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Title: The Humanisphere
Author: Joseph Déjacque
Date: 1858
Language: en
Topics: anarcho-communism, utopian
Source: https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/joseph-dejacque-the-humanisphere-1858/; proofread version retrieved on 2020-01-07 from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3603.
Notes: Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur

Joseph Déjacque

The Humanisphere

Utopia: “A dream not realized, but not unrealizable.”

Anarchy: “Absence of government.”

Revolutions are conservations. — (P. J. Proudhon)

The only true revolutions are the revolutions of ideas. — (Jouffroy)

Let us make customs, and no longer make laws. — (Emile de Girardin)

So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of

liberty…. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made

us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,

against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,

against spiritual wickedness in high places. — (Saint Paul the Apostle)

What is this Book!

This book is not a literary work, it is an infernal labor, the cry of a

rebel slave.

Being, like the cabin boy of the Salamander, unable, in my individual

weakness, to strike down all those who, on the ship of the legal order,

dominate and mistreat me, when my day is done at the workshop, when my

watch is finished on the bridge, I descend by night to the bottom of the

hold, I take possession of my solitary corner and, there, with teeth and

claws, like a rat in the shadows, I scratch and gnaw at the worm-eaten

walls of the old society. By day, as well, I use my hours of

unemployment, I arm myself with a pen like a borer, I dip it in bile for

grease, and, little by little, I open a way, each day larger, to the

flood of the new; I relentlessly perforate the hull of Civilization. I,

a puny proletarian, on whom the crew, the horde of exploiters, daily

inflict the torment of the aggravated misery of the brutalities of exile

or prison, I open up the abyss beneath the feet of my murderers, and I

spread the balm of vengeance on my always-bloody scars. I have my eye on

my Masters. I know that each day brings me closer to the goal; that a

formidable cry—the sinister every man for himself!—will soon resound at

the height of their joyous intoxication. A bilge-rat, I prepare their

shipwreck; that shipwreck alone can put an end to my troubles and to

those of my fellows. Come the revolution, will not the suffering have,

for biscuit, ideas in reserve, and, for a life-line, socialism!

This book is not written in ink; its pages are not paper sheets.

This book is steel, turned in octavo, and charged with fulminate of

ideas. It is an authoricidal projectile that I cast in a thousand copies

on the cobblestones of the civilizées. May its shards fly far and

mortally pierce the ranks of the prejudiced. May it split the old

society down to its foundations.

Privileged ones!—for those who have sown slavery, the hour has come to

reap rebellion. There is not a worker who, in the hidden reaches of his

brain, does not clandestinely fashion some thoughts of destruction. You,

you have the bayonet and the penal code, the catechism and the

guillotine; we have the barricade and utopia, sarcasm and the bomb. You,

you are the pressure; we are the mine: one spark can blow you up!

Know that today, in their iron shackles, beneath their superficial

torpor, the multitudes are composed of grains of powder; the fibers of

the thinkers are its caps. Is it not without risk that you crush liberty

on the brow of the somber multitudes. Rash reactionaries!—God is God,

you say. Yes, but Satan is Satan!… The elect of the golden calf are few,

and hell is full of the damned. Aristocrats, there is no need to play

with fire, the fire of hell, understand!…

This book is not a document, it is an act. It has not been traced by the

gloved hand of a fantasist; it is filled with heart and logic, with

blood and fever. It is a cry of insurrection, a strike of the tocsin

rung with the hammer of the idea in the hearing of the popular passions.

It is moreover a chant of victory, a triumphant salvo, the proclamation

of individual sovereignty, the advent of universal liberty; it is full

and complete amnesty for the authoritarian sorrows of the past by

anarchic decree of the humanitarian future.

This is a book of hatred, a book of love!….

Preface

“Know yourself.”

Social science proceeds by inductions and deductions, by analogy. It is

by a series of comparisons that it arrives at the combination of truth.

Thus, I will proceed by analogy.

I will try to be brief. The large volumes are not those that are most

read. In preference to long dissertations, to classical pedagogies, I

will employ the colorful phrase, it has the advantage of being able to

say a lot in a few words.

I am far from being steeped in science. I have read a bit, observed

more, and meditated a great deal. I am, I believe, despite my ignorance

in one of the one of the most favorable places to sum up the needs of

humanity. I possess all the passions, although I cannot satisfy them,

those of love and those of hate, the passion for extreme luxury and for

extreme simplicity. I understand all appetites, those of the heart and

of the belly, those of the flesh and of the mind. I have a taste for

white bread, but also for black bread, for stormy discussions and also

for sweet causeries. I know all the appetites, physical and moral; I

have the intuition of all intoxications; all that which excites or calms

has seductions for me: the café and poetry, champagne and art, wine and

tobacco, milk and honey, spectacles, tumult and lights, shadow, solitude

and pure water. I love work, hard labors; I also love leisure, times of

languid idleness. I could live a little and find myself rich, consume

enormously and find myself poor. I have looked through the keyhole at

the intimate life of opulence, I know its hot houses and it sumptuous

salons; and I also know from experience both cold and poverty. I have

been overfull and I have been hungry. I have a thousand caprices and not

one pleasure. I am likely to commit at times what the argot of the

civilized blacken with the name of virtue, and more often still what

they honor with the name of crime. I am the man most empty of prejudices

and most full of passions that I know; proud enough to not be vain, and

too proud to be hypocritically modest. I have only one face, but that

face is as mobile as the face of the waves; at the least breath, it

passes from one expression to another, from calm to storm and from anger

to tenderness. That is why, as a multiple passionality, I hope to deal

with human society with some chance of success, because treating it well

depends as much on the knowledge that one has of one’s own passions, as

on the knowledge that one has of the passions of others.

The world of anarchy is not of my invention, certainly, any more than it

is the invention of Proudhon, nor of Pierre, nor of Jean. Each by

himself invents nothing. Inventions are the result of collective

observations; is the explanation of a phenomenon, a scratch made on the

colossus of the unknown, but it is the work of all men and all

generations of men linked together by an indissoluble solidarity. Now,

if there is invention, I have the right at most to a patent of

improvement. I would be rather poorly praised if some hoaxers wanted to

apply to my face the title of the chief of a school. I know that one

expounds ideas bringing together or straying more or less from known

ideas. But what I do not understand is that there have been men who

accept them slavishly, in order to make themselves the followers of the

first comer, to model themselves on his way of seeing, to imitate him in

the least details: and to put on, like a soldier or a lackey, his

uniform or his livery. At least adjust them to your waistline; trim them

or widen them, but do not wear them as-is, with sleeves too short or

tails too long. Otherwise, it is not a sign of intelligence; it is

hardly worthy of a man who feels and thinks, thus it is ridiculous.

Authority aligns men under its flags by discipline, it shackles them by

the code of military orthodoxy, passive obedience; its imperious voice

commands silence and immobility in the ranks, autocratic fixity. Liberty

rallies men to its banner with the voice of free examination; it does

not petrify them in the same line. Each lines up where he likes and

moves as he pleases. Liberty does not regiment men under the plume of

the head of a sect: it initiates them in the movement of ideas and

inculcates in them the sentiment of active independence. Authority is

unity in uniformity! Liberty is unity in diversity. The axis of

authority, it is knout-archie [literally, government by whip]. Anarchy

is the axis of liberty.

For me, it is much less a question of making disciples than of making

men, and one is a man only on condition of being oneself. We incorporate

the ideas of others and incarnate our ideas in others; we combine our

thoughts, and nothing is better than that; but let us make of that

mixture a conception henceforth our own. Let us be an original work and

not a copy. The slave models himself on the master; he imitates. The

free man only produces his own type; he creates.

My plan is to paint a picture of society as society appears to me in the

future: individual liberty is moving anarchically in the social

community and producing harmony.

I do not presume to impose my views on others. I do not descend from

cloudy Sinai. I do not march escorted by lightning and thunder. I am not

sent by the autocrat of the whole universe to reveal his words to his

so-humble subjects and publish the imperial ukase of his commandments. I

inhabit the depths of society; I have drawn from them some revolutionary

thoughts, and I pour them forth, rending the darkness. I am a seeker of

truths, a herald of progress, a star-gazer for enlightenment. I sigh

after happiness and I conjure up its ideal. If that ideal makes you

smile, do as I do, and love it. If you find imperfections in it, correct

them. If it displeases you, create another. I am not exclusive, and I

will willingly abandon mine for yours, if yours seems more perfect to

me. However, I see only two great figures possible; one can modify its

expression, that is not to change its traits: there is absolute liberty

or absolute authority. As for me, I choose liberty. We have seen the

works of authority, and its works condemn it. It is an old prostitute

that has never learned anything but depravation and never engendered

anything but death. Liberty still only makes herself known by her timid

smile. She is a virgin that the embrace of humanity has still not made

fertile; but, let man allow himself to be seduced by her charms, let him

give her all his love, and she will soon give birth to generations

worthy of the great name that she carries.

To weaken authority and criticize its acts is not enough. A negation, in

order to be absolute, needs to complete itself with an affirmation. That

is why I affirm liberty, why I deduce its consequences.

I address myself above all to the proletarians, and the proletarians are

for the most part still more ignorant than me; also, before giving an

account of the anarchic order, a portrait which will be for this book

the last stroke of the author’s pen, it is necessary to outline the

history of Humanity. I will follow its march across the ages in the past

and in the present and I will accompany it into the future.

In this sketch I have to recreate a subject touched with a master’s hand

by a great artist in poetry. I don’t have his work at hand; and if I had

it, I rarely reread a book, as I have neither the leisure nor courage

for it. My memory is my only library, and my library is often quite

disordered. If some reminiscences escape me, if I happen to draw from my

memories, believing I drew it from my own thoughts, I declare at least

that it will be without knowing or wishing to. I hold plagiarists in

horror. However, I am also of the opinion of Alfred de Musset, I thus

think what another has thought before me. I would desire one thing, it

is that those who have not read the book of Eugène Pelletan, Le Monde

Marche, will want to read the book before continuing the reading of

mine. The work of this brilliant writer are a museum of the reign of

humanity up through our times, magnificent pages that it is always good

to know, and which will be an aid to more than one civilizee, leaning on

his elbows before my work, not only to supply what it lacks, but also to

aid in understanding its shadows and lights.

And now, reader, if you want to travel along with me, stock up on

intelligence, and let’s go!

Geological Question.

“If one says to them (i.e., to the civilized) that our swirl of

approximately two hundred comets and planets presents but the image of a

bee occupying a single cell in the hive; that the other fixed stars,

each one surrounded by such a swirl, represent other planets, and that

the whole of this vast universe, in its turn, counts only as a single

bee in a hive formed of approximately a hundred and thousand sidereal

universes, the ensemble of which comprises a biniverse, that then comes

the triniverse formed from several thousand biniverses, and so on;

finally, that each one of these universes, biniverses, triniverses is a

creature, having, like us, its own soul, its own phases of youth and old

age, death and birth…….; they will not follow this theme to its end,

they will cry out against the insanity, the outrageous daydream; and yet

they pose in principle the universal analogy!” — (Ch. Fourier)

We know the physiognomy of the Earth, its external structure. The

pencil, the brush and the pen have retraced the features. The canvases

of the artists and the books of the poets have taken it in its cradle

and have made us see it first enveloped in the swaddling clothes of the

flood, all soft still and with the tint of the first days; then firming

up and covering itself with a vegetative mane, animating its sites,

improving itself as it advances in life.

We also know its internal structure, its physiology; we have made the

anatomy of its entrails. Excavations have stripped its skeleton to which

we have given the name of mineral; its arteries, where the water

circulates, its intestines covered with a viscous flow of fire.

But who has occupied themselves with its psychological organism? Nobody.

Where within it is the seat of its thought? Where is its brain located?

We don’t know. And yet the globes, despite being of a different nature

than our own, are no less thinking and moving beings. Is that which we

have taken for the surface of the earth really the surface? And by

skinning it, by the scalping of the atmospheres that envelope it, don’t

we leave its flesh and fibers exposed, pierce the cerebellum clear to

the spinal cord, and strip the skin from the bones?

Who knows if, for the terrestrial globe, which is also an animated

being, of which the zoological study is so far from being completed, who

knows if humanity is not its brain-matter? If the human atom is not the

animalcule of thought, the molecule of planetary intelligence

functioning under the vast cranium of its atmospheric rings? Do we know

anything of the nature of its intimate senses? And would it be strange

if all our social actions, a swarm of homuncular societies, were the

ideas and dreams that people the face of the globe from one pole to the

other?

I won’t claim a prima facie resolution of the question, or affirm or

deny it absolutely. I have certainly not thought enough about the

subject. I only pose the thing in interrogative form, in order to

provoke research and a response. I very well may make that response

myself. It does not appear to me without interest to consider the

intellectual organization of the of the being within which we have been

born, any more than it appears to me uninteresting to occupy myself with

its bodily organism. For whoever wants to study the zoology of beings,

animals or planets, psychology is inseparable from physiology.

This prologue ended, let us leave the world to turn on its axis and

gravitate towards its sun, and let us occupy ourselves with the movement

of humanity and its gravitation towards progress.

First Part. Movement of Humanity

I.

