La politique cléricale et le socialisme

ELEVENTH CAHIER OF THE FOURTH SERIES

EDOUARD BERTH

ANTICLERICAL POLITICS AND SOCIALISM

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Charles Peguy

The essay one is about to read was published for the first time in the Revue Socialiste, issue of November 15, 1902. One should note, to the credit of Gustave Rouanet, deputy, director of the Revue Socialiste, that he justly and liberally, as director of the Review, welcomed and placed prominently an article strongly contrary to the governmental policy he supports as a deputy. Not only is this shift of attitude entirely to the personal credit of Mr. Gustave Rouanet, but it is in general to the personal credit of certain professions.

It is a notorious and notable fact that in the long debates being pursued for and against the freedom of conscience, the reviews and the books, which are of a thicker matter and form, of thicker work, and thus almost always more serious, have for the most part defended freedom; on the contrary, freedom has hardly been oppressed except by men of light work or of no work at all, by men of government, of parliament, of conference, of speech, of address, of newspaper, of elections, of vice-presidency, all forms in which responsibilities attenuate, blur, and disappear.

One may have or not have, one may have more or less the opinion of Berth on anticlerical politics and socialism: personally I believe I have become an anarchist as he is not; all free opinions are freely debatable; — what is indisputable is that there is more, much more work and much more reality, much more thought, much more rethought reality, much more justice and truth in this simple article than there has been in the last three years in all the speeches of all the ministers, all the senators, all the deputies, all the general councilors, all the municipal councilors, all the district councilors, and in the articles of all the journalists, on the primordial conflicts that are the object of these important debates.

Charles Peguy

Anticlerical Politics and Socialism

Edouard Berth

The fine days of anticlericalism have returned. All current politics gravitates around the clerical peril, and the struggle against the Church resumes more vigorously than ever. The Dreyfus Affair laid bare the underground work accomplished by Catholicism to reconquer modern society. As has been very justly observed, the Church is in the process of paying for its anti-revisionist attitude; no one dared touch the General Staff; the courts-martial are still standing; in a country as chauvinistic as ours, no government would dare to confront head-on the patriotic religion, that religion which the Third Republic, for its part, has so diligently cultivated. But if the country is ardently patriotic, it is no less ardently anticlerical — Mr. Jules Lemaitre, who had to separate from Mr. Francois Coppee, knows something about it: in France alone, a radical and anticlerical nationalism would perhaps have some chance of triumphing — and the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry was able to pass this law of reprisals and “republican defense” which is called the law on associations or rather the law against congregations.

The fine days of anticlericalism have returned. But what are the socialists doing in this affair? What is the role that socialism can play in the present conflict? Does it have an interest in the anticlericalist struggle? Should it participate in it, and in what spirit, for what ends? These are the questions we should like to examine here.

Let us first recall the essentials. We are in the presence of a struggle between the State and the Church, between the civil power and the religious power. This struggle is as old as the world; it is the eternal quarrel of Antigone; it runs through the whole of the Middle Ages; it fills modern history. At certain moments, the struggle seems to subside: these are the concordats, the truces, the modus vivendi. Then it revives, more bitter than before: these are the persecutions, the expulsions, the Kulturkampf.

What characterizes the present moment is that the question has been posed with a new acuteness by the Dreyfus Affair. The Church, or at least the most active and combative part of the Church — the congregations, the Jesuits, the Assumptionists — threw itself body and soul into the anti-Dreyfusard battle. The Croix and the Pelerin waged against the Jews, against Dreyfus, against the revisionists, a campaign of exceptional violence. The Church appeared then as the natural ally of all the forces of reaction, of the army, of nationalism, of anti-Semitism.

Anticlericalism can be seen from two very different points of view: the bourgeois point of view and the socialist point of view. Bourgeois anticlericalism is essentially a struggle of the State against the Church for sovereignty. It is the old quarrel of the Caesars against the popes. The bourgeois State wants to be sole master; it does not tolerate any power that claims to share with it the direction of souls. In this sense, bourgeois anticlericalism is a manifestation of statism, of Jacobinism, of that governmental absolutism which is one of the traditions of the French bourgeoisie.

Socialist anticlericalism — if such a thing exists — is of a very different nature. Socialism does not seek to replace one authority with another. It does not want the State to take the place of the Church in the direction of consciences. What socialism wants is the liberation of consciences, the abolition of all spiritual authority, whether religious or secular. In this sense, socialism is much more radical than bourgeois anticlericalism: it attacks not only the Church, but the State itself, insofar as the State claims to impose a uniform direction on thought.

