Casse-cou

Recklessness

Charles Péguy

When my friends came back to see me, they found me bedridden. A rather serious attack of the usual influenza had caught me in bad weather, coming upon an excess of fatigue brought on by an excess of work. I hastened to reassure them.

— I must confess to you that this illness has greatly inconvenienced the dilettantism in which, as everyone knows, I take such pleasure. But have no fear. I am feeling much better, because I have employed revolutionary methods.

— Could it be, said Pierre Baudouin, that you beat your chest with all your might, that you climbed up on the tables, that you let out inarticulate cries, knocked out your doctor, beat your wife, set fire to your house?

— Not at all. I lay down at full length in my bed and kept still.

— How could that be this famous revolutionary method?

— When on Saturday morning I woke up ill, I recognized the influenza. I was left to choose between the bourgeois method and the revolutionary method. The bourgeois method consists in imagining that one can usefully remedy ills without touching their real causes. The revolutionary method consists here in recognizing that one remedies ills usefully only by attacking the real causes of those ills.

It often happens that it is the bourgeois method that makes a racket and the revolutionary method that is the silent one. The bourgeois method consists in crudely daubing over the aspects of life. The revolutionary method consists in changing one’s life. The revolutionary socialist method demands that humanity change its social life.

— You talk a great deal for a sick man, interrupted Pierre Deloire. It seems to me that you are falling back into bourgeois methods.

— We often fall back into them. But it will be nothing. When I had recognized the solemn influenza I lay down at full length in my nice warm bed. The doctor came. I followed his prescriptions punctiliously. He ordered me to cease all work. I rested for two days, sleeping or dozing, my head as free of cares as if I should never again have to produce copy and had not signed for heavy monthly bills of exchange. I am better. Let me sleep. Tomorrow I shall get up. The day after tomorrow I shall work. Let us not be reckless. Let us follow the revolutionary methods.

— Since I have come, said Pierre Baudouin, allow me to work here. Put your collections of newspapers and reviews at my disposal. I have long wanted to write a few words to Jaurès. He will end up reading me seriously, and I hope he will answer me justly, as soon as he has given an answer to all the great men of this political world. We shall leave you now.

— How will you manage to write, said Pierre Deloire, impatient as you are, and great lover of spoken sentences, which go faster?

— Sit down there, replied Pierre Baudouin. Since you are a historian, you will cut out and paste the fragments from which I shall make quotations.

My dear Jaurès,

In the Petite République dated Tuesday, January 8, 1901, you published an article for which I ask your permission to reproduce in its entirety:

THE PHILOSOPHY OF VAILLANT

For some weeks now citizen Vaillant, rising above the passing quarrels and secondary disagreements that still trouble socialist action, seems to be tracing with lofty serenity the broad outlines of his method. He remains the fighting revolutionary he has always been, ready to support, to encourage, tomorrow as yesterday, the generous and sudden movements by which the oppressed break their chains. He finds it painful that so often human progress is bought at the price of violence, and he desires that the intense development of democracy, by giving a freer, easier, and vaster play to popular action, might spare the proletariat the bloody means that liberated the revolutionary bourgeoisie. But he knows that it does not depend on the working class alone to regulate the methods of revolution. It may perhaps have to defend itself against the brutal aggressions of the rulers, against the violence of the privileged; and the bestiality that “brain-washing” nationalism unleashes in the “upper” classes and the middle classes scarcely permits the idyllic hope of a fully peaceful evolution.

But, and it is here above all that we should insist, it is far from true that citizen Vaillant conceives of revolution in the sudden and theatrical form too often given to it. “To be a revolutionary from head to foot,” he says with irony, “one must create for oneself, in optimistic illusion, the imaginary conditions that put the result within the immediate reach of effort.”

Thus, those who seem to dream at every turn of a decisive coup de main, or even to hope that a catastrophe will bring about the complete social renewal, are the half-willing dupes of an illusion. Now, according to citizen Vaillant, this illusion becomes more and more difficult as socialism takes on more doctrinal considerations, that is to say as it better understands the complexity of social facts and the law of evolution that imposes upon all revolutionary thought a long period of economic and political preparation.

For a long time people believed that it would suffice to break a few cogs of the capitalist mechanism in order to replace it entirely. Today it is conceived “as a transformable organism,” which must evolve toward socialism under the conscious direction of the organized proletariat. For a long time, too, people believed it useful, in order to animate the proletariat to action, to diminish in short-term prophecies the chances of duration and the forces of resistance of capitalism.

It still has many means of renewal: colonial expansion provides an outlet for its overexcited production. It is certainly condemned to perish, but it would be reckless to assign the date of its end: “Through what stages shall we arrive at our goal?” says citizen Vaillant. “None of us can determine that.”

We cannot even say with assurance that the coming progress of the sciences of mechanics, electricity, and chemistry will automatically create, through the prodigious increase of production, the sufficient conditions for communism.

The proletariat must know well the milieu in which it acts, that is to say it must know well the formidable resistances it still has to overcome. “Thus,” says citizen Vaillant, “we shall have fewer illusions, but we shall have fewer disappointments.” It is not by the vain excitation of dreams, it is by the severe and noble enthusiasm of truth that citizen Vaillant animates the working class to tireless action, to the continuous effort of revolution.

This political and social philosophy of citizen Vaillant is connected to his general philosophy of the universe and of life. He often declares that he is a materialist and an atheist, and this is indeed the most popular translation, and in the language of French philosophy, the most exact, of his thought. But at bottom, it is the great spirit of German philosophy that animates him, the spirit of Spinoza, of Fichte, of Hegel, and of Feuerbach. He is a monist, that is to say that for him all the phenomena of the immense universe, all the forces apparently most diverse or most contrary, reduce themselves to a unity of principle, of substance, or of law. He does not admit the duality and the opposition of what we call matter and what we call spirit; and if spiritualism horrifies him, it is because it cuts reality in two, and in instituting two principles, it necessarily delivers one to the tyranny of the other. Whoever says duality says oppression; for of the two opposing forces, one must dominate the other, unless the two forces balance each other and neutralize each other in nothingness.

Thus the Church submitted natural life to the tyranny of the soul, artificially isolated from the body. Thus Christianity and spiritualism submitted the world to the tyranny of God. Dualism therefore engenders oppression and terror. On the contrary, if all phenomena and all beings are the infinitely varied manifestations of one same force or one same idea, none can pretend to oppress the others; and a free and growing harmony of energies and beings is possible in the immense and moving unity. What is the nature of this single force that envelops at once what we call matter and what we call spirit? Citizen Vaillant appears to consider the answer as secondary.

He wrote expressly some years ago that monism, whether materialist or idealist, responded in any case to the need of thought that aspires to unify the world, and to the need of life that does not wish to bend to any external force. I shall take care not to enter here, and today, into these great problems. I wish only to say in passing that in my eyes the hour approaches when the socialist and revolutionary proletariat must appropriate an organized doctrine of the universe and of life. What the Encyclopédie was for the revolutionary bourgeoisie, a new Encyclopédie, infinitely bolder and vaster, must be for the proletariat.

We must take up again the movement of human thought from Kant to Renan, passing through Hegel, Comte, and Marx. We must take up again the movement of science from Laplace to Maxwell, passing through Darwin, propose the principal results and principal tendencies to the proletariat that wishes to live the full life and project upon the universe an ardent light in which the clarities of individual thought will mingle with the ardent radiance of social life. This living organization of a socialist Encyclopédie will be one of the highest tasks that will impose themselves tomorrow upon our party and upon humanity.

But I return to the fine monist conception of citizen Vaillant, and I say that this profound unity of all forces, of all phenomena, implies that from one force to another, from one phenomenon to another, reality can move by continuous degrees. There is perpetual transformation, perpetual effort, and beneath the false appearances of fixed forms, eternal fluidity, incessant aspiration of life. Hence, in the social order, the philosophy at once profoundly evolutionist and boldly revolutionary of citizen Vaillant.