‘‘A cretin! That is to say a poor, dejected being, timid and small; a

matter that moves or a man that vegetates, a disgraced creature which is

stuffed with aqueous vegetables, black bread and flood waters; – a

nature without industry, without ideas, without past, without future,

without forces; – an unfortunate who does not recognize his fellows, who

does not speak, who remains insensible to the world outside, who is

born, grows and dies in the same place, miserable as the bitter lichen

and the gnarled oaks.

Oh! to see the man squatting in the dust and the head tilted toward the

ground, arms hanging, bent back, knees flexed, eyes bright or dull, the

gaze vague or frightening in its fixity, barely able to reach out his

hand to passers-by – with sunken cheeks, with long fingers and long

toes, hair standing on end like the fur of cats, a receding or drawn

brow, a flat head and a monkey’s face.

How imperceptible our body is in the midst of the universe, if it is not

magnified by our knowledge! How the first men were trembling in the face

of flood waters and falling rock! As the great Alps dwarf the

mountaineer of Valais! As he creeps slowly, from their feet to their

heads, by barely passable paths! One might say that he is afraid of

arousing subterranean furies. An earthworm, ignorant, slave, cretin, man

would be all of that today if he had never revolted against force. And

there he is, superb, giant, God, because he has dared all!

But man would still fight against the Revolution! The son would curse

his mother. Moses, saved from the waters, would deny the noble daughter

of the Pharaoh! That cannot be. To the God of heaven, to Fatality, the

blind Lightning; to the God of the earth, to the free man, the

Revolution which sees clear. Fire against fire, flash against flash,

deluge against deluge, light against light. Heaven is not so high that

we can not already see it; and man sooner or later attains what he

desires!” — (Ernest Cœurderoy)

‘‘The world moves.’’— (E. Pelletan)

The world moves, as Pelletan says—a beautiful writer, but a bourgeois

writer, a Girondin writer, a theocrat of the intelligence. Yes, the

world moves forward, on and on. Initially, it started by crawling, face

to the ground, on knees and elbows, rummaging with its snout an earth

still soaked with the waters of the deluge, and it fed itself on peat.

The vegetation made it smile, and it raised itself on its hands and

feet, and it grazed with its muzzle on tufts of grass and the bark of

trees. Crouching at the foot of the tree whose height solicited its

regard, it dared to lift its head; then it raised its hands to the

height of his shoulders, then finally it was standing on its own two

feet, and, from this height, it dominated with the weight of its gaze

all that which had dominated it the moment before. Then, still so weak

and naked, it felt something like a thrill of pride. It had just learned

the measure of its own body. The blood which, in the horizontal gait of

the man, had buzzed in its ears and deafened it, suffused its eyes and

blinded it, flooded its brain and muffled it; this blood, finding its

level, like the fluvial waters, the océanide waters, after the flood,

this blood flowed back in its natural arteries by the revolution from

horizontality to human verticality, clearing his forehead from one

temple to the other, and uncovering, for the fertilization, the limon of

all the intellectual seeds.

Until then, the human animal had only been a brute among brutes; he had

just revealed himself as man. Thought had dawned; it was still in the

germinal state, but the seed contained future harvests… The tree in

whose shadow the man had stood up bore fruit; he took one of them with

his hand, the hand… that hand which until then had been for him only a

leg and had served him to drag himself, to advance, now it was going to

become the sign of his royal animality, the scepter of his terrestrial

power. Having eaten the fruit in his reach, he sees some that his arm

cannot reach. So he uproots a young shoot, extends the reach of his arm

by means of this stick to the height of the fruit and detaches it from

its branch. This stick will soon aid him in his walking, in defending

himself against wild beasts or to attack them. After having bitten

fruit, he wanted to bite flesh; and off he goes to hunt; and as he has

plucked the apple, lo and behold he kills the game. And he makes a fur

garment from some animal skins, a shelter with some branches and leaves

from trees, those trees who trunks he had grazed yesterday, and whose

highest crowns he climbs today in order to seek out the eggs and

nestlings of birds. His eyes, which he had held glued to the crust of

the soil, now contemplated with majesty the azure sky and all the golden

pearls in its splendid jewel case. It is his sovereign crown, king among

all those who breathe, and to each of these celestial jewels, he gives a

name, and an astronomical value. The instinct that wailed in him has

been succeeded by an intelligence which still babbles but will speak

tomorrow. His tongue, like his hands, has been untied and both operate

at once. He can converse with his fellows and join his hands with

theirs, exchange with them ideas and strengths, sensations and feelings.

The man is no longer alone, isolated, and feeble; he is a race. He

thinks and acts, and he participates by thought and action in all that

thinks and acts among other men. Solidarity has been revealed to him.

His life is increased by it: he no longer lives only in his

individuality, no longer only in the present generation, but in the

generations that have preceded him and in those that will follow him.

Originally a reptile, he has become a quadruped, from a quadruped a

biped, and, standing on his two feet, he advances bearing, like Mercury,

wings on his head and heels. Through sight and thought, he rises like an

eagle above the clouds and plunges into the depths of the infinite. The

coursers that he has tamed lend him their agility in crossing

terrestrial spaces; the hollowed trunks of trees cradle him on the

waves, some branches carved as paddles serve him as fins. From a simple

grazer he has made himself a hunter, then a shepherd, a farmer, and an

industrial worker. Destiny has said to him: March! And he marches,

always advancing. And he has stolen a thousand secrets from nature; he

has shaped wood, molded the earth, forged metals; he has put his stamp

on everything around him.

Thus the individual-man has emerged from chaos. He has first vegetated

as a mineral or plant; then he has crawled; he advances and aspires to

the winged life, to a more rapid and extensive locomotion. Man-humanity

is still a fetus, but the fetus develops in the organ of generation, and

after its successive phases of growth, it will emerge, free itself

finally from the chaos, and, from gravitation to gravitation, attain the

fullness of its social faculties.

II.

– God is evil.

– Property is Theft.

– Slavery is Assassination. — (P.-J. Proudhon)

The Family is Evil; it is Theft; it is Assassination.

Everything that was, was necessary. Recriminations would change nothing.

The past is the past, and there is no returning there, except to draw

some lessons from it for the future.

In the first days of the human being, when men, still feeble in strength

and number, were dispersed over the globe and vegetated, rooted and

scattered in the forests like bluets in the fields, shocks and strains

could hardly occur. Each lived upon the common teat, and it produced

abundantly for all. Besides, a little was enough for a man: fruit to

eat, leaves for clothing or shelter, such was the trifling sum of his

needs. Only, what I observe, the point on which I insist, is that man,

from his debut in the world, on emerging from the belly of the earth, at

the hour when the instinctive law guides the first movements of newborn

beings, at that hour when the great voice of nature speaks into their

ears and their destiny is revealed to them by this voice which shows the

birds the aerial spaces, the fish the underwater firmaments, and the

other animals the plains and forests to roam; which says to the bear:

you shall live solitary in your den, to the ant: you shall live in

society in the anthill; to the dove: you shall live couple in the same

nest, male and female, in the times of love;–man then hears that voice

say to him: you will live in community on the earth, free and in

fraternity with your fellows; a social being, sociability shall increase

your being; rest your head where you will, pick fruits, kill game, make

love, eat or drink, you are everywhere at home; everything belongs to

you as to all. If you want to do violence to your neighbor, male or

female, your neighbor will respond with violence, and, you know, their

strength is nearly equal to your own; give free reign to all your

appetites, to all your passions, but do not forget that there must be a

harmony between your strength and your intelligence, between what

pleases you and what pleases others. And, now, go: the earth, on these

conditions, will be for you the garden of the Hesperides.

Before arriving at the combination of the races, the Earth, a little

girl eager to dabble in generation, hewed and carved from the clay, in

the days of its ferment, many shapeless monsters that she then crumpled

and tore up with a quiver of anger and a deluge of tears. Every work

demands an apprenticeship. And it is necessary to make many defective

attempts before arriving at the formation of complete beings, at the

composition of species. For the human species, her masterwork, she made

the mistake of squeezing the brains a bit and giving a little too much

scope to the belly. The development of the one does not correspond to

the development of the other. This makes an uneven joint, leading to

disharmony. It is not a reproach that I address to her. Could she have

done better? No. It was in the inevitable order that it be thus.

Everything was rough and savage around man; man must then begin by being

rough and savage; too great a delicacy of the senses would have killed

him. The sensitive withdraws into itself when the weather is stormy. It

only blossoms under the calm and radiant blue.

The day then comes when the increase of the human race surpasses the

increase of their intelligence. Man, still on the edge of idiocy, had

little rapport with man. His stupefaction makes him fierce. His body is,

it is true, much refined from its primitive abjection; he had trained

his muscular dexterity well, conquered bodily strength and agility; but

his mind, awakened for a moment, had fallen back into its embryonic

lethargy threatened to drag on in that state. The intellectual fiber

stagnated it its swaddling clothes. The goad of pain became necessary to

tear the mind of man from its somnolence and recall him to his social

destiny. The fruits became more rare, the chase more difficult: he had

to compete for possession. Men were brought together, often in order to

fight, but also to lend their support. No matter how, there was contact.

Rootless as they were, men and women would pair up; then they would form

groups, tribes. The groups had their herds, then their fields, then

their workshops. Intelligence was from now on released from it torpor.

The voice of necessity cried, March! And they marched. However, all this

progress was not accomplished without heartbreak. The development of

ideas always lagged behind the development of appetites. Equilibrium,

once upset, could not be reestablished. The world advanced, or rather

teetered in blood and tears. Iron and flame brought desolation and death

everywhere. The strong killed the weak or took possession of them.

Slavery and oppression attached themselves like a leprosy to the flanks

of humanity. The natural order collapsed.

A supreme moment, which would decide for a long series of centuries the

fate of humanity. What would intelligence do? Would it vanquish

ignorance? Would it deliver men from the torment of mutual destruction?

Would it lead them from this labyrinth where sorrow and hunger wail?

Would it show them the road paved with fraternal instincts which leads

to liberation, to general happiness? Would it break the odious chains of

the patriarchal family? Would it break down the emerging barriers of

property? Would it destroy the tablets of the law, the governmental

power, that double-edged sword which kills those it should protect?

Would it lead to triumph the revolt which always threatens the tyranny

which always stirs? Finally, – column of light, principle of life –

would it found the anarchic order in equality and liberty or, – funerary

urn, essence of death – would it found an arbitrary order on hierarchy

and authority? Which would have the upper hand, the fraternal communion

of interests or their fratricidal division? Would humanity perish two

steps from its cradle?

Alas! Very nearly so! In its inexperience, humanity took the poison for

an elixir. It writhed in terrible convulsions. It did not die; but

centuries have passed on its head without being able to put an end to

the torments that devour it; the poison always burns its innards.

That poison, a mix of nicotine and arsenic, is labeled with a single

word: God…

From the day when Man has swallowed God, the sovereign master; from the

day when it allowed into its brain the idea of an Elysium and a

Tartarus, of a hell and an otherworldly paradise, from that day he was

punished because he had sinned. The authority of heaven logically

sanctioned authority on the earth. The subject of God became the

creature of man. It was no longer a question of free humanity, but of

masters and slaves. And it was in vain that, for a thousand years, the

legions of Christ died as martyrs to atone for its sin, called original,

and deliver it from God and his pomps, from the authority of Church and

State.

As the physical world had its deluge, the moral world has had its own as

well. Religious faith submerged consciences, brought devastation in

minds and hearts. All the robberies of force were legitimated by the

ruse. The possession of man by man became taken for granted. From then

on the revolt of the slave against the master was suppressed by the lure

of heavenly rewards or infernal punishments. Woman was stripped of her

titles to the name of human, deprived of her soul, and relegated forever

to the rank of the domestic animals. The holy institution of authority

covered the ground with temples and fortresses, soldiers and priests,

swords and chains, instruments of war and instruments of torture.

Property, fruit of conquest, became sacred for the victors and the

vanquished, in the insolent hand of the invader as in the flashing eyes

of the dispossessed. The family, arranged in a pyramid with the leader

at the head, women, children, and servants at the base, the family was

consolidated and blessed, and dedicated to the perpetuation of the evil.

In the midst of this flood of divine beliefs, the liberty of man sinks

down, and with it the instinct for demanding right against fact. All

that there was of revolutionary forces, all that there was of vital

energy in the struggle for human progress, all of that was drowned,

swallowed up; all of that disappeared in the floods of the cataclysm, in

the depths of superstition.

Will the moral world, like the physical world, emerge from the chaos

someday? Will the light shine in the darkness? Will we witness a new

genesis of humanity? Yes, for the idea, that other dove which wanders

its surface, the idea which has still not found a patch of earth to

gather a palm, the idea sees the level of prejudices, errors, and

ignorance diminish day by day under the sky, – that is to say under the

skull, – of human intelligence. A new world will issue from the Ark of

utopia. And you, silt of the societies of the past, peat of Authority,

will serve to fertilize the germination and blossoming of the societies

of the Future and to illuminate in the gaseous state the monument of

Liberty.

Could that moral cataclysm have been avoided? Was man free to think and

act otherwise than he did? We might as well say that the Earth was free

to avoid the deluge. Every effect has its cause. And… but here comes an

objection that I see coming from far off, which every smug confessor of

God will not fail to pose to you, chuckling with delight:

“You say, Mr. Déjacque, that ever effect has a cause. Very well. But

then, you recognize God, for in the end the universe was not created all

by itself; it is an effect, is it not? And who do you expect created it,

if not God?… God is thus the cause of the universe? Ah! Ah! You see, I

have you, my poor Mr. Déjacque; you could not escape me. There is no way

out.”

