Second Study—Persons—Parallel English - The Libertarian Labyrinth

[These draft translations are part of on ongoing effort to translate both editions of Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church into English, together with some related works, as the first step toward establishing an edition of Proudhon’s works in English. They are very much a first step, as there are lots of decisions about how best to render the texts which can only be answered in the course of the translation process. It seems important to share the work as it is completed, even in rough form, but the drafts are not suitable for scholarly work or publication elsewhere in their present state. — Shawn P. Wilbur, translator]

1858

1860

ESSAYS IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY. — NO. 2

SECOND STUDY

PERSONS

CHAPTER ONE.

Principle of personal dignity.

Monseigneur,

Since it was on the occasion of a personal event that I conceived the idea for my book, allow me first of all to return to this event, to which you are no stranger, and to ask you a question. The particular, says logic, reproduces the general; the fact is necessarily the expression of the idea. Starting from a fact, we will only arrive better at the law, while the opposite would be impossible. Such is not, I agree, the method of the revelators; but it is that of common sense, and I am not exactly writing a theological treatise.

SECOND STUDY

PERSONS

CHAPTER ONE.

Principle of personal dignity.

Monseigneur,

I. — I will therefore ask you, Monsignor, you who know the written and the unwritten law, the sacred and the profane, by what cause, under the impression of what influence, by virtue of what right, a man whom I had never seen meddles in my business, publishing, while I am still living, my biography, without my consent and against my express will?

When M. de Mirecourt sent his secretary to me to ask me for details of my private life, I referred him to the registers of civil state, to the Journal de la Librairie and periodical sheets. When M. de Mirecourt, provided with your epistle, honored me with his visit, I urged him to leave me alone, and even to quit his profession of biographer. Without anymeans of action against him, what more could I do?

But morality, which governs the Christian as well as the socialist, morality, as you know, Monseigneur, extends further than the guarantees of the Code. So I ask you once again how, even setting aside defamation, a biographer can meddle with my person with impunity? This makes you smile, episcope, whose job is to monitor, inspect, report and censor your fellows. Listen to for me a moment, and you won’t laugh so much.

Property is inviolable. Under no pretext is it permitted to lay your hand on it, to use it for anything, to make any change in it, to diminish it, let alone to seize it, without the permission of the proprietor. Article 675 of the Civil Code does not even allow us to look at it. The violation of respect for property gives rise to actions that can range, depending on the seriousness of the case, from simple compensation to the peines afflictives et infamantes, and even to death.

Property is inviolable. Under no pretext is it permitted to lay your hand on it, to use it for anything, to make any change in it, to diminish it, let alone to seize it, without the permission of the proprietor. Articles 675-680 of the Civil Code do not even allow us to look at it; viewing the neighbor’s property is subject to strict conditions, which render its use quite innocent. The violation of respect for property gives rise to actions that can range, depending on the seriousness of the case, from simple compensation to the peines afflictives et infamantes, and even to death.

This is what the civil legislator has done for property, for a man’s possessions. And the divine legislator went even further: he forbade the desire for it; he made this covertousness a mortal sin: Non concupisces.

But when it is a question of a man’s self, we do not concern ourselves so closely. It is handed over to the inspection of the first comer, abandoned to the indiscretion of biographers, to the exploitation of libelers, to the insults of zealots, armed with the sword of speech and the stilleto of writing, for the defense of religion and order. All license is granted to them to seize this self, to do with it as they see fit, to look deeply into it, to settle there, to torture, deceive, vilify it, excluding certain excesses which the magistrate, upon the complaint of the patient, reserves the right to judge.

Where does this difference come from?

The existence of every man in society is divided into two parts, public life and private life, although it is true that they closely connected.

The first, I grant you, is in the public domain; this follows from the definition. Attack public life, provided the defense is free; I have no objection. But private life, who does it belong to? How can my intimate secrets, my habits, which will always be ridiculous or base in some ways, be divulged? How can this disclosure become a speculation? How can my soul serve as wreckage [salvage] for an entrepreneur in libel or be sold at auction, like a slave? Even when these biographies, illustrations or charges, contain nothing slanderous, they are indecent: it is not good for the freedom and the honor of a people if the citizens, staging the intimacy of their life, treat each other like valets de comédie and street acrobats. Do you want to prepare a country for bondage? make people despise each other, destroy respect… Who can justify such a license? You must know it, Monsignor, you who sometimes lend a hand to such expeditions?

Let a police officer can arrest me at any hour of the day or night at my domicile, on the basis of a secret denunciation, on suspicion, without the declaration of an crime; let me then be thrown into Mazas; let me be detained preventively for weeks, months, in a cell which, according to the principles of penal law, should at most only be open to the condemned person; let me then be judged according to the notes of an invisible agent, with whom I will not be confronted; or, in order to go even faster, let them send me without judgment, clandestinely, to Cayenne or Lambessa: it is a violence that falls only on the body, which explains, without justifying it, the state of social war in which we find ourselves and the dictatorship that is its consequence.

But private life, conscience in its intimate, unfathomable manifestations, what reason of state can authorize its violation? Ah! If you have taken habeas corpus from us, at least leave us habeas animam. After all, this arbitrariness exercised on our flesh, testimony to the power of a principle, honors us; who authorizes you to add infamy to it?

This is what the civil legislator has done for property, for the possessions of man. And the divine legislator went even further: he forbade the desire for it; he made this covertousness a sin that can become mortal: Non concupisces.

Where does this difference come from?

The existence of every man in society is divided into two parts, public life and private life, although it is true that they closely connected.

I therefore begin by laying down this principle, which I call the principle of personal dignity, as the foundation of the science of morals: Respect yourself.

This principle established, I say that it has the consequence of respecting in others, as much as in ourselves, dignity. Charity only comes later, very much later: for we are not free to love, whereas we are always free to respect, and dignity, as we will see below, is Justice.

Now, for anyone who considers our habit of license, our taste for calumny, our police regime, our spirit of insolidarity, our disregard for the public good, our inclinations as serfs and lackeys, it is obvious that respect for individual dignity is obliterated in our souls: I would only require this fact alone to conclude that our society has no mores.

I therefore generalize my question, and, without occupying myself further with what concerns me, I ask: How does respect for individual dignity—which, according to the definition that we have given of mores and the prejudice that we have for Justice, should be the cornerstone of society—so weakened in the consciousness of our nation?

For it is no longer a question here of an exceptional sacrifice, demanded by the public safety: it is a system of general disrepute, which, compromising the dignity of all citizens, compromises that of the entire nation.

Shall I tell you my whole thought, Monsignor? It is difficult for you to see this explanation that I am asking of you: you wear it on your forehead, between your two eyes. So it’s up to me to read it to you. Refute me, if you can; it is in your most precious interest: for, if you will allow me this metaphor, which has nothing to do with your person, I shall strike the shepherd, as the Scripture says, and mind the herd!

II. — I therefore begin by laying down this principle, which I call the principle of personal dignity, as the foundation of the science of morals: Respect yourself.

This principle established, I say that it has the consequence of making us respect the dignity of others as much as our own. Charity only comes later, very far later: for we are not free to love, whereas we are always free to respect, and dignity, as we will see below, is Justice.

II — The fact that I denounce has its principle in the notion of that Other (Study I , p. 83), which the eclectic philosophy shows us positioned behind consciousness, prompting it with its rights and duties, and which the plastic imagination of the first peoples transformed first of all into an external subject, animal, sun or genius, author and guardian of the law, worshiped under the name of God.

Christianity, which emerged in a time of misfortune, then drew from this transcendental concept all the consequences with which it was pregnant against the dignity of man and his own esteem; and it is to its influence that the contempt for persons that distinguishes our French society is due.

In medias res, as Horace said. I have posed the question on the basis of a fact: I will demonstrate it through history.

The fact that I denounce has its principle in the notion of that Invisible, which mysticism shows us positioned behind consciousness, prompting it with its rights and duties, and which the imagination of the first peoples transformed first of all into an external subject, animal, sun or heaven, author and guardian of the law, worshiped under the name of God. which emerged in a time of misfortune, then drew from this transcendental concept all the consequences with which it was pregnant; and it is to its influence that we owe the lack of dignity that has, for ten years, distinguished French society.

In medias res, as Horace said. I have posed the question on the basis of a fact: I will demonstrate it through history.

CHAPTER II.

Identity of personal dignity and right among the ancients. Subordination of the religious idea.

III. — If we carefully study the system of social institutions among the ancients, we soon realize that this system rested entirely on two subordinate ideas: Justice, which concerned the human subject, deriving from it alone, formulated and organized for it alone; and Religion, relating to the supernatural being, supposed author of the laws and juridical formulas, according to the mystical suggestion of the conscience.

Among the Greco-Latin races, which always placed religious or sacerdotal power after political or judicial power, without however separating them in a radical manner, Right was the same thing as dignity or personal prerogative; Religion was the guarantee, the surety, so to speak, furnished by the gods, of this same prerogative, of which the law, emanating from themselves, was only the determination. Dignity, like the will, freedom, being indefinite by its nature, Religion intervened with its precepts to give it limits.

Thus Law, the esssential thing for society, took precedence over worship, which served as its prop. The same subordination was observed between the magistrate, organ of justice responsible for stating the law, juri dicundo, according to the consecrated formula, and the priest, minister or herald of the divine guarantee, responsible for discovering the sign of it in the flight of birds and the entrails of the victims.

The Latin language provides a vivid testimony to the nature of these ideas, or let us say rather of these powers and their subordination.

Right, in Latin jus, is, according to the definition of the authors, that which is proper to or relates to each person, jus est suum cuique tribuere. It is, in each individual, taken as the center of action, the independent and sovereign subject of inherence, what constitutes the whole of their dignity, either as a faculty, attribution, prerogative, inclination or as a means of action and enjoyment, appanage or property.

This is made clear by the series of terms formed from the same root: jugis, jugum, jungere, juger, juvare, jubere, contracted from jus-habere, juxtà, etc. In all these words, the element ju expresses adequacy, connectedness, continuity, inherence, juxta-position, congruence, correctness. It is absurd to derive jus, from Jous, Jovis, the same as Ζεὺς or dies, diù, djoù as if right were the thought of Jupiter (why not of Juno?), even more absurd to make Jovis come from Jehovah.

In French, as in Latin, we say that a thing is juste, that it suits us, that it joins us, when it adapts precisely to another for which it is made. And this seems to me to be the original meaning of the German recht, later translated by directum, which we have upheld. Recht is what goes straight, rectà, as Molière says in Pourceaugnac:

Votre fait
Est clair et net,
Et tout le droit
Conclut tout droit.

[Roughly: “Your deed / Is plain and clear / And all the law / Concludes directly.”]

Hence our word droiture (righteousness), which fits so well with paces, turns and measures, literal translations of the words by which Greek and Latin express mores. It is abusing the metaphor to take the text of similar expressions to define the Law, as did Mr. Oudot, Direction of liberty by intelligence.

To finish with the etymology of jus, I will observe that this word is the genus of which the pronouns meum, tuum, suum, are the species; that is to say, it indicates the proper of man, without designation of persons; what the definition reported above suggests: Jus est suum cuique.

From the essentially subjective notion of droit (right), Jus, derives that of Justice, Justitia, defined by Ulpian: Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi, Justice is a constant and sustained disposition to render to each what belongs to them; and better still by Cicero (De Inventione, lib. II, n. 53): Justitia est animi habitus, communi utilitate comparatâ, suam cuique tribuens dignitatem, Justice is a disposition of the heart, formed by the common interest, by which we recognize in each their dignity.

This Latin conception of Right, Law and Justice, leaves no room for ambiguity: the rather ridiculous question, whether right comes from duty or duty from right, cannot arise there; the language opposes it. The right for each one is what his nature supposes, what his existence and his dignity demand; Justice is the recognition by each of this right, which moreover determines and sanctions religion, the true mother of the Law. Right is inherent in man, like the attribute in the subject, independent of any social constitution. The law only declares it, and, in the name of religion, commands respect for it. Such is the Roman conception; it is basically that of all peoples.

CHAPTER II.

Identity of personal dignity and right among the ancients: subordination of the religious idea.

III. — If we carefully study the system of social institutions among the ancients, we soon realize that this system rested entirely on two ideas subordinated to one another: Justice, which concerned the human subject, deriving from it alone, formulated and organized for it alone; and Religion, relating to the supernatural being, supposed author of the laws and juridical formulas, according to the mystical suggestion of the conscience.

Thus Law, the essential thing for society, took precedence over worship, which served as its prop. The same subordination was observed between the magistrate, organ of justice responsible for stating the law, juri dicundo, according to the consecrated formula, and the priest, minister or herald of the divine guarantee, responsible for discovering the sign of it in the flight of birds and the entrails of the victims.

The Latin language provides a vivid testimony to the nature of these ideas, or let us say rather of these powers and their subordination.

This is made clear by the series of terms formed from the root ju, of which jus, juris is the substantification: jugis, jugum, jungere, juger, juvare, jubere, contracté de jushabere, juxtà, etc. In all these words, the element ju expresses adequacy, connectedness, continuity, inherence, juxtaposition, congruence, respectability, conformity, property, attribution, correctness. It is absurd to derive jus, from Jous, Jovis, the same as Zeus or dies, diù, djoù, as if right were the thought of Jupiter (why not of Juno?), and even more absurd to make Jovis come from Jehovah.

In French, as in Latin, we say that a thing is juste, that it suits us, that it joins us, when it adapts precisely to another for which it is made. And this seems to me to be the original meaning of the German recht, later translated by directum, from which we have made droit. Recht is what goes straight, rectà, as Molière says in Pourceaugnac:

Votre fait
Est clair et net,
Et tout le droit
Conclut tout droit.

[Roughly: “Your deed / Is plain and clear / And all the law / Concludes directly.”]

Hence our word droiture (uprightness), which squares so well with allures, tournures and mesures (paces, turns and measures), literal translations of the words by which Greek and Latin express manners. It is abusing the metaphor to take the text of similar expressions to define the Law, as Mr. Oudot did, as the Direction of liberty by intelligence.

From the essentially subjective notion of droit (right), Jus, derives that of Justice, Justitia, defined by Ulpian: Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi, Justice is a constant and sustained disposition to render to each what belongs to them; and better still by Cicero (De Inventione, lib. II, n. 53): Justitia est animi habitus, communi utilitate comparatâ, suam cuique tribuens dignitatem, Justice is a disposition of the heart by which, subject to the general interest, we recognize each person’s dignity.

IV. — Thus, by its origin and its basis, the law is individualistic, egoistic. The idea of mutuality is not yet found there: it is replaced by divine command. Respect for the rights of others, according to this theory, does not come to me from the same source as the feeling of my own dignity; it comes from another cause. In reality, man knows only one right, which is his own; he only suspects rights in others thanks to religion. Personality is predominant here; who would be surprised? Man had known society and the gods for too little time to have been able to forget himself; he understood only his right, his own dignity, two terms synonymous for him, as Cicero’s definition shows, and as we see by the comparison of the radicals, δίκη, justice, decus, honor, dignitas , dignity.

Under these conditions, can we say that Justice exists?

Is it Justice, this artificial sentiment, inspired by the fear of the gods and in the common interest, communi utilitate comparatâ, of respect for the rights of others as well as for one’s own?

Ce n’est pas rien assurément que cette sanction d’un pouvoir supérieur, pris à témoin et comme garant du droit de chacun, protecteur de la dignité de tous, dans les limites posées par la loi, c’est-à-dire par les paroles ou formules sacrées (lex de lego, je parle). Et nous pouvons soupçonner déjà que la contemplation du surnaturel trahit quelque chose de naturel qui ne se montre pas encore, mais qui apparaîtra sans doute à fur et mesure de l’éducation des âmes et du progrès de l’humanité.

Mais, quelque espoir que nous en concevions pour l’avenir, la religion, symbole de la Justice, n’est pas la Justice. Elle la supplée, que dis-je ? elle implique sa négation, puisqu’elle la remplace ; et vienne le jour où, la critique ayant soufflé sur la foi, la religion sera écartée, la Justice sera perdue, et la morale, et la société avec elle.

Mais ne devançons pas les événements.

Chez tous les peuples, le Droit se pose, au début, comme dignité personnelle, placée sous l’égide de la religion, et la Justice est le respect de ce Droit. C’est ainsi que les voyageurs l’ont retrouvée chez les sauvages de l’Océanie. Le tabou est la consécration publique des personnes et des objets que l’on veut préserver de toute atteinte en les affranchissant du risque de guerre et du commun usage. Dans une superstition d’anthropophages se découvre l’origine de la Justice et des lois.

Qu’est-ce maintenant que cette religion ? Qu’on me permette encore une étymologie : c’est dans les mots que se trouve la raison des mœurs, le secret des croyances et la clef de l’histoire.

IV. — Thus, by its origin and its basis, the law is individualistic, egoistic. The idea of mutuality is not yet found there: it is replaced by divine command. Respect for the rights of others, according to this naive theory, does not come to me from the right itself, that is to say, from the same source as the feeling of my dignity; it comes from another cause. In reality, man knows only one right, which is his own; he only suspects rights in others thanks to religion. Personality is predominant here; who would be surprised? Man had known society and the gods for too little time to have been able to forget himself; he understood only his right, his own dignity, two terms synonymous for him, as Cicero’s definition shows, and as we see by the comparison of the radicals, δίκη, justice, decus, honor, dignitas , dignity.

Under these conditions, can we say that Justice exists?

Is it of Justice, this false sentiment, inspired by the fear of the gods and in the common interest, communi utilitate comparatâ, of respect for the rights of others as well as for one’s own?

It is certainly not nothing, this sanction from a higher power, taken as witness and as guarantor of the rights of each, protector of the dignity of all, as long as it is kept within the limits set by the law, that is that is to say, by the sacred words or formulas (lex from lego, I speak). And we can already suspect that the contemplation of the supernatural betrays something natural which has not yet shown itself, but which will doubtless appear gradually with the education of souls and the progress of humanity.

But whatever hope we conceive of it for the future, religion, symbol of Justice, is not Justice. It stands in for it… What am I saying? It supplants it, it implies its negation, since it replaces it; and the day will come when, criticism having blown upon faith, religion will be set aside, Justice will be lost, and morals and society with it.

But let’s not anticipate events.

Among all peoples, therefore, Right arises, at the beginning, as personal dignity, placed under the aegis of religion; and Justice is the respect of this Right. It is thus that travelers have found it among the savages of Oceania. The taboo is the public consecration of persons and objects that we want to preserve from any attack by freeing them from the risk of war and from common use. In a superstition of cannibals, we find the origin of Justice and the laws is discovered.

What is this religion now? Allow me one more etymology: it is in words that the reason for morals is found, the secret of beliefs and the key to history.

V.—The word religion, about which so much nonsense has been spouted and is still spouted, does not signify bond or connection, as the etymologists believed at first sight, who hastened to make religion synonymous with sociability. Religio, religare, to link, this homonym is all the rage. Since December 2, apparently the date of our religious rebirth, I have encountered it more than thirty times. It has become, for many people without religion, a decisive argument in favor of a religion or a new religation. But, I repeat, neither does the word religion mean bond, nor is the thing it expresse the union or the communion of souls, although religion is hardly conceivable without a common faith and a rallying sign. The ancients were hardly socialist. Religion, although it recommended justice, sometimes even charity, was in no way an inspiration for philanthropy in them; and it is with little intelligence that the new mystics, in order to get their social theories across, rehash an idea that never existed except in their brains, and which just proves that religion is dead, the lack of understanding of the word indicating the death of the idea.

Religio, or relligio, whose radical lig reappears in p-lic-are, f-lec-tere, supp-lic-are, to bend, to bow, and by derivation, to bind, is an old word that means inclination of the body, bowing, groveling, genuflection. It was used exclusively to designate man’s homage to divine authority. Latin authors never take it in any other sense. As the question deserves to be clarified, I will quote a few texts.

Relligio deorum is a common expression, which obviously does not signify the association or the republic of the gods, with which men were hardly concerned, but rather the respect of the gods, which, for the reasons I have given, mattered to them much more.

When the word relligio is used alone, the genitive deorum is always implied, as in this line:

Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum !
To such crimes has religion counseled!

As the poet is speaking of a religious war and the massacres that accompanied it, it is clear that religion cannot be understood as the social bond; it means the fanaticism of the divinity.

For the same reason, religio hominum, religion of men, is not said, is found nowhere: it is a contradiction.

Caesar, The Gallic War, book VI. n. 16, writes: Natio est omnis Gallorum admodüm dedita religionibus; “The whole nation of the Gauls is excessively devoted to religions.” And as an example, he cites human sacrifices, which have nothing to do with the social principle.

Cicero, Pro Cluentio, n. 194: Mentes deorum possunt placari pietate, et religione, et precibus justis; “The anger of the gods can be appeased by piety, religion and humble prayers.” And the Romans were not lacking in those things. In all the events, fortunate or unfortunate, that interested the republic to a high degree, the senate ordered bowing, supplications: this is the official word, synonymous with relligiones. The Te Deums were not invented today .

It is according to this meaning of the word relligio that Cicero, De Leg., n. 26, justifies against the Magi disciples of Zoroaster the custom of erecting temples to the Divinity:

“We know very well,” he said, “that the spirit of God is everywhere, ubicumque difusum; but we believe, we Greeks and Latins, that this custom adds to our piety and imposes a salutary respect, religionem utilem, on the cities. For, as it has been said with such high reason, piety and religion towards the gods have all the more influence on our souls the closer we contemplate their simulacra.”

Indeed, we only greet people we can see: the word of Pythagoras is very wise.

Virgile, Æneid., bk. ii, v. 188:

Neu populum antiquâ sub relligione tueri.
[nor protect the people under the patronage of their ancient religion]

The wooden horse, says Sinon, having been built by the order of Calchas to replace the Palladium, the Greeks gave it this gigantic dimension so that it could not be introduced into the city and protect the people, as before, under its ancient religion. The religion of the symbol replaces the religion of the deity.

Ibid, v. 715: Aeneas arranges to meet his companions under an old cypress, respected by the religion of the ancestors:

Antiqua cupressus
Relligione patrum multos servata per annos.

Ibid., lib. viii, v. 349: From the time of Evander, the religion of the Capitol made the peasants fearful:

Jam tum relligio pavidos terrebat agrestes.

It is impossible to see in all these passages the slightest idea of a social bond.

Ibid, bk. XII, v. 176-193: Oath of Aeneas, before fighting Turnus. He invokes all known and unknown gods, every religion of the air and every divinity of the ocean:

Quæque letheris alti
Relligio, et quæ cæruleo sunt numina ponto.

The synonymy established in this verse between numen and relligio proves what I am saying, that this last word only meant the gods, whose respectability it marked especially and par excellence. We said to the gods, when speaking to them: Vestra Relligio, as we say to a prince: Your Majesty.

What is Aeneas himself? Above all, a religious hero, the worthy author of the Roman people, the worthy ancestor of the Caesars, pius Aeneas. The whole Aeneid is the development of this idea, of which the policy of Augustus and the constitution of Rome is the commentary. M. Granier de Cassagnac (History of the Working Classes) is mistaken in the interpretation he gives of the word pius, and the passages he cites suffice to convince him. Pius is a superlative of religiosus; it means respectful even to devotion, to sacrifice. Hence the verb piare, for which we have expier (to expiate.) May Turnus perish, says Juno in the tenth book of the Aeneid, and may his devoted blood satisfy the vengeance of the Trojans:

Teucrisque pio det sanguine pœnas.

It is a question of a devotion like that of Curtius. This is why the word pius, pietas, is used to express filial affection and paternal tenderness. In paternity, says Tertullian, what is sweetest is not authority, it is piety: Gratius est nomen pietatis quàm potestatis. The passages from Papinian and the Pandects express the same idea.

Suetonius remarks of Tiberius, 69, that he was circa deos negligentior, quippe addictus mathematicæ, persuasionisque plenus cuncta fato agi, “very negligent of the gods, addicted as he was to magic, and full of the idea that everything is ruled by fate.” Doesn’t it seem that Suetonius continues Virgil’s thought, marking the abyss that separated the religious, the pious Augustus, from his impius successor? Indeed, if everything happens by fate, the gods are useless, and their religion a deception.

One last example. Livy, bk. v, c. 24 and 28, recounts that Camille, besieging a place, had promised the Apollo of Delphi a tenth of the booty. The envoys who carried the offering having been, during the crossing, taken by pirates and led to Lipara, the share of the god was about to pass into the hands of the corsairs, when the chief reminded his people that they had better abstain from a consecrated object, and to set the Roman messengers free. So well, adds the historian, did he know now to embue the multitude with a just religion, justa religione implevit. The law of nations not existing for the pirates, only the consideration of the gods could convince them of such a sacrifice. Where the hell, Molière would have said, is religion going to lodge itself?

I mentioned earlier the synonymy of pius and religiosus. Here is another that sheds new light on the question: it is that of relligio and timor, verecundia, reverentia, fear. Where did this particular respect of man for the Divinity come from? From a sense of fear, as Lucretius said in this verse:

Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor…

“It is fear that has made the gods in the world.” Only Lucretius was mistaken in relating this fear to a physical impression: it was the effect of the feeling of Justice which, in every new soul, is not without a mixture of terror. Virgil is much closer to the truth than Lucretius when he says:

Si genus humanum et mortalia temnitis arma,
At sperate deos memores fandi atque nefandi ;

“If you despise the human race and mortal weapons, believe that there are gods who remember crime and virtue!” Fear and respect, in Greek and Hebrew, as well as in Latin, are expressed by the same word; related to God, this name is synonymous with religion. Everyone knows this saying of the psalmist: The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom: Initium sapientiæ timor Domini.

When the word relligio is used alone, the genitive deorum is always implied, as in this line:

Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum !
To such crimes has religion counseled!

As the poet is speaking of a religious war and the massacres that accompanied it, it is clear that religion cannot be understood here as the social bond; it indicates the fanaticism of the divinity.

For the same reason, religio hominum, religion of men, is not said, is found nowhere: it is a contradiction.

It is according to this meaning of the word relligio that Cicero, De Leg., n. 26, justifies against the Magi disciples of Zoroaster the custom of erecting temples to the divinity:

Indeed, we only greet people we can see: the word of Pythagoras is very wise.

Virgile, Æneid., bk. ii, v. 188:

Neu populum antiquâ sub relligione tueri.
[nor protect the people under the patronage of their ancient religion]

Ibid, v. 715: Aeneas arranges to meet his companions under an old cypress, respected by the religion of the ancestors:

Antiqua cupressus
Relligione patrum multos servata per annos.

[Ancient cypress
The religion of the fathers has saved many over the years.]

Ibid., lib. viii, v. 349: From the time of Evander, the religion of the Capitol made the peasants fearful:

Jam tum relligio pavidos terrebat agrestes.

[Already at that time the religion frightened the fearful peasants.]

It is impossible to see in all these passages the slightest idea of a social bond.

Ibid, bk. XII, v. 176-193: Oath of Aeneas, before fighting Turnus. He invokes all known and unknown gods, every religion of the air and every divinity of the ocean:

Quæque ætheris alti
Relligio, et quæ cæruleo sunt numina ponto.

Teucrisque pio det sanguine pœnas,

Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor…

Si genus humanum et mortalia temnitis arma,
At sperate deos memores fandi atque nefandi;

V. — Le mot relligio étant le seul qui ait pu prêter à l’équivoque, il est inutile de chercher dans les autres idiomes des témoignages. Partout l’analogue de religio signifie marque de respect, adoration, piété, dévotion, culte ; ou bien chose sacrée, cérémonie sacrée : ce qui revient au même. Le grec dit προσκύνησις, prosternement, qui répond à relligio ; εὐσεβεία piété, l’équivalent de pietas ; ἱερα, ἱερεὒς, sacrifices, prêtre, en latin sacra, sacerdos. L’hébreu parle absolument de même : hischthahhaoth, ou hischthahhaouïah, marque ta prostration religieuse. « Tu ne leur rendrais pas de religion, » dit le Décalogue, parlant des dieux étrangers : lo thischthahhaouch. La Vulgate traduit : No adorabis ea, ce qui, au point de vue de la corrélation étymologique, manque d’exactitude. L’adoratio est le baiser jeté du bout des doigts à l’idole ; il eût fallu, si le verbe avait été usité dans ce sens : Non religabis te coram eis. Quant à pietas, εὐσεϐεἲα, il a pour correspondant hébreu khesed, que la Vulgate traduit tantôt par sainteté, tantôt par miséricorde. — Ps. iv, 4 : Sachez que Jéhovah protège ses dévots ; Vulg. : Scitote quoniam mirificavit Dominus sanctum suum, khasid lo. Ps. xi, 2 : Sauve-moi, ô Dieu, car il n’y a plus de religion ; Vulg. : Salvum me fac, quoniam defecicit sanctus, khasid. II Paral. vi, 42 : Souviens-toi des dévotions de David, grand faiseur de révérences, comme on sait, khasdeï. La Vulgate, qui a perdu le fil de l’idée, porte : Memento misericordiarum David.

C’est du mot khasid, piété, dévotion, que furent nommés les Hassidéens, espèce de mômiers juifs, que la religion rendait d’autant moins sociables.

Du reste, et quelque intimité qu’il y ait dans l’hébreu entre la religion et la loi, elles ne se confondent pas. En vertu de la religion, khasid, qui lui est due, Jéhovah impose à Israël l’observation de son pacte, pactum, fœdus, testamentum, en grec διαθήκη, en hébreu berith, dont le sens radical indique le sacrifice qui présidait, chez les anciens, à la conclusion des traités et à la promulgation des lois. Autre chose est d’après la Bible la religion de Jéhovah, et autre chose son pacte. C’est à tort que Bergier, et Mgr Gousset après lui, ont confondu ces deux termes, et qu’ils ont dit, d’après la fausse étymologie de relligio, que la religion est l’alliance de l’homme avec la Divinité.

Les écrivains du siècle de Louis XIV s’expriment comme les Latins, les Grecs, les Hébreux.

« Toute religion, dit Labruyère, exprime une crainte respectueuse de la Divinité. »

Tout ce qui compose le culte des dieux (cultus, de colere, cultiver, parer, honorer, religionner) se déroule en une série homogène : offrandes, sacrifices, libations, prières, hymnes de louanges, invocations, propitiations, purifications, pardons, expiations, vœux, processions, feu sacré, eau lustrale, consécrations, statues, temples, etc. Faites de la religion le lien ou l’alliance sociale, et tout cela devient inintelligible, absurde.

Pour achever la démonstration, disons enfin que, parallèlement aux formes et cérémonies du culte, le droit avait aussi ses formules, qui pour être moins pompeuses n’en tenaient pas une moindre place dans l’existence du père de famille et du citoyen : comme si, en réglant ce qui convient à la dignité des dieux, le législateur n’avait fait que préluder au règlement de la dignité de l’homme ; comme si religion n’était que la forme mystique de la Justice, ou la justice la réalité de la religion.

The word relligio being the only one that could give rise to ambiguity, it is useless to seek evidence in the others. Everywhere the analog of relligio means mark of respect, adoration, piety, devotion, worship; or else a sacred thing, a sacred ceremony, which amounts to the same thing. The Greek says proskynésis, prostration, which corresponds to relligio; eusebeïa, piety, the equivalent of pietas; hiera, hiereus, sacrifices, priest, in Latin sacra, sacerdos. Hebrew speaks absolutely the same: kischthahhaoth, or hischthahhaouïah, marks religious prostration. “Thou shalt give them no religion,” says the Decalogue, speaking of foreign gods: lo thischthahhaouch. The Vulgate translates: Non adorabis ea, which, from the point of view of etymological correlation, lacks accuracy. The adoratio is the kiss thrown from the tips of the fingers to the idol; it would have been necessary, if the verb had been used in this sense: Non religabis te coram eis. As for pietas, eusebeïa, it has for Hebrew correspondent hhesed, which the Vulgate translates sometimes by holiness, sometimes by mercy. — Ps. iv, 4: Know that Jehovah protects his devotees; Vulg.: Scitote quoniam mirificavit Dominus sanctum suum, Hebrew hhasid II. Ps. x1, 2: Save me, O God, for there is no more religion; Vulg.: Salvum me fac, quoniam defect sanctus, Hebrew. hhasid. II. parallel. vi, 42: Remember the devotions of David, great maker of reverences, as we know, Hebr. hhasdeï. The Vulgate, which has lost the thread of the idea, reads: Memento misericordiarum David

It is from the word hhasid, piety, devotion, that the Hassidians were named, a kind of Jewish momiers, whom religion rendered that much less sociable.

For the rest, and whatever intimacy there may be in Hebrew between religion and law, they are not confused. By virtue of the religion, hhasid, which is due to him, Jehovah imposes on Israel the observance of his pact, pactum, foedus, testamentum, in Greek diatheke, in Hebrew berith, the radical meaning of which indicates the sacrifice which presided, among the elders, the conclusion of treaties and the promulgation of laws. One thing is, according to the Bible, the religion of Jehovah, and another thing is his covenant. It is wrong that Bergier, and Mgr. Gousset after him, confused these two terms, and that they said, according to the false etymology of relligio, that religion is the covenant of man with the Divinity.

The writers of the century of Louis XIV express themselves like the Latins, the Greeks, the Hebrews.

“All religion, says Labruyère, is a respectful fear of the Divinity.”

Everything that makes up the worship of the gods (cultus, from colere, cultivate, adorn, honor, religion) takes place in a homogeneous series: offerings, sacrifices, libations, prayers, hymns of praise, invocations, propitiations, purifications, pardons, expiations, vows, processions, sacred fire, lustral water, consecrations, statues, temples, etc. Make religion the bond or the social alliance, and all that becomes unintelligible, absurd.

To complete the demonstration, let us finally say that, parallel to the forms and ceremonies of the cult, the law also had its formulas, which, although less pompous, did not hold a lesser place in the life of the father of the family and the citizen: as if, by regulating what suits the dignity of the gods, the legislator had only preluded the regulation of the dignity of man; as if religion were only the mystical form of Justice, or Justice the reality of religion.

VI. — Respect is therefore the element of religion; it is the whole of religion. Under what conditions can it exist? Is it enough to erect a statue, some sign, and say, like Aaron or Jeroboam: Israel, these are your gods, for the people to bow down and worship? You would be mad to believe it. The priests of the different cults are in the habit of accusing each other and reproaching each other for their idolatry: this mutual calumny simply proves that they do not know each other.

Man grants no religion to anything that falls under the senses. A visible, tangible, measurable divinity is a contradiction.

The God, protector of law, whom any multitude placed in favorable conditions tends to create for itself, and whose symbol or idol the priest then only has to fabricate, this God is first and foremost nothing other than the Essence, supposedly real although invisible, of what appears to this multitude, at the moment when the cult is founded, as supreme good and all-powerful principle, sovereign being. As a sovereign being, this Essence, which the understanding conceives beyond the phenomenon, and which the imagination soon clothes with a soul, a self, a figure, then becomes the subject or substratum of Justice: it is to it, consequently, that the believer addresses his reverences and his vows.

Thus, after the religion of Ormuzd, or of the Intelligible Light, symbolized by fire, there was the religion of Osiris, or of Life, symbolized by the ox and the other animals; then the religion of Beauty, which was, under the name of Aphrodite, that of the Greeks; then the religion of the Family, celebrated in Rome under the name of Vesta; then the religion of Christ, that is to say of Redemption or Liberty. We still know the religion of Force, Thor or Hercules; of Wealth, Mammon, Ops or Jehovah, etc. All these deities are only realizations of concepts, serving to express, according to the feeling of various peoples, either the sovereign good, the sovereign power or the sovereign wisdom, which sovereignties are then taken as protectors of the societies that devote themselves to them, and considered, as a consequence, as sources of right and guardians of virtue.

Let us suppose that today, Christianity having been put aside, there remains in souls enough religious feeling and poetic force to make the people wed themselves to a new faith, and that the idea of this faith be Progress, for example, or the Free Woman, or any other fantasy produced by the current of opinion: there is no lack of sects, at the time of this writing, that aspire to translate the more or less obscure elements of their illuminism into theological dogma.

First of all, religion, thus determined in its idea, would be posited as a simple affirmation of this idea. Then, by virtue of the tendency of the mind to seek the reality or the substratum of what it has the idea of, one would ask what is the cause whose apparent effects give rise to the idea, what is the subject of this cause, what is its essence, what is its body, what are its attributes. Finally, the importance granted to the idea attaching itself to the subject who provides it and taking the form of respect, fear or love, we would have, at the same time, the god and the sovereign, all the transcendental conditions of justice.

It is thus that every day we see innovators, yesterday atheists or pantheists, imperceptibly falling back into religion, and affirming: 1) a God, that is to say an essence of nature and of humanity, ideal, incomprehensible and indemonstrable, and as such, holy and respectable; 2) a Faith, that is to say a set of dogmas metaphysically deduced from the first conception, as such superior to experience and reason; 3) an Immortality, for, as we shall have occasion to show, if the subject of Justice is God, the moral sanction is also God, in whom henceforth the destiny of man is accomplished.

I shall return to this interesting subject of the constitution of the gods and of their high jurisdiction: it suffices, for the present, to have marked in an authentic way the relation that unites Religion and Justice.

Already we see that the first has no raison d’etre without the second: theology itself agrees. It is for our justification that Christ, the Son of God, became man, suffered death and established his Church. Already one has a presentiment that religion could well be only a mythology of Justice: for, if the first is respect, the second is dignity, and it suffices, to identify them, to eliminate the intermediary that one poses as author and guarantor of the other. But this identification requires centuries, and we are only at the beginning of the hypothesis.

In summary, ancient society was composed of two things: first, the right of man, dignitas, jus, which expressed itself through the manifestation of his prerogatives, the distinction between thine and mine, and did not imply any reverence. Before man, man remained standing; he saluted aloud, ave, and did not bow. Then there was respect for the gods, relligio, which manifested itself in kneeling, a sign of inferiority, and had as its object to obtain, through fear of these invisible essences, respect for the law, that is to say to inculcate Justice.

The man of ancient Italy, so religious, thus made law the principal thing, religion the accessory. Much better, the religion serving to consecrate the law was itself part of the law, that is to say, of the privilege or of the patrician dignity; it constituted, so to speak, its first division. Hence the double expression of divine right and human right, to express the privilege of religious consecration, without which the individual prerogative remained as if void. Hence also Modestine’s definition of marriage, juris humani et divini communicatio, participation of human and divine right, to say that the wife shared all the prerogatives, civil and religious, of her husband. This very real subordination of the religious element to the juridical element was perhaps not in the thought of the legislator; it was in the institution. The human, in this system, prevailed over the divine; and religion having its reason for existence only in Justice, the priesthood was also only an attribution of the magistrate.

Man grants no religion to anything that falls under the senses. A visible, tangible, measurable divinity is a contradiction.

We shall return to this interesting subject of the constitution of the gods and of their high jurisdiction: it suffices, for the present, to have marked in an authentic way the relation that unites Religion and Justice.

Already we see that the first has no raison d’etre without the second: theology itself agrees. It is for our justification that Christ, the Son of God, became man, suffered death and established his Church. One has a presentiment that religion could well be only a mythology of Justice: for, if the first is respect, the second is dignity; it suffices, to identify them, to eliminate the intermediary that one poses as author and guarantor of the other. But this identification requires centuries, and we are only at the beginning of the hypothesis.

CHAPITRE III.

Exaltation et déchéance de la personne humaine chez les anciens.

VII. — For you, Monsignor, theologian and jurisconsulte, it is not necessary to demonstrate that such a conception of Justice and its guarantees could not give rise to an exact theory and to a lasting constitution. From whatever point of view we occupy, whether we consider this system from the side of man or from the side of the gods, the law is divided, and Justice, which should express fraternity and union, is established on a double antagonism.

We begin by supposing that man owes nothing to man, that he does not depend on him, that he has nothing in common with him, that the respective rights of men involve no link or solidarity. Right is entirely individual, unilateral, unequivocal. It does not complicate itself with any duty; it has nothing social about it. So much so that, in order to make man respectable to man, we are obliged to establish another respect among them, respect for the Divinity.

Such a combination does not support examination. If right is originally in the human person, if it constitutes his prerogative, how can this right go so far as to recognize itself in others? How is man unable to do right to man? What good is this fantastic guarantee from heavenly powers? Is it not to be feared that sooner or later, philosophy attacking faith, manly pride will wipe out religion? So, if the law does not know how to find in right its own sanction, what becomes of Justice? And if Justice perishes, what becomes of society?

But if, on the contrary, we claim that it is for God alone to attest to the law, to guarantee it and to obtain its observance, that thus the feeling that each one has of his rights does not become respect for the rights of other than by an effect of religion, it must be said that Justice is in us an unfounded pretension, and that man is the vassal of the Divinity. From then on, it is human dignity that is in danger, and once again religion is on its way, goodbye to Justice and society.

CHAPTER III.

Exaltation and decline of the human person among the ancients.

Such a combination does not bear examination. I say first of all that the law is split in the sense that man is placed within the scope of two different laws, religion and justice, one of which serves the other, I agree, as attestation and sanction, but which in reality have nothing in common and are not related. The concept of religion can be deduced: this is what theology does. The concept of Justice can also be deduced: this is what legislators, jurists and magistrates do. But neither are Justice and its laws logically deduced from the religious concept, nor are religion and its dogmas linked in a rational way to the legal concept: these are two totally distinct orders of ideas, which have in common only this, namely, that the influence of the one serves to maintain in man respect for the other. What is the rational relationship between redemption and the right to property? Between providence and the code of procedure?… Obviously, there is nothing. These are two edifices leaning against each other, which the curious can roam through in turn, but which have neither communicating doors, nor symmetry, and whose meeting forms the strangest discordance.

I add, and this results from the irreducibility of the two laws, that with this theological-juridical complication, instead of putting an end to the antagonism of man with man, we have only created another, that of man with God. Human dignity is absolute: this is its nature. It can bow before the majesty of a Supreme Being, but on this express condition that this being will deign to enter into a discussion with it, and that religion will cause it to lose none of its prerogatives. But is that the case here? No. Religion, with its dogmas, its mysteries, its sacraments, its discipline, its terrors, its promises, crushes the dignity of man. God, through the relationship that worship makes us maintain with him, is not only a surety, a guarantor; he is an antagonist. This is what the myth of Israel struggling against God indicates, what Job’s complaint expresses with such fervent eloquence, what emerges with such force from the eternal opposition between philosophy and faith, as from that between secular power and ecclesiastical power.

One of two things must result: man must be everything here, or nothing. Now, paganism grants him too much or not enough. If the right, under the name of dignity, exists originally in the human person, if it constitutes his prerogative, it is necessary, on pain of illogic, that this right goes so far as to recognize itself in others. Man must be able to do justice to man: otherwise he would not have justice within him, which however is granted to him. What use then is the guarantee of the celestial powers? Sooner or later manly pride will wipe the slate clean. But religion dissipated, personal dignity degenerating into pride and selfishness, right no longer finding in itself its own sanction, what becomes of society?

If, in order to escape this danger, we insist on the necessity of religion, if we maintain that it belongs to God alone to attest to the law, to guarantee it and to obtain its observance; that thus the feeling that each has of his right becomes respect for the right of others only through an effect of religion, and that the whole problem is reduced to giving more responsibility to religion, the principle must be followed until in the end, to say that Justice is in us an unfounded pretension, and that man is the vassal of the Divinity. That’s what Christianity did. From then on it is human dignity that is in danger, and once again religion is on its way, farewell to Justice and society.

There is no escaping this dilemma. All this jurisprudence doubled with religion is like a sword that some flatter themselves to make stand upright on the pommel, others on the point, and which always loses its balance.

History fully confirms this criticism.

VIII. — Greco-Roman society raised the person high: there lies its glory. In the theology that it had made for itself a kind of consanguinity united men and gods; they negotiated, so to speak, from family to family, from power to power. In the Iliad, all the misfortunes of the Greeks come from the wrath of Achilles, towards whom Agamemnon lost respect, ἠτιμῄσεν, in the presence of the army. The gods intervene to reconcile the two chiefs, but Olympus is divided in its turn. One part declares itself for the Greeks, the other for the Trojans. Homer, the bard of these sensitive individualities, becomes the theologian, the legislator of the Greeks. Each city, each tribe chooses an Immortal, to whom it binds itself as if by a contract. Kings descend from Jupiter; Jupiter is the common stock from which gods and heroes arose. What exaltation of self-love must have excited among the Hellenes this marvelous epic of which the pivot, the unique idea is respect, the worthiness of the person!…

We find analogous ideas in the Bible. Jehovah does not beget, indeed, but below him is a chain of angels, elohim, of saints, kedoshim, that connects, without any solution of continuity, heaven to the human race. — I say to you, cries the Psalmist, you are gods and all sons of the Most High: Ego dixi: dii estis, et filii Excelsi omnes. This was taken, in David’s time, a bit more positively than in Christian theology. Psalm VII, which is supposed to date from the time of the Judges, is a song of triumph, in which the poet, having saluted the immeasurable greatness of Jehovah, celebrates in magnificent verses the quasi-divinity of man:

« Quand je contemple ta gloire, ce ciel œuvre de tes doigts, cette lune et ces étoiles que tu as créées, je me dis : Qu’il est grand le mortel, que tu te souviens encore de lui ! le fils d’Adam, que tu le visites ! Tu l’as placé un peu au-dessous des dieux, elohim ; tu l’as couronné d’honneur et de gloire, et tu l’as établi sur les œuvres de tes mains. »

Ne semble-t-il pas que l’homme ne se donne un Dieu que pour grandir d’autant sa propre nature ?

The Latin city is imbued with the same spirit. Romulus is the son of Mars, Julius descends from Venus, Numa is the husband of Egeria. But, without speaking of this mythology, what a story is that of Coriolanus, insulted by the people, to whom Rome, vanquished, could only sway by opposing to him the dignity of Veturia, his mother! Livy, writing under Augustus, and engaging in patriotic morality, distorted the tradition. According to the ancient idea, the offended and proscribed patrician owed nothing to anyone. He carried his country within him; the only law on which he depended was his prerogative, his dignity. Coriolanus is inflexible, because he is within his rights. Neither the majesty of the people, represented by the deputies, nor the religion of the gods, present to his eyes in the cortege of priests, shakes his courage. He only gives in when his mother, whom he was looking for in the crowd of matrons, uniting her destiny to that of the city, says to him, pushing him away: “I won’t kiss anyone who wants to make me a slave!” But in yielding to his mother Coriolanus only yields to himself: he is not a citizen who bows before the inviolability of his country; he is an outlaw who pardons those who outlawed him in consideration of his family. The pride of the mother got the better of the pride of the son, not by fighting him, but by making him, so to speak, identify with his enemies. These two souls understood each other. Who ever understood them in our schools?