There is no immutable and necessary social form that can arrest the push of economic forces and the surge of human energies. There is the thought of revolution. And also, even when it seems that there is a sudden passage from one form of life to another, from one form of society to another, it is by a muffled labor, it is by an obscure molecular rearrangement, it is by the tireless gnawing of the wave upon the rock, of desire and action upon privilege, that revolutionary transformations are prepared. Citizen Vaillant has a repugnance for everything that immobilizes and categorizes. What he reproached, for example, in the agrarian program of the French Workers’ Party, was not the provisional maintenance of small peasant property, was not the institution of a transition, but it was making of it, if I may say so, a frozen transition: it was not sufficiently saying that, even before finally losing itself in communism, small peasant property would already be modified by the contact or even by the approaches of communism; it was posing it like a stone at the edge of the flood, outside the current of transformations.

This profound and subtle philosophy gives him a very fine sense of all the reforms of transition, of all the nuanced evolutions that prepare and begin the Revolution. He will never consent to say, like so many other socialists, that such a reform, such an action, such an institution is impossible as long as capitalism has not fallen entirely. For him, it is as if one said that the uncertain dawn is impossible as long as the whole night has not disappeared.

The truth is that such an institution of social solidarity and workers’ dignity will have, in the capitalist milieu, a lower form, a lesser efficacy than in the socialist milieu. But citizen Vaillant does not conclude that this discord between the new institution and the capitalist milieu makes the institution impossible. He concludes, on the contrary, that the multiplicity of new institutions of solidarity and dignity will end by making impossible the milieu that deforms and debases them.

See, for example, the conclusion, so clear, so important from the point of view of method, of the article he recently published in Le Petit Sou, under the title: “Social Insurance.” It is a matter of insuring all workers against the totality of risks they run: accidents, old age or disability, unemployment.

“It is to the property-owning and employer contribution of all those who are employers of wage-earners; it is to the current budgets of public relief to furnish the necessary funds, and to the State to complete annually whatever may be lacking for the functioning and development of the insurance.

“In the de facto equality of socialist society, insurance will in its turn disappear into the higher forms of the institutions of solidarity, just as today it must absorb and transform the worn-out institutions of relief and the partial and incomplete experiments of insurance. Charity, public relief, and social insurance are the three successive stages we must pass through before the emancipation of the working class and the Social Republic render them useless.”

This is a vision admirable in its clarity and its breadth at once. I would add only that it is not on this single line of relief and insurance that stages and half-stages must be marked: it is on all the converging paths that lead to the socialist order. Thus, for example, from the condition of the isolated wage-earner in the absolute dependence of the employers to the fully emancipated worker of the communist city, several decisive transitions can be marked. But what I retain is the very idea of this movement, of this progression. And I say that at the present hour our passionate effort must aim to ensure, to hasten this methodical march. Three conditions, to my mind, are necessary, which I can today only indicate in a word:

1. A general philosophy, at once revolutionary and evolutionist, must communicate itself little by little to the conscious elite of the proletariat, and from close to close to the entire proletariat. This is that socialist and proletarian Encyclopédie I spoke of above, and to which I shall return.

2. The proletariat must organize itself into a unified political class party, having a very clear consciousness of its supreme goal, and knowing how to mark, also, in all questions, in the question of education, in the question of individual or agricultural property as in the question of relief and insurance, the stages that the proletariat must pass through. This will be the object of the program of action that the unified Party will trace.

3. Finally, this evolutionary and transitional action, this transitional society must have a corresponding legislative and governmental organ. Obviously, since citizen Vaillant proposes to us this march by stages, this evolutionary action through increasingly popular laws, he believes possible a legislative and governmental apparatus capable of producing these laws and applying them.

What will this constitutional organism of transition be? What part in it will be given to transformed parliamentarism, to popular initiative, to the referendum? I do not know. But here is what I know well: the primary, absolute condition of all this movement, of all this regulated and bold evolution that citizen Vaillant foresees in a particular order of questions and that will extend to all, is that the legislative and governmental force be republican, democratic, and active. Our first duty therefore, at this hour, is to wrest Parliament and the government from the forces of systematic reaction in the manner of Méline and from the impotent and howling chaos of nationalist bestialities.

This is why the formation of a left-wing majority, however timid it may be, supporting with constancy a left-wing government, however hesitant or insufficient it may be, is in my eyes a fact of extreme importance. It is, in my opinion, the shapeless rudiment, but a necessary one, of the legislative and governmental organism that must soon direct the movement of our society toward the supreme ends of equality willed by us. It is a first manifestation, in many respects infirm, incoherent, and disappointing, of the organic power of democracy weakly permeated by socialism.

It may be that the present government combats the Church and praetorianism only feebly and clumsily. But it has against it the Pope, the congregations, the military cliques that hate General André, and also those hungry for Cossack servitude. It has all that against it, and it endures. It is the sign that with a new effort of democracy and with a more powerful organization of the proletariat, left-wing governments, but bolder and more active ones, will be possible. I am astonished that after the almost continuous reign of the Périers, the Ribots, the Dupuys, the Mélines, and the Cavaignacs, people seem to make light of this symptom and this promise. It is in this sense that I am and remain ministerialist.

I do not believe, despite the treasures of talent and passionate sincerity that Péguy lavishes on his thesis in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, that it suffices for us, in a sort of moralistic anarchism, to arouse, from individual conscience to individual conscience, the pride of the just and the true. We must still forge, for the use of the proletariat, the instrument of government and legislation. It may well be, moreover, that the first instrument to come from the forge is elementary and clumsy, often refractory to our will. Do you know, at present, a better one?

I would also like to reassure Lagardelle a little, who, in Le Mouvement Socialiste, grieves over our withering. Perhaps he will think that the legislative and governmental action of our party must be connected to its general conception. Now, if we must, as Vaillant himself indicates with such force, pass through a transitional society, we must also arouse, in democracy, a transitional legislative and governmental action. And we must not disdain the sketches that announce, even from afar, the possibility of this organism.

Lagardelle, through the learned intermediary of a citation from Marx, calmly accuses us of “parliamentary cretinism.” No, I am mistaken; we have not quite arrived there yet. There too there is evolution, and we are merely on the march toward that unfortunate state. Ah! how cruel it is to have rounded the cape of forty! Men of middle age have all the misfortunes. Our elders formally accuse us of ambitious intrigue, and our juniors accuse us almost of “cretinism,” with a doctrinal definition, I grant you, and mitigating. We are in a narrow lane, and from both opposing rooftops, it rains equally upon us. May the fine sun of socialist unity come at last to dry us a little!

Lagardelle is a big enough boy to explain himself to you. Péguy too will give you the explanations he owes you. I, for my part, wish to ask you several that seem to me indispensable.

Your friends had long since noticed that you introduced your articles under the cover of a comrade’s authority. Your preferred formulas were the following: “It is with great reason that Sembat rose at the podium —” or: “In his latest article in the Revue Socialiste, Rouanet says very well —.” A distribution in which your enemies, as is fitting, had the best part.

This politeness had numerous advantages: it exercised the humility dear to you, it flattered the vanity of your friends, it could calm or postpone the animosity of your enemies. It allowed you to escape, or promised you that you would escape, from the Jaurèsian personalism that you dread above all. It gave pleasure around you. It drowned you a little in the mass. It diminished you.

It had but one disadvantage: it was not sincere. You wished it sincere no doubt, but it was not sincere, since you superimposed useless godfathers upon ideas that could and should perfectly well present themselves all alone, having come to you all alone. Today we no longer know, in the insincerity of this politeness, where truth begins and where it ends. I defy the most attentive reader to distinguish in the article I have reproduced for you where begins and where ends what is put there to please Vaillant and what is put there because it is the truth, or at least because you believe it is the truth.

You are wrong to wish to please citizen Vaillant thus. One should never wish to please through worldly compliments. This complaisance is not only insincere and unjust. It is vain. It serves only to reinforce and establish the crude contempt that an authoritarian like Vaillant may have for a man like you. When you praise the lofty serenity of citizen Vaillant, he sees in the compliment only a crude testimony of weakness. Being crude, he sees crudely. Having beaten you down a great deal, he knows that at bottom you are weak, a good weakling, that is to say one who yields to the fear of displeasing his enemies, to the fear of causing them pain, and a little, to the fear of their authority.

