not
only as vicious, extravagant, corrupting and unworthy,
but as illegitimate. We dispute endlessly: *The king reigns
and govern, the king reigns and does not govern*. Let us begin
by saying: He *governs and does not reign*; and if we are not
still in the realm of truth, at least we have made a step
towards it; for it is the people who are the *executive* power,
and it is the law that inaugurates them.

And let us preserve, let us restore the solemnity of Sunday,
so eminently social and popular, not as an object of
ecclesiastic discipline, but as an institution that conserves
mores, a source of public spirit, a meeting place
inaccessible to the cops, and a guarantee of order and
liberty. In the celebration of Sunday is lodged the most
fruitful principle of our future progress; it is by taking
advantage of Sunday that the reform will be achieved.

Let there rise in the midst of his brothers, with all the
authority of virtue and genius, the reformer that some
await. Let him come, powerful in words and deeds, to
convert and to punish. Let him see the horror of our vises,
and hear the tale of our follies. Let him lament our
miseries and let him cry out: The cause of the evil is in the
ideas. To heal the heart, you must correct the brain. Can
you remake your understanding? Can you change your
opinions, condemn what pleases you, hate what makes
you laugh, love and respect what hardly concerns you?
Do you believe these truths that you no longer
understand?

*Crime is imputable, satisfaction necessary, and punishment just*
*and legitimate.*

*Labor is obligatory, property only usufruct, and inheritance a*
*mode of conservation of shares; liberty is balance; the inequality*
*of nature is weakened by education, and effaced by the equality*
*of fortunes. Marriage is exclusive and holy: fornication is an*
*offense against nature, against persons and against society.*

*Reason oversees the senses; the conscience imposes a brake on*
*the animal passions. Man's end is not to enjoy, but to cultivate*
*his soul and contemplate the works of God.*

*Falsehood is the murder of the intelligence; the oath is inviolable.*
*The law is not the expression of a single will, nor of a general will; it is the natural relation of things, discovered and applied by reason.*

*The sanction of the law is in God, who gives it.*

Oh citizens! If you can't handle that medication, if you find this brew too bitter, stop complaining, ask for no medicine and rot in your own corruption. But listen to what will happen.

The sun will shine neither more nor less on the soil where you live. The dew and gentle breezes will refresh your fields and meadows in the same way. Your trees will not be less productive, your vines less fertile. You will not see hail, floods or fire desolate your towns or countryside more often. The elements will not be more murderous.

But opulence and misery, inseparable companions, will increase in an endless progression; large properties will invade everywhere. The bankrupt peasant will sell his inheritance; and when there are only landlords and tenants, lords and serfs, the first will give to the second a few clothes, lodging and some bread, and they will say to them: See how happy your are? What is liberty and equality? Long live harmony!

In those times, trivial talents and arts of luxury will be rewarded lavishly. We will see singers more wealthy than large villages are now. The wage of a comedienne will be more than the cost of a hundred bushels of wheat in a famine. The poor worker, the laborer's wife and the artisan will be humiliated.
The merit of women will no longer be anything but an
evaluation of their beauty, their most sacred right, to be
surrendered to the highest bidder. The wealthy will
possess them all, because they alone can pay; the poor will
be left with the disgraced and the castoffs of luxury.

The ignorance and exhaustion of the proletarians will be
at its height. They will not be prevented from learning, but
they will not be able to live without working, and when
they are not working, they will eat nothing. If someone
among them shows talent, he will be encouraged,
rewarded, and *enriched*; he will enter into the upper class
and be lost to his own.

The people, who always follow the example of the rich
and powerful, having lost respect and faith in the old
religion, which at least taught them the equality of men
before God, and could make them suspect that they are
also equals on earth, will traverse all the degrees of a
materialist and pantheist superstition; and when they
have been persuaded that God is All and that all is God,
then they will return to fetishes and manitous. They will
worship, as they once did, the trees and stones; they will
believe in the power or relics, and carry amulets; and the
wealthy, under the pretext of utility and tolerance, will
protect the new devotion, saying: There must be a religion
for the people.

However, they will sometimes encounter some proud
souls, men who refuse to bow down before the golden calf.
Those will want to compare accounts with the favorites of
fortune. — Why are you so rich and we are so poor? — We
have labored, respond the rich; we have saved, and we
have acquired.—We labor as much as you, how is it that
we never acquire anything?—We have inherited from our
fathers.—Ah! You invoke possession, transmission,
prescription. Well! We call on force. Proprietors, defend
yourselves!