We find this profound sentiment of personal dignity, which under the republic had shone with so much brilliance, once again, but with a tinge of resignation hitherto unknown, under the tyranny of the Caesars. Read Tacitus: his dark Annales are full of accounts of suicides carried out to escape the insult of despots. What the Roman feared most was not death, it was outrage in torment, ne illuderet. With what complacency he recounts the last moments of Otho, and the enthusiasm produced in the soldier by this noble and worthy end!

“Towards the end of the day, dying of thirst, he takes a sip of cold water as his only comfort. Then he has two daggers brought, chooses one, places it under his pillow, and falls into a peaceful sleep. At dawn, he pierces his heart, lets out a cry and expires. They hastened to bury him as he had recommended, lest his head be cut off and delivered up to outrage. The body was carried by the Praetorian guards. Bursting into tears, they celebrated his praises and kissed his hands. Some soldiers killed themselves at the stake, not that they felt guilty and afraid, but out of emulation of bravery and love for their prince. In the camps, at Bedriacum, at Plaisance, everywhere his death received the same tribute of admiration and praise.”

Tacitus adds: “A simple monument was erected to Otho: he will remain!” One would say that after the cowardly and miserable end of Nero, after the atrocities inflicted on the corpse of Galba, having to recount soon the ignominious torture of Vitellius, cut down on the Gemonian Stairs, the historian of that horrible epoch feels a kind of Roman consolation at the death of Otho, who died with honor and as a free man.

The whole Roman system was based on this principle of patrician dignity.

“Each, in aristocratic Rome, held rank for his talent and his labor (solertia, industria): knight, if he had only fortune; patrician, if he only had birth; senator, if he dreamed of filling a curule seat; œdilitius, prætorius, consularis, censorius, triumphalis, according to the honors he had obtained. This is what the parliamentary language of the Romans called the dignity of a man.” (Franz de Champagny, les Césars, Bk. I.)

The privileges of Roman dignity were: exemption from prison, torture, capital punishment, public charges; the right of marriage, will, paternal power, domain of property, etc.

Personal right thus engendered real right: hence it is that the plebeian could not rise to property; he had only possession.

The aim of the vanquished nations, their constant effort, was to obtain the right to honors, Justice, but the censorship was there to drive them back and maintain the purity of race and the constitution.

From these energetic mores, of which Christianity has extinguished even the idea, was born stoicism, supreme formula of ancient virtue, which flourished especially among the infants of the Wolf, and which counted in its ranks all the strong souls and inflexible characters that the later centuries saw appear.

Mais, il faut le redire, quelque altière que fût cette institution, elle ne pouvait donner lieu à une véritable Justice, et la société antique ne tarda pas à s’en apercevoir. Au fond, malgré les belles sentences et les actes d’héroïsme dont les auteurs abondent, la morale des anciens, avec ses quatre divisions cardinales, Prudence, Justice, Force et Tempérance, est une morale d’individualisme, incapable de faire vivre une nation. Pendant quelques siècles, les sociétés formées par le polythéisme eurent des mœurs : elles n’eurent jamais de morale. In the absence of a morality solidly established in principles responding to practice, more themselves eventually disappeared. It was not enough, really, to inspire an Alcibiades and a Lysander, a Coriolanus and a Caesar, with a high opinion of their dignity; they should have been taught to deduce from the same principle the rules of universal justice: now, polytheistic society had drawn from it only laws of exclusion and privilege.

This is what results, not only from the too well established facts of Greek and Latin history, but also from the reaction aroused among philosophers and statesmen by the odious exaggeration of personality.

“When I contemplate your glory, this sky the work of your fingers, this moon and these stars which you have created, I say to myself: How great is the mortal, that you still remember him, the son of Adam, that you visit it! You placed him a little below the gods, elohim ; You crowned him with honor and glory, and set him over the works of your hands.”

Doesn’t it seem that man gives himself a God only to increase his own nature by the same amount?

The Latin city is imbued with the same spirit. Romulus is the son of Mars, Julius descends from Venus, Numa is the husband of Egeria. But, without speaking of this mythology, what a story is that of Coriolanus, insulted by the people, to whom Rome, vanquished, could only sway by opposing to him the dignity of Veturia, his mother! Livy, writing under Augustus, and engaging in patriotic morality, distorted the tradition. According to the ancient idea, the offended and proscribed patrician owed nothing to anyone. He carried his country within him; the only law on which he depended was his prerogative, his dignity. Coriolanus is inflexible, because he is within his rights. Neither the majesty of the people, represented by the deputies, nor the religion of the gods, present to his eyes in the cortege of priests, shakes his courage. He only gives in when his mother, whom he was looking for in the crowd of matrons, uniting her destiny to that of the city, says to him, pushing him away: “I won’t kiss anyone who wants to make me a slave!” But in yielding to his mother Coriolanus only yields to himself: he is not a citizen who bows before the inviolability of his country; he is an outlaw who pardons those who outlawed him in consideration of his family. The pride of the mother got the better of the pride of the son, not by fighting him, but by making him, so to speak, even more ferocious. These two souls understood each other. Who ever understood them in our schools?

“Towards the end of the day, dying of thirst, he takes a sip of cold water as his only comfort. Then he has two daggers brought, chooses one, places it under his pillow, and falls into a peaceful sleep. At dawn, he pierces his heart, lets out a cry and expires. They hastened to bury him as he had recommended, lest his head be cut off and delivered up to outrage. The body was carried by the Praetorian guards. Bursting into tears, they celebrated his praises and kissed his hands. Some soldiers killed themselves at the stake, not that they felt guilty and afraid, but out of emulation of bravery and love for their prince. In the camps, at Bedriacum, at Plaisance, everywhere his death received the same tribute of admiration and praise.”

The whole Roman system was based on this principle of patrician dignity.

“Each, in aristocratic Rome, held rank for his talent and his labor (solertia, industria): knight, if he had only fortune; patrician, if he only had birth; senator, if he dreamed of filling a curule seat; œdilitius, prætorius, consularis, censorius, triumphalis, according to the honors he had obtained. This is what the parliamentary language of the Romans called the dignity of a man.” (Franz de Champagny, les Césars, Bk. I.)

The privileges of Roman dignity were: exemption from prison, torture, capital punishment, public charges; the right of marriage, will, paternal power, domain of property, etc.

Personal right thus engendered real right: hence it is that the plebeian could not rise to property; he had only possession.

But, it must be repeated, however haughty this institution was, it could not give rise to true justice, and ancient society was not long in noticing this. Basically, despite the beautiful sentences and the acts of heroism with which the authors abound, the morality of the ancients, with its four cardinal divisions, Prudence, Justice, Force and Temperance, is a morality of individualism, incapable of sustaining a nation. For a few centuries, the societies formed by polytheism had mores: they never had morals. In the absence of a morality solidly established in principles, mores eventually disappeared. It was not enough, really, to inspire an Alcibiades and a Lysander, a Coriolanus and a Caesar, with a high opinion of their dignity; they should have been taught to deduce from the same principle the rules of universal justice: now, polytheistic society had drawn from it only laws of exclusion and privilege.

IX. The noble Dorians, conquerors of the Peloponnese, had set the example of robbery: it was precisely among them that repression was born. Lycurgus made Sparta a community.

Pythagoras after him, and Plato afterwards, make the perfection of the Republic consist in the fact that no one has anything of his own, and does not even belong to himself.

Aristotle professes the same maxims: he says that each citizen must persuade himself that no one belongs to himself, but that all belong to the State.

Cicero, witness to the civil struggles that gave rise to the overflowing of the aristocratic personality, regards the love of country as the first of duties, and it gives rise to all the others.

These ideas, which have since become commonplace, were then new: it must therefore be admitted that until then society had rested on a contrary principle.

Then spread among the masses that spirit of centralization of power and crushing of wills that, issuing from the brains of a few thinkers, was to end, in Italy as in Greece, by engendering despotism. The Caesars were only the successors of Alexander and his heirs, who in their turn had only applied, like Epaminondas, Phocion, Philopæmen, with more or less good faith, the lessons of the philosophers.

Then individualist Europe, which had vanquished the absolutist East in the Persian wars—which in heroic Hellas had created philosophy and the arts, and in severe Italy founded law—Europe, in spite of its genius, became a counterfeit of the Orient. This is not quite what the philosophers had asked for, but it was the consequence. Every will must bow before the general will, the theoreticians had said; and it happened that the general will was none other than that of the Emperor, absolute master, like the kings of the East, of the earth and of men.

IX. The noble Dorians, conquerors of the Peloponnese, had set the example of robbery: it was precisely among them that repression was born. Lycurgus made Sparta a community.

Pythagoras after him, and Plato afterwards, make the perfection of the Republic consist in the fact that no one has anything of his own, and does not even belong to himself.

Aristotle professes the same maxims: he says that each citizen must persuade himself that no one belongs to himself, but that all belong to the State.

Cicero, witness to the civil struggles that gave rise to the overflowing of the aristocratic personality, regards the love of country as the first of duties, and it gives rise to all the others.

These ideas, which have since become commonplace, were then new: it must therefore be admitted that until then society had rested on a contrary principle.

XI. — Some writers of the Catholic school have taken advantage of this reaction to infer that antiquity had no knowledge of natural law; that under the influence of polytheism individual liberty was sacrificed, conscience enslaved, and that only with Christianity had the emancipation of the person begun. And, strange thing, it would be, to hear them tell it, the insufficiency of polytheism that had been the cause of that general servitude.

“Man,” says M. Huet, “is born to live under the superior direction of eternal reason or of God; he does not go all alone and by himself, not being the absolute being. Does he come to reject God, his interior and necessary support? Unable to behave, he seeks, he begs for support from outside; he alienates himself, give himself up to the State, which is charged with thinking and wanting for him. The state serves as God. This is what we saw under paganism: the domination of the ancient States over man was a form of idolatry. (Règne social du Christianisme, p. 72.)

Another, Mr. Bordas-Demoulin, quoted by the above:

“Piety, justice, virtue were obedience to the will of the legislator. The Jew did not inquire about what was good or bad in itself, but about what Moses had said. Thus acted the Gentile concerning his own legislation; and Lycurgus, Numa, Solon…” (Lettre à l’archevêque de Paris sur les droits des laïques et des prêtres dans l’Église.)

This is to confuse the eras, and to reason like someone who, taking the fancies of the multitude for the spirit of the Revolution, would maintain that in 1789 and 1848 the idea of liberty did not exist, and that the empire gave birth to it.

X. — Some writers of the Catholic school have taken advantage of this reaction to infer that antiquity had no knowledge of natural law; that under the influence of polytheism individual liberty was sacrificed, conscience enslaved, and that only with Christianity had the emancipation of the person begun. And, strange thing, it would be, to hear them tell it, the insufficiency of polytheism that had been the cause of that general servitude.

Another, Mr. Bordas-Demoulin, quoted by the above:

First of all, this is to confuse the eras, and to reason like someone who, taking the fancies of the multitude for the spirit of the Revolution, would maintain that in 1789 and 1848 the idea of liberty did not exist, and that the empire gave birth to it. And then, who does not see that this theory of the omnipotence of the State, whose source is in a transcendent or communist conception of the social pact, could only have been produced as a reaction to the primitive patriciate?

M. Franz de Champagny, a Catholic like MM. Huet and Bordas-Demoulin, but one who had to cast gloom over paganism from another point of view, refutes them in these terms:

“The philosophical morality of antiquity is almost always selfish; it relates all of our duties back to us; It is for itself, it is for its own dignity, it is for its proud satisfaction that it forms and that it advises the wise man. Almost duties, or very nearly so, are duties of self-respect. The wise man, no doubt, must be just towards others, because injustice would upset the balance of his soul and make it ugly in his own eyes; the wise man must be just, but he need not go beyond that.”

“The duties are all included by Cicero in Justice and honesty; honesty is precisely this worship of oneself, this maintenance of one’s own dignity, to which antiquity attached such singular importance. (Les Césars, Bk. II, p. 431 and 432.)

Where, I will ask M. de Champagny, did the moralists of antiquity get their doctrine, their ideal? From tradition, no doubt. So if this tradition engendered a morality of egoism, it was because it had its starting point in institutions favorable to the exaltation of the personality. Plato, in his dialogues, critiquing the democracy of his times, never ceases to advocate the ancients. Now, what were these ancients? Nobles, aristocrats.

M. Franz de Champagny, a Catholic like MM. Huet and Bordas-Demoulin, but one who had to cast gloom over paganism from another point of view, refutes them in these terms:

“The philosophical morality of antiquity is almost always selfish; it relates all of our duties back to us; It is for itself, it is for its own dignity, it is for its proud satisfaction that it forms and that it advises the wise man. Almost duties, or very nearly so, are duties of self-respect. The wise man, no doubt, must be just towards others, because injustice would upset the balance of his soul and make it ugly in his own eyes; the wise man must be just, but he need not go beyond that.”

“The duties are all included by Cicero in Justice and honesty; honesty is precisely this worship of oneself, this maintenance of one’s own dignity, to which antiquity attached such singular importance. (Les Césars, Bk. II, p. 431 and 432.)

The entire history of Rome and Greece, from the times of fable, agrees with M. de Champagny: it is the history of human personality, or, as the ancients called it, of heroism, of its great deeds, of its foundations, then, by the cause which I have related, of its corruption and its fall. Tyranny is relatively modern: it was born of democracy insurgent everywhere, around the sixth century BC, against the noble spirit. It soon weakens, following the great Persian war; after which the excesses of demagoguery again pushed minds towards a system of concentrated authority and brought about Macedonian domination.

The same thing happened for Italy. The ancient patriciate, whose heroic type is Coriolanus, was succeeded by an overwhelming demagoguery, which resolved almost immediately into an empire. It should even be noted that the name of imperator, which served to designate the new authority, is the translation of the Greek tyrannos or kyranos, tyrant, that is to say commander, patron, master.

The entire history of Rome and Greece, from the times of fable, agrees with M. de Champagny: it is the history of human personality, or, as the ancients called it, of heroism, of its great deeds, of its foundations, then, by the cause which I have related, of its corruption and its fall. The entire period of Dorian rule is nothing but that. Tyranny is relatively modern: it was born of democracy insurgent everywhere, around the sixth century BC, against the noble spirit. It soon weakens, following the great Persian war; after which the excesses of demagoguery again pushed minds towards a system of concentrated authority and brought about Macedonian domination.

The same thing happened for Italy. The ancient patriciate, whose heroic type is Coriolanus, was succeeded by an overwhelming demagoguery, which resolved almost immediately into precariousness. It should even be noted that the name of imperator, which served to designate the new authority, is the translation of the Greek tyrannos or kyranos, tyrant, that is to say commander, patron, master; the first indicating a military leader, the second a civilian leader.

It is this horror of demagogy, joined to the ancient spirit of the patriciate, that made love of country so precarious among the ancients, and produced those civil wars, those proscriptions, those emigrations, those betrayals, of which later centuries offer fewer examples. We know what trouble the Jewish priesthood had in bringing back the remnants of the nation from Babylon. In the time of Sertorius, part of the Romans had passed into Spain, which made this chief say:

Rome is no longer in Rome, it is all where I am.

From the care that Virgil takes in his palingenesian poem to recommend the love of the fatherland, we see how rare this sentiment was:

Vendidit hic auro patriam, dominumque potentem Imposuit…
Hic manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi.

No respect for personal prerogative, no homeland. Alcibiades sometimes serves his compatriots, sometimes makes war on them, depending on whether they show him animadversion or benevolence; the people have no resentment against him.

Rome is no longer in Rome, it is all where I am.

From the care that Virgil takes in his palingenesian poem to recommend the love of the fatherland, we see how doubtful this sentiment was:

Vendidit hic auro patriam, dominumque potentem Imposuit..
Hic manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi.

[Here he sold his country for gold,
and imposed a powerful dominion.]

As in the nineteenth century, it was the emperors, destroyers of the republic, tyrants of right, who preached patriotism and made it an instrument of reign. Chauvinism dates from Julius Caesar .

Tacitus, on the occasion of the law Papia Poppæa, made by Augustus against celibates, perfectly explains this shift from ancient independence to a regime of unbridled regulation:

“The first men,” he said, “still without evil passion, without villainy, needed no punishments and coercions, any more than encouragements. Doing nothing on their own against good morals, following the law of good entirely by the inclination of their hearts, the fear of fine or punishment had no hold on them. But when equality began to disappear, when in place of a sense of mores and respect for institutions — pro modestia ac pudore — ambition and violence marched uncovered, then began oppressions of all kinds, and in their wake the tyranny of the laws. When we were tired of princes, we gave ourselves up to law-makers. They were at first simple, as befits simple natures: such were those of Minos, Lycurgus, Solon, Numa. With time, the power to legislate became another means of discord and trouble: it was not enough to decide on things of common interest; the inquisition reached even into private life, and the corruption of the republic was marked each year by the multitude of decrees: In singulos homines latoe questiones, et corruptissima republica plurimoe leges. As much as we had suffered from the deluge of crimes, so we now suffered from the avalanche of laws: Utque antehac flagitiis, ita nunc legibus laborabatur.” ( Annal., Bk. iii , c. 25, 26 and 27.)

It was the same also for the Jews, whose end M. Bordas-Demoulin quite simply takes for the beginning. Everyone knows that the Pentateuch was composed towards the last times of the kingdom of Judah; that the messianic ideas, ideas of absolute royalty, were only born following the captivity and limited to the empires of Assyria and Persia; that previously individual liberty, like that of worship, had been excessive; that the kings, feudal chiefs rather than absolute sovereigns, protected it themselves, against the wish of the priesthood, champion of divine right and intolerance. It was quite another thing even in the time of the Judges, when each did what they wanted, sadly observes the sacred writer.

Facts so palpable that the writer who contradicted them would not even deserve to be read, should not need to be pointed out, but it is characteristic of doctrines founded on transcendence to invert everything and confuse everything.

Ancient right, personal in principle, failed when, powerless to determine social law, and finding the religion of the gods insufficient to maintain balance, the legislator set about creating the religion of the state.

“What is man before the gods?” the priest had asked.

“What is the man before the city?” demanded the statesman in his turn.

And communism, imperialism, utopia invaded the earth; the human person, his freedom, his dignity were made cheap; by dint of denying the individual, we end by denying the law, and instead of citizens there were only subjets and the faithful.

Tacitus, on the occasion of the law Papia Poppæa, made by Augustus against celibates, perfectly explains this shift from ancient independence to a regime of unbridled regulation:

“The first men,” he said, “still without evil passion, without villainy, needed no punishments and coercions, any more than encouragements. Doing nothing on their own against good morals, following the law of good entirely by the inclination of their hearts, the fear of fine or punishment had no hold on them. But when equality began to disappear, when in place of a sense of mores and respect for institutions — pro modestia ac pudore — ambition and violence marched uncovered, then began oppressions of all kinds, and in their wake the tyranny of the laws. When we were tired of princes, we gave ourselves up to law-makers. They were at first simple, as befits simple natures: such were those of Minos, Lycurgus, Solon, Numa. With time, the power to legislate became another means of discord and trouble: it was not enough to decide on things of common interest; the inquisition reached even into private life, and the corruption of the republic was marked each year by the multitude of decrees: In singulos homines latoe questiones, et corruptissima republica plurimoe leges. As much as we had suffered from the deluge of crimes, so we now suffered from the avalanche of laws: Utque antehac flagitiis, ita nunc legibus laborabatur.” ( Annal., Bk. iii , c. 25, 26 and 27.)

It was the same also for the Jews, whose end M. Bordas-Demoulin quite simply takes for the beginning. Everyone knows that the Pentateuch was composed towards the last times of the kingdom of Judah; that the messianic ideas, ideas of absolute royalty, were born following the captivity and limited to the empires of Assyria and Persia; that previously individual liberty, like that of worship, had been excessive; that the kings, chiefs of clans rather than absolute sovereigns, protected it themselves, against the wish of the priesthood, champion of divine right and intolerance. It was quite another thing even in the time of the Judges, when each did what they wanted, sadly observes the sacred writer.

Facts so palpable that the writer who contradicted them would not even deserve to be read, should not need to be pointed out, but it is the misfortune of preconceived opinions to invert everything and confuse everything.

Ancient right, personal in principle, failed when the legislator, powerless to determine social law, and finding the religion of the gods insufficient to maintain balance, set about creating the religion of the state, and when the State had begun, according to the expression of M. Huet, to serve as God.

“What is man before the gods?” the priest had asked.

“What is the man before the city?” demanded the statesman in his turn.

XII. — Man wants to be respected for himself, and to make himself respected. He alone is his protector, his guarantor, his avenger. As soon as, under the pretext of religion of the gods or reason of State, you create a principle of right superior to humanity and to the person, sooner or later the respect for this principle will cause respect for man to be lost sight of. Then we will no longer have either Justice or morality; we will have an authority and a police force under whose shadow society, like the traveler under the shadow of the upas, will crumble.

A Justice identical with individual dignity being given, Greek and Latin civilization was to perish through the exaggeration of a force without counterweight (ax. 5). The brake of power did no more than the religious crutch: it is not from outside that the balance to liberty must come, but from within. When the personality had lost the battlefield of the forum and the agora, it gave itself up, under cover of the emperor, to the devastation of the provinces, to the grabbing of lands, to usury, to domestic orgy; something unheard of, corruption seemed to reach even the gods. Man trampling his mores underfoot, the gods became infamous; there was no turpitude which did not find its model and its justification in some divinity. What could the idealism of Plato, the exegesis of Euhemerus, the mysticism of Apollonius of Tyana, the reform of Julian, do against this torrent? Among primitive nations, opinion placing the gods beyond humanity and mortal mores, their histories did not cause scandal: they were respected as august mysteries. At last, the meaning or the religion of the myths being lost, the dishonored gods departed; man was left alone, with baseless institutions and unprincipled mores. Everything was engulfed, republics, cities, parties, characters: there remained only the empire, democratic and social chaos, where the elements of a new world began to ferment again; and the first and most brilliant period of the religious age of mankind was closed.

XI. — Man wants to be respected for himself, and to make himself respected. He alone is his protector, his guarantor, his avenger. As soon as, under the pretext of religion of the gods or reason of State, you create a principle of right superior to humanity and to the person, sooner or later the respect for this principle will cause respect for man to be lost sight of. Then we will no longer have either Justice or morality; we will have an authority and a police force under whose shadow society, like the traveler under the shadow of the upas, will crumble.

A Justice identical with individual dignity being given, Greek and Latin civilization was to perish through the exaggeration of a force without counterweight. The brake of power did no more than the religious crutch: it is not from outside that the balance to liberty must come, but from within. When the personality had lost the battlefield of the forum and the agora, it gave itself up, under cover of the emperor, to the devastation of the provinces, to the grabbing of lands, to usury, to domestic orgy; something unheard of, corruption seemed to reach even the gods. Man trampling his mores underfoot, the gods became infamous; there was no turpitude which did not find its model and its justification in some divinity. What could the idealism of Plato, the exegesis of Euhemerus, the mysticism of Apollonius of Tyana, the reform of Julian, do against this torrent? Among primitive nations, opinion placing the gods beyond humanity and mortal mores, their histories did not cause scandal: they were respected as august mysteries. At last, the meaning or the religion of the myths being lost, the dishonored gods departed; man was left alone, with baseless institutions and unprincipled mores. Everything was engulfed, republics, cities, parties, characters: there remained only the empire, democratic and social chaos, where the elements of a new world began to ferment again; and the first and most brilliant period of the religious age of mankind was closed.

CHAPITRE IV.

Transition religieuse. — Le Christianisme tire les conséquences des prémisses posées par le Polythéisme et la Philosophie : condamnation de l’humanité.

XIII. — En principe, le polythéisme a reconnu que la notion du droit avait son point de départ dans la dignité de l’homme. En fait, il n’a pas su développer cette notion ; tout au contraire, par la garantie extérieure et supérieure qu’il donnait à la Justice, il l’a perdue.

Pour vous, Monseigneur, qui regardez le polythéisme comme l’œuvre du démon, ce dénoûment n’a rien que de naturel ; pour moi il est des plus graves, le polythéisme étant une religion, la religion, au même titre que le christianisme.

Produit fatal du polythéisme, l’empire, tout le monde en convient, accéléra la dissolution, d’autant mieux qu’il chercha son appui dans la restauration des idées religieuses. Pour la première fois l’impuissance de ces deux grandes institutions, l’État et l’Église, fut dévoilée.

La situation réclamait un remède qui, dépassant la mythologie et la politique, s’adressant à la conscience du genre humain, saisirait le mal dans sa source. La philosophie se présenta la première.

Stoïciens, pythagoriciens, cyniques ; au fond ces trois sectes étaient en parfaite communauté de vues, et avaient une pleine conscience de leur œuvre. Avec des maximes différentes, un mysticisme plus ou moins prononcé, chacune avait sa catégorie d’auditeurs : la philosophie du Portique, plus savante, plus sévère, plaisant davantage aux classes élevées ; celle de Diogène, plus rude, allant mieux au peuple ; celle de Pythagore, aux âmes religieuses.

Stoïciens, pythagoriciens et cyniques furent les vrais précurseurs du Christ.

Sauver à la fois la civilisation et la liberté, la conscience et la raison ; fonder la Justice, que le polythéisme n’avait fait que saluer, n’ayant su en trouver la formule ; abolir la servitude et la misère ; créer enfin la morale, que tout le monde sentait, voulait, mais que la sagesse des anciens avait laissée sans principe : quel programme ! quel rôle !

L’œuvre de réforme commença par la religion. C’était la pierre d’achoppement où la conscience de l’humanité devait une seconde fois se briser. Ils comprenaient à merveille, les novateurs de l’ère actiaque, tout ce qu’il y avait de monstrueux pour l’époque dans les cultes établis. Pleins de mépris pour une idolâtrie licencieuse, sans naïveté et sans bonne foi, ils jugeaient, et la suite montra s’ils avaient raison, que la première chose à faire était de porter la cognée à l’arbre immense du polythéisme.

Mais ils crurent, en rejetant les simulacres avec toutes les superstitions et les fables qui s’y rattachaient, qu’il convenait de maintenir, comme base de la science des mœurs, la notion théologique, l’antinomie de l’homme et de Dieu : c’est ce qui dès l’origine égara la réforme.

« Les stoïciens faisaient de la philosophie tout à la fois la science des choses divines et humaines, la contemplation de l’Être infini et l’étude pratique de la vertu.

« Ils concevaient la matière comme le principe passif des choses ; tandis que Dieu, qui est uni à la matière comme l’âme au corps, en est le principe actif, la cause ou la raison.

« Le monde est animé, vivant ; Dieu en est l’âme ; et comme cette âme n’est au fond qu’une même chose avec la matière, le monde est Dieu, ou Dieu est le monde. »

« La règle suprême des mœurs est de vivre conformément à la nature universelle. Le bien, comme le devoir, consiste dans la volonté de rester constamment fidèle aux lois de la nature. » (Tissot, Histoire de la philosophie).

La philosophie allemande de l’absolu ne va pas au delà. Comme le Portique elle aboutit au dogme de la fatalité, et se résout par le quiétisme.

Du reste, la morale des stoïciens abonde en maximes superbes. On connaît leur devise : Sustine et abstine, patience et détachement. — Il n’y a pas d’autre bien que la vertu, disaient-ils, pas d’autre mal que le vice ; la douleur même n’est rien. — Chose inouïe pour des païens, Musonius Rufus défend tout rapport d’amour hors mariage.

« L’intempérance, dit-il, est une grande occasion de pécher : tenez-vous en garde contre elle deux fois par jour. — Évitez les paroles obscènes, parce qu’elles conduisent aux actions. — N’ayez qu’un seul habit (conseil renouvelé par l’Évangile, Marc, x, 9). — Après une bonne action, la peine qu’elle a pu coûter est finie, il nous reste le plaisir de l’avoir faite ; après une mauvaise action, le plaisir est passée et la honte subsiste. »

Ce qui caractérise les stoïciens, c’est qu’ils prêchent sans cesse la probité, la frugalité, l’empire sur soi-même, les bonnes œuvres, l’humanité, la philanthropie, et malgré leur dureté, plus apparente que réelle, la miséricorde. Ce sont eux qui ont fait entrer dans la langue vulgaire ces mots sacramentels, reçus de l’antiquité, et que le christianisme revendique aujourd’hui comme son idée propre. À force d’élévation, la morale stoïcienne est tendue, orgueilleuse même : effet des circonstances au milieu desquelles elle s’est produite. Le christianisme est loin de cette vigueur, et quoi que disent ses apologistes, il ne peut soutenir la comparaison. Ni les Évangiles ni les Épîtres ne sont à la hauteur de Sénèque, d’Épictète, de Marc-Aurèle, de Perse. Aussi le premier élan du stoïcisme passé, la morale, continuant de s’appuyer sur un principe hors nature, ne pouvait que redescendre.

L’erreur des stoïciens avait été, comme je l’ai dit, de renouveler l’hypothèse transcendantale. Sous ce rapport ils ont laissé peu à faire à leurs successeurs. Connais-toi toi-même, Rien de trop, Suis Dieu, sont trois préceptes qui pour le stoïcien marchent de pair. — Obéir à Dieu, c’est la liberté, dit Sénèque. — Point d’honnête homme sans religion, dit-il ailleurs ; la vertu humaine ne peut se soutenir sans l’assistance de la Divinité, Neque enim potest tanta res sine adminiculo numinis stare (Ép. 41 et 75). Songe que Dieu te regarde, et que le spectacle le plus agréable pour lui est celui de l’honnête homme aux prises avec l’adversité.

Le regard de Dieu ! la vertu stoïque ne peut s’en passer, elle a besoin de cette gloriole. Où es-tu, chaste Épicure, qui disais que, les dieux ne s’occupant pas des hommes, les hommes devaient faire le bien sans s’occuper des dieux ?…

La philosophie stoïcienne ne fut point acceptée. On ne lui reprocha pas de compromettre, par sa théorie de l’âme du monde, la liberté déjà abîmée sous le despotisme ; on ne dit point qu’elle poussait trop à la résignation, quand il fallait prêcher surtout la résistance. Au contraire, sa morale parut trop énergique, sa foi trop raisonneuse ; le sage qu’elle avait conçu était encore, même au sein de Dieu, trop indépendant, trop fort. Les âmes déprimées se sentaient si faibles ! Ce Dieu infini, absolu, solitaire, les effrayait ; elles le voulaient plus près, plus occupé d’elles, en communion plus fréquente.

Peut-être, si l’on eût fondu en une même doctrine le stoïcisme et le pythagorisme, eût-on obtenu davantage.

« Plus théologique que celle de Zénon, l’école de Pythagore rapprochait davantage l’homme de la Divinité ; il entretenait plus vivant le sentiment de la vénération religieuse, et par suite d’une logique moins sévère, il se prêtait de meilleure grâce aux pratiques extérieures du culte. Il abandonnait moins l’homme à lui-même ; par le jeûne, par la frugalité de la vie, par les observances religieuses, il l’aidait à soutenir sa vertu et à garder l’équilibre de son âme… » (Franz de Champagny, les Césars, t. II.)

Mais il serait plus aisé d’accoupler le serpent avec la colombe que d’opérer la fusion de deux sectes. Les stoïciens devaient accuser les sectateurs de Pythagore de ramener la superstition et les mensonges du sacerdoce, pendant que ceux-ci reprochaient à leurs rivaux d’incliner à l’impiété, à l’athéisme. Toute transaction était impossible.

Passons sur les cyniques.

La raison pratique, alors comme aujourd’hui, demandait une chose ; la veine religieuse, non encore épuisée, en produisit une autre. Le christianisme se présenta. Qui était-il ? d’où sortait-il ? Je ne perdrai pas le temps à le chercher ; je me bornerai à dire ce qu’il devint rapidement, par la nécessité même de sa position.

CHAPTER IV.

Religious transition. — Christianity draws the consequences from the premises laid down by Polytheism and Philosophy: condemnation of humanity.

XII. —In principle, polytheism recognized that the notion of right had its starting point in the dignity of man. In fact, it did not know how to develop this notion; on the contrary, through the external and superior guarantee that it gave to Justice, it lost it (D).

For you, Monsignor, who regard polytheism as the work of the devil, this outcome is nothing but natural; for me, it is most serious, polytheism being a religion, religion itself, in the same way as Christianity.

Everyone agrees that empire, a fatal product of polytheism, accelerated its dissolution, all the more because it sought its support in the restoration of religious ideas. For the first time the impotence of these two great institutions, the State and the Church, was unveiled. The situation demanded a remedy that, going beyond mythology and politics, addressing itself to the conscience of the human race, would seize the evil at its source. Philosophy presented itself first.

Stoics, Pythagoreans, cynics, basically these three sects were in a perfect community of views, and had a full awareness of their work. With different maxims, a more or less pronounced mysticism, each had its category of listeners: the philosophy of the Portico, more scholarly, more severe, more pleasing to the higher classes; that of Diogenes, harsher, more sympathetic to the people; that of Pythagoras, for religious souls. Stoics, Pythagoreans and Cynics were the true precursors of Christ.

To save both civilization and freedom, conscience and reason; to found Justice, which polytheism had only recognized, having failed to find its formula; to abolish servitude and misery; finally to create morality, which everyone sensed, wanted, but which the wisdom of the ancients had left without a principle: What a program! What a role!

The work of reform began with religion. It was the stumbling block on which the conscience of humanity had to be shattered a second time. They understood perfectly, the innovators of the Actiac era, all that was monstrous for the time in the established cults. Full of contempt for a licentious idolatry, without naivety and without good faith, they judged, and what followed showed if they were right, that the first thing to do was to strike the ax at the immense tree of polytheism.

But they believed, in rejecting simulacra with all the superstitions and fables that were attached to them, that it was proper to maintain, as the basis of the science of morals, the theological notion, the antinomy of man and God: this is what misled the reform from the outset.

“The Stoics made philosophy simultaneously the science of divine and human things, the contemplation of the infinite Being and the practical study of virtue.

“They conceived of matter as the passive principle of things; while God, who is united to matter as the soul is to the body, is its active principle, cause or reason.

“The world is animated, alive; God is its soul; and as this soul is basically only the same thing as matter, the world is God, or God is the world.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“The supreme rule of mores is to live in accordance with the universal nature. The good, like duty, consists in the will to remain constantly faithful to the laws of nature”. (Tissot, Histoire de la philosophie.)

The German philosophy of the absolute is does not itself go further. Like the Portico, it leads to the dogma of fatality, and is resolved by quietism.

Moreover, the morality of the Stoics abounds in superb maxims. We know their motto: Sustine et abstine, patience and detachment. “There is no other good than virtue,” they said, “no other evil than vice; even pain is nothing.” — An unheard of thing for pagans, Musonius Rufus forbids any love relationship outside marriage:

“Intemperance, he says, is a great opportunity to sin: be on your guard against it twice a day. – Avoid obscene words, because they lead to actions. — Have only one coat (counsel renewed by the Gospel, Mark, x, 9). — After a good deed, the trouble it may have cost is over, we are left with the pleasure of having done it; after a bad action, the pleasure is gone, and the shame remains.”

What characterizes the Stoics is that they unceasingly preach probity, frugality, self-control, good works, humanity, philanthropy, and, despite their harshness, which is more apparent than real, mercy. They are the ones who introduced into the vulgar language these sacramental words, received from antiquity, and which Christianity today claims as its own idea. By dint of elevation, Stoic morality is tense, even proud: the effect of the circumstances in the midst of which it was produced. Christianity is far from this vigor, and whatever its apologists say, it cannot stand the comparison. Neither the Gospels nor the Epistles are up to Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Perse. Also the first impetus of past stoicism, morality, continuing to rest on a principle outside nature, could only descend again.

The error of the Stoics had been, as I have said, to renew the transcendental hypothesis. In this respect they left little to their successors. Know thyself, Nothing too much, Follow God, are three precepts which for the Stoic go hand in hand. “To obey God is freedom,” said Seneca. “No honest man without religion,” he said elsewhere; human virtue cannot sustain itself without the assistance of the Divinity, Neque enim potest tanta res sine adminiculo numinis stare (Ep. 41 and 75) (E). Remember that God is watching you, and that the sight most pleasing to him is that of an honest man struggling with adversity.

The gaze of God! Stoic virtue cannot do without it; it needs that conceit. Where are you, chaste Epicurus, who said that, the gods not concerning themselves with men, men should do good without worrying about the gods?.…

The Stoic philosophy was not accepted. It was not reproached by compromising, by its theory of the soul of the world, liberty already damaged under despotism; we do not say that it pushed too much towards resignation, when it was necessary above all to preach resistance. On the contrary, its morality seemed too energetic, its faith too rational; the sage it had conceived was still, even within God, too independent, too strong. Depressed souls felt so weak! This infinite, absolute, solitary God frightened them; they wanted him closer, more concerned with them, in more frequent communion.

Perhaps, if Stoicism and Pythagoreanism had been fused into a single doctrine, we would have obtained more.

“More theological than that of Zeno, the school of Pythagoras brought man closer to the Divinity; it maintained more alive the feeling of religious veneration, and in consequence of a less severe logic, it lent himself more gracefully to the exterior practices of worship. It left man less to himself; by fasting, by the frugality of life, by religious observances, he helped him to sustain his virtue and to keep the balance of his soul…” (Franz de Champagny, les Césars, t. II.)

But it would be easier to couple the serpent with the dove than to bring about the fusion of two sects. The Stoics would accuse the followers of Pythagoras of bringing back superstition and the lies of the priesthood, while the latter reproached their rivals with inclining to impiety, to atheism. Any transaction was impossible.

Let’s move on to the cynics.

Practical reason, then as now, demanded one thing; the religious vein, not yet exhausted, produced another. Christianity presented itself. who was it? where did it come from? I won’t waste time looking for it; I will confine myself to saying what it quickly became, by the very necessity of its position.

XIV

L’histoire de l’établissement du christianisme peut se résumer en quelques pages.

Obéissant à la loi des oppositions fatales, qui veut que tout système épuisé soit remplacé par son contraire, le christianisme se pose en contradicteur de la religion déchue. Ne demandez pas s’il comprend son époque, s’il se comprend lui-même. Il nie le paganisme, c’est le paganisme qu’il accuse de la dissolution sociale : voilà son idée fixe, voilà son plan.

« Ils ont changé (les idolâtres), dit l’Apôtre, la gloire du Dieu incorruptible en simulacres d’hommes corruptibles, d’oiseaux, de quadrupèdes, de serpents ; ils ont servi la créature à la place du Créateur, que tous les siècles doivent bénir, amen. C’est pour cela que Dieu les a livrés aux passions de leurs cœurs, à l’impureté, à la fougue de leur sens réprouvé. C’est pour cela que nous les voyons pleins d’iniquité, de malice, de fornication, d’avarice, de perversité, d’envie, d’homicide, de chicane et de tromperie ; brouillons, calomniateurs, ennemis de Dieu, insolents, superbes, inventeurs de crimes, sans respect pour leurs parents, sans raison, sans retenue, sans charité, sans foi ni loi. » (Rom., i, 23-31.)

Le tableau n’a rien de philosophique, il respire la calomnie et la haine. Qu’attendre de réformateurs qui procèdent avec ce discernement, avec cette modération ?

Ainsi le christianisme, dans la conscience qu’il a de lui-même, n’est pas une conciliation comme la cherchèrent les empereurs ; ce n’est pas non plus un développement comme Apollonius et Jésus lui-même en avaient eu l’idée, legem non solvere, sed adimplere : c’est une antithèse.

Or, comme toute antithèse ne peut, par sa nature, donner qu’une idée incomplète ; comme d’un autre côté toute réaction, dans l’ordre moral aussi bien que dans l’ordre physique, est égale à l’action, il était dès lors permis de prévoir que la nouvelle formule ne contiendrait comme toutes les autres qu’une part de la vérité, si tant est même qu’il y eût de la vérité en elle ; puis, qu’elle irait dans l’évolution de son principe aussi loin que le polythéisme était allé dans l’évolution du sien, ce qui veut dire qu’elle finirait par une chute semblable.

Suivons l’histoire de la palingénésie chrétienne.

Puisqu’on ne sortait pas de l’idée religieuse, et qu’on persistait à regarder le principe transcendantal comme indispensable à la constitution de la Justice, la première chose que le christianisme avait à faire était d’épurer le concept théologique, et de sanctifier, pour ainsi dire, la Divinité, déshonorée par la révélation antérieure. En cela il suivait la route ouverte par la philosophie, il n’avait rien encore d’original.

Un seul Dieu, dégagé de tout attribut physique et anthropomorphique, purgé de tous les scandales dont les anciens mythologues avaient le plus innocemment du monde couvert leurs Immortels ; un Dieu infiniment saint, mais distinct de la matière, cause de toute souillure ; un Dieu principe et sujet véritable de la Justice, que sa grâce communique à l’homme : tel devait être, d’après la loi de contradiction historique, et tel fut en effet le premier article de la foi chrétienne.

On voit dès à présent ce qui servira à l’Église, à peine formée, à démêler son dogme à travers le dédale des opinions que fera bientôt surgir cette première donnée, et à constituer son orthodoxie. Sa règle de foi, son critère, sera la contradiction au paganisme, ou pour mieux dire le renversement du système païen, et la séparation du christianisme d’avec toutes les théogonies antérieures. Aussi, lorsque plus tard, et conformément à cette règle, le dogme de la Trinité se précisa dans sa rigueur métaphysique, celle des trois personnes à qui fut dévolue la fonction épuratoire, l’Esprit, reçut-il par excellence la qualification de Saint : Credo in Spiritum sanctum et vivificantem.

XII. — The history of the establishment of Christianity can be summed up in a few pages.

Obeying the law of oppositions, which wants any exhausted system to be replaced by its opposite, Christianity poses as a contradictor of fallen religion. Don’t ask if it understands its time, if it understands itself. It denies paganism, it is paganism that it accuses of social dissolution: this is its fixed idea, this is its plan.

“They (the idolaters) changed, says the Apostle, the glory of the incorruptible God into simulacra of corruptible men, of birds, of quadrupeds, of serpents; they served the creature instead of the Creator, whom all ages must bless, amen. This is why God gave them up to the passions of their hearts, to impurity, to the ardor of their reprobate sense. It is why we see them full of iniquity, malice, wickedness, avarice, perversity, envy, murder, chicanery, and deceit; muddleheaded, slanderers, enemies of God, insolent, arrogant, inventors of crimes, without respect for their parents, without reason, without restraint, without charity, without faith or law.” (Rom., 1. 23-31.)

The depiction has nothing philosophical about it; it breathes calumny and hatred. What are we to expect from reformers who proceed with this discernment, with this moderation?

Thus Christianity, in the consciousness it has of itself, is not a reconciliation as the emperors sought it; nor is it a development as Apollonius and Jesus himself had the idea of it, legem non solvere, sed adimplere: it is an antithesis.

Now, as any antithesis can, by its nature, only give an incomplete idea; as, on the other hand, all reaction in the moral order as well as in the physical order is equal to action, it was therefore permissible to foresee that the new formula would contain, like all the others, only a part of the truth, if indeed there were any truth in it; then, that it would go in the evolution of its principle as far as polytheism had gone in the evolution of its own, which means that it would end in a similar fall.

Let us follow the history of Christian palingenesis.

Since it did not go beyond the religious idea, and persisted in regarding the transcendental principle as indispensable to the constitution of Justice, the first thing that Christianity had to do was to purify the theological concept, and to to sanctify, as it were, the Deity, dishonored by the previous revelation. In this it was following the road opened up by philosophy; there was still nothing original about it.

A single God, freed, as far as possible, from the physical and anthropomorphic attributes of the fallen gods, purged of all the scandals with which the ancient mythologists had most innocently covered their Immortals; a God infinitely holy, but distinct from matter, the cause of all defilement; a God, principle and true subject of Justice, who communicates his grace to man: such must have been, according to the law of historical contradiction, and such was in fact the first article of the Christian faith. (F)

We can already see what will help the Church, barely formed, to disentangle its dogma through the maze of opinions and to constitute its orthodoxy. Its rule of faith, its criterion, will be the contradiction to paganism, or rather the overthrow of the pagan system, and the separation of Christianity from all previous theogonies. Also, when later, and in accordance with this rule, the dogma of the Trinity became clearer in its metaphysical rigor, that of the three persons to whom was devolved the purifying function, the Spirit, received the qualification of saint par excellence: Credo in Spiritum sanctum et vivificantem.

XV

Mais ici surgissait une question pleine de périls.

Si le Dieu était déclaré pur, innocent des iniquités dont le déluge avait inondé la terre, la responsabilité du mal commis ne pouvant incomber aux anciens dieux, qui d’après la Bible et saint Paul étaient de purs néants, de vaines images des créatures, sur qui tomberait-elle ?

Dans l’état des idées et des choses le christianisme ne pouvait échapper à cette question, il était tenu de la résoudre. Le stoïcisme, le pythagorisme, qui ne l’avaient point résolue, n’avaient pu, à cause de cela, se faire accepter. L’explication de l’origine du mal, de la production du péché, était la condition sine qua non de la religion nouvelle.

Or, l’idée du Dieu trois fois saint admise en principe, l’explication en sortait toute seule.

Le coupable ne pouvait être que l’homme : solution d’autant plus satisfaisante, qu’elle présupposait la liberté. Comment l’homme, créature innocente de Dieu, était-il devenu coupable ? Comment, par un premier abus de son libre arbitre, s’était-il gangrené au point de devenir incapable par lui-même de toute justice ? C’est un mystère qu’on n’expliquait pas, mais qu’attestait suffisamment la corruption croissante, et, si j’ose ainsi dire, constitutionnelle, chronique de l’homme. À quelle époque faire remonter cette déchéance ? Tous les mythes la reportaient à l’âge d’or.

Le christianisme affirma donc le principe de la chute, ce fut son second article de foi. Puis il se chargea de l’expiation, ce fut son troisième article. Tout le christianisme se résume dans cette trilogie : Dieu créateur, Dieu médiateur ou expiateur, Dieu sanctificateur. Le reste n’est véritablement qu’accessoire.

Ainsi, du spectacle de la dissolution sociale combiné avec l’idée de Dieu pris pour principe de la Justice naquit ce dogme terrible, que l’homme est foncièrement dépravé, porté à mal ; qu’il n’y a que peu, bien peu d’honnêtes gens, ou, pour mieux dire, qu’il n’y en a pas du tout, etc.

Dieu, en un mot, ayant été fait à priori substance et sujet de la Justice, l’homme devint le sujet du péché ; ou, ce qui revient au même, l’homme ayant été déclaré corrompu et malicieux par nature, le siége de la Justice dut être reporté en Dieu : cela est géométrique.

XL. — But here arose a question full of perils.

If the God were declared pure, innocent of the iniquities with which the deluge had flooded the earth, the responsibility for the evil committed not being able to fall on the old gods, who according to the Bible and Saint Paul were pure nothingness, vain images of creatures, who would it fall on?

