Oeuvres de Ernest Coeurderoy (French Edition)

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Close Report a review At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. Would you like us to take another look at this review? What is the sanction? By what claims, by what signs, shall I distinguish the elect delegated by the People from the apostates who take advantage of its trust and usurp its authority?

When you come right down to it, how do you establish the legitimacy of the popular Word? How then, I beg of you, among so many rival apostles, contradictory opinions, and obstinate partisans, am I to recognize the voice, the true voice of the People? The problem of the sovereignty of the People is the fundamental problem of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the first principle of social organization.

Governments and peoples have had no other goal, through all the storms of revolutions and diversions of politics, than to constitute this sovereignty. Each time that they have been diverted from this goal they have fallen into slavery and shame. With this in mind the Provisional Government has convened a National Assembly named by all citizens, without distinction as to wealth and capacity: Thus it is supposed first that the People can be consulted; second, that it can respond; third, that its will can be authentically ascertained: But, if I prove that democracy, just like monarchy, only symbolizes that sovereignty, that it does not respond to any of the questions raised by this idea, that it cannot, for example, either establish the authenticity of the actions attributed to the People or state what is the final goal of society: The People, the collective being-I almost said rational being-does not speak at all in the true sense of the word.

The People, no more than God, has no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no mouth to speak. How do I know if it is endowed with some sort of soul, a divinity immanent in the masses, as certain philosophers hypothesize a world soul, and which at certain moments moves and urges it on; or whether the reason of the People is none other than pure idea, the most abstract, the most comprehensive, the freest of all individual form, as other philosophers claim that God is simply the order in the universe, an abstraction?

I am not getting involved in the investigations of esoteric psychology: Who can serve as its spokesman? And when you show me, like a coterie, nine hundred personages thus chosen by their fellow citizens, why ought I believe that these nine hundred delegates, who do not all agree among each other, are prompted by a mysterious inspiration from the People? And, when all is said, how will the law they are going to make obligate me?

Here is a president or a directory, the personification, symbol, or fabrication of national sovereignty: Here are a chamber, two chambers-one the spokesman of conservative interests, the other of the instinct for development: Here is a press, eloquent, disciplined, untiring, which each morning pours out in torrents millions of ideas which swarm in the millions of brains of the citizenry: Which of these powers represents the people?

Or else, if you say that it is the whole thing which represents the people, how is it that they do not all agree? Put royalty in place of the presidency, and it is the same thing: And what do we hear from the platform? And what does the Government know? Not so long ago it was escaping its responsibilities by denying its own authority to make decisions. It did not exist, it claimed, in order to organize work and give bread to the People. For a month it has received the demands of the proletariat; for a month it has been at work-and for a month it has had the official gazette publish every day this great news: The Government divides the People; it arouses hatred between the classes that compose it.

But to organize the People, to create that sovereignty which is simultaneously liberty and accord, this exceeds the Government ability, as formerly it exceeded its jurisdiction. Does the People, which is sometimes said to have risen like a single man, also think like one man? Does it have a memory, imagination, ideas? If in reality the People is sovereign, it thinks; if it thinks, doubtless it has its own way of thinking and formulating its thought.

How then does the People think? What are the forms of popular reasoning? Does it proceed by means of categories? Does it employ syllogism, induction, analysis, antinomy, or analogy? Is it Aristotelian or Hegelian? You must explain all that; otherwise, your respect for the sovereignty of the People is only absurd fetishism. One might as well worship a stone. Does the People call upon experience in its meditations? Does it bear in mind its memories, or else is its course to produce new ideas endlessly?

How does it reconcile respect for its traditions with its needs for development? How does it finish with one worn-out hypothesis and go on to try another? What is the law of its transitions and its movement from one idea to the next? What stimulates it, what defines the course of its progress? Why this moving about, this instability?

I need to know all this-otherwise the law you impose on me in the name of the People ceases to be authentic: Does the People always think?

And if it does not, how do you account for the intermittent character of its thought? If we suppose that the People can be represented, what will its representatives do during these interruptions? Does the People sleep sometimes, like Jupiter in the arms of Juno? When does it dream? When does it stay awake? You must teach me about all these things; otherwise, the power you exercise by delegation from the People being only interim, and the length of the interim being unknown, this power is usurped: If the People thinks, reflects, reasons, sometimes a priori, according to the rules of pure reason, sometimes a posteriori upon the data of experience, it runs the risk of deceiving itself.