I leave politics for today and confine myself to what you call the philosophy of Vaillant. I cannot believe that you have not at least suspected what it is. Half-engineer and half-doctor, piler-up of readings and compiler of texts, Vaillant is the inexhaustible tepid mumbler. We have heard him in congresses and in meetings. When you title him philosopher, since you know him as he is, either you forget what a philosopher is, or you are making fun of us, poor sinners, for the greater glory of socialist unity.

When you say that citizen Vaillant rises above quarrels and disagreements, you lie to us, for the sake of socialist unity. You know well that the old romantic Blanquist conspirator revels in disagreements, quarrels, and combinations.

You know what disquieting game he plays, going from sectarian Guesdist brutality to the false universality of the General Committee, remaining at the Congress to play the game of those who had left the Congress. You know too from what mad caprice of a shady and debauched capitalist the Petit Sou was born to us. Why treat this newspaper of ignoble business as an asylum of philosophy?

Why do you treat as passing the quarrels and as secondary the disagreements that divide French socialism? And do you not see that this easy skill of charitable polemic turns against you? If passing quarrels and secondary disagreements produce all the hateful rages, all the envious resentments and the stewed-up jealousies that you cannot hide from us, what then have we to fear from a serious disagreement and quarrels that are not secondary? What would we have worse to fear from primary disagreements? Why deny the undeniable, that the furious appetite for authoritarian power has painfully made French socialism sick? But what is incredibly mad, and incredibly dangerous, is to mask the truth in the same moment that one preaches respect for the truth: “It is not,” you say, “by the vain excitation of dreams, it is by the severe and noble enthusiasm of truth that citizen Vaillant animates the working class to tireless action, to the continuous effort of revolution.” But you, citizen Jaurès, in speaking thus, by what then do you animate the working class? And how do you treat the people?

You treat the people as a child that must be encouraged, by lies if need be and by illusion. We demand for us the people a serious education. Not one professor of philosophy, respecting his students, would dare hold before them the language you hold before the people. What am I saying? You are yourself, Jaurès, an agrégé professor of philosophy. Would you dare give in class the lesson that seems good enough for the people?

“This political and social philosophy of citizen Vaillant is connected to his general philosophy of the universe and of life.” Are you mad? To call the political and social philosophy of citizen Vaillant the hodgepodge of inanities by which he maintains his suspicious authority. But “his general philosophy of the universe and of life!” Words fail me. I wished to call you to account. But words fail me.

This simple sentence embraces so much naive impudence beneath its benevolent facility, or so much willful ignorance, that I am left stupefied.

So it is now going to be necessary that one be materialist and atheist. It will be necessary that I, Baudouin, that Deloire, that Péguy and all his subscribers be materialists and atheists with citizen Vaillant. As if materialism were not a metaphysics, and atheism a theology. When an uncultured and crude French bourgeois proclaims that he is a materialist, this means roughly that he has a desire to outrage ordinary morality. And when he says: “I am an atheist,” this means roughly that he has a desire to annoy the clergy. I do not see what advantage or interest we would have in imitating the old-bourgeois in what is crude and uncultured about them, in imitating the old-radicals in their mental or moral infirmities.

I have moreover been assured that citizen Vaillant did not understand his materialism and his atheism in the crudely old-bourgeois sense, but in a philosophical sense. Or rather in a pseudo-philosophical sense. That is to say not in the sense in which a true philosopher would understand them, but in the sense in which a good pedant of philosophy, whose inevitable memory would be smeared with short unintelligent bookish eruditions, would retain them. And it is here that all the gravity of your formidable imagination appears. It is here that all the unforeseen quality of your inconsiderate invention appears.

For the philosopher, materialism is one system of metaphysics among the rather numerous systems of metaphysics. Allow me to characterize it in a word by saying that it tends to reduce everything to matter, just as spiritualism tends to reduce everything to spirit. Many people would like everything to be reduced to matter. They do not know what that means, but it would please them all the same. One does not know why, but they would like that. Not only would many old-bourgeois be happy with it in order to annoy the moralists, but many intellectuals, having groaned under Cousinian professors, desire more or less confusedly to take their revenge in this way on Cousinian persecutions. And then materialism has an air of novelty, of boldness; it seems to annoy the police. It thus pleases the amateurs of easy demonstrations. One would please many voters if one reduced everything to matter.

The misfortune is that this reduction does not work by itself. We have of matter an idea more confused still and less usable than the one we have of spirit. Placed before this rather useless idea, either the materialist will brutally reduce to it the universe of ideas: this will be, so to speak, a metaphysical coup d’état, since the materialist will be able to accomplish the demanded reduction only by arbitrarily denying the immaterials of the universe, that is to say most of reality. Or else, placed before this sterile, dry idea, the materialist will surreptitiously reintroduce the qualities and the content of the immaterials: this will be, if you will permit me to use this word, a metaphysical act of Jesuitism, since the materialist will be able to accomplish the demanded reduction only by fraudulently insinuating, without naming them and without avowing their origin, the qualities of the immaterials into the confused idea we may have of matter.

Thus not only is materialism for the philosopher one metaphysics among metaphysics, but this materialism, in which, according to you, the philosophy of citizen Vaillant is summed up, is of all metaphysics the most untenable, the one that from the outset presents the most formidable difficulties, and, to tell the truth, the most insurmountable impossibilities, demanding a singular crudity if understood in the crude sense, but requiring a singularly rare subtlety if understood in the clever sense. And this is so true, this position is so untenable, that you yourself abandon it as soon as you have occupied it. After having declared to us that materialism is the expression, the most popular translation, and in the language of French philosophy the most exact, you quickly jump from materialism, which is a monism, to monism in general. This encroachment is no more justified than the one that would consist in jumping from spiritualist monism to monism in general.

Similarly, atheism is a metaphysics and a theology. Now, as much as we understand what we are saying when we affirm that we do not believe in the God of the Christians, in particular in the God of the Catholics, or that we do not believe in the gods of the pagans, so much would we be embarrassed to pronounce upon atheism absolutely, that is to say speaking indifferently. An atheism presupposes a God that one denies, or gods that one denies, and the definition of what one denies. At least in this sense an atheism is or presupposes a metaphysical theology. Reducing to monism in general, after Vaillant’s materialism, Vaillant’s atheism, you perform an operation of theological metaphysics, and no doubt an arbitrary operation of theological metaphysics.

Leaving the operation, I confine myself provisionally to the result. We have arrived at monism, and you insist that this monism be the great spirit of German philosophy, the spirit of Spinoza, of Fichte, of Hegel, and of Feuerbach. If you speak thus to follow the fashion, I pity you, and you are behind the times by forty years, or twenty. The great ship of German philosophy is today abandoned. Ask the philosophers of this time what part Fichte — as philosopher — Hegel, and Feuerbach have had in the philosophical formation of the new generations. And to what extent was their philosophy German, or human, or academic, or living, or social, or vain? And why do you wish to attribute Spinoza, born a Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam, to the German family? Is this international politeness? Let us not be Germans. Let us not be German nationalists. Let us not be French nationalists either. Let us be exactly internationalists, that is to say Frenchmen who have become internationalists.

After Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, and Feuerbach, and in their company, Vaillant is a monist, that is to say that “for him all the phenomena of the immense universe, all the forces apparently most diverse or most contrary reduce themselves to a unity of principle, of substance, or of law.” Bitterness and vanity. What do you call unity? Could it be like socialist unity? What do you call principle? What do you call substance? What do you call law? What do you call forces? What do you call appearance? What do you call diverse? What do you call contrary? What a hasty, incomplete definition.