“Imbecile! And the cause… of God?”

“The cause of God… the cause of God… Damnation! You know very well that

God cannot have a cause, since he is the first cause.”

“But, you brute, if you admit that there is a first cause, then there is

no more of anything, and there is no more God, since if God can be its

own cause, the universe can perhaps also be the proper cause of the

universe. That is as easy as ABC. If, on the contrary, you affirm with

me that every effect has its cause, and that consequently there is no

cause without a cause, your God must also have one. For in order to be

the cause of which the universe is the effect, it must be the effect of

a superior cause. What’s more, I want to tell you, the cause of which

your God is the effect is not at all of a higher order; very well, it is

of a very inferior order; that cause is very simply your cretinism. Go

on, that is enough interruption. Silence! And understand this well from

now on: you are not the son, but the father of God.

So I say that every effect has its cause. Only, that cause is visible or

invisible for us, depending on whether or vision or our thought is more

or less perfect, and our vision or our thought is an optical instrument

that is very crude, very incomplete.

There is not a being which is not the plaything of circumstances, and

man is like the other beings in this respect. He is dependant on his

nature and the nature of the objects that surround him, or, to put it

better, the beings that surround him, for all these objects have voices

which speak to him and constantly modify his education. All of man’s

liberty consists of satisfying his nature, of yielding to his

attractions. All that he has a right to demand of his fellows is that

they do not attack his liberty, the complete development nature. All

that they have a right to demand of him is that he does not attack

theirs. From his first steps, man having grown prodigiously in strength,

and having grown a bit in intelligence as well, although the proportion

was not the same, and comparing what he had become with what he had been

in the cradle, the man was amazed, dizzied. Pride is innate with him.

This sentiment has doomed him; it will also save him. The bourrelet of

creation weighed on the head of the human child. It wanted to be rid of

it. And as it already have the knowledge of many things, even though

there remained many things for it to experience; as it could not explain

certain facts, and wanted all the same to explain them, it found nothing

better than to expel them from the natural order and relegated them to

the supernatural spheres. In its vain ignorance, the terrible child

wanted to play with the unknown, it has made a false step, and it has

fallen head first on the angle of absurdity. Toddler’s mutiny, wound of

youth, of which it will long bear the scar!…

Man, – what pride, and at the same time what childishness! – man has

thus proclaimed a God, creator of all things, an idiotic and ferocious

God, a God in his own image. That is to say that he had made himself the

creature of God. He has laid the egg, he has incubated it and he began

to adore his chick, – I was going to say his droppings, – for man must

have had a very violent diarrhea of the brain the day when he does the

necessary… with such foolishness. The chick naturally has for a henhouse

some temples, some churches. Today that chick is an old cock,

three-quarters featherless, without crest and spurs, an old carcass so

stunted that it hardly deserves to have its neck twisted to put it in

the kettle. Science has taken from it, one by one, all of its terrible

attributions. And the acrobats in cassocks, who still wander the

fairgrounds of the world, no longer have much more of the almighty God

than the image displayed on the posters of their shack. And yet that

image is still a werewolf for the mass of humanity. Ah! if, instead of

kneeling before it, the faithful of the divinity had dared to look into

its face, they would see clearly that it was not a real person, but a

bad painting, a bit of varnish and mud, a masque all greasy with blood

and sweat, an antique masque with which the intriguers cover themselves

in order to impose on the simple and rope them in.

Like religion, – the family, property and government have had their

cause. It is equally in the ignorance of man. It is a consequence of the

nature of his intelligence, more lackadaisical about awakening than the

nature of his physical faculties.

Among the beasts, depending on whether the young ones require care for a

longer or shorter period of time, the material instinct is more or less

developed and is exercised in a more or less different manner, according

to the condition suitable for the species. Nature watches over the

preservation of the species. Among the wild animals, there are none

which live other than in a solitary state: the she-wolf nurses her cubs

and seeks her own food; she does not keep company with the male; her

strong individuality is all-sufficient. Maternal love doubles her

strength. Among the birds, frail and tender creatures, the nightingale,

the warbler, the mother incubates her offspring in the nest, the male

will go to seek a beakful. There is a union between the two sexes until

the day when the living fruits of their love have grown warm down and

strong feathers, and they are vigorous enough to cleave the air with the

strokes of their wings and go to the fields to harvest their food. Among

the insects, the ants and bees, sociable races, the young are raised in

common; there, individual marriage does not exist, the nation being one

single, indivisible family.

Human young take a long time to raise. The human female could not do it

herself, nurse it, cradle it and still provide for her own needs. It is

necessary that the man draw closer to her, like the bird with its brood,

that he help with the household tasks and bring food and drink back to

the cabin.

Man has often been less constant and more brutal than the birds, and

maternity has always been a heavier burden than paternity.

That was the cradle of the family.

At the time when the earth was a vast virgin forest, the horizon of man

was more limited. He lived like the hare in the limits of its nest. His

region did not extent more than a day or two’s journey. The lack of

communications made man nearly a stranger to man. Not being cultivated

by the society of his fellows, his intelligence remained fallow.

Wherever there could be conurbation of men, the progress of their

intelligence acquired more strength and more extent. Man, disciple of

man, gathered the servile, made a flock of them, confined them in pens.

He plowed the fields, sowed the furrows and saw the harvest ripen there.

But soon from the depths of the uncultivated forests appeared wild men

whom hunger drove from the woods. Isolation kept them in the state of

brutes; fasting, under the whip by which they were assembled, made them

fierce. Like a pack of furious wolves, they would pass through the

middle of these fields, massacring the men, raping and butchering the

women, destroying the harvest and driving the herds before them. Later,

the would take possession of the fields, establish themselves in the

habitations, spare the lives of half of their victims, of whom they

would make a herd of slaves. The man was yoked to the plow; the woman

took her place with the hens or in the pig sty, destined for the cares

of the cooking pot or the obscene appetites of the master.

This armed robbery by violators and murderers, this theft was the kernel

of property.

At the news of these robberies, the producers who were not yet conquered

assembled in the city, in order to better protect themselves against the

invaders. Following the example of the conquerors, whose approach they

dreaded, they named a chief or chiefs charged with organizing the public

forces and watching over the security of the citizens. Just as the

devastating hordes had established conventions which regulated the share

of each in the spoils; so they established a legal system to regulate

their disagreements and guarantee to each the possession of the

instruments of labor. But soon the chiefs would abuse their power. The

laborers of the city no longer had to defend themselves only against the

abuses from outside, but also against abuses from within. Unknowingly,

they had introduced and established the enemy in the heart of the

square. Pillage and murder had breached the walls and sat enthroned in

the midst of the forum, supported by the authoritarian beams. The

republic bore in its entrails its gnawing worm. Government had just been

born there.

Certainly, it would be preferable that the family, property, government

and religion not invade the domain of facts. But, in this time of

individual ignorance and collective improvidence, could it be otherwise?

Could infancy not be infancy? Social science, like the other sciences,

is the fruit of experiment. Could man hope that nature would disrupt the

order of the seasons, and that it would grant him the grape harvest

before the flowering of the vine, and the liqueur of harmony before the

development of the ideas?

In that era of savage childbirth, when the Earth still bore on her skin

the scars of a difficult delivery; when, rolling in her soiled sheets,

she still shuddered at the memory of her labor pains, and when in her

hours of fever, she twisted and tore at herself, and made floods of

sulfur and fire gush from the craters of her breasts; when, in her

terrible convulsions, she crushed, laughing a wild laugh, her limbs

between the rocks; in that era all peopled with horrors and disasters,

with furies and deformities, man, assailed by the elements, was prey to

all the fears. Danger surrounded him, and harried him from all sides.

His mind and his body were both in peril; but above all he had to

concern himself with the body, to save the fleshly globe, the star, in

order the preserve the radiance, the mind. Now, I repeat, his

intelligence was not at a level with his physical faculties; muscular

strength had a step on intellectual force. The latter, moved more slowly

than the former, let itself be outdistanced by it, and marched behind

it. A day will come when the opposite will be the case, and when

intellectual force will surpass physical force in speed; it will be the

cart, become a locomotive, which will tow the ox. Everything that is

destined to gain high peaks begins first by extending its roots

underground before growing towards the light and spreading its foliage

there. The oak sprouts less quickly than the grass; the acorn is smaller

than the pumpkin; and yet the acorn contains a colossus. A remarkable

thing, the child prodigies, little marvels at a young age, are rarely

geniuses at the age of maturity. In the fields of men as in the

societies of wheat, there are seeds that lie dormant longer beneath the

earth which often produce the finest stalk, the richest fruits. Before

rising, the sap needs to collect.

Everything that happens afterwards is only the consequence of these

three facts, family, property, and government, gather in a single one,

which they have all three crowned sanctified,–religion. So I will

rapidly pass over all that remains to cross of the past, as I pass over

that which is in the zones of the present, in order to arrive more

swiftly at the goal, the society of the future, the world of anarchy. In

this retrospective sketch of humanity, as in the outline of the future

society, my intention is not to make even an abridged history of the

march of human progress. I indicate, rather than narrate. It is up to

the reader to fill in from memory or intuition what I forget or fail to

mention.

III.

Liberty, equality, fraternity! – or death! — (Revolutionary sentence.)

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. — (Moses.)

The world marches. From a pedestrian it made itself a cavalier,

navigator of the road. Commerce, that conquest, and conquest, that other

commerce, galloped on the gravel of the great ways and sailed on the

flood of the marine plains. The chests of the camels and the prows of

the ships cut across the deserts and the Mediterraneans. Horses and

elephants, oxen and chariots, sails and galleys maneuvered under the

hand of man and traced their furrow on the earth and on the wave. The

idea penetrated with the sword in the flesh of the populations, it

circulated in their veins with the foodstuffs of all climates, it was

reflected in their sight with the merchandise of all countries. The

horizon had expanded. Man had marched, first from the family to the

tribe, then from the tribe to the city, and finally from the city to the

nation. Asia, Africa, and Europe no longer formed but one continent; the

armies and caravans had bridged the distances. India, Egypt, Greece,

Carthage and Rome had overflowed one on the other, rolling in their

current blood and gold, iron and fire, life and death; and, like the

waters of the Nile, they had borne with the devastation a fertilizing

manure for the arts and sciences, industry and agriculture. The flood of

the ravagers having passed by or been absorbed by the conquered people,

progress hastened to lift its head and to furnish a finer and more ample

harvest. India first, then Egypt, then Greece, then Rome had each shone

in their turn on the undulations of men and had matured their head

[intelligence] a little. Architecture, statuary, and letters already

formed a magnificent sheaf. In its revolutionary flight, philosophy,

like an electric fluid, still wandered in the clouds, but it growled

softly and occasionally sent out some sparks while waiting to rid itself

of its shackles and produce the thunderbolt. All-powerful Rome had one

foot in Persia and the other in Armorica. Like the divine Phoebus

driving the chariot of the sun, it held in its hands the reins of light

and shone on the world. But it its triumphal course, it had passed its

zenith and entered into its decadent phase. Its proconsular dictatorship

bordered on its decline. It had indeed, at some distance, triumphed over

the Gauls and Carthaginians; it had wiped out, in blood and nearly at

its gates, a formidable insurrection of slaves; one hundred thousand

Spartacuses had perished, arms in hand, cut to the heart by the swords

of the civic legions; the broken links had been resoldered and the chain

rendered weightier by the idea. But the she-wolf had been frightened.

And that struggle, where it had been necessary to spend the better part

of its strength, that struggle to the death had exhausted it. – Oh! In

recalling to myself those great June days of ancient times, that immense

barricade raised by the gladiators before the privileged of the Republic

and the armies of the Capitol; oh! I cannot help thinking in these

modern times of that other levee of shields of the proletarians, and to

salute across the centuries, – I, the vanquished of the banks of the

Seine, – the vanquished of the banks of the Tiber! The noise made by

such rebellions is not lost in the night of time, it reverberates from

fiber to fiber, from muscle to muscle, from generation to generation,

and it will have its echo on the earth as long as society will be a den

of exploiters!…

The gods of the Capitol grew old, Olympus crumbled, undermined by a new

heresy. The pagan Gospel had become unreadable. The progress of time had

corroded its letter and spirit. Progress produced the Christian fable.

The Empire had followed the Republic, the Caesars and emperors the

tribunes and consuls. Rome was always Rome. But the debauched

praetorians, the auctioneers of empire had replaced the recruiters of

people, the bloody pioneers of universal unity. The Roman eagles were no

longer deployed to the murmur of strong breezes, their weary eyes could

not longer gaze at the great lights. The dull torches of the orgy alone

suited their aging pupils; the exploits of the circus and the hippodrome

were enough for their bellicose caducity. Like Jupiter, the eagle

appeared old. The time of moral decomposition had arrived. Rome was now

hardly a shadow of Rome. The sewer was its Acheron, and it drifted,

drunk with abjection and led by the steersman of decadence, towards the

resting place of the dead.

In those days, as life appears in the breast of cadavers, as vegetation

emerges from putrefaction; in those days, Christianity swarmed in the

catacombs, sprouted underground, and pushed like grass through the pores

of society. The more it was mowed down the more strength it acquired.