Who will choose among the ideas and fantasies of the People? To whom shall we appeal its will, which may be erroneous, and consequently despotic? If the People can err, then there are two alternatives. On the one hand, the error may seem as respectable as if it were true, and can claim complete obedience despite the error. In this case the People is a supremely immoral being, since it can simultaneously think, will, and do evil. On the other hand, ought we find fault with the People in its errors? There would then be, in certain cases, a duty for a government to resist the People!

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Who will tell it: Who will be able to set it to rights, to restrain it? But what am I saying? If the People is liable to err, what becomes of its sovereignty? Cannot all inspiration from it hide immense peril as much as immense success, and its will be only a suicidal thought? Doubtless, you will say, the People has only a mystical existence. It manifests itself only at rare intervals, in predestined epochs!

But for all that the People is no phantom, and when it rises, no one can fail to recognize it…. Now if the People has, in all historical epochs, thought, expressed, willed, and done a multitude of contradictory things; if, even today, among so many opinions which divide it, it is impossible for it to choose one without repudiating another and consequently without being self-contradictory-what do you want me to think of the reason, the morality, the justice, of its acts?

What can I expect of its representatives? And what proof of authenticity will you give me in favour of an opinion, such that I cannot immediately make a claim for the contrary one? What astonishes me in the midst of the confusion of ideas, is that faith in the sovereignty of the People, far from dwindling, seems by this very confusion to reach its own climax. But beyond this initial affirmation, and when it is a question of going from the subject of the thought to its object, when in other words it is a question of applying the criterion to acts of Government, let someone tell me, where is the People?

In principle then, I admit that the People exists, that it is sovereign, that it is predicated in the consciousness of the masses. But nothing yet has proven to me that it can perform an overt act of sovereignty, that an explicit revelation of the People is possible. For, in view of the dominance of prejudices, of the contradiction of ideas and interests, of the variability of opinion, and of the impulsiveness of the multitude, I shall always ask what establishes the authenticity and legitimacy of such a revelation-and this is what democracy cannot answer.

But, the democrats observe-not without reason-the People has never been suitably called to action. Never has it been able to demonstrate its will except for momentary flashes: For the People to be able to speak its mind, it must be democratically consulted-that is, all citizens without distinction must participate, directly or indirectly, in the formation of the law. Now, this mode of democratic consultation has never been exercised in a coherent manner: Princes, nobles and priests, military men, magistrates, teachers, scholars, artists, industrialists, merchants, financiers, proprietors, have always succeeded in breaking up the democratic Union, in changing the voice of the People into a voice of monopoly.

Now that we possess the only true way of having the People speak, we shall likewise know what constitutes the authenticity and legitimacy of its word, and all your preceding objections vanish. The sincerity of the democratic regime will guarantee the solution to us….

According to the theory of universal suffrage, experience should have proven that the middle class, which alone has exercised political rights of late, does not represent the People-far from it, with the monarchy it has been in constant reaction against the People. We shall have an aristocracy of our own choice-I have no objection-in place of a natural aristocracy; but aristocracy for aristocracy I prefer, with Mr.

Guizot, that of fatality to that of arbitrary will: Or, rather, we will only restore, by another route, the same aristocrats; for whom do you want named to represent them, these working stiffs, these day labourers, these toilers, if not their bourgeoisie?

Unless you only want that they kill them!

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One way or another, preponderant strength in government belongs to the men who have the preponderance of talent and fortune. From the first it has been evident that social reform will never come out of political reform, that on the contrary political reform must come out of social reform. Neither the Revolution of July [] nor that of February [] has sufficed to illuminate this.

What they always want is inequality of fortunes, delegation of sovereignty, and government by influential people. Instead of saying, as did Mr. Thiers, The king reigns and does not govern, democracy says, The People reigns and does not govern, which is to deny the Revolution…. Since, according to the ideology of the democrats, the People cannot govern itself and is forced to give itself to representatives who govern by delegation, while it retains the right of review, it is supposed that the People is quite capable at least of having itself represented, that it can be represented faithfully.

This hypothesis is utterly false; there is not and never can be legitimate representation of the People. All electoral systems are mechanisms for deceit: Its system pretends to be universal, but whatever it does, in the entire electoral system there will always be exclusions, absences, and votes which are invalidated, erroneous, or unfree. The hardiest innovators have not yet dared to demand suffrage for women, children, domestic servants, or men with criminal records. About four-fifths of the People are not represented, and are cut off from the communion of the People.

