WHAT ARE THE REAL AND ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF SOCIETY IN FRANCE?
The first step towards extricating ourselves out of the chaos in which
we are plunged, is, a full understanding and frank admission of all the
real and essential elements of which society in France is now composed.
It is because we misunderstand these elements, or refuse them the place
and the consideration they deserve, that we remain in, or relapse into,
chaos.
A society may be tortured, perhaps destroyed; but you cannot force it to
assume a form and mode of existence foreign to its nature, either by
disregarding the essential elements of which it is constituted, or by
doing violence to them.
Let us first advert to that civil order which forms the basis of French
society, as of every other society.
Family; property of all kinds, whether land, capital, or wages; labour,
under all its forms, individual or collective, intellectual or manual;
the situations in which men are placed, or the relations which are
introduced among them by the incidents of family, property, and
labour;--such are the constituents of civil society.
The essential and characteristic fact in French civil society is, unity
of laws and equality of rights. All families, property of every kind,
labour of every description, are governed by the same laws, and possess
or confer the same civil rights. There are no privileges; that is, no
laws or rights peculiar to particular families, or to property or labour
of particular sorts.
This is a new and mighty fact in the history of human societies.
But notwithstanding this fact, notwithstanding this civil unity and
equality, there are evidently numerous and great diversities and
inequalities, which unity of laws and equality of rights can neither
prevent nor remove.
As to property, whether in immoveables or moveables, land or capital,
there are rich and poor; there are large, middling, and small
properties.
The great proprietors may be less numerous and less wealthy, and the
middling and small proprietors may be more numerous and more powerful,
than they were formerly, or than they are in other countries; but this
does not prevent the inequality amongst them from being real and great
enough to occasion a radical difference and inequality of social
position.
From diversities of position founded on property, I pass on to those
founded upon labour, of every kind and degree, from the highest
intellectual, to the lowest manual labour. Here too I meet with the same
fact. Here too diversity and inequality arise and subsist, in spite of
identical laws and equal rights.
In the professions called liberal, or those which depend on the
cultivation and employment of the intellect; among lawyers, physicians,
men of science, and literary men of every sort, some few rise to the
highest rank, attract business, and gain success, reputation, wealth,
and influence. Others earn laboriously what is barely sufficient for the
wants of their families, and the decencies of their station. Many more
vegetate in obscure and unemployed indigence.
And here one fact deserves notice. From the time when all professions
have been accessible to all, from the time when labour has been free,
subject only to the same laws for all, the number of men who have raised
themselves to the first ranks in the liberal professions has not
sensibly increased. It does not appear that there are now more great
lawyers or physicians, more men of science or letters of the first
order, than there were formerly. It is the men of the second order, and
the obscure and idle multitude, that are multiplied. It is as if
Providence did not permit human laws to have any influence over the
intellectual rank of its creatures, or the extent and magnificence of
its gifts.
In the other trades or professions, in which labour is chiefly material
and manual, there are also different and unequal situations. Some, by
intelligence and good conduct, accumulate a capital and enter upon the
path of competence and advancement; others, either incapable or
improvident, lazy or dissolute, remain in the narrow and precarious
condition of men dependent upon the daily casualties of wages.
Thus throughout the whole extent of civil society,--whether among those
who depend on labour, or those possessed of property,--diversity and
inequality of situation arise and coexist with unity of laws and
equality of rights.
How, indeed, can it be otherwise? If we examine every form of human
society throughout all ages and countries--whatever be the variety of
their organization, government, extent, or duration, or of the kind and
degree of civilization to which they have attained--we shall find three
types of social position always fundamentally the same, though under
very different forms and very differently distributed.
1. Men living on the income of their property, whether in land or
capital, without seeking to increase it by their own labour;
2. Men occupied in increasing by their own labour the property,
whether in land or capital, which they possess;
3. Men living by their labour without land or capital.
These diversities and inequalities in the social condition of men are
not accidental, or peculiar to any particular time or country. They are
universal facts, which naturally arise in every human society, amidst
circumstances, and under laws, the most widely different.
