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Title: The Revolutionary Question Author: Joseph DĂ©jacque Date: 1854 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communism, Direct Democracy, democracy Source: https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/joseph-dejacque-the-revolutionary-question/
Any government that does not understand the universality of the people
is a de-facto government. The law - if law and government did not swear
to be contiguous to one another - would be the people legislating
itself, without representation, without delegation.
To date, there have been only de facto governments. The government of
Monsieur Bonaparte is of this number.
But, as the former usurpers of the sovereignty of the people claim,
royalists of all shades, formalist republicans or mountain men, is Louis
Bonaparte outlawed?
If it concerns political law, the law as it has existed under all and by
all powers, elective or hereditary, constitutional or absolute, no,
Louis Bonaparte is not outlawed. On the contrary, he is the God and the
pontiff.
It is in the law in the same way as representative assemblies,
legislative or constitutive, granting charter or laws to the people;
like the provisional government launching its decrees and proconsuls on
the Revolution from Sinai of the Hotel de Ville. Like them, and more
than them, he has for him the sanction of universal suffrage.
On this point, no serious dispute is possible. No, Louis Bonaparte is
not outlawed - meaning out of political law.
But, there are other laws; social laws, human laws, natural laws.
Even still, is Mr. Bonaparte within the law? Obviously no. He is no more
than the Provisional Government taking advantage of February's victory;
committing 45 centimes; turning ignorance and fear against the popular
demonstration of April 16; recalling, for his occult plots, the army
into the heart of Paris; presiding over the massacres at Rouen, and,
under the name of the Executive Committee, the reaction of May 15, to
the law against the right of assembly. No more than the Constituent
Assembly of Republicans of yesterday, in search of a childish bourgeois
constitution, a mountain giving birth to a mouse; the Constituent
Assembly imprisoned, deported, shot and guillotined socialism in June
1848; putting themselves, in defiance of the freedom of the people and
their solemn declaration, on a campaign against Roman liberty. No more
than the Legislative Assembly voting on and enacting thanks to their
poverty tax; the suppression of constituents by their representatives,
the capital execution of universal suffrage; all this liberticidal
legality deduced or extorted from the Marrast Constitution.
Not only then is M. Bonaparte outlawed as were all the governments that
preceded him, not only he, the prince, the president, the emperor, but
outlawed also is the bourgeois, proprietor, banker, shopkeeper,
industrialist - the master exploiting the work, the production, the
misery and the hunger of the proletarian.
Yes, outlawed! And it is right, and it is duty-when one has the means,
the power, to protest against bourgeois or princely oppression, and by
the rifle by rebelling en masse, banner in the wind, barricades under
the sun, and by the knife, rising individually, alone, at the corner of
a deserted street and under the veil of the night. To kill and rob a
prince of his scepter, to kill and rob a bourgeois of his gold, is not
to kill and rob a man; it is to destroy a ferocious beast and strip him
of his fur; it is for the proletarian, at any moment of the twenty-four
hours of the day, a case of self-defense.
Who of you would dare to anathematize the serf of the Middle Ages
shaking the torch at the threshold of his lord, and burying him in his
bloody bed, in the middle of his feudal mansion cracking and writhing
under the fire's embrace? Who would dare to anathematize this serf
reclaiming his delightful freedom by iron and fire?
Who of you would dare to anathematize the slave of the ancient times,
striking the patrician in the light of an orgy, tearing his solid gold
cup from his hands and lips, and, after having emptied it fleeing,
carrying off in his loot and seal escape sealed with the seal of a
murder?
Who of you would dare to lay the anathema to the republican of old Rome,
who, wishing to deliver the Republic from a tyrant, plunges his dagger
into the side of the Caesar, thus whiping out the shame of servitude?
Well! The times are the same. Caesar still exists. Yesterday it was
called Provisional Government, Constituent Assembly, Legislative
Assembly, President of Coup d'Etat; today he is called Napoleon III, the
Emperor. Tomorrow perhaps, we will have named Ledru-Rollin or Blanqui
our Populist Dictator.
Brutus, all the Alibauds, all those that commited regicide, would they
be dead?
Is the patrician and the feudal lord not the bourgeois?
Is the slave and the serf not the proletarian?
Republicans, slaves, serfs of modern times, logic is inexorable, it
commands our conduct. Come on, stand up! And let's renew the tradition
with the Brutus, the Spartacus and the Jacques of old!
- Standing! Action! Insurrection! Revolution!
- Action, insurrection, yes; but why? -
- To imprison us without profit; to bequeath to our women and our
children mourning and misery? How sad!
- Revolution, yes; but which ?
- That which would replace power with another power, a man with other
men? Again, how sad! - All of us have the right and, - now the right
moment has come, - the duty to act; to use the muscles that nature has
given us to violently break the shackles of slavery that violence has
riveted to our throats and wrists. Individually, we can do little;
Collectively, we can do everything - we have the strength. - What we
lack is successful action, what too little, alas! We possess within our
great numbers, an idea; it is faith, passion, fanaticism to this idea;
faith, passion, fanaticism, without which one can not lift mountains,
perform miracles; an idea without which the force is infertile and sows
only to collect catastrophes. The force without the idea is a locomotion
machine heated to full steam and which, launched on a path devoid of
rails, will not delay, in its disorderly course, to tumble and crush
itself in its fall; it is an unmanned and compassless ship sailing all
over, in the midst of reefs, the chasm that will engulf it.
Thus, no action, no insurrection, no revolution can be without a social
goal, if we do not want to "replace a crime with another crime".
However, immobility is impossible. We must act, revolt, revolutionize.
That each one questions his thought, the thought of others, draws on it
and throws ideas into it. That all these individual convictions, without
losing anything of their individuality, are grouped in a unity of
principle, like the leaves with the bundle of the same tree. That one or
more of these questions, for example, questions of government, religion,
property, family, be asked. That all those who will resolve them in the
affirmative rank on one side, negatively on the other. Thus, without
being in agreement with all who are queuing up to these four great heads
of the Hydra which, under the scales of civilization, is nothing but
modern barbarism; thus, and reserving the ramifications of detail where
we all differ, - thus one could constitute the unity of the
revolutionary party. Then the ship would have a pilot, a compass, the
locomotive of the rails; strength would serve the idea of the mighty
revolution.
