Carnival of Anarchy #2

Just another of those interesting definitions of “socialism,” from the mid-19th century. I first encountered this particular passage in Proudhon’s posthumously published study of Napoleon III, but is originally from the still-untranslated second part of […]

[ezcol_2third] From The Spirit of the Age, another early translation from the French socialist movement, the “Socialist’s Catechism,” by Louis Blanc. Like the excerpts from Proudhon’s Confessions of a Revolutionist, this originally appeared in the […]

At times, even the most resolute hearts, those most firmly fixed on the sacred belief of progress, come to lose courage and to feel full of disgust at the present. In the 16th century, when one murdered in our civil wars, it was in the name of God and with a crucifix in the hand; it was a question of the most sacred things, of things which, when once they have procured our conviction and our faith so legitimately dominate our nature that it has nothing to do but obey, and even its most beautiful appanage disappears thus voluntarily before the divine will. In the name of what principle does one today send off, by telegraph, pitiless orders, and transform proletarian soldiers into the executioners of their own class? Why has our epoch seen cruelties which recall St. Bartholemew? Why have men been fanaticized to the point of making them coldly slaughter the elderly, women, and children? Why has the Seine rolled with murders which recalls the arquebuscades of window of the Louvre? It is not in the name of God and eternal salvation that it is done. It is in the name of material interests.