And the more accurately we study them, the more clearly we shall
perceive that there exists an intimate connexion and a profound harmony
between these facts and the nature of man, which we know, on the one
hand, and the mysteries of his destiny, of which we can only obtain a
dim and distant glance, on the other.
Nor is this all. Independently of these diversities and inequalities
among individuals, whether proprietors or labourers, other diversities
and other inequalities exist among the kinds of property and of labour.
These differences are not less real than the others, though they are
less apparent; nor are they more incompatible with unity of laws or
equality of civil rights.
Moveable property, or capital, has acquired, and continues to acquire,
an ever increasing extension and importance in the communities of
modern Europe. It is evident that the progress of civilization in our
times is entirely in favour of its development; a just requital for the
immense services which capital has rendered to civilization.
But this is not enough: efforts are continually made to assimilate
immoveable to moveable property; to render land as transferable, as
divisible, as convenient to possess and to improve as capital. All the
proposed innovations, direct or indirect, in the laws relating to landed
property, have this object in view, either openly or covertly.
But though a movement so favourable to capital is going on, landed
property is still the most considerable in France, and still holds the
first place in the estimation and the desires of the people. Those who
possess it addict themselves more and more to the enjoyment of it, and
those who do not possess it are more and more eager after its
acquisition. The great proprietor is returning to the taste for living
on his estate: the tradesman, who has earned a competence, retires to
the country to enjoy repose: the peasant thinks of nothing but how to
add field to field. Whilst everything is done to favour the development
of capital, landed property is more in request and more prized than
ever.
It may be confidently predicted that if, as I hope, social order
triumphs over its insane or depraved enemies, the attacks of which
landed property is now the object, and the dangers with which it is
threatened, will, in the end, enhance its preponderance in society.
Whence arises this preponderance? Is it merely because, of all sorts of
property, land is the most secure, the least variable;--that which best
resists the perturbations, and survives the calamities of society?
This motive, though real, powerful, and obvious, is far from being the
only one. There are other motives, or rather we may call them
deep-seated instincts, whose empire over man is great, even when he is
unconscious of it. These secure the social preponderance of landed
property, or restore it when transiently shaken or enfeebled. Among
these instincts two appear to me the most powerful; it will be
sufficient to indicate them, for an attempt to fathom their depths would
carry me too far.
Moveable property, or capital, may procure a man all the advantages of
wealth; but property in land gives him much more than this. It gives him
a place in the domain of the world--it unites his life to the life which
animates all creation. Money is an instrument by which man can procure
the satisfaction of his wants and his desires. Landed property is the
establishment of man as sovereign in the midst of nature. It satisfies
not only his wants and his desires, but tastes deeply implanted in his
nature. For his family, it creates that domestic country called home,
with all the living sympathies and all the future hopes and projects
which people it. And whilst property in land is more consonant than any
other to the nature of man, it also affords a field of activity the most
favourable to his moral development, the most suited to inspire a just
sentiment of his nature and his powers. In almost all the other trades
or professions, whether commercial or scientific, success appears to
depend solely on himself--on his talents, address, prudence, and
vigilance. In agricultural life, man is constantly in the presence of
God, and of his power. Activity, talents, prudence and vigilance are as
necessary here as elsewhere to the success of his labours, but they are
evidently no less insufficient than they are necessary. It is God who
rules the seasons and the temperature, the sun and the rain, and all
those phenomena of nature which determine the success or the failure of
the labours of man on the soil which he cultivates. There is no pride
which can resist this dependence, no address which can escape it. Nor is
it only a sentiment of humility as to his power over his own destiny
which is thus inculcated upon man; he learns also tranquillity and
patience. He cannot flatter himself that the most ingenious inventions
or the most restless activity will ensure his success; when he has done
all that depends upon him for the cultivation and the fertilization of
the soil, he must wait with resignation. The more profoundly we examine
the situation in which man is placed by the possession and cultivation
of the soil, the more do we discover how rich it is in salutary lessons
to his reason, and benign influences on his character. Men do not
analyze these facts, but they have an instinctive sentiment of them,
which powerfully contributes to that peculiar respect in which they hold
property in land, and to the preponderance which that kind of property
enjoys over every other. This preponderance is a natural, legitimate and
salutary fact, which, especially in a great country, society at large
has a strong interest in recognising and respecting.
