De l'Église et de l'État, fragments
TO SUBSCRIBERS
ON THE FUTURE OF THE UNIVERSITES POPULAIRES
have been cited here. We know the deplorable state of the Socialist Party today, its pursuit of a narrow unity for which the best individuals as well as the worst expend their energies, the flagrant immorality of the press that the working class reads; we also know the federalist tendencies that are beginning to make their appearance, the idea that is emerging of uniting the workers’ institutions of a single city, of a single region, and the founding of local workers’ newspapers. One understands that the struggle manifesting itself there between centralization and federalism, the vileness of the centralizers and the clumsiness and blunders of the federalists, will have a considerable influence on the development and evolution of the Universites Populaires.
To wish indeed to shield the U.P. from the various influences manifesting themselves in the workers’ movement would be folly. It would also be a grave error, a serious fault. It is necessary that, at the risk of perishing in the attempt, the various U.P. play their role; that, at the risk of corrupting themselves, they seek to influence the development of other workers’ institutions, whether political or economic. It has been said that at the moment when the principles of justice and individual liberty had to be upheld, the intellectuals emerged from their “ivory tower,” and great hopes were conceived for their participation
Charles Guieysse
in public life: the U.P. must not become new towers where men of the working class would shut themselves in with intellectuals. That at the moment of their birth, their life should be entirely interior is necessary; but when they are growing, they must bear witness to their strength by intervening wherever the principles of justice and liberty must be upheld; they must have an exterior life; otherwise they would merit no interest whatsoever.
In the departments, it seems clear that they are beginning to play this role; in Paris, they have been able to affirm on several occasions their exterior strength (campaign against the use of white lead, movement of sympathy toward Russian students…).
To act thus externally, they must consider what bonds will unite them among themselves, what bonds will unite them to other workers’ institutions.
Among themselves, a vast federation is impossible, for to federate so great a number of scattered organizations would lead either to a bad centralization from which only Paris would profit, or to a union so loose as to be useless. What seems bound to happen are regional federations (including one for the department of the Seine); one can conceive of the U.P. of neighboring cities uniting usefully, working together on the founding of U.P. in intermediate centers, organizing tours in the countryside, lending one another their lecturers, visiting one another.
In Paris, federation can be accomplished fairly quickly, as soon as each U.P. has resolved the budgetary question for itself. In certain provincial regions, it is being prepared.
For the work of consolidating the U.P., through federation and by every other means, there is a Society that can render services: the Societe des Universites Populaires. It was founded at the moment when the bourgeoisie had drawn closer to the working class, and it has gathered only bourgeois individuals; it must therefore not intervene directly in the conduct of the U.P., which are workers’ institutions. But precisely because it brings together people who love liberty for its own sake and wish the working class to win its emancipation, it can play, in relation to the whole of the U.P., the role that I have attributed to isolated intellectuals in relation to each U.P.: a consultative role. Let the Societe des U.P., without claiming any precise and immediate direction, help the U.P. in every useful way: let it gather intellectual forces to make them penetrate into the working class, while leaving the latter mistress of its own destinies and institutions. This is what it can and must do, without binding the U.P., as workers’ institutions, tightly and organically around itself.
As for the bonds that can and must exist between a U.P. and the other workers’ institutions of the same locality, it is premature to speak of them, for we possess few experimental data; it is not enough for us to know that several Bourses du Travail have founded U.P., and that a Cooperative houses a U.P.
And what it matters above all to insist upon today is this: that because the U.P. is the most recent and weakest institution today, there is no reason, however, for it to submit to other political and economic institutions. Its essential aim is to uphold the principle of liberty amid the various events that mark the class struggle; and, working for its part to develop working-class consciousness, its need seems to be to remind us that the union of all forces can and must be achieved without new servitudes, that order and method can and must be established without creating new social hierarchies, and that if, in the great movement of emancipation of the working class, the latter loses for a single instant the concern for liberty, the movement will not succeed.
Le Gerant: Charles Peguy
This cahier was composed and printed at the rate of unionized workers.
IMPRIMERIE DE SURESNES
Guieysse will forgive me for using for this personal testimony a few pieces of a cahier that was entirely his, of a cover that I wished to assign to Pages libres.
I have criticized very harshly in these very cahiers. I shall begin again as soon as it can be done honestly. I am the most resolute adversary of his ministerialism and of a certain parliamentarism that they have. But that is not the issue.
The issue is a vulgar ambush and a concerted assassination. They say in the editorial rooms, bad places, and they repeat that they have him this time, that they were waiting for him there, that they are going to break his back, that he must die from it, that he must not come back from it, that they must hear no more of him. And before the howling of all the dogs of all the packs, certain friends fall silent, wait, listen to the voice of wisdom.
Let me therefore be permitted to formally renew to Jaures the assurance of my old friendship. It is worth what it is worth. It is not the friendship of a powerful man of this world. It is rough. But it is guarded against certain bouts of amnesia. The man who literally exhausted his body and his strength in the great strike of Carmaux, the man who exhausted himself in the Dreyfus affair, deserves to be fought loyally. And every man has the right to be fought loyally.
I therefore take note and put myself down for this: that I am waiting to say everything I believe I have to say on and against the politics of Jaures, the tactics of Jaures, the action of Jaures, the philosophy of Jaures, the theory and practice of Jaures, until the odious rush of barbarians and ingrates, of boors and envious men, of nationalists and antisemites, and of militarists, of brutes and ragers, of enemies and false friends, has somewhat subsided.
Finally I put myself down for this: I admire more than anyone the ardor of M. Gohier. I declare that he has had an almost unique talent. I add that he has very often been right. He can once again become one of the pillars of the Republic. But if he takes it upon himself to lead us into denunciation by the terror of denunciation, I will not follow.
I do not wish to commit the cahiers to so grave a personal declaration. But it will be admitted that having safeguarded here as much as I could all liberties, and the perfect liberty of all our contributors, I also safeguard my own.
Charles Peguy
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On the Church and the State
Fragments
Georges Sorel
CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE
PARIS
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The fragments that are about to be read are taken from a study recently published by the Revue Socialiste. We were unable to present here more than two-thirds of this work. Those of our subscribers who wish to read it in its entirety will find it in the Revue Socialiste, issues of August, September and October 1901. Or else they may request from us the offprint published by the Librairie Jacques, rue Casimir-Delavigne, Paris.
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Much obscurity has been cast on the question of ecclesiastical property as a result of the habit that has been formed of confusing it with the property of private individuals; and this confusion stems from the use of the fiction of the civil person. This fiction was born from the conveniences of Roman procedure and corresponds to no adequate philosophical notion. It is worth noting that for quite some time religious orders have hardly solicited this favor anymore, which is not necessary for their functioning. “What does it matter to you,” say the monks, “our system of internal administration? The law would be right to impose upon us the obligation of having civil personality if we did not have solvent representatives who assume all the responsibilities that may arise. If we cause damages, it must be possible to prosecute us and to have judgments enforced. The question is whether, in fact, our representatives give every guarantee to those who might have to litigate against us. (1) We are sometimes exposed to being deceived by our trusted agents; but we content ourselves with this situation.”
Why then are laws made concerning religious associations, if these associations are content with the regime of common law?
Before the Revolution, the problem of mortmain arose above all from the agronomic point of view; it was observed that the vast estates of the abbeys were often neglected, because the monks did not wish to deprive themselves of a part of their revenues to make improvements; the popes themselves (2) struggled in vain for centuries to try to have the Roman countryside cultivated. It was thought that families attached to the soil would cultivate better than corporations, which had all the vices of latifundists living far from the land and taking no interest in it. Experience proved that one had not been mistaken.
It was found absurd, at a time when the country was poor, to levy on total revenue an enormous sum destined to maintain a large army of people who remained idle. It is quite remarkable that during the years that followed the Revolution, many families of the petite bourgeoisie complained of having lost an outlet for their children.
It is well known, finally, how much the question of population preoccupied our forebears; they thought that property is above all made for families, to permit the raising of children; thus the monasteries must have seemed to them not to deserve the right of being property owners. (1)
Today economic considerations no longer have as much value as in the eighteenth century. Within the Church a militant party has been formed; its wealth and its administration therefore interest the statesman far more than the jurist and the economist. Legislation now has as its object the control of this fortune; Napoleon had subjected the property of the secular clergy to state surveillance; the law just passed establishes an analogous regime for that of the regular clergy. Religious associations are no longer societies able to freely pursue particular ends; one must rather compare them to seminaries, cathedral chapters, church vestries; they will not be assimilated to associations having acquired civil personality through a declaration of public utility; they become auxiliary bodies, almost public establishments. (1)
It is quite remarkable that according to the theory of M. Waldeck-Rousseau, these official religious associations will never be property owners; they will merely have the administration of certain goods, assigned to the uses for which the State authorizes them to function. But if they come to be dissolved, the donors may reclaim the goods, without prescription being opposable to them; and what has not been reclaimed will become property without an owner. (2) I believe that this doctrine is the one that corresponds most exactly to the true nature of things. The Church is incapable of owning property.