And there will be combats and massacres; and when force
will again be established as law, when the *rebels* have been
destroyed, they will write on their tombs *ASSASSINS*,
while their victims will be glorified as martyrs.

And that will endure until God takes pity on us.

But who today will dare to speak in such language? Let us
save ourselves from all illusions. Certain people imagine
that a great personage must soon appear in the midst of
humanity, one of those *providential beings*, as we call them,
who will summarize all ideas, disengage truth from error,
strike down the old prejudices, put all opinions on a new
level, and with his strong hand launch the present
generation down a new road—or a new rut. The
nineteenth century will not pass, they say, before our
prediction comes to pass. Some go further: the great man
has already come; Elias has walked the earth; but the
world has not understood. The Turk says: God is God,
and Mohammed is his prophet. These
modern believers make a similar profession of faith. But
the time of the great reformers, like that of the founders of
religions, is gone forever. It is up to societies to fend for
themselves. Let them await their salvation only at their
own hands. Men never lack truth, but they often lack the
good faith and courage to recognize and follow it.
As for myself, I have not placed my confidence in
anything new under the sun: I have faith in some ideas as
old as the human race. All the elements of order and
happiness, preserved by imperishable traditions, exist. It
is only a question of recognizing the synthesis, the method
of application and development. How has humanity still
not succeeded in this? It is up to history to teach us. I
could say something of it as well as anyone; but, in my
opinion, the philosophy of history will exist only when the
social problem is resolved. Truth is necessary to give the
definitive reason for error. But can that truth itself be
found other than in unity? It is when the most furious
antagonism has been succeeded by general equilibrium,
when the struggle of all the doctrines has given birth to
the one and indivisible science, when the religions and
philosophies have been joined at the altar of truth, that we
will be able to shout: The times of testing are over; the
golden age is before us! Yes, humanity will know that it
has entered its legitimate path, when, looking upon itself,
it can say: One sole god, one sole faith, one sole
government, *Unus Deus, una fides, unum imperium*.
# Letter to the Members of the Academy of Besançon

Besançon, August 3, 1840

To the Members of the Academy of Besançon

Gentlemen, I have learned through the confidences of some of my friends that the publication of my Memoir on *Propriété*, and especially the preface addressed to the Academy of Besançon, which appears at the beginning of that Memoir, have roused your displeasure, not to mention you indignation, against me. That is the motive that enlists me to explain to you here, in few words and in all their simplicity, my conduct and my intentions.

First of all, what has been taken for a dedication is only a simple report, which my condition as the Suard *pensionnaire* and the obligation imposed on me to make known each year the progress of my studies seemed to me to explain sufficiently. I knew that a dedication is a certification of patronage of the person or the body to which one has dedicated it, so that it must be agreed to or even planned between the parties involved; I did not wish to free myself from that rule of decorum. On the other hand, a report is necessarily determined in form and content by the work on which one reports; that, Gentlemen, is what explains the silence that I have kept with regard to you, concerning the work, and concerning the address that precedes it.
As for the book itself, I would not argue here the cause
that I have embraced; I had no desire to place myself
before you as an adversary, no than as an accused; my
conviction, what I am saying? my certainty concerning the
truths that I have elaborated is invincible, and I respect
your opinion to much, Gentlemen, to ever combat it
directly. But, if I advance some unheard of paradoxes
concerning Property, that basis of our present political
state, does it follow that I am an implacable revolutionary,
a secret conspirator, an enemy of society? No, Gentlemen;
in admitting my doctrines without reservation, all that
you could conclude from it, and all that I conclude myself,
is that there exists a natural, inalienable right
of possession and labor, for the enjoyment of which the
proletarian must be prepared, just like the black of the
colonies, before receiving the liberty of which no one
today contests the right, must be prepared for liberty. That
education of the proletarian is the mission confided today
to all the men powerful in intelligence and fortune, under
pain of being sooner or later crushed under an deluge of
those barbarians to whom we are accustomed to give the
name of proletarians.

Should I respond to another sort of accusation? Some have
seen in my conduct toward my academic tutor, to whom I
have never made any communication, a sort of
ingratitude.