In the state of ideas and things, Christianity could not escape this question: it was bound to resolve it. Stoicism, Pythagoreanism, which had not solved it, had not been able, because of that, to make themselves accepted. The explanation of the origin of evil, of the production of sin, was the sine que non of the new religion.

Now, once the idea of the thrice-holy God was admitted in principle, the explanation would emerge by itself.

The culprit could only be man: a solution that was all the more satisfactory in that it presupposed liberty. How did man, an innocent creature of God, become guilty? How, by a first abuse of his free will, had he become gangrenous to the point of becoming incapable of any justice on his own? It is a mystery that was never explained, but which was sufficiently attested by the growing and, if I dare say so, constitutional, chronic corruption of man. To what period can this decline be traced back? All the myths carried it back to the golden age.

Christianity therefore affirmed the principle of the fall: this was its second article of faith. Then it charged itself with the atonement: that was its third article. All of Christianity is summed up in this trilogy: God creator, God mediator or expiator, God sanctifier. The rest is really just incidental.

Thus, from the spectacle of social dissolution, combined with the idea of God taken as the principle of Justice, was born this terrible dogma, that man is fundamentally depraved, borne to harm; that there are only a few, very few honest people, or, to put it better, that there are none at all, etc.

God, in a word, having been made a priori substance and subject of Justice, man became the subject of sin; or, what amounts to the same thing, man having been declared corrupt and malicious by birth, the seat of Justice had to be transferred to God: that is geometric.

Traduisons cette pensée en termes généraux : nous touchons à la source de toutes les servitudes et abominations de la terre.

Le problème de la Justice, ai-je dit (Étude I^er, ch. ii), résulte de l’opposition entre la société et l’individu.

La Justice est le rapport de subordination qui les unit.

En vertu du principe que le tout est plus précieux que la partie, le membre fait pour l’animal, non l’animal pour le membre, il implique contradiction de supposer la société en révolte contre l’individu ; l’individu seul peut être dit révolté contre la société, comme l’expérience prouve qu’il l’est en effet. La société, par elle-même, est sainte, impeccable. Toutes les théories communautaires, faisant de l’individualisme la cause du désordre social, supposent à priori cette impeccabilité. L’individu en effet, nonobstant sa destinée sociale, naissant égoïste, d’ailleurs libre, tout le péril vient de lui ; de lui seul naît le mal. Vis-à-vis de la société qui l’enveloppe et lui commande, la position de l’homme est celle d’un être inférieur, dangereux, nuisible ; et comme il ne peut jamais se dépouiller de son individualité, abdiquer son égoïsme, cet esprit de révolte qui l’anime, comme il ne saurait devenir une expression adéquate de la société, il est relativement à elle prévaricateur d’origine, déchu, dégradé.

En langage théologique, la sainteté essentielle de Dieu, expression symbolique de la société, implique la dégradation originelle de l’homme ; et réciproquement l’hypothèse plus ou moins empirique de la malfaisance innée de l’homme conduit à la conception de Dieu. Ces deux propositions s’appellent : là est le seul lien logique qui rattache l’homme à l’Être suprême.

Or qui dit Dieu ou déchéance dit implicitement Église, sacerdoce, commandement, obéissance ; dit expiation, rédemption, grâce ; dit enfin christianisme, puisqu’à moins d’affirmer le règne du mal, l’Église, le sacerdoce, et par ce moyen l’expiation et le retour en grâce, sont les seuls moyens de faire régner la Justice.

Conséquemment toute religion ou quasi-religion, quelle que soit son idole ou sa première hypothèse, qu’elle commence par poser théologiquement Dieu, ou bien abstractivement la société ; toute église qui s’affirme, au nom de l’un ou de l’autre de ces deux termes, comme le contrefort de la Justice et des mœurs, et qui à ce titre exige respect et obéissance de l’adepte, cette église-là, dis-je, cette religion, cette école, nie le droit individuel ; elle affirme le péché originel ni plus ni moins que le christianisme ; elle est anti-libérale et contre-révolutionnaire.

J’en citerai deux exemples.

XIV. — Let us take up this thought again, and first translate it into practical terms: we are touching the source of all the servitudes and abominations of the earth.

The problem of Justice results from the opposition of interests: Justice is the principle that is presumed to reconcile them. Its representative is society.

But, by virtue of the principle that the whole is more precious than the part, that the member is made for the animal, not the animal for the member, it implies a contradiction to suppose society in revolt against the individual; the individual alone can be said to be in revolt against society, as experience proves that he indeed is. Society, by itself, is holy, impeccable. All communitarian theories, making individualism the cause of social disorder, presuppose a priori this impeccability. The individual, in fact, notwithstanding his social destiny, being born egoistic, moreover free, all the danger comes from him; from him alone is born evil. Vis-a-vis the society which envelops and commands him, the position of man is that of an inferior, dangerous, harmful being; and since he can never strip himself of his individuality, abdicate his egoism, that spirit of revolt that animates him, as he cannot become an adequate expression of society, he is, relative to it, a wrongdoer from the beginning, fallen, degraded.

In theological language, the essential sanctity of God, symbolic expression of society, implies the original degradation of man; and reciprocally the more or less empirical hypothesis of the innate evil of man leads to the conception of God. These two propositions call to one another: that is the only logical link which, in the presence of the unexplained existence of sin, attaches man to the Supreme Being.

Now, whoever says God or degradation implicitly says Church, priesthood, command, obedience; says atonement, redemption, grace; finally says Christianity, since, short of affirming the reign of evil, the Church, the priesthood, and by this means expiation and return to grace, are the only means of making Justice reign.

Consequently, any religion or quasi-religion, whatever its idol or its first hypothesis, whether it begins by positing God theologically, or society abstractly; any church that asserts itself, in the name of one or the other of these two terms, as the buttress of Justice and morals, and which as such demands respect and obedience from the follower, this church, I say, this religion, this school, denies individual right; it affirms original sin neither more nor less than Christianity; it is anti-liberal and counter-revolutionary.

I will cite two examples.

XVI

Dans son dernier ouvrage, Terre et Ciel, M. Jean Reynaud, après avoir réfuté le mythe d’Ève et de la pomme, trop grossier à ce qu’il paraît pour sa raison, continue en ces termes :

« Quelles qu’aient été au juste l’espèce et les circonstances de la première faute commise, je n’avouerai pas moins que cette faute constitue un fait capital dans les annales de la terre. Par elle une révolution s’opère : le régime de la planète se transforme ; le principe du mal, absolument étranger jusqu’alors à cette résidence, s’y introduit et y jette les fondements de son règne terrible. L’instant est solennel ; et pour Dieu, qui mesure les événements, non dans leurs apparences, mais dans leurs suites, il y a là un coup prodigieux, et qui ne vient pas de lui. Dieu condamne donc, car il voit dans ce seul terme la chute de tous les hommes et toute la série de leurs égarements à venir… » (Terre et Ciel, p. 205.)

Quelle différence, pour un esprit philosophique, entre la théologie de M. Jean Reynaud et celle du prêtre qu’il s’efforce d’endoctriner ? De bonne foi, le dogme chrétien tient-il à la pomme ou à la pêche, car on n’est pas d’accord sur le fruit, et non pas plutôt à la désobéissance, quel qu’en ait été l’objet ? Et valait-il la peine de censurer le récit biblique, pour conclure ensuite dogmatiquement comme l’Église ?

L’autre exemple est encore plus instructif.

Parmi les nouvelles sectes, aucune ne s’est élevée avec plus de force contre le dogme de la déchéance que celle des saints-simoniens. Dans l’ardeur de sa négation, elle est allée jusqu’à diviniser le principe dont l’ancienne théologie faisait la cause du péché, à savoir la chair. Sainteté égale de la chair et de l’esprit, de l’âme et du corps, tel est le point de départ du saint-simonisme.

« Dieu est tout ce qui est, intelligence et matière, tout ce qui peut se voir et tout ce qui peut se comprendre. Tout est en lui et par lui. Nul de nous n’est hors de lui, mais aucun de nous n’est lui. Chacun de nous vit de sa vie, et tous nous communions en lui. »

Suivant une autre exégèse :

« Le Dieu chrétien ne s’était incarné qu’en Christ ; le Dieu saint-simonien s’incarne dans l’humanité. »

Voilà le dogme, renouvelé de saint Paul, de Spinoza, etc. Tout en nous donc, le corps aussi bien que l’âme, participant de la nature divine, il semble que nous devions être cette fois à l’abri de toute déchéance. Il n’en est rien : la divinité de la chair, pas plus que celle de l’esprit, ne nous sauvera de la dégradation.

Après la réhabilitation de la chair, je trouve dans la doctrine dont M. Enfantin est resté le chef deux choses : le principe hiérarchique, adopté comme loi de l’organisme social ; et la formule d’hiérarchie, À chacun selon sa capacité, à chaque capacité selon ses œuvres.

Or, qui est le juge de la capacité et de l’œuvre ? Le prêtre, le couple sacerdotal, représentant par son androgynie la dualité substantielle de Dieu ; le prêtre, initiateur et chef de la religion. C’est sur la judicature sacerdotale qu’est fondée la hiérarchie saint-simonienne.

Juge de la capacité !… Prosterne-toi, Église du Christ. Tu n’as humilié que la chair, l’église de Saint-Simon humilie l’esprit. C’est par la titillation de la chair que suivant toi nous étions déchus ; suivant Saint-Simon, ou plutôt suivant son vicaire, M. Enfantin, c’est par les fausses suggestions de notre entendement. C’était le corps et tout ce qui s’y rapporte que tu voulais en conséquence châtier ; c’est à la conscience que s’adresse cette nouvelle discipline. L’inégalité sociale, nous disait la révélation chrétienne, est l’effet de la révolte des sens. Erreur, répond M. Enfantin, elle résulte de l’imperfection nécessaire du jugement. Connais-toi toi-même, avait dit l’oracle de Delphes. C’est inutile, réplique la sagesse enfantine : le prêtre, l’homme de l’amour et de la synthèse, est là qui vous connaît et vous apprécie mieux que vous ne sauriez faire. Buvez donc et mangez, engraissez, faites des enfants et de la richesse ; le surplus ne vous regarde pas.

Ainsi le saint-simonisme se réduit à un coup de bascule. Avant lui, la chair et toutes les affections qu’elle inspire avaient été sacrifiées au salut de l’âme, particule du souffle divin ; maintenant c’est le moi dont la dignité est sacrifiée par la décision du prêtre à la conservation de la chair, partie du corps de Dieu : ce qui implique toujours dégradation, et la pire des dégradations.

Homme, disait l’église du Christ, tu es déchu par la concupiscence ; obéis à mon commandement, et je sauverai ton âme pour l’éternité.

Homme, reprend l’église d’Enfantin, tu es déchu par les hallucinations de ton génie ; soumets ton jugement, et je sauverai ta chair de la misère.

Les saints-simoniens se vantent en effet de détruire le paupérisme, ce qui n’est vraiment pas merveilleux à la condition qu’ils y mettent, le sacrifice de la volonté. Le difficile, c’est de préserver à la fois de la déchéance l’âme et le corps, c’est de sauver dans son intégralité la dignité de l’homme.

Aussi n’est-il d’aristocratie pire que celle imaginée par les disciples de Saint-Simon.

Dans le christianisme, après tout, l’homme-déchu n’étant châtié que dans cette vie mortelle ; le prolétariat, le travail servile, le paupérisme, n’étant que des accidents de la fatalité, que le jugement de Dieu faisait tourner à l’expiation des âmes, la meilleure partie de nous-mêmes restait intacte, et dans une certaine mesure inviolable. Jamais il n’entra dans la pensée chrétienne que les âmes fussent inégales en droits ; au contraire, il est de principe que tous sont égaux en Christ et devant Dieu. Le prêtre, ne jugeant pas les âmes, ne classe point les vivants selon leurs capacités ; il se borne à accepter, comme manifestation providentielle, le hasard de la naissance et des positions sociales, et impose au riche, en conséquence, la charité, au pauvre la résignation.

En Saint-Simon, c’est tout autre chose. L’homme est frappé dans son cœur, son âme, son esprit, son intelligence, son essence ; c’est la déchéance du moi dans ce qu’il a de plus intime, une archi-déchéance, une déchéance qui saisit l’homme avant sa conception dans le sein maternel, qui commence à l’émanation des âmes, au premier acte de la pensée divine.

Que je sois pauvre par nécessité, par accident, par décret providentiel, je puis me résigner en pensant que cela ne touche en fin de compte qu’à l’extérieur de mon être, à la superficie de ma personne ; et en me résignant je sens que je vaux, par ma résignation et mon dévouement, le plus vertueux de mes frères.

Mais qu’un prêtre, M. Enfantin et son épouse, M. Lambert ou tout autre, des hommes que je veux bien honorer tant qu’il leur plaira de rester hommes, se permettent de tarifer ma capacité, en conséquence de marquer ma place au soleil et de régler ma pitance tandis qu’ils s’adjugent des millions, j’avoue que ceci me révolte, et que si j’avais l’honneur de vivre dans l’église de Saint-Simon mon premier mouvement serait de souffleter le pontife.

On peut faire des observations analogues sur la religion positive de M. Auguste Comte, qui, au nom du vrai grand Être humanitaire, nie à priori la Justice, pose en principe le dévouement, et absorbe l’individu dans l’organisme collectif, devenu Dieu et en exerçant tous les droits ; — sur le déisme des éclectiques, et en particulier sur celui de M. Jules Simon, qui pose également en principe le devoir, et reporte le droit en Dieu, substance et sujet de la Justice ; — enfin, sur toute conception religieuse ou sociale, qu’elle soit d’ailleurs théiste, panthéiste ou athée, qui, pour déterminer les rapports de l’homme avec ses semblables, fait appel à un principe antérieur, supérieur ou extérieur à l’homme.

Toutes ces théories impliquent déchéance de l’humanité, et, ce qui paraîtra encore plus étrange, attendu leurs prétentions au rationalisme, elles impliquent l’idée de Christ, c’est-à-dire d’une incarnation divine.

Un mot sur ce sujet, et je clos ce chapitre.

XV. — In his last work, Terre et Ciel, M. Jean Reynaud, after having refuted the literal meaning of the myth of Eve and the apple, too coarse, it seems, for his reason, continues in these terms:

“Whatever the species and the circumstances of the first fault committed, I will not admit less that this fault constitutes a capital fact in the annals of the earth. Through it a revolution takes place: the regime of the planet is transformed; the principle of evil, hitherto absolutely foreign to this residence, is introduced there and lays there the foundations of its terrible reign. The moment is solemn; and for God, who measures events, not in their appearances, but in their consequences, there is a prodigious blow there, and one that does not come from him. God therefore condemns, because he sees in this single term the fall of all men and the whole series of their errors to come. (Earth and Sky, p. 205.)

What a difference, for a philosophical mind, between the theology of M. Jean Reynaud and that of the priest whom he endeavors to indoctrinate? In good faith, does Christian dogma hold on to the apple or the peach, because we do not agree on the fruit, and not rather on disobedience, whatever the object may have been? And was it worth censuring the biblical account, only to conclude dogmatically like the Church?

The other example is even more instructive.

Among the new sects, none rose with more force against the dogma of decay than that of the Saint-Simonians. In the ardor of its denial, it went so far as to deify the principle that ancient theology made the cause of sin, namely the flesh. Equal sanctity of the flesh and the spirit, of the soul and the body, such is the point of departure of Saint-Simonism.

“God is all that is, intelligence and matter, all that can be seen and all that can be understood. Everything is in him and through him. None of us is beside himself, but none of us are him. Each of us lives his life, and we all have communion in him.”

According to another exegesis:

“The Christian God was incarnate only in Christ; the Saint-Simonian God is incarnated in humanity.”

This is the dogma, renewed by Saint Paul, by Spinoza, etc. Everything in us, therefore, the body as well as the soul, participating in the divine nature, it seems that we should be this time sheltered from all decline. It is not so: the divinity of the flesh will not save us from degradation, any more than that of the spirit.

After the rehabilitation of the flesh, we find, in the doctrine of which M. Enfantin remained the head, two things: the hierarchical principle, adopted as the law of the social organism; and the hierarchical formula, To each according to his capacity, to each capacity according to its works.

Now, who is the judge of capacity and work? The priest, the priestly couple, representing by his androgyny the substantial duality of God; the priest, initiator and leader of the religion. It is on the priestly magistracy that the Saint-Simonian hierarchy is founded.

Judge of capacity!.…. Bow down, Church of Christ. You have humbled only the flesh, the church of Saint-Simon humbles the spirit. It is by the titillation of the flesh that according to you we were fallen; according to Saint-Simon, or rather according to his vicar, M. Enfantin, it is by the false suggestions of our understanding. It was the body and all that relates to it that you therefore wanted to chastise; it is to the conscience that this new discipline is addressed. Social inequality, Christian revelation told us, is the effect of the revolt of the senses. Error, replies M. Enfantin, results from the necessary imperfection of judgment. Know thyself, the oracle of Delphi had said. It is useless, replies the Enfantinian wisdom: the priest, the man of love and synthesis, is there who knows you and appreciates you better than you could possibly do. So drink and eat, fatten up, have children and wealth: the surplus is none of your business.

Thus Saint-Simonism is reduced to a swing of the scales. Before it, the flesh and all the affections it inspires had been sacrificed to the salvation of the soul, particle of the divine breath; now it is the self whose dignity is sacrificed by the decision of the priest to the preservation of the flesh, part of the body of God: which always implies degradation, and the worst of degradations.

Man, said the church of Christ, you are fallen through lust; obey my command, and I will save your soul for eternity.

Man, resumes the Church of Enfantin, you are deposed by the hallucinations of your genius; submit your judgment, and I will save the flesh from misery.

The Saint-Simonians indeed boast of destroying pauperism, which is really not marvelous on the condition that they put in it, the sacrifice of the will. The difficult thing is to preserve both the soul and the body from decay, it is to save the dignity of man in its integrity.

Also there is no worse aristocracy than that imagined by the disciples of Saint-Simon.

In Christianity, after all, fallen man being punished only in this mortal life; the proletariat, slave labor, pauperism, being only accidents of fatality, which the judgment of God turned into the expiation of souls, the best part of ourselves remained intact, and, to a certain extent , inviolable. It never entered Christian thought that souls were unequal in rights; on the contrary, it is the principle that all are equal in Christ and before God. The priest, not judging souls, does not classify the living according to their capacities; he confines himself to accepting, as a providential manifestation, the chance of birth and social position, and he imposes charity on the rich, and resignation on the poor.

In Saint-Simon, it is quite another thing. Man is struck in his heart, his soul, his spirit, his intelligence, his essence; it is the forfeiture of the self in what is most intimate, an arch-forfeiture, a forfeiture that seizes man before his conception in the maternal womb, which begins with the emanation of souls, with the first act of divine thought.

Let me be poor by necessity, by accident, by providential decree, I can resign myself to the thought that this only affects, in the end, the exterior of my being, the surface of my person; and in resigning myself I feel that I am worth, by my resignation and my devotion, the most virtuous of my brothers.

But that a priest, M. Enfantin and his wife, M. Lambert or any other, men whom I am willing to honor as long as it pleases them to remain men, allow themselves to rate my capacity, to mark my place in the sun and to settle my pittance while they take millions, I admit that this revolts me, and that if I had the honor of living in the church of Saint-Simon my first impulse would be to slap the pontiff. .

We can make analogous observations on the positive religion of M. Auguste Comte, who, in the name of the true great Humanitary Being, denies justice a priori, posits devotion in principle, and absorbs the individual into the collective organism, become God and exercising all rights; —- on the deism of the eclectics, and in particular on that of M. Jules Simon, who also posits duty in principle, and refers right to God, substance and subject of Justice (H); — finally, on any religious or social conception, whether theistic, pantheistic or atheistic, which, in order to determine the relations of man with his fellows, appeals to a principle prior to, superior to or external to the man.

All these theories imply the decline of humanity, and, what will seem even stranger, in view of their claims to rationalism, they imply the idea of Christ, that is to say of a divine incarnation.

A word on this subject, and I will close this chapter.

XVII

La critique moderne s’égaie volontiers sur la manière un peu leste dont fut faite au concile de Nicée la promulgation du grand dogme chrétien ; la dispute sur l’homousios ou homoïousios, surtout, a fourni matière aux plaisanteries. On va voir cependant que si jamais il y eut, de la part d’une assemblée humaine, un acte nécessaire autant que rationnel, ce fut la fameuse constitution dite Symbole de Nicée.

Au point où le christianisme et l’empire romain avec lui étaient parvenus en l’an 325, treize ans après la conversion de Constantin, la situation des esprits était telle :

L’ancienne religion était renversée ; il n’y avait plus de dieux.

Or, l’Humanité croyait fortement à Dieu, elle ne pouvait se passer de Dieu.

Ce Dieu, encore inconnu, devait être l’expression de la pensée générale sur le souverain bien, la nature de l’âme, le principe de la Justice, l’origine du mal, la rédemption, la sanctification et la fin de l’homme.

Il fallait donc, comme je l’ai dit plus haut (pages 133 et suiv.), que ce Dieu fût sujet de la Justice ou Verbe ; de plus, qu’il fût rédempteur ou victime, par conséquent qu’il fût homme.

Il était d’autant plus nécessaire que ce Dieu fût homme, un être vivant, personnel, aimant, souffrant, visible, palpable, qu’en tout état de cause la religion exige pour sa propre réalité que l’Être divin sorte de l’abstraction, qu’il se réalise, se personnifie, se produise, s’incarne en une manifestation accessible à toutes nos facultés (p. 111 et suiv.).

Les peuples avaient cru à Jupiter, à Vénus, à Apollon, à Sérapis, à Mithra : ils se seraient crus athées, s’ils s’étaient vus réduits à un dieu métaphysique, comme le Νοὗς d’Anaxagore. Le déisme, dit fort bien Bossuet, supportable comme hypothèse de philosophie, dans la pratique est un athéisme déguisé.

La divinité du Christ, en un mot, était la condition sine quâ non de l’existence du christianisme.

Avec Arius, le Christ redevenait un homme, un prophète, un révélateur de la famille de Moïse, de Zoroastre, d’Orphée. On demandait le Dieu.

Ce Dieu, le concile le donna : il fit en cela acte de haute politique, de haute intelligence, et d’un vrai sens religieux. L’ignorance reprochée aux évêques du parti orthodoxe fut ici plus savante, plus logique, plus loyale, elle fit preuve de plus de génie qu’Arius et toute sa bande.

La décision de Nicée fut la conclusion légitime de l’élaboration gnostique qui, dès longtemps avant l’apparition du Messie, agitait le problème de sa divinité. Plus on remontait dans la tradition, observait Arius, plus on voyait faiblir cette opinion ; et il tirait de cet affaiblissement rétrospectif un argument de sa fausseté. Mais c’était justement la preuve que plus le paganisme s’effaçait devant la religion du Christ, plus une réalisation nouvelle de l’essence divine devenait urgente ; plus, sous ce besoin des esprits, la qualité transcendante du Christ, soupçonnée depuis six ou sept siècles, et peu à peu affirmée, devenait lumineuse.

Il fallait donc, de toute nécessité, à peine d’un athéisme général, que le messie Jésus, natif de Galilée, crucifié sous Ponce-Pilate, sans perdre sa qualité d’homme, fût reconnu Dieu ; que sa mère fût dite mère de Dieu ; qu’en lui se trouvassent réunies deux natures et deux volontés, non pas en ce sens qu’il fût moitié homme et moitié Dieu, mais qu’il cumulât dans leur intégralité les deux natures humaine et divine. Le paganisme avait eu des demi-dieux, naïveté théologique que le christianisme redressa avec force et autorité, en posant l’Homme-Dieu.

Cela vous semble insensé, à vous autres druides, partisans de la métempsycose et de la religion naturelle, qui vous croyez philosophes. Mais ne vous y trompez pas : ce qui est arrivé pour le christianisme arrivera pour toute église fondée sur une conception métaphysique du grand Être, et qui saura, avec logique et conviction, déduire la thèse. Tôt ou tard cette église, prétendue spiritualiste, sera amenée à réaliser son concept et à se tailler un Dieu dans la chair, à peine de s’évanouir elle-même dans le néant.

C’est ainsi que s’est formé le polythéisme ou l’idolâtrie ; que le jéhovisme a abouti au messianisme, dont le mahométisme n’est qu’une dégénérescence ; c’est ainsi que depuis l’établissement du christianisme jusqu’à nos jours on a vu, à diverses époques, des religionnaires exaltés se donner qui pour christ, qui pour paraclet, qui tout bonnement pour dieu.

La raison de ce phénomène est dans notre puissance anthropomorphique, ou faculté de réaliser, en corps et en âme, la divinité.

Regardez le déisme de M. Cousin, celui des Écossais ou de M. Jules Simon : le travail de réalisation est déjà à moitié fait. Leur Dieu n’est-il pas vivant, personnel, volontaire, savant, prévoyant, gouvernant, juge, vengeur et rémunérateur ? Il a une vie, une âme, une conscience, un amour, une liberté : que lui manque-t-il ? Un corps ? C’est la moindre chose, vraiment. Spinoza, disciple de Descartes, a prouvé par sa géométrie comment l’esprit et la matière sont les deux modes de la substance divine. Or, vous n’avez pas encore réfuté Spinoza. Aussi n’a-t-il pas tenu au messianiste Wronski que le dieu de Hégel, le même que celui de Spinoza, ne devînt le Christ Alexandre.

Prétendre que l’être de Dieu, ou, ce qui revient au même, son concept, se réduise, s’arrête à la condition d’esprit pur, c’est affirmer que la matière est étrangère à la nature divine ; que l’on sait par conséquent ce qu’est cette nature et ce qu’est cette matière, ce que c’est qu’un corps et ce que c’est qu’un esprit : toutes prétentions de la plus haute impertinence.

XIV. — Modern criticism gladly amuses itself with the somewhat hasty manner in which the promulgation of the great Christian dogma was made at the Council of Nicaea; the dispute over the homoousios or homoïousios, above all, provided material for jokes. We will see, however, that if ever there was, on the part of a human assembly, an act necessary as well as rational, it was the famous constitution known as the Symbol of Nicaea.

At the point where Christianity and the empire had reached in the year 325, thirteen years after the conversion of Constantine, the situation of minds was such:

The old religion was overturned: there were no more gods.

However, humanity strongly believed in God; it could not do without God.

This God, still unknown, was to be the expression of the general thought on the sovereign good, the nature of the soul, the principle of Justice, the origin of evil, redemption, sanctification and the end of man.

It was therefore necessary, as we have said above, that this God should be the subject of Justice or the Word; moreover, that he was a victim redeemer, consequently that he was a man.

It was all the more necessary that this God be man, a living, personal, loving, suffering, visible, palpable being, since in any case religion requires for its own reality that the divine Being escape from abstraction, that it is realized, personified, produced, embodied in a manifestation accessible to all our faculties.

The peoples had believed in Jupiter, Venus, Apollo, Serapis, Mithras: they would have believed themselves to be atheists if they had seen themselves reduced to a metaphysical god, like the Nous of Anaxagoras. Deism, says Bossuet very well, supportable as a philosophical hypothesis, in practice is atheism in disguise.

The divinity of Christ, in a word, was the condition sine qua non of the existence of Christianity.

With Arius, Christ once again became a man, a prophet, a revealer of the family of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Orpheus. We asked for God.

This was the God that the council gave: in this way, it performed an act of high policy, high intelligence, and a true religious sense.

The ignorance reproached to the bishops of the orthodox party was here more learned, more logical, more loyal, it gave proof of more genius than Arius and all his band.

The decision of Nicaea was the legitimate conclusion of the Gnostic elaboration that, long before the appearance of the Messiah, raised the question of his divinity. The further back in tradition one went, observed Arius, the more one saw this opinion weaken; and he drew from this retrospective weakening an argument for its falsity. But it was precisely the proof that the more paganism gave way before the religion of Christ, the more urgent a new realization of the divine essence became; moreover, under this need of spirits, the transcendent quality of Christ, suspected for six or seven centuries, and little by little affirmed, became luminous.

It was therefore necessary, out of all necessity, at pain of a general atheism, that the messiah Jesus, a native of Galilee, crucified under Pontius Pilate, without losing his quality of man, should be recognized as God; that his mother be said to be the mother of God; that in him would be found two natures and two wills united, not in the sense that he was half man and half God, but that he emulated in their fullness the two human and divine natures. Paganism had had demi-gods, a theological naïveté that Christianity redressed with force and authority, by positing the Man-God.

This seems insane to you, to you druids, partisans of metempsychosis and natural religion, who believe that you are philosophers. But make no mistake about it: what happened to Christianity will happen to any church founded on a metaphysical conception of the great Being, which will be able, with logic and conviction, to deduce its thesis. Sooner or later this church, so-called spiritualist, will be able to realize its concept and carve out a God in the flesh, or else vanish itself into nothingness.

It is in this way that polytheism or idolatry was formed; that Jehovism ended in messianism, of which Mahometism is only a degeneration; it is thus that from the establishment of Christianity up to our own day we have seen, at various times, exalted religionists who give themselves, some for Christ, some for the paraclete, some quite simply for God.

The reason for this phenomenon is in our anthropomorphic power, or faculty of realizing divinity, in body and in soul.

Look at the deism of Mr. Cousin, that of the Scots or Mr. Jules Simon: the work of realization is already half done. Is not their God living, personal, voluntary, knowing, providing, governing, judging, vengeful and remunerative? He has a life, a soul, a conscience, a love, a liberty: what is he missing? A body? It’s the smallest thing, really. Spinoza, disciple of Descartes, proved by his geometry how spirit and matter are the two modes of divine substance. Now, you have not yet refuted Spinoza. Also he did not hold to the messianist Wronski that the god of Hegel, the same as that of Spinoza, did not become, one day the Christ Napoleon, the next day the Christ Alexander.

To claim that the being of God, or, what amounts to the same thing, his concept, stops at the condition of pure spirit, is to affirm that matter is foreign to the divine nature; that we therefore know what this nature is and what this matter is, what a body is and what a spirit is: all claims of the highest impertinence.

XVIII

Le dogme de l’Incarnation, développé et rendu populaire du premier au quatrième siècle de notre ère, semblait de nature à relever singulièrement notre espèce et à l’enorgueillir. Mais l’Incarnation était le corrélatif de la chute, dont le sentiment, l’emportant dans les âmes produisit une tristesse mortelle. L’Apôtre en rend témoignage : Nous savons, dit-il, que toute créature gémit et qu’elle est en travail : Scimus enim quod omnis creatura ingemiscit, et parturit usque adhuc (Rom., viii, 22). Et encore : La désolation du siècle produit la mort : Sæculi tristitia mortem operatur (II Cor., vii, 10).

Quoi de plus horrible en effet qu’une doctrine dont le principe est qu’il n’y a pas, parmi les humains, d’âme foncièrement honnête ; que la Justice est étrangère à ce bas-monde ; que la vertu n’appartient pas à l’humanité, et autres propos de misanthropie dévote ? Qu’attendre, pour la réforme des mœurs, de cette déclaration d’indignité universelle ? Au lieu de nous tirer de l’abîme, n’est-elle pas faite plutôt pour nous y enfoncer davantage ?

Nous aussi, génération du dix-neuvième siècle, nous avons épuisé la fureur des révolutions, la sottise des masses, l’insolence des despotes, la rage des partis, l’égoïsme des exploiteurs, la manie gouvernementale et réglementaire. Nous assistons à la décomposition de nos mœurs. Et comme au temps des Césars, il ne manque pas de prédicants, néo-chrétiens, ex-chrétiens, matérialistes, spiritualistes, panthéistes et athées, pour nous avertir de nous refaire une religion et une idole, attendu que nous ne pouvons rien attendre de bon de nous-mêmes, méchants et sots que nous sommes. Avec quelle surprise nous avons vu des hommes qui se disaient révolutionnaires offrir, en guise de consolation, cette triste thèse à leurs amis abattus !

Il faut un nouveau culte, il faut de nouveaux fers,
Il faut un nouveau dieu pour l’aveugle univers.

C’est la démocratie qui tient aujourd’hui ce langage de Mahomet. Comme si le dogme de la chute, comme si l’idée religieuse n’était pas devenue, par toute l’Europe, le mot d’ordre de la contre-révolution elle-même ! Comme si ceux qui depuis 1848 ont le plus déclamé contre la canaille humaine n’étaient pas précisément ce que le siècle compte de plus vil et de plus dépravé !

Rassurez-vous, druide, mage, brachmane, ou qui que vous soyez : cette Révolution que vous avez défendue, apparemment sans la comprendre, elle est le sel qui, sans autre invocation, nous préserve de la pourriture finale, le ferment immortel qui rend notre vertu vivace et victorieuse. Que la contre-révolution triomphante nous retienne dans cette ignominie tant qu’elle pourra, que des nations y succombent, que la vieille Gaule en reste pour un temps déchue, une troisième phase religieuse est impossible. Vous le reconnaissez vous-même : une philosophie positive peut seule désormais parler à la raison des peuples. Or, qui dit philosophie, analyse, démonstration, exclut le mystère, conséquemment le respect, religionem : car sans le respect l’idée théologique devient étrangère à la morale, et le dogme de la chute reste un non-sens.

Chacun de nos progrès est le fruit du temps et vient à son heure. Comme l’institution chrétienne était donnée dans l’institution polythéiste deux mille ans avant la naissance du Christ, de même l’institution de la liberté, que la Révolution française a fait lever sur le monde, était donnée dans le christianisme avant même que celui-ci se fût nommé, alors qu’il n’existait encore que dans la contingence des choses.

L’heure de la liberté est-elle donc venue, comme toutes les analogies de l’histoire induisent à le croire ? Toute la question est là. Naturellement l’Église le nie, sur la foi de ses promesses ; je l’affirme, sur des considérations d’un autre ordre, dont je vais actuellement, Monseigneur, vous faire part.

XVII. — The dogma of the Incarnation, developed and made popular from the first to the fourth century of our era, seemed of a nature to singularly elevate our species and to make it proud. But the Incarnation was the correlative of the fall, the feeling of which, prevailing in souls, produced a mortal sadness. The Apostle bears witness to this: We know, he says, that every creature groans and is in labour: Scimus enim quod omnis creatura ingemiscit, et parturit usque adhuc (Rom., vi, 22). And again: The desolation of the century produces death: Sæculi tristitia mortem operatur (II Cor., vn, 40).

What could be more horrible indeed than a doctrine whose principle is that there is not, among humans, a fundamentally honest soul; that Justice is foreign to this low world; that virtue does not belong to humanity, and other talk of devout misanthropy? What can we expect, for the reform of mores, from this declaration of universal indignity? Instead of withdrawing us from the abyss, is it not rather made to sink us deeper into it?

We too, the generation of the nineteenth century, have exhausted the fury of revolutions, the stupidity of the masses, the insolence of despots, the rage of parties, the selfishness of exploiters, the governmental and regulatory mania. We are witnessing the decomposition of our mores. And as in the time of the Caesars, there is no lack of preachers, neo-Christians, ex-Christians, materialists, spiritualists, pantheists and atheists, to warn us to remake a religion and an idol for ourselves, since we can expect nothing from good of ourselves, wicked and foolish as we are. With what surprise we have seen men who called themselves revolutionaries offer, by way of consolation, this sad thesis to our dejected friends!

We need a new cult, we need new irons, We needs a new god for the blind universe.

It is democracy that today maintains this language of Muhammad (C). As if the dogma of the fall, as if the religious idea had not become, throughout Europe, the watchword of the counter-revolution itself! As if those who since 1848 have declaimed the most against the human rabble were not precisely the most depraved of the century!

Rest assured, druid, mage, brahmin, or whoever you are: this Revolution that you have defended, apparently without understanding it, is the salt that, without further ceremony, preserves us from final decay, the immortal leaven that makes our living and victorious virtue. Let the triumphant counter-revolution keep us in this ignominy as long as it can, let nations succumb to it, let old Gaul remain for a time fallen, a third religious phase is impossible. You recognize it yourself: a positive philosophy alone can henceforth speak to the reason of peoples. Now, whoever says philosophy, analysis, demonstration, excludes mystery, consequently respect, religionem: for without respect the theological idea becomes foreign to morals, and the dogma of the fall remains nonsense (H).

Each of our progresses is the fruit of time and comes at its own time. As the Christian institution was given in the polytheistic institution two thousand years before the birth of Christ, so the institution of liberty, which the French Revolution gave rise to in the world, was given in Christianity even before that faith had named himself, when it still existed only in the contingency of things.

Has the hour of liberty then come, as all the analogies of history lead one to believe? The whole question is there. Naturally, the Church denies it, on the faith of its promises; I affirm it, on considerations of another order, which I am now going to share with you, Monsignor.

CHAPITRE V.

Si le Christianisme a sauvé la dignité humaine ? Péril croissant de la Justice.

XIX

D’après l’étude que nous venons de faire de l’évolution

polythéiste, l’heure a sonné pour une religion quand la conscience troublée vient à se demander, non pas si cette religion est vraie : le doute frappant sur le dogme ne suffit pas pour faire tomber une religion ; — non pas davantage si elle a besoin de réformes : les réformes en matière de foi prouvent la vitalité religieuse ; — mais si cette religion, réputée si longtemps la gardienne et le soutien des mœurs, suffit à sa tâche, ce que je traduis en autres termes, si elle a véritablement une morale.

C’est par là, vous le savez, Monseigneur, que périt le paganisme. Ni les platoniciens et les sceptiques, ni l’école du Portique ou celle d’Épicure, ni la critique chrétienne elle-même, en tant qu’elle s’attachait aux fables, ne suffirent à l’enlever. Il s’écroula le jour où toutes les intelligences furent saisies de cette idée, que le paganisme n’avait point de morale, qu’il était immoral.

Ainsi en sera-t-il tout à l’heure du royaume messianique. Je suis la voix qui, après tant et de si fatigantes controverses, demande, au nom de la conscience universelle, non plus si la foi est d’accord avec la raison, s’il y a des abus à corriger dans l’Église, si le clergé a des mœurs édifiantes, etc. : — il ne s’agit plus, pour notre époque, de la métaphysique du dogme, pas plus que de la vie privée des prêtres ; — mais si le christianisme possède une morale, ce qui est tout autre chose.

Et je réponds avec tristesse, comme le président de la Convention prononçant le verdict de culpabilité contre Louis XVI : Non, le christianisme n’a point de morale ; il ne peut pas même en avoir une…. Puis donc qu’après dix-huit siècles d’existence l’Église chrétienne se trouve dans le même cas où se trouva, après deux mille ans de durée, l’église polythéiste, qui périt parce qu’elle n’avait point de morale, elle est perdue.

CHAPTER V.

Has Christianity saved human dignity? Growing Peril of Justice.

XVIII. — According to the study we have just made of polytheistic evolution, the hour has struck for a religion when the troubled conscience comes to ask itself, not if this religion is true: doubt striking the the dogma is not enough to bring down a religion;—nor if it needs reforms: reforms in matters of faith prove religious vitality; — but if this religion, deemed for so long the guardian and support of mores, is sufficient for its task, which I translate into other terms, if it really has a morality.

It is through this, you know, Monseigneur, that paganism perishes. Neither the Platonists and the Skeptics, nor the school of the Portico or that of Epicurus, nor Christian criticism itself, insofar as it attached itself to fables, was enough to remove it. It collapsed the day when all intelligences were seized with the idea that paganism had no morality, that it was immoral.

So it will be shortly with the messianic kingdom. I am the voice that ask, after so many and such tiring controversies, in the name of the universal conscience, no longer whether faith agrees with reason, whether there are abuses to be corrected in the Church, if the clergy has edifying mores: — it is no longer a question, for our time, of the metaphysics of dogma, any more than of the private life of priests; — but if Christianity possesses a morality, which is quite another thing.

And I answer with sadness, like the President of the Convention pronouncing the guilty verdict against Louis XVI: No, Christianity has no morals; it cannot even have one… Since then, after eighteen centuries of existence, the Christian Church finds itself in the same situation in which, after two thousand years, the polytheistic Church found itself, which perished because that she had no morals, it is lost.

XX

Cherchons dans le dogme chrétien la raison métaphysique, théologique, de cette non-moralité. Le christianisme n’avait pas oublié que le trait le plus saillant de la dissolution païenne était la perte de la liberté et de la dignité personnelle ; qu’en conséquence le caractère spécial de la rédemption devait être de restituer cette dignité. Votre salut, dit l’Apôtre, a coûté cher, pretio redempti estis ; voulant marquer par là de quelle dignité était aux regards de Dieu l’âme de l’homme. Aussi, à l’exemple de l’Apôtre, si l’Église parle beaucoup d’expiation et de pénitence, on peut dire qu’elle parle encore plus de réhabilitation. Les apologistes chrétiens ne manquent pas de faire valoir cette excellente idée de la réhabilitation des âmes, dont le paganisme, lui, ne s’occupait guère. Et tous les jours l’Église témoigne à cet égard de son vif intérêt, par le zèle qu’elle déploie pour la conversion des infidèles, le baptême des enfants et l’absolution des agonisants.

Par malheur, cette réhabilitation se passe en figures, affaire de mysticisme et de spiritualité. Le royaume du Christ n’est pas de ce monde : cette dignité précieuse, que l’empire avilissant de César faisait perdre aux personnes, le christianisme promet de la leur rendre… dans l’autre vie ! Et il en est de même de la liberté, de l’égalité, de la richesse, de la science, de l’amour, de la sanctification. Ces biens que rien ne saurait compenser, condition de toute morale, ne doivent se réaliser que dans le ciel.

C’est bien autre chose vraiment pour ce qui est de la pénitence et de la mortification : là est suivant l’Évangile la véritable réalité terrestre. Dès qu’il s’agit de punir, le royaume du Christ apparaît, riches, pour vous dépouiller ; puissants, pour vous humilier ; esclaves, pour vous entretenir dans votre misère.

D’abord, l’homme étant, de par la révélation nouvelle, coupable devant Dieu, le rapport qui dans la société païenne avait existé entre la Justice et la religion fut interverti. La Justice passa au second rang, la religion eut les honneurs. La dignité personnelle subordonnée à l’adoration par ce simple changement, les individualités, qui jadis relevaient de leur droit, sui juris, se trouvèrent, il est vrai, de niveau en présence de la majesté suprême, mais abaissées de toute leur hauteur.

Dans le système chrétien, en effet, l’homme, auteur du mal, ne peut pas par lui-même avoir de droits ; il est hors le droit, ex-lex, il n’a que des devoirs. Qu’il éprouve des besoins, des aspirations, une certaine fierté, une estime de sa personne ; qu’en conséquence il sollicite pour ces besoins, pour ces aspirations, pour tout ce qui compose sa dignité, image de la dignité divine, le respect des autres, on l’accorde ; mais qu’il ait droit, de son fonds, à ce respect, on le nie positivement. Il n’y a rien dans l’homme qui justifie cette exigence, elle ne se conçoit même pas. Comment la dignité de mon prochain pourrait-elle faire que je la respectasse, si je n’y suis déterminé par une autre cause ? Ne suis-je pas autant que lui ? D’homme à homme nous ne nous devons rien, à moins que l’intervention d’un tiers plus puissant, nous obligeant tous deux envers lui, ne nous crée par cette obligation un devoir mutuel.

Les modernes théoriciens du droit et du devoir, qui tout en se séparant de l’Église en suivent fatalement la logique, tiennent absolument le même langage. Pour eux aussi c’est le devoir qui est donné le premier ; le droit n’est qu’une induction, une dépendance. Ainsi parlent MM. Jules Simon, Oudot, Auguste Comte, tous les communistes et religionnaires. N’est-ce pas la grandeur du christianisme d’avoir tellement absorbé en lui la substance de la religion, que ceux qui rêvent de le remplacer ne peuvent être que des copistes, et que hors de l’Église il n’y a pour l’adorateur ni logique, ni bonne foi ?

XIX. — Let us seek in Christian dogma the metaphysical, theological reason for this non-morality.

Christianity had not forgotten that the most salient feature of heathen dissolution was the loss of personal dignity, that therefore the special character of redemption must be to restore that dignity. Your salvation, says the Apostle, has cost dearly, pretio redempti cstis, wanting to show by that how costly the soul of man was at God’s expense. Also, following the example of the Apostle, if the Church speaks a lot of atonement and penance, we can say that it speaks even more of rehabilitation. Christian apologists do not fail to put forward this excellent idea of the rehabilitation of souls, with which paganism hardly concerned itself. And every day the Church testifies in this regard to its keen interest, by the zeal it displays for the conversion of the infidels, the baptism of infants and the absolution of the dying.

Unfortunately, this rehabilitation takes place in figures, a matter of mysticism and spirituality. The kingdom of Christ is not of this world: this precious dignity, which the degrading empire of Caesar made people lose, Christianity promises give them back. in the next life! And it is the same with liberty, equality, wealth, science, love, sanctification. These goods that nothing can compensate, condition of all morality, must be realized only in heaven.

It is quite another thing really with regard to penance and mortification: there, according to the Gospel, is the true earthly reality. As soon as it is a question of punishing, the kingdom of Christ appears, rich, to strip you; mighty, to humble you; slaves to support you in your misery.

First, man being, by the new revelation, guilty before God, the relationship which in pagan society had existed between Justice and religion was reversed. Justice took second place, religion had the honors. The dignity of man subordinated to the worship of God by this simple change, the individualities, which formerly belonged to their right, sui juris, found themselves, it is true, on a level in the presence of the supreme majesty, but lowered from their full height.

In the Christian system, in fact, man, author of evil, cannot by himself have rights; he is outside the law, ex-lex, he has only duties. We grant that he experiences needs, aspirations, a certain pride, an esteem for himself; that consequently he solicits for these needs, for these aspirations, for all that composes his dignity, image of the divine dignity, the respect of the others; but that he is entitled to this respect from his background is positively denied. There is nothing in man that justifies this demand; it is not even conceivable. How could the dignity of my neighbor make me respect him, when I know that I am worth nothing, and that he is no better than me? As man to man we owe each other nothing, unless the intervention of a more powerful third party, obliging us both toward it, creates in us a mutual duty through that obligation.

The modern theoreticians of right and duty, who while separating themselves from the Church fatally follow its logic, maintain absolutely the same language. For them also it is the duty which is given first; the law is only an induction, a dependency (I). Thus speak MM. Jules Simon, Oudot, Auguste Comte, all the communists and religionists. Is it not the greatness of Christianity to have absorbed the substance of religion so much into itself, that those who dream of replacing it can only be its copyists, and that outside the Church there is for the worshiper neither logical nor good faith?

XXI

Nous savons ce que dit le dogme ; suivons-en les effets dans la pratique et dans l’histoire.

Le système des sociétés polythéistes, dans lequel la pensée religieuse, n’intervenant que comme auxiliaire de la Justice, était loin de produire toutes ses conséquences, pouvait se définir : Système de la prérogative personnelle, ou du droit.