In politics as in economics, people have ultimately come to accept that wisdom is dispersed among the masses, that the value of things can only be measured through trial, and that one must appeal as much as possible to experimentation. The parliamentary regime is founded on the same principle as the capitalist economic regime; it functions properly only in countries where the modern industrial spirit is strongly developed and where the industrial classes play a preponderant role in Parliaments. It is a regime where everything is provisional; the variability of power has the consequence of facilitating successive corrections in laws and of not allowing abuses to accumulate in an increasing progression. What is above all essential in countries of modern liberty is the control exercised by any citizen over public authorities; and the legislation relating to the press has been drafted so that this control may be exercised with virtually no limits. Respect for authority is reduced to nothing in politics, just as in industry; the revision of laws is perpetually on the agenda, just as the transformation of accepted technical processes.
The Church understands nothing of this regime, which seems to it to be the very negation of all reason; it wonders where this feverish activity is leading; it seems absurd to it to launch out with such audacity upon unknown roads. Its notion of property, so vague, its conception of a simple right of use granted by God to man, its idea of a human community governed by Providence — these are so many reasons that make it difficult for it to grasp this complete rupture effected by man in nature, this independence of each producer who tries out what he invents exposing only himself, this rage for destroying the old aspects of things to try, at the hazard of each person’s genius. It seems to the Church that this audacity of the modern Prometheus closely resembles a sacrilege; accordingly, it has not failed to hurl anathemas against this spirit that respects nothing.
Catholic authors have, on the whole, seen clearly enough that religious anarchy, political anarchy and economic anarchy are very closely connected in modern history; they have believed that these are the consequences of one and the same spirit of revolt that seized humanity in the sixteenth century; they would be three aberrations of the spirit, for which Protestantism would bear the principal responsibility. (1) “It is the same false dogma of absolute liberty which, having begun its work of destruction in the religious domain, having continued its ravages in the political order, was bound to complete its dissolving action in the economic order.” It seems far more probable that the reverse is true; Protestantism became free when it penetrated into classes that practiced industrial liberty, and it was these classes that brought the old representative constitutions to assume the parliamentary form.
We have noted elsewhere that Christianity had left aside the consideration of rights in order to speak only of duties; this theory is found to be perfectly in accord with Caesarian economics. “There are only duties, says M. Waltzing… (1) Political right or liberty: empty words for them. Civil and private rights: they are confiscated, or else just enough remains of them to facilitate the service of the State and the cities by the corporations.”
No rights! That is to say that there will no longer be in the world anything but administrative relationships; that is to say that the entire life of citizens will be subordinated to considerations of convenience and expediency, or else to the pursuit of certain general advantages that the government claims to be the only one capable of appreciating. Justice properly so called will pass to the background; this is what is very remarkable in the Church.
One of the greatest efforts of modern legislation has been to separate, as far as possible, administration and justice, so that the habits of mind acquired by the administrator do not vitiate the spirit of the judge. Under the Ancien Regime, there had often been confusion between these two offices, and our forebears had been deeply struck by abuses that they wished to eliminate. In justice, the discussion being engaged between abstract persons who base their claims on general principles, the quality of the litigants not entering into account, the citizen can defend himself against authority by invoking the law. The formalities of civil law have acquired such importance that in order to secure guarantees for the accused, no better means has been found than to copy, in criminal matters, civil procedure.
Against this approach, contemporary criminologists have raised many objections: it is obviously easy for them to show that the civil trial and the criminal trial resemble each other in no way; but everyone knows this as well as they do; the question is not of the substance of the trial, but of the means that can be employed to guarantee the accused against the authority that prosecutes him. According to the criminologists, the accused should have been turned over to experts charged with examining what are the most effective measures to take to render him harmless, or even to set him on the right path; — by analogy with what happens with the mentally ill, the experts would have been able to keep their subject as long as they judged it useful. These great advances of science would have brought us back quite simply to ecclesiastical conceptions and to the arbitrary nature of penance. The accused would have had no other guarantee than what he could find in the conscience of the experts; and that is not much.
Far from entering upon this path, a decisive step was taken in the direction of legal guarantees by granting the accused the right to have a defender during the investigation. Under the Ancien Regime he had none at any stage of the trial; he had to defend himself and, as the crowning piece of logic, he could only be admitted to make proof of the justificatory facts chosen by the judge: the conscience of the magistrate was sovereign. (1) A last remnant of this doctrine is found in a famous provision of the law of 22 prairial, year II: “The law gives as defenders to calumniated patriots patriotic jurors; it grants none to conspirators” (article 6); as in many measures taken by the revolutionary government, one finds here the influence of the Ancien Regime spirit so powerful in Robespierre.
The Church — like the modern criminologists — does not understand that the accused can claim to stand on equal footing with the authority that represents the general interest. Its tribunals are administrative councils that seek to take measures suited to making the Church prosper, to ensuring exact discipline and to avoiding scandals. All persons who have been able to study the functioning of the officialites at the end of the Ancien Regime have been able to appreciate the practical reasons that had led to giving such broad scope to the appeal as from abuse, by means of which almost all cases were eventually taken from the ecclesiastical tribunals and brought before the Parlements: the officialites were a caricature of justice.
The Church has always claimed with insistence the judgment of testaments and of marriages, because in its eyes the principal question here is a moral question and the material interests at stake should be subordinated to considerations of conscience.
The testament is, for the Church, an act that has no economic rationale; its object is satisfactory works destined to permit the purification of the soul of the dying person. (1) Whereas, for Le Play, the testament is justified by the needs of the paternal estate, that the interests of the children must be sacrificed to the needs of the enterprise, that one seeks to avoid burdening the work with debts too heavy — for the Church, the testament results in imposing charges on the estate and despoiling the heirs to the benefit of the clergy. It is the manifestation of the remorse that troubles the father’s conscience; the Church, charged with reconciling sinners and possessing rites capable of sparing them suffering in the next life, connects the testament to its disciplines of the sacrament of penance; it alone can know the state of the testator’s soul, determine what were the needs of his salvation and know whether he was disposed to make the sacrifices necessary to avoid Purgatory. In judging testaments, it took up the defense of the unfortunate absent one against avid heirs; it performed a work of protection and charity — at the same time as it increased its revenues.
Marriage has very multiple ends; but what is above all important, what has justified, according to the Roman catechism, the dignity of sacrament recognized in it, is that it serves to procreate subjects for the Church — “that people might be procreated and educated for the worship and religion of the true God and our Savior” (Ut populus ad veri Dei et Salvatoris nostri cultum et religionem procrearetur atque educaretur); (1) secondly, it serves to combat licentiousness. The ecclesiastical tribunals are police bureaus charged with surveilling morals and ensuring the complete fulfillment of matrimonial ends: from this result so many decisions that are bizarre and sometimes scandalous according to modern ideas. Separation of bed and board presents a double inconvenience: it deprives the Church of subjects and it exposes the spouses to falling into incontinence; accordingly, the canonists have contrived to force the spouses to come together again: a man who has separated from his wife convicted of adultery and who falls, in his turn, into the same fault, must resume conjugal life. It would seem to us that there is double reason to make conjugal union impossible here, but the Church judges things quite differently; the two faults compensate each other; Fourier would later say that two negations equal an affirmation.
It does not appear that the ecclesiastical doctors have managed to understand, even at the present hour, the reasons that have made divorce necessary. The Church is right when it says that marriage is not a contract for the hire of services or a contract of partnership and that thus it cannot be dissolved for the motives that bring about the rupture of civil obligations; but it does not see that in the modern State, what is essential in marriage is the authority delegated to the head of the family by the magistrate. It is because of this delegation that modern legislators have taken from the priest the right to render marriage legitimate; this authority always remains under the control of the tribunals. (1) When the union of the spouses has become impossible, when authority would be abusive, what remains of the marriage? Divorce then becomes necessary, because it is important that, in the modern State, authority always be exercised with dignity and that it not serve ends other than those for which the delegation was made. (2) The return to common life in the conditions in which the Church imposes it after double adultery would be fully destructive of dignity and seems to us today monstrous.