My conduct with regard to Mr. Droz has been dictate to
me by a sentiment of decorum; could I enter with that
venerable writer into some conferences on moral science
and political economy, when those conferences must have,
in my opinion, the result of calling into doubt the value of
the moral and economic writings of Mr. Droz? Should I put myself in a state of argumentativeness and, so to speak, permanent disobedience with him? No one loves and admires the talent of Mr. Droz more than me; no one can ever demonstrate a more profound veneration for his character. Now, these sentiments were precisely so many reasons that that forbade a polemic that would have been awkward and too perilous for me.

Gentlemen, the publication of that work was commanded of me by the order of my philosophical studies. This is what the future will demonstrate to you. One last Memoir remains for me to compose on the question of Property; that work accomplished, I would pursue, without turning aside from my path, my studies in philology, metaphysics and moral science.

Gentlemen, I belong to no party, to no coterie; I am without advocates, without partners, without associates. I make no sect, and I would reject the role of tribune, were it ever offered to me, for the simple reason that I do not wish to enthralled myself! I have only you, Gentlemen. I only have hope in you. I await favor and a solid reputation only from you. I know that you propose to condemn what you call my *opinions*, and to reject all solidarity with my ideas. I will nonetheless persist in believing that the time will come when you will give me as much praise as I have caused you irritation. Your first emotion will pass, the distress born among you by the bold expression of a still unperceived physical and economic truth will ease, and with time and reflection, I am sure, you will arrive at the enlightened consciousness
of your own sentiments, which you do not know, which
you combat and I defend.

I am, Gentlemen, with the most perfect confidence in your
understanding and in your justice, your very humble and
devoted pensionnaire.

P.-J. Proudhon
# Explanations Presented to the Public Minister on the Right of Property

## Court of Assize of the Department of Doubs

(Session of February 3, 1842.)

Last February 3, there appeared before the jury of Besançon, the author of a brochure entitled *Warning to the Proprietors, or Letter to M. Considerant, editor of la Phalange, on a defense of property*, on the charge: 1) of attacking property; 2) of provoking various classes of citizens to hatred; 3) of inciting hatred and contempt of the government and king; 4) of offense against the catholic religion.

It is not our intention to give a detailed relation of that trial, which had in common with so many others of the same type only the form of the proceedings and the jurisdiction. The public minister invoked the *written law*, the accused spoke in the name of a science, and, by the form and content of his responses, seemed less to await a verdict of acquittal than a declaration of the court's incompetence. Thus, let no one accuse us of unfaithfulness, if we limit our account to that purely explanatory part of the defense which was intended by the accused as a sort of program of his researches on political and industrial organization, and the constitution of equality.

The advocate general, M. Jobard, defended the charges with all the skill of a consummate jurist, but was
obliged to limit himself to the text of the law. After him,
the accused read a written defense, from which we extract
the following passages:

I have only written one thing in my life, gentlemen jurors,
and I will tell you that thing right away, so there is no
question: *Property is robbery*. And do you know what I
have concluded from that? In order to abolish that species
of robbery, it is necessary to universalize it. I am, you see,
gentlemen, as conservative as you; and whoever would
tell you the contrary, would prove by that alone that they
have understood nothing of my books, and, I would say,
nothing of the things of this world.

It is up to the legislator, according to Justinian, to interpret
the law; it is also up to the writer to explain his writings.
Now, although I do not wish to make my defense a lesson
in political economy, it is important to my justification
that I explain how that *universalization* of property should
be understood: that will be the best response to the
charges of the advocate general. For if I prove that in
order to render properties equal, it is necessary to
preserve the existing rights, it follows that the thought of
expropriation would be a contradiction in my own
doctrine and, consequently, that it is logically impossible
that I could be guilty of the act of which I am accused, and
which is imputed to me only because the idea of
dispossession, which I reject, has been confused with that
of the abolition of the domain of property, which I
proclaim.

Let us speak of labor. Labor, gentlemen, is, after God and
religion, doubtless what you love and esteem most, and
what you recommend every day to your children. It is
though labor that you have become what you are; and
whoever would try to prove to you—to you who have
labored all your life, who have inherited legitimately from
your fathers, who feel you have clean hands and pure
conscience—whoever would try, I say, to prove to you
that your possession could be, without your knowledge,
vicious and founded on an illegitimate title, would not be
heard. You would dismiss him as a sophist.

Thus, let us leave the metaphysics of right; it is not within
the competence of the court of assize.