Le système chrétien, où la religion, parvenue à sa plénitude, est faite principe de la Justice, et qu’il n’est permis à personne faisant profession de foi religieuse de renier, peut se définir à son tour : Système de la déchéance personnelle, ou du non-droit.

Ceci est autre chose qu’une vaine antithèse.

Le christianisme, importé d’Orient à une époque révolutionnaire, au moment où la Gaule, l’Espagne, l’Afrique, l’Asie, se soulevaient à la fois contre l’empire, où les armées prétoriennes se détruisaient pour le choix de leurs césars ; le christianisme, saturé d’idées juives, égyptiennes, persanes, hindoues, expression de la misère des peuples, du désespoir de la plèbe, de la dégradation des esclaves, devait nécessairement opérer cette interversion de l’idée juridique et de l’idée religieuse. Ce qui dans l’École pouvait n’être qu’une récrimination dialectique, passant, à la faveur de circonstances exceptionnelles, dans les faits, est devenu pendant dix-huit siècles la formule officielle de la morale ; il ne pouvait pas y en avoir d’autre.

Je l’avouerai même, la dégradation de la personne humaine, démesurément exaltée sous l’ancien culte, était une nécessité de l’époque et une condition du progrès.

La Justice, on le voit par l’exemple des enfants et des sauvages, est de toutes les facultés de l’âme la dernière et la plus lente à se former ; il lui faut l’éducation énergique de la lutte et de l’adversité. Pour arriver à la vraie notion de la Justice, pour qu’il comprît et aimât à l’égal de sa propre dignité la dignité d’autrui, il fallait que l’intraitable moi fût dompté par une discipline de terreur ; et puisque cette discipline ne pouvait se produire que sous forme religieuse, il fallait faire d’une religion d’orgueil une religion d’humilité.

L’ère chrétienne est la véritable ère de la chute de l’homme, je veux dire de la grande épreuve qui devait faire surgir en son âme le sentiment complet de la Justice.

Avant tout le chrétien doit reconnaître son indignité, s’abaisser devant son Dieu, accepter la mortification et la discipline, convenir qu’il a mérité toute espèce d’affront et de châtiment. Son premier acte, le premier mouvement de son cœur, est un acte de contrition, une demande de pardon, un recours en grâce. Ce n’est qu’à ce prix qu’il peut espérer, par le ministère du prêtre appréciateur de son repentir, interprète vis-à-vis de lui de la céleste miséricorde, et muni par grâce spéciale du pouvoir délier et de délier, la remise de sa faute et l’exaucement de sa prière.

L’organisation des pouvoirs, dans la société chrétienne, suit la même marche.

Tandis que suivant le système antérieur le magistrat qui disait le droit avait le pas sur le pontife et l’augure, dans l’économie chrétienne c’est le prêtre qui a le pas sur le magistrat. Le prince n’est en réalité que le porte-glaive de l’Église ; l’empereur, évêque du dehors, est le valet du pape, évêque du dedans ; il tient la bride de son cheval et fait pour lui office de bourreau. Dès les premiers jours on voit dans les confréries christicoles, d’abord synagogues, puis églises, l’évêque attirer à lui la décision des affaires, supplanter le juge civil, détourner les fidèles des tribunaux établis. On peut voir dans Fleury les troubles, les dissensions, les plaintes, causés par cette usurpation d’un pouvoir abusif et sans contrôle.

L’impulsion une fois donnée aux esprits, et les causes qui l’avaient produite continuant d’agir, rien ne pouvait arrêter cette étrange révolution.

Le christianisme, par son principe, par toute sa théologie, est la condamnation du moi humain, le mépris de la personne, le viol de la conscience. De là à la profanation de la vie privée, au régime des billets de confession et de tout ce qui s’ensuit, il n’y a qu’un pas. L’état naturel de l’homme est un état de péché : comment le chrétien respecterait-il la personne de son frère, le prêtre celle de son ouaille, alors que tout chrétien doit se mépriser lui-même, et que le premier titre du prêtre à la fonction qu’il exerce est sa propre mésestime, quia respexit humilitatem ancillæ suæ ? Pour relever cet être déchu et le rétablir en honneur, il ne faut pas moins que l’immolation d’une victime céleste, renouvelée chaque jour en un million de lieux à la fois. Tel est le dogme symbolisé dans la passion du Christ, et manifesté à chaque instant sur quelque point du globe par la messe.

Ainsi le christianisme, ayant à vaincre l’exagération du moi, devait s’exagérer à son tour. Sa mission n’est pas d’établir la Justice, mais de préparer le sol où elle doit germer, Justumque terra germinet. Non-seulement il l’exclut de l’humanité par sa théologie, il la rend impossible par l’anéantissement de la dignité personnelle, par toutes ses institutions et ses symboles. C’est un instinct universel chez les nations de vouloir que leurs chefs soient entourés de gloire et de puissance : l’honneur rendu au prince semble un gage de la respectabilité du citoyen. Quel honneur attendre pour l’homme et pour la famille, partant quelle justice, dans une Église dont le chef s’intitule serviteur des serviteurs de Dieu, et donne aux princes du temporel à baiser sa pantoufle ?

XX. — We know what the dogma says: let’s follow its effects in practice and in history.

The system of polytheistic societies, in which religious thought, intervening only as an auxiliary of Justice, was far from producing all its consequences, could be defined: System of personal prerogative, or of right.

The Christian system, where religion, having reached its fullness, is made the principle of Justice, which no one professing Christian faith is allowed to deny, can be defined in turn: System of personal forfeiture , or of non-right.

This is more than a vain antithesis.

Christianity, imported from the East at a revolutionary time, when Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia were rising up against the empire at the same time, when the armed Praetorians would cut their throats for the choice of their Caesars; Christianity, saturated with Jewish, Egyptian, Persian and Hindu ideas, expressions of the misery of the peoples, of the despair of the plebs, of the degradation of the slaves, necessarily had to bring about this inversion of the legal idea and the religious idea. What in the School could only be a dialectical recrimination, passing into facts under cover of exceptional circumstances, became for eighteen centuries the official formula of morality: it could have no other.

I will even admit that the degradation of the human person, disproportionately exalted under the old cult, was a necessity of the time and a condition of progress.

Justice, as we see by the example of children and savages, is of all the faculties of the soul the last and the slowest to form; it needs the energetic education of struggle and adversity. To arrive at the true notion of the just, for the individual to understand and love the dignity of others as much as their own, it was necessary that the intractable self be tamed by a discipline of terror; and since this discipline could only occur in religious form, it was necessary to create, in place of a religion of pride, a religion of humility.

The Christian era is the true era of the fall of man, I mean of the great trial that was to cause the complete feeling of Justice to arise in his soul. (J)

Above all, the Christian must recognize his unworthiness, humble himself before his God, accept mortification and death, admit that he has deserved every kind of affront and chastisement. His first act, the first movement of his heart, is an act of contrition, a request for forgiveness, an appeal for mercy. It is only at this price that he can hope, through the ministry of the priest, appreciative of his repentance, interpreter to him of heavenly mercy, and endowed by special grace with the power to bind and to unbind, for the remission of his fault and the granting of his prayer.

The organization of powers in Christian society follows the same course.

Whereas, according to the previous system, the magistrate who pronounced the law had precedence over the pontiff and the soothsayer, in the Christian economy it is the priest who has precedence over the magistrate. The prince is in reality only the sword-bearer of the Church; the emperor, the bishop from without, is the valet of the pope, the bishop from within; he holds the bridle of his horse and acts as executioner for him. From the earliest days we see in the Christian brotherhoods, first synagogues, then churches, the bishop attracting to himself the decision of affairs, supplanting the civil judge, diverting the faithful from the established tribunals. One can see in Fleury the troubles, the dissensions, the complaints, caused by this usurpation of an abusive and uncontrolled power.

The impulse once given to minds, and the causes that had produced it continuing to act, nothing could stop this strange revolution.

Christianity, by its principle, by all its theology, is the condemnation of the human self, the contempt of the person, the rape of conscience. From there to the profanation of private life, to the system of confessional notes and all that follows, there is only one step. The natural state of man is a state of sin: how could the Christian respect the person of his brother, the priest that of his flock, when every Christian must despise himself, and when the first title of the priest to the function he exercises is his own disesteem, quia respexit humilitatem ancillæ suœ? To raise up this fallen being and restore it to honor, nothing less than the immolation of a celestial victim is required, renewed each day in a million places at once. This is the dogma symbolized in the passion of Christ.

Thus Christianity, having to conquer the exaggeration of self, had to exaggerate its humiliation. Its mission is not to establish Justice, but to prepare the ground where it must germinate, Justumque terra germinet. Not only does it exclude it from humanity by its theology, it renders it impossible by the annihilation of personal dignity, by all its institutions and symbols. It is a universal instinct among nations to want their leaders to be surrounded by glory and power: the honor given to the prince seems a pledge of the respectability of the citizen. What honor to expect for the man and for the family, consequently what justice, in a Church whose head calls himself servant of the servants of God, and gives his slipper to the princes of the temporal to kiss?

XXII

Quoi que nous fassions, pensions et disions, en tant qu’il provient de l’humaine nature, le christianisme le répute mauvais, sinon coupable ; ce qui nous échappe de vertueux et d’honnête est l’effet de l’influence divine.

Dans la donnée de la transcendance cette théorie est d’une logique irrésistible ; et ce qui le prouve, c’est qu’elle n’avait pas été absolument inconnue sous le polythéisme. Déjà les dévots avaient su tirer du culte qu’ils rendaient à leurs dieux cette conséquence impie.

« Quelque bonne action que tu fasses, dit Bias dans Diogëne Laërce, sache que c’est un présent des dieux. »

Cicéron parle de même :

« Il faut croire qu’aucun homme de bien n’a été tel que par le secours de Dieu ; et jamais il ne fut de grand homme sans une inspiration du ciel. » (De natura deor., ii, n. 165.)

Il dit ailleurs :

« S’il existe dans le genre humain de l’intelligence, de la vertu, de la bonne foi, de la concorde, elles ne nous viennent que des dieux. » (Ibid., 79.)

On voit par ces citations ce que contenait dans le secret de son principe la Relligio. Cicéron, Bias, Platon, Zénon, autant que Moïse et Isaïe, sont des Pères de l’Église. Les anciens poussèrent la chose beaucoup plus loin : ils attribuèrent aux dieux la découverte des sciences et des arts.

« Ne dites point, — c’est Sénèque qui parle, — que les découvertes que nous faisons nous appartiennent. Les semences de tous les arts ont été déposées en nous ; et Dieu, le maître invisible, aiguise et excite les génies. » (De Benef., iv, c. 6.)

Pline, lib. xxvii, c. 1, 2 :

« Le zèle des anciens pour les découvertes, leur générosité à les transmettre, est un don des dieux. Si quelqu’un s’imagine par hasard que l’homme a pu inventer toutes ces choses, c’est un ingrat qui méconnaît la munificence divine. »

Jusqu’à l’époque chrétienne ces éclairs de mysticisme ne paraissent pas avoir exercé une grande action sur les mœurs, bien moins encore la philosophie sut-elle en déduire une théodicée. Au christianisme était réservé de développer dans sa plénitude la fameuse doctrine de la Grâce, corollaire indispensable du péché originel.

Toujours donc et dans tous les cas, même quand le souffle divin l’inspire, et surtout alors qu’il l’inspire, il faut que l’homme, enfant du péché, s’humilie. Qu’il se complaise en lui-même, il devient apostat.

C’est pour cela que le christianisme, partant du principe que toute volonté est perverse, tout caractère vicieux, toute intelligence dépravée, toute action pollue, s’occupe incessamment de nous laver de nos souillures, et qu’il s’est constitué en une officine d’expiations. Rappellerai-je les jeûnes, les veilles, les abstinences, macérations, disciplines, oraisons, séquestrations ; les renoncements, la misère volontaire, le célibat perpétuel, et toutes ces inventions de la haine de soi dont se compose l’exercice, ἀσκήσις, du chrétien parfait, de l’ascète ?

« Tout est hostile à la religion catholique, naturellement parlant, dit un de ses apologistes, et l’esprit, et le cœur, et les sens, parce qu’elle-même se présente comme hostile à l’esprit par ses mystères, au cœur par ses préceptes, aux sens par ses pratiques. » (Nicolas, Études philosophiques sur le Christianisme.)

Et le catholicisme agit en conséquence : son culte est une série de rites expiatoires. N’avons-nous pas encore, en dehors des maisons religieuses où l’œil profane ne pénètre pas, les avents, carêmes, retraites, neuvaines, quatre-temps, rogations, lustrations, indulgences, chapelets, et le bréviaire insipide, et l’épouvantable office des morts ?…

Mais, Monseigneur, vous savez tout cela mieux que moi, et vos mandements font foi que ce n’est pas vous qui laisserez périr le vieil esprit chrétien. Laissons donc la pratique de la vie dévote, et maintenant que nous avons déterminé la raison historique et métaphysique du christianisme, voyons quel en a été l’effet sur les mœurs.

XXI. — Whatever we do, think, and say, as it comes from human nature, Christianity deems evil, if not culpable; what escapes us of virtue and honesty is the effect of divine influence.

In the data of transcendence, this theory is irrefutably logical; and what proves it is that it had not been absolutely unknown under polytheism. Already the devotees had been able to derive from the worship they rendered to their gods this impious consequence.

“Whatever good deed you do, says Bias in Diogenes Laertius, know that it is a gift from the gods.”

Cicero says the same:

“It must be believed that no good man has been such except by the help of God; and never was there a great man without an inspiration from heaven.” (De Natura deor., II, n. 66.)

He says elsewhere:

“If there exists in the human race intelligence, virtue, good faith, harmony, they come to us only from the gods.”

We see by these quotations what the Relligio contained in the secret of its principle . Cicero, Bias, Plato, Zeno, as much as Moses and Isaiah, are fathers of the Church. The ancients took the matter much further: they attributed the discovery of the sciences and the arts to the gods.

“Do not say—it is Seneca speaking—that the discoveries we make belong to us. The seeds of all the arts have been deposited in us; and God, the invisible master, sharpens and excites geniuses. (De Benef., 1v, c. 6.)

Pliny, lib. XXVII, c. 4.2:

“The zeal of the ancients for discoveries, their generosity in transmitting them, is a gift from the gods. If anyone imagines by chance that man could have invented all these things, he is an ingrate who ignores the divine munificence.”

Until the Christian period these flashes of mysticism do not appear to have had a great effect on mores; even less did philosophy know how to deduce a theodicy from them. It was reserved for Christianity to develop in its fullness the famous doctrine of grace, an indispensable corollary of. original sin.

Always therefore and in all cases, even when the divine breath inspires him, and above all when it inspires him, man, child of sin, must humble himself. Let him indulge in himself, he becomes an apostate.

This is why Christianity, starting from the principle that all will is perverse, all character vicious, all intelligence depraved, all action polluted, is incessantly concerned with washing us of our defilements, and why it has constituted itself as a dispensary of expiations. Shall I recall the fasts, the vigils, the abstinences, macerations, disciplines, prayers, sequestrations; renunciations, voluntary poverty, perpetual celibacy, and all those inventions of self-hatred that compose the exercise, askesis, of the perfect Christian, of the ascetic?

“Everything is hostile to the Catholic religion, naturally speaking, says one of its apologists, both the mind, and the heart, and the senses, because it itself presents itself as hostile to the mind through its mysteries, to the heart through its precepts, to the senses through its practices.” (NicoLas, Philosophical Studies on Christianity.)

And Catholicism acts accordingly: its worship is a series of expiatory rites. Have we not still, outside religious houses where the profane eye does not penetrate, Advents, Lents, retreats, novenas, ember days, rogations, lustrations, indulgences, rosaries, and the insipid breviary, and the appalling office of the dead?

But, Monsignor, you know all this better than I, and your letters prove that it is not you who will allow the old Christian spirit to perish. Let us therefore leave the practice of the devout life, and, now that we have determined the historical and metaphysical reason for Christianity, let us see what effect it has had on morals.

XXIII

Je le reconnais, le zèle déployé par l’Église pour la réparation du péché tant actuel qu’originel était tellement dans l’esprit de l’époque, il répondait si bien à l’accablement des âmes, que l’influence du dogme parut d’abord n’avoir rien que de salutaire, et qu’elle ne pouvait manquer de faire illusion. Les idées changèrent comme les sentiments. On mesura la valeur de l’homme, non plus sur ses qualités sociales et positives, mais sur les rigueurs de sa pénitence, l’intensité de ses expiations. C’est ainsi qu’en jugent les Orientaux avec leurs derviches et leurs fakirs. Aux épreuves de la persécution succédèrent celles de l’érémitisme : quels prodiges de vertu que les Pacôme, les Hilarion, les Sisoès, les Siméon Stylite ! et comme pâlissaient à côté d’eux les héros antiques, les Miltiade, les Aristide, les Cimon, les Agésilas, les Socrate, les Camille, les Cincinnatus, les Fabricius, les Régulus, les Scipion ! D’un commun accord la morale chrétienne fut estimée hors ligne ; sa perfection devint un article de foi, accepté sur parole et sans examen. De temps à autre l’ambition des évêques, les scandales du clergé, soulevaient l’irritation populaire, plus d’une fois l’Église fut traitée de prostituée de Babylone ; mais ces reproches ne tombant que sur le personnel, le matériel, je veux dire, la foi, n’était pas atteint. La libre critique ne s’éleva guère plus haut ; c’est ainsi qu’on a vu dans ces dernières années les écoles socialistes invoquer pour leur justification, à l’exemple des Albigeois et des Vaudois, la morale de l’Évangile, accusant seulement l’Église de l’avoir oubliée et d’y être infidèle.

Et c’est ce qui explique comment la société chrétienne put avoir des mœurs, de même que la société païenne en avait eu ; comment jusqu’au sein de l’Église il se produisit des caractères dont quelques-uns, survivant dans la mémoire des hommes à la foi qu’ils servirent, resteront grands devant la postérité.

Mais une doctrine qui viole l’humanité ne pouvait éternellement posséder l’humanité.

L’histoire des conciles n’est autre que celle des corruptions de l’Église ; l’histoire des hérésies, celle des révoltes soulevées par ces corruptions. Sans cesse l’Église est occupée à défendre son dogme et à rétablir sa discipline, sans s’apercevoir jamais que ce qui entretient le péché, c’est la discipline ; ce qui provoque l’hérésie, l’immoralité du dogme.

Dès le premier siècle, la corruption est partout : sur sept Églises, l’Apocalypse en compte au plus deux de saines.

Du deuxième au quatrième siècle, la corruption augmente encore : elle suscite les hérésies rigoristes de Marcion, de Cerdon et de Tertullien.

La persécution de Dioclétien retrempe la chrétienté dépravée : après Constantin, la dissolution devient son état normal jusqu’à Grégoire VII.

La période des croisades, de l’an 1077 à l’an 1300, est la plus pure de l’Église. Mais la corruption recommence à Boniface VIII, et, malgré la Réforme, malgré la Révolution, ne finit plus…

Grâce à l’opinion qui fait de l’Évangile le code de la morale et de l’Église son interprète, le christianisme continue de vivre ; mais la raison des peuples se déprave, et perd jusqu’au sentiment de la dignité humaine, principe de toute Justice et de toute morale.

L’un des plus récents apologistes du christianisme, M. Auguste Nicolas, fait en ces termes le parallèle de la morale païenne et de la morale chrétienne, en ce qui touche les qualités de l’homme et du citoyen. On peut juger, d’après cet inventaire, du progrès que l’humanité doit au christianisme.

« Chez les anciens, la fierté d’âme, le courage bouillant, le ressentiment implacable, impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer, tel est le portrait d’un héros, d’Achille. — L’ambition honorée dans la personne d’Alexandre ; l’assassinat politique, dans Brutus ; le suicide, dans Caton ; le patriotisme qui sacrifiait l’humanité à la patrie ; l’amour de la gloire qui sacrifiait la patrie à l’individu ; l’amitié, sentiment exclusif, quand il n’était pas criminel et monstrueux : voilà ce qui passait pour vertu chez les anciens. »

Ce portrait est tracé avec une intention évidente de dénigrement, et le parti pris de faire briller le chrétien aux dépens du polythéiste. Je m’en contente cependant. Prenons l’homme de l’antiquité tel que M. Nicolas nous le présente, avec ses vertus et ses vices, et réduisons le tout à son expression la plus simple : que trouvons-nous au fond du creuset ? Le latin l’a nommé : l’Homme digne.

« Sous le christianisme, continue M. Nicolas, nous voyons fleurir le sacrifice, l’humilité, la mortification, le détachement, la résignation, le repentir, le pardon des injures, la pauvreté volontaire, la continence, l’amour des ennemis, le zèle de la foi, la foi, l’espérance, la charité. — Il fut un temps, dit M. Nicolas, où toutes ces vertus, qui font le bonheur de l’humanité, n’avaient pas même un nom dans les langues. »

Acceptons ce tableau, tout flatté qu’il soit ; prenons le chrétien tel qu’on vient de le faire, avec son cortège de vertus auxquelles ne se mêle pas un vice, et résumons le tout en une simple formule : que reste-t-il ? le moyen âge a trouvé le mot : le Bon homme.

L’Homme digne, puis le Bon homme, voilà en quatre mots le chemin que la religion a fait faire, en quatre mille ans, à l’humanité.

À quand l’homme juste ?…

XXII. — I recognize that the zeal displayed by the Church for the reparation of both actual and original sin was so much in the spirit of the time, it responded so well to the despondency of souls, that the influence of dogma seemed at first to be nothing but salutary, and could not fail to create an illusion. Ideas changed like feelings. We measured the value of man, no longer by his social and positive qualities. but by the rigors of his penance, the intensity of his expiations. This is how the Orientals judge it with their dervishes and their fakirs. The ordeals of persecution succeeded those of hermitism: what prodigies of virtue Pachomiuses, the Hilarions, the Sisoes, the Pauls, the Antonys, the Simeon Stylites! And how pale beside them the ancient heroes, the Miltiades, the Aristides, the Cimons, the Agesilas, the Socrates, the Camilles, the Cincinnati’s, the Fabricius, the Regulus, the Scipios! By common accord Christian morality was considered out of line; its perfection became an article of faith, accepted on word and without examination. From time to time the ambition of the bishops, the scandals of the clergy, aroused popular irritation, more than once the Church was treated as a whore of Babylon; but these reproaches falling only on the personnel, the material, I mean, the faith was not affected. Free criticism rose no higher; it is thus that in recent years we have seen the socialist schools invoke for their justification, following the example of the Albigensians and the Waldensians, the morality of the Gospel, accusing only the Church of having forgotten it and of being unfaithful to it.

And this explains how Christian society could have mores, just as pagan society had; how even in the bosom of the Church characters were produced, some of which, surviving in the memory of men to the faith they served, will remain great before posterity.

But a doctrine that violates humanity could not eternally possess humanity.

The history of the councils is nothing other than that of the corruptions of the Church; the history of heresies, that of the revolts raised by these corruptions. The Church is constantly occupied in defending her dogma and re-establishing her discipline, without ever perceiving that what sustains sin is discipline; what causes heresy, the immorality of dogma.

From the first century, corruption is everywhere: out of seven churches, the Apocalypse counts at most two healthy ones.

From the second to the fourth century, corruption increased further: it gave rise to the rigorous heresies of Marcion, Cerdon and Tertullian.

The persecution of Diocletian gives new strength to corrupted Christendom: after Constantine, dissolution becomes its normal state until Gregory VII.

The period of the crusades, from the year 1077 to the year 1300, is the least impure in ecclesiastical history. But corruption breaks out again under Boniface VIII, and, despite the Reformation, despite the Revolution, it is no longer veiled.

Thanks to the opinion that makes the Gospel the code and the Church the interpreter of morality, Christianity continues to live; but the reason of the people is depraved, and loses even the feeling of human dignity, the principle of all justice and all morality.

One of the most recent apologists of Christianity, M. Auguste Nicolas, makes in these terms the parallel between pagan morality and Christian morality, in what touches the qualities of the man and the citizen. We can judge, from this inventory, the progress that humanity owes to Christianity.

“Among the ancients, pride of soul, boiling courage, implacable resentment, impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer, such is the portrait of a hero, of Achilles. — Ambition, honored in the person of Alexander; political assassination, in Brutus; suicide, in Cato; patriotism, which sacrificed humanity to the fatherland; the love of glory, which sacrificed the country to the individual; friendship, an exclusive feeling, when it was not criminal and monstrous: this is what passed for a virtue among the ancients.

This portrait is drawn with an obvious intention of denigration, and the commitment to make the Christian shine at the expense of the polytheist. I am, however, content with it. Let us take the man of antiquity as M. Nicolas presents him to us, with his virtues and his vices, and reduce the whole to its simplest expression: what do we find at the bottom of the crucible? Latin named him: the Worthy Man.

“Under Christianity,” continues M. Nicolas, “we see the flowering of sacrifice, humility, mortification, detachment, resignation, repentance, forgiveness of injuries, voluntary poverty, continence, love of enemies, zeal for faith, faith, hope, charity. — There was a time,” says M. Nicolas, “when all these virtues, which bring happiness to humanity, did not even have a name in languages.”

Let us accept this picture, flattering as it is; let us take the Christian such as we have just done, with his cortege of virtues which are not mixed with a vice, and let us sum it all up in a simple formula. What remains? The Middle Ages found the word: the Good Man.

The Worthy Man, then the Good Man, here is in four words the path that religion has made humanity follow, for four thousand years.

When will we see the just man?.…

XXIV

Que fait cependant l’Église ? quelles pensées l’occupent au milieu de cette immoralité toujours renaissante ?

Avec une gravité imperturbable, l’Église affirme son dogme ; elle l’explique, le développe, accusant l’esprit et la chair, travaillant de son mieux à les broyer l’un et l’autre sous sa discipline.

La religion enseignant d’une part la sainteté infinie et inaltérable de l’Être divin, de l’autre la corruption innée, permanente et indélébile de l’être humain, n’admettant pas plus de cessation pour celle-ci que de restriction pour celle-là, il s’ensuit que la vendetta exercée au nom du Dieu trois fois saint pour une coulpe ineffaçable doit durer autant que la vie du sujet, autant que l’humanité. L’affreux talion ne s’arrête pas même à la mort ; il se perpétue pour les infidèles par l’enfer, et ne finit pour les âmes élues qu’à leur sortie du Purgatoire, à ce moment de l’existence ultramondaine où l’inviolable Majesté enfin satisfaite dit à l’âme purifiée : Entre dans la joie de ton souverain, Intra in gaudium domini tui.

L’état moral dans ce système n’est pas de ce monde : c’est le privilége des saints que le sang du Christ a rédimés, privilége qu’ils n’obtiennent qu’avec la Béatitude. L’état moral, ou la félicité, est la chose qui n’a jamais été révélée, qu’aucun œil n’a vue, aucune oreille entendue, aucune intelligence comprise ; le secret dont le chrétien ne jouira que le jour où, affranchi de ce corps de boue, il contemplera son Dieu, auteur et sujet de toute morale, face à face, sicuti est, facis ad faciem.

La conclusion vient toute seule.

Puisqu’en définitive nous ne sommes moraux que dans le Paradis, la vie de l’homme sur la terre est dévouée aux supplices, comme celle du galérien. Honte à l’humanité ! telle est la devise du catholicisme, expression la plus complète de la révélation chrétienne. Le catholicisme, qui plus que les autres sectes s’est préservé des tentations libérales, aime à flétrir, à rabaisser, à couvrir d’ignominie. Il s’attaque à l’amour-propre, qu’il traite d’égoïsme ; à la dignité, qu’il nomme orgueil ; aux affections naturelles, qu’il considère comme une infidélité. Ce respect des autres, conséquence du respect de soi-même, si vif chez les anciens, et dont la violation rendit si méprisables les cyniques, il en a fait un vice, sous le nom de respect humain. Il est remarquable, en effet, qu’aucune religion ne s’est trouvée en guerre avec le respect humain autant que le catholicisme. La conscience sent vaguement qu’il y a là quelque chose de faux et d’insultant, et elle proteste. Le catholicisme s’en irrite d’autant plus : il vous met en pénitence, vous afflige, vous crucifie, vous confond, vous stigmatise, vous fleurdelisé, vous anathématise. L’âme la plus chrétienne est celle qui du cœur le plus soumis accepte la fustigation ; la plus héroïque, celle qui se brise, et s’avilit, et s’anéantit davantage. Pour vous rendre parfait à son point de vue, il vous poursuit dans votre conscience qu’il conspue, vous pourchasse dans votre volonté qu’il soufflète, vous arrête dans votre pensée qui vient de naître et qu’il condamne. Il se plaît à la recherche de vos misères, de vos fautes secrètes, de toutes ces peccadilles qui échappent au laisser-aller de la fantaisie, à l’indulgence de la nature et à sa promptitude, quas humana parum cavit natura ; il les enfle, il les grossit, les enlumine, les envenime. Puis il exige que vous vous en accusiez, que vous en demandiez pardon, que vous vous en fassiez absoudre : c’est ce qu’il appelle vous réconcilier. Sinon, il vous confessera de force, il vous recommandera au prône, il vous affichera à la porte, il vous couvrira de votre péché comme d’un excrément. C’est ainsi du moins que les choses se passent dans ces maisons modèles, qu’on voit se relever de tous côtés, et où le christianisme est pratiqué dans sa pureté et sa plénitude. Or, tout le monde sait que la tendance de l’Église a constamment été de soumettre les nations au régime des couvents. Faut-il rappeler ces moyens connus de la police épiscopale, plus en faveur que jamais : excommunications, monitoires, révélations des secrets du confessionnal, pénitences canoniques, et tout ce que renferme d’épouvantements ce nom inexpiable, la Sainte-Inquisition ? C’est la religion des soupçons iniques, des interprétations atroces, des diffamations anonymes, des procédures secrètes, des tribunaux masqués, des tortures souterraines, des cachots perpétuels, des in pace. Le Cavalletto n’a-t-il pas été rétabli à Rome, tout récemment, par Pie IX ? Il faut à l’Église des supplices de choix, et c’est trop peu pour elle du supplice, elle y joint la dérision. Néron se contentait d’envoyer à Thraséa l’ordre de mourir ; le centurion ne mettait pas la main sur le proscrit. En 93, la Terreur se montra aussi réservée que Néron : le suicide n’étant pas dans nos mœurs, on chercha un genre de mort qui ne laissât pour ainsi dire rien à faire au bourreau. Devant le bûcher des Inquisiteurs la guillotine est trois fois sainte ; et la postérité n’oubliera pas que le plus grand crime de Carrier, aux yeux des terroristes, fut d’avoir déshonoré le supplice. L’Église n’a pas reculé même devant l’extermination par le fer et par le feu : c’est à son esprit de répression pénitentiaire et de sainte vengeance, plus qu’à sa politique, qu’il faut attribuer ses croisades contre des populations qui n’avaient d’autre tort que de réclamer une morale, et auxquelles elle répondait par les flammes d’Alby, les massacres des Alpes et de l’Apennin, les assassinats de la Saint-Barthélemy.

XXII. — But what does the Church do? what thoughts occupy it in the midst of this ever-reviving immorality? With imperturbable gravity, the Church affirms its dogma; it explains it, develops it, accusing the spirit and the flesh, working as best it can to crush them both under its discipline.

Religion teaching on the one hand the infinite and unalterable holiness of the divine Being, on the other the innate, permanent and indelible corruption of the human being, no more admitting a cessation to the perversity of the one than a limit to the perfection of the other, it follows that the vendetta exercised in the name of the thrice holy God for an indelible guilt must last as long as the life of the culprit, as long as humanity. The dreadful talion does not stop even with death; it is perpetuated for the reprobate by hell, and does not end for the chosen souls until they leave Purgatory, at that moment of ultramundane existence when the inviolable Majesty, satisfied at last, says to the purified soul: Enter into the joy of your sovereign, Intra in gaudium domini tui.

The state of morality, in this system, is not of this world: it is the privilege of the saints whom the blood of Christ has redeemed, a privilege that they obtain only with beatitude. Morality, or sanity of the soul, is the thing that has never been revealed, which no eye has seen, no ear heard, no mind understood; the secret which the Christian will enjoy only on the day when, freed from this body of mud, he will contemplate his God, author and subject of all morality, face to face, siculi est, facie ad faciem.

The conclusion comes by itself.

Since, ultimately, we are moral only in Paradise, the life of man on earth is devoted to torture, like that of the galley slave. Shame on humanity! such is the motto of Catholicism, the most complete expression of Christian revelation. Catholicism, which more than other sects has preserved itself from liberal temptations, likes to stigmatize, to belittle, to cover with ignominy. It attacks self-love, which it treats as selfishness; dignity which it calls pride; natural affections, which it regards as infidelity. That respect for others, a consequence of the respect for oneself, so lively among the ancients, and the violation of which made the cynics so contemptible, it has made of it a vice, under the name of human respect. It is remarkable, indeed, that no religion has been at war with human respect as much as Catholicism. Conscience vaguely senses that there is something false and insulting in this, and it protests. Catholicism is more irritated by it; it puts imposes penance on you, afflicts you, crucifies you, confounds you, stigmatizes you, brands you, anathematizes you. The most Christian soul is that which accepts the beating with the most submissive heart; the most heroic, the one that breaks, and debases itself, and annihilates itself even more. To make you perfect from its point of view, it pursues you in your conscience which it shouts down, pursues you in your will which it stifles, stops you in your thought which has just been born and which it condemns. It delights in seeking out your miseries, your secret faults, of all those peccadilloes that escape the carelessness of fantasy, the indulgence of nature and its promptness, quas humana parum cavit natura; it swells them, it enlarges them, illuminates them, envenoms them. Then it demands that you accuse yourselves of them, that you ask for forgiveness, that you be absolved by it: this is what it calls reconciling yourselves. If not, it will confess you by force, it will recall the sermon you, it will post at the door, it will cover you with your sin as with excrement. This is at least how things happen in these model houses, which we see rising on all sides, and where Christianity is practiced in its purity and plenitude. Now, everyone knows that the tendency of the Church has constantly been to submit the nations to the regime of the convents. Is it necessary to recall these known means of the episcopal police, more in favor than ever: excommunications, monitories, revelations of the secrets of the confessional, canonical penances, and all the terrors contained in this inexpiable name, the Holy Inquisition? It is the religion of iniquitous suspicions, atrocious interpretations, anonymous defamations, secret procedures, masked tribunals, underground tortures, perpetual dungeons, in pace. Wasn’t the cavaletto recently reestablished in Rome by Pius IX? The Church needs choice tortures, and torture is too little for her, so she adds derision to it. Nero contented himself with sending Thrasea the order to die; the centurion did not lay his hand on the exile. In 93, the Terror showed itself as reserved as Nero: suicide not being in our morals, we sought a kind of death that left, so to speak, nothing to do with the executioner. Before the stake of the Inquisitors the guillotine is thrice holy; and posterity will not forget that Carrier’s greatest crime, in the eyes of the terrorists, was to have dishonored the execution.

The Church has not recoiled even from extermination by sword and fire: it is to her spirit of penitentiary repression and holy revenge, more than to her policy, that we must attribute her crusades against populations who had done no other wrong than to demand a morality, and to which it answered with the flames of Alby, the massacres of the Alps and the Apennines, the assassinations of Saint-Barthélemy.

XXV

Convenons cependant d’une chose.

La pénitencerie chrétienne n’est plus guère aujourd’hui qu’une symbolique qui ne gêne en rien le bien-être et le luxe, et l’humilité une vertu fictive, qu’on se rappelle en présence de Dieu, jamais bien entendu en présence de l’homme. Pour deux sous, une fois payés, on se rachète à Paris de tout le jeûne du carême : la belle pénitence que de dîner une fois l’an, le vendredi saint, avec des lentilles à l’huile et un œuf sur le plat ! La belle humilité de s’agenouiller dans un cabinet, sur un prie-Dieu de velours, le corps vêtu de soie, la couronne ducale à côté sur un tabouret !… Les jésuites ont rendu depuis longtemps la dévotion aisée ; les joies de la vie ne sont plus défendues ; on a remplacé la pénitence effective par la pénitence en esprit ; et il est permis aux riches de goûter les plaisirs de ce monde sans préjudice de la félicité de l’autre, pourvu qu’ils gardent dans le cœur la foi, le détachement, la pénitence et l’humilité. Dans le cœur ! ce n’est pas lourd. Dieu a-t-il donc besoin de nos macérations et disciplines ? Non, pas plus que de nos libations et de nos sacrifices. Numquid manducabo carnes taurorum, aut sanguinem hircorum potabo ? Le sacerdoce sait cela depuis le temps des prophètes ; devenu aussi charnel que les disciples de Saint-Simon, il se moque à bon droit des railleries des libertins.

Mais voici qui devient sérieux.

Dans le christianisme, la condition des personnes n’est pas la même : l’inégalité, comme nous verrons, est providentielle. Il est nécessaire qu’une partie, la plus nombreuse, de l’humanité, serve l’autre. Pour que ce service soit obtenu il faut sacrifier la dignité humaine : comment le peuple y consentira-t-il s’il n’y est amené par la religion, par la foi ? Subordination, hiérarchie, obéissance, service, exploitation de l’homme par l’homme, tout cela suppose déchéance, pénitence, sinon apparente, au moins dans l’esprit, ce qui est bien autrement grave et qui seul est essentiel ; abnégation du moi et de ses prérogatives.

Dans ce système d’une féodalité raffinée, on se gardera d’enseigner comme article de foi que les privilégiés ont plus de mérite devant Dieu que les sacrifiés, que les riches hommes sont d’origine plus sainte que les bons hommes, comme la plèbe dévote se nommait au douzième siècle. La religion ne commet pas de ces imprudences. On rejettera sur la Providence le décret qui privilégie ceux-ci en déshéritant ceux-là ; on rappellera aux premiers l’humilité devant Dieu, le sacrifice en esprit, la charité envers leurs frères, le rachat de leur prérogative temporelle par la foi et par le culte ; on apprendra aux seconds la résignation, en leur promettant d’ailleurs des dédommagements à leur misère dans la vie éternelle.

Ainsi, dit l’Église, le roi et le berger sont égaux devant le Tout-Puissant ; mais le roi a été établi d’en haut pour commander à ses frères.

Ainsi le pape se nomme serviteur, quoique indigne, des serviteurs de Dieu.

Ainsi ceux qui sont élevés en dignité, puissance et richesse, doivent reconnaître qu’ils ont tout reçu de Dieu par grâce, afin que les petits, qui pourraient ne pas respecter cette fortune venant de l’homme, la respectent venant de Dieu.

Tel est l’esprit de la société chrétienne. L’inférieur respecte dans le supérieur, non pas l’homme, mais un fonctionnaire du Ciel. De son côté le supérieur, considérant que celui à qui il commande est son frère en Jésus-Christ, semble lui dire : Excusez-moi, mon frère ; ce n’est pas en mon nom que je vous tyrannise, que je vous exploite. Dieu m’en garde ! j’ai plus que vous horreur du despotisme et du privilége. Et qui suis-je pour m’attribuer de semblables droits ? C’est la sagesse divine qui a ainsi réglé les choses : Omnis potestas, et omnis obedientia, à Deo !

En Russie, le jour de Pâques, qui est le premier de l’an, le tzar, au sortir de la messe, donne le mot d’ordre à tout son peuple ; il prononce la profession de foi, Christ est ressuscité ! et embrasse les premiers qu’il rencontre, lesquels transmettent le baiser aux autres. C’est le pendant de la profession de foi islamique : Il n’y a de Dieu qu’Allah, et Mahomet, ou le sultan son successeur, est son prophète. Ce qui veut dire en bon français : Vile multitude, obéissez.

XXIV. – However, let’s agree on one thing.

The Christian penitentiary is today hardly more than a symbolism that in no way hinders well-being and luxury, and humility a fictitious virtue, which we remember in the presence of God, but never, of course, in the presence of the man. For two pennies, once paid, one redeems oneself in Paris for the entire Lenten fast: the fine penance of dining once a year, on Good Friday, with lentils in oil and a fried egg! The beautiful humility of kneeling in a closet, on a velvet prie-dieu, the body dressed in silk, the ducal crown on a stool beside it! The Jesuits have long made devotion easy; the joys of life are no longer forbidden; effective penance has been replaced by penance in spirit; and it is permissible for the rich to taste the pleasures of this world without prejudice to the happiness of the other, provided they keep faith, detachment, penance and humility in their hearts. In the heart! It is not heavy. So does God need our macerations and disciplines? No, no more than our libations and our sacrifices. Numquid manducabo carnes taurorum, aut sanguinem hircorum potabo? The priesthood has known this since the days of the prophets; become as carnal as the disciples of Saint-Simon, it rightly laughs at the raillery of libertines.

But here is what gets serious.

In Christianity, the condition of persons is not the same: inequality, as we will see, is providential. It is necessary that one part, the most numerous, of humanity should serve the other. For this service to be obtained, human dignity must be sacrificed: how will the people consent to it if they are not led to it by religion, by faith? Subordination, hierarchy, obedience, service, exploitation of man by man, all of this presupposes degradation, penance, if not apparent, at least in spirit, which is far more serious and which alone is essential; abnegation of the self and its prerogatives.

In this system of refined feudalism, we will be careful not to teach as an article of faith that the privileged have more merit before God than the sacrificed, that the rich men are of holier origin than the good men, as the devout plebs were called in the twelfth century. Religion does not commit such imprudences. We will throw back on Providence the decree that privileges these while disinheriting those; the former will be reminded of humility before God, sacrifice in the spirit, charity towards their brothers, redemption of their temporal prerogative by faith and worship; the latter will be taught resignation, by promising them compensation for their misery in eternal life.

Thus, says the Church, the king and the shepherd are equal before the Almighty; but the king was appointed from above to command his brethren. Thus the pope calls himself a servant, though unworthy, of the servants of God. Thus those who are elevated in dignity, power and wealth, must recognize that they have received everything from God by grace, so that the little ones, who might not respect this fortune coming from man, respect it coming from God.

Such is the spirit of Christian society. The inferior respects in the superior, not the man, but a functionary of Heaven. For his part, the superior, considering that he whom he commands is his brother in Jesus Christ, seems to say to him: Excuse me, my brother; it is not in my name that I tyrannize you, that I exploit you, God forbid! I have more horror than you of despotism and privilege. And who am I to give myself such rights? It is divine wisdom that has settled things thus: Omnis potestas et omnis obedientia a Deo!

In Russia, on Easter Day, which is the first of the year, the Czar, on leaving mass, gives the watchword to all his people; he pronounces the profession of faith, Christ is risen, and kisses the first ones he meets, who transmit the kiss to the others. It is the counterpart of the Islamic profession of faith: There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet, or the sultan his successor, is his prophet. Which means in good French: Vile multitude, obéissez—Vile multitude, obey.ƒ\n

XXVI

Après tout, le christianisme mérite l’estime du philosophe, non pour la moralité qu’il fait naître : à lui pas plus qu’au polythéisme ou à toute autre religion l’homme n’est redevable de sa Justice, mais parce qu’il est logique, et que comme tout ce qui est logique il a droit à la considération de la science.

Lorsque parut le christianisme, l’idée théologique jouissait seule de la confiance des masses. Le christianisme perfectionna cette idée, il purifia Dieu, en lui donnant un caractère de sainteté et de grandeur qu’il n’avait jamais eu, et plaçant en lui le siége de la Justice, exilée de la terre, disait-on, depuis l’âge d’or.

L’humaine nature, en revanche, était d’un consentement unanime jugée coupable : le christianisme reporta sur elle l’infamie qui auparavant déshonorait les dieux. La personnalité était devenue exorbitante : il l’abîma. La société, au lieu de se perfectionner par le développement de ses forces, avait paru rétrograder : il nia la justification par la liberté, suivant la parole du psalmiste : Non justificabitur in conspectu tuo omnis vivens.

Le crime, comme un déluge, inondait la terre : il en entreprit l’expiation.

L’humanité, enfin, s’était déifiée elle-même, dans ses dieux, ses héros, ses empereurs : il l’attacha à la croix en la personne de son Christ.

Oh ! le christianisme est sublime, sublime dans la majesté de son dogme et la chaîne de ses déductions. Jamais pensée plus haute, système plus vaste, ne fut conçu, organisé parmi les hommes. Moi qui n’y vois qu’une création de la conscience universelle, je ne puis m’empêcher de saluer en lui le génie de l’humanité, qui pour le salut d’elle-même s’est imposé cette longue expiation. Et je fais ici serment que, si l’Église parvient à renverser la thèse nouvelle que je lui oppose, et contre laquelle elle ne trouvera pas d’argument dans sa tradition, parce que les ennemis qu’elle a combattus autrefois comme ceux qui l’attaquent aujourd’hui, lui empruntant son principe, devaient être condamnés par les conséquences ; si, dis-je, l’Église remporte contre la Révolution cette victoire, j’abjure ma philosophie et je meurs dans ses bras.

Dans ce dogmatisme effrayant, irrécusable pour quiconque admet l’hypothèse de la transcendance, la morale n’existant qu’en Dieu, c’est-à-dire n’étant rien, que restait-il à faire pour gouverner la société, sinon de créer un rituel, et comme application du rite une discipline ?

C’est par sa discipline, non par sa morale, que le christianisme a gouverné le monde. Nous verrons en effet dans l’étude suivante que le christianisme, ne reconnaissant pas le droit personnel, est conduit à nier du même coup le droit réel : ainsi le voulait la logique, ainsi l’exige le commandement divin, le principe de religion.

XXV. — After all, Christianity deserves the esteem of the philosopher, not for the morality it gives birth to: man is no more in indebted to it for his Justicethan to polytheism or to any other religion; but because it is logical, and because, like everything that is logical, it has a right to the consideration of science.

When Christianity appeared, the theological idea alone enjoyed the confidence of the masses. Christianity perfected this idea; it purified God, giving him a character of holiness and grandeur that he had never had, placing in him the seat of Justice, exiled from the earth, it was said, since the Golden Age.

Human nature, on the other hand, was, by unanimous consent, judged guilty: Christianity transferred to it the infamy that had before dishonored the gods.

Personality had become exorbitant: it damaged it.

Society, instead of improving itself by the development of its forces, had seemed to retrogress: it denied justification by liberty, following the words of the psalmist: Non justificabitur in conspectu tuo omnis vivens.

Crime, like a deluge, inundated the earth: it undertook its expiation.