In testaments, the interest of families, and in marriage, respect for dignity, play a very small role in the eyes of the Church, solely occupied with its own power. (3)
Ecclesiastical law is so constituted that authority can do just about whatever it judges fitting; there are scarcely any cases where the canonists do not furnish the means of giving a legal veneer to the most arbitrary decisions; but since all their subtleties would not always be sufficient, the Church has secured for itself the faculty of overriding the rules, by reserving to the Roman pontiff the right to decide what he judges fit to decide for the greater good of the community. This intervention, which gives so much liberty to the administration, suppresses legal rights almost entirely: to employ the language of the Greek philosophers, the Church substitutes the regime of decrees for the regime of laws. (1)
Ecclesiastical law is an entirely analogous law to that part of penal law that deals with political crimes; condemnations pronounced for political offenses have never been assimilated to ordinary condemnations. The most perfect type of this legislation is found in the law of 22 prairial, year II, which I have already cited: “The rule of judgments is the conscience of jurors enlightened by love of the fatherland; their aim, the triumph of the Republic and the ruin of its enemies” (article 8). In changing fatherland and Republic to Church, one would have the rule of ecclesiastical law.
The doctrine of sovereignty was maintained for a long time in the schools for polemical reasons; to reject pontifical control over the States, the divine right of kings was invented; and the pontifical dogma became chimerical the day the princes were strong enough to enforce respect for their authority. Later the sovereignty of the peoples was invented, which gave rise to many variants: some wished that peoples could alienate their rights in favor of a family — by sale or by perpetual emphyteusis; others maintained that there could only be temporary delegation — by a sort of lease; still others claimed that citizens must live as partners. (1)
Today theories of sovereignty are abandoned by all reasonable people; the absolute is banished from politics and everyone agrees that liberty is the essence of democracy. The idea of sovereignty is today purely ecclesiastical, and if it is sometimes seen to reappear in the world, it is because ideas of Catholic origin are always very powerful. (2)
Applied to the economic domain, it leads to absurd results; it presupposes universal servitude: prohibition on producers from innovating without the permission of the police, obligation on consumers to content themselves with what the regulated corporations deign to offer them. This economic absurdity struck minds forcefully and contributed no little to undermining the ancient philosophers’ theories of sovereignty.
We have been led to consider the opposition between the modern world and the Church in already quite abstract forms; many persons claim that this is insufficient and that this opposition must be derived from the theories that modern society and the Church hold about science. Taine maintained this opinion and it is necessary to say a few words about it.
For a very long time, the representatives of liberal ideas claimed that the world is governed by principles; but in recent years a great change has occurred in their way of thinking; one could say that from idealists they have become materialists. The practice of government has shown them that things do not happen as simply as they formerly believed, and they now proclaim that ideological contradictions matter rather little in practice. They do not deny that there is an enormous distance between ecclesiastical ideas and the ideas issuing from the Revolution; but they maintain that men can devote themselves to common works without agreeing on abstract principles and that the intellectual unity of a country does not have the importance formerly attributed to it.
Taine says (1) that the conflicts existing between science and religion are capable of creating “in the soul of each Catholic a combat and painful anxieties”; he sees in this ideological conflict the great question of modern times. Granting to Taine that the picture drawn by Catholic tradition and the one that contemporary science is gradually sketching are “irreducible one to the other,” one cannot for all that accept his conclusions without proof; one would need to establish, through numerous, precise and truly demonstrative facts, that this discordance is of a nature to disturb the judgment of Catholics, whether in civil life or in scientific research. Taine, who is ordinarily so desirous of bringing proofs in support of his slightest assertions, contents himself here with reasoning. His intellectualist and quasi-mathematical psychology did not permit him to understand that there might not be an absolute parallelism between states of mind and objective conditions; consequently every contradiction between two conceptions of nature pushed to their ultimate limits of abstraction must translate into a combat in the man who accepts both of them; every contradiction that appears as grave, evident and powerful to an enlightened mind, must assume the same characteristics for every enlightened mind; what Taine judges troubling must trouble Catholics.
Experience does not show us that present-day Catholic scientists are more seriously hampered by traditional theology than free scientists are by their general hypotheses about the world. I readily acknowledge that in historical matters, ecclesiastical writers do not have absolute freedom of mind; but the same is true of all historians who concern themselves at once with scholarly research and with politics. It is well known that Rossi (1) was long accused by theologians of accumulating heresies in his publications on Christian archaeology; these attacks did not prevent him from producing a useful and considerable body of work that ultimately involves no theological conclusion.
In the eyes of Taine, the dogma of transubstantiation, as it was rigorously defined in the sixteenth century, is one of those that “are best suited to preventing forever any reconciliation between science and faith.” The example is indeed very happily chosen, because Catholic doctors committed here the great imprudence of founding this dogma on a physico-chemical theory corresponding to an ancient natural philosophy and which could, as a result, cause serious embarrassment to contemporary scientists. The question is whether, in reality, this dogma has created any hindrance for the research of Catholic physicists or chemists: no reasoning can teach us anything on this subject; one must appeal to observation; — and I believe I can affirm, on the basis of my personal research, that Taine’s hypothesis is not confirmed.
Instead of claiming that certain phenomena must occur according to the laws of psychology, it would have been more scientific to seek how the classical laws of psychology, which Taine believed to be certain, needed to be supplemented to take account of observation. There is certainly a grave problem to solve: it is certainly singular that Catholic thinkers can so easily accommodate themselves to theories that seem contradictory; but have not theologians at all times been able to make theories that are quite opposed — at least in appearance — such as those of liberty and grace, coexist peacefully?
Far from the conflicts between science and faith increasing in intensity, it seems that they were much graver formerly than today: one should ask whether the ancient conflicts were not struggles between two scientific conceptions rather than true religious questions; the denunciations of theologians often served to satisfy many hatreds, as M. Lea has shown us in his History of the Inquisition.
The theologians who condemned Galileo believed that the new astronomical theories could trouble souls, because the Scriptures had always been explained using the theory of Ptolemy; they reasoned in much the same way as Taine; but experience has shown that souls were not troubled at all. I do not believe that one can draw any conclusion, in this question, from the conduct of Descartes, who kept his treatise on Light in manuscript after the condemnation of Galileo: the Jesuit colleges were then practically the only ones destined to produce men of letters in France; Descartes was striving to create a philosophy for use by men of the world; he must therefore have wished to win the favor of the directors of the only establishments that could accept his philosophy. (1)
Taine’s explanation, in any case, could apply only to the professionals of science; and the great modern religious phenomenon is the detachment of the peoples who are abandoning the Church. (2) “Through an imperceptible and slow retreat, the great rural mass, following the example of the great urban mass, is in the process of becoming pagan again; for a hundred years the wheel has been turning in this direction, without stopping… Interior Christianity, through the double effect of its Catholic and French envelope, has grown warmer in the clergy, especially in the regular clergy; but it has grown cooler in the world.” To explain this, Taine speaks to us of the need for liberation that all classes feel today, of the iniquitous system of oppression that France suffered under the Restoration and the Second Empire, when the Church and the State marched hand in hand. In the end, it is purely historical reasons and not ideological reasons that have caused the struggle.
It is easy to see, in all the polemics engaged against the teaching of the Church, that it is political motives that direct minds. When the republican State resolved to establish secular popular education, it was not under the influence of metaphysical motives: the goal to be reached was very near and entirely material. The men who had just conquered power were persuaded that it was necessary, to ensure the duration of the Republic, to accustom the new generations to identifying Republic, Fatherland and France. They succeeded in their enterprise and more, perhaps, than they had hoped, for they engendered chauvinistic passions that were not without having greatly hindered them. (1)
The force of abstract formulas and their permanence surpass everything one can imagine; just as we can only properly express our thoughts in our mother tongue, (2) we end by attaching ourselves, in a particular manner, to the ideas that we manifest by making use of the oldest acquisitions of our memory. The men who received primary education in the public schools created since the war cannot speak of history and politics without using the extremely restricted vocabulary that they were taught to handle, and this vocabulary is republican and nationalist. They have become republicans because they cannot manage to represent to themselves any other government having common sense in their eyes than republican government; they are nationalists because all their thoughts on general politics are determined in advance by the patriotic formulas inculcated in them at school.