And above all what a dangerous definition. By this, if you mean that at the moment Deniel tortures Dreyfus, at the moment the Boxer torments the missionary and the soldier the Chinese, at the moment the bourgeois of Calais starve their workers, in these exemplary moments the hamstrings of Dreyfus and the wrist of the torturer, the skin of the missionary and the fingers of the Boxer, the skin of the Chinese and the fingers of the soldier, the empty bellies of the workers and the full bellies of the bosses belong to the same cosmic, physical, chemical, physiological, mechanical system, you pronounce at least a uselessness. If you go further, if to your theoretically arbitrary definition you wish to give some practical extension, it becomes singularly dangerous.

From the fact that the bourgeois of Calais and their workers belong to the same material system, and, in a sense, to the same mental system, and, somewhat, to the same moral system, if you conclude, as it seems, to some metaphysical resignation; from the fact that the unjust and the just, the false and the true belong, in a sense, to the same system, to the same world, if you conclude more or less confusedly that the unjust and the just, the false and the true fall back into some superior unity, take care: by dint of goodness, of optimism, it is Providence itself that you are restoring to us. You will end up confessing to us that everything comes to the same thing, because everything lies in the inscrutable ways of the metaphysical One.

Divine Providence was no doubt imagined in particular by good people who, being of religious soul, watched helpless and grieved at the accomplishment of the sins of this world. They imagined Providence because they passionately loved final goodness. However consoling the hypothesis of Providence might have been, we deliberately refused to admit it. You know for what reasons. Are we now going to restore it in the form you propose? In place of Christian Providence are we going to institute secular Providence, in the species of metaphysical monism? Religious Providence, Christian Providence presupposed religious monism, the one Christian God, all-powerful, creator of heaven and earth and sovereign lord of all things. Conversely, a certain secular monism entails an institution of secular Providence. Now do not believe that we renounced the hypothesis of religious Providence in order to substitute for it the hypothesis of secular Providence, of optimistic monism, or of monist optimism. You know for what reasons. Allow me to remind you of them as I reread the text you have proposed to us.

“Citizen Vaillant does not admit the duality and the opposition of what we call matter and what we call spirit” — I am quite willing, provided citizen Vaillant begins by defining what he means by matter, what he means by spirit, what he means by duality, what he means by opposition. When he has defined his words for us, we shall be able to talk; we shall see whether we can grant him the reduction he asks of us, or rather that you seem to command us. In the meantime we observe that reality presents us not only with dualities, but with multiplicities, pluralities. That one can and that one should reduce these pluralities to unity, that is a problem, that is in question, but that is not resolved in advance, and is not resolved either by a commandment or by an enthusiasm, or by a stroke of authority, or by a stroke of grace.

“And if spiritualism horrifies him, it is because it cuts reality in two.” No, citizen, it is not spiritualism that cuts reality. Reality appears to us and presents itself as cut into many. Spiritualism is innocent as long as it does not introduce fictitious cuts. Cuts and weldings are valid only if they are not fictitious.

“And in instituting two principles, it necessarily delivers one to the tyranny of the other.” Where have you learned that duality or plurality necessarily entails the tyranny of the one of the two or the one of the several? This is true if one of the two is tyrannical and the second servile, but it is not true if the first has the modesty and the second the pride of the free man. I take the liberty of bringing the free man into these metaphysical discussions because it becomes evident here that your metaphysical preoccupations are commanded by your political concerns. You are a monist in metaphysics because you are and as you are a unitarist in politics. In politics too you believe that in instituting two principles one necessarily delivers one to the tyranny of the other. It is because in your evaluations you totally neglect the consideration of liberty. The free man, whether he be one of the two in the duality or one of the several in the plurality, does not exercise tyranny and does not endure it. The true anarchist has an even deeper disgust for exercising authority than for submitting to it. It is even the reason why an orator who wants to launch a crowd of strikers behind a black flag, or who, armed with a rifle, stands guard beside that flag, is everything one might wish, but not a true anarchist.

“Whoever says duality says oppression; for of the two opposing forces, one must dominate the other, unless the two forces balance each other and neutralize each other in nothingness.” It is exactly here that the intimate vice of your metaphysical and political mentality lies. The day the Petite République published the article I am commenting on for you, I said to several comrades how much this article seemed to me a disquieting symptom. — Let it be, they answered me, it is an article outside the series, immediately forgotten. Tomorrow Jaurès will no longer think about it, and his readers even less. — I believe on the contrary, I do you the honor of believing that this carefully worked article expresses you profoundly, expresses, sincerely in these passages, the ulterior thoughts, the ulterior ideas that have long commanded your politics and all your action. I believe that you are profoundly a monist in metaphysics and profoundly a unitarist in politics. I believe that from there come the hesitations and the inconstancies, the deviations, the failures, and the recent amnesties. I must therefore seize with eagerness the profound revelation you make to us this time. You profoundly believe that unity is the condition of everything, that unity must be made before all else, that from unity everything will come. From duality, from plurality you expect nothing but the victorious tyranny of the one over the subjection of the second, or the neutralization in the nothingness of a sterile equilibrium.

“Thus, you say — that is to say, by duality — the Church submitted natural life to the tyranny of the soul, artificially isolated from the body.” It is always reckless to sum up in a few words a history as vast and as profound as that of the Church. But it would rather seem to me that the Church failed through an excess of unity. Unity of dogma, which bound consciences. Unity of rite, which bound gestures. Unity of organization, which bound lives. Formal unity, at least. But is this not the kind being imposed upon us? The subjection of the body to the soul was the result of a mystical spiritualist monism. “Thus, you say, Christianity and spiritualism submitted the world to the tyranny of God. Dualism therefore engenders oppression and terror.” Singular conclusion. Quick, easy, reckless consequence. It rather appears that it is again a mystical need for religious monism that drove Christians to gather together in the unity of a creator God the indefinite variety of creatures. There would therefore be nothing to say that dualism delivers the world to the tyranny of God, the body to the tyranny of the soul; there would be nothing to say that duality delivers a slave principle to the tyranny of a master principle. But there would simply be this to say: that the old authority exercises itself in dualism and in monism; it loves to exercise itself everywhere; in dualism it tends to establish an external subjection; in monism it tends to establish an internal subjection. You complacently attribute to Vaillant a metaphysical solution, a metaphysical revolution; a vain politeness to a vain revolution; it would consist in substituting an internal subjection for an external subjection. I fear that this mutation of metaphysical servitude symbolizes exactly the revolution you dream of in the installation of the socialist party. May one not say, in the state of men and events, that, wishing to unify the socialist party, you wish for nothing but to substitute for external hatreds the internal rending, for external envies the domestic resentments?

I must press you in politics on the meaning of your unity; I must press you in metaphysics on the meaning of your monism. This monism gives you remorse and you relax its definition. As the materialists surreptitiously bring the immaterials back into their idea of matter, so you good-naturedly stretch, so as to displease no one, the walls of your metaphysical unity. By a remarkable analogy, in you the frankness, the philosophical straightforwardness falters before monism just as political straightforwardness has faltered before unity. “If all phenomena and all beings are the infinitely varied manifestations of one same force or one same idea, none can pretend to oppress the others.” One would be equally justified in saying: if all men are brothers, none can pretend to oppress the others; or: if all Christians are brothers in Jesus Christ, none can pretend to oppress the others; or: if all Frenchmen are sons of the same fatherland, none can pretend to oppress the others; or: if all socialists have the same General Committee, none can pretend to oppress the others. One must have the candor of a child and the insolent confidence you love to dare propose such remedies. The entire history, public and private, of humanity rises up against this dangerous childishness. Domestic resentments, internal hatreds have a bitterness that makes them more formidable than most other bad sentiments.

