💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › felix-frenay-the-law.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:59:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: The Law
Author: Félix Frenay
Date: 1864
Language: en
Topics: Law, Justice, morality, the law, the state
Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2018 from https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/felix-frenay-the-law-1864/
Notes: Félix Frenay, “La loi,” Le Prolétaire 10 no. 1 (January 8, 1868): 2–3. Félix Frenay was a Belgian worker who may have been involved in the Belgian section of the International Workingmen’s Association (the “First International”). In addition to writing political pieces like this one, Frenay was a poet. An English review of his book of poetry about working class life described his views as being radical communist-Internationalist. His comments regarding the law are reminiscent of Proudhon’s statement in his 1851 work, General Idea of the Revolution: “Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government” (included in Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas). The translation is by Shawn Wilbur.

Félix Frenay

The Law

It is truly interesting to observe that over the course of the centuries

that history allows us to nous survey, the human mind, in its slow, but

continual march, while undermining institutions, beliefs and prejudices,

while attacking all the abominations, has always made one exception.

Indeed, when all the religions have fallen or totter on their

foundations, one alone will remain upright and solid… and that is the

law.

We have polished manners and softened legislations, ridding them of the

most shocking asperities, but who has ever attacked the law in its very

essence? Who? We could almost respond: no one. And, yet, isn’t it an

injustice!

A few men gather and devise constitutions, codes and rules, to which

they give the name of laws and which they then impose on others under

penalty of death or prison. How is this not tyranny?!

The least idea of justice and injustice is enough to make us understand

that, if we can sacrifice our own interests, we are not allowed to

dispose of those of others, and that, according to this principle, a law

could only be legitimate if, against all odds, an entire nation, since

there is a nation, could gather, hear one another out and reach

agreement to draw it up; still, it would only be legitimate for a

generation. So make as many laws as you like, but obviously only for

yourself; give up your own liberty, but respect ours.

⁂

What is the law? A dictate emanating from sovereign authority, says the

dictionary. But dictated by what right and by what authority?

Law implies justice, harmony, and yet whoever says law says violence and

oppression.

The most precise definition of the word law is imposed justice. But

justice imposed by force ceases, by that very fact, to be justice.

Besides, justice imposes itself, and has no need, like law, to rely on

bayonets, to have an escort of gendarmes. True law is written in the

consciousness of free people, where it illuminates much better than in

codes produced by minds that are sick or clouded by prejudices.

Thus, what we are accustomed to call the law cannot be justice, car

justice is one, and the liberal subtleties of the relative can in no way

be applied to it, for what is just is just everywhere, as much in

Belgium as in France, as in Prussia, Turkey or Japan, unlike the law,

which condemns in one country what it permits in some other.

On the other hand, and in modern scientific language, law has a more

rational definition and means: necessity, inevitable; thus all bodies

obey the laws that govern matter and non can escape from them.

Can we make a body raided in the air and then left to itself not fall

toward the earth, which is its center of attraction? Can we make a light

that is not transmitted in a straight line and a shadow that would be on

the side of a body facing the source of light? No, the laws of nature

oppose it. It is impossible that is should not be thus and,

consequently, it is not necessary that someone makes sure that the law

is observed, for the law is the thing itself… The law is harmony and

does not resemble in any way the human absurdities that we manage to

impose and enforce a bit only by means of a large cohort of police, and

which demand a frightening abundance of courts and condemnations.

We know full well that man, reading this, will cry “abomination,”

because we attack the conventional ideas, which are those of the

majority, and that the majority must always be right and true. And yet,

when the minority becomes the majority, as we almost always see, does it

follow that what has just and true yesterday can be unjust and false

tomorrow?… How are we to reconcile all that with the universally

accepted axiom that justice and truth are immutable?

“When a system of morals and politics is established over a people,” say

Paul de Jouvencel, “that system may be true or false, just or unjust,

but if it has soldiers, magistrates and executioners, it is necessary to

obey. Vainly the conscience of man makes a just rebellion against the

absurd iniquity; they insist to the man that it is his conscience that

is criminal, and they prove it by reading the article of the code that

declares it criminal; and, in order that the proof be most efficacious,

they throw him in a dungeon, hang him, burn him, they have him drawn by

4 horse or they cut off his head, according to the customs of the

country and the prescriptions of the code that watches over the system

of morals.