Principles :
Liberty, equality, fraternity
Consequences:
Abolition of government in all its forms, monarchic or republican, the
supremacy of one alone or of majorities;
But anarchy, individual sovereignty, complete, unlimited, absolute
liberty of everyone to do everything which is in the nature of the human
being.
Abolition of Religion, whether catholic or Israelite, protestant or any
other sort. Abolition of the clergy and the altar, of the priest,–curate
or pope, minister or rabbi;–of the Divinity, idol in one or three
persons, universal autocracy or oligarchy;
But the human being,–at once creature and creator,–no longer having
anything but nature for God, science for priest, and humanity for altar.
Abolition of private property, property in the soil, in buildings, in
the workshop, in the shop, property in everything which is an instrument
of labor, production or consumption;
But collective property, unified and indivisible, possession in common.
Abolition of the family, the family based on marriage, on paternal and
marital authority, on heredity;
But the great human family, the family united and indivisible like
property.
The enfranchisement of women, the emancipation of children.
Finally, the abolition authority, privilege, and antagonism;
But liberty, equality, fraternity incarnated in humanity;
But all the consequences of the triple formula, passed from theoretical
abstraction into practical reality, into positivism.
That is to say Harmony, that oasis of our dreams, no longer fleeing like
a mirage before the caravan of the generations and delivering to each
and all, under the shade of fraternity and in universal unity, the
sources of happiness, the fruits of liberty: a life of delights,
finally, after an agony of more than eighteen centuries in the sandy
desert of Civilization!
No more government, that constricting machine, that fulcrum of the
reactionary lever.
All government,— and by government I mean all delegation, all power
apart from the people,—is conservative in its essence,—blinkered and
retrograde,—as it is in the essence of man to be selfish. Among men, the
selfishness of one is tempered by the selfishness of the others, by the
solidarity that nature has established, whatever he does, between the
man and his fellows. But the government being unique and consequently
without counterbalance, it results that it takes everything for itself,
that everything that does not prostrate itself before its image,
everything that challenges its oracles, everything that threatens its
lifespan, in short, everything that is progress, is inevitable its
enemy. – Thus, let a government emerge, – an improvement in the
beginning over the government that preceded it, – and soon, in order to
maintain itself, and in the face of the new ideas that undermine it, it
will call to its aid reaction after reaction; it will draw from the
arsenal of arbitrariness the measures most unfriendly to the needs of
its era; will make a barrage of lois d’exception until, – the mine
packed and lit with the wick of revolution, – it explodes, surrounded by
all the paraphernalia of its means of defense. Could it act otherwise,
to abandon a single one of its bastions?—The enemy, which is to say the
revolution, would only have seized it in order to establish its
batteries there. Capitulate? It had arranged its surrender; and it knew
that in the hands of the victor it was the looting of its interests, its
enslavement and then death.
O you, soldiers of progress, but timid lovers of liberty, who still bear
at the bottom of your hearts – like a remainder of the familial and
catholic education of your youth, – the prejudice of authority, the
superstition of power, remember 1830 and Louis-Philippe, 1848 and the
Provisional Government; the programs of the HĂ´tel de Ville and the
Luxembourg; the promises of July and of February. Recall the lies and
hypocrisy capturing the confidence of the people; trickery and violence
gagging them before the expiration of their vow of silence, of their
three months of misery.
And do not hope for better men, a more fortunate choice. It is not the
men, but the thing itself that is bad. Depending on the milieu, the
conditions under which it works, the men are useful or harmful to those
who surround them.
What is necessary is to not place them outside the common law, in order
not to put them in the necessity of harming. What is necessary is not to
give ourselves shepherds if we do not want to be a flock, or rulers if
we do not want to be slaves.
No more government, and thus no more of these destructive ambitions that
only use the shoulders of the people, ignorant and credulous, to make of
them a step-stool for its covetousness. No more of these
candidates-acrobats dancing on the rope of the professions of faith,
with the right foot for this one and the left foot for that. No more of
these political prestidigitators juggling the three words of the
republican motto, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, as with three balls
that they pass before the eyes of the gawkers and then make disappear in
the depths of their conscience, that other pocket of malice… No more of
these acrobats of the public square who, from the height of the balcony
of the Tuileries or the HĂ´tel de Ville, on the boards of a Convention or
a Constituent Assembly, have for so many years made us witness the same
parades, the pasquinade of the best of republics, and who, in the end,
we must always pay,—poor simple sorts that we are,—with our sweat and
our blood.
No more government, and then no more army to oppress the people by the
people. No more University to level the young intelligences under the
yoke of cretinism, manipulating their brains and hearts, and knead and
mold them in the image of an obsolete society. No more
magistrate-inquisitors to torture on the rack of examination and to
condemn to the stifling of prison or exile the voice of the press and
the clubs, the manifestations of conscience and thought. No more
executioners, no more jailers, no more gendarmes, no more city
constables, no more snitches to track, seize, detain and put to death
all who are not devoted to the authorities. No more directing
centralization, no more prefects, no ordinary or extraordinary envoys to
spread the state of siege through all the departments. No more budgets
to recruit, arm, equip, to fatten with potatoes or truffles, to
intoxicate with schnick or champagne that uniformed domestic staff from
the soldier to the general, from the prefect to the policeman and from
the executioner to the judge.
No more government, and then a million men, two million healthy arms
returned to labor, to production.
Toothless duenna, virago with crooked fingers, medusa with a brow
crowned in vipers, Authority! Back and make way for liberty!
Make way for the people in direct possession of their sovereignty, for
the organized commune.
as a transition in order to arrive at anarchy.
Direct legislation, with its majority and minority, is certainly not the
last word of social science, because it is still government and, as I
said, I am one of those who tend towards individual sovereignty. But
since individual sovereignty does not yet have a real formula, that I
know of, that it is still in the state of intuition in the minds, it
must be resolved with what is applicable, that is to say the most
democratic form of government, pending its absolute abolition. Moreover,
with direct legislation, the majority is and remains moving. Like a
tide, it moves every day under incessant action, under the propaganda of
progressive ideas. Finally, today it is the only means of force to be
used, the most straight line to follow in order to achieve all the
social reforms.
To those who dispute the ability of the people to legislate their own
intelligence, to govern themselves, I will answer with their votes since
48. Show that they have not always been intelligent, always
revolutionary, I say not in result, but in principle. In this four-year
period, did the schemers who asked for his votes not do so with reform
programs? In February did the royalists not say the most Republican
things! Wasn't the December 10 election even a protest against the
bourgeoisie, our red hands still steaming from the days of June? And is
it his fault if all the promises were nothing but lies? And will the day
come when he is called to vote on the law, instead of voting on men,
will the result not be any different?