Whether you wish it or not, your infinitely multiple unity or your unified multiplicity reduces itself in practice to its two elements, resolves itself into its material multiplicity and its formal unity. In vain you admit that “a free and growing harmony of energies and beings is possible in the immense and moving unity.” If you leave to the multiplicity of energies and beings its full value, your unity becomes supererogatory and cumbersome. A free and growing harmony can do without, must do without a superior unity, however moving and immense one may stretch that unity. If you truly leave to multiplicity all its free variety, there is no advantage in keeping somewhere, under the name of unity, some survival of a God whom we have renounced. “What is the nature of this single force that envelops at once what we call matter and what we call spirit? Citizen Vaillant appears to consider the answer as secondary.” He is wrong, and I am going to give him an important answer: the true nature of this force as he can represent it to himself is of the divine nature. “He wrote expressly some years ago that monism, whether materialist or idealist, responded in any case to the need of thought that aspires to unify the world.” I was told throughout my schooling that human thought felt the need to unify the world. I believed it was true, because I was a docile child. I repeated it myself as long as I was a disciplined student. This repetition won me prizes and honorable mentions. It was no less the repetition of an insincerity. When I questioned myself, it seemed to me that I felt no such need at all. I am nevertheless part of human thought. I have known varied landscapes. I have not felt the need that the plain be the mountain or that the plateau become identical to the valley. I have not even felt the need that the valley of the Yvette be identical to the valley of the Bièvre. Today I feel this need less than ever. When economic servitudes leave me some leisure, my mind wanders like a good bourgeois — I mean like an honest man — among the variety of phenomena, among the variety of events, among the variety of men. I know Pierre and I know Paul, and I feel not the slightest need that Pierre be Paul or that Paul be Pierre, or that Pierre and Paul be a superior Third. Pierre is Pierre. Paul is Paul. Jaurès is Jaurès. Vaillant is Vaillant. I know what that means. I go further. When I recall, in these moments of leisure, the advancement of my human thought, it seems to me that most of the time it advanced by distinguishing new nuances in what had seemed to me until then homogeneous. I recall a time, my dear Jaurès, when the socialists all seemed to me men who had indistinctly abandoned their persons and their possessions to the preparation of the Social Revolution. I imagined that Vaillant, Guesde, Lafargue, Jaurès, Baudin the elder, Fournière, Sembat, Zévaès were identically the same man. I had therefore let reign in my memory among the images I had of these men a remarkable unity, better achieved than all those you will attempt. Must I conclude from this that I should remain that stupid all my life? Will you dare say that this unitary stupidity was better than the multiple difficulties in which we now struggle?

I feel no need to unify the world. The further I go, the more I discover that free men and free events are varied. It is slaves and servitudes and subjections that are not varied, or that are least varied. Diseases, which are in a sense servitudes, are much less varied than healths. When men liberate themselves, when slaves revolt, when the sick recover, far from advancing toward some unity, they advance in growing variations. Students at school or at catechism are much closer to unity. Adolescence is not merely growth in age and height and wisdom: it is above all growth in variety. Workers crushed by fatigue are in general much closer to a certain unity. As the social revolution frees humanity from economic servitudes, men will burst forth in unexpected varieties.

“He wrote expressly some years ago that monism, whether materialist or idealist, responded in any case to the need of life that does not wish to bend to any external force.” You are playing with words. The external will remain no less external to me because we shall be vaguely enveloped, he and I, in an external whole or subsumed under a superior whole. You do not fuse the Boxer with the Christian or the Christian with the Chinese because you observe that they belong to the same humanity. You do not fuse the Englishman and the Boer because you observe that they belong to the same white race. You do not fuse the tulle-maker and his boss when you observe that they are from the same France. You will not fuse me with either Zévaès or Vaillant when you have instituted between them an artificial and formal socialist unity. When Zévaès wishes to exercise authority over me, that authority is external to me. When Zévaès, remaining exactly the same with regard to justice and truth, but insinuated into the factitious formal unity, wishes to exercise authority over me who, at least I hope, will have remained the same also in the same regards, the authority of Zévaès will be no less external to me.

We come to the point where the danger of your invention takes definitive shape. “In your eyes the hour approaches when the socialist and revolutionary proletariat must appropriate an organized doctrine of the universe and of life.” No, citizen. The hour approaches when the socialist and revolutionary proletariat must appropriate at least the great means of production and exchange or communication. You are seduced by deceptive analogies. But comparison is not proof.

“What the Encyclopédie was for the revolutionary bourgeoisie, a new Encyclopédie, infinitely bolder and vaster, must be for the proletariat.” I do not know if it is not dangerous to refer thus to the old bourgeois revolution when one wishes to represent to oneself the coming social revolution. However gripping the dramatic grandeur and the historical grandeur of the principal bourgeois revolutionaries and of the contemporary people may have been, the least one can say of the French Revolution is that it did not succeed, since we have to begin it again every day. There is therefore a presumption that it is a model and even a precedent that is at least incomplete. If it is true moreover that the success of these events comes for the most part from their preparation, if in particular for the French Revolution the rarest heroisms, the most generous devotions led to more or less an immense bankruptcy, it is permissible to think that this revolution not only was pursued according to bad revolutionary methods, but above all had begun after an insufficient or bad revolutionary preparation. This considerably diminishes for me the value of the great Encyclopédie. Not that I do not recognize and admire the grandeur of that effort. More than anyone I respect the precursors. But precisely because they were our precursors, it is probable that we have surpassed them. To despise them would be an imbecile fatuity. But to imitate them slavishly would be a somewhat silly docile admiration. Believe well that if he returned among us, Diderot would be the first not to imitate Diderot, seeing that he was not much of an imitator.

I quite understand that you would not slavishly imitate the Encyclopédie. You have higher ambitions. “We must take up again the movement of human thought from Kant to Renan, passing through Hegel, Comte, and Marx. We must take up again the movement of science from Laplace to Maxwell, passing through Darwin, propose the principal results and principal tendencies to the proletariat that wishes to live the full life and project upon the universe an ardent light in which the clarities of individual thought will mingle with the ardent radiance of social life. This living organization of a socialist Encyclopédie will be one of the highest tasks that will impose themselves tomorrow upon our party and upon humanity.” And you return to the fine monist conception of citizen Vaillant. I am not yet returning to it with you. I remain at the first of the three conditions that are necessary to ensure, to hasten the methodical march.

“1. A general philosophy, at once revolutionary and evolutionist, must communicate itself little by little to the conscious elite of the proletariat, and from close to close to the entire proletariat. This is that socialist and proletarian Encyclopédie I spoke of above, and to which I shall return.”

I take the liberty of stopping at these lines to draw the attention of the censors. — Why do you stop, I was told, at these castles in the air? — I answer that they are serious, that they are close to your heart, that they are in the direction of a whole school in formation, that they have already received a beginning of execution. When someone presumed to title socialist history a contemporary history in which all the fragments of socialist unity were to collaborate after you and somewhat under your direction, very few of your friends were devoted enough to cry out to you: recklessness. You begin again, therefore, and you make it worse. I shall begin again too, and I shall make it worse. History is not socialist. It is historical. Philosophy is not socialist. It is philosophical. And a true Encyclopédie will not be socialist. It is already impossible for it to be encyclopedic.

I am grateful to you for having, in the movement of human thought, going beyond what you call German thought, restored Renan, Comte, and Laplace. But this legitimate enlargement already bursts before our eyes the variety of the ancient philosophers, of the philosophies that have become historical. It is to usurp the common past of humanity to wish to install there a laborious factitious unity. Because you are a monist in metaphysics and a unitarist in politics, you arbitrarily wish that human thought be, in its varied labors, the material for a unitary and monist history. But it would be much more impossible for you, so to speak, to reconcile Kant and Renan, Hegel and Comte, Fichte and Spinoza, than to come to an arrangement with citizen Vaillant. For the great philosophers loved their liberty. It is even partly for that reason that they were great philosophers. Be assured that if they lived among us, the five or six you have named would by no means hold congresses to institute the great party of philosophical unity. But they would freely live — and no doubt separately — their lives. Freely — and no doubt separately — they would make their metaphysics or their physics or their philosophy. A more or less obscure professor, a unionized worker in precision instruments, a mathematics tutor, they would work freely and not in a unitary fashion. The only difference there would be is no doubt that material life, indispensable and preliminary, would be much more painful for them, because the bourgeois society in which we live is harder on free intellectual labor than most previous societies were. But do not believe they would form committees, hold sessions, open and close meetings, propose motions, draft resolutions, proceed to ballots. The entire economy of philosophical liberty rests first on this foundation: that a single person can be right against all, and even that there can be times when no one is right. The great philosophers whose lives in history have overlapped have in general manifested no enthusiasm for working in common. This does not prove that working in common is negligible, but it seems to me to prove that working in common, like working in retreat, has its domain and its proprieties.

