Quelques mots sur Proudhon

A Few Words on Proudhon

Georges Sorel

In the Petite République of Tuesday, 22 January, Jaurès drew our attention to “a very substantial and very penetrating summary of the entire work of the powerful thinker and writer” that Proudhon was; he congratulates the author, M. Bourgin, for not having imitated those people who content themselves with calling Proudhon a petty bourgeois and excuse themselves “from reading and understanding him.” This article struck me; and perhaps the readers of the Cahiers have been, like me, very glad to learn that henceforth Proudhon is officially reinstated among the authors of socialism — a few years ago he was excommunicated: “M. P. Lafargue,” says M. Bourdeau (Débats, 6 March 1896), “treats Proudhon as a reactionary, and another socialist has invited the daughters of the conservatives to plant roses on his tomb” — Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, ranked Proudhon among the conservative and bourgeois socialists.¹

If Proudhon is rehabilitated, it is because one can apparently be a socialist without signing the official papers of the General Committee; Proudhon would never have consented to accept the profession of faith demanded of delegates to the congresses of the Avenue Wagram.

Glancing at the bibliography that Jaurès describes as “very carefully compiled,” I noticed two curious gaps in the list of books to consult on Proudhon. M. Bourgin leaves us unaware that Marx wrote in 1847 The Poverty of Philosophy, and that in 1896 M. A. Desjardins, member of the Institut and Advocate General at the Cour de Cassation, published two volumes on Proudhon. These two omissions made me suspect that the author may have worked according to the methods of the famous university man, and that the summary of the entire work might well be incomplete.

Why, in the analysis of the Economic Contradictions, suppress the celebrated Chapter VIII on Providence? This chapter is essential, however, for Proudhon never ceased to develop his ideas on the opposition between the divine and the human, between authority and liberty, between the right of force and economic right; without this duality there is no way to fit the study of history into frameworks that allow the theories of natural right to be put to use. The manner in which M. Bourgin has spoken of the book on War and Peace makes me suspect that he was afraid to submit Proudhon’s ideas to his readers in their entirety — ideas that seem to him surprising, at times “without connection and without system.”

Why present to us in so unintelligible and so truncated a fashion the solution to the problem of population? In general, M. Bourgin suppresses everything Proudhon wrote on chastity; it is for this reason that he has said almost nothing of the Principle of Art and that he has not at all set forth what Proudhon thought about divorce.

Why not acquaint us with the conception of life that Proudhon developed so many times? Labour is an emanation of the spirit, the privilege and the glory of man; it will never be attractive, but it can be ennobled; it will go on forever increasing, and humanity will never surpass an honest and decent poverty. These austere conceptions are not to everyone’s taste today.

Why not say a word about the project for reforming the Concordat? This is perhaps on account of the justification Proudhon gave for it: “The French nation was not prepared for the regime of pure morality by a Protestant preparation, and, if one wishes to avoid a relapse into mysticism and even into superstition, the most effective means is to preserve, as far as the principles of the Revolution permit, the ecclesiastical ministry.” (Justice, vol. VI, p. 342.)

I shall not enumerate other omissions of detail; there would be too many; but I ask myself why M. Bourgin did not analyse the famous pamphlet: The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d’État. The socialist parties vanquished, Proudhon thought that Napoleon would be, like his uncle, obliged to pass into law many of the revolutionary ideas; and he saw in certain acts of the dictator indications of a politics capable of overturning the entire old world. He called upon the republicans not to shut themselves up in idle opposition but to enter the Assemblies to defend the interests of the people. Later he was to preach abstention, when, the country having emerged from a revolutionary period, the question was whether or not to collaborate with the old opposition groups and a regular government. Against deviations and compromises (as one would say today), Proudhon proclaimed the necessity of a split and declared: “In this strange combination of monarchical authority and capitalist and mercantile anarchy that constitutes the bourgeois order, opposition to power appears as an integral part of the system, by no means as an eventual protest.” (Political Capacity, p. 189.) It was not merely to combat the Empire, but above all so as not to mix the socialist people with the more or less advanced bourgeoisie, that he advocated abstention. One would hardly guess this from reading the substantial summary.

What was Proudhon’s historical role? M. Bourgin has gone to great trouble (pp. 52–73) to find verbal analogies between Proudhon’s formulas and earlier ones; I am well aware that people had spoken of banks before him and even before Saint-Simon; I believe I can affirm that it is completely inaccurate to say that Proudhon is “greatly indebted to Fourier.” I am very surprised that the author did not point out what so many others had pointed out before him: the juridical character of Proudhon’s work, a character that separates it so distinctly from all the works of the earlier socialists. Proudhon does not seek a system of authority that delivers to each person what the utopian believes to be the individual share; he wants that, through the reform of mores, the progress of economic institutions, and a growing respect for juridical forms, there should come about, according to the rules of law, an equilibrium that gives, as well as possible, satisfaction to the need for justice. — It would not have been useless, in this connection, to point out the importance he attached to legal forms and the opposition he mounted against the law on the right of coalition.