Why not at nineteen, eighteen, seventeen? One year, one day makes the elector rational! You have thus resolved the grand problem of the inferiority of the sex. The Jacobins welcomed the revolutionary women who sat knitting at their meetings; no one has ever said that the presence of these citizenesses weakened the courage of the citizens! You set aside the domestic servant. You are saying that this sign of servitude does not cover a generous soul, that in the heart of a valet beats no idea which will save the Republic!

Is the race of Figaro lost? It is the fault of this man, you will say: And why are there servants? I want to see, I want to hear the People in its variety and multitude, all ages, all sexes, all conditions, all virtues, all miseries: You claim that there would be grievous trouble for good discipline, for the peace of the State and tranquillity of families, if women, children, and domestic servants obtained the same rights as husbands, fathers, and masters, that in addition the former are adequately represented by the latter through their solidarity of interests and the familial bond.

I acknowledge that the objection is a serious one, and I do not attempt to refute it. Seven-tenths of this category receive the aid of public charity: In the National Assembly the proletariat will be like the officials in Mr. And all these citizens who, because of work, sickness, travel, or lack of money to go to the elections, are forced to abstain from voting, how do you count them? But, consents to what? To the opinion of the majority, or indeed to that of the minority? And those who vote only on impulse, through good-nature or interest, through faith in their republican committee or parish priest: It is an old maxim that in all deliberations it is necessary not only to count the votes, but to weigh them.

In your committees, on the contrary, the vote of an Arago or Lamartine counts no more than that of a beggar. Will you say that the consideration due men for their merit is secured by the influence they exercise on the electors? Then the voting is not free. It is the voices of ability that we hear, not that of the People.

One might as well preserve electoral suffrage based on qualification by ownership of property…. I pass over in silence the material and moral impossibilities which abound in the mode of election adopted by the Provisional Government. It is completely devoted to the opinion that in doubling the national representation and making people vote for inseparable lists of candidates, the Provisional Government wanted the citizens to choose not men but principle, precisely in the manner of the former Government, which also made people vote on the system, not on the men.

How is one to discuss the choice of ten, twenty, twenty-five deputies? How, if each citizen votes freely and in knowledge of his cause, are the votes of such elections-by-list to be counted? How are such elections brought to a conclusion, if they are serious? Evidently it is impossible.

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I do not discuss, I repeat, the purely material side of the question: I keep to issues of right. What formerly was obtained through venality, today they extort from impotence. They say to the elector: Here are our friends, the friends of the Republic; and there are our adversaries, who also are the adversaries of the Republic-choose. And the elector who cannot appraise the abilities of the candidates votes out of confidence! Instead of naming deputies for each district, as under the fallen regime, they will have them elected by province. They wanted, by this measure, to destroy the spirit of localism.

How wonderful it is that the democrats are so sure of their principles! If the deputies, they say, are named by districts, it is not France which is represented, but the districts. The national Assembly would no longer be representative of the country; it would be a congress of separate delegations. I observe first that any system which can be true only in conditions themselves impossible seems to me a poor system.

But to me the democrats here appear singularly inconsistent and perplexed by mere trifles. If the representatives ought to represent not the provinces, nor the districts, nor the towns, nor the countryside, nor industry, nor commerce, nor agriculture, nor special interests, but only FRANCE! Why not one per , or ,! Was it more difficult to vote on a list of ninety names than on one of fifteen? But who does not see that deputies thus elected apart from all special interests and groups, all considerations of places and persons, by dint of representing France, represent nothing; that they no longer are mandated representatives, but legislators set apart from the People; and that in place of a representative democracy we have an elective oligarchy, the middle term between democracy and royalty.

There, citizen reader, is where I want to bring you. From whatever aspect you consider democracy, you will always see it placed between two extremes each as contrary as the other to its own principle, condemned to oscillate between the absurd and the impossible, without ever being able to establish itself. Among a million equally arbitrary terms, the Provisional Government has acted like Mr.

Of representative truth, as of government of the People by the People, the Provisional Government has taken no account…. In order that the deputy represent his constituents, it is necessary that he represent all the ideas which have united to elect him. But, with the electoral system, the deputy, the would-be legislator sent by the citizens to reconcile all ideas and all interests in the name of the People, always represents just one idea, one interest. The rest is excluded without pity. For who makes law in the elections? Who decides the choice of deputies?