For you, gentlemen jurors, nothing is more justly acquired
than that which you have gained by the sweat of your
brow; nothing is more formally condemned by the
catechism than holding back the wages of the workers.

Religion has made that crime one of the four sins which
cry to the heavens for vengeance. That posited, I asked
myself one day how many ways one can retain the wages
of the worker; and that examination showed me some
very curious things—things that you, gentlemen, do not
suspect.

If a laborer made three francs worth of products in a day,
he is right to ask three francs for it. All deduction is a
crime which cries vengeance, and do not forget it. Now,
the world is full of people from whose daily wage a
quarter, a third, or a half is retained every day, and that
without the Code Napoleon, which certain people admire
as the equal of the Decalogue, even anticipating the case.
A pair of shoes is worth, I suppose, five francs. Estimating at two francs and fifty centimes the supplies which enter into the fabrication of a pair of shoes, the rest makes up the wage of the worker, the price of his day of labor. And allowing that the worker is free, that he receives his wage entirely, and that every day he makes a pair of shoes, we would say of his that he gains two francs and fifty centimes per day. But it frequently occurs that a worker is not known in the business, or else that he lacks the means to form an establishment; besides, it is with a clientele as with a piece of land; it is attached to individuals, transmitted from father to son, and not obtained by just anyone. The public has its habits. It gives itself to a boutique, to a sign; nothing is more capricious than its favor. In this case, the worker who is without work offers his services to another worker who is established, and who is called *bourgeois*.

Like the other worker, the bourgeois sells his shoes for five francs. There is competition on one side, which prevents the indefinite increase of the price of merchandise; from the other, the value of supplies and the necessity to live, which prevents the lowering of prices below a certain level. If then, the bourgeois has work, it is probable that he will make his fellow labor, but on the condition that that fellow renounces a part of his wage, for it is necessary that *the master gain from the worker*. And so the worker will not receive all that is coming to him, every day he will see with his own eyes his product selling at a price higher than he has received, and all this without any right to reclaim the deduction.
Soon, gentlemen jurors, I will show that this *bourgeois*, on whom you perhaps believe that I call all the fury of the populace, is in general a very honest man, who cannot do otherwise, and who is often more to be pitied than the one that he despoils.

But let us see what results from the deduction made from the daily labor of the workers.

When you buy a pair of shoes, you buy the day of a shoemaker. When a cobbler buy shoes, he buys back his own day. Thus if his day is worth fifty sous on the market, and he gains only forty at the workshop, how do you want him to pay his own goods? In that case, you say, he must make his shoes himself. He will have them at cost price, and escape the deduction.

The observation is fair, but we are not finished. The shoemaker cannot procure by himself all the things he needs, since he has only one profession; it is necessary, in order to survive, that he buy, by turns, the day of a tailor, the day of a baker, the day of a vintner, etc. And as he can buy all these days only by offering his own in return; as on the other hand, assuming equal pay for all the trades, and also an equal deduction, the price of all these days surpasses what the purchaser can offer for them. It follows that a worker who needs to buy three hundred sixty-five days of others' labor, at three francs, in order to live, and who receives only two francs and fifty centimes per day, finds himself at the end of the year damaged a sum of one hundred eighty-two francs and fifty centimes according to Barrême.
You will perhaps say that wages not being everywhere the same the worker at two francs fifty centimes makes up for the worker at two francs and below. But, gentlemen jurors, it is precisely that which makes the inequality of conditions; it because of this that there are *poor states*, as one says, although the ancient wisdom had declared that there were no *foolish trades*, but only *foolish people*. Society is like a pyramid: the lower courses support the upper, and sink under the weight. In addition, it suffices for a rule of proportion in order to find the mean of the deductions, and consequently the arithmetic reason for the impoverishment of certain classes of laborers. That is calculated exactly like the tables of mortality.

And that is what explains to us the hopeless profundity of the popular proverb: *The cobblers are always the most poorly shod*; that is also why the masons find themselves the most poorly housed, why the vintners often drink only water, and rarely of the best sort; why the bakers cry famine in the very heart of abundance. It is because there are some bourgeois, some masters, placed over the workers, who make a deduction from their wages, because they are themselves robbed by others, until finally we come to a privileged few who, raised above all the others, profit from all the deductions, but do not suffer any, for the excellent reason that they work for no one.