Christianity, work of the Saint-Simonians of the era, has a

revolutionary character more superficial than profound. The formalists

follow one after another and… resemble one another. It is always [a

matter] of universal theocracy, God and the pope; never-ending

authority, both celestial and terrestrial, the begetting father and the

Père Enfantin, but also father Cabet and the Almighty Father, the

Supreme Being and the holy father Robespierre; hierarchy of all degrees,

command and submission at every instant, the shepherd and the lamb, the

victim and the sacrificer. It is always the herdsman, the dogs and the

flock, God, the priests and the mob. To the extent that it will be a

question of divinity, the divinity will always have as a consequence in

humanity, – at the summit, – the pontiff or the king, the man-God; the

altar, the throne, or the seat of authority; the tiara, the crown, or

the presidential gown: the personification on the earth of the sovereign

master of the heavens. – At the basis, – slavery or servitude, the

system of helots or the proletariat; the fasting of the body and the

intelligence; the rags of the attic or the rags of the penal colony; the

work and the fleece of the brutes, the work skimmed, the fleece sheared,

and the flesh itself devoured by the rich. – And between these two

terms, between the base and the summit, – the clergy, the army, the

bourgeoisie; the church, the barracks, the shop; theft, murder, cunning;

man, lackey to his superiors, and arrogant lackey to his inferiors,

crawling as the reptiles crawl, and, sometimes, rearing up and hissing

like them.

Christianity was all of that. In the evangelical utopia there was much

more chaff than wheat, and the wheat has been stifled by the chaff.

Christianity, in reality, has been much more a conservation than a

revolution. But, from its appearance, there was in it some sap/lifeblood

subversive of the old social order. That is what raised woman from her

inferiority and proclaimed her the equal of man; what broke the irons in

the thought of the slave and opened to him the doors of a world where

the damned of this one would be the elect of that. There had already

been in some parts revolts of Amazons, as there had been revolts of

helots. But it is not in the destiny of man and woman to march divided

and exclusively from one another. The Christ, or rather the multitude of

Christs that the name personifies, took them by the hand, made brothers

and sisters of them, gave them the word for a sword, future immortality

for a place to conquer. Then, from the height of his cross, he showed

them the circus: and all the free recruits, these volunteers of the

religious revolution set forth, – hearts beating and courage in their

faces, to the lion’s maw, to the blaze of the pyre. Man and woman mixed

their blood in the arena and received side by side the baptism of the

martyr. Woman was not the least heroic. It is her heroism which decided

the victory. These young girls tied to a post and delivered to the teeth

of the flames or eaten alive by ferocious beasts; these gladiators

without defenses, who died with such good grace and with so much charm;

these women, these Christians bearing on their brows the halo of

enthusiasm, all these massacres, become apotheoses, ended by impressing

the spectators and by stirring them in favor of the victims. They would

espouse their beliefs. The martyrs moreover rose from their ashes. The

circus, which had massacred so many of them, always massacred them, and

always armies of assailants came to stretch out their necks and die

there. In the end, however, the circus admitted its defeat, and the

victorious emblems of Christendom were displayed on the walls of the

field of carnage. Christianity would become Catholicism. The good grain,

exhausted, would give way completely to the bad.

The grandeur of Rome no longer existed but in name. The empire struggled

like a castaway in the midst of an ocean of barbarians. That rising tide

overran the Roman possessions and breached the walls of the imperial

city. Rome succumbed to the fury of the waves [lames]. Pagan

civilization had had its dawn, its zenith, its setting; now it tied up

the bloody glimmer of its last rays in the gloomy immensities. Following

that tempest, all that there was of scum at the heart of society tossed

on its surface and sat in state on the crest of these barbaric

intelligences. The successors of the apostles tainted in its dignity the

virginity of Christianity. The fraternal immaculate conception aborted

on its bed of triumph. The doctors in charge of the delivery had

introduced into the maternal organ a killing solvent, and the drug had

produced its effect. On the day of delivery, the fetus no longer gave

signs of life. Then, in place of the aborted fraternity, they put the

young from their own loins, a monster half authority and half servility.

The barbarians were too uncouth to perceive the fraud, and they

worshipped the usurpation of the Church as a legitimate thing. To

propagate the new cult, to take around the cross and banner was the

mission of barbarism. Only, in these hands used to wielding the sword,

they reversed the image of the crucified. They throttled the crucifix by

the head, which they took for the handle, and put its point in the air

like a blade out of a sheath.

However, these great displacements of men did not occur without shifting

some barriers in their passage. Some properties and nationalities were

modified. Slavery become servitude. The patriarchate/patriarchy had had

its days of splendor, it was now the turn of the prelacy and the barony.

Military and religious feudalism covered the ground with keeps and

steeples. The baron and the bishop were the powerful then. The

federation of these demi-gods formed the empire of which the kings and

the popes were the master-gods, the suzerain lords. – The Middle Ages,

nocturnal disk, rose on the horizon. The bees of science no longer had

anywhere to deposit their honey, if it was not in some monastery cell;

and still the very holy catholic inquisition would infiltrate there the

pincers and red iron in the hand to destroy the precious deposit and

torture the philosophical swarm. Already it was no longer the shadows of

the twilight but the funereal veils of the night which glided over the

manuscripts of antiquity. The darkness was so thick that it seemed that

humanity must never escape from it. Eighteen times the tolling of the

centuries rang on the clock of time before the huntress Diana shot like

an arrow the first rays of the dawn in the heart of that long night.

Only once during those eighteen centuries of barbarism or civilization,

– call them what you will, – one single time, the giant Humanity stirred

beneath its chains. He would have still endured the tithe and the land

tax, the corvée and the hunger, the lash and the gallows, but the

violation of his flesh, the odious seigneurial rights weighed too

heavily on his heart. The titan convulsively clenched its fists, gnashed

its teeth, opened its mouth, and an eruption of torches and pitchforks,

of stones and scythes flowed out over the lands of the seigneurs; and

château-forts collapsed and chatelaines loaded with crimes ground under

the debris. The wildfire that lowly vassals had kindled, which

enlightened/illuminated for an instant the somber feudal period, was

extinguished in their own blood. The Jacquerie, like Christianity, had

its martyrs. The war of the peasants of France, like that of the helots

of Rome, led to defeat. The Jacques, those legitimate sons of the

Christs and the Spartacuses, would share the fate of their ancestors.

There would soon be no more of that rebellion than a bit of ash. The

emancipation of the communes was all that resulted from it. Only the

notables among the villagers would profit from it. But the spark brooded

under the ashes and should later produce a general conflagration: 89 and

93 would blaze over the world.

We know that era too well for it to be necessary to revisit it. I will

say just one thing: what doomed the Revolution of 93, was first, as

always, the ignorance of the masses, and then it was the Montagnards,

people more unruly than revolutionary, more agitated than agitators.

What doomed the Revolution, was the dictatorship, it was the committee

of public safety, royalty in twelve persons superimposed on a vast body

of citizen-subjects, who from them on became accustomed to be nothing

more than the enslaved limbs of the great mind, to having no other will

than the will of the head that dominated them; so much that, the day

when that head was decapitated, there would be no more republicans. The

head dead, the body dies. The chattering multitude clapped their hands

at the Thermidorian representation, as it clapped its hands before the

trestles of the Decemvirs and as it clapped its hands at the spectacle

of the [coup of] 18 Brumaire. They had wanted to dictate to the masses,

they had worked at their exhaustion by stripping them of all initiative,

by making them abdicate all individual sovereignty. They had subjugated

them in the name of the Republic and by the yoke of the conductors of

the res publica; the Empire only had to yoke this cattle to its chariot

to be cheered by it. While if, on the contrary, we had left to each the

task of representing himself, of being his on agent; if this committee

of public safety was composed of the thirty millions inhabitants who

peopled the territory of the Republic, that is to say of all that which

in this number, men or women, were of an age to think and act; if the

necessity then had forced each to seek, in his initiative or in the

initiative of his close relations, the proper measures to safeguard

their independence; if one had reflected more carefully and that we have

seen that the social body like the human body is not the inert slave of

thought, but rather a sort of animated still [alambic] the free function

of whose organs produces thought; that the thought is only the

quintessence of that anarchy of evolution the unity of which is caused

by the attractive forces alone; finally, if the Montagnard bourgeoisie

had had less monarchic instincts; if it had only wanted to count as one

drop among others in the arteries of the revolutionary flood, instead of

posing like a pearl/bead crystallized/precipitated on its flood, like an

authoritarian gem set in its foam; if it had wanted to revolutionize the

heart of the masses instead of enthroning itself over them and claiming

to govern them: doubtless the French armies would not have disemboweled

nations with cannon shots, planted the tricolor flag over all the

European capitals, and slap with the slanderous and so-called honorary

title of French citizen all the conquered people; doubtless not. But the

genius of liberty would have made men everywhere inside as outside; but

each man had become an impregnable citadel, each intelligence an

inexhaustible arsenal, each arm an invincible army to combat despotism

and destroy it in all its forms; but the Revolution, that Amazon with

the fascinating eye, that conqueror of man by humanity, would have

struck up some great social Marseillaise, and unfold over the earth its

scarlet scarf, the rainbow of harmony, the radiant purple of unity!…

The Empire, restoration of the Caesars, led to the restoration of the

old monarchy, which was a progress over the Empire: and the restoration

of the old monarchy led to 1830, which was a progress from 1815. But

what progress! A progress in idea much more than in facts.

Since the ages of antiquity, the sciences had constantly gained ground.

The Earth is no longer a solid and immobile surface, as we formerly

believed in the days of a creator-God, ante- or ultra-diluvian monster.

No: the earth is a globe always in motion. The heavens are no longer a

ceiling, the floor of a paradise or an Olympus, a sort of vault painted

in blue and festooned with golden corbels; it is an ocean of fluid of

which neither the eyes nor the thoughts can plumb the depths. The stars,

like the suns roll in that azure wave, and are worlds gravitating, like

our own, in their vast orbits, and with an animated pupil under their

luminous lashes. This definition of the Circulus: “Life is a circle in

which we can find neither beginning nor end, for, in a circle, all the

points of the circumference are the beginning or end;” that definition,

taking some more universal proportions, will receive an application

closer to the truth, and thus become more understandable to the common.

All these globes circulating freely in the ether, attracted tenderly by

these, repulsed gently by those, all obeying only their passion, and

finding in their passion the law of their mobile and perpetual harmony;

all these globes turning first by themselves, then grouping together

with other globes, and forming what is called, I believe, a planetary

system, a colossal circumference of globes voyaging in concert with more

gigantic planetary systems, from circumference to circumference, always

extending, and always finding new worlds to increase their volume and

always unlimited spaces in which to execute their progressive

evolutions; in the end, all these globes of globes and their continuous

movement can only give a spherical idea of the infinite, and demonstrate

by irrefutable arguments, – arguments that one can touch with the eye

and the thought, – that anarchic order is universal order. For a sphere

that always turns, and in every sense, a sphere which has neither

beginning nor end, can have neither high nor low, and consequently

neither a god at the summit nor a devil at the base. The Circulus in

universality dethrones divine authority and proves its negation by

proving the movement, as the circulus in humanity dethrones the

governmental authority of man over man and proves it absurd by proving

movement. Just as the globes circulate anarchically in universality, so

men should circulate anarchically in humanity, under the sole impetus of

sympathies and antipathies, reciprocal attractions and repulsions.

Harmony can only exist by anarchy. That is the whole solution of the

social problem. To desire to resolve it otherwise, is to want deny

Galileo eternally, to say that the earth is not a sphere, and that this

sphere does not revolve. And yet it turns, I will repeat with that poor

old man who was condemned to perjure himself, and accepted the

humiliation of life in order, no doubt, to save his idea. With this

great authoricide, I forgive his apparent cowardice in favor of his

science: it is not only the Jesuits who believe that the end justifies

the means. The idea of the Circulus in universality is in my eyes a

subject of too great scope to devote to it only these few lines; I will

return to it. While awaiting more complete developments, I call on

revolutionaries to meditate on this passage.

Thus, from discovery to discovery, the sciences advance. New continents,

the two Americas, Australia, was grouped around the old. One of the

proclaimers of American independence, Franklin, snatched the lightning

from the hands of Jehovah, and science made of it a domestic force which

travels on a thread of iron with the speed of a flash and fetch you the

response to the word that you throw it, with the docility of a dog.

Fulton tamed steam, that amphibious locomotive, that Salomon de Caus had

grasped by the throat. He muzzled it and gave it for armor the hull of a

ship, and he took advantage of some muscular fins to replace the

capricious wingspan of the sails. And the strength of the hydra is so

great that it laughs at winds and waves, and it is so well tamed that it

obeys with an incredible suppleness to the least pressure of the

helmsman.

On land, on roads lined with rails, the monster the body of iron and the

raucous voice, with flaming lungs, leaves for behind it the tender, the

coucou [a kind of carriage] and the stage-coach. At the signal of the

one who mounts it, at a light tap of the stirrup, it leaves, dragging in

tow a whole avenue of rolling houses, the population of a whole quarter

of town, and that with a speed which prevails over the flight of the

bird. In the factories, slave to the thousand cogs, it work with a

marvelous dexterity at the most delicate labors as at the crudest work.