To accomplish this colossal work, it was necessary to break established institutions, wound many interests and threaten the power that the Church exercised in matters of education: when the republican school work was begun, the Church was engaged in close alliances with the monarchist parties; it was believed impossible to leave it the place it occupied in popular education, and the secular school was created. The ecclesiastical institutes wished to defend their position; they saw in the reform pursued by the government nothing but competition and a matter of shopkeeping; they addressed themselves to the rich and reactionary classes to establish, with their help, schools of opposition. Today the clergy is beginning to understand that it committed a great mistake and that it let itself be carried away too much by considerations of immediate and material interest; it is through its imprudence that it created a struggle between Church and State. When it saw that the Republic was firmly established, it deserted the monarchists and loudly proclaimed its attachment to the present Constitution.
The priests saw that secular education had so strongly attached the new generations to the republican formula that it was dangerous not to recognize the accomplished fact, and they thought that, this attachment depending only on forms of language, it would be possible for them to regain influence over the people by speaking, they too, the republican language.
During the period of secularization of the schools, antireligious polemics had been very numerous; but they did not have as their aim, as the theologians believed, to make France pagan; they were an accident in the midst of our political struggles and secularization was not the consequence of anti-Catholic propaganda. When the school work had been completed, calm returned and people wondered, with a certain naivete, how the country had become, all of a sudden, so indifferent to philosophical and religious questions; it had not become so, it had always been so; it had been passionate only about the defense of the Republic through primary education. There even came a moment when anticlerical polemics seemed unintelligible and supremely ridiculous. It took the Dreyfus affair to make them revive.
It is not ideological conflicts that have engendered political struggles, but rather the latter that have led polemicists to attack the ideas of Catholics and to present them as dangerous to modern civilization. Let us therefore examine the aspects under which the Church presents itself in the political domain; it is clear that the nature of the Church cannot be formulated in an abstract manner: to determine it, one must specify the kind of questions one intends to approach; nature is something essentially relative.
It is quite clear that the Church is not an association like so many societies created for a moralizing, philanthropic, educational purpose, etc. The discussion that took place in the French Chamber did much to dispel widespread sophisms: the most enlightened defenders of the congregations did not shrink from acknowledging that the religious orders are not associations like the others; — and then the Church would be, even less, an association!
To understand the role of the Church in the modern world, one must always take into account the very great place occupied today by what Hegel called the thinking estate, that is to say, the whole body of men who live outside of production and occupy themselves with general and ideal interests (professors, jurists, etc.). The priests form a group of theologians who reason upon sacred texts, who engage in high philosophy and formulate dogmas for the use of the faithful. As a result of the division of labor, the function of thinking on religious matters has been concentrated in a small class of competent persons, whom everyone leaves to operate as they see fit, without concerning themselves with their methods of research. When the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and of Papal Infallibility were defined, some persons wondered whether these novelties were going to bring about schisms in the Church: the facts have shown that few people troubled to form an opinion on these dogmas, which were accepted without difficulty. Catholicism thus gave proof that in becoming much more ardent, it had become much more foreign to philosophy than before; philosophy does not accommodate the division of society into a thinking class and classes relieved of the faculty of reasoning; philosophy is entirely liberty.
Art, religion, philosophy are considered by Hegel and by Marx as products of the spirit, almost completely foreign to the determinations of civil society: our entire civilization rests upon the liberty of the spirit, which can manifest itself as it sees fit, according to the tendencies of its creative faculties; to make the spirit independent of the police — that is one of the most important works of legislation in modern democracies. Nothing seems to us more ludicrous than the idea of having an official art, and yet art has far more connections with economics than philosophy has.
Ecclesiastical theoreticians maintain that the Church should enjoy, in a democratic country, the greatest liberty, because it is essentially a school of theology and theology is a sort of philosophy. They claim, consequently, for their body, the right to free activity.
The Church is something quite other than a school of theology; it is also a body of priests distributing sacraments under certain conditions that it determines. The sacraments have sometimes been assimilated to magical rites; but this is only an incomplete or even false assimilation; experience shows us, in fact, that the power of the Church is all the stronger as magical terror has more completely disappeared to make way for mystical sentiments. The Christian faith is very weak in the ignorant classes of societies and especially in the countryside, because the peasant sees in the rites hardly more than incantations of sorcerers whom he pays.
Today the peasant is abandoning the path to the church, not because he has been converted to new ideas by urban freethinkers, but because he is no longer as afraid of his cure as formerly. M. Gebhardt says regarding modern Italy: (1) “Since a liberal regime has dispensed the Italians from a false semblance of political religiosity, the characteristic trait of Catholicism is indifference. This does not prevent a languid, distracted, so to speak fragmented or fortuitous practice of the cult or of sacramental discipline. This piety is not the effect of a serious religion; it has no beneficial repercussion on the moral life of the individual.” One could say as much of a large part of France: political liberation causes the Church to lose its magical influence.
The Church should not be compared to the ancient corporations of magicians, who proposed to produce miracles whose popularity they exploited. Miracles still play a role, but one should not grant them great importance and use them to interpret the action of the Church. Its essential aim is to police religious sentiment: nothing of the sort had existed in the past and consequently the Church cannot be compared to any of the historical associations. It seems to me now established in science that Catholicism is a phenomenon that has no analogues in the course of the centuries; consequently it is impossible to treat it according to a common law, since it is unique.
The Church presents itself under a double aspect: school of theology and body of religious police: unity is achieved by means of pontifical authority, which is at once supernatural and civil, which promulgates dogmas and which regulates the practice of life, which reigns over faith and over morals.
The faithful obey it because in them there exists the firm conviction that it is a unique authority, having the monopoly of divine graces at the same time as it is the source of all truth. Let the Church suppress its exclusivism and its intolerance, and it will dissolve into innumerable sects; among the causes that secured its triumph in the fourth century, historians place in the first rank its exclusivism, which gave Christianity a superiority over all the cults with which it could be compared. (1)
The more the Church has been able to emancipate itself from the contributions left to it by the society of the Middle Ages, the more it has freed itself from the political interests of its dignitaries, to acquire a clear consciousness of its principles, the more also it has understood that its essence was obedience to the Roman pontiff. There is no reason for this constitution, so severely monarchical, (1) to change in the future, as some persons dreamt a half-century ago; parliamentarism will not come to implant itself in the Church by way of imitation; it would have no reason for being here, since it is founded on a conception of the search for the better by a route entirely opposed to Catholic ways.
It seems indeed that the Church is destined henceforth to follow its destinies freely enough that external forces no longer come to act upon its proper constitution; it is and will remain pontifical; but there is so great an opposition between this regime and the regime of modern States that many persons wonder whether such a coexistence can last. Some years ago, Professor Labriola expressed an original opinion on the future of Catholicism: “What I see very clearly,” he says, (2) “is this: that Christianity, which is in substance the religion of the most civilized peoples, will leave after it no new religion. Those who henceforth will not be Christians will be irreligious. The materialists of history think, for their part, and apart from any subjective appreciation, that the men of the future will very probably renounce all transcendent explanation of the practical problems of everyday life, because ‘It was fear that first created gods in the world’ (Primus in orbe deos fecit timor). The formula is ancient, but its value is eternal.”
It is very regrettable that the Italian professor gave no argument in support of these assertions and, in particular, did not think it necessary to explain in what way his belief in the disappearance of religions depends on historical materialism; the reason he gives would apply solely to the most ancient magical rites, and even M. Ribot (1) does not find it sufficient even for primitive religions. Affective evolution, the same author further remarks, (2) attributes an importance every day greater to sentiments of admiration, confidence, love, ecstasy; and thus the causes derived from fear become less important in religious genesis.
I believe, for my part, that Christianity will not perish; the mystical faculty is something very real in man, and experience shows us that it does not diminish in intensity through the ages; it remains as powerful today as it has always been; it is not weakened by scientific development. I believe, with Taine, (1) that in the first century of our era, this mystical faculty, directed by complex intellectual causes, made a wholly original creation; it discovered what Christianity named the kingdom of God; thereby a new element — good or bad according to the subjective appreciations of each — was introduced into Western civilization and became incorporated with it. The human spirit creates and always adds to its domain; I do not think one can prove that it ever loses what it has once acquired. (2) Why then would Christianity be an exception to the rule? If it had succeeded, through evolution, to another religion, it would be possible to think that it could, in its turn, yield its place to a new one; but this is not true; it was a discovery, a true creation; Labriola is right to say that it will not be replaced; but why would it perish? I cannot manage to understand.