Now, gentlemen jurors, political economy, a science of recent date, but which already promises marvels, gives the means of escaping that impasse, without harming anyone's lifestyle, without detracting from any interest, without taking anything from the rich, without asking
anything of them but the permission to work more and better than one has done up to this day.

Like geometry, political economy has its axioms, its definitions, its laws and its formulas; like geometry it proceeds methodically from the known to the unknown, and starting from the most trivial truths, it raises itself to the intelligence of divine and human laws.

What say the geometers?

*The straight line is the shortest route between one point and another.*

*All the radii of the circle are equal.*

*Every straight line which falls on another straight line, forms with it two adjacent angles, which are equivalent to two right angles.*

It is with this that the geometers measure the circumference of the globe and the height of mountains, calculate the course of the celestial bodies, predict eclipses, weigh the moon and planets, and find the distance and diameter of the sun.

The economists, in another order of ideas, proceed in absolutely the same way. Here are what principles they rely on.

*Man produces nothing except by labor.*

*Wages must be equal to product.*
*The productive force of labor is in direct relation to its division.*

With the aide of these simple principles, and of some others which follow from them, the economists propose to abolish robbery and property without dispossessing anyone. To organize labor, to explain the causes and the accidents of revolutions. To plumb the secrets of God and to calculate the future. And they will come to the end of it, do not doubt it, gentlemen of the jury, for every question that the human mind can address, it can also resolve.

According to this new species of levelers, of which I count myself a member, who hardly resemble those who terrified France fifty years ago, according to these reformists who are so slandered and so little understood, it is absurd to give six thousand francs to a rector and fifteen hundred francs to a judge, and we know why; according to them, property is a monopoly the temporary existence of which entered into the views of Providence, and we explain what those views have been. But also, according to them, it is necessary to always increase the income of the proprietors, in order to make possible the equality of conditions. I will, gentlemen of the jury, give you an idea of their theories in this regard, theories that the government, which will soon be as egalitarian as I am, has already begun to put into practice.

Let us speak of finance.

We call a *rentier* every capitalist who loans to the State, in perpetuity, a sum of money, at 3, 4, or 5 percent interest. Now, the smallest sum the State accepts in loan being, I
believe, 100 francs, and the share of the loan limiting to a small number of persons the advantage of the rent, it follows that the constitution of that rent, always much sought after, creates a true privilege. That creation dates from the National Convention.

But all the French, according to the Charter, are equal before the law; as a consequence, the government, not being able to abolish the privilege of the rent, has occupied itself in recent years with making all the French privileged on the same basis, but how much better it is to interest them in order and public peace. Hence the savings banks, where one receives from 1 franc up to 200, and where interest is paid from 2 up to 4 percent.

Now, gentlemen of the jury, let the worker who does not receive from his bourgeois all the wages from his labor, come in the end, by dint of economies, to create a little income, and you will understand, on the one hand, that this income will form the supplement of the wages that he was expecting to gain, and that he had not received completely; on the other hand, that this rent paid by the State to the thrifty workers being taken from the revenues of the State, and these revenues being deducted in the form of a tax on the proprietors, the State would have to make a part of the revenues pass from the latter into the pockets of the former, an operation which, in the long run and with a bit of consistency, would lead to the equality of all the revenues.

Thus the whole secret consists in making the deduction take place in a circular manner from the one to the others and come back to its point of departure, that is to say that
the citizens all work for one another, and, by turns robbed and reimbursed, receive a profit equal to the loss they suffer. At first glance, it seems much simpler that each wage be equal to each individual product; but things could not happen in this way at first, and the organic reason for *this rotation of profit*, if I dare put it that way, is perhaps the most admirable secret of political economy.

Thus, profit, interest, the right of increase, property or suzerainty, is a usurpation, a theft, as Diderot said, more than a century ago, and yet society could live only with the aid of that theft, which will no longer be one, as soon as by the irresistible force of institutions it will become general, and which will cease completely when an integral education has rendered all the citizens equal in merit and in dignity.

In order not to prolong this audience, I will spare you, gentlemen of the jury, some detailed means and processes by the aid of which the egalitarian economists propose to accelerate the realization of that future. Nothing is more curious than to see them transform by circulating money houses, lands, furniture and even tools; to constantly increase everyone's income, by decreasing the fatigues of labor, and gradually enriching the workers, by making greater and greater deductions from their wages.

Those are some trade secrets that I do not have to teach you.