“There is little hope that this will end. On the contrary, in time one

becomes accustomed to it: one accepts what the code says as just and for

what it forbids as unjust. Finally, in order to have peace, one tries to

do as they are ordered and not to do what is forbidden. And then the

time that this obedience has lasted forms a kind of prescription, and

serves, if need be, as roof and support for the system of morals and

politics. “

⁂

The child is born. The law takes note of it, hovers over his cradle,

like a threat, to the great despair of the mother; it guards him,

observes him, lies in wait, waiting with an implacable patience until he

is big and strong enough. Then when the young man emerges from

adolescence, when he becomes useful to his fellows, when he begins to

help his family or create a new one, that is when all at once the law

appears, and he is torn from his affections, from his future. They put

in his hands a weapon, which they teach him to maneuver absolutely like

an automaton. They read him regulations, from which, they tell him, he

cannot free himself without dishonor. It is forbidden for him to think,

to speak, to love and to move. He must disregard all the faculties that

make him a man. He must abdicate his individuality, become a machine,

and, like the machine, obey blindly. Such is the military law:

obedience, passive… and stupid.

And there is a man who becomes, despite himself, a member of the

soulless body that we can the Army.

There is a being, living an individual life, a man who only asks to

develop his own faculties, suddenly reduced to the ranks of the

zoophytes, for what is the regiment, if not a collective being like the

coral, which has [un]intelligence instead of immobility? Yes, there is

an individual who can no longer walk like everyone, nor greet others

like you and me; an individual whose hair must be cut in a certain

manner and whose beard must be trimmed according to a certain fashion,

who eats, drinks, sleeps and, as needed, kills—all according to the

rules. In short, there was a man… there is a beast.

⁂

Is the law equal for all? No, it tolerates compromises; it has, above

all, a weakness for money. It is only inexorable for the poor. For them

society has nothing, neither instruction, nor science, nor food, nor

clothing, nor shelter, nothing but scorn and harshness. It pushes the

wretch to the brink of the abyss, then strikes him with all the rigor of

its laws. In this it resembles the imbecile who plunges his dog in the

water and then beats it because it is wet.

⁂

In a particular society there exist a rule, most often absurd, it is

true, but one made known to you before you are admitted, to which you

submit willingly. From then on, humiliations and fines can rain down

without anyone being about to find fault with it. Didn’t we make an

informed commitment? But what would say of a society where we found

ourselves inserted despite ourselves and subject to all the humiliations

of a regulation that is that much heavier as we cannot avoid it? We

would laugh, as that clearly far surpasses the mark of injustice and

absurdity, and we would break both the rules and the society. Yet this

is how we are in the great society, where individual sovereignty has

pride of place. We find ourselves ruled over by an arsenal of codes and

regulations that, far from having been made by us, we never even manage

to known, although we most certainly feel their effects.

⁂

Can we take a step without bumping up against the law? Make a move

without feeling its aggravations? Doesn’t it weigh on us in every act of

life, from the cradle to the grave? Assuredly. Consequently, the law is

a yoke, a straightjacket and cannot be reconciled with liberty, any more

than darkness can be reconciled with light. — That is our conclusion.

⁂

It might not be superfluous to seek the causes of this obsession with

following a rule, from which even the most independent minds have so

much difficulty freeing themselves. But as that is a study that goes

beyond the scope of this article, we will set it aside for later,

promising however to address, along with that other question comes after

it: Can or must the law be eliminated abruptly or gradually? We will

limit ourselves, for the moment, to protesting against all the laws,

oppressive or protective, no matter what one wishes to call them,

against all codes, regulations and prescriptions, as being incompatibles

with liberty, and declare that above the principle of the sovereignty of

the people we put that of the sovereignty of the individual.

Brussels, December 1864.

Félix FRENAY.