And again, I will add, in what condition did the people vote? Was he
free? No. But under the control of the master who insinuated to him:
"Vote for a man whom you suspect might not be in your interest, but vote
for him, and not for another whose candidacy would satisfy you better,
for I hold you by the belly ... and, for reforms which would have their
effect only in six months, - supposing that they obtained a majority in
the House, - tomorrow you would die of misery and hunger: your vote and
your job, or your independence and jobhunting..." While at face value
this is the vote of the law by the people itself, overnight it will be
able to appropriate the instrument of work, by ensuring our susbsistence
the threat in the hands of the master becomes vain and falls like a
broken sword.
Moreover, I believe the people - and especially the people of Paris -
are ready or nearly ready for this idea of ​​direct legislation. December
2 proved it. The people remained deaf to the voices of those who claimed
to be their chiefs, and who, decked out in their scarves, with the title
of representatives, invited them to defend their prerogatives. They
remained neutral in the face of the two champions, bourgeois and prince,
who were fighting for power. And indeed, what does the master's colors
matter to them, if they still have to undergo a master?
They let Bonaparte pass. But patience: there is only one step from a
negation to the affirmation of its opposite. And the day is not far when
everyone, from bored spectator to the tournament of political coteries,
will become an actor and intervene by throwing their democratic gloves
into the arena; and in front of all the old parties and the cadavre of
legitimacy that is this rotten-limbed vampire-emperor, and before the
Past, and before the Present, and before the Future, Revolutionaries
mummified in the granite of 93 will assert themselves, the great All, in
their own sovereignty.
I therefore believe that at the next takeover of social democracy,
direct legislation can and will be decreed by the people of Paris on its
barricades and cheered on by the people of the departments.
Here it is formulated by articles, as I understood it.
ARTICLE 1: Sovereignty lies in the universality of the people,
regardless of age or sex.
It is direct, imprescriptible, inalienable.
ARTICLE 2: The territory of the Republic is divided into
circumscriptions of 50 000 souls.
These constituencies form the commune.
The people, in their universality, are sovereign to decide what is of
their general interest.
ARTICLE 3: The municipality is divided into as many sections as is
necessary for the ease of meetings and deliberations.
The people, in their collective community, are sovereign to decide what
is of local interest.
ARTICLE 4: There are as many special committees as necessary for the
reviewing, reporting, and if necessary the drafting of proposals.
They are named by the universality of the citizens composing the
commune.
ARTICLE 5: Any proposal of general interest that gathers 500 000 members
is brought to the knowledge of all sections of each municipality.
ARTICLE 6: Any proposal of local interest which gathers 1 000 members is
brought to the knowledge of all the sections of the commune.
ARTICLE 7: After reading, the proposal is either rejected or taken into
consideration. If it is taken into consideration, it is referred to the
special commission to return to the agenda of the sections.
On the contrary if urgency has been declared, the discussion may open
immediately.
The vote is exercised on any proposal, absolutely as for the election of
either a president, if the proposal is of general interest, or a
representative if it is of local interest. And, as in parliamentary
assemblies, the people, who are their own representatives, amend, reject
or adopt all that is submitted to their deliberations.
ARTICLE 8: For a proposal to become law, it must be adopted by the
majority plus one of the voters.
If a first ballot was unsuccessful, the proposal, with the five
amendments that would have received the most votes, would be submitted
to the sections for a ballot.
If this second ballot was also not successful, there would be a third
vote, another ballot between the two amendments which would have
received the greatest number of votes.
Finally, if one of the two amendments did not yet meet the majority and
the proposal was adopted in principle, it could be referred back to the
committee to be recast in the sense indicated by the generality of the
votes, and put back to order of the day of the sections.
ARTICLE 9: Public Functions. - The appointment to public functions is
made by popular election. The official is always and at every moment
revocable and responsible.
To the function is attached a remuneration.
The remuneration, for any function, is uniform and based on the average
price of a working day.
ART. 10: For the communal ministry. - Each commune appoints two clerks
to the ministry.
One, minister of labor or production, and in charge of the interior.
The other, Minister of Exchange or Traffic, and responsible for the
outside.
Each of them, with regard to his administration, executes and watches
over the execution of the decisions taken by the people.
ARTICLE 11: For the General Ministry - The ministry of the commune
temporarily designated by lot, as administrative center, fulfills the
office of general ministry with all municipalities of the republic and
foreign nationalities.
ARTICLE 12: External Relations - The universality of the people
nominates in election their ambassadors to other nations with imperative
mandate.
ARTICLE 13: Justice. - Justice is free. It is made by a jury drawn in
each commune.
For there to be a verdict of guilty, the jury must be unanimous.
An egalitarian magistracy is appointed by the people of each commune.
It is responsible for hearing the case, and, after the verdict of the
jury, to pronounce the acquittal or the sentence according to the text
of the law.
No prosecution may be carried out except at the request of a plaintiff
and after authorization of the section to which the accused belongs.
ARTICLE 14: Police and Army - Police, like the army, are not a function
and can not delegate. It is a right and a duty to make the law, a
personal and physical debt that everyone is obliged to pay in turn by
lottery, as for the jury. -
ARTICLE 15: The juror, the policeman, the militiaman, the day they will
be on duty, will each receive the pay of a working day.
ARTICLE 16: Of Education. - Education is free.
Each commune appoints its teachers by popular election.
ADDITIONAL ARTICLE: All codes, laws, decrees, prior to the present
proclamation are declared null and void, as not having been deliberated
and voted by the people, the only legitimate legislator.
ARTICLE 1: Sovereignty lies in the universality of the people,
regardless of age or sex.
It is direct, imprescriptible, inalienable.
Let's think, let's reason a little:
Will you set the age of majority at twenty-one? But can not a
twenty-year-old man have the same advanced faculties as another
twenty-one? Is not he equal, humanly speaking? Will you fix him at
twenty? Is it not the same for the nineteen and so for the others? To be
consistent, we should also fix the age when the old man, losing his
faculties and falling back into childhood, will no longer have to vote;
establish categories of capabilities; to expel from the legislative
councils those who can not read, or those who, knowing how to read, do
not know, or know little how to discuss. By chance will the kids at the
udder claim a ballot? And - in this society, old with civilization,
where we still meet, standing and galvanized by the electric battery of
capital, the fossil institution of the family, - well, if, for children
of another age , the father exerts a disastrous influence, on other
children, w another father be able to exercise a contrary influence?