You see, gentlemen, why the true egalitarian is necessarily a conservative; it remains for me to show you how the
adversaries of property are necessarily friends of order
and government.

The Code Civil, article 556, states:

"The deposits and increases which form successively and imperceptibly on the banks of a river or a stream are called *alluvium*. Alluvium profits the riparian proprietors.

Art. 557. "It is the same with the relays formed by the current, which insensibly remove material from one of its banks and carry it to the other: the proprietor of the increasing bank profits from the alluvium, without the resident on the opposite side being able to come to demand the land that he has lost.

Art. 559. "If a river or a stream, navigable or not, carries away by sudden violence a considerable and identifiable part of a field on its banks, and bears it to a lower field, or on its opposite bank, the owner of the part carried away may reclaim his property, etc."

It is useless to add that on this point there exist as many customs as countries, as many opinions as doctors; this much jurisprudence has known how to work in matters of economy!

Such is the spirit of the Code: if the water takes from me a chunk of the field that I possess, I can reclaim it, provided that I make my demand within a year; if it takes it from me grain of sand after grain of sand, then I lose my property. Too bad for me if my field is found too close to
the stream: the legislator will do nothing for me. We see
that the spirit of conquest has passed this way.

The economist, on the contrary, maintains that the
property must be restored; he demonstrates, by a
mathematics of his own, that all the riparian proprietors
are connected with one another; that none of them can
ever be dispossessed; that all are responsible for the
property of each, and each interested in the property of all;
that it falls to the municipal authorities ensure the
maintenance of the possessions, and to their perfect
development. Now which of these two appears the better
friend of order and society, gentlemen of the jury, the
conquering legislator or the egalitarian economist?

The economist also proves, by analogous principles, that
the worker without clientele is like the proprietor
dispossessed by a flood; that the homeless proletarian falls
under the charge of those housed; that it is among the
duties of the administrative authorities to see to it that the
laborers are housed according to their nature and the
demands of their position in life; that a mayor, a prefect,
can and should in some cases require, in return for rent,
the rich citizen to house the poor one; to order the
restoration of a property, at the expense of the selfish
proprietor who has let it degrade and become ugly, as
well as the demolition of a shack that disrupts the
alignment of a road; to ensure finally that each uses his
goods as prescribed and for the greatest advantage of
industry, architecture, commerce, morals and hygiene.
That is what the egalitarian economists call *disciplining possession*, or, in other words, *abolishing property*. What is so frightening about that abolition?

But they add, these economists, that to succeed in that enterprise, it is necessary above all to abstain from dividing goods and establishing an agrarian law; it is necessary to teach, with the national spirit, the spirit of family, and instead of changing the systems of institutions, to develop all the institutions.

The economists, gentlemen, may be wrong, and I doubt that you will give the least bit of faith to the things that I announce. But in the end, their errors are at least very innocent, since instead of tending to destroy, they tend to preserve.

And what I say here is not a subterfuge devised to support my cause; nor is it a tactic of opposition. Might it please God that the radicals had pursued a similar tactic! We would have long since ended our disputes, the government would be tranquil, and the royals would be secure. What I have just said in my defense, for two years I have not ceased to repeat it: I will, among other proofs, read a letter addressed by myself to the Minister of the Interior, a few days before the seizure of the work which is remanded to you. You will see how, after having destroyed the right of property by critique, I propose to transform it by means of organic and industrial development, and you will ask yourself if the author of such a program is a despoiler and anarchist.<fnref n="10" />

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ The public minister, in response to these words of the accused,</footnote>
To M. Duchâtel, Minister of the Interior

"If we want to spare society new upheavals, we must shake up jurisprudence; we must reconstitute it with the help of a new administrative right, and by imbuing it with the economic element.

"Such is the opinion today of the most learned jurists. According to the Attorney General of the Court of Cassation, our Civil Code needs to be rewritten from one end to the other. We can say as much for the other codes, and for the Charter itself. But, in order to accomplish that great work, we must associate three powers, until this time lamentably enemies, civil jurisprudence, the administration, and political economy: that is the aim of the memoirs that I have published.