Proudhon’s influence has not been very great up to now on French socialism: the federalist ideas that manifested themselves in the International could have arisen without him, for they had historical origins — but Marx’s influence has not been particularly notable either.

I believe the moment has come when Proudhonian ideas, after having exercised a great influence on contemporary bourgeois thought, are about to become considerable for the future of socialism. The fundamental question that is posed at present, the one that hides beneath the appearance of quarrels between schools, is the question of State socialism; MM. Millerand and Waldeck-Rousseau² are the representatives of this doctrine, which has on its side the monarchical tradition of France. The danger presented by the revival of the Saint-Simonian spirit among the intellectuals who have come to socialism has already been pointed out here.³

The reforms being undertaken everywhere may lead to very different results depending on the ideas that the proletariat forms of its role; they may lead to State socialism of a more or less demagogic kind (as history acquaints us with so many examples in countries in decline), if the workers believe themselves called to receive the protection of the State and ask for favours; — they may lead to a certain evolution in the direction of proletarian socialism, if the workers acquire the sense of right and pursue the emancipation of their class on the terrain of economic organisations. In this case, they will be faithful to Proudhon’s ideas.

Among so many projects that are in the air in the various countries, it is essential to assign a special role to those that concern credit institutions, the facilities afforded to commerce, and transport at cost price. All these projects, which may be defined as a progressive socialisation of exchange, are inspired by Proudhonian ideas; I do not believe they can be seriously studied without reading, with great care, what Proudhon wrote on these matters — which seem somewhat foreign to M. Bourgin.

Today, finally, when it is no longer possible to content oneself with the cutting formula of the Manifesto — “The proletarians have no fatherland” — and when people are searching, on all sides, for how socialism can be reconciled with the idea of the fatherland, it will not be useless to reread Proudhon, who was so preoccupied with questions of foreign policy, who, in the national interest, fought vigorously against Italian unification, and who so ardently defended the European equilibrium created by the treaties of 1815. — I have been unable to find any indication of these very grave questions in M. Bourgin’s summary.

References

Proudhon. Federation and Unity in Italy. — Complete Works, vol. XVI, p. 137 (written in 1862):

Whatever may be the opinion of a statesman in matters of faith, unless he serves a revolutionary government armed for revolutionary propaganda, he is forbidden to act upon thought and religious institutions, and notably to settle, to the detriment of the Holy See — as the imperial government is ceaselessly urged to do — the question of temporal power. Leaving aside the fact that the separation of the spiritual and the temporal, pushed to its logical conclusion, reduces in theory to an absurdity and in practice to a hypocrisy, it is not by such means that beliefs are demolished and that Churches and sects destroy themselves.

Philosophy alone, and the most radical philosophy, acting slowly upon free intelligences, is competent here. All that an ordinary government can do, obliged as it is to tolerate opinions and creeds, is to let time do its work and to abstain from all initiative. Troublemakers threaten the Papacy with schism, even with Protestantism; a few, outrageous flatterers, propose to Napoleon III that he declare himself the head of the spiritual as well as of the temporal. One may judge, from such fantasies, the disarray of minds. The schism, if it were serious — I mean if it truly had as its cause religious sentiment, the Christian idea — would be the triumph of the Papacy, by showing how solid still is the rock upon which the Church is built. Protestantism is dead: only Germanic hacks can call themselves Christians while denying the authority of the Church and the divinity of Christ. As for making Napoleon III the head of the spiritual, in imitation of the first Caesars: that is where I await him. On that day, the Revolution would say to him, as Saint Remi said to Clovis: “Bow thy head, proud Sicambrian; worship what thou hast burned and burn what thou hast worshipped.” But it is not the empire of the Gauls that he would receive as a reward for his baptism…

Proudhon. On the Federative Principle and the Need to Reconstitute the Party of the Revolution. — Complete Works, vol. VIII, pp. 206–207 (written in 1863):

The true, the sole question between the party of faith and the party of progress is the moral question, in which we are certain to fail and condemn ourselves by waging against our antagonist a disloyal war, and by adding hypocrisy to spoliation.⁴ What sustains the Church against all attacks and what makes the Catholic party the most powerful of all — M. Fr. Morin must know this better than anyone — is not its unity; it is the weakening of consciences that no idea, from above or from below, any longer supports; it is the materialism of our education; it is the abandonment of revolutionary thought, replaced by the most detestable pharisaism; it is our impure romanticism and our Voltairean libertinism.