But here is where the question becomes delicate. In practice, socialists are divided. Some think that in the present struggle between the State and the Church, socialism should ally itself with the State, should support the anticlerical policy of the government, should help the bourgeois State to crush the Church. Others think, on the contrary, that socialism should maintain its independence, should refuse to be enlisted in the quarrels of the bourgeoisie, and should content itself with proclaiming the principle of the absolute freedom of conscience.

The partisans of the first thesis invoke the danger represented by the Church. They say: the Church is the enemy; the congregations are the advance guard of reaction; if we do not help the State to destroy them, they will destroy us. This is the thesis of Jaures, of the ministerial socialists, of all those who support the Combes policy.

The partisans of the second thesis invoke the principle of freedom. They say: by helping the State to crush the Church, we are consolidating the power of the State; now, the State is as much our enemy as the Church. It is not by strengthening our jailer that we shall escape from prison. The true policy of socialism is to oppose all forms of oppression, whether they come from the Church or from the State. This is the thesis of the revolutionary syndicalists, of the libertarians, of all those who distrust the bourgeois State.

For our part, we believe that this second thesis is the correct one. Socialism has nothing to gain from mixing itself up in the quarrels of the bourgeoisie. The anticlericalist struggle, as it is currently being waged, is a purely bourgeois struggle. It is a struggle between two forms of authority, between two forms of domination. The Church wants to dominate consciences in the name of God; the State wants to dominate consciences in the name of Reason, of Science, of Progress. But for the proletarian, for the worker, both forms of domination are equally oppressive.

What the worker needs is not that the State replace the Church as the guardian of his thought. What he needs is that no one be the guardian of his thought. What he needs is freedom — true freedom, not that caricature of freedom which is imposed from above by decree and which consists in forbidding people to think as they please under the pretext of preventing them from thinking badly.

The truly socialist position on the religious question is the following: absolute freedom of conscience; separation of Church and State; neither persecution nor privilege for any belief. The State should not concern itself with what people believe or do not believe. Each person is free to pray or not to pray, to go to church or not to go, to believe in God or not to believe.

This position is at once much more simple and much more radical than that of the anticlerical bourgeois. The anticlerical bourgeois wants to fight the Church; the socialist wants to ignore it. The anticlerical bourgeois wants to replace religious teaching with secular teaching; the socialist wants to suppress all imposed teaching. The anticlerical bourgeois wants a strong State to hold the Church in check; the socialist wants neither a strong State nor a strong Church, but free individuals.

One could object that this position is utopian, that in the present struggle one must choose sides, that abstention is impossible. This objection has a certain weight. But let us observe that the choice is not between the Church and the State, but between two conceptions of freedom. And in this choice, socialism can only choose the most complete freedom, even if this means sometimes appearing to support the Church against the State, when the State becomes the oppressor.

The great error of the anticlerical socialists is to believe that by helping the bourgeois State to destroy the religious congregations, they are advancing the cause of the proletariat. In reality, they are only advancing the cause of the bourgeois State. They are helping the bourgeoisie to concentrate all power in its hands. They are contributing to the destruction of one of the few forces that still limit the omnipotence of the State. For the congregations, whatever one may think of them, were at least independent of the State; and any independent force is, to a certain degree, a guarantee of freedom.

This is not to say that we should defend the congregations. We have no more sympathy for the Jesuits than for the Jacobins. But we say that the true interest of socialism is in the direction of more freedom, not of more authority; in the direction of the dispersion of powers, not of their concentration; in the direction of pluralism, not of monism.

The socialist conception of the religious question is thus profoundly different from the bourgeois conception. The bourgeois anticlerical sees in the Church a rival power that must be destroyed. The socialist sees in the Church a form of authority among others, which will disappear of itself when men have become free. The bourgeois wants to replace one catechism with another; the socialist wants to suppress all catechisms. The bourgeois wants the laicization of the State; the socialist wants the laicization of society itself, which is something very different.

In sum, the true position of socialism in the present debate is one of independence and of critical vigilance. Socialism should refuse to let itself be dragged into the battles of the bourgeoisie. It should maintain its own conception of freedom, which is much broader and more radical than bourgeois anticlericalism. And above all, it should beware of the temptation to use the power of the State as an instrument of liberation: for the power of the State is never an instrument of liberation; it is always an instrument of domination.