What I have just shown with relation to property, is equally true with
relation to labour. It is the glory of modern civilization to have
understood and proclaimed the moral value and the social importance of
labour; to have raised it to the estimation and the rank which justly
belong to it. If I had to point out the most profound evil, the most
fatal vice, of the state of things which prevailed in France up to the
sixteenth century, I should say, without hesitation, the contempt in
which labour was held. Contempt of labour and pride in idleness are
certain signs either that society is under the dominion of brute force,
or that it is verging to its decline. Labour is the law which God has
enjoined on man. It is by labour that he developes and improves
everything around him--by labour that he developes and improves his own
nature. Labour is become the surest pledge of peace between nations. The
respect and the liberty enjoyed by labour tend more than anything to
calm the anxieties which we might otherwise too justly feel, and to
raise our hopes for the prospects of the human race. By what fatality
then has it happened that the word _labour_, so honourable to modern
civilization, is become a war-cry and a source of disasters in France?
It is because that word is made a cloak for a great and pernicious lie.
It is not labour, its interests or its rights, which are the object of
the ferment excited in its name; the war which has been declared on the
plea of protecting labour, is not in fact waged in its behalf, nor, if
successful, would redound to its advantage. It is, on the contrary,
directed against labour, whose ruin and degradation would be its
infallible result.
Labour, like family, property, and everything else in this world, is
subject to natural and general laws; among which are, diversity and
inequality of the kinds and the results of labour, and of the stations
of those by whom it is performed. Intellectual labour is superior to
manual. Descartes, who enlightened France, and Colbert, who laid the
foundations of her prosperity, performed a labour superior to that of
the workman who prints the works of Descartes, or who helps to produce
the manufactures fostered by Colbert; and among these very workmen,
those who are intelligent, moral, and industrious, justly attain to a
situation superior to that which the same description of labour can
secure to the dull, the lazy, or the licentious. The variety of tasks
and vocations allotted to man is infinite. Labour is everywhere--in the
house of a father of a family, who educates his children and
superintends his affairs; in the cabinet of a statesman who takes part
in the government of his country; in that of the magistrate who
administers its laws; of the philosopher who instructs, and of the poet
who charms it; in the fields, on the ocean, on the highways, in the
manufactories and the workshops; and in every situation, in every
variety of labour, in every class of labourers, diversity and inequality
arise and subsist; inequality of intellectual power, of moral merit, of
social importance, of material wealth. These are the natural, primitive,
universal laws of labour, originating in the nature and condition of
man, or, to speak more properly, ordained by the wisdom of God. It is
against these laws that the war of which we are witnesses is waged; it
is this hierarchy of labour, founded on the decrees of God and the free
actions of man, which it is the object of this war to abolish; and to
substitute--what?--the degradation and the ruin of labour, by the
reduction of all labour and all labourers to the same level! Examine the
meaning which is usually affixed to the word _labour_ in the language of
these enemies of social order. They do not distinctly say that material
and manual work are the only real work; indeed they occasionally affect
great respect for purely intellectual labour: but they omit to mention
the various sorts of higher labour which are performed on every stage of
the social scale; their whole attention is absorbed by material labour,
which they constantly represent as the kind of labour whose importance
throws every other into the shade. In short, they talk in a manner to
excite and keep alive in the minds of the men employed in physical
labour, the opinion that theirs only has a claim to the name and the
rights of labour. Even when speaking not of labour, but of labourers,
they hold the same levelling and depreciating language;--ascribing the
rights of labour to workmen, as such, independently of all degrees of
personal merit. Thus the coarsest and most ordinary labour is assumed as
the standard to which all the higher degrees are adjusted; and diversity
and inequality are abolished, for the supposed advantage of that which
is the least and the lowest in the scale!