The majority, half plus one of the votes. From this it follows that half less one of the electors is not represented or is so in spite of itself, that of all the opinions that divide the citizens, one only, insofar as the deputy has an opinion, arrives at the legislature, and finally that the law, which should be the expression of the will of the People, is only the expression of half of the People. The result is that in the theory of the democrats the problem consists of eliminating, by the mechanism of sham universal suffrage, all ideas save one which stir opinion, and to declare sovereign that which has the majority.

But, perhaps it will be said, the idea that fails in such an electoral body will triumph in another and, by this means, all ideas can be represented in the National Assembly. When that is the case, you would have only put off the difficulty, for the question is to know how all these ideas, divergent and antagonistic, will concur on the law and be reconciled thereon.

Thus the Revolution, according to some, is only an accident, which should change nothing in the general order of society. According to others, the Revolution is social still more than political. How can such obviously incompatible claims be satisfied? How at the same time can there be given security for the bourgeoisie and guarantees for the proletariat?

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How will these contrary wishes and opposed inclinations come to be mixed together in a resulting community, in one universal law? Democracy is so far from being able to resolve this difficulty that all its art, all its science is used to remove the obstacle. It makes appeals to the ballot box; the ballot box is simultaneously the level, the balance, the criterion of democracy. With the electoral ballot democracy eliminates men; with the legislative ballot, it eliminates ideas….

It is one vote that makes the representative, one vote that makes the law! With a question on which hangs the honour and health of the Republic, the citizens are divided into two equal factions. On the two sides they bring to bear the most serious reasoning, the weightiest authorities, the most positive facts. The nation is in doubt, the Assembly is in suspension. One representative, without discernible motive, passes from right to left and turns the balance; it is he who makes the law.

And this law, the expression of some bizarre will, is supposed to be the will of the People! It will be necessary for me to submit to it, defend it, even kill for it! By a parliamentary caprice I lose the most precious of my rights, I lose liberty! And the most sacred of my duties, the duty to resist tyranny by force, falls before the sovereign noggin of an imbecile! Democracy is nothing but the tyranny of majorities, the most execrable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, nor on a nobility of blood, nor on the prerogatives of fortune: If universal suffrage, the most complete manifestation of democracy, has won so many partisans, especially among the working classes, it is because it has always been presented on the basis of an appeal to men of talent, as well as to the good sense and morality of the masses.

How often have they not brought out the offensive contrast of the speculator who becomes politically influential through plunder and the man of genius whom poverty has kept far away from the stage! We can do more; we can follow them step by step in their legislative acts and their votes; we shall make them transmit our arguments and our documents; we shall indicate our will to them, and when we are discontented, we shall recall and dismiss them.

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The choice of abilities, imperative mandate, permanent revocability-these are the most immediate and incontestable consequences of the electoral principle. It is the inevitable program of all democracy. Now democracy, no more than constitutional monarchy, does not sustain such a deduction from its principle. What democracy demands, like monarchy, is silent deputies who do not discuss, but vote; who, receiving the order from the Government, crush the opposition with their heavy and heavy witted battalions.

These are passive creatures, I almost say satellites, whom the danger of a revolution does not intimidate, whose reason is not too rebellious, whose conscience does not recoil before anything arbitrary, before any proscription…. In every kind of government the deputy belongs to the powerful, not to the country… [It is required] that he be master of his vote, that is, to traffic in its sale, that the mandate have a specified term, of at least a year, during which the Government, in agreement with the deputies, does what it pleases and gives strength to the law through action by its own arbitrary will….

If monarchy is the hammer which crushes the People, democracy is the axe which divides it: They have brought us back to the practices of barbarians who, lacking rationality, proceeded by acclamation and election. They have taken a material symbol for the true formula of sovereignty. And they have said to the proletarians: When you vote, you shall be free, you shall be rich; you shall enact capital, product and wages; you shall, as another Moses did, make thrushes and manna fall from heaven; you shall become like gods, for you shall not work, or shall work so little that if you do work it shall be as nothing.

Whatever they do and whatever they say, universal suffrage, the testimony of discord, can only produce discord. And it is with this miserable idea, I am ashamed for my native land, that for seventeen years they have agitated the poor People! For six months the opposition deputies, like comedians on tour, travelled through the provinces, and for the fruit of their benefit performance what have they brought back to us, what?