Won't there be a kind of compensation?
Will you deny the right of the woman? But the woman is a human being
like the man. Ah! if the bourgeois of 89 made the Revolution for their
own benefit and to the exclusion of the proletarians, - proletarians,
would you make the same mistake, commit the same crime by making the
revolution for the benefit of men and the exclusion of women? ? No, no
doubt, for then you would be, in blindness and infamy, the equal of your
masters.
And the thief and the murderer, and the madman, will they rob you of the
right to vote? But in the name of what principle? Is it in the name of
liberty, in the name of equality, in the name of fraternity, say? To
eliminate from legislative lists the galley-slave, the man most entitled
to complain of society, isn't it to call soon for the turn of the
proletarian, this other convict of labor? Eliminate the madman, isn't it
soon to call also for the turn of the free thinker on the pretext of
subversive opinions? Hey! What, after all, is a few more ballots in the
ballot box? What do a few drops of water do, a river even at the level
of the ocean? To set a limit on age or any condition from the exercise
of sovereignty, is to restore the arbitrary on its carriages, it is to
open the breach of all restrictions: it is the six months of the
Constituent Assembly's residence which inevitably led to the law of 31
May.
There is no middle-ground: The principle of the sovereignty of the
people is good or it is bad; if it is bad, why take the mask of it, when
we would have only to trample it under foot, to take the divine right
out of its well and to draw ourselves into its legitimacy? If, on the
contrary, it is good, it must be affirmed in its entirety, not to
cripple it, to take it with all its members, to accept its logical
consequences under pain of denying the whole by denying a part. To
amputate him is to kill him.
And now, will we speak of impossibility? Impossibility ... in 1847
didn't we also say the same of universal suffrage: 1848 came, and
universal suffrage worked; the same will be true of direct legislation.
ARTICLE 2: The territory of the Republic is divided into
circumscriptions of 50000 souls.
These constituencies form the commune.
The people, in their universality, are sovereign to decide what is of
general interest.
I want the community of 50,000 souls, because I believe that this number
is necessary for everyone to find the satisfaction of their needs. I
want her so that she can have her schools and her invalids, her theaters
and her amphitheatres; its libraries, arsenals of thought, and its
machines, industrial and agricultural weapons; its crystal palace,
basket of all productions, and its public gardens, boxes of all the
flowers; its parks, its capped walks of greenery and its lounges of
leisure, its popular salons shaded with silk and velvet; its fountains,
its monuments, its baths, its museums, what do I know yet! ... the
useful and the pleasant at last: the working instrument and the
instrument of pleasure.
ARTICLE 3: The municipality is divided into as many sections as is
necessary for the ease of meetings and deliberations.
The people, in their communal community, are sovereign to decide what is
of local interest.
I want the sovereign commune, because I am for freedom against
authority; because I want to leave the free field to progress; because
if a commune is ahead of the others for any organizational matter, it is
not right, it is anti-social that it is hindered in the application of
its ideas. I want it sovereign at last, because I want unity and not
agglomeration ... agglomeration is the result of constraint; unity, the
result of freedom. It is the law of attraction which causes the stars to
gravitate in their circle; it is the law of attraction that will link
the communes to national unity and, later, the nationalities to
universal unity.
ARTICLE 9: Public Functions. - The appointment to public functions is
made by popular election. The official is always and at every moment
revocable and responsible.
To the function is attached a remuneration.
The remuneration, for any function, is uniform and based on the average
price of a working day.
The people, being sovereign, must necessarily appoint themselves to
functions. It is up to the one who makes the law to execute it.
The functions, moreover, are considerably simplified. Two ministers,
teachers, magistrates, and the latter in very small numbers: that is for
each commune. Now, for all the communes united, there are also the
agents of the other nations. And that's all. As for administrative work
of all kinds, they should be awarded to associations. And each of these
associations, - one for the handling of the pen, the staff of the
offices; one for the handling of the pickaxe, the maintenance of the
roads; such others for the service of the railroads, posts, bazaars,
retirement homes and health, etc. etc. ; and each of these associations,
I say, will nominate for election those of the associates judged the
most apt to occupy such or such a post. In this way, the leprosy of
functionalism is destroyed, by this impertinent, lazy and routine
functionalism. There are only workers who are all interested in the
accomplishment of their task and all specially employed according to
their faculties.
ARTICLE 10 and 11: From the Ministry. - Each commune appoints two clerks
to the ministry.
One, minister of labor or production, and in charge of the interior.
The other, Minister of Exchange or Traffic, and responsible for the
outside.
Each of them, with regard to their administration, executes and watches
over the execution of the decisions taken by the people.
- The ministry of the commune temporarily designated by lot, as
administrative center, fulfills the office of general ministry with all
the municipalities of the republic and foreign nationalities.
The role of each of the ministers is very simple. They are the
intermediary between the poll that orders and the administration that
executes. It is the foreman of the administrative workshop who
distributes the work to the workers of various specialties and
supervises them at work.
ARTICLE 12: External Relations - The universality of the people
nominates in election their clerks to other nations with imperative
mandate.
More politics, therefore more diplomacy. No more intrigues of cabinet or
alcove, these treacherous and gloomy tricks woven by deceit and
opprobrium to deceive the least roguish or the weakest, like the web of
the spider to take the flies. But instead agents, draped in the loyal
word of the people, and acting openly and uncovered.
ARTICLE 13: Justice. - Justice is free. It is made by a jury drawn in
each commune.
For there to be a verdict of guilty, the jury must be unanimous.
An egalitarian magistracy is appointed by the people of each commune.
It is responsible for hearing the case, and, after the verdict of the
jury, pronouncing the acquittal or the sentence according to the text of
the law.
No prosecution may be carried out except at the request of a plaintiff
and after authorization of the section to which the accused belongs.
There also are the people - the section, the jury - the conscience that
pronounces; and the magistrate, a tool to instruct the cause, a machine
to read the law, who executes.
And I speak neither of the jailer, nor of the executioner, nor of the
preventive and repressive detention, nor of the prison, nor of the
scaffold. These government monstrosities have had their day. I want for
all penalties only moral or material reparation, or material and moral,
as the case may be; and if there is no place for compensation,
banishment.