Do those who hold such language serve--do they even understand--the
cause which they affect to advocate? Is it by such means that we can
advance, or even barely keep our ground, on that glorious path of
civilization in which labour acquired its proper rank and dignity? Do we
not, on the contrary, mutilate, degrade, and disgrace labour, when we
strip it of a part of its noblest claims, and substitute in their stead
pretensions which are not only absurd and preposterous, but mean, in
spite of their insolence? Lastly, does not such language show a gross
misconception and violent perversion of the natural facts on which civil
society in France is founded? This, though admitting unity of laws and
equality of rights, assuredly never pretended to abolish that variety of
faculties, merits, and destinies, which is one of the mysterious laws of
God, and the inevitable result of the free will of man.
Let us now turn from civil to political society; that is, the relation
existing between men, in virtue of their interests, opinions and
sentiments, and the ruling power under which they live. Let us endeavour
here to determine also the real and essential elements of which society
is now composed in France.
In a free country, or in one struggling to become free, the elements of
political society are political parties, in the widest and highest
acceptation of the term.
Legally, there are now no other parties in France than those inherent
in every constitutional state; the party of the Government and that of
the Opposition. There are neither Legitimists nor Orleanists. The
Republic exists, and will not suffer the principle of its existence to
be attacked; and as this is the indisputable right of every established
government, it is by no means my intention to contest or to infringe it.
But there are things so inherent in society, that prohibitive laws, even
when obeyed, fail to eradicate them. There are political parties of
which the germ lies so deeply buried, and the roots so widely spread,
that they do not die, even when they are no longer apparent.
The Legitimist party is not a mere dynastic, nor is it a mere
monarchical, party. It is indeed attached to a principle and to a name;
but it also occupies a great substantive place both in the history and
on the soil of France. It represents all that remains of the elements so
long predominant throughout that French society which contained within
itself the fruitful and vigorous germs of progress; and out of which
arose, after a growth of ages, the France which suddenly burst forth in
1789, mighty, aspiring, and glorious. Though the French Revolution
overthrew the ancient fabric of French society, it could not annihilate
its elements. In spite of the convulsions by which they were dispersed,
and in the midst of the ruins by which they are surrounded, these still
subsist, and are still considerable in modern France. At every
succeeding crisis they evidently acquiesce more completely in the social
order and political constitution which the country has adopted; and by
this acquiescence they take their station in it, and change their
position without disowning their character.
Moreover, does anybody believe that the party which endeavoured to found
a constitutional monarchy in 1830, and which upheld that monarchy for
more than seventeen years, has vanished in the tempest that overthrew
the edifice it had raised? It has been called the party of the
_bourgeoisie_,--the middle classes; and this in fact it was, and still
is. The ascendancy of the middle classes in France, incessantly supplied
by recruits from the bulk of the population, is the characteristic
feature in our history since 1789. Not only have they conquered that
ascendancy, but they have justified their claims to it. Amidst the
grievous errors into which they have fallen, and for which they have
paid so dearly, they have shown that they really possessed the qualities
that constitute the strength and greatness of a nation. On all
emergencies, for all the wants of the country in war or peace, and to
every kind of social career, this class has abundantly furnished men,
nay, generations of men, able, active, and sincerely devoted to the
service of their country. When called on in 1830 to found a new
monarchy, the middle classes brought to that difficult task a spirit of
justice and political sincerity of which no succeeding event can cancel
the merit. In spite of all the passions and all the perils that assailed
them, in spite even of their own passions, they earnestly desired
constitutional order, and they faithfully observed it. At home, they
respected and maintained universal, legal and practical liberty; abroad,
universal, firm and prosperous peace.