Humanity, finally, had deified itself, in its gods, its heroes, its emperors: Christianity attached it to the cross in the person of its Christ,

Oh! Christianity is sublime, sublime in the majesty of its dogma and in the chain of its deductions. Never was a higher thought, a more vast system, conceived, organized among men. I ,who see in it only a creation of universal remorse, I cannot help saluting in it the genius of humanity, which for the salvation of itself has imposed on itself this long expiation. And I swear here that, if the Church succeeds in overturning the new thesis that I oppose to her, and against which she will find no argument in her tradition, because the enemies she fought in the past, like those who attacking it today, borrowing its principle from it, were to be condemned by the consequences; if, I say, the Church gains this victory against the Revolution, I will abjure my philosophy and die in her arms.

In this frightening dogmatism, irrefutable for whoever admits the hypothesis of transcendence, morality existing only in God, that is to say, being nothing, what remained to be done to govern society, if not to create a ritual, and, as an application of the rite, a discipline?

It is by its discipline, not by its morality, that Christianity has governed the world. We will see in fact in the following study that Christianity, not recognizing personal right, is led to deny at the same time real right: so logic would have it, so the divine commandment, the principle of religion requires it.

XXVII

Le dernier mot du christianisme sur l’homme et sur la Justice a été prononcé, en style de bel esprit, par l’auteur des Maximes, La Rochefoucauld : ce mot est égoïsme.

Siffler l’humanité, après l’avoir flétrie, c’était encore de la piété, et c’était aussi de la logique.

La Rochefoucauld, M. Cousin nous l’a appris, ayant consulté sur son petit livre les autorités chrétiennes de son temps, en reçut les plus grands éloges. Tout Port-Royal applaudit. Rien de plus exact que cette morale des Maximes, disait-on, de plus conforme à l’esprit de l’Évangile. À la même époque, l’académicien Esprit publiait un gros livre ayant pour titre : De la pauvreté des vertus humaines. C’était la pensée de La Rochefoucauld doctrinalement justifiée par les principes de la foi. Et n’est-ce pas toujours le même esprit de dénigrement qui fait le fond des Caractères de La Bruyère et des Pensées de Pascal ; qui, sous une forme adoucie et avec l’apparence de la tendresse, avait inspiré quatre siècles auparavant l’auteur de l’Imitation ?

Partout où subsiste l’idée religieuse, la conclusion de La Rochefoucauld contre l’humanité est irréfutable.

De nos jours il est de bon goût dans un certain monde de déclamer contre les vertus humaines, lesquelles, dit-on, prennent leur principe dans l’orgueil. Sur toute la ligne ordre est donné aux membres du corps enseignant de combattre la morale pure aussi bien que la raison pure, et d’inculquer fortement à la jeunesse cette vérité : que l’homme reçoit du ciel la force de remplir ses devoirs, comme il emprunte à la foi la certitude de toutes ses connaissances. Dieu seul, dit M. Saint-Marc de Girardin, peut nous donner la vertu de persévérance. Et dans une série d’études il prouve que l’erreur capitale de Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la source de ses faiblesses fut d’avoir cru que l’homme pouvait trouver en soi la force d’aimer assez la vertu pour la pratiquer. Ce qui n’empêche pas M. Saint-Marc de Girardin de penser avec M. Cousin que La Rochefoucauld a forcé les conséquences de son principe, et de traiter son livre de désolant.

Explique qui pourra ce bavardage éclectique. Mais qu’attendre d’une société dont la sagesse consiste à confesser que l’humanité mérite mort et dérision, puis à la couvrir de bandelettes et de fleurs, d’après ce principe d’une hypocrisie quintessenciée, que si le cœur de l’homme est pervers, s’il ne se porte au bien que par l’impulsion d’une force divine, il n’est ni beau, ni charitable, ni utile de le lui dire ?

XXVI. — Christianity’s last word on man and on Justice was pronounced, in witty style, by the author of the Maxims, La Rochefoucauld: this word is egoism.

Hissing at humanity after having blackened it was still piety, and it was also logic.

La Rochefoucauld, M. Cousin has taught us, having consulted the Christian authorities of his time on his little book, received the greatest praise from it. All of Port-Royal applauded. Nothing could be more exact than this morality of the Maxims, it was said, more conformable to the spirit of the Gospel. At the same time, the academician Esprit published a large book entitled De la poverty des vertus humaines. This was the thought of La Rochefoucauld, doctrinally justified by the principles of faith. And isn’t it always the same spirit of denigration that underlies La Bruyere’s Caractères and Pascal’s Pensées; which, in a softened form and with the appearance of tenderness, had inspired the author of the Imitation four centuries before?

Wherever the religious idea subsists, the conclusion of La Rochefoucauld against humanity is irrefutable.

Nowadays it is in good taste, in a certain world, to declaim against the human virtues, which, it is said, have their origin in pride. On the whole line, the order is given to the members of the teaching body to combat pure morality as well as pure reason, and to strongly inculcate in youth this truth: that man receives from heaven the strength to fulfill his duties, as he borrows from faith the certainty of his knowledge. God alone, says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, can give us the virtue of perseverance. And in a series of studies he proves that the capital error of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the source of his weaknesses was to have believed that man could find in himself the strength to love virtue enough to practice it. This does not prevent Mr. Saint-Marc Girardin from thinking with M. Cousin that La Rochefoucauld has forced the consequences of his principle, and to treat his book as distressing.

Let those who can explain this eclectic chatter. But what are we to expect from a society whose wisdom consists in confessing that humanity deserves death and derision, then in covering it with bandages and flowers, according to this principle of quintessential hypocrisy, that if the heart of the man is perverse, if he does good only by the impulse of a divine force, is it neither beautiful, nor charitable, nor useful to tell him so?

CHAPITRE VI.

Âge nouveau : la Révolution. — Immanence et réalité de la Justice.

XXVIII

No religion, no morals, said the reason of peoples in the religious period of history; and we have just seen how religion, making God the subject of morals, results in the negation of humanity.

Now, no humanity, no morality: there remains only the symbolism of worship, the arbitrariness of the Church and the ignominy of its discipline. And we can now understand how the period of religion must have been the period of immorality.

Under paganism, religion was limited to giving security to a moral system that was nowhere defined; and for want of a science of mœurs, ancient society succumbed.

Since the establishment of Christianity, religion has endeavored to supply this science, which is always ignored, through the office of penitence; and we are witnessing civilization collapsing again.

In vain, to rebuild it, jurisconsults and philosophers, scholars and scholars, mystics and utilitarians, bring to it the tribute of their sleepless nights; in vain, to seduce consciences through the attraction of rationality, they simplify theodicy or suppress it. As they do not escape from the system, as it is always divine Justice or State Justice that they propose, we do not listen to them: they bore us.

Wouldn’t it be time to change the hypothesis, to seek the rule and the guarantee of mœurs, no longer in a transcendent revelation, but in the consideration of ourselves and, having found it, to resign ourselves to be honest without religious motives, were it only for the pleasure of honesty?

What motivates my faith in the Revolution is that I find it logical, as Christianity was at the time of its institution, as polytheism had been 2,000 years before it. The Revolution is more than logical; it is real. Founded on the experience of history, freed from all illuminism, it possesses all the characteristics of certainty, reality, universality and observability.

Consider its march, and the manner in which it entered the world.

CHAPTER VI.

New age: the Revolution. — Immanence and reality of Justice.

XXVII. — No religion, no morals, said the reason of peoples in the religious period of history; and we have just seen how religion, making God the subject of morals, results in the negation of humanity.

Under paganism, religion was limited to giving security to a moral system that was nowhere defined; and for want of a science of mœurs, ancient society succumbed.

Since the establishment of Christianity, religion has endeavored to supply this science, which is always ignored, through the office of penitence; and we are witnessing civilization collapsing again.

Consider its march, and the manner in which it entered the world.

XXIX

After a treatment of eighteen centuries, Christianity had left society in a state as deplorable as that in which it had taken it; one could even say that the situation was aggravated by all the tenacity that religious impotence lent to the disorder. What Christ could not do, what man would dare to undertake?

Si Pergama dextrâ
Defendi possent, etiam hâc defensa fuissent.

The human consciousness must be robust, you will admit, to withstand such a long disappointment. Eighteen centuries, after the twenty of Greco-Latin polytheism, and the fifty or sixty of the Egyptians and the Magi!

“It is not humanity that has lacked in faith,” said the Revolution to itself; “it is faith that has lacked humanity. Let us no longer attribute the immorality that kills us to an internal cause: this cause is other than ourselves, it is accidental and external. Let us similarly stop expecting the light that our government demands from a superhuman wisdom: man and society are no more difficult to penetrate than nature.”

And here is that which from the outset puts vice and crime down to ignorance, superstition, misery, bad economy, bad governments, and which calls for revelation to reason.

“Considering,” says the declaration of September 8, 1791, “that ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt for the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments, etc.”

The declarations of June 24, 1793 and of 1848 repeat the same thing. Those of July-August 1789, February 15 and 16, 1795, 5 Fructidor Year 3 (August 25, 1795) implicitly contain the same ideas. As for the constitutions of the consulate and of the empire, of 1814 and 1830, if they have not reproduced them, it is because it did not suit them to criticize the governments.

For me, I admit that this way of proceeding seems to me as decisive as it is rational. A priori, as results from the notion of being and its modes, it would imply a contradiction if man and society do not possess within themselves the law of their mores (Def. 1); — à posteriori, the hypothesis to attributes the corruption of the human subject to himself, and which has reigned, according to the calculation of the Egyptians and Orientals, for more than 8,000 years, has engendered only corruption and hypocrisy. Therefore, conclusum est adversus theologos, we must change the system.

The source of the evil transferred from inside to outside, it remains to find the remedy. To whom does the Revolution address itself?

The clergy accused the revolutionaries of atheism. It was raising a dangerous, insoluble question that made us lose sight of the real one. How could an assembly of legislators trained in the school of science and experimental philosophy engage in a discussion of theology, say whether or not there was a Supreme Being, wha this Being was, and what relations humanity maintained with it?… The Revolution therefore set aside the theological idea, but without denying it or admitting it, except to reestablish it later, if necessary, and with reservations.

This is what results from all the statements. Those of September 3, ’94, June 24, ’93 and August 22, ’95 are placed under the invocation of the Supreme Being; but those of July-August ’89, December 13, ’99 say nothing about it. As for the constitutions of the empire, of 1814 and 1830, thye are limited, in providing a salary to the cult, to applying the principle of religious liberty, without making the slightest mention of the divinity

Even that, you will say, is atheism. — Let’s not quarrel. The Revolution, by dismissing, along with original sin, the hypothesis of God, does not deny it in itself: interpreter of social law and scientific reason, it does not believe itself to be a sufficient quality to deny or affirm what goes beyond reason and experience. Remaining in the sphere of human manifestations, it limits itself to saying that the idea of God is foreign to human morals, that it is even harmful to morals; not that God is bad in himself—what is bad in itself?—but because its intervention in the affairs of humanity produces only evil there, by the consequences, the abuses, the superstitions and the laxity that it entails.

La Révolution était trop sage pour toucher à des idées de cette espèce. Elle savait qu’avant elle tous les fondateurs et réformateurs de sociétés s’étaient attachés, dans l’intérêt de la morale, à épurer l’idée divine. Tel est le Dieu, disait-on, telle sera la société. N’est-ce pas ce que font encore aujourd’hui les religionnaires dissidents, qui, jugeant le Dieu Christ au-dessous de l’époque actuelle, poursuivent une détermination théologique plus en rapport avec la susceptibilité de leur raison et l’étendue de leurs lumières ? La Révolution avait observé au contraire que la qualité ou perfection du sujet divin est chose à peu près insignifiante ; qu’il peut être indifféremment ange, homme, étoile ou phallus, pourvu qu’il obtienne le respect ; que c’est par le respect ou la religion qu’il inspire qu’il exerce son action sur la morale ; et c’est contre la religion en tant qu’élément de moralité que la Révolution se prononçait.

In summary, the Revolution positively intended to free morality from all mystical mixture; thereby it has radically separated itself, not only from Christianity, but from all religion, past, present, and to come. The rage to theologize must be great for the zealots of this Revolution to have been able to discover that it emanated in a straight line from Christian dogma!

XXVIII. — After a treatment of eighteen centuries, Christianity had left society in a state as deplorable as that in which it had taken it; one could even say that the situation was aggravated by all the tenacity that religious impotence lent to the disorder. What Christ could not do, what man would dare to undertake?

Si Pergama dextrâ
Defendi possent, etiam hâc defensa fuissent,

And here is that which from the outset puts vice and crime down to ignorance, superstition, misery, bad economy, bad governments, and which calls for revelation to reason.

For me, I admit that this way of proceeding seems to me as decisive as it is rational. A priori, as results from the notion of being and its modes, it would imply a contradiction if man and society do not possess within themselves the law of their mores; — a posteriori, the hypothesis to attributes the corruption of the human subject to himself, and which has reigned, according to the calculation of the Egyptians and Orientals, for more than 8,000 years, has engendered only corruption and hypocrisy. Therefore, conclusum est adversus theologos, we must change the system.

The source of the evil transferred from inside to outside, it remains to find the remedy. To whom does the Revolution address itself?

The clergy accused the revolutionaries of atheism. It was raising a dangerous, insoluble question that made us lose sight of the real one. How could an assembly of legislators trained in the school of science and experimental philosophy engage in a discussion of theology, say whether or not there was a Supreme Being, wha this Being was, and what relations humanity maintained with it? The Revolution therefore set aside the theological idea, without denying it or admitting it, except to reestablish it later, if necessary, and with reservations.

This is what results from all the statements. Those of September 3, ’94, June 24, ’93 and August 22, ’95 are placed under the invocation of the Supreme Being; but those of July-August ’89, December 13, ’99 say nothing about it. As for the constitutions of 1804, 1814, 1815, and 1830, they are limited, in providing a salary to the cult, to applying the principle of religious liberty, without making the slightest mention of the divinity.

The Revolution was too wise to touch ideas of this sort. It knew that before it all the founders and reformers of societies had endeavored, in the interest of morality, to purify the divine idea. Such is God, it was said, such will be society. Is this not what the dissenting religionists still do today, who, judging the God Christ beneath the present era, pursue a theological determination more in keeping with the susceptibility of their reason and the extent of their enlightnment? The Revolution had observed, on the contrary, that the quality or perfection of the divine subject is something almost insignificant; that it can be indifferently angel, man, star, or phallus, provided it obtains respect; that it is through respect or religion that it exercises its influence on morals; and it was against religion as an element of morality that the Revolution declared itself.

XXX

Man therefore remains: it is up to him to provide us with the subject of Justice, principle, rule and sanction of his mœurs.

Placed face to face with nature, man, through his moral superiority and the deployment of his faculties, creates by himself his right over things;

Through his activity, he creates his right to the exploitation of the land, which he makes his domain, and through work he creates his right to appropriation;

Through his reason, he creates his right to science and to the manifestation of his thought;

Through the affections of his heart, he creates his right to the family and to the affections that flow from it.

But, face to face with man, what will be the right of man? What can it be? It will not be an action, like that which man exerts on things and on the animals themselves: such an action would immediately produce conflict, would establish the emptiness of right.

The right of man vis-à-vis man can only be the right to respect.

But what will determine, in the heart, this respect?

The fear of God, answers the ancient legislator.

The interest of society, respond the modern innovators, atheists or non-atheists.

It is always placing the cause of respect, hence the principle of law and justice, outside of man, and consequently denying this very principle, destroying its sine qua non condition, its innateness, its immanence. A Justice that is reduced for man to obedience or utility departs from the truth: it is a fiction.

What remains then, since we cannot do without Justice, since this Justice must be something immanent and real within us, and since, according to the manifestations of the universal consciousness and the axioms of science (ax. 2, 3, 6), it cannot be that Justice is not something?

It remains that Justice is the first and most essential of our faculties; a sovereign faculty, for that very reason the most difficult to know; the faculty of feeling and affirming our dignity, consequently of wanting it and defending it, both in the person of others and in our own person.

It remains, I say, that man is constituted in such a way that, notwithstanding the passions which agitate him and of which his destiny is to make himself master, notwithstanding the motives of sympathy, of common interest, of love, of rivalry, hatred, even revenge, that he may have vis-à-vis such and such an individual, he experiences in his presence, whether he likes it or not, a certain respect that even his pride could not overcome.

To feel and to affirm human dignity, first in all that is proper to us, then in the person of our neighbor, and this without a return of egoism and without any consideration of divinity or community: that is right.

To be ready in all circumstances to take up with energy, and if necessary against oneself, the defense of this dignity: that is JUSTICE.

XXIX. — Man therefore remains: it is up to him to provide us with the subject of Justice, its principle, its rule and its sanction.

Placed face to face with nature, man, through his moral superiority and the deployment of his faculties, creates by himself his right over things;

Through his activity, he creates his right to the exploitation of the land, which he makes his domain, and through work he creates his right to appropriation;

Through his reason, he creates his right to science and to the manifestation of his thought;

Through the affections of his heart, he creates his right to the family and to the affections that flow from it.

The right of man vis-à-vis man can only be the right to respect.

But what will determine, in the heart, this respect?

The fear of God, answers the ancient legislator.

The interest of society, respond the modern innovators, atheists or non-atheists.

It remains that Justice is the first and most essential of our faculties; a sovereign faculty, for that very reason the slowest to form and the most difficult to know; the faculty of feeling and affirming our dignity, consequently of wanting it and defending it, both in the person of others and in our own person.

To be ready in all circumstances to take up with energy, and if necessary against oneself, the defense of this dignity: that is JUSTICE.

This amounts to saying that through Justice each of us senses themselves at the same time as person and community, individual and family, citizen and people, man and humanity. A sentiment easy to observe, first by the disapproval aroused in us by the sight of any insult done by one man to another man; then by the remorse we feel for the insults of which we ourselves are the authors; finally, by the shame we feel in the presence of a culprit, as if this culprit were ourselves.

XXXI

To feel one’s being in others, to the point of sacrificing every other interest to this feeling, of demanding for others the same respect as for oneself, and of becoming irritated against the unworthy who suffers from being missed, as if the care of his dignity did not concern him alone, such a faculty seems at first sight strange.

Reflecting on it, we will find that things must happen in this way, that if it were otherwise we would no longer be moral natures. I am taking morality here from the point of view of individualism. We would lie to our dignity, which is contradictory.

It is a law of creation and of reason that beings are distinguished from one another by their differences, and reciprocally that identity of attributes supposes identity of essence; so that, essence appearing above all in the generality, preserving itself through generality, defining itself all the better as generality embraces a greater number of particular cases, the individuals separated by their differences merge, through the essence that is common to them, in one unique existence.

Now every man tends to determine and make his essence prevail, which is his dignity. (Def. 5)

It follows that the essence being identical and one for all men, each of us feels himself both as a person and as a collectivity; that the injury committed is felt by third parties and by the offender himself as well as by the offended; that consequently protest is common, which is precisely Justice.

To use theological language, which consists in placing transcendental realities where science limits itself to placing abstractions, when Justice makes its imperious voice heard in our soul, it is the WORD, Logos, common soul of the humanity, of which each of us is an incarnation and an organ, that calls us and commands us to defend it.

Psychological analysis thus brings us its testimony here. It demonstrates a priori that Justice, or the faculty of feeling our dignity in others as well as in ourselves, as a result of the will to defend it, is an essential thing in us; it remains for experience to prove in its turn that it is a real thing.

We will try later to directly establish the reality of our juridical faculty: let it suffice for the present to recall the principal facts that make it plausible.

XXX. — To feel one’s being in others, to the point of sacrificing every other interest to this feeling, of demanding for others the same respect as for oneself, and of becoming irritated against the unworthy who suffers from being missed, as if the care of his dignity did not concern him alone, such a faculty seems at first sight strange.

Reflecting on it, we will find that things must happen in this way, that if it were otherwise we would no longer be moral natures. I am taking morality here from the very point of view of individualism. We would lie to our dignity, which is contradictory.

It is a law of creation and of reason that beings are characterized by their differences, and reciprocally that identity of attributes supposes identity of essence; so that, essence appearing above all in the generality, preserving itself through generality, defining itself all the better as generality embraces a greater number of particular cases, the individuals separated by their differences wish to consider themselves as copies of each other, relating, by the essence that is common to them, to one unique existence.

Now every man tends to determine and make his essence prevail, which is his dignity itself. (Def. 5)

It follows that the essence being identical and one for all men, each of us feels himself both as a person and as a species; that the injury committed is felt by third parties and by the offender himself as well as by the offended; that consequently protest is common, which is precisely Justice.

To use theological language, which consists in placing supernatural realities where science limits itself to placing abstractions, when Justice makes its imperious voice heard in our soul, it is the WORD, Logos, common soul of the humanity, embodied in each of us, that calls us and commands us to defend it.

Psychological and metaphysical analysis thus brings us its testimony here. It demonstrates a priori that Justice, or the faculty of feeling our dignity in others as well as in ourselves, as a result of the will to defend it, is an essential thing in us; it remains for experience to prove in its turn that it is a real thing.

We will try, in another study, to directly establish the reality of our juridical faculty: let it suffice for the present to recall the principal facts that already make it plausible.

XXXII

1. It is a fact that, despite all the iniquities that dishonor it, society only subsists through justice; that civilization advances with its sole support, and that it is the principle of all the well-being enjoyed by our species.

There is therefore in humanity a principle, a force that sustains it, that communicates life to it. This principle, whatever it is, is not nothing. (ax. 3)

Il y a donc dans l’humanité un principe, une force qui la soutient, qui lui communique la vie. Ce principe, quel qu’il soit, n’est pas un néant (ax. 3).

2. This principle does not come, by an additional infusion, from an essence higher than humanity, as the religious myths say; it can’t come that way. On the one hand, in fact, religion tends to the abasement of human dignity, which is the basis and object of Justice; it only persists because of that abasement. On the other hand, the religious movement is the opposite of the juridical movement: while faith gradually weakens and loses its influence, the understanding of right and its practice develops, takes hold of all positions. However we envision them, religion and justice appear to us to be opposed: the relation that unites them, which we shall have to determine, cannot be a relation of causality.

3. Justice also does not come from the great humanitary collective, from the True Great Being, as Auguste Comte called it. It is neither sympathy, nor sociability, nor the inclination to assistance.

In the first place, it would be with this naturalism as with the transcendental hypothesis itself: for the glory of the Great Being it would debase the individual, kill the moral sense within him and annihilate Justice.

Then, there is a fact no less well attested by history than the one we have just related with regard to religion, that the movement of Justice among the nations is parallel to that of liberty and inverse to communism, gouvernementalism and all the formulas that tend to absorb individual initiative personnelle in society or the State.

Among the animal species that inhabit the globe, there are several that are distinguished by their sociability. Is man one of these species? Yes and no. He can be defined as a animal that fights as well as a sociable animal. What is certain, at least, is that he rejects association as the animals feel and practice it, which is pure communism. Man, a free being par excellence, only accepts society on the condition of finding himself free there: a condition that can only be obtained with the help of a particular feeling, different from sociability and superior to to it. This feeling is Justice.

As for assistance, the duty of which, prior to any right, would constitute, according to Mr. Oudot, Justice, it is a virtue of advice, not of PRECEPT, as the casuists say; very good in itself, like the charity to which it belongs, but so foreign to Justice that the object of the latter is to annul it by rendering it useless.

Justice, we never tire of recalling, is the feeling of our dignity in others. Now, as it is proper to our dignity to do without the assistance of others; consequently, to desire that our neighbor does without our own, and, what is more, that he abstains from it. Christianity, which conceived of love through charity, debitum conjugale, could not fail to make Justice also dependent on charity. In this it was faithful to its principle and its role. But who would have expected to see this theory, at which our pride revolts, taken up by the philosophers who came out of the Revolution, and who present themselves as its interpreters? And isn’t it a strange thing that the same writers who, in order to make Justice more sacred in our eyes, begin by relating it to Heaven, making it superior to man, then pull it down below man, by deducing it from the affections of pure animality?

4. Since criticism has led us to speak of animality, let us compare what happens in the heart of man, when he finds himself in relations to his fellows, with what he experiences in his relations with the animals.

Man hunts animals: it is one of his prerogatives. For these beings of an inferior order, he lays snares; he uses violence and perfidy towards them; he treats them as a despot, according to his good pleasure; he skins them, exploits them, sells them, eats them, and all of this without crime or remorse. His conscience does not murmur about it, neither his heart nor his mind suffer from it; for him, there is no injustice. And the reason, if you please? The reason is that he does not recognize any dignity in animals or, to speak rigorously, that he does not feel his dignity, if I dare say it in this way, in their person.

There is, however, between man and beast a certain sympathy, founded on the confused feeling of universal life, in which all living beings participate. This sympathy has always been the object of theological and philosophical speculation; from time immemorial, some dreamers have sought to deduce from it some kind of relationship between man and the animal kingdom. We know the discipline of Pythagoras and the Brahmins, founded on the dogma of metempsychosis. Now that the notion of right and duty among humans has become obscured, some moralists have seen fit to speak to us of our duties towards animals, and I find in the Revue de Paris, June 15, 1856, an article where the return of the great alliance, the ancient alliance, universal charity, is announced as one of the characteristics of the new era.

I ask pardon of the Grammont Law, as well as of the oriental hospitality for horses and donkeys, but I can only see in all this pantheistic verbiage one of the most deplorable signs of our modern mental and intellectual decadence. The ancient alliance, preserved at Singapore, among the Arabs and the Turks, is nothing other than the primitive and bestial state of humanity. As man rises, he moves away from the beasts; and if he loses his inclinations as a hunter and executioner, on the other hand he takes on the habits of the most hardened exploiter towards them.

What is meant, I ask you, by the return to the ancient alliance, to Pythagorean sentiments, with this immense consumption of wool, leather, horn, Prussian blue, butter, cheese, fresh or salted meat? Our philozoia will always be reduced to English practice: feeding animals well, caring for them well, cross-breeding them well, in order to obtain more milk, fat, hair, meat, and fewer bones, in order to eat them. And whatever kindness we display towards them, it is not, let us be certain, out of consideration for their persons, but out of concern for our own delicacy.

It is quite another thing with regard to man, white, yellow, red or black. As long as I adopt with him the manners that I allow myself with the brutes, I offend him, and, what is more extraordinary, I offend myself by offending him.

If I make a false statement to my neighbor, I am failing his dignity; I am deceiving him. What is more, I fail my own; I lie. It is a double wrongdoing: by the nature of Justice, crime is always double.

If I make him a slave, if I take his wife, his child, his property, if I kill him, I am a tyrant, a thief, an assassin, an adulterer. I feel that I have put myself beneath the humanity that is in him and in me, which means that I recognize myself as worthy of death.

What does all this mean, if only between man and man, besides the feeling of benevolence and brotherhood, there is another of consideration and respect, which departs from the ordinary circle of natural sympathy with all living beings, and is no longer found between man and animals; in other words, if between man and beast, if there is sometimes cause for affection, there exists nothing of what we call Justice, and that this is one of the traits that distinctly distinguish our species, like speech, poetry, dialectics and art?

XXXI. — 1. It is a fact that, despite the iniquities that dishonor it, society subsists through justice; that civilization develops with its sole support, and that it is the principle of all the well-being enjoyed by our species.

There is therefore in humanity a principle, a force that sustains it, that communicates life to it. This principle, whatever it is, is not nothing. (ax. 3)

2. This principle does not come, by an additional infusion, from an essence higher than humanity, as the religious myths say; it can’t come that way. On the one hand, religion is the negation of human dignity, which is the basis and object of Justice. It is instituted to make up for the lack of Justice in us; it does not give it to us. On the other hand, the religious movement is the opposite of the juridical movement: while faith gradually weakens and loses its influence, the understanding of right and its practice develops, takes hold of all positions. However we envision them, religion and justice appear to us to be opposed: the relation that unites them, which we shall have to determine, cannot be a relation of causality.

3. Justice does not come to us from society either: how could the genus possess a quality that is not in the individual? — It is neither sympathy, nor sociability, nor kindness, nor the inclination to assistance.

In the first place, it would be with this socialism as with religion: for the glory of humanity, it would debase man, kill his moral sense and annihilate justice.

Then, there is a fact no less well attested by history than the one we have just related with regard to religion, which is that the progress of justice is proportional to that of liberty, the inverse of communism as of religion and any formula tending to absorb personality into the society or state.

Finally, it is obvious that Justice cannot be reduced to sympathy or sociability, a feeling of pure instinct, which it is useful and laudable to cultivate, but which by itself, far from engendering respect for dignity in the enemy, as Justice commands, vigorously excludes it. Among the animal species that inhabit the globe, there are several that are distinguished by their sociability. Is man one of these species? Yes and no. He can be defined as a animal that fights as well as a sociable animal. What is certain, at least, is that he rejects association as the animals feel and practice it, which is pure communism. Man, a free being par excellence, only accepts society on the condition of finding himself free there: a condition that can only be obtained with the help of a particular feeling, different from sociability and superior to to it. This feeling is Justice.

As for assistance, the duty of which, prior to any right, would constitute, according to Mr. Oudot, Justice, it is a virtue of advice, not of precept, as the casuists say; very good in itself, like the charity to which it belongs, but so foreign to Justice that the object of the latter is to annul it by rendering it useless. Justice, we never tire of recalling, is the feeling of human dignity. Now, as it is proper to our dignity to do without the assistance of others, so we want our neighbor to do without ours and, what is more, that he abstains from it. Christianity, which conceived of love through charity, debitum conjugale, could not fail to make Justice also dependent on charity. In this it was faithful to its principle and its role. But who would have expected to see this theory, at which our pride revolts, taken up by the philosophers who came out of the Revolution, and who present themselves as its interpreters? And isn’t it a strange thing that the same writers who, in order to make Justice more sacred in our eyes, begin by relating it to Heaven, making it superior to man, then pull it down below man, by deducing it from the obscure and purely carnal affections of animality?

4. Since criticism has led us to speak of the animal, let us compare what happens in the heart of man, when he finds himself in relations to his fellows, with what he experiences in his relations with the animals.

There is, however, between man and beast a certain sympathy, founded on the confused feeling of universal life, in which all living beings participate. This sympathy has always been the object of theological and philosophical speculation; from time immemorial, some dreamers have sought to deduce from it some kind of relationship between man and the animal kingdom. We know the discipline of Pythagoras and the Brahmins, founded on the dogma of metempsychosis. Now that the notion of right among humans has become obscured, some moralists have seen fit to speak to us of our duties towards animals, and I find in the Revue de Paris, June 15, 1856, an article where the return of the great alliance, the ancient alliance, universal charity, is announced as one of the characteristics of the new era.

I ask pardon of the Grammont Law, as well as of the oriental hospitality for horses and donkeys, but I can only see in all this pantheistic verbiage one of the most deplorable signs of our modern mental and intellectual decadence. The ancient alliance, preserved at Singapore, among the Arabs and the Turks, is nothing other than the primitive and bestial state of humanity. As man rises, he moves away from the beasts; and if he loses his inclinations as a hunter and executioner, on the other hand he takes on the habits of the most hardened exploiter towards them.

XXXIII

Justice explained in its cause, separated from religion, distinguished from sympathy, it remains to be seen how it intervenes for the constitution of society.

The Revolution alone has conceived and defined the Social Contract.

At this, someone exclaims: Association is spontaneous; there has never been a social contract. — No, no more than there has been a grammatical contract. Does this prevent grammar from being given a priori as a map of speech, by the very nature of the mind?

There therefore exists a contract or constitution of society, given a priori by the forms of consciousness, which are liberty, dignity, reason and justice, and by the relations of neighborhood and exchange that individuals inevitably maintain among themselves. It is the act by which the men forming a group declare, ipso facto, the identity and solidarity of their respective dignities, recognize each other reciprocally and by the same title as sovereigns, and stand for each other as guarantors.

Thus Justice, that lofty prerogative of man, which pagan Rome had placed under the guard of her gods, which Christian Rome made disappear in the sanctity of its triad—Justice has Justice as its guarantee and sanction. So that the members of the new society, guaranteeing each other, reciprocally make use of tutelary gods and of Providence: a conception that effaces all of the most profound productions of the reason of the peoples. Never had such a glorification been made of our nature; never were the doctrines of transcendence nearer their end.

Duty in this system therefore pre-exists right; to put it better, duty, being the condition of man, does not leave him right.

The social contract nullifies this theology. According to the revolutionary principle, man constituted in a state of society by the Justice that is immanent in him is no longer the same as in a state of isolation. His consciousness is different, his self is changed. Without abandoning the rule of well-being, he subordinates it to that of the just, all the more because he discovers in respect of the contract a superior felicity, and that over time he has made a habit of it, a need, a second nature. Justice thus becomes another egoism. It is this egoism, the antithesis of the first, that constitutes probity.

A friend gives me a considerable sum in deposit, then happens to die. No one is aware of the deposit, the owner of which did not even demand a receipt. Shall I return the sum?

It would be ignorance of the human heart to deny that the first movement was a secret desire to keep. The deceased only has distant relatives, rich themselves, unworthy, whom he did not love. I have reason to believe that if he had foreseen his end, he would have made me his legatee: his very confidence bears witness to this. Who am I depriving, anyway? Foreigners, to whom this chance fortune will come as if it fell from the sky! Why shouldn’t it fall on me instead? Who will call me to account? Who will know?

I reflect, it is true, that the established law is by no means in accord with my covetousness; that an unexpected circumstance may reveal the secret; that then I am dishonoured; that it would not even be a small difficulty to explain such wealth, etc.

All of this puzzles me greatly. Finally my conscience rises: I tell myself that such meditation is already a disgrace; that if the law is imperfect, if human prudence is faulty, if the chance that enriches some and frustrates others is absurd, if this combination of circumstances is immoral, I have no right as a result and that all pleasures of ill-gotten wealth are not worth a quarter of an hour of my own esteem.

In short, I return the money.

You see, exclaims La Rochefoucauld, that you have been an honest man out of selfishness!…

Let us be clear: yes, out of the selfishness of Justice, which is a contradiction in terms, and completely reverses your indictment.

How can we fail to see that there exists here a being whom the consideration of Justice, the feeling of his dignity in others, has distorted to the point of making him take the side of others against himself; that under the influence this obsession with right there has formed in him, superior to his first will, a juridical will, which I will even call supernatural, not that I relate it to a transcendent or divine cause, but because it expresses a new state, superior to the state of nature, and which tends more and more to erase it?

Let selfishness therefore develop in this sphere as much as it wishes: far from imputing it to myself as a crime, I claim to make it the title of my holiness. Yes, I will shrink from public degradation. I will do a good deed out of human respect. I will push hypocrisy so far as to repeat this role, if I can, every day. I will use my selfishness to constantly create new rights for the consideration of my brothers; by dint of indulging in this selfish habit, I will make of it my second nature. I will bask in my ow worthiness; I will end up showing as much joy at following the suggestions of my self-respect as a member of society, as I used to show ardor in satisfying my private passions. It is precisely in this, and in this alone, that henceforth my VIRTUE consists.

Say now that my motives are not pure, since there is an interest in them: it is nothing more than a miserable equivocation, unworthy of a man of sense. The good action which in the system of Transcendental Justice had to relate to God, consequently to egoism, you are forced at this hour to relate to pure Justice, immanent in all men. Certainly, there is for the works of Justice, a delight of conscience, as there is a pleasure for the enjoyment of the senses. I would no longer be moral if I did not feel this delight. Theologians teach that the love of God in heaven is inseparable from bliss, that he is bliss itself. This is precisely what the theory of immanence says. The sacrifice of Justice is inseparable from bliss; it is felicity itself, no longer that selfish felicity whose sacrifice justice demands; but a superior filicity, such as the elevation of the subject to social dignity supposes. What more could La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, La Bruyère, Port-Royal and the whole Church demand?

XXXII. — Justice explained in its principle, separated from religion, distinguished from sympathy, it remains to be seen how it intervenes for the constitution of society.

The Revolution alone has conceived and defined the Social Contract.

Association, you say, is spontaneous; there has never been a social contract. — No doubt, no more than there has been a grammatical contract. Does this prevent grammar from being given a priori as a map of speech, by the very nature of the mind?

According to the transcendentalists, man being incapable by himself of obeying the law and of sacrificing his own interest to Justice, religion intervenes to constrain him in the name of the divine majesty. Duty in this system therefore pre-exists right; to put it better, duty, being the condition of man, does not leave him right.

A friend gives me a considerable sum in deposit, then happens to die. No one is aware of the deposit, the owner of which did not even demand a receipt. Shall I return the sum?

In short, I return the money.

You see, exclaims La Rochefoucauld, that you have been an honest man out of selfishness!…

Let us be clear: yes, out of the selfishness of Justice, which is a contradiction in terms, and completely reverses your indictment.

CHAPTER VII.

Définition de la Justice.

XXXIV. — We can now give the definition of Justice; later, we will see the reality of it.

1. Man, by virtue of the reason with which he is endowed, has the faculty of feeling his dignity in the person of his fellow man as in his own person, and of affirming, in this respect, his identity with him.

2. Justice is the product of this faculty: it is the respect, spontaneously experienced and reciprocally guaranteed, for human dignity, in some person and in whatever circumstance it finds itself compromised, and at whatever risk its defense exposes us.

3. This respect is at the lowest level in the barbarian, who makes up for it by religion; it is strengthened and developed in the civilized, who practices justice for its own sake, and incessantly frees himself from all personal interest and all divine consideration.

4. Thus conceived, Justice is adequate to beatitude, the principle and end of man’s destiny.

5. From the definition of Justice is deduced that of right and duty.

Right is for each the ability to demand from others respect for the human dignity in their person; — duty, the obligation for each to respect this dignity in others.

At base, right and duty are identical terms, since they are always the expression of respect, payable or due; payable because it is due, due because it is payable: they differ only in the subject, me or you, in whom the dignity is compromised.

6. From the identity of reason in all men, and from the feeling of respect that leads them to maintain their mutual dignity at all costs, results equality before Justice.

Modesty is a form of Justice, a polite way of saying that, while reserving the rights of our dignity, we do not intend to rise above our fellow human beings and cause any harm to their self-respect. The ancients had a keen sense of this virtue; their biographies, as much as their harangues, offer beautiful models. Among Christians it degenerates into an affectation of humility; it is false.

Pride, ambition and glory openly violate Justice. They call to mistrust, hatred and repression: it is a positive and direct offense against the dignity of others.

Glory is that pompous, swelling instinct that is ridiculed in the fable of the frogs and the ox. Glory, says the Scripture, belongs only to God, who alone cannot be exaggerated because he is infinite: Dignus est accipere…gloriam. It is as hateful in the nation as in the individual.

CHAPTER VII.

Definition of Justice.

XXXIII. — We can now give the definition of Justice; later, we will see its reality.

1. Man, by virtue of the reason with which he is endowed, has the faculty of feeling his dignity in the person of his fellow man as in his own person, of affirming himself at once as individual and as species.

4. Thus conceived, Justice, rendering all conditions equivalent and interdependent, identifying man and humanity, is virtually adequate to beatitude, the principle and end of man’s destiny.

5. From the definition of Justice is deduced that of right and duty.

Right is for each the ability to demand from others respect for the human dignity in their person; — duty, the obligation for each to respect this dignity in others.

6. From the identity of reason in all men, and from the feeling of respect that leads them to maintain their mutual dignity at all costs, results equality before Justice.

Pride, ambition and glory (L) openly violate Justice. They call to mistrust, hatred and repression: it is a positive and direct offense against the dignity of others.

7. From the distinction we have made between Dignity and justice — the first individual and unilateral; the second bilateral, indicating a relation of connection and solidarity — is deduced for the legislator the distinction to be established between the acts of the private life and the acts of the public life, and as a consequence the whole theory of the law on defamation.

The acts of private life are those that the man or the family accomplish by virtue of their personal and family individuality, in the secrecy of their dwelling, and which, not being directly connected to any foreign interest, do not come under any law and do not involve the dignity of anyone. Such facts cannot be revealed and made fun of, however ignoble or ridiculous they may be: this would be a lack of charity and justice, and would cause society more harm than profit.

Acts of public life are all those in which the dignity or interest of society are involved: such acts can be legitimately revealed and reproached, unless there has been condemnation and punishment: in the latter case the reproach becomes an insult, it is no longer permitted.

According to these principles, it can be said that the French law on defamation is itself an outrage to public morals. It covers, without making any distinction between public and private life:

“Any allegation or imputation of a fact that undermines the honor or consideration of the person or body to which the fact is imputed is defamation. (Law of May 17, 1819, art. 13.)

“Under no circumstances will evidence by witnesses be admitted to establish the reality of offensive or defamatory facts.” (Law of February 17, 1852, art. 28.)

“It is forbidden to report on libel suits. (Law of August 11, 1848.)

These laws, all of them reactionary, have been made in the interest of the prominent persons that each new government makes it a duty to protect against the reproach of the citizens. They are of little interest to the masses, and the latitude they allow makes it disgusting for any man who does not feel himself the friend of power to resort to them. Such a manner of covering private life, of repressing calumny and extinguishing hatred, is nothing but a reserve of impunity, to the profit of the influences of the moment.

XXXV — Some observations regarding this definition.

It is necessary, and its negation implies a contradiction: for if Justice is not innate in humanity, if it is superior, external, foreign to it, it follows that human society has no law of its own, that the collective subject has no mores, that the social state is a state against nature, civilization a depravity, speech, the sciences and the arts the effects of unreason and immorality: all propositions that common sense belies.

It states a fact, namely that, if there is not always and necessarily community of interests between men, there is always and essentially solidarity of dignity, something superior to interest.

It is pure of any mystical, physiological element. Instead of the religion of the gods, it is respect for humanity; instead of an animal affection, a kind of organic magnetism, the exalted feeling that reason has of itself.

It is superior to interest.

I must respect, and, if I can, cause my neighbor to be respected as myself: such is the law of my conscience. In consideration of what do I owe him this respect? In consideration of his strength, his talent, his wealth? They are external accidents, precisely what is unrespectable in the human person. In consideration of the respect he pays me in turn? No, Justice is superior even to this interest. It does not wait for the reciprocal to act; it affirms and desires respect for human dignity, even among the enemy, which is why there is a right of war; even in the murderer, whom we kill, stripped of his quality as a man, which is why there is a criminal law.

What I respect in my neighbor is not the gifts of nature or the charms of fortune; it is neither his ox, nor his ass, nor his servant, as the Decalogue says; it is not even safety that I expect from him in exchange for mine: it is his quality as a man.

Justice is therefore a faculty of the soul, the first of all, that which constitutes the social being; but it is not just a faculty: it is an idea, a relation, an equation. As a faculty it is capable of development; it is this development that will constitute, as will be seen later, the education of humanity. As an equation, it presents nothing variable, arbitrary or antinomic; it is absolute and immutable like any law, and, like any other law, highly intelligible. It is through it that the facts of social life, indeterminate in their nature and contradictory, become susceptible to definition and order.

XXXIII. — Some observations regarding this definition.

It states a fact, namely that, if there is not always and necessarily community of interests between men, there is always and essentially solidarity of dignity, something superior to interest.

It is pure of any mystical, physiological element. Instead of the religion of the gods, it is respect for ourselves; instead of an animal affection, a kind of organic magnetism, it is the exalted, impersonal sentiment that we have of the dignity of our species, a dignity that does not separate us from our liberty.

What makes me respect my neighbor is not the gifts of nature or the advantages of fortune; it is neither his ox, nor his ass, nor his servant, as the Decalogue says; it is not even safety that he owes me, as I owe him mine: it is his quality as a man.

Justice is therefore a faculty of the soul, the first of all, that which constitutes the social being; but it is more than a faculty: it is an idea, it indicates a relation, an equation. As a faculty it is capable of development; it is this development that will constitute the education of humanity. As an equation, it presents nothing variable, arbitrary or antinomic; it is absolute and immutable like any law, and, like any other law, highly intelligible. It is through it that the facts of social life, indeterminate in their nature and contradictory, become susceptible to definition and order.

It follows from this that Justice, conceived as an obligatory relation at the same time as a reality for the soul, can no longer, by the deduction of its notion, lead to the subversion of itself, as has happened to all systems, religious or non-religious, that claimed to give its formula, and as would not fail to happen again if, as the Revolution is accused of, the substitution of the Rights of Man for respect from on high were to result in making man an idolater of self [autolâtre], that is to say, a God.

Justice involves at least two terms, united by the common respect for their dignity, diverse and rivalrous in everything else.

Let me take a notion to worship myself: in the name of Justice I owe the same adoration to my neighbour, to all men. Here, then, are as many gods as worshippers, which brings religion to naught, by virtue of the principle that God is one or he is not, Deus unus aut nullus.

But that’s not all: man is a perfectible being, which is equivalent to saying always imperfect. As a result, the respect I pay him can never amount to adoration and thus we are necessarily retained in Justice, the exact definition and full observance of which places an abyss between the ancient condition of humanity and the new.

It follows from this that Justice, conceived as an obligatory relation at the same time as a power of the soul, can not, by the deduction of its notion, lead to the subversion of itself, as has happened to morals every time that we have tried to establish it on religion, and would not fail to happen again if, as the Revolution is accused of, the substitution of the Rights of Man for respect from on high were to result in making man an idolater of self [autolâtre], that is to say, a God. Justice, in fact, implies at least two terms, two persons united by common respect for their nature, idolater. Let me take a notion to worship myself: in the name of Justice I owe the same adoration to all men. Here, then, are as many gods as worshippers, which brings religion to naught, since if the debt is equal to the claim the result is zero. But that is not all: man is a perfectible being, which is equivalent to saying always imperfect. From which it follows that the respect I pay him can never amount to adoration and thus we are necessarily retained in Justice, the exact definition and full observance of which places an abyss between the ancient condition of humanity and the new.

XXXVI. — This definition of Justice is confirmed by all previous definitions, incomplete and partial, if we examine them separately, but reproducing as a whole all the characteristics of that which I propose.

Moïse résume sa loi ; Tu aimeras le Seigneur ton Dieu de tout ton cœur, de toute ton âme et de toutes tes forces, et ton prochain comme toi-même. Au livre de Tobie on lit le fameux précepte : Ne fais pas aux autres ce que tu ne veux pas qu’ils te fassent ; d’où l’on peut inférer que ce précepte faisait partie de la loi, et en exprimait l’esprit.

Moi et le prochain, voilà bien les deux termes de l’équation ; aimer, voilà la réalité animique. Mais ce n’est que de l’amour, et l’amour ne se commande pas. Comment faire ? À l’amour du prochain Moïse donne pour motif l’amour du Seigneur : ce qui détruit la réalité du droit et fonde la Justice sur le vide.

Le Christ a suivi Moïse : comme lui, il pose en première ligne le précepte de l’amour de Dieu, d’où il déduit l’amour du prochain. Mais tandis que Moïse, législateur et juge, part de l’amour pour arriver à la Justice, commande ce qui lui paraît être le plus pour s’assurer ce qu’il considère comme le moins, Jésus, messager d’amour, tendant à remplacer la législation par le sentiment, s’en tient à l’amour, et laisse la Justice à la Synagogue et à César. Ce sera la mort de son Église. Dans l’esprit de l’Évangile, en effet, la charité, la fraternité, la communauté est l’idéal, la Justice un état d’imperfection.