ARTICLE 14: Police and Army - Police, like the army, are not a function
and can not delegate. It is a right and a duty to make the law, a
personal and physical debt that everyone is obliged to pay in turn by
lottery, as for the jury.
Here again are the people, direct agents, sharing the attributions by
means of election. All the people doing their policing, no police
outside the people.
More special bodies with a permanent organization is a danger to public
liberty. Arm all of the people, have no army outside the people; not
even for genius, not even for the navy. Civil engineers, civilian
navigators doing their service on warships, when their turn requires it,
serve in the engineering companies. And this without ceasing to remain
workers of industry, workers of the maritime exchange.
To recall to memory of all the vexatious and bloody scenes of the police
and the army, is it not to call upon them civic excommunication, eternal
dissolution?
The police and the army! ... Eh! Who, then, even today, would not be
weary of stretching out the lace and the yatagan of these two mutes of
capital, that sultan with Argentinian fibers, the metallic lubricity,
the ruthless jealousy?
ARTICLE 16: Of Education. - Education is free.
Each commune appoints its teachers to the popular election.
Free education; an allowance for the proletarians and parents of young
pupils, or the child who is fed, clothed and slept in a special, airy,
spacious house open to outdoor life, who will attend classes instead of
learning at a price of gold and the cloister of the colleges.
Free education. Everyone can profess. That is, the growth given to
progress. New methods and new study plans emerging from the limbo of
theory and coming asking and receiving in the light of advertising the
baptism of experience. The teaching of modern languages, for example,
substitutes for the largest number to the teaching of the dead
languages. Professional and social instruction substituted for bourgeois
and avocétière instruction. Attractive study replacing stultifying
study. - Ignorants of Catholicism and the University, the murderers and
shopkeepers of education, buried by the stiff competition of free
education, liberty and truth. All these merchants of prayers and
amulets, under pretext of education; all these merchants of soup or
paper, under pretext of instruction, driven out, by neglect, of the
temple of science. The teacher is created for the student and no longer
is the student created for the teacher.
ADDITIONAL ARTICLE: All codes, laws, decrees, prior to the present
proclamation are declared null and void, as not having been deliberated
and voted by the people, the only legitimate legislator.
"All codes, laws-decrees prior to the present proclamation are declared
null and void, as not having been deliberated and voted by the people,
the only legitimate legislator."
Because no one can be compelled to submit to the laws he has not made,
and against such laws "insurrection is the most sacred of rights and the
most indispensable of duties".
It is up to the people, if they want laws, and once in possession of the
mechanism of direct legislation, to boil all their intellects and to
make all their machinery work.
Oh! As the plan of the engineer's hands in the building-shop, that
direct legislation has passed from law into fact; moving in the service
of the sovereignty of the people!
Oh! It is possible to imagine a revolutionary organization of the force
of impulse of 36 million souls!
The religions have this in common that all preach to the oppressed
submission to the yoke of the oppressor. If the sword of the soldier
makes the multitude physical slaves, the catechism of the priest,—a
weapon far more dangerous,—makes them moral slaves.
The idea of a god, the worship of divinity: that is the first cause
whose effect is the decline of man, the first page of the book where was
written in substance the martyrology of humanity.
Also, whoever denies divine right on the earth, must equally deny la
royalty of a supernatural being in the heavens.
We laugh today at the ancient peoples who worshipped the sun. And,
relatively as ignorant, if not more ignorant than them, we worship, in
another form, a being that our imagination endows with extreme power.
And,—much more stupid than these idolaters of a star that only does us
good and that we can at least feel with the touch of sight,—we got to
see our idol above and outside of nature. And the more harm it does us,
the more we bless it, for, we are told by the fortunate of this world,
the more we have had to suffer here below, the more happiness we will
have in the other, there on high, doubtless in a very distant paradise,
since, like God, it is beyond the infinite. And not only the
body,—carnal creature, that this God would have given us,—must be killed
each day by fasting; but the soul,—spiritual creature,—must be subject
to all sorts of mortifications. And that for the greater glory of a God
who is infinitely good, infinitely just, infinitely kind, infinitely
merciful…
That is to say that, to recall a certain axiom, “we see the straw in our
neighbor’s eye, but do not see the beam in our own.”
The clergy, it can be said, is the poisoner of the human conscience. It
is the clergy that, in the form of preaching, pour on us in daily doses
the nicotine of the renunciation of the joys of this world, of the right
of man and citizen. It is the auxiliary of despotism that is most to be
dreaded, or rather it is despotism itself. The kings and emperors have
only the mantle of sovereign power. The clergy has its scepter.
An allegory: See in the service of some old bachelor one of those girls
endowed with a problematic age and an undeniable stoutness. In
appearance, they are the servants, but in reality, the mistresses. At
once flexible and violent, hypocritical and shameless at times, they are
there, never losing from view the aim of their covetousness, the article
of the will. Nothing is done in the house without their consent. They
have the keys to everything, the direction of everything and the use of
everything. It is these girls who can accurately say that they rule and
govern. This is because they have the secret of the master’s weaknesses.
By day, they know how to tickle his little passions through some incense
from the kitchen, by some obscenity of language; by night, through some
intimate indulgence, some courtisanerie of the flesh. Such is the clergy
in the service of the prince, religion in the pay of authority.
What good is divinity and worship, if it is not to habituate us to
sacrificing to the gods of the earth? Of what use is it, again, to
prostrate ourselves before fetishes. Let us study instead of praying.
Let us instruct ourselves in the natural sciences. Ignorance, that is
what makes our globe a vale of tears, a hell. Science, that is what will
make it a sojourn of delights, an Eden. Yes, it is science that,—men
tearing each other apart today like damned souls,—will make angels
communing together in abundance and fraternity.
Go on! The axe in the confessionals! The hammer to the churches! Fire to
all the cassocks! Let us demolish, let us break, let us burn from, the
bottom to the top, divinity and worship,—altar and holy books, temples
and vicarages. There is only one hour when the light can shine out from
this chaos of lies and injustice, from this jumble of old castoffs
called religion. It is the hour when—soaking the aspergillum in the
resin,—we will make a torch to ignite the rest!
Today, the religious question is resolved. Religion is no longer
maintained except with the aid of authority, as authority depends on the
aid of religion. This one is the grindstone that sharpens the other,
that one the cutting edge that protects this one. On the day of a
popular victory, it will be the last judgment for religion, as well as
for authority.
