So if now the government, as it was made by the Constitution of 1848, cannot guarantee work, credit, assistance, education, progress, the sincerity of universal suffrage, nothing of what constitutes the social state, how could it guarantee the political state? How should it guarantee order? What a singular matter!—this political reform, which was intended to give us social reform, appears to us as a perpetual anomaly, from whichever side you take it.
The government is not only in conflict with itself through the separation of its powers, it is so with society through the incompatibility of its functions. Without the distinction of legislative and executive the government offers liberty no guarantees; without a declaration of social rights it is nothing but the force given to wealth to use as disciplinary action against poverty. But with the separation of powers you open the door to conflicts, corruption, coalitions, rifts, competitions; with the declaration of rights you create a final result of categorical refusal for all its decisions and acts: whatever you do the Constitution, which is intended to reconcile all, can only organise discord. At the bottom of your so-called social pact is civil war.
Is it possible to find a way out of this labyrinth, and to pass from the political constitution to the social constitution without doing somersaults? I venture to answer in the affirmative. But I warn the reader that this will not come to pass by a transaction, an eclecticism, the sacrifice of an idea or any adjustment of forces and counterweights; it will be by elevating all the constitutional and social principles presently struggling with one another to their highest potency: centralisation and separation, universal suffrage and government, work and credit, liberty and order. At first sight it seems that this method must increase antagonism: its effect will however be to make it disappear. Except that we will no longer have this distinction of political constitution and social constitution at all: government and society will be identified and indiscernible from each other.
§II520
I have said that the vice of any constitution, political or social, what creates conflicts and antagonism in society, is on the one hand—to confine myself to the only question I wish to examine at present—the fact that the separation of powers, or to put it better, of functions, is badly done and incomplete; on the other, the fact that centralisation is insufficient, since it does not respect the law of specialism to a sufficient degree. It follows that collective power is almost nowhere in action, nor is thought, or universal suffrage, exercised. It is necessary to push the separation, when it is hardly begun, as far as possible, centralising every power separately; to organise universal suffrage in its plenitude according to individual nature and kind and give the people the energy and activity that it lacks.
This is the principle: to demonstrate it and explain the social mechanism I now only have to provide arguments, for which a few examples will suffice. Here, as in the natural sciences, the practice is the theory; exact observation of the fact is science itself.
For many centuries the spiritual power has been separated to a varying extent from the temporal power.
I will observe in passing that the political principle of the separation of powers, or functions, is the same as the economic principle of the separation of industries or division of labour: at which point the identity of the political constitution and the social constitution are already dawning upon us.
I will furthermore remark on the fact that the more reality and fecundity a function, industrial or otherwise, contains within itself, the more it grows, realises itself and becomes productive by means of separation and centralisation, so that a function’s maximum potency corresponds to its highest degree of division and convergence, its minimum to the lowest degree of the same. Lack of division and lack of potency are synonymous terms here. Separation and centralisation, that is the double criterion by means of which one may recognise whether a function is real or fictitious.
Now, not only have the temporal and spiritual powers together with the majority of political functions in no way been distinguished and grouped according to the laws of economy, but we shall see that these powers and functions are very far from being strengthened by the principles of organisation claimed to be suitable for them, but are on the contrary wasted away and annihilated by this very organisation, to the extent that what is supposed theoretically to give life to authority is exactly what kills it.
First of all, there would thus be a complete separation between the spiritual and the temporal if the latter not only refrained from interfering in the celebration of the mysteries, the administering of the sacraments and the government of church parishes, etc., but also did not intervene in the matter of the nomination of bishops. There would subsequently be greater centralisation and therefore more regular government if the people in each parish had the right to choose its priests and succursalists521 or even not take any at all; if the preachers in each diocese elected their bishop, if the bishops’ assembly or a primate of the Gauls sorted out all their religious affairs, the teaching of theology and questions of religious service by themselves. By this separation the clergy would cease to be in the hands of political power and thus no longer an instrument of tyranny towards the people; it would no longer retain the secret hope of recapturing political supremacy; and by this application of universal suffrage the ecclesiastical government, centralised in itself, receiving its inspirations from the people and not from the government or the Pope, would be in constant harmony with the needs of society and the moral and intellectual state of its citizens.
For it means nothing for the centralisation of a country that the church ministers, the agents of power as of every other social function, are answerable to a centre, if the centre itself is not answerable to the people but is placed above the people and independent of it. In that case centralisation is no longer centralisation; it is despotism.
Where the sovereignty of the people is taken as a dogma, political centralisation means nothing else than the people itself being centralised as a political force: to take away central agency from the people’s direct action is to deny it sovereignty and give it tyranny instead of centralisation. The suffrage of subordinates is the point of departure of all central administration.