It pleases you that the movement of human thought be a linear movement so that it may be a unitary movement, the line being one. It pleases you to place the great philosophers and the great scholars in single file like little schoolchildren. It pleases you to represent to yourself and to represent to us the great hearts and the great minds as attached to realizing a continuous progress of human thought in which each would be the continuator of the preceding one and the exact predecessor of a new continuator. This academic imagination does not seem to me to conform to reality. It does not conform to the idea that most great philosophers have had of themselves and their philosophy. Unless one attributes a rather crude vanity to men who do not all seem capable of it, one is forced to observe and accept this considerable fact, that most great philosophers ignored or failed to appreciate many of their predecessors and many of their contemporaries. And furthermore, those they did not ignore or fail to appreciate, they often appropriated, adapted, adopted, somewhat monopolized. They did not consider themselves the faithful transmitters of human thought, the guardians, the stewards of humanity. Most of them had no concern to ensure the linear unity of human thought, the unity of human thought across history. At most they made what they knew of the history of human thought lead up to themselves. Most neglected to fabricate this singular unity of human thought to which you are so attached, because you wish to set historical unity before socialist unity and metaphysical unity. The great philosophers did not think of continuing and completing their predecessors, but rather of refreshing and renewing them. They did not think of having themselves continued and completed by their successors, but either they sincerely believed they held the definitive truth, at least the essential truth, or they thought, they expected that successors would treat them as they themselves had treated their predecessors; they expected that they would be renewed and refreshed. You would no doubt have surprised a man like Renan if you had spoken to him of completing Kant by passing through Hegel, Comte, and Marx. He was a historian and knew these great philosophers or professionals of philosophy better. And he was shrewd. He knew better the art and the philosophy and life itself, and no doubt he thought that one must, as they say, take some and leave some. You will not leave any. But he who grasps too much does not hold tight.

Humanity is not a miserly capitalist who heaps up and superimposes, mound upon mound, strata upon strata, the accumulated treasures of dead knowledge. This conception that you have is not even entirely true of science. It is by no means true of art. It is not true of philosophy. Even in science we know from history that advancements have often been made by mental violence, intellectual revolution, break-in, not only by the slowly regular capitalization of modest results. The introduction, or the intervention, of differentials in mathematics was not the simple continuation of an old savings account. No doubt events, observations, experiments, facts are capitalized — in capital sometimes crushing for the scholar or the historian — but the interpretation or the simple penetration of the matter thus capitalized can advance by leaps. Now an attentive analysis reveals that interpretation and penetration form part of the facts themselves, that in a certain sense we make the facts. All the more reason that philosophy often advances by lurches. The true philosopher calls everything into question at every instant, or at least, if a complete instability is untenable, at the threshold of his method, at the threshold of his inquiry, at the threshold of his work, at the threshold of his life, finally, at the threshold of a piece of work, he calls everything into question. He uses or does not use his predecessors: that is his business, under his personal responsibility as a philosopher. It is evident that in fact he does not ignore them. But it is incontestable that his philosophy is characterized first by the fact that he calls everything into question, absolutely, and not by the fact that he more or less adroitly uses such or such of the ancient philosophers.

The preliminary, indispensable condition, without which one may become a historian of philosophy, but without which one cannot be, one is not a true philosopher, is that at least once one has called everything into question. Personally, under one’s own responsibility, on one’s own account, at one’s own expense, at one’s own risk. Similarly, one is not a true artist if one has not called into question on one’s own account the prior givens. But more profoundly than in art, and more profoundly than in philosophy, one is not a man if in life one has not once called everything into question. Unhappy he who has not at least once, for a love or a friendship, for a charity, for a solidarity, called everything into question, tested the very foundations, analyzed for himself the simplest acts. Unhappy and not very revolutionary.

For it is here that you play with bad luck: the forms of thought, the forms of action that you eliminate by granting some monopoly to some unity of human thought are precisely those that are exactly revolutionary. Science is not revolutionary. When Zola repeats that science is revolutionary, he means by that that it furnishes revolutionaries with the most powerful means of revolution, and he means that the application of scientific results often leads to revolutionary practices or effects. But pure science is not revolutionary. It is nothing at all, except scientific, sincere, and patient. It can give us only information, indications, since it is only an inquiry pursued by humanity upon certain proposed objects of reality. As soon as one passes to action, as soon as one leaves pure knowledge, one makes art, philosophy, or action. That is to say that one calls things into question, and that one is revolutionary.

Science itself is entirely enveloped in art. When the uncultured like Vaillant speak of science, one would think the universe is a rigid mechanism, a play of strings. But when, instead of dealing with agrégés of philosophy — I do not say that for you, I speak of agrégés of philosophy I know, who have fallen into sociology, and who want to make for us a sociology more rigid than the mechanics of mechanicians — when, instead of dealing with agrégés of philosophy, one converses with true scholars, with true arithmeticians, with a true geographer, or with a naturalist who has pushed beyond the indispensable P.C.N., one is quite surprised to see how the true scholar is bathed in art, how mathematics is harmonious, plastic, intuitive, how natural history demands suppleness and mobility, how in every science discoveries, inventions, and the play of hypotheses demand freshness, novelty, renewal, refreshment — and that fruitful disrespect for the continuity, for the unity of human thought that we shall properly call the revolutionary sentiment.

If we are revolutionary socialists, citizen, it is precisely because, having reached manhood and no longer listening to our masters, we broke within ourselves, each for his share as a man and under his responsibility, the prior unity of human thought, as it reached us, it is because we called into question society, the social world, without lingering to consider that we were poor, weak, ignorant, and that our elders were far more learned. We called into question the simplest acts, the smoothest practices, such as eating, drinking, and sleeping, buying and paying, loving or not loving. This calling into question made us make, doubt it not, marvelous discoveries. Not because we perform marvels, but because every revolutionary calling into question will be fruitful in results.

I have had the opportunity to converse a few times for a few minutes with Duclaux. You will not contest that he is a true scholar. One is quite surprised that he has this suppleness and this mobility. These men are always ready to doubt everything they have done, provided one demonstrates to them that it is doubtful. They will always welcome the new hypothesis, provided it is more probable; they themselves will propagate the new idea, provided it is or seems to them just, even if their thirty years of laboratory work should be thereby rendered useless, even if the unity of their life should be broken by it. It is in this that they are profoundly revolutionary. It is for this reason that in public life they give, when they put their minds to it, the profoundly revolutionary action that you know. They prefer truth to unity. Or rather they believe they know what truth is. But when one speaks to them of unity, they wonder what that can possibly mean. They make it their profession to seek and sometimes they find truth. They do not seek unity for itself. Péguy has had for three months and will publish in a few weeks the stenographic record of the lecture Mr. Duclaux gave at the school of advanced social studies for the inauguration of the preparatory course for the teaching of popular universities. You will see there how little the author is preoccupied with ensuring the unity of teaching. Duclaux must know a little about how one should teach the sciences. Far from wishing to unify teaching, that is to say to extend to popular teaching the methods and means of bourgeois teaching, or to primary teaching the means of secondary teaching, even in mathematics this revolutionary demands that one change, that one break the unity, that one teach mathematics in a popular way in order to teach it more truly. He dares not to respect a mathematician whose name imposes itself upon earliest childhood. You will see that.