Suivant les Pythagoriciens, la Justice est la réciprocité ou talion. Sur quoi Aristote observe que dans la pratique la réciprocité n’est pas toujours juste, ce qui est matériellement vrai. Un autre défaut de la définition pythagoricienne est de s’arrêter à la surface, et de ne pas remonter jusqu’à l’âme, comme avait fait Moïse.

Aristote dit à son tour : « La justice est cette qualité morale qui porte les hommes à faire des choses justes… Le Juste est ce qui est conforme à la loi et à l’égalité. »

La définition d’Aristote fait reparaître l’élément psycholo-gique, omis par l’école de Pythagore. Mais le Péripatétique va de tautologie en tautologie quand, après avoir dit que la Justice est une disposition de la volonté à faire ce qui est juste, il définit le juste ce qui est conforme à la loi et à l’égalité. Pour comble d’obscurité, il remarque que l’égalité, dans la pratique, n’est pas elle-même toujours juste, non plus que la réciprocité, qu’il serait plus exact de dire la proportion. Par où l’on voit qu’Aristote n’était point arrivé à cette conception supérieure du droit dans laquelle l’égalité, la réciprocité et la proportionnalité deviennent termes identiques. Quant à l’efficacité de la Justice, il n’y compte aucunement. Il dit en propres termes que la multitude ne s’abstient du mal que par la terreur ; que la science ne peut rien sur elle, et que le tout dépend, en dernière analyse, d’une influence divine, sans laquelle l’éducation et la raison sont impuissantes. (Morale à Nicomaque, traduction de Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire.)

Nous avons vu la définition romaine, d’après Ulpien : Justitia est constans ac perpétua voluntas suum cuique tribuere. Elle généralise en deux mots, suum cuique, ce que la définition d’Aristote laissait dans le vague relativement au rapport juridique, tantôt égalitaire ou réciproque, et tantôt proportionnel. Et complétant la définition d’Ulpien par celle de Cicéron, Justitia est animi habitus, communi utilitate comparata, suam cuique tribuens dignitatem, nous voyons que par les mots suum cuique il faut entendre la dignité personnelle, jus ou dignitas.

Mais d’où vient cette volonté ? Est-elle de l’essence de l’âme, déterminée à priori ou par des considérations extérieures ? Cicéron donne à entendre qu’elle a pour cause l’intérêt général. Et la religion romaine, non moins que l’esprit du patriciat, prouvent de reste que le sentiment de la dignité chez le Romain n’allait pas au delà de sa propre personne ; que sa Justice était, si j’ose ainsi dire, incluse à son égoïsme, et n’atteignait le prochain que par des motifs d’intérêt et de religion, qui n’avaient au fond rien d’impératif pour la volonté et rendaient la Justice boiteuse et précaire.

Plus franc que le Romain, le Barbare définit le Droit la raison du plus fort. Or, regardez-y de près : cette définition brutale, dont Lafontaine nous a appris à rire dès l’enfance, n’est autre au fond que celle du préteur : Suum cuique. C’est l’affirmation de la prérogative personnelle, jus, manifestée par la force.

À la raison du plus fort s’oppose la raison du plus habile. Ulysse balance Ajax : Fortisque viri tulit arma disertus. C’est toujours l’affirmation de la dignité personnelle, manifestée par une autre faculté, l’intelligence. Ces définitions ont cela de vrai, qu’elles placent énergiquement le siége de la Justice et du droit dans la personne humaine ; elles marquent le point de départ de la science : elles font le premier pas, et s’arrêtent aussitôt.

Spinoza : Le Droit est la puissance que nous avons sur la nature, et qui est limitée arbitrairement par l’État. — Cela revient à la définition barbare : Le Droit, c’est la force.

Hobbes et Bentham : Le Droit est l’intérêt (jus) que nous avons à une chose. — Fort bien ; mais qui nous garantit la satisfaction de cet intérêt ? Nous sommes intéressés à beaucoup de choses pour lesquelles le sentiment général nous déclare cependant sans droit : d’où vient cela ? Ne serait-ce pas que le Droit implique quelque autre chose qui ne se trouve pas dans l’intérêt ? Cette définition, qui a fait fortune en Angleterre, ruine la Justice, et ne laisse à sa place que le calcul et la licence.

Grotius : Le Droit est la faculté de faire tout ce qui ne rend pas impossible l’état social. — C’est en effet un principe de législation, que tout ce qui n’est pas défendu par la loi est permis ; c’en est un autre que la Justice, si parfois elle froisse l’intérêt particulier, sert toujours l’intérêt général, communi utilitate comparata, dit Cicéron. Mais jamais législateur n’a prétendu que ce fût là toute la Justice. La définition de Grotius revient à celle de Spinoza : elle n’est pas au-dessus de celle des barbares.

Bayle, à l’exemple d’Ulpien, fait de la Justice un sentiment particulier de l’âme humaine, et soutient en conséquence qu’une société d’athées pourrait exister aussi bien et mieux qu’une société de fanatiques. Par là Bayle sépare radicalement l’élément moral de l’élément religieux ; mais il ne creuse pas sa pensée et passe outre.

La philosophie du Dix-huitième siècle a suivi Bayle : elle cherche le principe de la morale, la raison du droit et du devoir, dans la nature humaine, et indépendamment de la sanction divine. Elle est sur le chemin de la vérité, dont le temps seul pouvait amener la complète intelligence.

Gassendi, de même qu’Épicure, Hobbes, Bentham et autres, ramène la Justice à l’égoïsme ; Mandeville, Helvétius, Saint-Lambert, toute l’école sensualiste, se jette dans cette voie. Conséquence fatale où devait aboutir la définition individualiste du préteur : Suum cuique.

Wolf, cité par M. Renouvier : Agis toujours de telle sorte que ton action puisse être regardée comme comprise dans la série des choses naturelles ordonnées par Dieu, et travaille à faire entrer toi-même et autrui dans ces lois. — Cette maxime est précieuse en ce qu’elle indique d’une part que la Justice doit avoir un caractère, non point égoïste, mais social ; de l’autre en ce qu’elle pose le principe de la justification spontanée et du progrès. Elle pèche en ce qu’elle fait reparaître dans la Justice la notion de Dieu, qui en détruit la réalité.

Bergier : Sa définition est celle de l’Église, irréprochable au point de vue religieux : « Le Droit est ce que tout l’homme peut faire ou exiger des autres en vertu d’une loi. S’il n’y avait point de loi, il n’y aurait point de Droit. Or, c’est la loi divine qui est le fondement, la règle et la mesure de mon droit.

La définition de M. Blot-Lequesne rentre dans la précédente : La Justice est antérieure et supérieure à la race humaine ; c’est la raison de Dieu.

Kant s’efforce de construire la morale, comme la géométrie et la logique, sur une conception à priori en dehors de tout empirisme, et ne réussit pas. Son principe fondamental, le commandement absolu, ou impératif catégorique, de la Justice, est un fait d’expérience, dont la métaphysique est impuissante à donner l’interprétation. Le Droit, dit-il, est l’accord de ma liberté avec la liberté de tous. De là sa maxime imitée de Wolf : Agis en toute chose de manière que ton action puisse être prise pour règle générale. Le moindre défaut de ces propositions de Kant est qu’au lieu de définir la Justice, elles en posent le problème. Comment obtenir cet accord des libertés ? en vertu de quel principe ? d’où puis-je savoir que mon action peut ou non servir de règle générale ? Et que m’importe qu’elle en serve ? que me fait cette abstraction ? Aussi Kant, prenant Dieu pour contrefort de la Justice, par là même anéantit la Justice, et livre son système.

Krause et autres : Le Droit est la faculté d’exiger tout ce qui est nécessaire à l’accomplissement de ma destinée. — À merveille ! voilà une définition qui pose nettement la prérogative individuelle, le jus de l’homme et du citoyen. Il n’y manque qu’une chose, c’est de savoir si à la faculté d’exiger, que me décerne Krause, répond chez mes semblables une disposition à obéir. Un autre défaut, non moins capital, existe dans cette définition : elle ne tient pas compte de la prérogative sociale, qui dans certains cas exige le sacrifice de la personnalité. C’est du pur égoïsme.

Hégel distingue entre le droit de nature et le droit social. Le droit de nature est le droit de la force ; le droit social est le sacrifice de ce qu’il y a d’arbitraire et de violent dans le droit naturel : c’est avec la réalisation de la liberté, l’harmonie de l’intérêt privé avec l’intérêt général. — Nous verrons ailleurs que la liberté, suivant Hégel, comme suivant Spinoza, est zéro. Il ne reste donc que, le droit de nature étant la force, et l’homme ne pouvant pas vivre à l’état de nature, la force doit passer à la collectivité, ce qui fait de la Justice ainsi que de la liberté une fiction. Conclusion impie contre laquelle protestent, dans toutes les consciences, la liberté et la Justice.

Lerminier : « La première notion du Droit se produit sous une forme négative et restrictive. L’homme rencontre des êtres qui lui ressemblent. Alors il conçoit qu’il a le devoir de respecter ceux qu’il appelle ses semblables, et qu’il a le droit d’en être respecté lui-même ; qu’entre lui et eux il y a identité, et partant équation de droits et de devoirs. C’est pour l’homme la reconnaissance obligatoire, mais inactive, de sa propre liberté et de celle des autres. » (Philosophie du Droit.)

Cette définition du Droit est certainement une des meilleures. Le principe d’identité, source du respect, y est nettement posé, et tout mysticisme éliminé. Malheureusement, ce respect, comme le dit M. Lerminier, est purement négatif et inactif : c’est de l’étonnement, c’est tout ce qu’on voudra ; ce n’est pas l’effet d’une faculté positive, énergique, hors de laquelle point de Justice, point de salut. Laisse-moi, et je te laisserai : voilà ce qu’est le Droit posé par M. Lerminier. C’est le contraire de ce qu’Ajax dit à Ulysse dans Homère : Enlève-moi, ou que je t’enlève ! qui exprime si bien le droit de la force.

Pour suppléer à cette inactivité du Droit, M. Lerminier fait intervenir un nouveau principe, le principe de sociabilité, qui rapproche les hommes et les fait passer de l’inertie juridique à la solidarité politique et sociale. C’est retomber, par la traverse des affections animales, inférieures à la Justice, dans l’inconvénient du transcendantalisme.La sociabilité de l’homme reçoit de la Justice sa forme et son caractère ; comment pourrait-elle la créer ? Et si elle ne la crée pas, comment cette Justice inerte, même soutenue de l’intérêt général, pourrait-elle tenir contre les réclamations de l’égoïsme ?

Si la Justice n’existe pas tout entière, à priori, dans le cœur de l’homme, elle n’est rien : ni la religion, ni la société, ni l’État ne lui sauraient donner l’énergie, et nous tombons en défaillance.

Jules Simon : Le Droit est la faculté de faire ce que prescrit le Devoir ; ou plus simplement, le Droit c’est le Devoir. — Et qu’est-ce que le Devoir ? — La volonté de Dieu en toutes choses, répond M. Jules Simon. On n’est pas plus orthodoxe. Au reste, il est juste de dire que M. Simon a parfaitement compris que son système détruit la Justice. La Justice pour lui n’existe pas : c’est un sentiment complexe, formé de trois éléments, amour de Dieu, amour du prochain, amour de soi-même, et que soutient l’espérance théologale des récompenses éternelles.

Oudot : Après avoir défini le Droit Direction de la Liberté par l’Intelligence ; puis l’avoir subordonné au Devoir, qu’il définit à son tour : Idée de la direction à donner à la Liberté afin d’arriver à un but dont la perspective lui est montrée comme cause impulsive ou finale, M. Oudot complète sa théorie en définissant la Justice : Accord de l’amour de Dieu et du prochain avec une certaine défiance de l’amour de soi-même. Il est assez difficile de se retrouver dans toutes ces directions, ces accords et ces défiances. Mais il est clair que pour M. Oudot, comme pour M. Jules Simon, Droit et Devoir se confondent avec les idées de besoin, d’instinct, de subordination, c’est-à-dire n’ont pas de réalité propre et sui generis ; que la Justice se confond à son tour avec les affections ordinaires de l’âme, bienveillance, sympathie, amour, sociabilité, qui nous sont communes avec les bêtes ; qu’elle n’a pas plus de réalité propre que le Droit ; qu’enfin ce Droit, ce Devoir et cette Justice étant subordonnés à une sanction surhumaine, qui seule fait de nos besoins, instincts et amours, en certains cas, une chose commandée, et par là nous suggère l’idée de la Justice et du Droit, on peut tenir cette idée, en dehors de la théologie, pour un préjugé de l’entendement, une présomption de l’orgueil et une injure à la Divinité.

Théorie de la chute : produit le plus clair de l’école Normale et de l’école de Droit. Qu’on dise après cela que nous sommes en progrès !

E. de Girardin : Il n’y a qu’un seul Droit au monde, le Droit du plus fort. Le Droit, c’est donc la force. Or, la force est de deux espèces : la force matérielle et la force intellectuelle. La force matérielle, voilà le droit barbare ; la force intellectuelle, voilà le droit civilisé. Changez donc, transformez la force matérielle en force intellectuelle, et vous arriverez à cette formule supérieure : Raisonner, c’est le droit.

Là-dessus M. de Girardin rompt des lances pour prouver l’excellence du régime du raisonnement sur celui de la force. Ce qui en ressort de plus clair est que M. de Girardin proteste contre le droit du plus fort ; qu’il le trouve détestable, inique ; qu’il a en horreur les héros et les brigands, et qu’au lieu de combattre il demande à parlementer. Certes M. de Girardin a raison de se fier à son esprit plus qu’à ses muscles ; mais si je suis le plus fort pourquoi veut-il que je l’écoute ?… Tout ce qu’il peut dire à ce sujet suppose un principe nouveau, autre que la force matérielle et la force intellectuelle, en vertu duquel il me rappelle de la lutte à la raison. Ce principe, il l’entrevoit et le nomme : Le Droit, dit-il, est l’inviolabilité humaine. Mais à l’instant il se rétracte, il nie la Justice obligatoire, qui n’est autre que le sentiment de cette inviolabilité ; il n’admet quant à lui que la Justice réciproque. Réciprocité, réciprocité ! voilà ce qu’il lui faut. Mais la réciprocité, principe théorique des opérations de crédit et d’assurances, n’est toujours qu’un rapport, une formule, une abstraction, qui n’implique nullement en elle-même que le plus fort doive s’y soumettre. La réciprocité en un mot, bien qu’elle soit la forme de la Justice, n’en est pas le principe. Elle reste dans l’idée pure, elle n’atteint pas au réel.

M. de Lourdoueix, adversaire de M. de Girardin, donne à son tour la définition suivante : Le Droit est la ligne la plus courte qui va de la raison de Dieu à la raison de l’homme. Formule imitée de Cicéron : La première loi est la droite raison de Dieu. Ce qui se réduit à dire, en écartant l’image de la ligne droite et la mention de l’Être suprême, que le Droit est la droite raison, ou, en autres termes, que raisonner c’est le Droit, comme l’avait avancé M. de Girardin. Mais il était écrit, dans la raison divine sans doute, que ces deux messieurs, bataillant devant le public, ne pouvaient ni ne devaient s’entendre.

XXXIV. — This definition of Justice is confirmed by all previous definitions, incomplete and partial, if we examine them separately, but reproducing as a whole all the characteristics of that which we propose.

Moses sums up his law: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself. In the book of Tobit we read the famous precept: Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you; from which it may be inferred that this precept formed part of the law and expressed its spirit.

Me and my neighbor: these are indeed the two terms of the equation; to love, that is the reality of the soul. But it is only love, and love cannot be commanded. What are we to do? As a motive for the love of the neighbor Moses gives us the love of the Lord, which destroys the reality of right and establishes Justice on a void.

Christ followed Moses: like him, he placed in the forefront the precept of the love of God, from which he deduces the love of the neighbor. But while Moses, legislator and judge, begins with love in order to arrive at Justice, commands what seems to him to be the most in order to secure what he considers the least, Jesus, messenger of love, tending to replace legislation with feeling, clings to love, and leaves justice to the Synagogue and to Caesar. It will be the death of his Church. In the spirit of the Gospel, in fact, charity, fraternity, community is the ideal; Justice, a state of imperfection.

According to the Pythagoreans, Justice is reciprocity or the talion. Whereupon Aristotle observes that, in practice, reciprocity is not always just; which is true in certain cases, for example, in revenge, where insult is returned for insult, oculum pro oculo, dentem pro dente. Another defect of the Pythagorean definition is to stop at the idea, and not to arrive at the power, as Moses did.

Aristotle says in turn: “Justice is that moral quality that leads men to do just things… The just is that which is in conformity with the law and with equality.”

Aristotle’s definition brings back the psychological element, omitted by the school of Pythagoras. But the Peripatetic goes from tautology to tautology when, after having said that Justice is a disposition of the will to do what is just, he defines what is just as what is in conformity with the law and with equality. To add to the obscurity, he remarks that equality, in practice, is not itself always just, any more than reciprocity; that it would be more exact to say the proportion. Where we see after having said that Justice is a disposition of the will to do what is just, he defines what is just which is in conformity with the law and with equality. To add to the obscurity, he remarks that equality, in practice, is not itself always just, any more than reciprocity; that it would be more exact to speak of the proportion. By which we see that Aristotle had not arrived at that superior conception of right in which equality, reciprocity and proportionality become identical terms. As for the efficacy of Justice, it does not matter. He says in proper terms that the multitude abstains from evil only through terror; that science can do nothing about it, and that everything depends, in the last analysis, on a divine influence, without which education and reason are powerless. (Morale à Nicomaque, translation by BARTHÉLEMY SAINT-HILATRE.)

We have seen the Roman definition, according to ULPIAN: Justitia est constans ac perpetua voluntas suum cuique tribuere. [“Justice is a constant and perpetual will to give to each his due.”]

It generalizes in two words, suum cuique [to each his own], what Aristotle’s definition left vague with respect to the legal relationship, sometimes egalitarian or reciprocal, and sometimes proportional. By completing Ulpian’s definition with that of Cicero, Justitia est animi habitus, communi utilitate comparatâ, suam cuique tribuens dignitatem—”Justice is an attitude of mind, comparing the common interest, giving to each his own dignity,”—we see that by the words suum cuique we must understand personal dignity, jus or dignitas.

But where does this will come from? Is it from the essence of the soul, determined a priori or by external considerations? Cicero says well that Justice, by granting to each his dignity, reserves the common utility. From which it follows that the duty of the citizen is divided into two, the care of the dignity of others, the care of the public thing. Which comes first? Cicero does not explain himself: but the Roman religion, no less than the spirit of the patriciate, proves that the feeling of dignity in the Roman did not go beyond his own person; that his Justice was, if I dare say so, included in his egoism, and reached his neighbor only by motives of interest or religion, which had basically nothing imperative for the will and made the Justice hobbled and frail.

More naive than the Roman, the BARBARIAN defines right as the reason of the strongest. Look at it closely: this brutal definition, which Lafontaine taught us to laugh at from childhood, is basically none other than that of the moneylender: Suum cuique. It is the affirmation of personal prerogative, jus, manifested by force.

The reason of the strongest is opposed to the reason of the most skillful. Odysseus balances Ajax: Fortisque viri tulit arma disertus. It is still the affirmation of personal dignity, manifested by another faculty, intelligence. These definitions are true in that they forcefully place the seat of Justice and of right in the human person; they mark the starting point of science: they take the first step, and stop immediately.

Spinoza: Right is the power we have over nature, which is arbitrarily limited by the State. — It falls far short of the barbaric definition: Right is might.

Hobbes and Bentham: Right is the interest (jus) that we have to a thing. Very well; but who guarantees us the satisfaction of this interest? We are interested in many things for which the general sentiment nevertheless declares us without right: where does that come from? Doesn’t Right imply something else that is not in interest? This definition, which has made a fortune in England, ruins Justice, and leaves in its place only calculation and license.

Grotius: Right is the faculty of doing everything that is not rendered impossible by the social state. — It is indeed a principle of legislation, that all that is not forbidden by law is permitted; it is quite another that Justice, if sometimes it offends the particular interest, always serves the general interest, communi utilitate comparata, says Cicero. But never has a legislator claimed that this was all Justice. Grotius’ definition, purely negative, amounts to that of Spinoza: it is not even on the level of that of the barbarians.

Bayle, following the example of Ulpian, makes Justice a sense proper to the human soul, and consequently maintains that a society of atheists could exist as well or better than a society of fanatics. Bayle thereby separates the moral element from the religious element; but he does not delve into his thought and disregards it.

The philosophy of the eighteenth century followed Bayle: it sought the principle of morality, the reason of right and duty, in human nature, independent of divine sanction. It is on the path of truth, the complete understanding of which only time could bring.

Gassendi, like Epicurus, Hobbes, Bentham and others, reduces Justice to egoism; Mandeville, Helvétius, Saint-Lambert, the whole sensualist school propelled themselves down this path. A fatal consequence to which the individualist definition of the moneylender must lead: Suum cuique.

Wolf, quoted by M. Renouvier: Always act in such a way that your action can be regarded as included in the SERIES of natural things ordained by God, and strive to make yourself and others enter into these laws. — This maxim is valuable in that it indicates on the one hand that Justice must have a character, not egoist, but social; on the other, in that it lays down the principle of spontaneous justification and progress. It sins in that it causes the notion of God to reappear in Justice, which destroys its reality.

Bergier. His definition is that of the Church, irreproachable from a religious point of view: “Right is what any man can do or require of others by virtue of a law. If there were no law, there would be no Right. Now, it is the divine law that is the foundation, the rule and the measure of my right.”

The definition of Mr. Blot-LEQUESNE falls within the previous one: Justice is prior and superior to the human race; it is the reason of God.

Kaxr strives to build morality, like geometry and logic, on an a priori conception outside of any empiricism, and does not succeed. His fundamental principle, the absolute command, or categorical imperative, of Justice, is a fact of experience, of which his metaphysics is powerless to give an interpretation. Right, he says, is the accord of my freedom with the freedom of all. Hence his maxim, imitated from Wolf: Act in all things in such a way that your action can be taken as a general rule. The least defect of these proposals is to pose Justice as a problem, rather than defining it. How are we to obtain this agreement of freedoms? According to what principle? How can I know that my action may or may not serve as a general rule? And what does it matter to me that it serves in this way? What does this abstraction mean to me? Also Kant, taking God for the buttress of Justice, thereby destroys Justice, and delivers up his system.

KRAUSE et al: Right is the faculty of demanding whatever is necessary for the fulfillment of my destiny. — Marvellous! Here is a definition that clearly poses the individual prerogative, the jus of the man and the citizen. There is only one thing missing, and that is to know whether the faculty of demanding, which Krause bestows on me, is matched in my fellows by a disposition to obey. Another defect, no less capital, exists in this definition: it does not take into account the social prerogative, communi ulilate comparatâ, which in certain cases requires the sacrifice of the personality. It iss pure egoism

Hegel distinguishes between natural right and social right. The right of nature is the right of force; social law is the sacrifice of what is arbitrary and violent in natural law: it is the realization of liberty, the harmony of private interest with the general interest. We will see elsewhere that liberty, according to Hegel as according to Spinoza, is zero. It therefore remains that, the right of nature being force, and man not being able to live in the state of nature, force must pass to the collectivity, which makes of Justice, as well as liberty, a delegation. An impious conclusion against which liberty and justice protest in all consciences.

LERMINIER: “The first notion of Right occurs in a negative and restrictive form. Man encounters beings who resemble him. Then he conceives that he has the duty to respect those whom he calls his fellows, and that he has the right to to be respected himself; that between him and them there is identity, and hence an equation of rights and duties. It is for man the obligatory, but inactive, recognition of his own liberty and that of others.” (Philosophie du Droit.)

This definition of Right is certainly one of the best. The principle of identity, the source of respect, is clearly laid out there, and all mysticism eliminated. Unfortunately, this respect, as Lerminier says, is purely negative and inactive: it is astonishing, that’s all you want; it is not the effect of a positive, energetic faculty, outside of which there is no justice, no salvation. Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone: that iss what the Right posited by Lerminier is. This is the opposite of what Ajax says to Odysseus in Homer—Lift me up, or let me lift you!—which expresses so well the right of force.

To make up for this inactivity of Right, Lerminier brought in a new principle, the principle of sociability, which brought people together and moved them from legal inertia to political and social solidarity. It is to fall back, through animal affections, inferior to Justice, into the inconvenience of transcendentalism. The sociability of man receives its form and its character from Justice; how could it create it? And if it does not create it, how could this inert Justice, even supported by the general interest, be able to stand against the demands of egoism? If Justice does not exist entirely, a priori, in the heart of man, it is nothing: neither religion, nor society, nor the State can give it energy, and we fall into failure.

Jules Simon: Right is the ability to do what Duty prescribes; or more simply, Right is Duty. — And what is Duty? — The will of God in all things,” replies Mr. Jules Simon. No one is more orthodox. Besides, it is fair to say that Mr. Simon has perfectly understood that his system destroys Justice. Justice for him does not exist: it is a complex feeling, love of God, love of neighbour, love of oneself, which sustains the theological hope of eternal rewards.

Oudot: After having defined Right as the Direction of Liberty by intelligence; then having subordinated it to Duty, which he defines in turn: the Idea of the direction to be given to Liberty in order to arrive at a goal whose perspective is shown to it as an impulsive or final cause, Mr. Oudot completes his theory by defining Justice: the accord of the love of God and neighbor with a certain mistrust of self-love. It is quite difficult to find oneself in all these directions, these agreements and these mistrusts. But it is clear that for Mr. Oudot, as for Mr. Jules Simon, Right and Duty merge with the ideas of need, instinct, subordination, that is to say, they have no reality of their own and sui generis; that Justice is in its turn confused with the ordinary affections of the soul, benevolence, sympathy, love, sociability, which we have in common with the beasts; that it has no more reality of its own than the Right; that finally this Right, this Duty, this Justice being subordinated to a superhuman sanction, which alone makes our needs, instincts and loves, in certain cases, something commanded, and thereby suggests to us the idea of Justice and Right, we can hold this idea, outside of theology, for a prejudice of the understanding, a presumption of pride and an insult to Divinity. Theory of the fall: the clearest product of the Normal School and the School of Law. Let it be said after that that we are making progress!

E. De Girardin: There is only one Right in the world, the Right of the strongest. Right is therefore force. Now, force is of two kinds: material force and intellectual force. Material force, that is the barbarian right; intellectual force, that is civilized right. Change then, transform material force into intellectual force, and you will arrive at this superior formula: Reasoning is right.

Thereupon M. de Girardin breaks lances to prove the excellence of the regime of reasoning over that of force. What emerges most clearly is that M. de Girardin protests against the right of the strongest; that he finds it detestable, iniquitous; that he abhors heroes and brigands, and that instead of fighting he asks to parley. Certainly M. de Girardin is right to trust his mind more than his muscles; but if I am the strongest, why does he want me to listen to him?.… All that he can say on this subject supposes a new principle, other than material force and intellectual force, by virtue of which he calls me back to the struggle to reason. He foresees this principle and names it: Right, he says, is human inviolability. But at the moment he recants, he denies obligatory Justice, which is none other than the feeling of this inviolability; he admits, for himself, only reciprocal Justice. Reciprocity, reciprocity, that’s what he needs. But reciprocity, theoretical principle of credit and insurance operations, is always only a relation, a formula, an abstraction, which in no way implies in itself that the will must submit to it. Reciprocity, in a word, although it is the form of Justice, is not its energy. It lacks reality.

M. de Lourdoueix, adversary of M. de Girardin, gives in his turn the following definition: Right is the shortest line that goes from the reason of God to the reason of man. This is a formula imitated from Cicero: The first law is the right reason of God, Wwhich amounts to saying, setting aside the image of the straight line and the mention of the Supreme Being, that Right is right reason, or, in other words, that reasoning is Right, as M. de Girardin had suggested. But it was written, in divine reason no doubt, that these two gentlemen, battling in front of the public, could not and should not get along (M).

XXXVI. — Let us summarize this whole study in a few lines.

The point of departure for Justice is the sentiment of personal dignity.

Before our fellows this sentiment is generalized and becomes the sentiment of human dignity, which it is in the nature of reasonable beings to feel in the person of others, friend or enemy, as in their own.

It is for this reason that Justice is distinguished from love and from all the feelings of affection, that it is gratuitous, the antithesis of selfishness, and that it exercises on us a constraint which takes precedence over all other feelings.

It is also for this reason that in primitive man, in whom the dignity is brutal and the personality grasping, Justice takes the form of a supernatural commandment and is based on religion.

But soon, under the influence of this auxiliary, Justice deteriorates; contrary to its formula, it becomes aristocratic, and, in Christianity, reaches the degradation of humanity. The supposed respect for God banishes respect for man everywhere; and, respect for man annihilated, Justice succumbs, and society with it.

Then comes the Revolution, which opens a new age for humanity. Through it Justice, vaguely known in the earlier period, and followed by instinct, appears in the purity and fullness of its idea.

Justice is absolute, immutable, not susceptible to more or less. It is the inviolable meter of all human acts.

Suppose a society where Justice is preceded, however slightly, by another principle, religion for example; or else in which some individuals enjoy a consideration, however slight, superior to that of others: I say that, Justice being virtually annulled, it is inevitable that sooner or later society will perish. However weak the pre-eminence of faith and feudalism may be, the day will come when the superior will demand the sacrifice of the inferior. Then, as a consequence, the inferior will revolt. Such is the history of humanity; such is the Revolution.

This evolution of the legal idea, in the mind that conceives it and in the history that represents it, is inevitable. If there are rational creatures on Jupiter, Venus or Mars, these creatures, by virtue of the identity of their reason, have the same notion of Right as that which governs our humanity.

And if these same creatures, before arriving at the full and pure notion of Right, had, like us, by the law of their organism and the constitution of their intelligence, to pass through a preparatory period, during which Justice would have been observed as a sovereign order, their religion, subordinating Justice, pronouncing consequently the unworthiness of the legal subject, must have undergone the same phases as ours, and its last formula would have been Christianity. Christianity, like Justice, is inherent in all the humanities of the universe. Subject to the law of progress, they must, according to the activity of their nature, be subject for some period of time to the oscillations of faith and reason, of liberty and despotism, and obtain their emancipation by the same Revolution.

The Revolution passed over us like a torrent. Its history is not done, its profession of faith has yet to be written; for fifty years its friends have done it more harm by their ineptitude than its adversaries. And yet, despite the infidelity of its annalists, despite the poverty of its teaching, the Revolution, by the sole virtue of its name, more powerful than that of Jehovah, carried everything along. Since the storming of the Bastille, there has not been a power in France that has dared to deny it to its face, and pose frankly as a counter-revolution. All have betrayed it however, even the man of the Terror, even Robespierre, and especially Robespierre…. Faced with the Revolution, the Church itself is forced to veil its face and hide its grief. Would you dare, Monsignor, you and all the French episcopate, to issue a decree abrogating of the rights of man and of the citizen? I dare you to do it.

It is written: You will not disrespect your brother; Turpitudinem fratris tui non revelabis. There it is, that law of respect, the principle of all justice and all morality: you will find it inculcated in twenty places of the Pentateuch. Moses spoke as did the idolater; the consent of all antiquity is against you. It is to this tribunal of the universal conscience that I refer you and the whole Church; to this incorruptible tribunal, whose jurisdiction you cannot accept or challenge without dooming yourselves.

XXXV. — Let us summarize this whole study in a few lines.

The point of departure for Justice is the sentiment of personal dignity.

It is also for this reason that in primitive man, in whom the dignity is brutal and the personality grasping, Justice takes the form of a supernatural commandment and is based on religion.

But soon, under the influence of this auxiliary, Justice deteriorates; contrary to its formula, it becomes aristocratic, is misunderstood among the common people, and, in Christianity, reaches the degradation of humanity. The supposed respect for God banishes respect for man everywhere; and, respect for man annihilated, Justice succumbs, and society with it.

Then comes the Revolution, which opens a new age for humanity. Through it Justice, vaguely known in the earlier period, and practiced by instinct, appears in the purity and fullness of its idea.

Justice is absolute, immutable, not susceptible to more or less. It is the inviolable meter of all human acts.

And if these same creatures, before arriving at the full and pure notion of Right, had, like us, by the constitution of their intelligence, to pass through a preparatory period, during which Justice would have been observed as a sovereign order, it would still follow that their religion, subordinating Justice, pronouncing consequently the unworthiness of the legal subject, must have undergone the same phases as ours, and its last formula would have been Christianity. Christianity, like Justice, is inherent in all the humanities of the universe. Subject to the law of progress, they must, according to the activity of their nature, be subject for some period of time to the oscillations of faith and reason, of liberty and despotism, and obtain their emancipation by the same Revolution.

APPENDIX.

NOTES AND CLARIFICATIONS.

Note (A), page 5.

Principle of personal dignity. — The object of this study has been to demonstrate that Justice is born within us from the feeling of our own dignity; that it is the same thing as this dignity, so that, whether it is a question of our neighbor or of ourselves, Justice and dignity are in us identical, adequate and solidary. So that the following maxim can be taken for an axiom of morality and of law: Any outrage to personal dignity is a violation of Justice, and vice versa.

The principle of personal dignity is the one that Mr. Cousin gives to morality: “To be free, remain free,” says the leader of the eclectic school. Now, what is liberty, from the point of view of practical reason, and in the philosophy of M. Cousin? The integrity of the person, of the faculties, and above all of the mores. The possession of oneself, through the integrity of mores and the balance of passions and faculties, what we have called dignity, is liberty.

From another point of view, that of sociability, the principle of personal dignity and of its identity with Justice, is again the basis and essential feature of contemporary morals.

“The feeling that dominates me,” says a writer of the same shade as M. Cousin, M. Alexis de Tocqueville, “when I find myself in the presence of a human creature, however humble his condition, is that of the original equality of the species; and therefore I concern myself perhaps even less with pleasing or serving them than with not offending their dignity.”

Respect for personal dignity is the measure of all public freedoms. M. Guizot says, in Mémoires de mon temps: “One does not elevate souls without freeing them.” The converse is also true.

How, it will be said, do writers such as Cousin, Alexis de Tocqueville and Guizot deduce from a principle that is dear to them all human morality, all revolutionary law, apart from all religious belief?

We do not undertake to explain the inconsistencies of others: we will answer, only for ourselves, that the absolute incompatibility between the laws of morality and the dogmas of religion had never been proposed until now; that then religion, as an aspiration towards the absolute, which can never be entirely destroyed, was supposed to have, in mœurs, always the same necessity, the same intensity, the same influence; no one asked whether its action was purely transitory; if, from a certain moment, it should decrease by reason of the progress of Justice. It is, moreover, the character of eclectic philosophy, like that of conservative politics, to maintain all the principles, all the spontaneity, all the forces of humanity, without worrying about their agreement.

Respect for personal dignity is the principle of all the social virtues that the moralists ordinarily distinguish from Justice, but which are only its varied forms: affability, politeness, tolerance, charity.

“We dishonor Justice,” says Fénelon, “when we do not add gentleness and condescension to it: it is doing evil to the good.”

The principle of personal dignity finally appears as a sanction of Justice, in that it makes us superior to the iniquity of others: “You bear injustices,” says Pythagoras. “Console yourself; the misfortune is to make them.” Stoicism offers nothing finer: it is there in its entirely.

If the offense to the dignity of persons is an attack on Justice, the offense made to the dignity of a people is the subversion of all justice: this is why despotism, tyranny, police or priestly inquisition are agents of corruption and death.

A corollary of this principle is that the tyrant can never be just, and that a despot cannot be said to be a good king. Personal government, whether avowed or surreptitious, despotism and tyranny are an outrage to national dignity.

A second corollary is that, in a society, authority is adequate to Justice, since there cannot be in the state any dignity superior to national dignity, and that national dignity is Justice itself.

Note (B), page 18.

Origin of religion. — All that we say here about the meaning and origin of religion, and about the conception of divine spirituality, is confirmed by the learned professor of Strasbourg, F.-G. Bergmann :

“Man is drawn to religion, first by the invincible feeling he has of his physical insufficiency to protect himself against the enemy and the inexorable forces of nature, and against the hazards and accidents of life; then by the feeling of his intellectual weakness, to understand reality, life and the world, in their essence and in their causes; finally by the feeling of his moral impotence to satisfy the law of Justice which imperiously announces itself in his conscience. He therefore feels the need to lean on some Being who is physically more powerful than himself, who is the keystone of his more or less scientific system, and who is finally the sanction of his moral conscience.” (Les Gètes, ou La filiation généalogique des Scythes aux Gètes et des Gètes aux Germains et aux Scandinaves, p. 152.)

This, says Bergmann, is how primitive humanity proceeds, the child-man. The first feeling he experiences, when he wakes up on earth, is that of his physical, intellectual and moral weakness. He will triumph, in time, over the first by its industry; over the second by philosophy, science, indefatigable observation; over the third by discipline, by society, by the maintenance of his dignity, and by the happiness that virtue gives him. Until then he seeks his support in a superior being: of what nature will this being be?

“Originally,” Bergmann continues, “no one conceived of a god, an object of physical nature, other than as a living being (ζώον animal), endowed with superhuman power, and having precisely the form that one saw in him in nature. The first object which was thus clothed with divinity by the first peoples was the sky, the brilliance of which ceaselessly struck their gaze, attracted their attention, night and day, by its marvelous and sublime phenomena, and inspired them through its beneficent influences the idea and religious reverence of a superhuman, powerful, and generally benevolent being. As the sky had no human figure, it could only be conceived at first as a gigantic animal, as a zoomorphic god.… From its characteristic attribute, which is light, it was named Tüvus, the shining one, the same as Ziu, Zeus , Dius , Djou-piter, etc.

“The first conception of divinity was therefore purely zoomorphic. Then it became, by elimination, anthropomorphic, and finally purely spiritualistic. (Ibid., p. 154.)

Bergmann then quotes a multitude of etymologies in support of his theory, of which here are a few: Gott, name of God in German, the Good; — Bog, in Slavic, the venerable; — Bacchos, from the Sanskrit paka, the respectable, the same meaning as Bog; — Moloch, the king; — Baal, the master; — Adonaï, the lord; — the Azes, in the language of the Scandinavians, supporters, protectors. — The meaning commonly given to the name of Jehovah, He who is, is, in our opinion, false: this word signifies the Mighty or the Strong; in some passages he is called the strength of Israel. In the Psalms, he is constantly invoked as a support: Jehovah is my fortress, Dominus arx mea. The most interesting of all these etymologies of the name of God is that of Ormuzd, the god of the Magi, in the Zende language, Ahuro-maz-daô, Sun much-shining, or better, much-knowing. God, the Sun, is the source of all light, consequently of all knowledge: he is, as Bergmann says, the keystone of the scientific system of man, precisely what we say today of Justice.

Whatever the conception of the Supreme Being, zoomorphic or anthropomorphic, he is for the worshipper the subject of the inherence of force, of science and of Justice: it is thus that he becomes the guarantor of public faith and contracts, the author and sanctioner of law.

“The mythological relationship that existed in ancient times between the Sun God and Justice has left traces in the judiciary practices of the Scandinavians and the Germans. According to these usages, Justice could only be done while the Sun was racing across the sky. The judge sitting in court had to have his face turned to the Sun, that source of light, purity and justice. The shield, or the targe, symbol of the Sun (Targitavus) and of royalty, hung above the seat of the head of the jury; so that to go to the targe could mean, among the Germans and the Scandinavians, to go to the judicial assembly. Then the court sat at the great times of the year, that is to say at the great religious holidays; and one took advantage of the great concurrence of men which took place at the time of these religious and judicial assemblies to also engage in commerce, under the protection of justice. The place, all around or very close to the place where the court was held, was therefore transformed each time into a fairground; and just as in the Christian Middle Ages the name of the mass, or of the religious act by which the religious festival was opened, became the very name to designate the fair (Ger. messe, fair), so, among the peoples of Geto-Gothic origin, the word targe also took on the meaning of market (Swed. torg n. market; Spanish, trueco). From this name the Goths of Spain formed the verb trocar, from which is derived the French troquer. (Ibid., p. 200.)

Footnote (C), page 19.

Realization of the divine concept. — This question is one of those to which it is important to call the attention of the people with the greatest force. Under the names of deism, pantheism, natural religion, etc., an abominable superstition is hatched, to the shame of the century, and to the loss of reason and liberty. Those who work at it with the most zeal do not yet seem to suspect the result of their efforts; they do not see that after having eliminated the living, real, positive god of Genesis and Sinai, the god of Adam, of Noah, of Abraham, of Moses and of the prophets; the god incarnate in Jesus Christ, always present by his spirit in the Church, who gives himself as nourishment in the Eucharist, they prepare, with their deism, a realization or incarnation of the Supreme Being a hundred times more monstrous. Here, the facts speak louder than all of the denials: we have need, in order to prove our claim, only to show how they come about.

The idea of God as pure spirit, governing the world by the laws of nature alone and without further intervention of his wisdom and power, without special manifestations, without miracles, without internal or external communication with man; this idea, which is that of pure deism, can be maintained as long as the god remains in the state of a philosophical notion, a cosmic hypothesis, an aesthetic or moral given, having life only in books and in school.

But the day when this god enters into the practice of humanity, he tends to realize himself, to manifest himself by sensible signs, to take on a body, soul, face and character; to be communicated to certain chosen ones; finally to establish a cult and a priesthood. This movement of realization is inevitable: the contrary would imply contradiction. One does not practice God without realizing him, just as in politics one does not affirm the absolutism of the state without creating a despot. This is how all religions, all theologies, all mythologies and all churches have been formed. It is in this way that Christianity, after having first reduced Pharisaic and pontifical mosaicism to its simplest expression, by posing itself as a monotheism without temple, without sacrifice, without priesthood, almost without dogmas, is then developed by the necessity of its practice into a theology, that is, into an endless realization of the Divinity. Civilization lives no more on religious fictions than on legal fictions: it seeks in everything the true, that is to say the real and the positive. Put the idea of God at the head of the constitution; soon the people will want to see this God; they will enter into communication with him, they will give him prophets, apostles, a Christ.

Haven’t we had, since 89, the goddess Reason, the messiah Robespierre with his prophetess Catherine Théot, the Mapah, and so many others? Didn’t M. Enfantin make people worship his androgyny? Wasn’t Napoleon I in the process of becoming a demi-god when the disasters in Russia put an end to his apotheosis? Aren’t the Mormons beginning again, at this moment, in the face of America, the biblical marvels, which the fanatic John of Leyden had already attempted to put into practice in the sixteenth century? Mesmerism, table-turning, poltergeists, sympathetic snails, aren’t they ready to hand over to old Europe a religion and a god? They only await the command. Doesn’t Catholicism itself redouble its prestige?

Well! what time was ever more fertile in miracles?

Like Mosaicism in its final moments, does it not already have its abbreviators, its simplifiers, its gnostics? Have we not pronounced the name of neo-Christianity? Isn’t the whole philosophical mob at work collecting its debris? One seizes upon the idea of God, and turns it into pure theism or natural religion. The other takes the Triad for himself; a third collects the dogma of original prevarication; all affirm Providence, human imbecility, the need for reparation. We do not agree on the future life: these make it a circle of existences through the worlds, those a metempsychosis. However, it must be believed that the new religion is not about to be established. Every day brings new data to this great work. Among the strange Masons of this incomprehensible Babel, some, while affirming the distinction of substances and the necessity of a subsequent life to fulfill the desiderata of the latter, deny, with all the energy of their faith, the existence of a Supreme Being; others, taking the diametrically opposed point of view, revert to polytheism, which in their eyes is much more reasonable, more lively, more fruitful, more ideal than monotheism, and above all much easier to reconcile with the conditions of science.

What, however, is the common thought of all these secondary creators, who could no longer be called the increment, jovis incrementum, but the after-effects of the divinity, if they inspired us with even more pity than disgust?

This thought is that the people need a religion; it is that the people by themselves have neither conscience nor reason, non est in eo sanitas, and that they would be ungovernable if they were not dominated by the terror of the gods and the compensatory or penal compensations of the future life.

So watch over yourselves, people of the people! Do not allow yourself to be drawn into these insolent religions, whose first and last word is to dishonor you dogmatically, in order to then piously exploit you. Remember, morning and evening, that the glory of man on earth is to suffice; that you possess within yourselves all the conditions of virtue and happiness; and that your first law is to guard your soul and bow to no deity either of heaven or earth or hell.

Footnote (D), page 34.

Separation of religion and morality among the ancients. — There are few ideas, in matters of philosophy, literature, and morality, which are not, so to speak, as old as humanity itself. A contemporary writer, M. Demogeot, Histoire de la littérature, observed that the ancients had already laid down the principle of morality without religion. But this theory had no development. Greece was only a prelude to philosophy. Starting with Alexander, the more the world advances, the less it seems able to do without the help of religion; and as the idea has no real novelty until it is first realized, it can and must be said that the separation of faith and morals entered the world with the French Revolution.

Footnote (E), page 37.

Opinion of Seneca on Revelation. — Seneca’s thought, as it is presented in the text, may seem exaggerated. He says in the same place: Quid aliud est natura quam Deus? Nature, what is it other than God? But there would be much to do if it were necessary to reconcile all the ideas that fall from the pen of Seneca. He is a kind of eclectic, a mind open to all new ideas; sometimes theist, sometimes pantheist, mystic and reasoner, conservative of traditions and apostle of the revolution, a man whose speech is the echo of universal thought, still confused and contradictory, much more than of his own. This is how, after having expressed this idea, reported below (page 54): “To obey God is liberty;” — and this other: “So great a thing that virtue cannot subsist without the help of God,” he said: “Are you asking me in what this absolute liberty consists? To fear neither men nor gods. Quœris que sit ista absoluta libertas? No homines timere, no Deos. A thought that can still be explained in the religious sense.

Footnote (F), page 39.

Monotheism. — It is common enough today, even among writers who admit no religion, to make monotheism a prerogative of the Semitic peoples, and its establishment in the civilized world a sort of humanitarian mission of the race of Israel. . All this would suppose that the monotheistic conception is more rational, more approaching the truth, more worthy of civilized nations, more moral, more social, finally, than the polytheistic conception, which distinguishes, it is said, the Indo-Germanic peoples.

There are, in these various assertions, almost as many errors as there are words.

First of all, it is impossible to prove, by any monument, that monotheism is more natural to Semitic peoples than to Iaphetic peoples, or, what comes to the same thing, that it originated and developed among the first , who would then have revealed it to the second. The opposite would rather be the truth.

In remote times, polytheism is everywhere, in Egypt, in Arabia, in Palestine. Monotheism is no less frequent, if by monotheism we mean the adoration, among a people, of a special divinity, to the exclusion of all the others.