Who is the man who,—free,—would be so gangrened with pious morality to
still want to deliver his sister or his companion, his daughter, his
children, to the salacious teachings of the confessional, to the
systematic corruption of their physical and moral nature? Who is the man
who—for himself, for the ruin of his body and his soul,—would still want
to pay the tithe for the breeding and fertilizing of calotins of all
sects and all stages? Are there many of them?
So, no more religious budgets: religious liberty. Let those who want a
priest pay them. but let priests and cults withdraw to the compartment
of their superstition, and let them never reappear in the public light,
as an attack on the modesty of reason.
Religion! ruined virgin, immodest vestal, thick with human stupefaction;
you who, in the debauchery of the temporal, have let faith, that sacred
fire of your altars, be extinguished; prostitute for Caesar, you must
die!… The gulf is wide open, but, before falling in, look!… and
recognize, by his brow, shining with a triple halo, no longer the son of
God, but the son of humanity, the son of nature. It is the Messiah of
socialism who,—prophesied for generations by the philosophers,—has
finally been born on the rude pallet of the proletarian; and who,—like
his elder brother, rising again after having been crucified,—will
convert the old Christian world to the new Gospel, to the humanitary
trinity: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!
And all the oppressed quiver at his approach; and he really comes to
redeem them from slavery, for his REPUBLIC is of this world!
What would governmental authority be, even with the support of religion,
that seducer of souls, if it did not have the jaunet [coin] of property
to reel in the arms, capital to credit the force. It would be an armless
despotism, very much in danger, at the moment when it wanted to appear
bold, of reaping, instead of servile obedience, many blows from the
popular John Bull; a peddler of whims on the verge of closing up shop,
being at the end of its lease and lacking consumers who want to gulp
down its drugs.
Unfortunately, the idea of individual property is not only in the minds
of the bourgeois, it is also in the brains of the proletarians, and it
is so prominent there that the sickly poor,—who do not have a shirt to
cover their body, nor a bit of bread to chew on,—cross themselves,
crying out against the partageux! As if,—supposing that communism was
division, which is not true since it is quite the contrary,—there would
not be enough for them to divide for them in a society where they have
nothing, and where others have everything…
However, if the idea of collective property is still repugnant to
populations atrophied by misery, there is one thing that repels them at
least as much, which is the exploitation of man by man.
The community that, by concentrating the forces and efforts of each
[individual], the forces and efforts of each thing, makes them all
converge on the same aim, on social economy, and, through the unity of
property, through human solidarity, would assure to the individual an
equal sum of enjoyments, an immense distribution of well-being and
liberty;—and permit me a regarding this word: Liberty! Which has been
misused so much against community and of which it is true to say that
the communists of certain schools have undervalued.—It is this: in a
society of equals, where the sovereign will be called the people, and
not the king or pope, emperor or father, president or servant,
dictatorship or delegation,—would men, whole all have the instinctive
sentiment of liberty, and who all desire the integral development of
their multiple nature, not place it in the first rank of needs to be
satisfied?— And, to take up once again my interrupted phrase – the
community, I say, where, all belonging to all, everyone would be rid of
the daily concern with supplying individual provisions; delivered from
the necessity of hardening their heart, of numbing their intelligence,
of exhausting all their energy in imaging and employers some means of
production for themselves and of destruction for their fellows, and cold
then open their mind, as well as their soul, to thoughts as fecund for
all as for each, where the organization of attractive labor by series
would have replaced Malthusian competition and repulsive work; the
community, splendid ideal, luminous sphere, still blinds, alas! by
dazzling them, the masses hunkered in the rut of the past in the
darkness of ignorance. They see and feel more closely the exploitation
qui, cigar in mouth, whip in hand, keeps them bent beneath the weight of
labor in the heartbreak of humiliation and need, while the master
promenades through satisfactions and pleasures his arrogance and his
idleness.
The right to labor, that is what, among the slogans of 48, has most
deeply impressed the proletarians. That is the wedge that, for lack of
[protection], will penetrate into the entrails of property and finish by
getting the better of it.
But it is not a question, as in February, of proclaiming it in
principle; it is necessary to decree it materially, to solidify it, to
give it a body, which means to abolish usury in all its forms, in the
form of interest on capital, at any rate; in the form of wages, for
whatever labor; in the form of rent [location] for anything at all,
lodgings or lands, workshops or tools. Declare the exploitation of man
by man a crime and an offense.—Let the one who would have a house, if he
does not inhabit it alone, be required to give mortgaged shares on it in
exchange for the quarterly payment. Let the one who would have lands, if
he does not cultivate them alone, be required to associate with those
who cultivate with him. Let the one who would have a workshop, some
tools, if he does not occupy it, if he does not use them alone, be
required to associate with those would will work with him. Let every
parasitic intermediary between the producer and consumer be destroyed.
Let bazaars,—communal property, gratuitous exchange,—replace the shop,
mercantile personality, usurious commerce. In the new code, let theft by
the golden key, theft by exploitation be likened to theft with false
keys, to theft with force. Let the usurer,—under the name of proprietor,
banker, manufacturer, or trader, be likened to the common criminal, and
blackened and punished like him. Finally, let us preserve or remake
another law of expropriation for reasons of public utility, and let all
those who would leave their houses empty, their lands uncultivated,
their tools unoccupied be expropriated, as is the practice today for a
road or a railway, and the instrument of labor or habitation put in the
hands of laborers who have asked for them.
Here is the manner in which we could proceed to the expropriation, for
reasons of public utility, moveable or real property. In each commune,
some arbitrators named by the people would be committed to the appraisal
of properties. The appraisal made, the ex-proprietor would receive the
total in mortgage notes on the property itself, and which would be
nothing other than bills of exchange being legal tender throughout the
republic. As for the individuals, men or women, without means of
existence and without manual trade or employment in the various
administrative associations, they will receive the minimum for the
workday, like laborers in the apprentices’ workshops.
And let no one be mistaken. If I only propose a palliative to the
scourge of propertarianism, it is not because that is all that I desire.
The aim, as I have said, is collective property, possession in common.
But, the sovereignty of the people being given, and nothing being
possible but what the people want; convinced, furthermore, that it would
not be in the will any more than in the power of any dictatorship to do
violence to them on this subject, I bow before its prejudice, forced and
constrained as I am, by proposing only the redemption of property,
instead of expropriation pure and simple.