I am not one of those who disregard or despise the power of the
affections in political affairs. I do not regard it as any proof of
greatness or strength of mind to say, “We don’t care for such or such a
family; we attach no value to proper names; we take men or leave them
according to our wants or our interests:” to me, this language, and the
class of opinions which it discloses, appear to betray far more
political ignorance and impotence than elevation of mind or rectitude of
judgment. It is, however, indisputable that political parties having no
other attachment than that excited by proper names, and no other
strength than that derived from personal affections, would be extremely
feeble and inefficient. But can anybody for a moment imagine that the
Legitimist party, or the party attached to the monarchy of 1830, are of
that nature? Is it not evident, on the contrary, that these parties are
far more the offspring of the general course of events than of
attachment to persons? that they are of a social, as well as a political
nature, and correspond to the most deep-rooted and indestructible
elements of society in France?
Around these great parties floats the mass of the population; holding to
the one or the other by its interests, its habits, or its virtuous and
rational instincts; but without any strong or solid adhesion, and
incessantly assailed and worked upon by Socialists and Communists of
every shade. These last do not constitute political parties, for they do
not espouse any political principle, nor advocate any peculiar political
organization. Their only endeavour is to destroy all the influences, and
to break all the ties, material or moral, which bind the part of the
population living by the labour of its hands, to the class occupied in
the business of the state; to divide that part of the population from
the land-owner, the capitalist, the clergy, and all the other
established authorities; and finally to work upon it through its
miseries, and rule it by its appetites. One name denotes them all; all
are members of the one great Anarchical Party. It is not the superiority
of this or that form of government which they preach to the people--it
is sheer and absolute anarchy; for one kind of government is as
incompatible with chaos as another. There is, however, one striking
fact: whether sincere or depraved, blind Utopians or designing
Anarchists, all these disturbers of social order are Republicans. Not
that they are more attached or more submissive to republican government
than to any other; for every regular and efficient government, whether
republican or monarchical, is equally odious to them; but they hope that
under a republic they shall find stronger weapons to aid their attacks,
and feebler barriers to resist them. This is the secret of their
preference.
I have thus surveyed French society on every side. I have sought out and
exhibited all its real and essential elements, and all my inquiries lead
to the same result. On every side, whether in political or civil life, I
meet with profound diversities and inequalities: diversities and
inequalities which can neither be obliterated in civil life by unity of
laws and equality of rights, nor in political life by a republican
government; and which endure or revive under legislation of every kind
and government of every form.
This is not an opinion, an argument, or a conjecture, but a statement of
facts.
Now what is the import and tendency of these facts? Shall we find in
them the ancient classifications of society? Will the ancient political
denominations apply to them? Do they exhibit an aristocracy opposed to a
democracy; or a nobility, a bourgeoisie, and a so-called people? Would
these diversities and inequalities of social and political position
form, or tend to form, a hierarchy of classes analogous to those which
formerly existed in French society?
No, certainly!--the words _aristocracy_, _democracy_, _nobility_,
_bourgeoisie_, or _hierarchy_, do not correspond to the constituent
elements of modern French society, or express them with any truth or
accuracy.
Does then this society consist solely of citizens equal among each
other? Are there no different classes, and only individual diversities
and inequalities, devoid of all political importance? Is there nothing
but a great and uniform democracy, which seeks satisfaction in a
republic at the risk of finding repose in a despotism?
Neither is this the fact; either of these descriptions would equally
misrepresent the true state of our society. We must emancipate ourselves
from the tyranny of words, and see things as they really are. France is
extremely new, and yet full of the past; whilst the principles of unity
and equality have determined her organization, she still contains social
conditions and political situations profoundly different and unequal.
There is no hierarchical classification, but there are different
classes; there is no aristocracy, properly so called, but there is
something which is not democracy. The real, essential, and distinct
elements of French society, which I have just described, may enfeeble
each other by perpetual conflicts, but neither can destroy or
obliterate the other. They survive all the struggles in which they
engage, and all the calamities which they inflict on each other. Their
co-existence is a fact which it is not in their power to abolish. Let
them then fully acquiesce in it; let them live together, and in peace.
Neither the liberty nor the repose, the dignity nor the prosperity, the
greatness nor the security of France, are to be had on any other terms.
On what conditions can this peace be established?