"Property, basis of our social order, is also, by the transformation of its principle into that of sovereignty, the basis of our government. But what is that property? it is quiritaire property, jealous, invasive and antisocial property; property which gives all to the citizen to the detriment of the State, which consecrates individual monopoly to the detriment of the general interest. Now,

has cited a passage from the First Memoir, in which the author declares himself *anarchist*. The public minister has not understood that the word *anarchy* was meant in this place in the sense of the *negation of sovereignty*, that is, a substitution of pure reason for caprice in the government. In a word, the author believes in science and recognized the sovereignty of no one. But, in his defense, in conformity with received language, he declares himself non-anarchist, by which he means "a friend of order."
that property, as it was established by Roman law and
preserved by the Code Napoleon, is no longer sufficient,
in its ancient form and determination, to the needs of
civilization: all persons, finally—philosophers, jurists,
economists, and men of State—and all doctrines—theories
about centralization, industrial solidarity, the organization
of labor, the systematization of rights, mortgage reform,
the progressive abolition of commercial duties, the
allocation of taxes, etc., etc.—conspire to restrain, modify,
and transform the ancient right of property.

"It is in consideration of that movement of the public
spirit that I dared to describe property as *theft*, expressing
in this way a sort of anticipation of future views, and not
intending to formulate an accusation against the
proprietors. And allow me to say, Monsieur Minister, that
the nation's repose, the strength of its powers, the
grandeur of France, will only date from the day when that
proposition has become an article of faith and principle of
government.

"In the past, victories and conquests were the sole source
of the legitimacy of the sovereign; Voltaire, hardly more
than a century ago, still celebrated that barbarous right.
Today the king holds his powers as a result of elections
and the law: that is certainly progress, but the
constitutional monarchy is not the last word of the
political creed, nor the last expression of sovereignty. As
for the sovereignty of the people, constantly alleged by
those who know nothing more, I regard it simply as an
abstraction of words, an ideological generality, but not as
a principle, much less as a formula.
"Now, just as the royalty constituted by the Charter is a middle term between divine right, or conquest, and the ideal of government, just so, between brutal force and association there is, in relation to civil right and political order, a legal intermediary that all existing institutions, all tendencies of opinion, and all the acts of the government work to eliminate; that middle term between barbarity and civilization is property.

"But, Monsieur Minister, it is with these political elements as with simple bodies: combined in certain proportions, they produce chemical compounds with properties totally different from those of the principle components. Thirty-three parts oxygen and sixty-seven of hydrogen give water, a liquid body, stifling, and anti-phlogistic, formed from the combination of two gases, the one breathable by itself, and the other highly combustible.

"Thus, in the political order, the institutions change by the addition of new elements. Sadly, society is not always conscious of the metamorphosis that happens to it. Hence, there is an extraordinary effervescence, and sometimes dangerous resistances in the heart of the nations. If the new idea comes from an individual, it raises general disapproval against it; if it comes from the reigning powers, it excites the trembling of the people and long agitations among the masses. The minister has proven it quite recently in the matter of the census.

"Mixed with pure democracy, the absolute monarchy has produced, according to the differences in the doses, the varieties of constitutional government that we have seen in England and France. Granted by turns to the prince or
the nation, the election of a Senate, a body aristocratic by
its nature, gives either a house of peers or a house of
deputies, assembled sovereigns in which nothing
oligarchic or feudal will any longer be found. Similarly,
introduce into diplomacy and the parliamentary cabals
the elements and methods of science, and you will soon
arrive at a system of true government, rid of all the wars
of parties, and all the intrigues of the opposition.

"Property, according to Mr. Rossi, is a monopoly, but a
necessary monopoly. Now, this is the gloss that I have
made on that definition of the learned author. Mix the
general interest, up to the point of saturation, into
monopoly property, and you will have a new principle,
analogous, but not identical, to the right of possession and
use, known to the old jurists.

"The phenomenon of political composition is precisely
that which has passed before our eyes and which, stopped
by various obstacles, causes all the anxieties of society and
all the confusions of government. There, monsieur, is the
fact of social progress that I have labored to record for
eighteen months, and of which I hope to determine the
laws and calculate the consequences. Society advances,
without hardly sensing it, toward a political organization
that is absolutely and divinely true, legitimate, perfect,
and eternal. It is no longer a question here of ontological
aphorisms on equality, fraternity, the rights of man and
the citizen, the sovereignty of the people, etc. The
metaphysics of the *Social Contract* and *The Spirit of the
Laws* is worn out; in the place of these hollow theories
rises a new science, exact and mathematical, before which
the uncertainties of journalism and the tempests of the