Instead of this democratic, rational system what do we see? The Government, it is true, does not intervene in matters of religious practice, it does not teach the catechism, it does not give instruction at the seminary. But it does choose the bishops, who only find their centre at Rome in the person of the Pope without agreeing among themselves and without any superiors. The bishops choose the priests and succursalists, sending them into the parishes without the slightest participation of popular suffrage, often in fact in spite of the people’s wishes. This all amounts to the Church and the State, interlocked, if sometimes at war with each other, forming a kind of offensive and defensive league apart from the people, united against its liberty and initiative. Their concerted government weighs heavily on the nation instead of serving it. It is pointless for me to enumerate the consequences of this order of affairs: they immediately spring to everybody’s mind.
In order to achieve organic truth, political, economic or social, it is therefore necessary—for in this all is one:—first to abolish the existing constitutional amalgamation by taking the appointment of bishops away from the State and finally separating the spiritual from the temporal;—second to centralise the Church in itself by a system of graduated elections;—third to put the suffrage of the citizens at the basis of ecclesiastical power as with all the other powers of the State.
In this system what is meant by GOVERNMENT today is nothing but administration; the whole of France is centralised, as far as ecclesiastical functions are concerned; the country governs itself solely by means of its electoral initiative, as much in questions of salvation as in secular matters; it is no longer governed. Whether established religion will have to be maintained or suppressed is not the question at the moment. If it survives it will be by the energy intrinsic to it; if it dies out it
will be for lack of vitality: in either case its destiny, whatever that might be, will be the expression of the people’s sovereignty, manifested by absolute separation and regular centralisation of functions, in other terms, by the organisation of universal suffrage in religious matters. And one already foresees that if it were possible to organise the whole country for temporal matters in the way we have indicated for its spiritual organisation, then the most perfect order and the most vigorous centralisation would exist without there being anything of what we call constituted authority, otherwise known as Government, which is nothing but a simulacrum of centralisation.
Another example:
At one time there was considered to be a third power, beyond the legislative and the executive, the judicial power. The Constitution of 1848, following those of 1830 and 1814, only speaks of the judicial order.
Whether order, power or function, here I find, as with the Church, a further example of the preponderance of the State, this time under the pretext of centralisation and, consequently, a new inroad on the sovereignty of the people.
Judicial functions, by their different specialities, their hierarchy, their convergence in a single ministry, manifest an unequivocal tendency to separation and centralisation.
But they are not at all answerable to judicially liable persons; they are all at the disposition of the executive power, appointed every four years by the people with irremovable spheres of duties, and are subordinate, not to the country by election but to the government—of president or prince. The result is that the liable persons are brought before their supposedly natural judges like the parishioners to their priests, meaning that the people belongs to the judiciary as by inheritance, that the litigant belongs to the judge and not the judge to the litigant.
Apply universal suffrage and election by degrees to judicial functions as to ecclesiastical functions, suppress irremovability, which is the loss of the electoral right; divest the State of all action or influence upon the judicial order and ensure that this order, being centralised in itself and separate, is only answerable to the people: and then you will first of all have robbed power of its most potent instrument of tyranny, having made justice a principle of liberty as much as of order. And, if you do not suppose that the people, from which must emanate all powers by virtue of universal suffrage, is in contradiction of itself by not wanting in justice what it wants in religion, you are assured that the separation of power cannot engender any conflict and can safely posit that henceforth separation and equilibrium are in principle synonyms.
In this way the people have the final say on the church and justice by means of a genuine separation of powers and centralisation; the functionaries of the two orders are directly or indirectly answerable to them, and the people do not obey but command, are not governed but govern.
But the consequences of effective separation and centralisation do not stop there. There are in society artificial functions, as we have said, which primitive barbarism suggested and made necessary but which civilisation tends to cause to disappear, first by the practice of liberty and then by the progress of separation itself. Religious observance and the courts are of this number.
If opinion in the matter of faith is truly free; if by the effect of this liberty all religions, either existing ones or those yet to emerge, are declared equal before the law; if every citizen is consequently permitted to vote for the ministers and contributions to the cost of his own religion without being forced to contribute to the maintenance of the others: then it follows first that as everyone is the judge in the last resort concerning a matter lacking in rational certainty and positive sanction, the unity or centralisation of a church is rendered impossible, all the more so because the divergence of professions of faith will become greater; second that the importance of religious opinions will be weakened and the authority of the churches diminished by the same mechanism that was supposed to increase them; third and finally, that the ecclesiastical function, being incompatible with universal suffrage and the laws of social organisation, will gradually fall into disuse so that the church personnel will sooner or later be reduced to zero.