Typography, that magnificent invention by means of which we sculpt the

word and reproduce it in thousands of copies, typography owes it a new

development. It is it which weaves the cloth, dyes it, waters it,

stitches it, it which saws the wood, files the iron, polishes the steel;

it finally which fashions a mass of instruments of labor and objects of

consumption. In the fields, it clears, it labors, it sows, it harrows

and it reaps; it grinds the grain under the millstone; the milled wheat,

it bears to the city, it kneads it and makes it into bread: it is an

encyclopedic laborer. Without doubt, in society as it is organized, the

steam machine displaces many existences/livelihoods and has competed

successfully with [human] arms. But what is that but a partial and

passing evil, in comparison with the general and final results? It is it

that clears the roads of the future. In Barbarism as in Civilization,

which in our days are synonymous, progress can make a road only by

passing over corpses. The era of peaceful progress will only open on the

bones of the civilized world, when monopoly will have given the last

gasp and the products of labor will be in the public domain.

Astronomy, physics, chemistry, all the sciences, to put it better, had

progressed. Social science alone had remained stationary. Since Socrates

who drank the hemlock, and Jesus who was crucified, it had no great

light. When, in the most squalid regions of society, in something very

differently contemptible than a stable, in a shop, was born a great

reformer. Fourier came to discover a new world where all the

individualities have a value necessary to the collective harmony. The

passions are the instruments of the living concert which has for a bow

the fiber/disposition of the attractions. It was hardly possible that

Fourier would entirely reject the habit; he preserved, despite himself,

from his commercial education, bourgeois tradition, some prejudices in

favor of authoritarian and servitude which made him deviate from

absolute liberty and equality, from anarchy. Nonetheless, I take off my

hat to this bourgeois, and I recognize in him an innovator, a

revolutionary. As much as the other bourgeois are dwarfish, so much that

one is a giant. His name will remain inscribed in the memory of

humanity. 1848 arrived, and revolutionary Europe caught fire like a

powder-trail. June, that jacquerie of the nineteenth century, protested

against the modern abuses of the new seigneur. The violation of the

right to work and of the right to love, the exploitation of man and

woman by gold raised up the proletariat and put weapons in its hands.

The feudalism of capital trembled on its bases. The great barons of

usury and the baronets of small business walled themselves up in their

counting-houses, and from the height of their platform launch at the

insurrection enormous blocs of armies, boiling floods of mobile guards.

By means of Jesuitical tactics they managed to crush the revolt. More

than thirty thousand rebels, men, women and children, were cast into the

dungeons of the hulks and blockhouses. Countless prisoners were shot, in

defiance of a placard posted at all the street-corners, which invited

the insurgents to lay down their arms and declared that there would be

neither victors nor vanquished, but only brother, – warring brothers,

they meant! The roads were littered with bits of brains. The disarmed

proletarians were crammed in the vaults of the Tuileries, the Hôtel de

Ville, and the Ecole Militaire, in the stables of the barracks, in the

quarries of Ivry, in the ditches of the Champ-de-Mars, in all the

cesspits of the capital of the civilized world, and massacred there with

all the refinements of cruelty! Shots rained through all the basement

windows, lead fell in the guise of bread in these cesspools where, among

the rales of the dying, the bursts of mad laughter, – they splashed in

the blood and piss up to the knees, asphyxiated by the lack of air and

tortured by hunger and thirst. The neighborhoods were treated, as in the

Middle Ages, as a place taken by storm. The archers of civilization

would go up in the houses, descend into the cellars, probing all the

nooks and crannies, passing the blade of the bayonet through anything

that appeared suspect. Between the dismantled barricades and the place

of each cobblestone one could have put the head of a corpse… Never,

since the world began, had we seen such slaughter. And not only the

national guards of the city and the province, the industrialists and the

shopkeepers, the bourgeois and their satellites would commit after the

combat a thousand and one atrocities; but even the women, the women of

the shop and of the salon, would show themselves till more relentless

then their husbands in the bloody scramble. It was they who, from the

height of balconies, waves the scarfs; they who cast flowers, ribbons,

and kisses to the troops conducting the convoys of prisoners; they who

insulted the vanquished; they who demanded with loud cries and with

dreadful words that they shoot before their door and hang from their

shutters these chained lions whose roaring had made them grow pale in

the midst of their agio or their orgy; they who, at the passage of these

gigantic victims of torture, spat in their faces these words, which for

many were a sentence: To death! To the garbage!… Ah! Those women were

not women, but females of the bourgeois!

They thought they had destroyed Socialism in the blood. They had, on the

contrary, just given it the baptism of life! Crushed in the public

square, it took refuge in the clubs, in the workshops, like Christianity

in the catacombs, recruiting proselytes everywhere. Far from destroying

the sentence, the persecution had made it germinate. Today, like the

grain of wheat under the snow, the seed is buried under money, victor

over labor. But let time pass, let the thaw arrive, let the liquidation

melt with a spring sun all that cold display of lucre, that metallic

blanket heaped up in layers on the breast of the proletariat; let the

revolutionary season emerge from the Fish of February [Pisces] and enter

into the sign of Aries, and we will see Socialism lift up its head and

follow its zodiacal momentum until it has reached the figure of the

Lion, – until the grain has produced its ear.

As 89 had its rebellious angel: Mirabeau, launching from the heart of

the Jeu de Paume [Tennis Court], that fierce/bloody apostrophe at the

brow of the aristocracy: “Go say to your master that we are here by the

will of the people, and that we will only leave by the force of

bayonets!”, 48 also had it Proudhon, another rebellious spirit, who in a

book, had spit that fatal conclusion in the face of the bourgeoisie:

“Property, it is theft!” Without 48, that truth would have long rested

ignored in the depths of some library of the privileged. 48 has brought

it to light, and given it for setting the advertisement of the daily

press, the full blown abundance/diversity of the clubs: it has been

etched in the thought of each laborer. The great merit of Proudhon is

not to have been always logical, far from it, but of having provoked

others to seek logic. For the man who also said: “God is evil, – Slavery

is assassination, Charity is a mystification”, – and so on; the man who

has demanded with so much force the liberty of man; that same man, alas!

has also attacked the liberty of woman: he has banned for from society,

he has declared her outside of humanity. Proudhon is still only a

fraction of revolutionary genius; half of his being is paralyzed, and it

is unfortunately the side of the heart. Proudhon has anarchic

tendencies, but he is not an anarchist; he is not humanity, he is

masculinity. But if, – as reformer, there are flaws to that diamond, –

as agitator, it has some dazzling gleams. Certainly, that is something.

And the Mirabeau of the Proletariat has no reason to envy the Mirabeau

of the Bourgeoisie; he has surpassed him with all the loftiness of his

groundbreaking intelligence. The one was only a single surge of

rebellion, he was a flash, a glimmer rapidly extinguished in the

darkness of corruption. The other made thunder clap after thunder clap

reverberate. He has not only threatened, he has struck down the old

social order. Never has a man crushed in his passage so many age-old

abuses, so many so-call legitimate superstitions.

89 was the 48 of the insurgent Bourgeoisie against the nobility; 48, the

89 of the insurgent Proletariat against the Bourgeoisie. See you soon,

93!

And now, pass on provisional authorities: white republic, as long ago

called for it a famous poet who feared then that one would melt down the

Vendome Column to make two pieces of it. Pass on, blue republic and red

republic, republic called moderate and honest, as it made of men known

as devoted, doubtless because these men and that republic were neither

one nor the other. Pass too, pashaism of Cavaignac the African, hideous

Othello, jealous of the form, who stabbed the Republic in the heart

because it had some social leanings. Pass, Napoleonic presidency,

emperor and empire, pontificate of theft and murder, catholicity of

mercantile, Jesuitical and soldierly interests. Pass, pass, last

glimmers of the lamp [of] Civilization and, before you go out, make move

on the panes of the temple of Plutus [the Bourse?] the bourgeois shadows

of that great seraph. Pass, pass, dying light, and illuminate in

receding the nightly rounds of the courtesans of the present regime,

phantoms grouped around the specter of Sainte-Hélène, that whole

phantasmagoria of titled, mitered, tasseled, silvered, coppered,

verdigrised revenants, that bohemia of court, of sacristy, of shop and

backroom, sophisticated sorcery of the imperial Sabbat. Pass! pass! The

dead go fast!…

Go on, Caesar, in that den of vice that they called the Tuileries,

satisfy your obscene whims: caress these ladies, and these flasks, empty

the cup of princely delights; sleep, Masters, on cushions of smooth

satin, or velvet pillows. That elysian whorehouse is well worthy of your

old hovel of Hay-Market. Go on, ex-constable of London, take your

scepter in hand, and beat them all, these great lackey-lords, and that

whole people lackeys of your lackeys; bend them further still under the

weight of your despotism and your abjection. Go on, providential man,

break the bones of this skeleton society; reduce it to powder, so that

one day the Revolution will have nothing to do but breath over it to

make it disappear.

Priests, intone the Te Deum over the planks of your churches. Baptize,

catechize, confess, marry and bury the living and the dead; sprinkle the

word with sermons and holy water in order to exorcise the demon of free

thought.

Soldiers, sing the dregs and the foam, the red intoxications. Kill at

Sebastopol and kill in Paris. Bivouac in the blood and the wine and the

sputum; empty your tins and empty your rifles; smash human skulls and

make their brains gush out; unstop tons of spirit, make them flow in a

purple stream, and wallow in this stream to drink full gulps… Victory!

soldiers: you have, in the number of 300 thousand, and after two years

of hesitation, taken the ramparts of Sebastopol, defended by the

fair-haired children of Russia; and, 500 thousand strong, and after one

or two nights of ambush, you have conquered, with a wholly military

bravura, the boulevards of Paris, these boulevards where parade, arm in

arm, an army of strollers of all ages and all sexes. Soldiers! you are

brave, and from the depths of his grave [Louis-Auguste] Papavoine

contemplates you!…

Judges, informers, legislators and executioners, track, deport,

guillotine, penalise the good and the bad according to the code, that

proliferation of malcontents who, encountering you, nibblers and

devourers of budgets, do not think that all is for the best in the best

of all possible worlds. Manipulators of the scales of justice, weigh in

the weight of gold the culpability for the social demands. – Bankers,

shopkeepers, factory owners, leeches of production for whom the producer

is such a pleasant prey, reach out your trunks, grasp the proletariat by

the throat, suck all the gold from his veins. Speculate, trade, engage

in usury, exploit; make holes in the worker’s smock and holes in the

moon. Rich men, fatten your paunch and thin the flesh of the poor. –

Lawyers, plead the pro and the con, the black and the white; dispossess

the widow and orphan for the profit of the influential prevaricator, and

the small artisan for the profit of the large industrialist. Provoke

trials among the proprietors, until society convenes your trial and that

of property. Lend to the criminal tribunals the support of your parodies

of defense, and so exonerate the sentence, under the pretext of

exonerating the accused. – Bailiffs, solicitors and notaries, write on

paper stamped with acts of property or piracy; dispossess these and

invest in those; frolic like caterpillars on the rich and fertile

summits, in order to drain more quickly the sap which from lower layers

rises without ceasing to feed them. – Doctors of Public Education, who

have the ability/faculty to mercurialize the children of society in the

name of the university or clerical, cretinism, spank the girls and boys

and then spank them again. – Graduates of the Faculty of Medicine for

the mercurial and arsenical medication, authorize the sick, experiment

on the proletarians and torture them on the beds of your hospitals. Go

on, empiricals, not only your certificate of scientific incapacity and

parochial rapacity authorizes you to it, but you have, moreover, the

guarantee of the government. Do it, and if only you are in possession of

an aristocratic clientele and a right-thinking character, the head of

State will detach from his crown a star of gold to hang from your

buttonhole.

All of you, finally, who luxuriate in shame, abusers of authority on

whom fortune smiles, as the prostitutes smile on the doorsteps of the

houses of ill repute; debauchees of the Christian decadence, corrupters

and corrupted, stamp, stamp on the “vile multitude,” soil it with your

much, wound it with your heels, try to kill its decency, its

intelligence, its life; do it, and do it again!…

And then, after…?

Will you prevent the sun from shining and progress from following its

course? No, for you could not make it so that usury is not usury, that

poverty is not poverty, that bankruptcy is not bankruptcy, and that

revolution is not revolution!!…

Oh, Bourgeois, you who have never produced anything but abuses, and who

dream of eternal satisfactions by managing your momentary satisfactions,

tell me, Bourgeois, when you pass now through the streets, don’t you

sense something like a shadow that follows you, something that goes and

does not lose your trail? As long as you are standing, dressed in the

imperial livery, as in a breast-plate, as long as you have regimented

bayonets for crutches, and the blade of the guillotine tops this immense

body of weapons, with the penal catechism on one side and the religious

code on the other; as long as capital shines on all of that like a sun

of Austerlitz, Bourgeois, you will have nothing to fear from the wolf,

the hyena or the ghost whose scent frightens you. But, on the day when a

veil passes over the sun; the day when your livery will be worn down to

threads, the day when, shivering in your nudity, you stumble from

misstep to misstep and roll to the ground, alarmed, terrified; the day

when you fall back from Moscow to Berezina; oh! that day, I say to you,

woe to you! The wolf, the hyena, or the ghost will open you at the belly

and the throat, and it will devour your entrails, and it will tear into

shreds you livery and your limbs, your bundles of bayonets and you

catechisms and codes. Then it will be over for your utopia of capital.