Polytheism is found even in the Decalogue. When Jehovah said to the Hebrews through the mouth of Moses: You shall have no other gods in my presence, he does not deny the existence of these gods, he only claims to enjoy, to their exclusion, the worship of Israel. It is in this sense that the Israelites themselves understood it, as can be seen from a passage in the book of Judges: where Jephthah, addressing himself to the king of the Ammonites, claims in the name of Jehovah the ownership of the territory of Canaan, just as the Ammonites claimed ownership of their country in the name of their god Chamos. In other passages of the Bible, Jehovah is put on the same line as the other gods, which, I repeat, implies at least theoretical, if not practical, polytheism, each nation being supposed to serve, in a particular way, the god it had chosen as protector. The same thing takes place in the Greek cities: each, originally, has its national god or goddess; Pallas or Minerva reigns in Athens, Venus at Sparta, Juno at Samos, Diana at Ephesus, Jupiter at Dodona, Apollo at Delphi, etc., like Jehovah at Jerusalem, Astarte at Sidon, Chamos among the Ammonites, Moloch among the Moabites, Baal, Mammon, Beelzebub, etc., in other localities. Here is polytheism and monotheism combined together: in this respect, I repeat, there is no difference between the sons of Japheth and those of Shem. The plurality of gods, elohim, is so familiar to the Hebrew language that this plural is continually constructed with a singular proper name: Jehovah my gods; Chamos your gods; as if the names of Jehovah, Chamos, etc., indicated a divine collectivity, just as those of Israel, Ammon, Moab, etc., indicate a human collectivity. Then, the tribes and the cities approaching, forming alliances, the gods seem to make a pact in their turn: Israel sacrifices to the gods of its neighbors, who on their side send offerings to Jehovah. This is what the Bible talks about fornication. The Greek towns use it in the same way; the promiscuity is everywhere: that is polytheism.

In the second place, if it cannot be said that monotheism arose and developed, as an indigenous product, among the Semites, while polytheism reigned among the Indo-Germanic races, it is no more true that the Jews were charged, by a kind of providential mission, to propagate this belief in the world. All of this is an illusion of history, caused by the determination that monotheism received, at the decisive moment of its disclosure.

The dogma of the unity of God, as a principle of religion, is the product of an elimination which has taken place naturally, slowly, among all peoples, much less by philosophical meditation than by the political revolutions of states. . The conquest involving, if not the total abrogation of the cult of the vanquished people, at least the supremacy of that of the victorious people, a host of divinities returned to nothingness, simply because the cities they protected had been incorporated into other states. Jehovah would have been lost, like Moluch, Chamos, Tartac, and so many others, if the Jewish priesthood had not succeeded in obtaining from Cyrus, after the capture of Babylon, an edict restoring Judaic nationality. To restore the nation, to rebuild the Temple, it was all one. It seemed so extraordinary, it was such an amazing thing to see a people, a god, so to speak rise from the grave and live a new life, that the Jews thought themselves invincible from that moment, and began to hope for their Jehovah and for themselves destinies similar to those of the empires of Assyria and Persia. All nations, said the prophets, were to come to worship in Jerusalem, as they had gone to Babylon: this is expressed by the honorary titles given to Jehovah of God of gods, Lord of lords, God of armies, To whom none of the gods is comparable. It’s still polytheism, no longer, it os true, a democratic polytheism as in the past, when the gods walked in tandem, it is a hierarchical polytheism. The courtesy of Alexander towards the great pontiff Jaddus was the height of Judaic exaltation. So when later Antiochus Epiphanes undertook to make the Jews fornicate with the gods of Greece, it was no longer time: a party of puritans form; persecution brought rebellion, and Jehovah’s people regained its independence for some time under the Maccabees. At that time, polytheism had long been undermined among Europeans by philosophy; the unity of God was taught in the mysteries, without the Jews, or any nation among the Semites, even suspecting this revolution. The Hebrew language, devoid of abstract terms, is incapable of expressing a metaphysical idea: how do we expect the people to have conceived from the outset, by an intuition diametrically opposed to their genius, the idea of the unity of God, the most metaphysics of all ideas? What proves that monotheism, in the philosophical sense of the word, had not yet entered the minds of the Jews in the first century of the Christian era, is precisely their messianic faith. What is messianism? The supremacy of the god of the Jews above all other gods, and, consequently, the domination of Israel over all peoples. Monotheism is so little a Jewish or Semitic idea that it can be said that the race of Shem has been disavowed, rejected by it: this is expressed in the declaration of the apostles to the Jews, obstinate in their particularism: Since you reject the word of God, of the universal God, we pass on to the Gentiles.

Monotheism is a creation of the Indo-Germanic spirit; it could only emerge from there. What caused it to be baptized in Palestine—it received circumcision only under Mahomet—is, as we have said in the text, that monotheism positing itself, as a revolutionary antithesis, in the face of imperial and conservative pantheonism, logic wanted it to start from the most incandescent center of the revolution, to appropriate its theology, cosmogony, liturgy, traditions, and even language.

As for the superiority, theoretical and practical, of monotheism over polytheism, after having been, for nearly 2,000 years, an axiom of metaphysics and morals, it seems today, among lovers of religion, to become doubtful again. We appreciate, more than we had done before, this splendid polytheism, which had given such a magnificent flight to the human personality, and the memory of which is associated, in the memory of men, with the creations of the most poetic. most marvelous and of the most accomplished art. We begin to find that, being losing in reality what it gains in extent, the world might be full of spirits of all sizes, from the spirit of man to that of Sirius, from the spirit of Sirius to that of the largest system, and that the spirit or the universal being was, like Hegel’s absolute being, a pure nothingness. If it were up to M. Renouvier, one of our most recent critical philosophers, the religious world would unhesitatingly make this evolution, which at least, if we are to believe the exact and positive philosopher, would have some chance of not being so easily reduced to the absurd.

What is certain is that monotheism, where it was cultivated, could not maintain itself in the purity of its essence. From before Jesus Christ, Plato and others distinguished in God different hypostases; the Gnostics carried the number up to eight, ten, twelve; the Kabbalah got lost in the same speculations, to which the Council of Nicaea put an end, in the year 325 A. D., by deciding that there would be three persons in God, neither more nor less.

The example of Mahomet, who does not associate, that is to say who denies the collectivity in God, in no way invalidates the preceding observations. Mahomet did not appear among the still idolatrous Arabs until the sixth century AD. His monotheism is borrowed from that of the Jews and of Arius, whose descent we have just explained. If there is more unitary rigor in the Allah of the Arabs than in the Christian God and the Jehovah of the Jews (see the Book of Wisdom, and Job, v. XXVIII), this comes both from the necessity in which the Believers found themselves to oppose the old religions, and of their theological incapacity.

Footnote (G), page 51.

Religious democracy. — An opinion still very widespread among democrats is that religion by itself is, whatever may be said, favorable to liberty, to equality, to the development of justice, but that it has been distorted and dishonored by the priests. This was the opinion of Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre and the Jacobins; it was this opinion that prepared the reopening of the churches and the Concordat, and which, nowadays, has procured a certain vogue for the school of M. Buchez, that of P. Leroux and a few others. But the illusion dissipated: little by little we returned to the true principle of the Revolution, to the faith of Diderot, of Condorcet, of Volney, of Mirabeau, of Sieyès, of the Gironde, of Danton, of Clootz. The religious republican is becoming increasingly rare: we will not find today an assembly of democrats who voted for the preamble of the Constitution of 1848.

Here is what a citizen of Charente-Inférieure wrote to us last year, remaining faithful to the profession of faith of the Savoyard Vicar:

“Except for one great thing, genius, which you have more than me, and another less great thing, fame, I think I see enough analogies between us to take the boldness to write to you, and even to hope for a good and cordial response.

“Like you, I am the son of a blacksmith, a former volunteer in ’92;

“Like you, I was a language teacher;

“Like you, I have written a grammar, of which I ask you to accept a copy, and on which I earnestly solicit your opinion;

“Like you, I believe that all the priesthoods have compromised the religious idea.

“But I don’t believe, like you, that this idea is lost, nor that it should or can be lost. I see in it, on the contrary, the true and indefectible distinction of Humanity; I take the joke seriously: All animals are reasonable; man alone is religious.

“You yourself, O confessor and martyr, how religious you are, whatever you may say! religious to the god Justice , who would certainly be the true one, if you recognized in him a personality, the supreme personality, without which my humble logic searches in vain for the effective cause of our little personalities.

“Will you allow me to say how I explain this difference in our fundamental opinions? By the difference of our cults, of our religious education.

“You know: Omnis repletio mala, perdicum autem pessima. [“All overeating is bad, but partridges are the worst.”] Catholicism has made you eat too much of its partridges, which, it is said, are a little past their prime. I perfectly understand your indignation; I have seen many other cases with the same cause. As for me, Protestantism has served me, and at my discretion, only unleavened bread and bitter lettuce: I always have an appetite for religious food.

Neither the god of Calvin, nor the god of Hildebrand,  Satisfied my heart; it has sensed a greater one.

“Ah! this one, when you come to preach it!.… Atheists, generous Monsieur Proudhon, alas! they are known by their fruits; and you are not one who bears these fruits.

“Believe therefore in God, in the being just in essence, in the formal, although inaccessible, ideal of Justice, in the indispensable friend of the People, you child of the People; in the eternal worker, noble smith of thought; and then there won’t be a nail that you won’t be able to drive.

“It’s even, it seems to me, the one and only way to recork those of your real opponents. There is reason to fear that by not employing it you will do their business better than ours, in spite of yourself.

“I also know that nowadays you have to sing above your own pitch to be heard; but your timbre has enough bite to do without this dissonance.

Leave the artifice there, it is not made for you.

“You don’t need it any more… than my rash advice, which however, I’m sure, won’t displease you: you have too much wit not to say that it’s a way, in some dreamers, to show their sympathy and admiration.”

If the author of this letter, as affectionate as he is witty, had read me better, or understood me better, I am not saying that he would not have found anything in my book to reproach, but his observations would certainly have focused on anything else.

Thus, I neither believe nor say anywhere that the priesthoods have compromised the religious idea: it is an analogy to be removed between my honorable correspondent and myself. I say on the contrary that it is the religious idea that compromises the priesthood; in other words, it is not the Church that makes religion, but religion that makes the Church; so that if the latter has lost sight of Justice, the fault is not with the corruption of the clergy, as the Calvinists say, but precisely with the religious idea, represented by the Church.

Thus, again, I do not deny that religion, although it has, in my opinion, become incompatible with morality, is one of the traits that distinguish man from other animals. On the contrary, I admit this distinction; I even admit that the mark is indelible. Only, I maintain that religion is only a figure, a poetry, a mythology of Justice, and that this is why Justice, affirming itself, no longer has anything to do with religion. Let this thesis be rejected, well and good: but let it not be suppressed by attacking me; because, as we know, deleting is not answering.

It pleases my correspondent to make me an atheist. — But, although I am perhaps of all mortals the one least tormented by the fear of God, I am not an atheist; I have always protested, and in the most serious way, against this qualification. Let us not argue about the nature and attributes of God; let us stick to the vulgar definition: that one is an atheist, who dogmatically denies the existence of this God. Now, I profess to believe and to say that we cannot legitimately deny or affirm anything that is absolute: this is one of the reasons for which I reject the divine concept of morality. Let it be said that such a doubt is untenable, that by the sole fact that God is possible, he is, and that I can no longer remain indifferent to him. I understand the objection, and if it is made, I’ll try to answer it. But don’t make me an atheist, when my philosophy itself opposes the qualification.

Catholic education is attacked for the atheism, real or supposed, into which it sometimes happens that Orthodox Christians fall. They much prefer Protestant education, which, at least, they say, leaves us with an appetite for religious things. I confess that in my eyes this would be a sad recommendation for Protestantism. But I don’t see that there are fewer atheists among Protestants than among Catholics; I even maintain that there are more of them, were it only for this consideration that Protestantism, by virtue of its principle, tends necessarily, and hardly inconsequently, to deism, which is a disguised atheism, as Bossuet put it so well. What proves it is that a notable part of the Protestants, the most religious, feeling that the faith was going away, have separated from the mother church and form a separate sect, under the names of Pietists, Methodists, etc. To save their religion, in short, the most pious among the Protestants return to Catholicism.

My opponent boasts of having found a greater God than the God of Calvin and the Popes. It would be generous for him to let us know him, this God. I am very much afraid that what he takes for an enlarged idea of the Divinity is, on the contrary, its vanishing. The more the idea gains in extent, says logic, the more it loses in reality. This is what happens, for example, when the religious man passes from polytheism to monotheism, from the latter to pantheism, etc.

But let’s not quibble over the details: let’s get to the point. The fact is that a fraction of the republican party after having denied divine right according to Gregory VII, accepts it according to J.-J. Rousseau, Robespierre and Napoleon. Now here is what, without worrying more about the existence or non-existence of God, we oppose to this party of mired revolutionaries, and that we beg them to refute seriously:

1. In civilization, the religious movement is inverse to that of liberty and science, so that what is progress for the latter means, implies retreat for religion, and vice versa .

2. The intervention of an external authority, natural or supernatural, in the order of Justice and as a sanction of Justice, is destructive of Justice. In other words, Justice asserts and defends itself alone, or it does not exist.

8. The worship rendered to the gods has as its inseparable corollary the disdain, dedignationem, of man and his degradation, as the theory of an original prevarication demonstrates.

4. The idea of God, however metaphysical it may be, from the moment it is introduced into social practice, tends to realize itself physically, to constitute a priesthood and to bring back idolatry, messianism and all superstitions.

These fundamental propositions are the main subject of our publication. Let them be refuted, let us be shown how the abstract idea of God can become a positive law of practical reason without entailing all these consequences: then we will see what we have to do.

Footnote (H), page 51.

Conditions of a new religion. — It is certain that religion tends to be rationalized as civilization progresses. Anthropomorphic polytheism is superior to zoomorphism, in that an idol in human form is something higher than an idol in the form of a bull; likewise the monotheism taught by Plato, Anaxagoras, and preached in the mysteries, is superior to polytheism, in the sense that the first testifies to a higher degree of abstraction than the second. This elevation of the religious idea is what deludes many people. We see in it a perfection, a progress of religion, and we like to believe that, as Christianity has regenerated society by raising itself above polytheism; all the same it may be, it is probable, even necessary that a new religion, transforming Christianity, and elevating religious thought to an unknown degree, rejuvenate society. A poor sophism, at the slightest examination will make disappear!

What is this alleged perfection of the religious idea? Quite simply the return of man to reason, the retaking of possession of ourselves by philosophy and freedom. In other words, the so-called progress of religion is nothing other than the progress of the revolution that initiates it and assimilates it. In the first moments of this great crisis, the return to reason is concealed in the form of an ascent in religion: thus humanity, in its greatest conversions, testifies to its conservative spirit, and is reluctant to change its mind. But it is obvious that this ascent is nothing but a retreat: this results from the comparison of dogmas, and above all from the increasing pretensions to rationalism. The reason in my verses leads man to faith, said the younger Racine. Such is the thesis of the Fathers of the Church, of the Doctors, of the Councils, of every Christian, in a word, who aspires to realize his faith. But where does this rationalism lead us?

The ancient gods, including the god of Moses, and in many cases also that of the Christians, while boasting of enlightening men, of warning them by their oracles, take pleasure in confusing reason with absurd mysteries. and incredible wonders. The unintelligible and the impossible remain, during the great religious period, the distinctive sign of the divine spirit and the seal of its power. But little by little this smoke dissipates: one comes to conceive that reason in God is of no other form and nature than that which manifests itself in man. It is above all, it is said, from the point of view of intelligence that man was created in the image of God, whose Word or Logos, the personification of universal reason, even ended up taking our flesh. And because we have discovered that God, as an intelligent and moral being, must resemble man, we imagine that we have come a long way in religion.

Undoubtedly, reason, science, insight, memory, foresight, all the faculties of the mind, are incomparably greater in God than in man; but in the end, in one as in the other, they are of the same nature; and as men, by getting closer, instruct each other, in the same way God, by communicating with us, even revealing to us some of his secrets, uses our reason, instructs us by virtue of this reason, in such a way teaches that if we believe in his word, it is no longer so much, as in the past, because this word comes to us from God, as because our own reason approves of it.

Therefore, as far as reason is concerned, we have made ourselves peers and companions of God, although our acquired knowledge is not equal to his, nor our faculties as powerful. Admit that this God deigns to enter into communication with us: at the point where things are, we will discuss him, like Job; we will address him, not prayers, but questions; we will overwhelm him with how and why; we will examine his decisions, his explanations, his revelations; we could take him for a teacher, but we could not make an oracle of him. But if he refuses to answer, if he withdraws, we will say to him: You are impatient, Jupiter; so you are a fool! And we will laugh at him.

Now, what happens in religion, from the point of view of intelligences, also happens there from the point of view of consciences. For centuries right and law, mingled with a host of ceremonial observances, have been taught to man as a commandment from God; this commandment has been received without discussion, without examination, practiced without discernment, developed without philosophy. For centuries, it was believed that God was the subject of Justice, its author, its inventor, its promulgator, and we worshiped him as sovereign king, master, lord. Little by little, we said to ourselves that the law of God, as well as his Word, was within us; that this law was the expression of our nature, the formula of the relations that we maintain with our fellow-creatures, and that there had been in us a conscience that inclines us to follow it. The Church itself does not deny it; it avows the immanence in us of Justice, at least during the period of innocence, maintaining only that the first man having prevaricated, our soul has been corrupted and our conscience has become impotent. Such is the dogma of the Church, against which all the protestations of rationalism now rise.

Admitting then that a new religious evolution is preparing, what will be its character, from the point of view of Justice?

It is possible, since our mind conceives it, and no experience denies it, that there exists a great Spirit, creator and organizer of the Universe, all-powerful, all-knowing, therefore personal, moral and just. Admitting, between this God and us, a communication, relations, it is obvious that, just as he can help, by his word and his science, the development of our reason, he can also help, by his Justice, the development of our morality. But, as I was saying just now, justice in God will not destroy ours; it will not be of any other nature than ours, any more than his reason destroys our reason, or is of another nature than our reason. Our conscience will always pronounce in the last resort on the wisdom of the divine laws; it will always aspire to do good by it own virtue: so that the new, perfected religion, instead of creating, as before, between God and man a relationship of subordination, submission, redemption, will create one of simple commutative Justice, of reciprocal right, of mutual edification, in a word, equality. God, by his good examples and his good counsels, will still be able to render us precious services: he will no longer be for us that justifying, sanctifying, restorative and gracious spirit that the Church teaches us; such a claim would be retrograde and would offend us. God, finally, if it is true that by a new religious infusion he must draw closer to us, will be for us, in spite of his infinite greatness, an analogue, a companion, an auxiliary if you will, who, if he aids in our justification by the communication of his Justice, will find himself justified, sanctified and glorified by ours. Thus the sun, which attracts both the smallest of the planets and the largest, which illuminates them, warms them, animates them, is in its turn attracted, heated, animated by them. For such is the essence of Justice that communication between beings is reciprocal.

But it is evident that then there is no more religion, no more latria, no more worship: God, by virtue of the supposed perfection of religion, being himself no more adorable than the lowest of the miscreants. We are in full justice: the hypothesis of a religion of progress is reduced to zero.

This is why we maintain that from the religious elements in circulation there will never be formed either a dogma, or a religion, or a new church; why Catholicism, the greatest of religions, is also the last.

Footnote (I), page 55.

Right and duty. — One cannot believe how far the horror of law and freedom goes in a certain circle of democrats. It is in vain that the Revolution, before which one affects to uncover oneself as before a crucifix, has posited by its first act the Right of Man and of the Citizen . We do not want this principle, Right; human nature is denied dignity and morality with a category of argument that betrays its Christian origin and the secret thought of another tyranny. Justice, for Mr. Pierre Leroux, is despotism ; for M. Louis Blanc, individualism ; for almost all, federalism . The true doctrine, the true principle of the Revolution, is Duty; Duty, whose anteriority and superiority necessarily imply that the true justice-bringer is not man, but God (Catholic theory) or society (communist theory); that man consequently has rights only indirectly, in the sense that each citizen is bound, in the name of the community, to render his duties to his brothers, who in turn must render theirs to him; that thus justice is not commutative by nature, but distributive; so that the social problem consists in creating, in the multitude, a distributing Authority according to the St-Simonian formula, To each according to his capacity, to each capacity according to its works .

It has been said many times, and nothing could be truer: It is always communism, feudalism, absolute power, theocracy, which these religionaries covered with the mask of the Revolution tend to establish; it is to their detestable influence, as much as to the corruption of interests, that we must attribute the anti-juridical regime of the 2nd of December. What deceives the masses in this doctrine of death is the respect which its partisans affect to show for the collectivity, and their distrust of selfishness: as if the collectivity were everything, the man nothing; as if there were not society and society, just as there are fagots et fagots; as if, finally, the deviations of individualism did not stem precisely from social absolutism!

One cannot take too much care in unveiling these fatal theories, covered in liberal tinsel. Here is how a young neo-Christian, so-called sworn enemy of intolerance, preaching against the pope, in an infallible tone of dogmatism, the separation of the temporal and the spiritual, consequently affirming the sovereignty (in the temporal) of the people , and maintaining that the sovereign, as sovereign, is of no religion; here is how this so-called zealot of democracy deduces the notion of right from that of duty. Let’s put an end to these logomachies, if possible, once and for all:

“What is Right?

“I am obliged to develop, to tend to my end: it is my Duty .

“My right is that no one prevents me, puts an obstacle to the development of my being. The good, for a given being, is the fulfillment of its being; and as all the ends of all beings concur, by a marvelous harmony, in the universal end of being, to strive for one’s end, to accomplish one’s being, is to live in the order of nature and according to God, who has made beings solidary. Such is my duty; and the duty that my fellow men have of putting no obstacle in the way of the accomplishment of this duty, constitutes my right. (Revue Contemporaine, January 30, 1860; review of a work on European law by M. Mamiani.)

To lay bare the poverty of this argument, it suffices to preface the words of the writer a little.

To posit, as a first principle, Duty , and necessarily he seeks to posit it on a fact. “I am obliged ,” he said, “to develop my faculties, and to tend to my end:” such is this fact. — To develop my faculties, to tend to my end, constitutes for me an obligation ; this obligation is the starting point of science, the alpha and omega of morality.

Let us admit the obligation, if you will. I only ask why I am obliged , what binds me and makes the fulfillment of my being a duty? In what way, why and towards whom would I be guilty, if I refused this accomplishment?

The end of man, replies our doctor, is to live according to God . This word says it all. It signifies that the end of man is not in himself, but in another who is called God; consequently that Justice is primitively in God, and by derivation only in man, whose whole dignity consists in despising himself and in sacrificing himself, according to the Jesuitical motto: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam . There was no need to put on such grand airs: it would have been better to say simply, like Polyeucte: I am a Christian .

The author then develops his thought:

“If freedom is the right (a negative right, resulting for each of us from the duty that our fellow men have not to disturb us in the accomplishment of our being ), it is the right for all. All therefore, as long as we are, think, act, are, according to our duty, responsible towards God, but God alone , because he alone judges thought, principle of speech and conduct, etc. “

Let’s complete the deduction.

If I am responsible only to God alone, in whom is Justice, and who is my end, by what right, if I am guilty, will I be judged? I challenge the jurisdiction of my fellow men; I do not recognize human tribunals. Such has been the practice of the Church, which, from the time of Jesus Christ, has constantly tended to substitute itself for the state, and to replace it with its mystical jurisdiction, instituted from on high (Quodeumque ligaveris, etc.), the justice of free men and the whole system of guarantees and legal reparations. We thus return to indulgences: and as the judgments of the Church, to be enforceable, require force, it follows from this whole theory of duty, not, if you will, that the head of the spiritual cumulates the temporal, no more than in the republic of 1848 the legislative power cumulated the executive, but that it dictates its laws to it, and if need be addresses to it, in the name of God and of the Church, its requisitions.

For us, we say that the end of man is in himself, and that to place it outside of him, were it even in God, is to declare him, ipso facto, unworthy, subordinate, and serf; that thus the right and the duty are born for him simultaneously and indivisibly from the consideration of his dignity; that it is this increasingly lofty feeling of dignity that, in the presence of one’s fellows, becoming a feeling no longer final but generic, gives rise to sociability and constitutes Justice,

Justice is therefore essentially human, commutative, reciprocal; what makes the bond of right is the conscience, which forbids us to violate the dignity of our neighbor, at the risk of violating our own and destroying ourselves morally. In case of injury, the culprit is responsible towards himself and towards his peers, so that every man is both justicier and justiciable. If you abandon this definition, you return to Catholicism; accept it, you reject Catholicism, and with Catholicism any kind of absolutism, religious, theocratic, monarchical, feudal and communitarian.

I understand that we seek in good faith to reconcile these extremes, as eclectic philosophy and constitutional government attempted at the same time, in 1814, 1880 and 1848. What I cannot forgive is that sophists, to put it mildly, decked themselves out in more or less liberal opinions to corrupt popular innocence and lead the Revolution to a new and unworthy evasion. Let those who love freedom beware: their enemies most to be feared are not those who fight under the banner of the emperor and the pope; they are among those menders of religion who for seventy years have infected the reason of the masses and serve as procurers of all our shame.

Footnote (J), page 56.

Original sin. — So that we are not accused of ignorance or bad faith, and to remove any pretext for chicanery, we are going to report, in precise terms, the doctrine of the Church on original sin.

“The Council of Trent has decided, Sess. v, can. 1, that Adam by his sin lost Holiness and Righteousness, incurred the wrath of God, death, and captivity under the dominion of the Devil; — can . 2, that he transmitted to all his descendants not only death and the sufferings of the body, but the sin which is the death of the soul; — can. 3, that this sin, proper and personal to all, can only be removed by the merits of Jesus Christ; — can. 6, that the stain of this sin is fully blotted out by baptism.”

“From this the theologians conclude that the effects and the penalty of original sin are, 1), the privation of sanctifying grace and of the right to eternal happiness, a double advantage which Adam enjoyed in the state of innocence; 2) the derangement of concupiscence or inclination to evil; 3) subjection to suffering and death: three wounds from which Adam was exempt before his sin. Whence follows the absolute necessity of baptism to remedy it. Catholic dogma extends no further. ( Berger , Dict. de Théol.)

The truth of this dogma is founded on three sorts of proofs: 1) Revelation, 2) the common feeling of all the ancient peoples, among whom the tradition of it was preserved; 3) philosophical reflection, based on experience.

The Church is the depositary of the revolution.

As for the tradition preserved among the ancient peoples, that is a matter of archeology and history. M. de Lamennais collected, in volume III of the Indifference , a mass of passages from the ancient authors, which establish the identity or the analogy of universal consent with the account of the Genesis, Finally, as regards the testimony of reason and experience, it is certain that the problem of the origin of evil is one of those that have most tormented philosophers, and that a very small number, even among the least religious, have succeeded in breaking free from general prejudice.

“One can say that original sin is a notorious and palpable fact. All men are born with depraved inclinations, are prone to all vices and are enemies of virtue. Their life on earth is visibly a state of misery and punishment. It is obvious that man is not as he should be, nor as he came out of the hands of the Creator.

“Cicero, who so eloquently painted the grandeur of human nature, cannot fail to be struck by the astonishing contrasts offered by this same nature, subject to so many miseries, to illnesses, to sorrows, to fears, to the most degrading passions; so that, forced to recognize something divine in a man so unhappy and so degraded, he does not know how to define it, and calls him a soul in ruins . ( De Republ . lib. 3.)

“This is why, in Plato, Socrates reminds his disciples that those who have established the mysteries, and who are not, he says, to be despised, taught according to the ancients that whoever dies without being purified remains in hell, immersed in mud; and that he who has been purified dwells with the gods. Virgil reproduces this doctrine in the sixth book of the Aeneid.

“All the ancient theologians and poets said, according to Philolaus the Pythagorean, that the soul was buried in the body as in a tomb, in punishment for some sin. This was also the doctrine of the Orphics; and, as at the same time, it was recognized that man had come out good from the hands of God, and that he had lived at first in a state of purity and innocence, the crime for which he was punished was consequently posterior to his creation.

“But how did one man’s crime infect his whole race? How can children justly bear the penalty for their father’s fault? They carry it, this pain, it is a constant fact, which consequently it is by no means necessary to explain. God is just, and we are punished: that is all we need to know; the rest is just pure curiosity.” ( Notes of Mgr. Gousset , in the Dict. theol.)

Such are the facts of the theory, and such are the proofs. The difficult point, after having recognized this original corruption, was to set its limits and to determine its effects with precision. In this respect, theology is far from being satisfactorily explained. — “If we are asked,” said Bergier, “in what formally the stain of original sin consists, how and by what means it is communicated to our soul, we will humbly answer that we know nothing about it, because, as Saint Augustine says, it is as difficult to know its nature as it is certain that it exists: Hoc peccato nihil est ad prædicandum nolius, nihil ad intelligendum secretius.”

To what degree was man infected? We cannot say. Physically, sin does not prevent him from living for a certain period of time, from being well at times, from reproducing; but he is subject to illnesses, to old age, to misery, and finally condemned to die. The same applies to morals: sin has not entirely robbed us of our intelligence, it has thrown it into trouble; it has not taken away our free will, it has made us less strong against the servitude of the senses and the oppression of nature; it has not abolished in our soul every kind of moral sense, every notion of justice and every good desire, it has made us more cowardly and less able to overcome our evil inclinations. In the eyes of God, it is quite true that any unbaptized man will never see his creator face to face and will not enter into sovereign beatitude; but it does not follow that he is damned, if he has not committed a mortal sin, and if it does not depend on him to have himself baptized. It will be with him as with children dead without baptism, who are gathered in a place where they undergo neither pain nor sadness, deprived only of the presence of God.

To sum up, theology, in a hurry to explain itself, seems to imply that before Adam’s sin, Justice was in us more determined, conscience more energetic, liberty more complete, intelligence more limpid than they have been since; that the inclination to evil was weaker, or even nil; concupiscence, the excitement of the senses and of the passions, also weaker, or even without action. It is a diminution of the forces of life, intelligence and will, amounting to a positive inclination to evil, which before did not exist. A question of quantum on which it is obviously impossible to arrive at a precise measurement. In short, Humanity is sick, and through its own fault; the most vigorous among its members are only convalescents. Final healing takes place only after death, and under the prior condition of having received the faith in Christ: take away the transfusion of the blood of this divine mediator, the baptismal ablution, the purgations of penance, the Eucharistic food and the energetic cordial of grace, and all is lost. Not only will Humanity, entered into the tomb, never see its God; but from this very life, evil prevailing, society falls into rot. No religion, no justice, no humanity.

Well, even in these terms, and with the theological restrictions, it remains true that, according to the doctrine of original sin, human nature is fundamentally perverted; that it is incapable of constituting itself according to Justice; that concupiscence is stronger in it than conscience; that consequently it is physically, organically, constitutionally depraved; that God alone, who created it, preserves it by his grace, sustains it by his Justice, saves it from its perverse inclinations, and operates in it, by a mysterious therapy, the little good that prevents it from dissolving.

There is therefore nothing exaggerated in the consequences that we bring out, in this Study and in the following ones, of the dogma of original prevarication: systematic humiliation of the human person; contempt for the species; denial of human and civic rights; absolutism of power; hierarchy of fortunes; police, inquisitorial regime; violation of family, home, marital secrecy, liberty. The Church itself, in its religious communities, in its episcopal police and in all its theocracy, has deduced from its dogma all these consequences: it would be in vain, and we will have more than one occasion to show it, that one would claim to separate dogma from discipline, to save the essence of Christianity by sacrificing the clergy to it. Everything here forms an indissoluble chain: to break it at one point is to introduce schism and heresy into the Church, and to crucify Jesus Christ anew.

There remains one last point to be clarified, that of the formation of this dogma, which we attribute, like that of monotheism itself, exclusively to the Christian revolution.

It is obvious, in the first place, that the ancient myth of Adam, Eve, the serpent and the apple, the analog of which is found in all mythologies, does not have the significance that Christian theology supposes. This is what the Cathars, the Montanists and above all the Pelagians maintained from the 3rd and 4th centuries, reproaching Saint Augustine for outraging the meaning of the Scriptures. The first mythologists admitted, which is natural and true, that man, composed of sensitive, affective and intellectual faculties, is fragile; that it is all the more difficult for him to keep his balance because he has less knowledge and experience, and because the practice of society has less developed Justice in him. They drew the conclusion from this that the first man had been , in this respect, such as his descendants showed themselves after him; and as, in any career or evolution, as well as in any enterprise, the first errors are the most dangerous, because their influence embraces the whole sequence, it was concluded, in the form of an apologue, that the direction of humanity in its mores had not been first of all the most rational, the most learned, the most upright—something that philosophy perfectly admits—and that if, for example, servitude, war, misery, even death, desolated humanity, it was due to some primitive fault, — Christ, added the Pelagians, had had the mission of putting us back on the true path: such was the meaning of redemption, to which the same Saint Augustine gave, according to them, a completely abusive extension. Of an original corruption of the human soul, transmitted from generation to generation, there was, argued Pelagius, no question: antiquity had not even suspected it; it was a product of the imagination of Saint Augustine, who moreover was only the echo of the Gnostics, Marcionites and Valentinians, slanderers of human nature and humanity, teaching the corruption of the flesh and maintaining, as the lutheran Flavius later put it, that evil is the very substance of man .

It may be added that the system of practical morality of the patriarchs, among whom the knowledge of the true God had, it was said, been preserved, was quite irreconcilable with the dogma of original sin. Far from man being punished in this life for a sin prior to his birth, unhappiness in the patriarchal period was almost unknown. The one who was struck was struck for a current fault, public or secret; death was only an evil when it arrived before its time, like a catastrophe, and when the deceased left no successor of his name. Such is the theory of the book of Job, against which we see that the author has precisely intended to raise an objection, by showing the just punished side by side with the triumphant sinner. Introduce into the book of Job the idea of original sin, with its two corollaries of redemption and the immortality of the soul, and all this controversy falls away: the mystery of the affliction of the just is explained, at least as much as a mystery can be explained by another mystery.

Pelagius and his adherents were right when they accused Saint Augustine of outraging the meaning of the myths and of innovating in religion. Unfortunately for their thesis, the corruption of morals was such that it formed a mystery more incomprehensible than that of original sin itself. Nothing could then explain such a degradation; no effort of human discipline seemed capable of effecting a cure: the case was truly hopeless. Experience, stronger than all reasoning, seemed here to rise up against Pelagius; and what legitimizes, in a way, his condemnation is that the revival of morals in the converted world was due precisely to the profound humiliation and bitter repentance which the theory of original sin cast in souls.

A final consideration ensured the triumph of the dogma of the fall: it is that religion, well studied, necessarily implies it. Worship is a confession. Under whatever aspect it is considered, religion presupposes this idea, that man is powerless, by himself, to do good; that his existence on earth is not related to his destiny; that alone it is not enough; that his being is sick, etc., etc. : all ideas that imply degradation, anomaly or mutilation, which basically is always the same thing.

Footnote (K), page 65.

Influence of the Dogma of the Fall on the Judgments.—

“The other judges presume that an accused is innocent; these (the ecclesiastical judges) always presume him guilty. When in doubt, they make it a rule to decide on the side of rigor, apparently because they believe men are bad.” ( Montesquieu , Persian Letters .)

Of what use, then, is the so-called corrective that consists in saying: “We are slandering the Church by making her say that man is bad: he is sick, that is all?” — Are not the consequences of this disease, inveterate, incurable, absolutely the same as if man were the creature of Satan, and had never enjoyed a minute of health?

Footnote (L), page 88.

Of the passions. — Nature composed man of flesh and mind; as it gave him reason and conscience, it also gave him passions and senses. By themselves, therefore, the passions are not bad, and deserve no anathema. Self-esteem, the dignity and pride that result from them, ambition itself and the love of glory, have their legitimacy. In this respect, the Phalansterian criticism of the old moralists is unassailable. But it does not follow that the passions must be taken for the basis and the rule of human relations: because they are natural, they are not therefore justified; it is this very justification that is the object of morality and the supreme condition of society. Left to themselves, the passions tend, each in its own way, to invade the whole man; they would lack their role, and man would remain helpless, if it were otherwise. But Justice is given to us precisely to restore the balance, to call the passions to order and to curb their exorbitance. Such is the first of our duties: whoever forgets it lacks Justice. Let us be proud, ambitious, even glorious, but within the limits of right; let us go, if need be, as far as anger, as the Psalmist says, Irascimini and nolite peccare , but without ever letting go of the bridle on our anger, since passion, by its tendency, is selfish and offensive.

Footnote (M), page 98.

Immanence of Justice. — “Men are born to be virtuous: Justice is a quality that is as specific to them as existence.” (Montesquieu, Persian Letters, letter X.)

“Virtue is not something that should cost us; Justice for others is charity for us.” (Ibid., XII.)

“Justice is a relationship of propriety that really finds itself between two things: this relationship is always the same, whatever being considers it, whether it is God, or whether it is an angel, or finally whether it is a man.”
“When there would be no God, we should always love Justice, that is to say, make our efforts to resemble this being of whom we have such a beautiful idea, and who, if he existed, would be necessarily correct. Free as we would be from the yoke of religion, we should not be free from that of equity.
“Here, Rhédi, is what made me think that Justice is eternal, and does not depend on human conventions; and when it depended on it, it would be a terrible truth, which one would have to hide from oneself.
“When a man examines himself, what satisfaction for him to find that his heart is just! This pleasure, severe as it is, should the delighted see his being as much above those who do not have it, as he sees himself above tigers and bears. Yes, Rhédi, if I were sure of always following inviolably this equity which I have before my eyes, I would believe myself to be the first of men. (Ibid., LXXXIII.)
In these remarkable passages, Montesquieu confirms our theory point by point.
Justice is a quality , we say a faculty , that is as proper to us as existence.
Justice is a relationship of propriety ; we say that right, jus, is the relation of propriety between the dignity of man and things.
This relationship is real , adds Montesquieu; we say the same.
This relationship is absolute; it depends neither on human conventions nor on the good pleasure of the Divinity. We have made it the keystone of our scientific and moral system.
Justice finds in itself, according to Montesquieu, its sanction and its reward; this is what we will demonstrate later.
It may be objected that the same Montesquieu wrote later, in favor of religion, this famous passage: “Religion, which seems to concern itself only with the other life, also makes our happiness in this one. “We do not undertake to make Montesquieu, or anyone else, agree with himself. It is the right of criticism to seize upon ideas as they arise, to form regular bundles of them, to mark oppositions and incompatibilities. It is then for the general reason of to decide on which side is the truth, the safest practice, the healthiest morality.
We know the effort made by Kant to reestablish, through the theory of practical reason, the religious dogma destroyed by the critique of pure reason. Does this impossible restoration, which came, in Kant, from the inexact idea he had of the role, the influence and the movement of religion, in any way affect the truth of the following words of the great philosopher?
“Man carries the moral law within himself; to practice it freely, he needs neither the idea of a superior being nor any foreign motive. The kingdom of God does not assume a sensible form; you don’t hear it said: Look, there it is. Christ said, not only to his disciples, but to the Pharisees: The kingdom of God is within you . (Of Religion within the Limits of Reason .)
This doctrine is traditional among jurists, and independent of their religious opinions. Before Kant and Montesquieu, Grotius had said that reason alone sufficed to give existence to law , independently of the idea of God. Pufendorf is less firm: he recognizes the truth of the principle of Grotius, that reason alone suffices to give existence to right; but he maintains that, without the idea of God, the rules of law would not have the force of law , which is to substitute for law the theory of original sin.
Heineccius maintains that Justice has its sanction. in itself, in the very felicity of innocence, which excludes all auxiliary religion.
Wolf similarly says, “Always do the things that can make you more perfect and perfect your state; on the contrary, avoid everything that can deteriorate your nature and make your state worse.” This is the principle of personal dignity transformed into a maxim of Justice, according to the French proverb: Do what you must, come what may .
Hutcheson, a Scot no less religious than the preceding ones, is even more explicit. In his Investigations into the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue , he expressly teaches that “as the principle of the taste we have for beauty, order, harmony, and design, resides in an inner sense, in a sort of instinct independent of reflections—likewise the principle of our inclinations, of our tastes, of our determinations in favor of virtue, must also be placed in an instinct, in a natural disposition of our souls in an internal sense . which he calls moral sense (the expression has passed into everyday language). Hutcheson accordingly asserts that the virtue emanates from quite another affection than self-love, or personal interest, in which he differs radically from English writers, one might almost say from the English nation, for whom Justice is indistinguishable from utility.
Burlamaqui agrees with Hutcheson’s ideas. He says, in substance, that the soul acts in us by means of faculties or powers, the principal of which are understanding, will, liberty, conscience. Obligation, considered in its first origin, can be defined as a restriction of natural freedom by reason; in other words, what enchains liberty and forms the bond of right is consciousness. — The attraction we have for virtue, as well as for truth, comes from a special aptitude or faculty, which appeals to honest and just things as the stomach appeals to food. Finally he fell with these words which cut through all uncertainty:
“Does the will of God oblige us because reason approves of it; or rather does reason oblige us because + it makes us know the will of God? or, in other words, is reason anterior or posterior to the will of God, in fact of obligation? — Burlamaqui replies that we are bound by reason prior to the will of God: which no one can support, adds, crossing himself the commentator of Felice.
We see by these quotations, by the reservations they express in favor of religion, by the terror felt by weak souls, such as Pufendorf and de Félice, that the theory of Immanence is not new, and that the 17th and 18th centuries fully understood its significance. It escapes the heart of all authors whenever they forget to ask themselves what will become of religion with such a theory. Mably, writing in the same spirit, around the year 1760, a little treatise on the Rights and Duties of the Citizen, reprinted in 1793, thought he could not make his thoughts heard better, while preserving an enigmatic appearance, than by plagiarizing in head of his work, as a warning to the reader, the following passage from Cicero, preserved by Lactantius, Divin. Inst ., lib . 6, c. 3. It is the most eloquent profession of faith of the innateness, universality and supremacy of Justice, under the image of a God who dwells in the conscience of man,
“Est quidem vera lex, recta ratio naturæ congruens, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna, quæ vocet ad officium jubendo, vetando à fraud deterreat; Quæ tamen neque probos frustra jubet aut vetat, nec improbos jubendo aut vetando movet. Huic legi nec obrogari fas est, neque derogari .ex hâc aliquid licet, neque tota abrogari potest. Nec verd aut per Senatum aut per lvi hâc lege mus. Neque is quærendus explanator, aut interpres ejus alius; nec erit alia lex Romæ, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthàc; sed et omnes gentes, et omni tempore una Lex, et sempiterna, et immortalis continebit. Unusque erit communis quasi magister et imperator omnium Deus ille, Legis hujus inventor, disceptator, lator; cui qui non parebit ipse se fugiet, ac naturam hominis aspernabitur, atque hoc ipso luet maximas pœnas, etiamsi cætera supplicia quæ putantur effugerit.
[“There is indeed a true law, a right reason consistent with nature, diffused in all, constant, eternal, which calls to duty by commanding, and deters fraud by forbidding; Yet it neither commands or forbids the righteous in vain, nor moves the unscrupulous by commanding or forbidding. It is not right to abrogate this law, nor to derogate from it. Anything from this is permissible, nor can it be abrogated in its entirety. Neither green, nor by the Senate, nor by the 14th, shall we pass this law. Nor is he to be sought for an interpreter, or another interpreter of it; nor will there be another law in Rome, another in Athens, another now, another hereafter; but all nations, and at all times, shall contain one Law, both eternal and immortal. And one will be common as the teacher and commander of all, that God, inventor, debater, and expounder of this Law; He who does not conform to this will flee himself, and the nature of man will be despised, and this very thing he will suffer the greatest punishments, even if he escapes the other punishments which are supposed to have escaped.]

NEWS OF THE REVOLUTION.

Of THE DIGNITY OF NATIONS AND OF THEIR DECLINE,

according to the example of December 2.

The dignity of nations! — This is the theme to which we are going to give some developments in this second part of our Appendix, and according to which we will summarily judge the events of the last month.

As we have expressed above (Note A) any offense to personal dignity is a violation of Justice; likewise, any insult to national dignity is a subversion of justice, and vice versa.

The coarse plebs, the egotistical and busy middle class feel such outrages only faintly: this insensitivity is one of the causes of the prolongation of despotism. When the insult is addressed to everyone, it seems to be addressed to no one: in the community of servitude, say the advocates of tyranny, injustice does not exist. Evil passions mingling in it, each comes to rejoice in public slavery, to which he affects to declare himself indifferent. Let, for example, Napoleon II, responsible for giving a Constitution to France, allow himself to say, without any consideration, that the nation which is about to be elected is not ripe for liberty: not a word of protest will rise; the public functionary, the magistrate, the soldier, the priest, all submit, crestfallen, to correction. The bourgeois says to the proletarian: It is to you that the apophthegm is addressed; are you happy? — And the proletarian responds to the bourgeois: You have fallen like me! That’s what I’m asking. — Unworthy of both! Like kids who have received punishment for their childishness, the people and the bourgeois, instead of washing away their common shame in repentance or revenge, soil each other with it. Have no fear for the despot.

Tyranny, said Plato, is both the personification and the punishment of public indignity. We could define it as the government of outrage. It consists in the fact that, by the substitution of interests for laws, the exercise of power has become impossible with respect for right: so that the government, if it wanted to be just, would no longer have any raison d’être, it would fail in its mission and would have to step down.

Symptoms of dissolution are showing all over Europe. Everywhere the same divisions, the same apprehensions, the same failings. The tendency to concentration, to militarism, to the repression of the rights of the masses, is universal. A kind of general coup d’etat hovers over Europe, an unequivocal sign of the decadence of the old world.

France, having preceded the other nations in the development of the revolutionary idea, was the first to begin its movement of retreat. She is not the only one to backslide: everyone follows her. May her example, studied in all sincerity and charity, stop the peoples, if there is still time, on this disastrous slope. The salvation of France, with which the whole of Europe is united, that of civilization, depends on it.

On this occasion, we remind our readers that our invariable rule, when speaking of His Majesty the Emperor Napoleon III, is to treat him as a constitutional monarch, irresponsible and inviolable. It is the condemnation of the imperial regime that one cannot for a single moment take it literally, without doing the cruellest and most irreparable outrage to him who is its chief.

I. Imperial Constitution. — The Constitution of 1852, like all those which have been given in analogous circumstances, could be defined as the Declaration of Indignity of the French people. This Constitution, who, first of all, is its author? The vulgar, reasoning from the posters in the streets, replies: The same who carried out the coup d’état, Napoleon III. — Yes, as it was the Convention that was the author of the death of Louis XVI; as Louis XVI, in summoning the States-General, created the author of the Revolution. When will we see history and politics purged of these pitiful ambiguities?