There would be occasion here to ask whether the destinies of Christianity are identifiable with those of Catholicism; but it is certain that at the present hour there is a certain concentration of believers around the pontificate and that the Protestant communities seem rather to be losing than gaining. Whatever the case may be, few people believe today in the approaching disappearance of the Church; one must therefore arrange to live with it. (1)
In France, governments have followed, since Napoleon, a single policy and wish to recognize in the Church only the Roman pontiff. Napoleon was a man of very little religiosity; he concerned himself therefore very little with dogma; he saw that he had facing him a sovereign authority with which one could treat and through the intermediary of which one could impose an ecclesiastical constitution upon the French; he turned to account the arbitrary power of the pope. His idea was that it was necessary (2) “to dominate spiritual things without touching them, without meddling in them, to make them square with his views, his policy, but through the influence of temporal things.”
One is sometimes surprised that the court of Rome shows itself so docile and that it accepts, without too much complaint, measures against which it would raise the most violent protests if they were taken in Germany or in Italy; instead of engaging French Catholics to agitate to claim what it ordinarily calls the imprescriptible rights of the Church, it calms them or even prescribes submission. This calculation is entirely natural on its part: the anticlerical measures taken, from time to time, by the French government do not diminish the influence of the pontificate on the rich classes of France; these are even more disposed to furnish money for Catholic works as the clergy seems more persecuted; the recruitment of religious orders has not been hindered until now by the policy adopted by the ministries most clearly hostile to the Church. The pontificate is not injured in its own interests, and it obtains, in compensation for its complaisances, a protection every day more extensive and more effective for its missionaries. France has become, in our day, the secular arm of which the Church makes use to defend itself throughout the world; it is not even entirely certain that at certain moments — and even when our government passed for radical — words of encouragement were not spoken to the Pope, (1) capable of making him believe that the Eldest Daughter of the Church would defend the Vatican in case of conflict with Italy.
Since the Concordat, the court of Rome has always considered the particular interests of French Catholics as matters that could be neglected and should be subordinated to its own; the French government will be able to do whatever it wishes to the monks in France, provided it protects the Church abroad, that it puts at its disposal our ambassadors and our armies. The China War may well have been the ransom of the latest law on the congregations.
The policy of the French government, which from time to time combats Catholic schools in France and supports them abroad, shocks many minds passionate for logic: it seems singular to them that one can, for example, subsidize colleges run by congregations that one judges dangerous at home — that “the University of Beirut [which belongs to the Jesuits] could be regarded as the citadel of French influence in the Levant.” (1)
It is evident that this would be incomprehensible if the State were a person standing in the presence of another person that would be the Church; but the difficulty disappears (at least in large part) when one examines of what multiple elements the State is composed.
The ancient philosophers, placing themselves at a very abstract point of view, reduced the State to something infinitely simple: it should have been, according to their definitions, the expression of the general will that makes laws conformable to reason, and they believed that it was really similar to this image; they made of it a being possessing qualities borrowed from individual psychology; there are even still philosophers speaking of social consciousness, of social thought, etc.
What is true in this philosophical phantasmagoria is that certain resemblances exist between the men of a single nation to such a degree that the laws may be regarded, to a fairly large extent, as the manifestation of a community of juridical thought; but one must not go too far in this direction. This community has as its basis instinctive similarities, very poorly determined in the consciousness of each; — in Parliament, groups are formed that participate in the instincts of the masses, but whose tendencies are much more intellectualized than those of the men they are supposed to represent (1) — it is not yet these groups that make the laws, but a very small number of persons who have political flair, that is to say, who are capable of drafting formulas that the majority will approve without always fully understanding them. It is the result of this long and complicated work that the philosophers reduce to a simple manifestation of a simple force and that they call the product of social thought. It would be much more accurate to say that national ideas are determined by reason of the laws that are imposed on the nation; the laws are like nuclei around which popular instincts crystallize, which without their support would remain fluid and indeterminate. Laws depend on the people, but in a very indirect manner, while they are a direct cause of generation for popular ideas.
Liberal constitutions do not so much have as their purpose to permit the accomplishment of popular wills as to create obstacles to the wills of parties, so as to ensure a certain continuity in legislation. The parliamentary regime has practically succeeded, much better than all the most learned constitutions could have done, in producing this limitation of the arbitrary; but for it to function properly, it is necessary that mores lend themselves to this tendency toward moderation and that they add much to the efficacy of the rules. Each party must act thinking that the laws it could make against its adversaries will fall back upon it when it is in the opposition; this sentiment of political foresight is very rare in countries where capitalist foresight does not exist; it is the primordial condition of all liberty.
Despite its great complexity, the parliamentary regime would still not succeed in satisfying the exigencies of the modern spirit if it were not complemented by other institutions capable of exercising a moderating action upon it. The application of the law is, for this purpose, entrusted to bodies to which a very great liberty of interpretation is granted: nothing would be more absurd — in a State that aspires to create the juridical order — than to wish to force judges to slavishly follow the orders of the party in power and to conform — as is sometimes said — to the intentions of the legislator. During the Revolution, instructions drafted by the commission that had drawn up the text were appended to the laws; but this practice was abandoned; it could only be justified by the ignorance of our forebears regarding the true conditions of the separation of functions within the State and also by the momentary absence of regular judicial bodies.
Jurisprudence has the effect of leveling out legislative deviations and of reducing a whole body of contingencies to a system of law, so that the compromises, misunderstandings and gropings of the parliamentarians disappear beneath the doctrine. It is the result of this work that the philosophers consider, quite artificially, as the development of the Idea of the State; far from there being a development dependent on a unity of direction, the appearance of logic is the result of the action of people foreign to the government.
When, on the contrary, one considers the external action of the State, unity appears quite real; it is no longer the same bodies that are at play; the policy of the exterior may differ from that of the interior, because they are not produced in the same way.
The institutions of war, founded on the traditions of the army and of diplomacy, determine, in a durable manner, the politics of a country. In the complicated work of the genesis of law, the mind seeks to satisfy its logical needs, passing — through many mediations — from popular instincts to the doctrine of jurists; there is a complete process of intellectualization. Here, on the contrary, we are in the presence of very elementary tendencies, fairly close to those of primitives and dominated by superstitions. While the class of jurists represents what is most intellectual in the thinking estate, the military class represents what is most instinctive. (1)
It is well known that opinions in which instinct dominates, upon which logic acts feebly, are those that present the greatest stability; accordingly one should not be surprised to see national prejudices last sometimes for centuries. From Charles VII to Napoleon III, French sovereigns believed that they should dominate in Italy; the memory of the family compact seems to have been the principal motive that led Napoleon I to wish to place kings of his house on the thrones of Naples and Madrid. Until 1850, it would not have been prudent for a French writer to contest the right of France to the Rhine frontiers and the Polish dogma; and now, we have the Russian dogma. One can make the same observations regarding English politics; Gladstone, who had spent his life declaiming on the liberty of peoples, had Egypt occupied; his opposition to ideas of conquest translated itself only into foolish blunders and the disaster of Khartoum.
As the parliamentary regime develops in a country, as the problems of internal administration become more complex and require the constitution of more massive bodies, a separation increasingly marked between internal and external policy occurs; the latter becoming the domain of a class that scarcely participates in the movements of the parliamentary parties. This separation is extremely clear in France; but it exists everywhere, in a more or less complete manner; in almost all constitutional monarchies, the king considers himself as having the right to exercise a personal influence on the affairs of war and diplomacy.
If the Church seeks, in France, with so much obstinacy to attach itself to the military class, it is not only — as has often been reproached — because it seeks to find a support in the army against the people, but it is rather because it is keen to maintain a current of external policy conformable to Catholic interests. Its efforts bear on the navy even more than on the army, because the navy continually puts the country’s strength in contact with adversaries of Catholicism.
For thirty years, this alliance of the Church and the military class has been able to develop its results in full liberty and produce a nationalistic fever; this propaganda was hampered by no one and it profited from the patriotic preparation carried out by the primary schools.
The priests form in society a well-defined class, which perhaps presents a more perfect development than any other class; nowhere does one find such a unity of views. For a long time, in France, the Church lived in the shadow of the conservative parties; now it seeks to emancipate itself from this tutelage and there is often talk of the formation of a purely Catholic party.
When a Catholic party exists, it is not a party like the others; whereas the elements of parties are generally very mobile, here they are welded into a block; the Catholic party participates only very imperfectly in parliamentary work, work entirely made of compromises. In our modern societies, everyone is persuaded that the present has only a very secondary and fairly provisional value, that we must progress by degrees, grope continually without having a well-defined goal, directed by a desire — ardent but vague — toward what seems to be better. The truly new character of modern legislation results from the fact that the legislator believes himself bound to give satisfaction to this aspiration; one could say, imitating the revolutionary formulas, that the first of all our rights is the right to progress through liberty. Politics models itself on economics and seeks to realize this progress through procedures that recall, in many respects, the pursuit of progress in capitalist production.