Like a kite whose string is broken, your sun of gold will plunge into

the abyss. Paris will become your Waterloo; and Waterloo, you know,

leads to St. Helena… In truth, in truth I tell you, there will be

neither pity nor mercy for you. “Remember June!” they will shout at you.

Eye for eye and tooth for tooth! – Bourgeois, bourgeois, you have been

too Jewish to know the law of Moses…

Ah! Always iron, lead and fire! Always fratricide among men! Always

victors and vanquished! When will the time of bloody trials cease? Will

Civilization, which eats cadavers, finally die from indigestion?

When then will men understand that Authority is evil;

– That Property, which is also authority, is evil;

– That the Family, which is still authority, is evil;

– That Religion, which is always authority, is evil;

– That Legality, Constitutionality, Regulativity, Contractality, which

are all authority, are evil, still evil, always evil!

Genius of Anarchy, spirit of future centuries, deliver us from evil!!!

Second Part. Anarchic Utopia

Prelude

Dream, Idea, Utopia

Daughters of right, sylphs of my dreams,

Equality! Liberty! my loves!

Will you always only be lies!

Fraternity! Will you always flee from us!

No, n’est-ce pas ? my darling goddesses;

The day approaches when the ideality

The old clock-face of reality

Will mark the hour of utopias!…

Dear utopia, ideal of my heart,

Oh! defy one more the ignorance and error. — (Les Lazaréennes)

What is a utopia? A dream unrealized, but not unrealizable. The utopia

of Galileo is now a truth; it has triumphed despite the sentence of his

judges: the earth turns. The utopia of Christopher Columbus was realized

despite the clamor of his detractors: a new world, America, has risen at

his call from the depths of the Ocean. What was Salomon de Caus?[1] A

utopian, a madman, but a madman who discovered steam. And Fulton?

Another utopian. Instead, ask the academicians of the Institute and

their emperor and master, Napoleon, called the Great… Great like the

prehistoric monsters, with stupidity and ferocity. All innovative ideas

were utopias at their birth; age alone, by developing them, makes them

enter the world of the real. The seekers of ideal happiness, like the

searchers for the philosopher’s stone, will never realize their utopia

absolutely, but their utopia will be the cause of humanitary progress.

Alchemy did not succeed in making gold, but it has drawn from its

crucible something good more precious than a vain metal; it has produced

a science, chemistry. Social science will be the work of the dreamers of

perfect harmony.

Humanity, that conquering immortal, is an army corps that has its

vanguard in the future and its rearguard in the past. To move the

present and pave its way, it must have its outposts of skirmishers, lost

sentries who shoot the idea at the limits of the Unknown. All the great

stages of humanity, its forced marches on the terrain of social conquest

have only been established in the steps of the guides of thought.

“Forward!” cried these explorers of the Future, standing on the alpine

summits of utopia. “Halt!” grumbled the laggards of the Past, squatting

in the ruts of mired reactions. “March!” responded the genius of

Humanity. And the great revolutionary masses set off at its

voice.—Humanity! On the road of future centuries I fly the flag of the

anarchic utopia, and cry to you: “Forward!” Let the stragglers of the

Past sleep in their cowardly immobility and find death there. Respond to

their death-rattle, to their deathly groans with a resounding call to

movement, to life. Put the clarion of Progress to your lips, take your

insurrectionary drumsticks in your hands, and beat and sound the

marching tune.

—March! March!! March!!!

Today when steam exists in all its virility, and electricity exists in

an infant state; today when locomotion and navigation are made with

great speed; that there are no longer Pyrenees, nor Alps, nor deserts,

nor oceans; today when the printing house publishes the word in hundreds

of thousands of copies and commerce peddles in even the most unknown

corners of the globe; today when exchange by exchange we open the ways

of unity; today when the labors of generations have formed, stage by

stage and arch by arch, this gigantic aqueduct that pours across the

present world torrents of science and enlightenment; today when the

motive and the force of expansion exceeds all that the most utopian

dreams of ancient times could imagine of the grandeur of modern times;

today when the word “impossible” scratched out of the human dictionary;

today when man, new Phoebus directing the advance of steam, warms up the

vegetation and produces where he pleases greenhouses where sprout, grow

and flower the plants and trees of all climates, an oasis that the

traveler encounters in the midst of the snow and ice of the North; today

when human genius, in the name of its suzerainty, has taken possession

of the sun, that focus of brilliant artists, when it has captured its

rays, chained them in its workshop, and constrained them, like servile

vassals, to etch and paint its image on zinc plates or sheets of paper;

today, finally, when every march takes giant’s steps, is it possible

that Progress, that giant among giants, will continue to advance softly,

softly [piano-piano] on the railways of social science? No, no. I tell

you that it will change its pace; it will put itself in step with steam

and electricity, and it will struggle with them with peace and agility.

Woe then to those who want to stop it in its course: they will be spewed

out in shreds on the other side of the tracks by the cowcatcher of the

colossal locomotive, that cyclops with an eye of fire that tows with all

the heat of hell the satanic procession of humanity, and which, standing

up on its axles, advances, brow high and head lowered, along the

straight way of anarchy, shaking in the air its brown hair studded with

sparks of flame! Woe to those who would want to go against this rolling

volcano! All the gods of the ancient and modern worlds are not big

enough to measure up to this new Titan. Make way! Make way! Step aside,

crowned cowherds, merchants of human livestock who return from Poissy

with your cart, Civilization. Pull over, Lilliputian bully-boys, and

make way for utopia. Make way! Make way for the forceful breath of the

Revolution! Step aside, money-changers and forgers of chains, make way

for the idea-changers, to the forger of the thunderbolt!…

— I had hardly finished writing these lines when I was forced to stop,

as I have been forced to do quite often in the course of this work. The

excessive stress on all my faculties, to lift and cast off the burden of

ignorance which weighs on my head, that fanatic over-excitement of

thought, acting on my weak temperament, made tears pour from my eyes. I

choked and sobbed. Blood beat in my temples and raised in my brain some

torrential waves, boiling flood that my arteries did not stop

precipitate there through all their channels. And while with the right

hand I tried to contain and calm the frantic activity of my brow, with

the left hand I tried in vain to contain the accelerated pulsations of

my heart. The air no longer reached my lungs. I tottered like a drunken

man, going to open the window of my room. I approached my bed and threw

myself down on it.—I asked myself: Was I going to lose life or reason?

And I got up, not being able to remain lying down, and I lay down again,

unable to remain standing. It seemed to me that my head would explode,

and that someone twisted my breasts with pliers. I choked: iron muscles

grasped my by the throat… Ah! The Idea is a lover who in its ardent

embraces bites you until you cry out, and only leaves you a moment,

breathless and spent, to prepare yourself for new and more ardent

caresses. To woo her, if you are not strong in science, you must be

brave in intuition. “Back!” she says to the rogues and cowards, “You are

unbelievers!” And she leaves them to mope outside the shrine. That

languorous, splendid and passionate mistress requires men of saltpeter

and bronze for lovers. Who knows how many days each of her kisses costs!

Once the spasm subsided, I sat down at my desk. The Idea came to sit

beside me. And, my head resting on her shoulder, one hand in her hand

and the other in the curls of her hair, we exchanged a long look of calm

intoxication. I went back to writing, and in her turn she leaned on me.

and I felt her soft contact reawaken the eloquence in my brain and in my

heart, and her breath again inflamed mine. After rereading what I had

written, and in thinking of that inert mass of prejudices and ignorance

that it was necessary to transform into active individualities, into

free and studious intelligences, I felt a hint of doubt slip into my

mind. But the Idea, speaking in my ear, soon dispelled it. A society,

she told me, which in its most obscure strata, under the blouse of the

worker, feels such revolutionary lava rumble, storms of sulfur and fire

such as circulate in your veins; a society in which are found some

disinherited to write what you have written, and thus appeal to all the

rebellions of arms and intelligence; a society where such writings find

presses to print them and men to clasp the hands of their authors; where

these authors, who are proletarians, still find bosses to employ

them,—with exceptions, naturally,—and where these heretics of the legal

order can walk the streets without being marked on the forehead with a

hot iron, and without anyone dragging them to the stake, them and their

books; oh, go on, such a society, although it is officially the

adversary of new ideas, is close to going over to the enemy… If it still

does not have a feeling of the morality of the Future, at least it no

longer has a feeling for the morality of the Past. The society of the

present is like a fortress surrounded on all sides, which has lost

communication with the army which has protected it and which has been

destroyed. It knows that it can no longer resupply. So it no longer

defends itself except for appearances sake. One can calculate in advance

the day of its surrender. Without any doubt, there would still be

volleys of cannon shots exchanged; but when it has exhausted its last

munitions, emptied its arsenals and its granaries of abundance, it must

strike the flag. The old society no longer dares protect itself, or, if

it does protect itself, it is which a fury which testifies to its

weakness. Young people enthusiastic for the good can be bold and see

success crown their audacity. The old, envious and cruel, always fail in

their recklessness. There are still in our days, and more than ever,

many priests to religionize souls, as there are judges to torture

bodies; soldiers to pasture on authority, as there are bosses to live at

the expense of the workers. But priests and judges, soldiers and bosses

no longer have faith in their priesthood. There is in their public

glorification of themselves, by themselves, something like an ulterior

motive of shame for doing what they do. All these social climbers, these

bearers of chasubles or robes, of belts garnished with pieces of gold or

steel blades, do not feel at ease between the world that is coming and

the world that is departing; their legs are reckless, and they feel like

they’re walking on hot coals. It is true that they always continue to

preside, to sentence, to shoot, to exploit, but, “in their heart of

hearts, they are not sure they are not thieves and assassins!…” that is

to say that they do not dare to admit it to themselves fully, for fear

of being too afraid. They vaguely understand that they are at odds, that

civilized society is a society of ill repute, and that one day or

another the Revolution can accomplish a raid of justice in this dive.

The footstep of the future echoes dully on the cobblestones. Three

knocks on the door, three blasts of the alarm in Paris, and that’s it

for the stakes and the players!

Civilization, the daughter of Barbarism, who has Savagery for a

grandmother, Civilization, exhausted by eighteen centuries of

debauchery, suffers from an incurable disease. She is condemned by

science. She must pass away. When? Sooner than one might think. Her

sickness is a pulmonary phthisis, and we know that consumptives maintain

the appearance of life up to the last hour. One debauched night she will

lie down, to rise no more.

When the Idea had finished speaking, I drew her gently into my lap and

there, between two kisses, I asked her the secret of the future times.

She was so tender and so good to those who love her ardently that she

could not refuse me. and I remained hanging at her lips and gathered

each of her words, as if captivated by the attractive fluid, by the

emanations of light with which her pupil inundated me. how beautiful she

was then, the graceful enchantress! I wish I could retell with all the

charm with which she told me these splendors of the anarchic utopia, all

these magical delights of the Harmonian world. My pen is not skillful

enough to give anything but a pale glimpse. Let those who would know its

ineffable enchantments appeal, as I did, to the Idea, and let them,

guided by her, evoke in their turn the sublime visions of the ideal, the

luminous apotheosis of future ages.

II.

Ten centuries have passed over the face of Humanity. We are in the year

2858. —Imagine a savage from the earliest ages, torn from the heart of

his primitive forest and cast without transition forty centuries distant

into the midst of present-day Europe, in France, at Paris. Suppose that

a magical power had liberated his intelligence and walked him through

the marvels of industry, agriculture, architecture, of all the arts and

all the sciences, and that, like a cicerone [2], it had shown him and

explained to him all their beauties. And now imagine the astonishment of

that savage. He would fall down in admiration before all these things;

he would not be able to believe his eyes or ears; he would cry out at

the miracle, the civilization, the utopia!

Now imagine a civilisée suddenly transplanted from the Paris of the 19th

century to the time of humanity’s beginnings. And imagine his amazement

before these men who still have no other instincts but those of the

brute, who graze and bleat, who bellow and ruminate, who kick and bray,

who bite, claw and roar, men for whom their fingers, tongue, and

intelligence are tools of which they do not know the use, a mechanism of

which they are not in a state to understand the works. Picture this

civiliseé, thus exposed to the mercy of savage men, to the fury of wild

beasts and untamed elements. He could not live among all these

monstrosities. For him it would be disgust, horror, and chaos!