I believe and I await the end of the temporal papacy, since I believe and I await absolute justice and the pure morality of humanity, of which the French Revolution was, in my view, the precursor. I believe, therefore, that there will come a day when spiritual authority will no longer be distinguished from temporal authority, since both will be founded on the same conscience, the same reason, and the same freedom. What fills me with dread and what I would weep tears of blood over is some juggling reform, borrowed from Luther and Calvin; some mockery of a state religion or national church copied from Henry VIII; worse still, some new cult of the Supreme Being or of Reason, some theophilanthropy, some Mapa or other spiritist or Mormon folly.

In the dilapidation of souls, I believe any superstition possible. Our so-called Voltaireanism does not reassure me; I have no confidence in freethinkers who know only how to jest and enjoy themselves. Philosophy, if it is not armoured with virtue, inspires in me nothing but disdain. That is why, while maintaining toward the Church the position that the Revolution has, in my view, established for the modern world, I denounce to public contempt, together with the manoeuvres of the unitary democracy, the see-sawing of a pantheism without morals⁵ and of a clique without principles.

Proudhon. On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, vol. IV, pp. 240–243 (written in 1858):

The first feeling that man experiences at the sight of woman is entirely one of love; he will not linger there long. From the intoxication of the senses he passes rapidly to the adoration of the soul, and when he still imagines himself a lover, he has already become a just man and a saint.

All that man sees in woman, as in a mirror where his conscience beholds itself, woman tends to become; and woe to her, woe to them both, if she betrays the realisation of love, if she fails to meet the secret expectation of man!

Disdain for sexual love and for sensual pleasure: Let the man tormented by lascivious thoughts look upon his wife — he blushes, and he is happy to blush, because he believes her to be beyond his torment. No doubt it is from him that she received modesty, as she received from him, in the nuptial ceremony, the ring and the crown; but this modesty has become incarnate in her person — she alone knows how to be chaste and faithful. And the collective conscience of women bears witness to this immense generosity of their hearts: they abhor the lascivious, the fickle, the unfaithful.

Sensual pleasure conquered, man has become a hero; no effort will cost him any longer; such is the influence of woman upon him. The first, by her chastity, she set the example; in return she demands that man show himself valiant, enterprising, distinguished, always ready for duty and sacrifice.

The practice of work and of justice: Woman, whatever she may learn or undertake, is not, by the destination of her sex, industrious, agricultural, a merchant, a scholar, any more than a judge, a man of war, or a statesman. She may well lend us some aid in our labours, assist us with some counsel in our transactions: at all times she has taken for herself the gentlest portion of labour… As for her justice, it is like her philosophy: she has no other than religion. The woman who prays is sublime;⁶ a man on his knees is almost as ridiculous as one who dances an entrechat.

None of this, however, constitutes the mission of woman: her true lot is to be entrusted with the guardianship of our morals and our characters, charged with ceaselessly representing to us, in her person, our ideal conscience. What connection, tell me, between such a destiny and pleasure? More than one man has owed to the presence of his wife his not having faltered; more than one woman, after having dreamed in her husband of the assemblage of virile virtues, has wasted away upon finding herself bound to a coward, to a corpse.

I had the good fortune to have a mother chaste among all women, and, despite the poverty of her peasant upbringing, of an extraordinary good sense. Seeing me grow up and already troubled by the dreams of youth, she said to me: “Never speak of love to a young woman, even when you intend to marry her.”

I was long in understanding this precept, absolute in its formulation, which proscribed even the excuse of a good motive. How could love, that thing so sweet, be condemned by the mouth of a woman? Whence did she derive this austere morality? Never, I declare, have I read or heard anything of such force. Did she mean that married persons should not love each other?… Of course not: she had divined, by an elevated sense of marriage, what philosophical analysis has demonstrated to us: that love must be drowned in justice; that to caress this passion is to diminish oneself and already to corrupt oneself; that love is not pure in itself; that once its office has been fulfilled — the revelation of the ideal and the impulse given to conscience — we must set it aside, as the shepherd, having curdled the milk, removes the rennet; and that all amorous conversation, even between betrothed, even between husband and wife, is unseemly, destructive of domestic respect, of the love of work, and of the practice of social duty.

Footnotes

1. It should be noted that in the Manifesto there is a separate section for petty-bourgeois socialism; Proudhon would be entirely bourgeois, according to this document. — These notes are by M. Sorel. ↩

2. In a speech to the trade association of the paper industry, M. Millerand proclaimed himself the faithful and modest collaborator in the social work pursued by the President of the Council (Débats, 19 January 1901). At Lens he had delivered a pompous eulogy of the employers’ works of social peace: one could draw an entire catechism of social peace from his improvisations. ↩

3. See the fourth cahier of the second series. ↩

4. This text is a polemic concerning Italian unity and the temporal power of the pope. ↩

5. An obvious allusion to the last Saint-Simonians. ↩

6. Madame Ackermann was, one day, scandalised to see a crucifix hanging in the room of Madame Proudhon. ↩