And, that proposition tending to the abolition of individual property
through the elimination of the exploitation of labor by capital, the
proletarians most wrapped up in the routine of the past will vote for it
with both hands.
Capital! An octopus of gigantic proportions which has for suckers the
leeches of exploitation; horrible mollusk of the ocean of labor that,
like the other with its venom, disrupts the tide of production with your
gold, you who, attaching yourself to the virile parts of humanity, to
all that gives birth through labor, sucks and pumps through all the
pores the blood of its veins and the marrow of its bones;—monster of
nervous plunder, your hour has also struck on the dial of public
condemnation, and you will not escape the harpoon of the right to labor!
The individual property that you have vomited up cannot escape, some
day, the same destiny, and humanity will bathe freely in the blue waves
of community!
Government, religion, property and family all stand together, all are
linked, all coincide. All are cause and effect, parallel and
consequence, logical induction and deduction of one another.
A creation of religion, the family is the branch onto which property and
government have been grafted, the flank that has borne them; it is the
sap that feeds them, the breast that nourishes them. it is not enough to
cut the branches, we must also dig up the trunk and tear up the roots.
It is not only the children that must be taken and slaughtered, it is
also the mother that must be driven back to her lair, if we do not want
the tree or the beast to give us new offspring.
The family… see how it has preserved across the ages, and despite its
successive transformations, the marks of its origin [stigmata]. It has
remained to the patriarchy what representative government is to absolute
authority.
A little State,—in which the man is sovereign, the wife and children
subjects,—it constantly places individual duty in antagonism with
nature, material interest in hostility with conscience.
A confederation of private principalities, it makes society a permanent
battleground where each group, in the name of its domestic economy,
comes to fight against other groups. Inside, it is the insurrection of
the subjects, woman and child, that man, a mixed despot of liberalism,
is powerless to contain. On the one hand, there is brutality and
corruption erected as a system of government; on the other, hypocrisy
and intrigue, as reprisals.
It is on one side, at the end of a house of debauchery, with girls in
the Chaussée-d'Antin or lorettes de la Cité; on the morning of a ball at
the Opera or Courtille; on the return from the circle or the tavern,
where he lingered, where he drank, played, lost, dissipated the revenue
of fifteen years of his fortune, pays him fifteen days of his labor. It
is the man, - worker or bourgeois, - imposing silence on tears and
reproaches by a reverse of hand, or a promise of adornment, adornment of
Indian for the housekeeper, adornment of diamonds for the lady of House.
It is on the other side the insurrection of the woman or the child, the
child and the woman: insurrection by the lie to escape the souring of
the paternal or marital authority, insurrection by the false in keeping
accounts, by flying with escalation for satisfaction with gluttony or
coquetry; insurrection by the truant school to evade the tax of study,
the unpleasant work of the class; insurrection by the sweet note, to
escape from boredom, to the barracks of the household; insurrection by
disorder and din to obey the need for action of young age; insurrection
by arsenic and adultery to obey the suppressed passions of the soul and
the senses.
It is for all disillusionment; it is the desecration of all true
feelings, of all the pure and sweet aspirations of love. It is
prostitution sanctioned and catechized by religion and by the
government. It is the girl sold to the old man or thrown into the arms
of a stranger. It is the trade of youth and beauty. It is the ball of
forced mating riveted to the footsteps of the two sexes by the cessation
of prejudice or material interest: the interest or prejudice
approximating here what is unpleasant and condemning them to live under
the same roof; prejudice or interest dividing what is sympathetic and
condemning them to separation, to removal. It is the sacrifice of the
soul and the body offered in perpetual holocaust to the golden calf.
It is everywhere, finally, the tribulations, the scandals. It is
sickness, unemployment, bankruptcy, bringing in their wake the moral
disturbance, the material disturbance, debauchery or want, the rending
of the fibers of the stomach and the heart.
In the question of government, I concluded to unity by direct
legislation. In the question of religion, to unity by the cult of
positive sciences. It is with all my strength that I tend to the unity
of property by communism, as to the unity of the human family by the
destruction of the little family.
To destroy this feudalism of the family, what does it take? Abolish
heredity, that apple of discord which disunits the brethren; this apple
of Eve who tempts the offspring, fascinates her, and leads her to
parricide; the heredity which honors in the father the use of all the
fraudulent means, all the meanness and all the crimes devoted to the
acquisition of a fortune to bequeath to his children; finally, heredity,
which makes the children enjoy a good they have not won, and that most
often, not to say always, the father has stolen from his neighbor;
property which, lawfully or unlawfully acquired, is and becomes by the
death of the holder the patrimony of all.
What does it still need? Abolish marriage, this legal prostitution, this
trafficking of women who survived the slave trade. That the one who
wants the free man claims the enfranchisement of the woman. Who has been
breastfed by a slave has slave blood in his veins. Who has been
moralised by a slave has slave thoughts in the brain. Who is betrothed
to a slave, who is the owner of a slave, is betrothed to slavery, is
possessed of slavery. If we want for man new destinies, let us engrave
the right, this morality of nature, in the heart of his companion; let's
make the oak crown for the girl instead of the orange crown, let's give,
let's give a new mold to the human embryo.
Thus, the enfranchisement of women by the abolition of marriage and the
organization of the right to work, by the destruction of the tyranny of
man and of hunger.
Emancipation of the child by the equality of all before the common
inheritance; by the institution of schools where he will find all that
is necessary for his physical and moral development, and where he will
be free to exercise his right to existence and education, if he does not
prefer to remain with his father and mother, whose paternity and
maternity can not be oppressive, having no longer any legal sanction.
The child must no more be at the discretion of the family authority than
the man at the discretion of the governmental authority. It is not under
the bell of the little family, of the dung of the selfish group that the
child must vegetate; he needs, as with the oak, to grow and become a man
in his strong individuality, space and freedom.
The woman, - I am ashamed of my sex, to be reduced to saying of those
things which should be in the mind and heart of all, - the woman is in
human nature the parallel of the man, she is his equal in need of
satisfaction, in right to satisfy them. Wanting to establish a
superiority or an inferiority on one side or the other is to distort the
scales of the scale, to violate the weighting and balance, it is to do
to nature.