A Constitution is the product of circumstances. That of 1848, voted in under the pressure of February, gave too much play to new ideas; it alarmed old interests too much for it to be seriously applied. The government of the Republic, delivered to a reactionary majority, was, from December 20, 1848 to December 2, 1851, only a series of violations of the pact. The situation worsening at the approaches of 1852, an explosion of threatened interests became inevitable. Louis-Napoleon made himself its instrument: that is all. Was he then, more than in 1848, conscious of his position? We don’t believe it; but what do we care? His name became the corporate name of the anti-legal regime into which the nation rushed motu proprio; this honor, to preside over an eclipse of French reason, Louis-Napoleon, without experience of things, without philosophy, without caring for his name, which he imagined he could still illustrate, known only by annoying adventures and by themes in variations on the Napoleonic Idea; this sad honor of leading a decadence, we say, Louis-Napoleon wanted it, sought it, and, by forcing the hand of the country a little, ended up obtaining it: this is, as regards the acts of 1848 and 1851, more or less the limit of his initiative.

What now is in the Constitution of 1852? As for the text, it is a copy of that of 1804: in this again consists the whole initiative of Napoleon III. For the basis, and all for the application, it is something else. From the point of view concerning us at the moment, which is that of the dignity of nations, starting from Justice, all constitutions, whatever their tenor, can be reduced to two sorts: one aims to consecrate right, others to infringe upon it. The first, consequently, carry the national dignity high; at the same time that they constitute the government, they organize control, subordinate power to the law and to the legislature. The second exalt the authority of the prince, abolish control, subordinate the legislator and the law to the will of the master, and make justice dependent on him. Everything for the country or everything for the despot: this is, in a few words, according to one’s point of view, the summary of constitutional science. In the first case, the nation deals only with itself, the head of state is its man; in the second, it is the lessor of the Constitution who treats the country as he deems appropriate and the citizens become the emperor’s men.

Therefore, by virtue of the plebiscite voted following December 2, 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, then simply President of the Republic, was called upon to give a Constitution to the French people. This Constitution, improvised in the circumstances that we have described, was accepted, but not discussed: which means that Louis-Napoleon, in taking the purple, laid down his conditions for the people, who on their side had to abstain from making their own to the Emperor. It was fatal. The work was therefore equal to the situation: it is impossible for a nation to show less concern for its rights, for a head of state to show less consideration for the country he represents, than the Emperor and the French peopledid on this occasion. When one thinks that it would suffice to write at the head of the Imperial Constitution these simple words, The dignity of the nation is inviolable, to destroy all its dispositions, the arms fall and the mind becomes confused. How could a people, that rose in its entirety, four years ago, against a government accused of corruption, attach itself to the pillory? How did liberal France get into what Paul-Louis Courier crudely called Bonaparte’s prison?.…

The national forfeiture posed in principle, replaced by the autocracy of one alone, the rest follows naturally. In the first line, the abolition of control. By virtue of Article 12 of the Sénatus-consulte of December 25, 1852, combined with the discipline imposed on the Legislative Body, the Emperor was almost exempted from rendering any account. The Constitution, duly analyzed, is reduced to this. What serious examination of the accounts of the empire has taken place in France since the coup d’état? Who really knows the financial situation of the country? Who could say what has become of so many millions demanded from taxes, from loans, from estates, from the Bank, from the savings assocations, from the consignments and from the army, from the circulation of treasury bonds, now untraceable through so many transfers? As a result, the Imperial Government, by virtue of the Constitution that it has made and of the aforementioned senatus-consultum, is exactly in the position of a merchant who, questioned by his creditors, would claim to be exempted from the obligation to keep books, and consequently, in case of distress, to show his accounts and justify his management. Or again, the imperial government is like the director of a company that would have the right, under the terms of the statutes, not to be accountable to anyone, neither to the board of directors, nor to the supervisory board, nor even to the meeting of shareholders. Indeed, the Emperor, says the Constitution, is responsible only to the French people, to whom he always has the right to appeal. But, assuming, despite all the precautions taken by the Constitution to ensure, in case of conflict, the triumph of the Emperor over the Legislative Body, that the people, called upon to render, by a yes-or-no vote, their verdict, give reason to their deputies, what would the responsibility of the emperor mean? France could have been ruined, bankrupted, and their would remain as surety, what? His Majesty’s abdication, his head perhaps! A beautiful compensation! Who does not see that the country, to escape a revolution, would prefer to give a new blank check to the so-called head of state, as happened on December 2? Derision and indignity: this, then, is what the constitutional act of 1852 amounts to, as could be said of the Constitutions of 1791, 1793, 1795, 1814, 1830, 1848; they have made a null act, null by the insult done to the nation, by the unreason of the articles and the monstrosity of the consequences.

It is a surprise given to the country, say the malcontents; it is to force the direction of the constitution, reply the hypocrites of the system, to slander the confidence of the country, and to be unaware of the faithfulness of the emperor… Let us leave the phrases as well as the intentions, and stick to realities. From the moment that a coup d’état was carried out against the Constitution, liberal and legal, of 1848, one could not the next day, by a simple change of wording, restore control, impose on power the obligation to render an account, to ensure its responsibility, in a word, to return to the law. What would have become of the coup d’état? What would have become of Louis-Napoleon, outlawed by the representatives? What would have become of the reaction?

The so-called imperial work is therefore positively the work of circumstances; Louis-Napoleon affixed to it, with his stamp, the stamp of his uncle, without suspecting for a minute that, by the mere fact of his usurpation, he was placing himself in the position of a bankrupt. The French people are shamed by it: for the moment we have nothing else to note. Let France and the Emperor advise.

II. Property under the Empire. — When a nation abdicates its dignity, liberty passes away, and property follows closely after. It is logical: no social sovereignty, no property. Property, no longer supported by public right, is no more than a concession of the autocrat; it is favor, privilege, monopoly, gift, anything you like, except right. Property, which believed it could be saved by the violation of the law, now finds itself outside the law; it comes from good pleasure: what a fall!

By virtue of the constitution, which grants the emperor the right to make commercial treaties and regulations of public utility, to authorize limited companies, etc., etc., the imperial government disposes, in a manner one can call absolute, of the fortune of the citizens. Does it please the emperor to bring to the national market, in spite of national interests or prejudices, of national solidarity, products from abroad? he brings them there; — to grant a corporation a portion of the public domain? he concedes it; — to suppress a whole category of industries for the benefit of a great monopoly, he suppresses it; — to close an establishment? he closes it; — to withdraw an office, dearly paid for, and passed to the state of transmissible property? he withdraws it; — to seize upon a kind of exploitation and to reward his creatures with privilege? he seizes what he pleases, gives it to whoever he pleases, and as compensation to the dispossessed entrepreneurs, he makes them issue stock certificates. Of all these facts there are thousands of examples: this will some day be the most interesting part of our economic history. Does it please His Majesty to reserve to a corporation, instituted to prevent speculation, the privilege of futures markets? Nothing is easier for him, thanks to this beloved and loyal Court of Cassation, which orders the expulsion of free brokers with the same seriousness as it prohibits the distribution of electoral bulletins. Does it please the emperor to expropriate a building? he declares the public utility, and seizes the building, If it pleased him to increase or decrease the funds, he would increase or decrease them; things are arranged in such a way on the Stock Exchange that the transactions, while surrounded by a thousand obstacles, having to be carried out exclusively by friendly hands of power, the drop can never go either quickly or far, while when the rise comes to declare itself, everything rushes. If, instead of indulging in speculation on the stock exchange, the sovereign deemed it preferable to make a profit on a few commercial transactions, nothing would be easier for him. Not only does he possess the secrets of the State, he holds in his hands all the interests, By the faculty he has of making commercial treaties, of raising or lowering tariffs, of creating banks, docks, to authorize or prohibit companies, to activate, slow down, move circulation, he is the absolute master of the market as well as of property. It would be up to him alone to renew, by virtue of his powers, on all categories of production, the famous Pact of Famine. Does he want the partnership to stop? he makes a law against limit partnerships, and the capital no longer goes there. Later, he will find it good that the partnership resumes its course; and, again, capitalists and entrepreneurs will do business. With confidence lacking, capital declining, stores overflowing, consumption ceasing, the emperor ordered people to work all the same. It is made known on his part to the heads of industry that it would be disagreeable to him to learn that the workmen are unemployed; and the unfortunate industrialists bleed themselves, ruin themselves, and make people the work. On the other hand, is the emperor leaving for the army? orders are given secretly to the establishments to close, so that the workmen can conduct him. Is he coming back from the campaign? the same unofficial notice from the police, so that the workers go to meet him; this is how the imperial regime won its popularity. Do the demolitions required for the embellishment of the capital cause the rents to rise disproportionately? the police intervene between the workers and the owners. — Same system in the departments. The communes, indebted beyond their resources, are advised to go into debt again and to open national workshops; and the communes, dominated by the prefects, only know how to obey. Is there a mayor who balks? he is deposed; a city council that resists? it is dissolved, And all this, I repeat, is rational; it is not the emperor who wishes it, it is the nation, since, seized with a cowardly terror at the approach of 1852, fearing for its interests the application of some new right, it has sacrificed dignity to avarice, right to force, and has taken refuge in absolute power.

Admittedly, Napoleon III is far from making the most of his position: he simply does not think about it. Never, in his innocence as a candidate, had he suspected what that odious word, despotism, contained; he never dreamed of anything other than the Napoleonic Idea. But others have seen further than he: that is what attracts so many solicitations to him, what has won his government the support of all those greedy mediocrities, some of whom have allowed themselves to be seen by justice. , while the others, gorged or expecting nothing more, will be the first to cry, on the day of peril: Down with the tyrant!

If, between the imperial despotism and the republic, there existed only a question of form, as for example between the so-called moderate republic and the constitutional monarchy; if, in both cases, the national dignity, the respectability of the citizen, right, finally, and liberty were saved, perhaps, whatever importance one must in all things grant to the form, would we take our part. It is not us who would like to set fire to the fatherland for a question of form, any more than for a question of spelling. But it is a question of our dignity as men, as citizens, as taxpayers, as merchants, as industrialists, as workers, as owners, a dignity to which the imperial government, in whatever way it justifies its actions, cannot prevent itself, at any moment, from inflicting mortal harm. When the imperial government showered us with riches, we would always find ourselves degraded. To be nothing at home, neither in one’s house, nor in one’s business, nor in one’s commerce, nor in one’s industry, nor in one’s property, when one is not a slave, is the height of derision. We are protesting here against outrage, not against authority. Authority, we could resign ourselves to it, if authority were justice. But we cannot bear the loss of our dignity, because the loss of dignity is moral death, the worst death.

III. The army fund. — Since we are on questions of money, let us speak of an institution of the Empire still little known, which shows how far selflessness can go among a people, contempt for principles among advisers of the government. A Parisian correspondence, inserted in the Nord of February 22, contains the following:

“Today’s decree (February 20) on exemption from military service deserves not to go unnoticed. Until now, families were warned at least several months in advance of the price they would have to pay to exempt their sons from military service. As a result of the new decree, the minister of war cannot fix the price of the exemption until ten days before the commencement of the operations of the board of review. The reason for this measure is that events, depending on whether they have a tendency towards peace or war, can noticeably modify the rate of indemnity for exemption; it was therefore important to wait until the last limit to make known the figure adopted by the minister of war. In previous years, this figure was published around January; it will hardly be known now until around the month of May.”

This contains quite a revelation. Proponents of personal initiative must have never heard of the division of functions, the basis of all control. Entered in the way of the good pleasure, they launch themselves at full speed, without concern for the public, any more than for the imperial Majesty.

The law of March 21, 1832 on the recruitment of the army had admitted the principle of replacement. It was a slight departure from the principles of ’89: but no one complained about it; replacements and replaced found their account there, and, if one had wanted to lighten the weight of the service, the country tending to peace, they would only have needed to decrease the quotas, the duration of the service, the number of exemptions, and to take the organization of the national guards more seriously. These combined measures would have made very bearable the blood tax, the most terrible of all, the one that most directly threatens the population, work and freedom.

Be that as it may, the legislator of 1832, by admitting the principle of recruitment, had refrained from intervening in an order of transactions regarded until then, at least for one of the parties, as not very honorable: we want to talk about the replacement trade. The imperial government did not have the same reservations: it believed itself high enough in public opinion to be able, without risk of blame, to assume the monopoly of replacements; and here is the incredible position that has been made by the decree of April 26, 1855, on the endowment of the army, combined with article 6 of the Constitution and 12 of the Sénatus-Consulte of December 25, 1852.

“The Emperor,” says the Constitution, “commands the armies of land and sea, declares war, makes treaties of peace, alliance and commerce.” These words seem to be copied from the Charter of 1830; but, owing to the excessive difference of positions, the bearing is quite different. In an economic style, article 6 of the Imperial Constitution signifies that the Emperor, in the name and at the expense of the French people, to whom he alone is responsible, but to whom we have been told that he is not accountable, is an entrepreneur of military operations: he fixes the number of quotas, and consequently that of subsidies; he exonerates, for a fee, the young people called to the service; he provides, using the benefits paid to him by exempt persons, for replacements; he lends soldiers to the powers that ask him for them, to England to force China, to Piedmont to conquer Lombardy, to the Pope to keep him from the revolutionaries. He would lend it to Austria to defend her from the turbulence of the Hungarians, to the Tsar to contain his peasants, to the Sultan to protect him against the Christians, but no one would have the right to accuse him for his actions.

So it pleases His Imperial Majesty to call 100,000 Frenchmen into service: by virtue of the Constitution he can.

It suits him to enlist only three quarters of the contingent, that is 75,000 men, the other 25,000 left in their homes, ready to leave on first requisition. Under the Constitution he can.

This done, there will be, on the one hand, 25,000 men who do not join will cost the State nothing: but, by virtue of the Sénatus-consulte of December 25, 1852, the Emperor has the right to order a transfer to account and not to return the excess of funds voted, and as a government is always short of money, the emperor will probably not fail to exercise this right. On the other hand, among these 25,000 men, a good number of young people will ask to free themselves by paying the fee fixed for exemption from service: as many couples of a thousand francs, more or less, which fall into the coffers of the army. The Emperor thus finds himself almost twice paid for the soldiers whom he leaves unemployed: and all this, by virtue of the powers conferred on him, he can do in all good and honor,

What will be the rate of compensation required for exemption from service? It is not fixed; it varies, like the needs of the army, according to imperial policy. The emperor, in charge of the defense of the country, cannot be chained by a number: it would compromise the defense. “Then,” you will say, “since the benefit varies, the rate will be debated between the Legislative body, representing the families, and the government?” No; by virtue of article 6 of the law of April 26, 1855, the emperor fixes the rate of the benefit: it is to take it or to leave it. — At least the families will be informed in advance; will they be able to cope? Not yet: events influencing the price of men, the government reserves the right to take the favorable moment to make known its conditions: this is what the decree of February 20 says.

Does the political situation seem tense, the peace of Europe compromised? The emperor, who provides for the scarcity of replacements, raises the rate of the benefit: it is within the law. Suddenly, he gets along with the powers; the political horizon clears, the newspapers of the empire sing hymns to peace; military service is more offered, less demanded; cannon fodder abounds, the price of replacements drops: a good deal for the army fund, which received the highest price of the exemption and which will pay the lowest to the replacements, perhaps even will pay nothing at all, if the Emperor deems there is no need to replace. It looks very much like gambling on the blood of citizens, doesn’t it? This is required by the law of April 26, 1855, in execution of which the decree of February 20, 1860 was issued.

Despite this abstention from replacements, the Emperor may still have soldiers left over, and the needs of the treasury may still increase. The decree of December 25, 1852 provided him with a new means of getting out of trouble. Sixty thousand men, sent on leave of six months, will go to live at the expense of their families, and will leave, on the war budget, twenty millions available. By means of a new transfer of account, the operation, which under the charter of 1880 would have been qualified as diversion, becomes perfectly regular and legal.

That’s not all. Replacements and the re-engaged only receive a fraction, about a quarter, of the price of their re-engagement; the surplus remains in the army fund until the expiry of the service: in the event of death, only a part is reimbursed to the heirs, if there are any. So that the army fund, after having benefited from the difference between the amount of services paid for exemption from service and that of the sums allocated to replacements; after having filled itself with the sums left available from the war budget as a result of sending on leave, still enjoys the interest of the sums for which it is indebted to the replacements, and, if these replacements die in service, becomes their inheritor .

This is how the jurists of the imperial government understand the division of powers, and accounting, and control, and responsibility. That Charlemagne, Clovis, used it in this way, on the one hand with their Franks, who were all soldiers and could neither read nor write; on the other with the Gallo-Roman populations, treated by them as a conquered people: one can imagine that there was no shame for anyone. But in the 19th century, among the French, after thirty-six years of parliamentary rule, with universal suffrage as a guarantee of control, it was of such exorbitance that nothing, in our opinion, better demonstrates the perfect good faith of the emperor. What man, I beg you, who was even a little bit shrewd, wanting at least to keep up appearances, would use such big tricks?

What becomes, you ask, of the sums accumulated in this fund? No one could tell; no one knows. “The emperor commands the forces of land and sea, declares war, makes peace; he fixes, in good time, the rate of the benefit for the exemption from the service; he has the right to make transfers from one chapter of the budget to another; finally, he is responsible only to the French people, to whom nothing obliges him to render his accounts.” This is called the system of personal initiative! Please, Sire, a little less initiative: if not for you, who are above suspicion, let it be for the consideration of the French people.

IV. The press. — The Emperor has heard that thought is free in France: he has said so on several occasions; his ministers have repeated it ad nauseam. How is it, then, that the imperial government has put its hand over the mouth of the country, as M. de Lamartine once said under Louis-Philippe? I know of no greater insult from a government, or greater indignity for a nation. This phenomenon has moreover, like the preceding ones, its reason in the same principle. It is not due to a man; it is the effect of the moral degradation of the country. The coup d’état of December 2 having been directed, as we have said, against a revolutionary democracy, to which respect for liberty and legality gave an irresistible ascendancy; the salvation of interests taken for reasons of state and declared superior to justice; the imperial constitution being made consequently counter to right, in defiance of right, the encounters necessarily were and have been:

That the head of state would be omnipotent;

That his power would be exercised without control;

That property, which had hitherto been supported by social sanction, would henceforth come under the gracious authority of the prince;

That the finances of the state would be subject to a secret accounting, as if they were merged with the civil list;

In a word, that public order, the security and the fortune of the citizens would rest in the future, no longer on a system of balances and guarantees, but solely on the genius of one man and his probity.

In this state of things, admit the liberty and the publicity of discussion, and the whole edifice crumbles: society finds itself postponed to the eve of December 2, and interests in the presence of the Revolution. What is to be done in such a situation? The Imperial Government is showing it to us, and the experience is not new. As the press could not be totally suppressed, any more than thought, we decided to make it speak as Philip of Macedonia made the Pythia speak, according to the wishes and the views of the government. The means are not lacking for this, and all are legal means, note this point. To make the press speak well, and the country think well, the System has, in addition to administrative intimidation aimed at printers and booksellers, authorizations and refusals of authorization, warnings, press releases, the suppressions, the decorations, the subsidies, the transactions, and consequently mystifications. For example, a newspaper had the misfortune to incur suppression. It is allowed to reappear, on condition that it takes for its editor a man devoted to the ministry. Of course-subscribers know nothing of the scheme; they think they receive free speech, but they feed on imperial advertisements. It is at this price that a skeptical nation, which prefers gold and pleasures to the exercise of right, and which has lost its self-respect, can be saved; likewise, that property, truth, today comes under the reason of state. You have to have experienced it, to understand what torture is imposed on the writer by this sword of Damocles suspended over his thought, over his conscience. . The vainest flatter themselves, by dint of art, of consideration, of reticence, with dodging the blow, and flatten themselves; the bravest are generously beaten, and as there is no more spring, no echo in souls, to the bitterness of condemnation is added, for these untimely champions of free thought, the regret of a needless sacrifice.

“The press is free,” say the ministers in their circulars; “All the French people can publish their opinions by complying with the laws.” We have just seen in what net imperial legality holds the periodical press. As for non-periodical writings, they are mastered by other means. Thus, according to imperial jurisprudence, insulting public and religious morality implies attacking religion, which is no longer the same thing. ; the attack on religion implies the attack on the Church, which is something else again. So that, on matters of morals, religion, church, philosophy, it is only permitted to publish, in the matter of books, what suits the Church and what the government permits. — Same way of judging in economic matters. The attack on the principle of property can be found in any discussion of banks, railroad companies, stock exchanges, wage-earning, workers’ societies, ground rent, the interest of capital, the right to work, etc. It depends on the judgment of the courts So that, the writer being judged much less on his opinions than on his known or presumed tendencies, it is possible to publish, on economic questions, only what the government allows. — Same reasoning again in matters of politics and public law. The attack on the Constitution, on the rights that the emperor derives from the will of the French, incitement to hatred, etc., etc., all of this can be encountered in a philosophical research on the origin of societies, the principle of government, the responsibility of power, the comparison between despotism and the republic, all the more so in day-to-day discussions, which are of more direct interest to the action of the Head of State. So that, on questions of practical or theoretical policy, it is really permitted and possible to publish only what the government considers it is proper to let pass. — Who would believe it? The imperial government is in the process of inventing a new offense, which will completely shield its foreign policy: it is the offense of national lèse-majesté. In the warning given to the Press, in connection with the annexation of Savoy, M. Billaut says that the facts published by this newspaper offend French sentiment. So that the French writer who would maintain that any annexation of territory, accomplished in spite of the formal wish of the populations, is contrary to the spirit of the Revolution, to the principles of 89, to respect for nationalities, departing from the dignity and the true interests of France, would be a bad citizen, an enemy of the homeland, a foreign agent!

Note further that the right of free discussion is implied, but not recognized by the Imperial Constitution. Indeed, the very explicit article of the Charters of 1814 and 1830, The French have the right to publish and opinions by complying with the law, this article has been deleted. The Imperial Constitution does not recognize, in an express and formal manner, this right of publication held by the last two monarchies. It limits itself to saying, in a general way, art. 1, that it recognizes, confirms and guarantees the great principles proclaimed in 1789, which are the basis of French public law. But what are these principles? What does this public right consist of? The Constitution knows nothing about it. It will be what we want, what the government likes, according to its sometimes extensive, sometimes restrictive system of interpretation, ad libitum. The definitions are yet to be made: until then, it is impossible to take judicial advantage of the great principles of ’89.

The stamp of unworthiness among peoples, as among individuals, is stupidity. Foolishness and lack of soul! exclaims Beaumarchais, with redoubled eloquence, pleading against Goësmann. It is a sad thing to see how the French nation, squatting under the master who mounts it, becomes stupid and foolish. Its writers, its academicians, obliged to hold their pens, stammer and gossip; its jurists quibble, its philosophers ramble, its artists grimace, its landlords cry like calves, its businessmen bray with confidence. All ideas are falsified, all principles disguised; by dint of mutilation, reticence, complacency, the clearest notions become equivocal. The truth subordinated to reason of state, the lie is universal. You asked for it, Dandins, you asked for it! [Molière reference]

V. Justice. — The facts that we have just reported are today platitudes, banal truths. So it’s not as news that we have decided to reproduce them, it is as facts of social psychology. For there is one thing that has not become commonplace, and that it is important that everyone be clear about, it is that public unworthiness, in a day of forgetfulness, created the current despotism; it is that this despotism is something other than a simple substitution of the initiative prince for the initiative of the country; it is a system of outrages against society, the straitjacketing of the nation, consequently the overthrow of all rights and all morals. A man, a gang, do not create such monsters: it requires, I repeat, the tacit consent, the felony of the people.

Let one put at the head of acts of public authority, court sentences, writs of bailiffs, minutes of notaries, the name of the Emperor in place of the Holy Trinity or of the Republic one and indivisible: the danger is not great, if Justice is well done, although it would be more appropriate for it to be rendered in the name of the people. It is another thing when the power, by the law of its origin, is led to lay hands on Justice, as on property, as on the press, the stock exchange and the treasury; when he makes the magistrate speak, no longer according to the law, but according to his reasons of state; when he turns and turns again, according to his policy, traditions and maxims. The question then is no longer between monarchy and democracy, between the sovereignty of the people and divine right, between authority and liberty; it is, apart from the qualities of the prince, which his position dominates, and his personal honor, which is not at stake, it is, we say, between probity and prevarication, between the honor of the country and his infamy.

Under the imperial regime, the public ministry, which alone has the right to prosecute, to receive complaints and revelations, which alone is permitted to call rogues to order without being accused of defamation, the public ministry has from the first the ability to leave the law dormant, or to exhume it if it deems it appropriate, and to crack down. This is what M. Billaut meant not so long ago with menace in his circular relative to clerical agitation. Discretionary power, discretionary legislation, discretionary Justice, that, in six words, is the imperial system. The law is a sword that the government leaves sheathed, as long as it does not feel threatened, but that it draws and brandishes at the first manifestation of indiscipline. — If necessary, say our lawyers who have become ministers, presidents of the Senate and of the Council of State, if it were necessary to apply the law in its rigor, society would be intolerable, and government impossible. — Then remake your legislation, above all call the juror, so that the country has the responsibility for tolerance; for, suffer it to be told to you, monarch and advisers, your discretionary Justice, your discretionary law, and all your discretionary faculties, are an abominable hypocrisy:

Discretionary ability to use the law or not to use it;

Discretion to sue or not to sue;

Discretionary ability to transport without judgment, to issue warrants to appear, to search, to arrest, to jail;

Discretionary ability to prolong or shorten trial proceedings;

Discretionary power to order an investigation, to refuse it, to direct it, to restrict it;

Discretionary power, the investigation completed, to indict or order the dismissal;

Discretionary ability to qualify offenses;

Discretionary faculty, in political and press matters, to assess the intention, the circumstances, the meaning of the writings, not from the point of view of society and the law, but from the point of view of reasons of State;

Discretionary ability to authorize or prohibit reporting;

Discretionary power to order closed sessions;

Discretionary right to distribute or to prohibit memoirs;

Discretionary ability to limit, stop, divert the defense;

Discretionary faculty to throw invective at the defendant, to excite against him, against his opinions and his ideas, the hatred of the citizens; .

Discretionary power to increase or reduce penalties in a proportion that may vary from one to one hundred;

Discretionary power to grant amnesty and pardon:

Isn’t this the picture of your justice? Add that the emperor enjoys the discretionary power to raise or lower the salaries of the magistrates, to appoint them, to move them, to grant or refuse them advancement, to retire them, to to make ministers, to dismiss them if they are removable: which assures him of their almost unanimous support in all that he does and undertakes by virtue of his discretionary authority. It is not for nothing, and you show it, that it is written in the constitution that justice is administered in the name of the emperor. It is the emperor, in fact, who today makes the right and the non-right. In him, as in God, is the principle of all equity and justice. Monarchy by divine right had invented nothing like it: if, in feudal times, the prince had wanted to claim, to the exclusion of the people, the juridical prerogative, the Church could have reminded him that he was only the first of sinners. The voters of December took advice neither from human right nor from divine right. What did Justice matter to them? What they wanted was to be done with ideas, it was to give themselves a strong power, from which they could obtain concessions, subsidies, bribes, with whom they could traffic all rights and all liberties. Unless of that they saw themselves seized by the Revolution, they believed themselves lost. Unworthy generation, whom the emperor treats above its merits, when he is content to qualify its interests as miserable.

VI. — Secrecy of letters. — One fact that, better than any other, shows to what extent the moral situation, of which the 2nd of December has become the expression, weighs on Justice, is the judgment of appeal rendered on the violation of the secrecy of letters. Among the prerogatives of imperial authority, that of opening and inspecting the envelopes entrusted to the post office is perhaps the most outrageous. All governments have been suspected of having a black cabinet; only the government of Napoleon III, formed of men who had protested against the immorality of that of Louis-Philippe, gave itself the merit of frankness in this. It does not do things underhandedly: it covers himself with beautiful and good laws, voted by the Legislature; beautiful and good judgments rendered by the judicial authority. If we are well informed, twenty-four advisers of the Court of Cassation, against sixteen, voted for the judgment that authorizes the Minister of the Interior and his agents, in the interest of public safety and order, to open the letters and packages entrusted to their care. What does this mean? Lawyers, say the vulgar critics, never fail in bad causes, and plausible grounds are always found for the worst designs. Euphemism is the favorite figure of despotism. For us, who seek the reason of things in things themselves, we declare that it is impossible for us to attribute to a ministerial influence the decision of the twenty-four magistrates, and that, if the imperial system seems to us deplorable, the court de Cassation, at least, did not lack logic. Let no one expect from us a refutation of this memorable decision,

In principle, the Supreme Court wanted to say, the violation of the secrecy of letters is an outrage to the dignity of the citizens and of the nation. Public faith is one of the pillars of social order; it cannot be harmed without this order being shaken. The mission of power is to enforce respect for the public faith, and to set an example of this respect. If good faith were banished from the rest of the earth, said King John of France, it should find its way into the mouths of kings. In these conditions, and unless in other respects it injures justice, the government need fear treachery from no one. Its existence is intimately linked to the maintenance of the law, which itself has no enemies. So that one can regard as an axiom that the incompatibility between Justice and public authority is a contradiction: the government that would allege such an incompatibility would denounce itself to the animadversion of the citizens. But, continues the Court, considering, in this case, that the government of the Emperor was established, by a serious fault of the nation, under other auspices; that he is the product, not of the conscience of the country, but of the unworthiness of the country; that he consequently represents, no longer the pact of the citizens, but their antagonism; that since December 2, 1851, Justice has been overwhelmed in France by the reason of state, and that reason of state has as its object the maintenance, development and greater satisfaction of established interests; that it is with this view that the discretionary power of the Emperor was created, by the vote of six million suffrages; that in such a state of things the imperial authority must be considered as taking precedence over the national majesty; that thus the safety of the prince and his dynasty prevails over public faith and honesty, for these reasons, etc.

All the institutions, all the laws, all the acts of the imperial government, are uniformly reduced to these terms: the forfeiture of the country, the preeminence of the prince, the supremacy of his free will over public faith and reason, everything in virtue of interests that otherwise would find themselves compromised: what properly constitutes the indignity of the country, the abolition of national majesty.

In vain the ministers of this government protest their reservations; in vain do they allege that it is only a question for the government of thwarting plots; that use will only be made of the option granted in exceptional cases, etc. All these platitudes about necessity, moderation, good intentions, only highlight the immorality of the thing. There is no greater political necessity than that of respecting the law; there is no moderation that renders its violation lawful, no good intention that excuses felony. Everyone knows that his secrets are at the discretion of the police: there is nothing more to be said. No more public faith, no more society, no more nation.

VII. Naivety of the system. — What is sad is that neither the emperor nor the country seem to be aware of their position. Anyone who has seen things up close will admit that Napoleon III cannot be called a tyrant, nor the French nation be said to be tyrannized. Nothing could be more ingenuous, better intentioned, more frankly exercised than imperial power; one could even say, nothing more accepted, if history were not there to attest that twelve years ago the nation was quite different, if its conscience did not tell it that it fell by its own forfeiture, if no one knew that at the first crack the explosion would be terrible. .

After the attempt of Orsini, the President of the Legislative Body, M. de Morny, in a speech full of anger, pointed out, among the causes of this regicide, the ingratitude of the old parties saved by the coup d’état. Assuredly, M. de Morny was sincere, he spoke from the abundance of his indignation: but this very sincerity proves to what extent the government of Napoleon III, by dint of taking its role seriously, has lost the feeling of national dignity. Let’s not haggle over the benefit; grant, if you will, that without December 2 the bourgeoisie, which is accused of having remained faithful in spite of its interests to its former loves, would have run greater risks in 1852 than in 1848, and let us balance the scales. Louis-Napoleon has saved, for the moment, the bourgeois from ruin; but by the extra-legality of his government, he deprives them of honor daily. The imperial government resembles those benefactors who spare their proteges neither recommendations, nor services, nor money, but who take their wives, their daughters, their sisters, and who, at the first sign of discontent, cry ingratitude,

This absence of moral sense is so much in the nature of the imperial government that it can to betray it at any time, without it realizing it. We have just quoted M. de Morny; we have just quoted M. Billaut threatening religious congregations with laws that he holds in reserve. Here is another, M. Rouland, if we remember correctly, who, apropos of the snub made to the Holy Father and the murmurings of the clergy, also complains of episcopal ingratitude. The Church, says this minister, was saved, like the bourgeoisie, by the coup d’état; the Church was showered with the benefits of the Emperor; influence, honors, privileges, money, power; he sacrificed everything to her, even his popularity. And for gratitude, the Church excommunicates him, agitates the population, pushes to revolt!… — What does it mean, I ask you, this complaint from M. Rouland? It means that the Napoleonic Empire has never understood what a church is; that it imagined that that daughter of Jesus Christ, whose visible head is at Rome, in receiving his favors, sacrificed its principles for him; that it flattered itself that it would make her accept its state theology, just as it made her take advantage of its reasons of state, in short, of making her a cog in the wheel of its system. Such is the motive that brought the cardinals into the Senate, to increase the salaries of bishops, parish priests, vicars; deliver primary instruction to ignorantins, caress the Jesuits, encourage religious congregations. There was a tacit pact, according to the Minister Rouland, between the Church and the Emperor, and the Church has violated the pact. But, we are given to understand, the Emperor will know how to do without the support of an incorrigible clergy who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing; the Emperor relies on the faith of the masses, which is not the faith of ultramontanes, hostile to the homeland, which is not that of the Gallicans either, observes M. de Morny, given that Gallicanism smacks of schism, heresy, and leads to revolt; but which is the Catholic, Apostolic, Carlovingian and Napoleonic faith; faith that the government of the emperor will be able to defend as well against the mutinies of the episcopate as against the attacks of the voltairians and the ideologues. And there is an echo in France of this mess; there are found so-called democratic, republican newspapers, friends of the Revolution, to support it! Shame and indignity!

VIII. Political decadence. — People abroad are not convinced enough of that kind of bonhomie in a more-than-oriental despotism that distinguishes the government of Napoleon III; he is credited with infinitely too much trickery, cunning, Machiavellianism. Analyze the current French consciousness: you will have the secret of the policy, internal and external, of the government of Napoleon III. The public conscience failed, in France, on December 2; the imperial government, such as we have just drawn the picture of it, is the expression of this fall. But France has not for that said goodbye to her old sentiments: the Revolution is not dead there; the need for Justice, the disgust with the arbitrary, are there as poignant as ever. Add that every day a new generation advances, which does not believe itself in the least involved by the coup d’état; that out of thirty-six millions of souls who expiate the sin of December, there are twenty-four million innocents. This remorse, these young elements, with which the imperial policy is forced to reckon, give it an air of compunction that foreigners take for hypocrisy, and which is nothing but the somnambulism of a bad conscience. — If the Emperor waged war, it was, as his Minister for Foreign Affairs would tell us, to maintain the balance of Europe, to protect the weak against the strong, to emancipate nations, to enforce respect for nationalities. If he aspires to great influence, it is to remind governments of equity, of traditions, of principles. Therefore he gives or causes to be given to the pope advice for reform; to Austria, counsels of liberalism; to the King of Naples, counsels of moderation; to the Sultan, counsels of tolerance; to Spain, counsels of legality; to Belgium, peace counsels; to Piedmont, he recommends reserve; to Tuscany, he recalls the Italian federation. Do you know what this gossip proves? It is because France regrets her lost liberties, her conciliatory policy, the rule of law, the works of peace, the confidence of the people, and her own esteem. What the 2nd of December has taken from it, the 2nd of December strives to restore to it in imagination and in hopes. In this, as in all things, he is sincere, perfectly intentioned, and in the best faith in the world.

Napoleon III, says Anglo-Germanic mistrust, has his eye fixed on the line of the Rhine. — It is because, since December 2, France has been reproaching Napoleon I with having lost it. How can we not see that the imperial government is condemned, by its equivocal origin, to oscillate ceaselessly between the memories of the first empire and those of the July monarchy? The nation, violently driven back by December 2 towards a state of war, divided against itself, suspicious of those abroad, seeks its strategic borders, and complains that it no longer finds them. Did it think about it from 1814 to 1852?

Napoleon III, I continue the enumeration of grievances, repeatedly threatened England with a fall. — We might have believed it, in fact; but after each gesture, he returned to the entente cordiale. Look: he does not breathe a word about Perim; of the piercing of the isthmus of Suez, nothing more. Sooner or later, no doubt, the quarrel will start again: what do you want? The memory of fifteen years of war, the memory of fifteen years of peace: beneath the national conscience which cries: I cannot live with shame; glory, Sire, or liberty!

Napoleon III, in defiance of the acts of the Congress of Vienna, has just united Savoy with France. How do you have the courage to blame him for that? Was this most unfortunate initiative rewarded with a sadder result? In 1859, the Emperor went down to Italy: his aim was to drive out the Austrians, which naturally meant to re-establish in their place, in the Peninsula, French influence and the former sovereignty of the Bonapartes. What has happened? Instead of a federative Italy, gravitating like a group of satellites in the Napoleonic orbit, he finds a unitary Italy, ready to stand up as one man against the Emperor of the French, after having expelled the Emperor of Austria. What a disappointment! Also, how eagerly Napoleon III signed the Peace of Villafranca! How much he regretted not being able, without contradicting himself, to demand the restoration of the Archdukes! A little longer, and all of Italy belongs to Victor-Emmanuel. To deal with this eventuality of a state of 26 million souls, which he had neither desired nor foreseen, but which his bad luck caused him to create at the gates of France, Napoleon III obtained authorization from his ally the king of Sardinia to transfer his south-eastern frontier from the foot of the Alps to the crest! Perhaps it would have been better, to make up for such a great fault, to neutralize, between France and Italy, Savoy and the county of Nice, as we neutralized Switzerland between Austria and France. But, to cry out for conquest, for this meager compensation, dear neighbors, is cruelty.

Through the torrent of invectives vomited against the Emperor of the French by the foreign press, it is impossible not to see how, at bottom, the imperial government finds itself flouted. — You violate the treaties, said jealous England to Napoleon; you are undermining the European balance. We no longer get along; you no longer have our confidence. However, as you promise to let the Italians choose their government, I accept your treaty of commerce, and I declare that the annexation of Savoy does not affect me. — You are violating the treaties, resumed the Tsar; but as, to effect this annexation, you do not intend to avail yourself of universal suffrage, which moreover would not be favorable to you, I declare that this annexation does not concern me. — You are violating the treaties, adds the regent of Prussia: however, as you reject the principle of natural frontiers, that you first invoked, I declare that I will limit myself to a simple protest, and not make war!…

It is thus that a nation that has lost respect for itself becomes a laughingstock for others; it is thus that after moral dissolution comes political decadence. Napoleon III, say the onlookers, will at least be able to flatter himself that he will leave an enlarged France after June. Yes, and more isolated, and better encircled, and in full decomposition. What is an addition of territory when the moral life is no longer there? — Stagnation in the nation, hypertrophy in the state.

IX. Final mystification. — M. de Lamartine has said: “Louis Napoleon is an honest man; I know him, I answer for him.” — M. de Lamartine is very good: do you ever doubt the honesty of a head of state? Can an emperor not be an honest man? Take away from Napoleon III his intrinsic morality, his probity beyond question, his chivalrous ideas, his candid good faith, what will become of him, good God! with the discretionary power that he possesses? And what will become of us?

As for me, I go further than M. de Lamartine, and I believe I am in the strict truth: There are two men in Napoleon III, a victim and a martyr.

Napoleon III is the victim, or rather the scapegoat of our apostasy: this is what earned him his candidacy in 1848, and which made his coup d’état a success. On this point I have nothing to add to the preceding considerations. Napoleon III is the martyr of the Napoleonic Idea, an idea that he carries in his heart, as the faithful after communion carry Jesus Christ; an idea that led him to undertake his two enterprises in Strasbourg and Boulogne; an idea, finally, that he represents alone and which would no longer have, in France, the slightest course, if he were not there, in person, with a budget of 1,800 million and 600,000 soldiers, to support it.

Now, insofar as he represents the Napoleonic idea, Napoleon III is in perpetual contradiction with the conservative idea, which took him for its savior: this is what explains how his ministers, his advisers, his generals, his secretaries all his entourage, are constantly busy holding him back, repairing his mistakes, mitigating his errors, concealing his deviations, interpreting his anachronisms. The greatest embarrassment of the imperial government is the imperial prerogative. Up to now the empire has lived on conservative prudence, acting as a counterweight to the Napoleonic idea, and nothing proves that the genius of the individual will soon outweigh the force of the situation. Already, during his presidency, Louis-Napoleon had shown the deep disagreement that exists between his Idea, and the necessary, obligatory policy of his government. We remember the letter to Edgar Ney, which gave M. Odilon Barrot so much trouble; these eccentric harangues, these fantastic reviews, these messages with a phraseology that was sometimes so odd. The ministers had enough to do, in parliament, to respond to the interpellations. The Emperor has lost none of the originality of the President: thus the task of his menders has become singularly aggravated.

The Napoleonic idea threatens England: M. de Persigny immediately tries to mend the English alliance. What hasn’t this excellent M. de Persigny done to prevent his master from marrying an upstart!… The Napoleonic idea proclaims free trade: MM. Baroche and Rouher restore protection. The Napoleonic idea invokes, with regard to Savoy, the principle of natural frontiers: M. Thouvenel disavows the principle of natural frontiers. The Napoleonic idea invites M. About to ridicule the government of the pope; the Minister of Justice has M. About’s book prosecuted. One day, the Napoleonic idea sends to the Moniteur the decree for the annexation of Belgium; the Minister of State forbids the printing of this decree. The Napoleonic idea claims to direct, from Biarritz, the operations of the siege of Sebastopol: General Pellissier had the electric wire cut to avoid the idea. At that time, the Napoleonic idea had announced its intention of going to the Crimea to share the fatigues of the soldiers, and MM. Baroche and Troplong, throwing themselves at its knees, had had great difficulty in holding it back. In 1859, the Napoleonic idea once again felt the need to command the army in person: this time, who would prevent it? Fortunately, the generals agree among themselves to consider His Majesty’s battle plans as null and void. What more can be said? The Napoleonic idea goes astray, the innocent, in the mines, the docks, the canals, the cars, the railways, the banks, the insurances; and from time to time the administration, the prosecution, sweat blood and tears to extricate it from these unfortunate affairs. The Napoleonic idea at grips with the conservative idea, born of July 1830: that is the whole secret of imperial policy. The story of their struggles will be that of the reign. The most skillful have worn themselves out: MM. Odilon Barrot, Dufaure, Léon Faucher, de Falloux, Drouyn de l’Huys, Walewsky, de Persigny, etc. Now, admire the advantage of a regime of silence. The public laughed at the President: they no longer know what to think of the Emperor, whether he is a mediocrity or a genius.

What becomes serious, and heartbreaking, is to see the culmination of this incredible mystification. Everything has an end in this world: could MM. Baroche, Troplong, de Morny et tutti quanti, who, out of devotion to the public good, thought it necessary to affix to the government of December 2 the countersignature of their honor, tell us what, according to them, will be the final result?

The government of Napoleon III, in the way it is engaged, in the presence of the ideas which are agitated, of anger ready to explode, cannot change its maxims. It cannot return to constitutionality, to legality, to liberty, to control. It cannot want to be accountable, to expose itself lightheartedly to an outburst of public opinion. It is therefore necessary that it compresses still more, that it shortens the chain, that it stifles Justice, principles and liberty more and more. But, while the government obeys the impulse that gave it existence, the nation enters little by little into an opposite current; public opinion is alienated; the Decembrist party is imperceptibly reduced to the personnel of the administration and the police, and the moment is approaching when, as in 1814, it will be possible to say: The empire is the emperor. So, the balance being broken, there will be revolution: is this why the interests have supported December 2?

To avert this danger, will the Napoleonic idea be allowed to take the upper hand over the conservative idea, and, appealing to the worst instincts of the country, will we throw ourselves into the career of conquest? I do not know to what extent the powers of Europe, divided by their selfishness, forgetful of their solidarity, without concern for the dignity of the people, would be in a mood to tolerate new incorporations on the part of France . It is possible that the Tsar, who promises himself compensations from the East; that Prussia, to whom the empire of Germany would be granted; that Austria, which would be allowed to extend on the other side of the Danube; that England, who will know how to do her part, will let France expand to the Rhine? Such a connivance, in determining the organization of militarism throughout Europe, would only result in bringing out more clearly the inanity of the idea, by showing France imprisoned in a circle of great states. And after? Will the empire be more solid, less agitated, when, by new annexations, it will have increased in its bosom the mass of the discontented? War will therefore always be necessary: but then there will be coalition, and, if events follow their natural course, invasion. Is that why the conservatives overthrew the republic?

Could it be that among the multitude of those who have served Napoleon III and who owed their fortune to him, that around him, among his family, among his friends, there could not be found a man with enough heart and intelligence to make him understand what detestable thought he serves as an organ, and on what abyss of ignominy his power rests? Not a man who says to him: Sire, since your imbroglio of December 2, there are no longer in France either principles or, liberties. Your government, in the terms posed by your lawyers, hostile to thought, suspect to property, offensive to the nation, resolves itself into a pact of iniquity, into systematic prevarication; your power is an outrage against common sense, and you yourself, the personification of this chaos, are you, unwittingly, an obstacle to morality and public safety?

Perhaps it is written that the powers, that the nations, which, while applauding the coup d’état, have declared themselves in solidarity with it, must, like France, be punished where they have sinned. So, may the destinies be fulfilled! But let it be known: the Republic declines all responsibility in the events.

END THE SECOND STUDY.

1858

1860

SECOND STUDY

PERSONS

CHAPTER ONE.

Principle of personal dignity.

SECOND STUDY

PERSONS

CHAPTER ONE.

Principle of personal dignity.

CHAPTER II.

Identity of personal dignity and right among the ancients. Subordination of the religious idea.

CHAPTER II.

Identity of personal dignity and right among the ancients: subordination of the religious idea.

CHAPITRE III.

Exaltation et déchéance de la personne humaine chez les anciens.

CHAPTER III.

Exaltation and decline of the human person among the ancients.

CHAPITRE IV.

Transition religieuse. — Le Christianisme tire les conséquences des prémisses posées par le Polythéisme et la Philosophie : condamnation de l’humanité.

CHAPTER IV.

Religious transition. — Christianity draws the consequences from the premises laid down by Polytheism and Philosophy: condemnation of humanity.

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

CHAPITRE V.

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

CHAPITRE VI.

XXVIII

CHAPTER VI.

New age: the Revolution. — Immanence and reality of Justice.

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

CHAPTER VII.

Définition de la Justice.

CHAPTER VII.

Definition of Justice.

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