Has the name of the Encyclopédie not misled you? Was it in its time a monument of human thought, a repertory of humanity? Was it not rather a war machine, heavy and formidable? I have never read the Encyclopédie. But I have attentively heard the careful lectures of a conscientious master on the Encyclopédie. The impression that emerged from them was not that this dictionary of articles was a universal monument of human knowledge, of thought or philosophy. I have read the preliminary discourse: it is poverty itself. There is nothing interesting in it except the distribution of articles and the names of the collaborators. The examples you cite turn against you. The great philosophies or great works from which you make the links of your human unity are the work of individual persons. Neither Kant nor Renan was a congregation, a syndicate, a collective. And your Encyclopédie, to what extent was it a collective work? To what extent on the contrary was it individually the work of Diderot? Would it have existed without the incessant individual action of Diderot? Would it not verify this law, that in collective works that succeed there is almost always someone?

To make this new Encyclopédie you will call for Encyclopedists. We know who will answer you. If the University man had left his class to teach truth to the people, if he had ceased teaching the sons of the bourgeois to go teach the sons of the people, if he had left his too-small class for a vaster audience, we would have wished him welcome among us. But in the Petite République dated Friday, October 26, 1900, we read with much pain this demagogic article:

DOWN WITH THE SKULLCAP!

In the popular universities. — Concerning a lecture by Abbé Denis. — Our tactics toward the clericals.

It is again the question of freedom of education that Mr. Deherme and his new collaborator, Abbé Denis, have just raised at the Coopération des idées. Our comrades of the Faubourg Antoine have taken it upon themselves to resolve it with as much simplicity as promptness: they showed the “priest” the door.

I was there. Everything took place very honestly. I had come to hear Abbé Denis, curious to know what he would dare tell us about the “social role of Christianity.” And I proposed to give him a reply, to invite him in courteous terms to comment for us on two or three articles of the Syllabus. But I was able to see, from the outset, that a contradictory debate was not necessary to enlighten the faithful of the Popular University about religion. And I was glad to hear them cry: “Down with the skullcap!” When it is a matter of refuting the doctrine of the swindler, I rather appreciate objections presented in this vigorous and synthetic form.

I know well what the bourgeois gazettes are going to tell us, what Deherme told us the day before yesterday, when he presented to us the citizen-priest:

“At the Coopération des idées, as its name indicates, everyone has the right to formulate his thought. One leaves it to each to compare the opinions present, to appreciate their value, and to form a reasoned conviction.”

Thereupon, Deherme reminded us of a few eloquent sentences from a speech by Gabriel Séailles, and he concluded that we should listen religiously to the homily of Mr. Denis. I would not be far from believing that Deherme somewhat mistook the thought of Mr. Séailles; if the eminent professor had heard the commentaries with which the citation was accompanied, I imagine they might have seemed to him indiscreet. Be that as it may, is it not most distressing to see that Mr. Deherme has let himself be taken in by the sophisms of the so-called liberals, and that his error risks compromising the success of his work?

We must not, in fact, allow the clericals, under cover of liberalism, to make fools of us — even at the price of a few shares of stock in a future palace of the people. The priest who makes advances to us invites us to meditate the cynical declaration of Veuillot: “We ask them for liberty because it is in their principles; we refuse it to them because it is not in ours.” Since we are forewarned, let us try not to be dupes. If this sentence sums up most exactly all clerical policy, it indicates to us at the same time what attitude we must observe toward Catholicism. This defiant and defensive attitude is only too justified. Since the clericals do not want liberty, they cannot claim that it be refused to them. They have taken from themselves the right to complain. As Ferry said, whose memory I like to invoke, to please Le Temps: “It would be absurd and criminal to have tolerance for the intolerant.”

Not only has Deherme not followed his program, as he seems to believe, but he has put himself in flagrant contradiction with his principles. At the Popular University of the Faubourg Antoine, all ideas are freely set forth. Very well. But that can mean only one thing: that one receives with equal sympathy all those who present themselves and who speak in the name of reason. Now, by its own admission, is Catholicism not the brutal negation of everything rational? Is it not absurdity itself erected as dogma? We for our part speak reason; and we cannot converse with those who do not speak our language.

This is why I join with Maurice Bouchor in begging Deherme not to confuse the spirit with the Holy Spirit. Let him open his door wide to those who come to bring or to ask for light; but let him close it to those who come to blow out the torch. “Down with the skullcap!”

No doubt it would not have been without elegance to say to Abbé Denis:

— Admire our tolerance. Never would you have permitted a freethinker to speak in your church. But we are of a broader and more generous spirit: we consent to listen to you. Acknowledge in good grace that it is we who put into practice the precept of your Christ: it is we who render good for evil.

Is that not what Deherme wished? I suppose that if he solicited or accepted the assistance of this ecclesiastic, it is less from weakness than from coquetry. But is the moment well chosen to flirt with the Church? It is not at the hour when the clericals prowl around the popular universities and seek to slip into them surreptitiously “in order to modify their spirit” that it is fitting to open one’s arms to them and wipe away their Lamourette kiss.

People cried, the other evening: “One must not let the wolf into the sheepfold.” Let us not exaggerate: I am quite disposed for my part to consider Abbé Denis a very formidable wolf; but I was able to convince myself, the day before yesterday, that our comrades of the Faubourg are not yet ready to let themselves be devoured.

There can be no ambiguity about the meaning of their protests. The people do not have enough leisure to listen to theologians. There is a small number of truths acquired, of postulates that it is useless to call incessantly into question. In coming to the Popular University, Abbé Denis wastes his time, and ours.

Moreover, it is now nearly two thousand years that the churchmen have had the floor; we are beginning to know what they have to tell us. And they still have enough pulpits to repeat it to those who wish to hear them. If they wish to permit us to go to their places to give them a reply, if they invite Jaurès or Pressensé to come set forth the socialist doctrine to the faithful of Saint-Sulpice or Notre-Dame, then we shall be delighted to return their courtesy. Until then, let the clericals not be surprised if in our relations with them we do them the honor of adopting clerical policy.

A UNIVERSITY MAN

I do not wish to deal incidentally with the Deherme incident. I believe this affair, forgotten today, but which will return in some form, remains morally the most serious and the principal one of this entire year. I do not know Deherme. I do not know his affair well. I shall inform myself about it. But I draw the attention of honest people, of you, of the University man, who is an honest man, to the tone of this article. Written by a polemicist, it would be disquieting but habitual. Written by a university man, it is deplorable. I tell you in truth, Jaurès: every time that articulate speech is drowned out by noise, by inarticulate clamor, even if the speech were that of our worst enemies, and even if the clamor were from our friends, for those who know how to see to the bottom, it is we who are defeated.

The symptoms multiply. Blind you who do not see them. In the Petite République dated Wednesday, January 9, 1901, the same University man writes:

On the other hand, what displeases me in the manual of Mr. Brunetière — which, in a proud homage to his master Bossuet, he himself qualifies as a Discourse on the History of Literature — is that it appears to us as a sort of appendix to the Discourse on Universal History; what frightens me is that it is animated by the same sectarian spirit and that it could bear the same subtitle: “To explain the continuity of religion”; what seems to me monstrous is that a secular professor, whose first duty is to teach his students the value and proper use of reason, applies himself insolently to convince reason of error, imposture, and imbecility…

Crime of high treason, if ever there was one! And I am not exaggerating. Was Esterhazy, revealing to Schwarzkoppen the mechanism of the 120 short gun, truly more guilty than this lecturer at the Ecole Normale and at the Vatican, who claims to deliver to the Church the soul of French youth?

I ask you, Jaurès, you who were among the first to measure for us the crime of Esterhazy, do you admit that the treason of Mr. Ferdinand Brunetière is identical to the treason of the commanding count? If, as I believe, the university man is serious, if truly the crime of Mr. Brunetière is like the crime of Mr. Esterhazy, the same crime entails the same sanction, and you perceive the path that leads to the burning of books, awaiting the burning of authors. If the university man is not entirely serious, by what right does he not write seriously for the people who read their newspaper seriously?

Elsewhere than in your pages the symptoms multiply. The mania of persecution and the mania of grandeur that alter the mentality of Gohier exercise growing ravages there. You have known the wholly military brutality with which yesterday and recently he treated a man like Jean Grave. In L’Aurore of Tuesday, February, he wrote:

Since people demand, in order to enforce the law against the cassock, that the exhibition of the cassock be a subject of scandal and a cause of disorder, nothing is easier than to fulfill this condition.