In a word, while the separation of industries is the condition of their equilibrium and the cause of wealth, religious liberty is the ruin of religion with respect to its power and social function: what more could one wish for? Faced with society, the Church does not exist.
The same must happen with justice, too. The election of judges by the People every five or ten years is not the final consequence of the principle: it will have to be recognised that in every court case the litigant or the accused has the right to choose his judges. What am I saying here? It is that one must avow with Plato that the true judge for every man is his own conscience, which leads in the long run to replacing the regime of courts and laws by the regime of personal obligations and contracts, that is to say, to the suppression of the judicial system ...
In this way, once the hypothesis of absolute Government is dismissed, and it cannot but be treated thus, the governmental principle, as with religion and justice, through the development of its own laws, the separation of faculties and their centralisation, ends up by negating itself: it is a contradictory idea.
I now pass to another order of things, the institution of the military.
Is it not true that the army is the Government’s own province and that it belongs much less to the country than to the State, whatever constitutional fictions might suggest? Once upon a time the staff of the army was part of the royal household; under the empire the gathering of the elite army corps bore the name of imperial guard, young and old. It is the Government that takes 80,000 recruits annually, not the country that gives them; it is Power that in the interests of its personal policy and to make its will respected appoints the leadership and orders troop movements at the same time as it disarms the national guards, not the nation which arming spontaneously for its defence avails itself of the public force, of its purest blood. There again the social order is compromised, and why? On the one hand because military centralisation not answerable to the people is nothing but pure despotism, on the other because the ministry of war, however independent it may be of the other ministries, is nevertheless still a prerogative of the executive Power, which only recognises one head, the President.
The people have a confused instinct for this anomaly when on the occasion of every revolution they insist on the removal of the troops, when they demand a law pertaining to military recruitment and the organisation of the national guard and the army. And the authors of the Constitution foresaw the danger when they wrote in article 50: The president of the Republic has the armed forces at his disposal without ever being able to command them in person. What prudent legislators, indeed! And what, one may inquire, does it signify that he does not command them in person if they are at his disposal, if he can send them where he will, to Rome or to Mogador?—if it is he who gives the orders, who appoints the different ranks of officers, who bestows the military crosses and pensions?—and if there are generals who command for him?
It is the right of the citizens to appoint the hierarchy of their military chiefs, the simple soldiers and national guards appointing the lower ranks of officers, the officers appointing their superiors.
Organised in this way the army retains its civic feelings; it is then no longer a nation within the nation, a fatherland within the fatherland, a sort of travelling colony in which the citizen as a naturalised soldier learns to fight against his own country. It is the nation itself, centralised in its strength and youth quite independently of Power, which like any magistrate of the judicial order or of the police can call for the public force in the name of the law, though that force is not at its disposal and cannot be commanded by it. As for the eventuality of war, the army only owes its obedience to the representatives of the nation and the military chiefs appointed by them.
Does it follow that I regard the military as a natural institution inherent to society and in which I only find
one fault that endangers liberty, i.e. that of a defective organisation? That would be to suppose me to have a very mediocre understanding of the Revolution. I have endeavoured to show how the People has to organise its military in such a way as to simultaneously guarantee its defence and its liberties, while waiting for the nations to agree to terminate the armed peace, since they are the only ones competent to judge the opportunity of general disarmament. But who does not see that the same applies to war as to justice and religion and that the only sure means of abolishing it, after the conciliation of international interests, would be to organise the military as I have just indicated—and as prescribed by the principles of ’93—while depriving the Government of its power to wage war against the wishes of the nation?
I will continue.
At all times societies have felt it necessary to protect their trade and industry against foreign imports: the power or function that protects indigenous labour in every country, guaranteeing it the national market, is the Customs.
I do not wish to give any impression here of prejudging the morality or immorality, the utility or disutility of the Customs: I shall take it as society offers it to me and confine myself to examining it from the point of view of the constitution of powers. Later, when we pass from political and social questions to the purely economic question, we shall seek to find a solution to the problem of the balance of commerce that is appropriate to it and see whether indigenous production can be protected without the cost of law and surveillance, in a word, without the Customs.
The Customs is by virtue of the fact of its existence a centralised function: its very origin, like its form of action, excludes any idea of piecemeal structure. But how is it that this function, which is within the special competence of merchants and industrialists and should by rights be exclusively the concern of the authority of the chambers of commerce, is still a dependency of the State?
Property Is Theft! Page 58