The Church considers things quite differently; in its eyes, there is no right against right; all its politics is summed up in this famous formula; nothing done against it can have any definitive value; in no legislative measure does it consider the relative improvement that may result from it; it judges it according to its conformity with the final goal; it asks whether this measure constitutes a step toward the state of reason that it claims to realize in the future. There is a great analogy between its attitude and that of certain German Social Democrats, movement and final goal replacing the hypothesis and thesis of the Catholics. (1)
In its capacity as a corporation, subject to the infallible pontiff and charged with supervising the faith and morals of each, the Church cannot be a party that gropes: it knows the truth; it cannot admit the provisional within itself and recoils from compromises, good for people who know only imperfectly. In the parliamentary regime, to make a compromise is to accept, loyally and without ulterior motives of revenge, an evolution judged necessary, and to agree with one’s adversaries to formulate a rule that will serve as a point of departure for a new progressive life. The Church cannot make compromises without doubting its right and denying its infallibility. It proceeds only by diplomatic bargaining; between independent States, there is no legal system; there are temporary agreements that never involve more than the simple recognition of a situation of fact; the victor finds it entirely natural that the vanquished should prepare for a war of revenge; the Church proceeds in the same manner; it submits to the necessities of the day, with the hope of taking advantage of all favorable circumstances to return to a better position.
The Church would rather like to find everywhere absolute governments with which it would be possible to deal according to the rules of classical diplomacy; the formulas of diplomacy always flatter the self-esteem of those who employ them; the Roman prelates have a childish self-esteem.
In our century, zealous Catholics have understood that the old methods had had their day and that the center of power is today in the Parliaments; they therefore made themselves the unofficial diplomats of the Church, dealing with parties or with governments. In France, both diplomacies function concurrently and Catholic deputies have complained, more than once, of being thwarted by the nunciature. (1)
It would be desirable that there were in the French Chambers a perfectly defined Catholic party, because then the questions would be posed with a clarity that they do not have today. The pontificate would have much more difficulty in getting an external policy as favorable to the Church as the policy followed by our governments for years accepted. It might even happen that the clerical parliamentary party would refuse to sell the interests of the French priests in exchange for advantages granted in favor of missionaries operating in distant countries. It would obviously be more difficult to practice anticlericalism in France and clericalism in the Orient when in Parliament there would be a strong clerical party fighting against the republican parties. Current Catholic policy succeeds thanks to the use of a thousand small means and because it almost always conceals itself, appearing openly only in times of crisis.
Taine believed (1) that the peasant’s hatred of government by cures came, in good part, from his aversion for the big bourgeois and the nobles, who are the current allies of the clergy; I believe he is mistaken and that it would be more accurate to say, on the contrary, that the conservatives in France have ruined themselves, forever, by accepting the protection of the clergy. Gambetta well knew what he was doing in denouncing Mac-Mahon as the man of the cures.
Conversely it seems to me that the pontificate will strive in France to win partisans among the various republican groups, rather than have itself represented by a party that could only create conflicts.
In Italy the pontificate finds itself in an even more delicate situation than in France, because it is difficult for the clericals not to wound the patriotic sentiments of a recently unified country. At the beginning, it counseled Catholics to abstain from political elections; it hoped to embarrass the government; today it maintains this tactic, out of necessity, although it does not at all hinder the march of the affairs of State. Catholics take part in administrative elections, have representatives in communal and provincial assemblies; but a Catholic party in the Chamber could seriously compromise the papacy. It seems, moreover, that in a great part of Italy, Catholics show very little respect for pontifical recommendations and that they vote; but they arrange things with candidates to the best advantage of their local interests and they avoid having deputies of their own. (1)
In Germany there is an almost purely Catholic party; but this is because the modern State has not yet taken possession of Germany. The mores of the country are not favorable to the functioning of a true parliamentary government. The groups recall, in their general bearing, the cities of the Middle Ages, which discussed with kings their local interests, without greatly concerning themselves with general questions; they are outside the government and they strive to obtain as much as they can; there are more or less cynical bargainings, but no true compromises as in a real parliamentary regime. Each time a military law is to be voted upon, the government negotiates with the parties; generally the vote on the law depends on the Catholics, and these demand that some of the measures formerly taken against the Church be repealed.
Such a traffic in votes would be impossible in our country; in France patriotic sentiment is much more developed than among our neighbors and military appropriations never raise anything but criticisms of detail.
The German Parliament being a sort of congress where plenipotentiaries come to discuss among themselves in order to obtain as much as possible in favor of their constituents, the conduct of the clericals does not arouse too great a reprobation. It will no longer be the same when the parties have acquired the idea that all must participate in a common work; this idea is not easy to introduce into minds; the socialists and the progressives show themselves no less unsuited to the modern regime than their adversaries; they fight for the love of principles, without greatly concerning themselves with the consequences of their votes. (1) The day the socialist party succeeds in becoming a truly political party, pursuing participation in parliamentary power, the life of Germany would be transformed from top to bottom.
A great practical difficulty for the formation of a clerical party in France will henceforth result from the new legislation on congregations; the control that the State is organizing over their fortune and their management cannot fail to develop; it will have the effect of preventing a notable part of the resources accumulated by the piety of the faithful from being diverted from their pious destination to be assigned to political propaganda. It seems that the papacy has tacitly accepted this control and understood that there was a certain danger for it in allowing too militant a spirit to develop in the French clergy.
The entire history of the relations between Church and State in France is dominated by the memories of the Revolution; never has the Church mourned the loss of its preponderance; it does not claim its former estates and its tithes; it wants domination and it will do everything it can to acquire it. Napoleon had not yet restored the cult when already he was complaining of a new spirit that (1) animated the Church and that he had not foreseen. “The new priests are being raised in a somber, fanatical doctrine; there is nothing Gallican in the new clergy.” The clergy disciplines itself; the spirit of solidarity increases within it; the old worldly interests fade before the great interests of the Church.
What the Church offers most tempting to its clergy is domination; this is what Taine perhaps did not sufficiently bring to light. One is sometimes surprised to see Anglican priests come to Catholicism, abandoning fine positions; but is there a religious body where the highest dignitaries themselves have so little real power as among the Anglicans? A simple village cure has, in his little sphere, with his confraternities and his good works, a power full of charm for those who love command. The experience of politics and of the Church shows that there are few passions stronger than the one that makes us desire power over our fellows. (1)
In 1815, the clergy believed the moment had come to resume the offensive; but at that time, memories of the Revolution were so vivid, the army was so opposed to the cures and the owners of national properties so frightened, that the audacity of the Church was bound to raise the country against the government that protected it. Under the reign of Louis-Philippe, the clericals adopt a new tactic; they no longer speak of anything but defending the rights of the people trampled underfoot by the Orleanist bourgeoisie; in 1848, they distinguish themselves among the most ardent republicans and deliver sermons at the foot of liberty trees; but the expedition to Rome soon embroils them with the democrats; this affair was, on their part, the greatest imprudence they committed in half a century.
When the coup d’Etat arrives, the Bonapartist “boheme” (1) has no more devoted allies than the men who, three years before, showed themselves the enemies of all despotism. Until 1859, the Church triumphs; it exercises severe control over schools of every order (2) and over philosophical thought; in 1858, it obtains prosecution against Proudhon on the most absurd grounds. (3)
The Italian War brought a great change in the relations of the Empire with the Church; but the government did not adopt a clear attitude during the ten years that preceded its fall: this period was almost entirely dominated by the Roman question; it was a matter of knowing whether France, after having supported the Church in Syria and China, would support it eternally in Europe and would make war in favor of the pope. The problem of clerical domination was posed brutally; everyone clearly understood its import; the Church never ceased to lose its influence in the country, until the day when the struggle over secular education began. The Church was again defeated.
When calm was restored in minds, the Church resumed its work of attack and its partisans had the good fortune to find on their path the Panama affair, which permitted them to cast suspicion on the entire Gambettist party. This was the revenge for secularization; no one dared resist; antisemitism had been born some years earlier but its success had been mediocre before the founding of the Libre Parole (1); the clericals hesitated, in many cities, to mingle in this movement, which seemed to them dangerous because of its demagogic allure.