Well! The anarchic utopia is to civilization what civilization is to

savagery. For one who has crossed by thought the ten centuries that

separate the present from the future, who has entered into the future

world and explored its marvels, how has seen, heard and felt all its

harmonious details, who has been initiated into all the pleasures of

that humanitary society, for that person the world of the present is

still an uncultivated, swampy land, a cesspool peopled with fossil men

and institutions, a monstrous skeleton of society, something misshapen

and hideous that the sponge of the revolutions must wipe from the

surface of the globe. Civilization, with it monuments, its laws, and its

customs, with its property boundaries and its ruts of nations, its

authoritarian brambles and its familial roots, its prostitutional

vegetation; Civilization with its English, German, French, and Cossack

patois, with its gods of metal, its crude fetishes, its pagodian

animalities, its mitered and crowned caimans, its herds of rhinoceros

and deer, of bourgeois and proletarians, its impenetrable forests of

bayonets and its bellowing artilleries, bronze torrents stretched out in

their carriages, roaring and vomiting up cascades of bullets;

Civilization, Civilization, with its caves of misery, its penal colonies

and its workshops, its houses of prostitution and detention, with its

mountainous chains of palaces and churches, of fortresses and shops, its

dens of princes, bishops, generals, and bourgeois, obscene macaques,

hideous vultures, ill-mannered bears, metalivores and carnivores who

soil with their debauchery and make bleed with their claws human flesh

and intelligence; Civilization, with its Penal gospel and its religious

Code, its emperors and its popes — its gallows-constrictors which

throttle a man in their hemp loops and then swing him on high from a

tree, after having broken his neck, its guillotine-alligators which

crush you like a dog between their terrible jaws and separate the head

from the body with one blow of their triangular portcullis;

Civilization, finally, with its habits and customs, its pestilential

charters and constitutions, its moral cholera, all its epidemic

religionalities and its governmentalities; Civilization, in a world, in

all its vigor and exuberance, Civilization, in all its glory, is, for

the one who has fixed in his sight the dazzling Future, what the

savagery at the origin of the world would be for the Civilizee, the

newly born man emerging from his terrestrial mold and still wading

through the menses of chaos; so also the anarchic utopia is, for the

civilisée, what the revelation of the civilized world would be for the

savage; that is to say something hyperbolically good, hyperbolically

beautiful, something ultra- and extra-natural, the paradise of man on

the earth.

III.

Man is an essentially revolutionary being. He does not know how to stay

in place. He does not live the life of limits, but the life of the

stars. Nature has given him movement and light, in order to orbit and

shine. Isn’t the limit itself, although slow to move, transformed

imperceptibly each day until it is entirely metamorphosed, and doesn’t

continue in the eternal life its eternal metamorphoses?

So, Civilisees, do you want to be more limited than the limits?

“Revolutions are acts of conservation.”

So revolutionize yourself, in order to preserve yourself.

In the arid desert where our generation is camped, the oasis of anarchy

is still for the caravan worn out from marches and counter-marches, a

mirage floating at random. It is up to human intelligence to solidify

that vapor, to settle the azure-winged phantom on the ground, to give it

a body. Do you see over there, in the deepest depths of the immense

misery, do you see a somber, reddish cloud gathering on the horizon? It

is the revolutionary simoom. Look out, Civilisées. There is only time to

fold the tents, if you do not want to be engulfed in that avalanche of

burning sand. Look out! And flee straight ahead. You will find the fresh

spring, the green lawns, the fragrant flowers, the tasty fruit, and a

protective shelter under wide, high canopies. Do you hear the simoom

that threatens you? Do you see the mirage that calls to you? Look out!

Behind you is death; to the right and to the left, death; where you

stand, death… March! Before you is life. Civilisées, Civilisées, I tell

you: the mirage is not a mirage, utopia is not a utopia; what you take

for a phantom is the reality!…

IV.

And, having given me three kisses, the idea drew aside the curtain of

the centuries and revealed to my eyes the main stage of the future

world, where it would show me the Anarchic Utopia.

Second Part. The Future World

Mutual liberty is the common law. — (Emile de Girardin)

And the earth, which was dry, became green again, and all could eat of

its fruits, and come and go without anyone asking them: Where are you

going? You cannot pass here.

And the little children gathered flowers, and brought them to their

mothers, who smiled sweetly on them.

And there were neither rich nor poor, but all had in abundance the

things necessary to their needs, because everyone loved and helped each

other as brothers. — (Paroles d’un croyant)

And first, the Earth has changed its features. In the place of the

swampy wounds which consume its cheeks, shines an agricultural down,

golden harvest of fertility. The mountains seem to suck in wildly the

open air of liberty, and balance on their crowns their fine plume of

foliage. The deserts of sand have given place to forests peopled with

oaks, cedars, and palms, who trample underfoot a thick carpet of moss,

soft greenery enameled with all the flowers that love the cool shade and

clear streams. The craters have been muzzled, their devastating

eruptions have been hushed, and a useful course has been given to those

reservoirs of lava. Air, fire, and water, all the elements with

destructive instincts have been tamed, and captive under the eye of man,

they obey his least desires. The heavens have been scaled. Electricity

carries man on its wings and leads him through the clouds, him and his

aerial steamboats. It makes him cross in a few seconds spaces that would

today take us entire months to cover on the backs of heavy marine

vessels. An immense irrigation network covers the vast prairies, where

they have cast the barriers in the fire, and where countless herds pass,

destined to feed man. Man sits enthroned atop his machines of labor, he

no longer fertilizes the field with the steam of his body, but with the

sweat of the locomotive. Not only have they filled the ruts of the

fields, but they have also passed the harrow over the borders of

nations. The railroads, the bridges cast over the narrows and the

submarine tunnels, the diving-vessels and aerostats, propelled by

electricity, have made the whole globe a single city which one can tour

in less than a day. The continents are the quarters or districts of the

universal city. Monumental dwellings, scattered in groups in the midst

of cultivated land, form squares. The globe is like a park, in which the

oceans are the watery parts; a child can, playing ball, step over them

as nimbly as a brook. Man, holding the scepter of science in his hand,

has from now on the power that we have previously attributed to the

gods, in the good old days of the hallucinations ignorance, and he makes

rain and good weather as he pleases; he commands the seasons, and the

seasons bow before their master. Tropical plants bloom in the Heaven

discovered in the polar regions; some channels of boiling lava snake at

their feet; the natural labor of the globe and the artificial labor of

man have transformed the temperature of the poles, and they have

unleashed spring there where perpetual winter reigns. All the cities and

hamlets of the Civilized world, its temples, its citadels, its palaces,

and its cottages, all its luxuries and all its miseries have been swept

from the earth like filth from the public roads; there remains no more

of Civilization than the historic cadaver, relegated to the Mont-Faucon

of memory. A magnificent and elegant architecture, as nothing that

exists today can give the sketch, to replace the petty proportions and

the poverties of style of the structures of the Civilized. On the site

of Paris, a colossal construction raises its bases of granite and

marble, its cast pillars of a prodigious thickness and height. Under its

huge iron dome open to the sky and set, like lace, upon a base of

crystal, a million strollers can gather there without being crushed.

Circular galleries, laid out one on top of the other and planted with

trees like boulevards, form around that immense circle a vast belt no

less than twenty leagues in circumference. Amid these galleries, a

railway transports, in light and graceful carriages, from one point to

another, take them and drop them off where they please. In each side of

the railway is a mossy avenue, a lawn; then, a sandy avenue for the

horsemen; then, a paved or parqueted avenue; then, finally, an avenue

covered with a thick, soft carpet. All along these avenues are

positioned couches and chairs with spring cushions, covered with silk

and velour, wool and chintz; and also benches and chairs of varnished

wood, marble or bronze, bare or furnished with seats of braids or

leather, plain cloth or fur in spots or stripes. On the edges of these

avenues, some flowers from all the countries, blooming on their stems,

have fore flowerbeds long consoles of white marble. At intervals light

fountains are detached, some in white marble, in stucco, in agate and

bronze, lead and solid silver; the others in black marble, in violet

breccia, in Siena yellow, in malachite, in granite, in stones, in shells

and copper, and gold and iron. The elements are mixed together, in whole

or in part, with a perfect understanding harmony. Their forms,

infinitely varied, are skillfully arranged. Some sculptures, works of

deft artists, animate by ideal fantasies these urns from which, in the

evening, gush, with streams and bursts of clear water, streams and

bursts of light, cascades of diamonds and lava that flow through the

plants and aquatic flowers. The pillars and ceilings of the galleries

have a bold and strongly accented ornamentation. It is neither Greek,

nor Roman, nor Moorish, nor Gothic, nor Renaissance; it is something

recklessly beautiful, audaciously graceful, it is the purity of profile

with the lasciviousness of contours, it is supple and responsive; this

ornamentation is to the ornamentation of our days what the majesty of

the lion, that superb mane-bearer, is to the ungainliness and nakedness

of the rat. Stone, wood, and metal contribute to the decoration of these

galleries, come together harmoniously. On bases of gold and silver stand

sculptures of oak, maple, and ebony. On fields of colors soft or severe

runs raised ornamental foliage of galvanized iron and lead. Muscles of

bronze and marble divide all this rich fleshiness into a thousand

sections, and connect the whole. Opulent draperies hang along arcades

that, on the inward side, are open to the amphitheater, and, on the

outward side, are closed off from bad weather in all seasons by a wall

of glass. Inside, colonnades forming a veranda support at their summit

an entablature and platform or terrace, crenellated like a fortress or a

dovecote, and gives passage, through these architectural openings, to

the visitors who descend or climb there by means of a moving balcony

raising or lowering at the least pressure. These circular galleries,

regular on the whole, but different in the details, are cut at intervals

by projecting wings of a still more imposing character. In these

pavilions, which are like the links of that chain of avenues, there are

rooms for refreshments and snacks, rooms for conversation and reading,

for games and rest, for amusements and recreation, for the adult ages as

well as for the childish ones. In these sorts of repositories, open to

the motley crowds of pilgrims, all the refinements of luxury that one

could call aristocratic in our time, seem to have been exhausted, while

there is an otherworldly wealth and elegance there. These pavilions, in

their lower story, are so many peristyles through which one enters the

immense arena. This new Coliseum, of which we just explored the tiers,

has its arena, like the ancient coliseums: it is a park dotted with

groves of trees, lawns, bed of flowers, rustic grottos and splendid

bandstands. The Seine and a multitude of canals and pools of all shapes,

whitewater and backwaters, careen or wander, rest or snake through all

of that. Wide chestnut-lined avenues and narrow paths bordered by

hedges, and covered with woodbine and hawthorn, cross them in all

directions. Groups in bronze and marble, masterpieces of statuary, mark

these avenues and are enthroned there at intervals, or stand, at the

branching of some hidden way, in the crystal of a solitary fountain. At

night, little globes of electric light project, like stars, their timid

rays on the on the shadows of the greenery, and farther along, above the

most uncovered parts, an enormous sphere of electric light pours from

its orb torrents of solar light. Some heat sources, infernal braziers,

and some ventilators, aeolian lungs, combine their efforts to produce in

that enclosure a climate that is always temperate, and a perpetual

flowering. It is something a thousand and one times more magical than

the palace and garden of the Thousand and One Nights. Aerostatic skiffs,

aerial boatsmen cross as the crow flies that free human aviary, come,

go, enter and leave, follow or cross one another in their whimsical

progressions. Here are multicolored butterflies that flit from flower to

flower, there some birds from the equatorial zones, which frolic in

complete liberty. Children play on the lawns with roe, deer, lions,

animals which have become domesticated or civilized, and they serve them

as hobby horses to ride upon or to harness to their wheelbarrows.

Panthers, tame as house cats, climb beneath the columns or trees, leap

on the shoulders of the rock of the grottos, and, in their splendid

bounds or their fickle simpering, draw around the man the most graceful

curves; and, creeping on its feet, asks him for a look or a caress. Some

subterranean organ, roaring of steam or electricity, make heard at times

their baritone voice and, as with a common concert, mix their dull notes

with the keen warbling of the singing birds, those light tenors. About

the center of this valley of harmony rises a labyrinth, at the high

point of which is a cluster of palm trees. At the foot of these palms is

a platform in ivory and oak, with the most beautiful silhouette. Above

this platform, and leaning against the stems of the palms, is hung a

large crown of polished steel surrounding a cap of blue satin

proportionate to the crown. A drapery of velvet and garnet silk, with a

golden fringe, and supported by some twists of gold, falls in curls

behind. On the front of the banner is a large diamond star, surmounted

by a crescent and a plume of open flame. On each side are two bronze

hands, also attached to the banner, one on the right and one on the

left, also serving as two clips for the flame. It is on that platform

that, in the days of solemnity, climb those who wish to speak to the

crowd. It is understood that, to dare approach such a pulpit, they must

be something other than our orators and parliamentarians. Those would

literally be crushed under the moral weight of that crown; they would

feel the platform beneath their feet quake from shame and fall away to

engulf them. Also, these men who come to take their place under this

diadem and on these allegorical stages, are only those who have to

spread, from the height of that urn of intelligence, some great and

fertile thought, a pearl set in a brilliant speech, which, coming out of

the crowd, falls back on the crow like the dew on the flowers. The

rostrum is free. Ascend those who wish,—but only wish it if you can

ascend. In this world, which is very different from our own, they take a

sublime pride in only raising their voices in public to say something.

Icarus would not have dared to test his wings; he would have been too

certain of falling. He would have needed more than an

intelligence/understanding of wax to attempt the ascension of speech

before such an audience. An ingenious acoustic mechanism allows the

million listeners to hear distinctly all the words of the speaker, as

far as he may be from them. Some optical instruments, admirably

perfected, allow them to follow the movements, both gestures and facial

expressions, at a very great distance.

Seen with the eyes of the Past, that colossal carousel, with all its

human waves, had for me the spectacular appearance of the Ocean. Seen

with the eyes of the Future, our societies of lawmakers and our

democratic councils, the Palais Bourbon and the Salle Martel, no longer

appeared to me except in the form of a glass of water. That is man and

as he sees things different, as the panorama of the centuries rolls or

unrolls his perspectives. What was utopia for me was for them completely

ordinary. They had much more gigantic dreams that my little imagination

could not embrace. I heard talk of plans so far above the common that I

could barely grasp the sense of them. How, I asked myself, would a

civilisée from the Rue des Lombards look in the midst of these people:

in vain he could put his head in his mortar, crush it like a peach pit,

grind the brain up fine, he will never manage to extract from it a ray

of intelligence capable of understanding even the smallest word.