A scheme for land redistribution! It is under this schismatic flag that we have claimed to preserve the initiative of progress, to march at the forefront of nations in the conquest of liberty, to inaugurate harmony around the world! Yesterday, we regarded with pity the peoples who did not know as we have how to raise themselves to constitutional sublimity. Today, fallen a hundred times lower, we still are sorry for them, we shall go with a hundred thousand bayonets to make them partake with us of the benefits of democratic absolutism.

And we are the great nation! Be quiet, and if you do not know how to do great things, or express great ideas, at least preserve common sense for us…. In monarchy, the acts of the Government are an unfolding of authority; in democracy they constitute authority. The authority which in monarchy is the principle of governmental action is the goal of government in democracy.

The result is that democracy is fatally retrograde, and that it implies contradiction. Let us place ourselves at the point of departure for democracy, at the moment of universal suffrage. All citizens are equal, independent. Their egalitarian combination is the point of departure for power: By virtue of democratic principle, all citizens must participate in the formation of the law, in the government of the State, in the exercise of public functions, in the discussion of the budget, in the appointment of officials.

All must be consulted and give their opinions on peace and war, treaties of commerce and alliance, colonial enterprises, works of public utility, the award of compensation, the infliction of penalties. Finally, all must pay their debt to their native land, as taxpayers, jurors, judges, and soldiers.

If things could happen in this way, the ideal of democracy would be attained. It would have a normal existence, developing directly in the sense of its principle, as do all things which have life and grow. It is thus that the acorn becomes an oak, and the embryo an animal; it is thus that geometry, astronomy, chemistry are the development to infinity of a small number of elements. It is completely otherwise in democracy, which according to the authors exists fully only at the moment of elections and for the formation of legislative power.

This moment once past, democracy retreats; it withdraws into itself again, and begins its anti-democratic work. Authority was the idol of Mr. Guizot; it is also that of the democrats. In fact it is not true, in any democracy, that all citizens participate in the formation of the law: It is not true that they deliberate on all public affairs, domestic and foreign: Citizens discuss affairs, ministers alone deliberate them.

It is not true that each citizen fulfills a public function: By their nature public functions exclude the vast majority of citizens…. It is not true that citizens participate in the nomination of officials; moreover this participation is as impossible as the preceding one, since it would result in creating anarchy in the bad sense of the word. It is power which names its subordinates, sometimes according to its own arbitrary will, sometimes according to certain conditions for appointment or promotion, the order and discipline of officials and centralization requiring that it be thus….

Finally, it is not true that all citizens participate in justice and in war: In a word, hierarchy in government being the primary condition of government, democracy is a chimera.

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The reason that authors give for this merits our study. They say the People is outside the state because it does not know how to govern itself, and when it does know, it cannot do it. Ignorance or impotence, according to democratic theory the People is incapable of governing itself: This is what is meant by the democrats, who once in the government dream only of consolidating and strengthening the authority in their hands. Thus it was understood by the multitude, who threw themselves upon the doors of the City Hall, demanding government jobs, money, work, credit, bread!

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And there indeed is our nation, monarchist to its very marrow, idolizing power, deprived of individual energy and republican initiative, accustomed to expect everything from authority, to do nothing except through authority! When monarchy does not come to us from on high, as it did formerly, or on the field of battle, as in , or in the folds of a charter, as in or , we proclaim it in the public square, between two barricades, in electoral assembly, or at a patriotic banquet.

Drink to the health of the People and the multitude will crown you! Oeuvres completes de P-J. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie. This year marks the th anniversary of the birth of the first self-proclaimed anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas contains several selections from Proudhon, including excerpts from.

For more on Proudhon, see my introduction to the Pluto Press edition of the General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, now posted as one of my pages on this blog. One selection I really regret not including in Volume 1 of Anarchism: Stock, , originally published and translated by Paul Sharkey. Coeurderoy is perhaps best known for his Hurrah!!! Coeurderoy was a radical republican turned socialist active in the Revolution in France. Trained as a doctor, he cared for injured workers following the abortive uprising of June I am a citizen of the world these days and regard that title as greater than anything the proudest of nations can bestow; what is more, it is of my own choosing and not doled out through some accident of birth.

I am exiled, which is to say, free; these days one can only be so outside of society, country and family, all of them buckling under shameful servitude. What care I about armies, flags, governments and police! I skip across frontiers like the smuggler.