The discussions raised by the socialists on the subject of monopolies, of scandalous concessions and of capitalist profits, have always had the defect of having too abstract a character to be perfectly understood by the masses; and there is the unfortunate habit of presenting Marx’s ideas in a form so hard to hear and so inapplicable that socialist teaching is given to no avail. (1) Demagogues have always proceeded in an opposite manner; they seek to denounce men who can be charged with all the vices of a regime; there is no poor person who has not had dealings with some bad creditor in his life and who is not, consequently, disposed to welcome any proposed law that will strike the money-lenders. This procedure has been further perfected by the antisemites; the Jewish bankers form a minority within the minority of the rich; it is easy to represent them as foreigners who come to enrich themselves at the expense of the nation. The socialization of the means of production — that does not say much to the mind; but the claim of the State against the Rothschilds and other millionaires — that is easy to understand! Men who do not have great experience of financial calculations can easily believe that such claims, such reviews of accounts, could permit the State to undertake great things without costing the taxpayers anything.
I do not believe that antisemitism is a passing accident, an aberration due to the perverse influence of a few men; I believe it will last as long as socialism has not very clearly vanquished demagoguery, as long as it has not dedicated itself to pursuing practical ends, reforms capable of interesting the classes that furnish the principal contingent of antisemitism.
The antisemites were clever enough to take the lead in the attacks against the Panamists: the promoters of Panama had been people of the last degree of respectability, men full of honor, pure French of France — as M. Drumont would say — ; high Jewish banking had held itself apart, almost completely; it had even been several times reproached for not having given its support to so national a work; but some Jewish business agents had been mixed up in the shady negotiations; Panama became, thanks to M. Drumont, a Jewish affair. Legends always concentrate crimes and exploits upon a small number of representative characters: Arton, Hertz, Reinach became the heroes of Panama in the legend arranged by M. Drumont.
The conservatives then perceived that antisemitism could have its uses, for it permitted all the anger to be directed at an insignificant group of people — with foreign names for the most part. They had, almost all of them, borne a grudge against the Jews for secularization, because throughout France the Jews had been ardent partisans of the school laws. However, they did not clearly accept the support of the antisemites until the day they saw the great profit that M. Drumont had been able to draw from the Dreyfus trial: it then became clear that the clericals and the conservatives could carry minds along by making use of the patriotic argument.
I believe that the Church has not committed a greater mistake, since the expedition to Rome, than having taken sides against the revision of the Dreyfus trial. The agitation that occurred in France interrupted the underground work of pontifical diplomacy; there was a general enthusiasm among the clericals, who followed the most ardent among them and who were intoxicated by their first successes; it seemed to them that the day had come to crush the Gambettist party already greatly shaken since the Panama scandals. Personal vengeances, rancors ten years old, were sacrificed for the advantages painfully won since the rallying of the clergy to the Republic.
This campaign roused from their torpor many republicans who were beginning to think that anticlericalism was an old-fashioned thing. The men who believed with all the forces of their soul in the principles of the Revolution and who considered that secular education had transformed France protested with energy against the antisemitic furies; it seemed to them impossible that the cause of Truth could encounter many obstacles in a regenerated republic. They perceived with fright that Ideas are not very powerful when they are alone; and they saw that there were reforms to be made in institutions to defend the modern world against the Church.
The Dreyfus affair could have succeeded only if one had accepted that the army be subjected to the free control of citizens; now, this seemed inadmissible to military men accustomed to regarding themselves as forming an isolated class, made for the struggle against the outside and living outside the parliamentary regime; — this seemed extraordinary to many politicians who had long preached respect for the army. The radicals hesitated greatly to take up the defense of a rich officer, because they were afraid of being accused of corruption, they who had so often denounced the corruption of the opportunists. It seemed to them extremely dangerous to engage in a confused affair, which would always remain mysterious and which contained novelistic adventures, while in popular memory the war of 1870 had been nothing but a succession of betrayals each more extraordinary than the last. They were much more in contact with the provincial voters than the Gambettists, who had become Parisians; they knew all the prejudices against which they would have to fight to support the cause of revision; they chose the line of least resistance and many howled with the wolves.
The Dreyfus affair impassioned all of Europe, because abroad one is accustomed to regarding France as an exceptional country, in which social conflicts are struggles of Ideas; all the adversaries of clericalism hoped that victory would remain with the representatives of modern thought. (1) But if this manner of understanding the affairs of France is false, it is certain that all the struggles that occur among us interest all liberal minds: there is no country, indeed, where the reactionary forces are as powerful as in ours; when they are defeated, all the parties of resistance are discouraged and all the advanced parties are animated with new ardor. This is what explains why it was often believed that revolutions break out in Europe in imitation of Parisian movements. (1)
For some years, clericalism had been pursuing a very active campaign for domination everywhere, and the awakening of liberal conscience, provoked by the Dreyfus affair, seemed to be of good augury for the future.
One would have to close one’s eyes to the evidence not to see that the law on congregations was conceived as a reprisal against the antisemites and the Catholics. Reading the newspapers that had supported revision shows with what passion the vanquished awaited reprisals; the ease with which the Senate voted a law containing so many exceptional provisions surprised everyone and would be inexplicable if one did not know how many Dreyfusards this assembly contained.
One would therefore be wrong to see here an episode of a struggle engaged by the spirit of the Revolution against the Church, with a view to persecuting Catholics; there was only a measure of reprisal — rather modest moreover — coming after the most formidable campaign that the clericals had waged since the reactions that followed 1848.
The Church does not represent things to itself in this manner; it believes itself attacked by a sect which, from time to time, succeeds, whether by force or by cunning, in seizing the forces of the State. Projecting outward its own personality, it represents its adversaries on its own model; it believes that it has to fight against an Anti-Church, having its dogmas, its hierarchy and perhaps also a pontificate; for a century Catholic authors have been unable to explain modern history to themselves except by making the Masonic lodges play a truly extravagant role. One should not believe that the satanic theories are fabricated for the exclusive use of the readers of La Croix: they have exercised an enormous influence on Catholic thought since the Revolution and even today we read in books intended for seminaries that the ancient Sabbath of sorcerers is reproduced in substance in certain lodges that Satan favors with his apparitions. (1)
If the Church is mistaken about the causes of modern conflicts, one should not believe that there is not some part of truth in its illusions; for there are no illusions of this kind that do not contain a certain dose of reality: we must ask ourselves whether there might not be found today a party in the thinking estate that would seek to dispute domination with the Church. The Church has long sought to create a great influence for itself through education and the press; the old means of action — parish preaching, missions, religious orders — are no longer sufficient to attain the goal of domination that the Church pursues today; it has lost the legal means of supremacy, it is no longer an Order within the State; but it can exercise a considerable influence on the march of public authorities if it succeeds in attracting to it a sufficient number of men who believe that their interests and their honor are attached to the success of the Church. Its teaching no longer has as its sole object to make fervent Christians: the aim is to develop dispositions capable of leading pupils to fight for the Church: the ecclesiastical colleges are therefore no longer at all what they were a century ago; they are branches of political committees, and one could say that they are organs of spoken journalism. It is the clerical press that has led the movement for more than fifty years and the official heads of the Church are obliged to reckon with it.
The major press is not, in general, hostile to the Church: newspapers are powerful enterprises conducted with a view to procuring profits for their shareholders; directors seek out what the currents of fashion are and they direct their editors along the paths that seem to them bound to be the most profitable. The Church therefore has only an infinitesimal number of adversaries in journalism, except during crises when it has aroused the indignation of a very great number of persons by its imprudence; it is only then that it becomes profitable to wage the campaign against the clergy seriously. (1)
There exists, however, a small anticlerical fraction in the press; this fraction has old and close alliances with the teaching personnel, and it reacts upon the University, just as the clerical press reacts upon the ecclesiastical colleges.
When, after the Revolution, public education was reorganized, the aim was to form cultivated young men; nothing in the programs or in the ministerial instructions would allow one to think that there must be hostility between the Church and the University; if one conducts an inquiry into the opinions of most professors of the State, one finds that they would be in the majority rather favorable than hostile to Catholic ideas; everything seems to concur to ensure a truly neutral teaching. The Church no longer accepts neutrality; neutrality would be for it abdication; what it wants, as I have said, is to form militants devoted to it. It is to attain this end that it has waged for three-quarters of a century so ardent a campaign against university education.
Against the Church has been constituted, under the influence of the anticlerical press, a politico-scholastic party, which claims to represent the University, or rather to defend it — for no one would dare claim that this party has a majority among the professors. (1) This party pursues the domination of minds and is too often inspired by the narrow ideas of the eighteenth century; it can therefore be considered, to a certain extent, as an Anti-Church. When one speaks of the struggle between State and Church over education, one speaks, in reality, of the conflict born between this party and the clerical party.