Let the aristocrat, baron of the turf or of the bank, placing the woman
in the same rank as his horses or his dogs, make, as of a luxury animal,
the exhibition at the Bois de Boulogne or at Chantilly; that the
aristocrat, artist or beautiful spirit, the living frame in the rosewood
or the gilding, giving him for stem or envelope the satin and the lace,
exposes it to the museum or in the greenhouse of his living room between
two vases of China or two statuettes of Pradier, like a price painting
or a rare flower; that the bourgeois himself, a small manufacturer or a
small shopkeeper, considers it only as a job at Jacquart to mend his
stockings, or as an automaton to align his accounts; it is conceivable,
and they are in their role by doing so. But let the proletarian, the
workman, see only a utensil to skim the pot, a trough for the male's
appetites: that is what is less understandable. And when they are
so-called democrats, so-called socialists who, by thought and action,
insult human nature and insult women, this forms a strange anomaly!
To deny the needs and faculties, the rights and intelligence of women,
is to do as bourgeois and aristocrats deny the rights and the
intelligence of the proletarian, as white Americans deny the human race
in the negro . Whose fault is it, if women are no other than what they
are? Is it the fault of the master or the slave if the negro cultivates
the sugar cane instead of cultivating his mind? If the workman works the
material instead of working his intelligence, and if the woman scours
his pots or is studying to adorn his body like a doll for the pleasure
of the rich, instead of polishing the faculties of his brain and to
adorn it with solid knowledge? Men, do not boast, do not outrage the
woman; we have no right to it: the slave is only the reflection of the
master.
Proletarians who want to free us, let us extend a fraternal hand to the
woman, and let us marry with her the conquest of freedom, the overthrow
of the exploitation of man by man and the exploitation by man of wife.
O family! Sodom of all corruptions, feast of Balthazar of all vices, I
call upon you the rain of fire of human curses, the vengeful thunders of
socialism! May you, O family! who carry in your organs the virus of
prostitution, on your lips the rodent canker of social demoralisation,
may you soon disappear from the soil of our institutions and give way to
the great principle of human unity, to the edification and the
organization in the world of freedom of feeling and feeling ...
Thus, as solution, liberty, equality and fraternity.
Liberty of thought,
Liberty of love,
Liberty of labor,
Liberty of action :
Liberty in everything and for everyone.
Equality of rights, equality of duties: social equality.
Fraternity, that is social character impressed by the simultaneous
action of liberty and equality on the page of humanity; vignette which
follows from the text; last syllable which concludes the formula
according to the spelling out of two others; qualifier of solidarity and
unity.
And, as means of operation, as transitional means, direct legislation.
And let no one repeat that the people are too ignorant; that it is to
put into their hands an instrument of which they will no know how to
make use; that they must wait, and wait for those who have the science
to govern them. No, I would respond to these leather-breeches of the
revolution, to these Decembraillards of the dictatorship. It is only by
working at the forge that one learns to be a blacksmith; it is only by
making law that the people will learn to make them well. I know well
that the apprentice blacksmith strikes himself more than once on the
fingers before knowing to forge well. That teaches him to pay more
attention to what he does, and, as they say, “to make the trade enter
the fingers.” The people, apprentice legislators, will also sometimes
strike themselves by legislating, which will teach them to examine more
closely the propositions and better manage their vote. And if, one day,
it makes bad laws, the next day, it will be done with them, and put them
on the scrap heap, to forge and pound out better ones.
But, before arriving there, there is one material obstacle to overcome,
– it is the empire; another means of operation to employ, – it is
insurrection. Despite his seven or eight million votes, the emperor is
enthroned on a crater. The lava bubbles in the bottom of the pit. The
torment of June 48 and the fruitless agitations which preceded or
followed have in part, it is true, exhausted the enthusiasm, quelled the
insurrectionary energies of the generation which passes; – but the
younger generation rises; the social idea boils in their brains and will
soon attain its degree of upward force. If Bonaparte does not himself
make some larges vents to reduce the pressure and allow the passage of
socialism, it will be done for him: one day or another, he will be swept
away by a volcanic eruption. The earth trembles under the flowering of
the reaction, and the old society, like another Pompeii, will soon be
swallowed up by the incandescent flood of the revolution.
To work then! For it is not a question of sitting back and waiting for
the day of atonement. We must prepare. Each day, women and proletarians,
and in the measure of our strength and convictions, in the household, in
the workshop, on deserted street-corners, starting today, at every hour,
and at every instant, we must act, rise up, and make revolution.
To the work! And let those who are hungry and want to eat;
Let those who are thirsty and want to drink;
Let those who are naked and want to be clothed;
Let those who are cold in body and soul, and want to warm themselves
with the caloric of the brazier of with love;
Let those who carry in their hands and on their face the furrows plowed
by a homicidal labor and no longer want to plow their flesh to fatten
some idlers;
Let those who feel themselves withering under the fog of physical
privations and want to fast and clear their lungs in the climate of less
deleterious institutions;
Let those who incubate in their bosom the consumption of moral sorrows
and want to cure it;
Let all those who suffer and want to enjoy;
Finally! Let all those who have palms and crowns of misery, rise!… and
let their number and their rebellion chill will terror the spectators,
organizers and executors of their martyrdom!
Stand up everyone!
And by the arm and the heart,
By speech and by the pen,
By dagger and rifle,
By irony and imprecation,
By pillage and adultery,
By poisoning and fire,
Let us make, – on the highway of principles or in the corner of
individual rights, – by insurrection or by assassination, – war to
society!… war to civilization!…
Stand up! – And if, by some misfortune, there are some who fall into the
hand of governmental authority, – let each of us, – accused at the bar,
condemned under the rod, in the dungeons or on the block of detentions
or executions, – let each of the new believers confess, – before
humanity and taking nature as witness, – that they have acted only by
virtue of their right and in order to obey the religion of their
conscience…
Stand up, proletarians, everyone stand! – And, unfurl the flag of social
war! Stand up! And, – like the fanatics of the Koran, – in the thick of
the insurrectionary fray, where those who are slain die to be reborn in
the future society – lot us repeat that cry of anathema and
extermination for religion and the family, for capital and government;
that cry of hate and love, – of hatred for privilege, love for legality;
– that vengeful cry, that cry of our faith:
– the REVOLUTION is the REVOLUTION, and LIBERTY, – today vilified, in
order to be hounded, hunted, but tomorrow victorious and powerful and
always immortal, – LIBERTY is its PROPHET!…