In those communes where the municipality is republican enough to issue the decrees in question — the majority of voters is republican enough to facilitate their execution.

Let the anticlericals therefore do what is necessary.

Let cassocks and frocks be seen in the noisiest taverns, in the most disreputable establishments.

Let all drunkards arrested on the public way find themselves, as if by chance, draped in a cassock. Let the appearance of a cassock excite in the village, as if by enchantment, the howlings of dogs and the hoots of urchins.

The most exacting jurists will be satisfied, and the mayor will intervene in the fullness of his powers.

You can read well enough that these lines need no commentary. From the dailies these manners have overflowed into the reviews, which, by their very institution and by their readership, still had some propriety. In the Revue Blanche of April 1, 1900, François Daveillans published this political and social note. Of all the cynical things published about the amnesty, this note is the most cynical. It is upon it and upon its author that the letter of Zola and the irreproachable letter of Colonel Picquart fall most heavily. I reproduce this note for you:

It would be well to tackle it once and for all among Dreyfusards of the day before, among violent and intransigent Dreyfusards — of whom I am one — but I mean to tackle it otherwise than by howlings or rodomontades, or otherwise too than by silences and abstentions.

One must vote yes or no and give reasons for one’s vote.

1. Does our cause authorize us to sacrifice innocents to it? That is what one must first decide. I count our hostages. Since, is it not so, we have confidence in the partiality of military justice, and since even a Dreyfusard minister of war, ordering it, by innovation, to be an effective justice, would not be obeyed, Colonel Picquart, if he comes before the court-martial that threatens him, will receive two to five years in prison. Since we count on a nationalist jury at Versailles, Emile Zola, who will not have in his pocket a written order given by the minister to the judges of Esterhazy, will not have made his proof and may well receive a year in prison. Since we distrust, by experience, the possible jury even in Paris, we must consider possible a year in prison for Joseph Reinach. Do we have the right, not to let, but to have accomplished the sacrifice that these men offer to our cause?

2. Are the compensations for this sacrifice, which I now suppose to be accomplished (with or without our consent), worth it? Let us count. General de Boisdeffre, General Gonse, General de Pellieux, General Chamoin, Colonel Maurel, Commandant Lauth, the archivist Gribelin — I pass over others — for the various crimes, false testimonies, forgeries and complicity in forgery, falsification of judicial dossiers, collusion, etc., of which they may be accused, are subject to courts-martial. That is enough said. Need I add that in the case these “tribunals” would be all the more suspect as they would be composed of officers higher in rank? On the other hand, it would be repugnant to us (for we have had and shall have such delicacies) to abolish the competence of courts-martial in matters of common law, by a law that, while justifiable in equity and applicable in law, would nonetheless coincide too closely with the circumstance. And would we obtain this law? There remains General Mercier, who could be referred to the High Court. But besides the fact that this procedure, without precedent under our present constitution, would consequently be uncertain, what grievances would be invoked for the prosecution? The communication of secret documents to judges, which is no doubt an abominable crime, has the defect of not being expressly provided for by our Code. Here, in matters of penalties and no longer of procedure, a law could not be retroactive without violating a fundamental principle of public law. What then? Forgery and use of forgery (use of the inexact text of the Panizzardi dispatch)?

Or what else?

What is not uncertain, what does not depend on a regrettable deficiency of the law, is that this man, for the majority of consciences that we know, is, with complete certainty, with complete conviction, a criminal. Well then, cannot he be made to purge, by ourselves alone, in our midst, a penalty more formidable than any code could inflict upon him? Have you already met this man in a street, with his furtive and despite everything uneasy eye, the swagger of a gait too “bold” not to be affected?

This man, I tell you, is afraid of being recognized, recognized by these passers-by, these children whom he neither knows nor recognizes — and who have a clear conscience. We, simple citizens, of our own legitimate authority, we can by ourselves alone decide, and, by portraits disseminated, by lectures, by vast edifying publicity, we can by ourselves alone execute this punishment of General Mercier: that everywhere, that always, he be recognized.

3. Are the questions, as they are presently posed, posed to the best advantage of our cause? The Dreyfusards who, in the Dreyfus affair, saw only Dreyfus will not understand this doubt. I address myself to the others. It is understood that Captain Dreyfus cannot be stripped of his human right, of the right to demonstrate his innocence and rehabilitate himself legally. In that case, do we have reason to devote one or several years of struggle to demonstrating that Colonel Picquart did not hand over the Boulot file and did not betray the secret of the carrier pigeons? Do we have a chance, on the rest of the story, or even on the main point, of arriving — I do not say at the total truth appearing, but merely at the portion of truth won to this day being recognized as truth by adversaries riveted to their bad faith or their imbecility? Do we have a chance of sweeping along, in the work of this impossible conversion, the republican mass of the country? — On the other hand, I see notably another posing of the question: Of the Jesuits and of us, they are too many, or else we are, in the same country, for the same “republic.” Here the ground is broad, here it is solid, here we shall be followed. “Let’s go!”

FRANCOIS DAVEILLANS

I do not linger to comment on this note for you. You can still read. I have reproduced it for you because it exactly represents the mentality of your future encyclopedists. The author is an important man, the most important of your young encyclopedic men. He is an agrégé of philosophy. Received first, I believe. He is one of the four authors of the history of the variations of the General Staff. There would be a lamentable history to write of the variations of the authors and readers of the history of the variations of the General Staff. In short, he is someone of whom Mr. Francois Simiand has the highest opinion. In the Revue Blanche of February 1, 1901, under the title: “What the Voters Will Understand,” he published this lesson in political immorality. I repeat that the author has high ambitions and you will tell me if your conscience as an honest man is reassured.

Seized, willy-nilly, of the question by the vote of the Chamber that imposes upon their attention, in every corner of the country, the large white posters bearing the speech of Mr. Waldeck-Rousseau, will the voters initiate themselves into the subtle controversy of the jurists, take sides for or against “the cause or object contrary to public order,” and have a precise opinion on common law or exception law applicable to religious congregations?

Their judgment, no doubt, will be less technical and more simple. Some will judge that “the Republic” declares war on “Religion,” that is to say on their religion, on Catholicism. Others will judge that “the Modern Spirit” enters a new struggle with “the Spirit of the Past.” Must one respect or must one, once again, try to hinder militant Catholicism in France? There is the question on which the majority will count itself.

The deputies perhaps nuance their judgment a little more, and perhaps pause a little more over scruples of doctrine, through the illusory conscience of legislators whose crude empiricism readily imagines itself to be and to develop a rational system of principles. But, on the whole, the deputies represent fairly exactly the simplism of the voters.

Whether we regret it or not, it does not depend on Mr. Waldeck-Rousseau that the democratic will, from which, in this affair, he draws his force and his impetus, be concerned and delighted to found a fine juridical construction. There is not its work. It is to bring down Jesuitism and to fortify democracy. It is the business of lawyers to find the parade reasons behind which the interest of conservation, still having timidities about purely and simply affirming its legitimacy, willingly shelters its defense, and to choose the honest formulas that, clothed in the generality of law, will ensure the ends pursued in the present case, without risking for the future compromising other ends, equally dear and equally well-founded.

But that, through love of their realized fictions, and through superstition for their systems inadequate to the concrete life of law and custom, these delegates to the juridical formula should end up hampering the movements of democracy itself when they have as their sole mission to hamper those of its adversaries — that is what the democratic will shall neither understand nor tolerate. The end shall not, by us, be subordinated to the means.

One must hope, for the share of the goal that is common to us, and for the success of the total work, initiated or compromised at the first detail, that the divergences foreseen in the bloc of the majority, whose support the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet has until now merited and obtained, shall manage to attenuate themselves and become a new and better understanding, fast enough and soon enough so that the common and attentive adversary shall be once more disappointed.

FRANCOIS DAVEILLANS

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