Links:
- A New Proudhon Library [project page]
- Le Représentant du Peuple: misc. writings
Prospectus of Le Peuple — published after May 20, 1847
In 1789, a famous publicist wrote: “What is the Third Estate? — Nothing. — What ought it to be? — Everything.”
What Sieyès said in 89 regarding the bourgeoisie, we now say regarding the people and on behalf of the people. The people are everything in civilization: defenders of the homeland, creators of public wealth, revealers of science, poetry and art, supreme check on government. There is no idea, no seed, no fruit, no marvel that does not spring from the minds or the hands of the people. Let them withdraw from the stage for a moment; let this collective power abandon the workshop, the factory, the laboratory and the study, and all production ceases, all thought collapses. Society, in every one of its faculties, is struck dead.
And yet, the people are nothing! Why?
Ah! It is because we still live under the sway of fictions; because the people, body and soul of society, form no part of society, and because today, just as in the past, they are merely an instrument of fortune in the hands of men of privilege — men representing the people, who alone impose the legal order, the official society.
Does the people, at the dawn of civilization, bow before the Supreme Being? Immediately, to satisfy this need of the soul, they give themselves representatives,: priests. “So many men between God and me!” cried Rousseau. — All the evils spawned by religion have sprung from this dual source: the mysticism of dogma and the creation of a priestly caste, of a representation of the people before Heaven.
All subsequent institutions have been modeled on this pattern. In its labor for political unity and centralization, the people have always been represented by elected officials, princes, hereditary senators or deputies serving fixed terms — whatever the name, whatever the system. The people exercise their sovereignty only through alienation. In order to settle disputes and punish the guilty, they have irremovable magistrates; to cultivate the soil, they require transferable property rights; to develop industry, they need monopolies; to circulate wealth, they need banks; to shape their hearts and minds, they accept — or impose upon themselves — a vast educational system. Even regarding their sense of the beautiful and the ideal — that which is most intimate, personal and spontaneous — the people appoint tutors and guides for themselves: they require critics to shape their taste and formulate their judgments. We can now see where this abdication of all our faculties has led us!
Wherever we look, the people appear to us as an inert, passive mass, instrument and raw material for everything that takes place in society, yet excluded from society itself; acting not by their own virtue, taking no initiative, and left without oversight to the arbitrary will of their representatives: priests, kings, deputies, magistrates, landowners, capitalists, businesspeople, men of letters and so on.
What could be the consequences of such a regime? The facts speak as eloquently as the hunger, as the despair, as the agony of a people. We shall not dwell on the past; our present miseries are burden enough.
There are eight million destitute people in this France, the queen and flower of civilization. That is the standard figure for institutionalized beggary. In times of crisis, in the lean seasons, the famished legion of the destitute numbers as many as twelve million. This army of citizens is at the mercy of private alms and public charity; it lives or dies at the whim of events and philanthropists. Such is the vanguard of the proletariat.
Next come the wage-earners in vast numbers: at least twenty million who lack a sufficient income to live on, and who depend more or less on the day’s wage for the day’s bread. They come from the farms, the factories and the workshops; they are living wealth, for without them all capital is dead; for from the grain of wheat that blossoms and rises in the sun to the lace adorning queens, there is not a single product that is not their handiwork. Yet the wealthiest among them never falls asleep without the torment of anxiety about the morrow. Unemployment, the off-season, bankruptcy, sickness, competition and all their attendant disasters hover around them, over the heads of their elderly and the cradles of their children. Thus, the social constitution — founded as it is on the alienation of the people’s sovereignty, collective capital, and public wealth into the hands of a privileged few, this deceitful system constitutes, for the people of France, a regime of atrocious servitude, a kind of penal colony where hunger takes the place of the chain.
But that does not sum up the proletarians’ entire burden; it is further swelled by an incalculable series of taxes — personal taxes, taxes on furnishings, business licenses, municipal entry duties, direct and indirect levies, and so forth — whose underlying principle may not be entirely unjust, yet which, as a necessary consequence of our hierarchical social order, fall with their full weight solely upon those who own nothing: upon the people. As for the citizens’ civic condition: no education, no political rights, thwarted vocations, closed professions—a threefold servitude: moral, material, and intellectual.
What is the remedy for this?
The remedy lies not in dictators or messiahs; that is always alienation, representation and religion. History has taught us enough on these points. Dictators and messiahs are a contradiction for a people that reasons and proclaims itself sovereign; as for religion, we grant it no sanctuary other than the individual conscience…
The remedy lies neither in a representative oligarchy nor in the various systems of monarchy.
The remedy lies in certain principles proclaimed by our great Revolution, but never put into practice; it lies in the positive study of society as revealed by economic science, the principles and development of which the newspaper Le Peuple will present.
Economic science teaches us that organizing labor and organizing government are one and the same thing; that in this organization, all mythology must vanish and the people — and within the people, every individual citizen — must act directly in every sphere; that once organization begins in one area, it inevitably extends to all others; that for the definitive constitution of society, it makes no difference whether one starts with commerce, industry, government or public education, and so on, since each social function is simultaneously the principle and the end of all the others; so that if the people, through a lawful association, could gain control of one of these categories, they would soon master all the rest. This chain of events is inevitable, irresistible…
What, then, do we ultimately desire?
We want the people — that is, every worker, as well as the entire body of workers — to be able to worship God without a priest, work without a master, trade without usury, own property without mortgages, cultivate their hearts and minds free from prejudice, and participate in the governance of their country without relying on heroes or scoundrels to represent them!
Now, what are our resources? What is our evidence? When will this be realized?
Proletarians, we would be vile impostors if we ever asked for a single cent from your pockets or a single hair from your heads without being able to offer you immediate compensation for your sacrifice. You are poor; we do not claim to enrich you by imposing new levies upon you. We alone bear the risks of this undertaking. Our treasures are ideas; our weapons, ideas; our guarantees, also ideas. The Revolution today is neither the Gospel nor the Social Contract, whatever value they may have held in times past; the Revolution is, as we have told you, economic science…
We shall lay out before your eyes the principles, consequences and applications of this science, currently scattered throughout our representative constitution, our legal codes, our institutions and our established routines. From it, we shall derive a comprehensive system of solutions regarding public right and the right of nations; the relationship between labor and capital, and between society and liberty; and matters of morality, literature and art. We shall then ask whether you wish to commit yourselves to one another, through a solemn pact, to respect, in all your dealings, the laws of justice and good faith that we have demonstrated to you.
At this price, we dare promise you liberty, equality, fraternity, wealth, power and glory — in less time than it took your fathers to lose them between the fall of Louis XVI and the coronation of the Emperor.
First specimen issue (October 14, 1847)
- Le Représentant du Peuple: Its Aim
- A Few Words on the Arrangement of Le Représentant du Peuple
- Our General Formula
- Internal and External Politics
- Organization of Labor
- 1789
- A Great Organizing Party Is Still Possible
- What the Present Government Can Do Netter
- To Skillful Conservatives
- Let Us Associate, the Charter in Hand
- Reality
- Finally!!!
- So Drink to Industrial Reform
- Contents of the Newspaper
- Post-Scriptum
Second specimen issue (November 15, 1847)
- A Call to the Workers and to the True Friends of the People (pdf)
- Economic Results of the French Revolution
- Political Results of the French Revolution
- Organization of Labor (pdf)
- Contents of the Newspaper
- A Great Organizing Party Is Still Possible
- What the Present Government Can Do Better
- To Clarify — Is To Emancipate
- We Come To Create the Press of the Poor
- Duty of Labor (pdf)
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