Many of our professors have taken it into their heads that their profession would be a rather contemptible thing if they did not have charge of souls, if they were not destined to form the men of the future, if their pedagogy were not to have the effect of producing a regenerated society. In their chairs they consider themselves journalists in reserve and they believe themselves militants charged with defending the modern spirit.
The results obtained by the action of this politico-scholastic party do not seem very encouraging; a very lively polemic was engaged last year to determine whether the University forms republicans and what are the causes that render sterile the efforts of so many apostles. (1) There is one point that seems to me established: at a rather distant time, when there was not so great a desire to transform instruction into a sort of spiritual generation, in the time of the old Imperial University, the pupils thought just as freely, perhaps more freely than today; the teaching of that time therefore had a good result, since it led to intellectual liberty.
The new methods seem to have produced, almost always, rather bad results; there has been a desire to bring much more into evidence the action of the professor upon the pupils and, whatever the merit of the present masters, it is difficult to believe that they are worth Cicero and Seneca, who had been the directors of thought of our forebears in times of great intellectual liberty. Scholastic apostolate gives very bad results for the formation of the mind in the clerical schools, which are poisoned by laziness, snobbery and docility; the same consequences have not yet revealed themselves to as high a degree in the University, because the professors are not all harnessed to the apostolate and because the variety of their teaching profits the liberation of the mind.
For a fairly large number of years, all revolutions seem to have automatically acted to increase the emancipation of man; but it is by no means evident that such a movement must always occur; if truly the University does not form republicans or forms only a rather minuscule proportion, perhaps we should fear that the next revolutions will scarcely be penetrated with the liberal spirit. The politico-scholastic party, which combats the Church, has exactly the same spirit as the latter; it would like to make the world march to its liking. It has all the ambitions of the old Saint-Simonians who claimed to constitute everything in hierarchical form.
The battle waged between the clerical party and this politico-scholastic party does not have very great direct interest for democracy; whatever the victor, the people would find pitiless masters.
What appears to us as the highest mission of the State is to defend liberty of thought, against the caste of priests as well as against the caste of professor-journalists. The State has spiritual duties to fulfill and this one is obviously the first of all in a democracy; liberty of thought is not decreed, is not taught; institutions must produce it spontaneously. The modern democratic movement has an economic base, easy to recognize; (1) it is founded on the highly developed competition of trades: all our law is imbued with the idea of unlimited competition; almost all our thoughts bear its mark. Now, in our day, this competition is threatened: by the constitution of large enterprises transforming medium-sized employers into employees and by the development of State socialism. It is therefore a very urgent question to examine: that of the means to employ to defend liberty — at least within the limits where it can be defended.
There would certainly be nothing more effective than to suppress in education everything that tends to increase the strength of the central power. Marx was quite right when, in 1855, (1) he pointed out the desirability of creating, with the purely financial aid of the public Treasury, schools removed at once from the influences of the State and of the Church. I believe that this opinion is one of the most important to be found in his writings; we see thereby that he had the idea of a federalist organization of education: such an organization is very unfavorable to the dictatorship of a thinking class.
Bernstein has shown (2) that as early as 1871 Marx had adopted political conceptions imbued with federalism: (3) these conceptions are all the more interesting in that in 1848 he had been, like all the German revolutionaries and under the influence of the memories of 1793, very opposed to federalist ideas. If one wishes to fight against the spirit of domination, there is nothing more urgent than to reform education according to the views contained in the letter on the Gotha Program.
The socialists vote, as if by instinct, all the anticlerical measures that the old radical party proposes when, by chance, that party finds itself carried to power. But in recent years, since there has been so much discussion about what the class struggle permits and what it forbids, some persons have wondered whether the socialists were being quite logical in instinctively following this current, which does not seem determined by their principles.
It must be very frankly admitted that Marx’s doctrine on the class struggle has remained still quite obscure; it is not always certain that the formulas by which he expressed his opinion regarding the political action of the proletariat have been perfectly understood. For my part, I confess that I do not understand the explanations that the German officials give of the master’s doctrine; I believe that I am not the only one who does not understand.
And first, is it true that parties are simply the tracing of economic classes? Marx very often expresses himself as if this were so; but one could easily find in his writings contradictions, if one admitted that he had truly identified parties and classes. Kautsky himself acknowledges (1) that in England, in the eighteenth century, the economic differentiation existing between Whigs and Tories was constantly diminishing and that finally it became useless to consider for distinguishing the parties. It seems that the progress of the capitalist economy has the effect of producing a greater mixing of social layers and of effacing professional marks: if there is a greater separation between the working class and the bourgeoisie, within the latter the parties depend much less on the division of labor.
One must not forget that in modern countries, parties strive more and more to conceal material interests beneath ideological aspects. The disputes of a purely material order that occurred in the Greek and Italian republics seem to us today entirely contemptible; each party now claims to defend Right and Truth. The old demagogic factions were founded on the simple division of the City into rich and poor; they brought about the ruin of all the countries where they occurred; until now modern States have marched, in a more or less unsteady manner, along a path that all regard as progressive; the socialists fully intend to make the world achieve more decisive progress than that of the past; one cannot therefore confuse them with demagogues solely occupied with satisfying the material desires of the masses.
Socialism contains spiritual elements; at the very least, it contains them insofar as it is interested in the development of democracy; for democracy has essentially only spiritual ends: liberty, right for all, etc. I well know that for Marx socialism is not an increase of democracy and that the latter gives to the opposition of classes its perfection; but if democracy is thus, in a certain measure, the contrary of socialism, it is also a nourishment for its progress, for it is thanks to democracy that popular education can be accomplished in the most complete manner. The contradiction between democracy and socialism bears above all on economics; their agreement, on the spiritual side of social life.
Marx had observed (1) that democrats imagine they can rise above class struggles; this is entirely natural according to what has just been said: democrats fight to make tyrannies disappear, to combat the estates that claim to govern — whether by reason of talent or by reason of their professions —; they seek to develop the spirit of liberty and to increase the juridical guarantees given to men; their attitude distances them from economic considerations. The socialists also have to fight against the same enemies as the democrats and they participate in all the struggles for liberty, as if they were, like the democrats, freed from the specific feeling of class.
The struggle against militarism is the most difficult to wage of all those that can be engaged against domination; it remains, most often, a simple exercise in rhetoric and meets with nothing but indifference. How many persons have been truly interested in the methods of government employed in Madagascar? How many have been seriously moved by the accounts of the China War? Something still more singular: there exists a considerable literature on the regime of the disciplinary corps; but no politician feels the utility of taking in hand the reform of these abuses; public opinion scarcely concerns itself with them, politicians officially ignore them.
For one to be able to act effectively against militarism, truly extraordinary circumstances must present themselves: the Dreyfus affair was such a case; but one does not always find two such circumstances in a century. As a result of the convergence of many chances, men belonging to all classes of society and to very opposed parties had gathered with a view to pursuing a work that could produce very great practical and democratic results. The socialists who believed that the dogma of the class struggle opposed their participation in this great combat showed themselves more scrupulous about their principles than the kings of France had been: these, despite their devotion, very often allied themselves with the Protestants of Germany against the Catholic sovereigns of Spain and Austria.
It is not possible to engage an effective struggle against militarism in conditions other than these; there must be an amalgam among the parties, such that this struggle cannot take on the character of an antipatriotic movement; in France, the patriotic idea is so strongly tied to the democratic memories of the Revolution that the best-conducted campaigns fail as soon as a campaign for the defense of the fatherland can be opposed to them.
To wish to attack militarism with the sole forces of socialism is to march toward certain failure and to render socialism unpopular. In the Dreyfus affair, there was no question of a juridico-economic order at stake; and consequently what was the precept of class struggle doing there? Some authors, poorly informed of the principles of modern socialism, found this fine argument: that Dreyfus was rich and that the misfortunes of a rich man should not interest the poor; and they added that many poor wretches were being martyred in the public works camps. And so what?
The argument could have had some value if the question had been to know what degree of sympathy the victims of courts martial deserve; but that was not the question; rather it was to know what are the most favorable circumstances for gathering sufficient forces to fight against the domination of the military class.
It is in anticlericalism that one finds, most completely perhaps, the amalgam of the various social classes; it represents perfectly the daily struggle against domination, because the priest is in daily contact with the citizen, while the military oligarchy exercises only an intermittent tyranny. I believe that there is no action more important for activating the propagation of socialism in the countryside than anticlerical action; let one read, moreover, the provincial socialist newspapers, and one will see that their principal means of influence is the war against the cures.
GEORGES SOREL