This monument of which I have tried to give a sketch, is the palace or

rather the temple of the arts and sciences, something in the future

society like the Capitol and Forum in the societies of the past. It is

the central point where all the radii of a circle lead and from which

they then spread out to all the points of the circumference. It is

called the Cyclidéon, that is to say the “place devoted to the circulus

of ideas,” and consequently to all that is the product of these ideas;

it is the altar of the social cult, the anarchic church of the utopian

humanity.

Among the sons of this new world, there is neither divinity nor papacy,

nor royalty nor gods, nor kings nor priests. Not wanting to be slaves,

they do not want masters. Being free, they worship only Liberty, and

they practice it from their infancy and profess it at every moment, even

in the last moments of their life. Their anarchic communion has no need

of bibles or codes; each carries within them their law and their

prophet, their heart and their intelligence. They do no do to others

what they would not want others to do to them, and they do to others

what they would want others to do to them. Desiring good for all, they

do good for others. Not wanting their free will attacked, they do not

attack the free will of others. Lovers, loved, they want to increase in

love and multiply by love. As men, they give back to Humanity a

hundredfold what as children they cost Humanity in care; and to their

neighbor the sympathies that are due to their neighbor: look for look,

smile for smile, kiss for kiss, and, when needed, bite for bite. They

know that they have only one common mother, Humanity, that they are all

brothers, and they know what fraternity demands. They are conscious that

harmony can only exist through the cooperation of individual wills, that

the natural law of attractions is the law for the infinitely small as

for the infinitely large, that nothing that is sociable can move except

by it, that it is the universal thought, the unity of unities, the

sphere of spheres, that it is immanent and permanent in the eternal

movement; and they say: Apart from anarchy there is no safety! And they

add: Happiness is of our world. And all are happy, and all encounter on

their road the satisfactions that they seek. They knock, and all doors

open; sympathy, love, pleasures and joys respond to the beating of their

hearts, to the pulsations of their brains, to the hammer-blows of their

arms; and, standing at their doorstep, they salute the brother, the

lover, the laborer; and Science, like a humble servant, introduces them

farther into the vestibule of the Unknown.

And you would want a religion, some laws among such a people? Go on,

then! Either that would be a danger, or it would be a useless thing

[hors-d’oeuvre]. Laws and religions are made for slaves by masters who

are also slaves. Free men carry neither spiritual ties nor temporal

chains. Man is his own kind and his own God. “Me and my right,” such is

his motto.

On the site of the principal cities of today, they have constructed some

Cyclidéons, not like, but analogous to the one I have described. That

day, there was in this one a universal exhibition of the products of

human genius. Sometimes there were only partial expositions, expositions

by district or continent. It is on the occasion of this solemnity that

three or four orators had delivered speeches. In this cyclique of poetic

labors of arms and intelligence was displayed a whole museum of marvels.

Agriculture brought its sheaves, horticulture its flowers and fruits,

industry its fabrics, its furniture, its finery, science all its gears,

its mechanisms, its statistics, its theories. Architecture brought its

plans, painting its pictures, sculpture and statuary their ornaments and

statues, music and poetry the purest of their songs. The arts, like the

sciences, had put in this setting their richest jewels.

It was not a contest like our contests. There was neither a jury for

admission nor a jury for rewards selected by lot or ballot, nor a grand

prize granted by official judges, nor crowns, nor certificates, nor

laureates, nor medals. The great, free voice of the public is the sole

sovereign judge. It is in order to please that power of opinion that

each comes to submit their works, and it is that power which, passing

before the works of each, awarding them according to its special

aptitudes, not trifles of distinction, but more or less lively

admirations, examinations more or less attentive, or more or less

disdainful. Also, its judgments are always equitable, always in

condemnation of those less courageous, always in praise of the most

valiant, always an encouragement to emulation, for the weak as well as

the strong. It is the great righter of wrongs, which testifies to each

individually that they have more or less followed the path of their

vocation, that they are more or less astray; and the future is charged

with ratifying these maternal observations. And all its children grow at

every opportunity through that mutual instruction, for all have the

proud ambition to distinguish themselves equally in their various

labors.

At the end of the feast, I went up in an aerostat with my guide, we

sailed in the air for a minute and we soon disembarked on the steps of

one of the squares of the universal city. It is something like a

phalanstery, but without any hierarchy, without any authority, where

all, on the contrary, bears witness to liberty and equality, to the most

complete anarchy. The form of that city is very nearly that of a star,

but its rectangular faces are not at all symmetrical, each has its

particular type. The architecture seems to have modeled in the folds of

its structural robe all the undulations of grace, all the curves of

beauty. The interior decorations are of an impressive elegance. It is a

happy mix of luxury and simplicity, a harmonious choice of contrasts.

The population there is five or six thousand persons. Each man and woman

has their separate apartment, which is composed of two bedrooms, a

bathroom or washroom, a study or library, a parlor, and a patio or

hothouse full of flowers and greenery. It is all ventilated by fans and

heated by stoves, which does not prevent there also being chimneys for

the approval of the sight: in winter, lacking sunlight, they love to see

the flames glow in the hearth. Each apartment also has its taps for

water and light. The furniture is on an artistic splendor which puts to

shame the princely rags of our contemporary aristocracies. And still

each can add or restrain as they wish, simplify or enrich the details;

they have only to express the desire. If they want to occupy the same

apartment for a long time, they occupy it; if they want to change every

day, they change. Nothing is more simple, there are always vacancies at

their disposition. These apartments, by their position, allow each to

enter and leave without being seen. On one side, in the interior, is a

vast gallery giving onto the park, which serves as a great artery for

the circulation of the inhabitants. On the other side, on the exterior,

is a labyrinth of little private galleries where modesty and love slip

secretly. There, in that anarchic society, the family and legal property

are dead institutions, hieroglyphs whose meaning has been lost: the

family is one and indivisible, and property is one and indivisible. In

that fraternal communion, labor is free, and love is free. Everything

that is the work of arms and intelligence, everything which is an object

of production and consumption, common capital, collective property,

belongs to each and to all. Everything which is a work of the heart,

everything which is private in essence, individual sensation and

sentiment, [is an] individual capital, bodily property, everything which

is man, finally, in its proper sense, whatever his age or his sex,

belongs to him. Producers and consumers produce and consume as they

will, when and where they please. “Freedom is free.” Nobody demands of

them: Why this? Why that? As the children of wealth, at the hour of

recreation [recess?], draw from the basket of their playthings, one

taking a hoop, the other a racket, this one a ball and that one a bow,

playing together or separately, and change friends or toys according to

their fancy, but always urged into movement by the sight of others and

the needs of the turbulent nature; so also the children of anarchy, men

or women, choose in the community the tools and the labor that suits

them, working along or in groups, and change groups or tools according

to their whims, but always stimulated to production by the example or

others and by the attraction that they feel to work/play [jouer]

together at the creation. So also at a diner of friends, the guests eat

and drink at the same table, take as they choose a bit of some dish, a

glass of some wine, without any of them overdoing with the gluttony of a

an early fruit or a rare wine; and so too the men of the future, at that

banquet of anarchic communion, consume according to their taste

everything that appears pleasant to them, without ever overdoing with a

delicious early fruit or a rare product. It is instead for who will only

take the smallest portion.—At the common table [table d’hôte], in

Civilized countries, the travelling salesman, the businessman, the

bourgeois, is coarse and brutal: he is unknown and he pays. Those are

legal manners. At a meal of hand-picked people, the man of the world,

the aristocrat, is decent and courteous: he bears his name emblazoned on

his face, and the instinct of reciprocity commands civility from him.

Those who oblige others are obliged. Those are free manners. Like this

bumpkin of commerce, legal liberty is coarse and brutal; anarchic

liberty, however, has all the delicacies of good fellowship. [Déjacque’s

note is found at the end of the text.]

Men and women make love when the please, as they please, and with whom

they please. Full and complete freedom on both side. No convention or

legal contract binds them. Attraction is their only chain, and pleasure

their only rule. And love is more lasting and surrounded by more modesty

than among the Civilized. The mystery with which they like to envelope

their free liaisons adds a charm which is always renewed. They would

regard as an offense to moral chastity and as a provocation to jealous

infirmities, to unveil in the light of the public the intimacy of their

sexual amours. All, in public, have tender glances for one another, like

those of brothers and sisters, the vermillion radiance of warm

friendship; the spark of passion only glows in secret, like the stars,

those chaste glimmers, in the dark azure of the nights. Fortunate loves

seek shade and solitude. It is from these hidden sources that they draw

pure happiness. For hearts in love with one another there are some

sacraments which should remain unknown to the non-believers.—In the

Civilized world, men and women appear at the town hall and church to

publicize their union, spread the nakedness of their marriage in the

lights of a fancy ball, in the midst of a quadrille, and with orchestral

accompaniment: all the sparkle, all the bacchanal desired. And

scandalous custom of the of the brothel nuptial, at the appointed hour,

by the fig leaf is torn the hands of the matrons from the lips of the

bride; they prepare her for some horrible bestialities.—In the anarchic

world, one with turn aside with blushing and disgust from that

prostitution and these obscenities. All these women sold, this commerce

in cashmeres and études, petticoats and pot-au-feu, this profanation of

human flesh and thought, this crapularisation of love,—if the men of the

future could picture it, they would shudder with horror as we would

shudder, in a dream, at the thought of a terrible reptile that clutches

us in its cold and mortal coils, and we will bathe our face with its

lukewarm, venomous saliva.

In the anarchic world, a man can have several lovers, and a woman as

well, without any doubt. Temperaments are not all the same, and

attractions are proportional to our need. A man can love one woman for

one thing, and love another for another thing, and reciprocally for the

woman’s man. Where is the evil, if they obey their fate? The evil would

be to assail and not to satisfy it. Free love is like fire; it purifies

everything. What I can say is that, in the anarchic world, inconstant

loves are a very small number, and constant loves, exclusive loves,

loves between two, are the greatest number. Vagabond love is the search

for love, it is the journey to it, the emotions and the fatigues, but it

is not the end. The unique love, perpetual love, axis of two hearts

merged in a reciprocal attraction, such is the crowning bliss of the

lovers, the apogee of sexual evolution; it is the radiant hearth towards

which all pilgrimages tend, the apotheosis of the human couple,

happiness at its zenith.

At the hour when we love, isn’t doubting the perpetuity of our love

denying it? either we don’t, and so do not love; or we love, and do not

doubt. In the old society love was hardly possible possible; it is

always only a momentary illusion, too many unnatural prejudices and

interests are there to disperse it, it is a fire as soon extinguished as

lit, which goes up in smoke. In the new society, love is a flame too

bright and the breezes that surround it too pure, too according to the

sweet, smooth, and human poetry, to not be strengthened in its ardor and

exalted by the contact of al these breaths. Far from impoverishing it,

everything it encounters serves it as food. Here the young man, and the

young woman, have all the time to be acquainted. Equal by education, as

well as by social position, brother and sister in arts and in sciences,

in studies and professional labors, free in their steps, their gestures,

their words, and their look, free in their thoughts as well as their

actions, they have only to seek one another to find one another. Nothing

is opposed to their meeting, noting opposes the modesty of their first

confessions, pleasure of their first kisses. They love, not because it

is the will of fathers and mothers, by commercial interests or genital

or cerebral debauchery, but because nature has prepared them for one

another, because it has made twin hearts, united by a single current of

thoughts, a sympathetic fluid that echoes all their heartbeats and puts

their two beings in communication.

Is this the love of the Civilized [really] love, love in naked form,

public love, legal love? It is love’s savagery, something like a rude

and brutal intuition. Love among the harmonized, love artistically

veiled, love chaste and worthy, although sensory and passionate,

anarchic love, that is humanely and naturally love, it is its ideal

realized, the scientification. The first is animal love; the second is

hominal love. One is obscenity and venality, brutish sensation,

cretinous sentiment; the other is chastity and liberty, the sensation

and sentiment of the human being.

The principle is one, for the wild stock as for the hominal, for the man

of Civilized times as for the man of Harmonic times, it is beauty. Only,

beauty for the earlier and inferior men, for the fossils of Humanity, is

the blood-red and plump complexion, the shapeless and multicolored

enceinture, a luxury of meat or crinoline, feathers of sea birds or

Austrian ribbons, it is the Hottentot Venus or the party girl [poupée de

salon]. For the later, superior men, beauty is not only in the carnal

stuff, it is also in the purity of forms, in the grace and majesty of

manners, in the elegance and choice of finery, and especially in the

luxury, in the magnificence of the heart and mind.

Among these perfectibilized persons, beauty is not a privilege of birth

any more than the sparkle of a golden crown, as in the savage and

bourgeois societies; it is the daughter of their works, the fruit of

their own labor, an individual acquisition. What lights up their face is

not the external reflection of an inert metal, as it were, a cheap

thing, it is the radiation of everything that is in the man of boiling

ideas, of vaporized passions, of heat in movement, continuous

gravitation which, arrived at the summit of the human body, at the

cranium, filters through its pores, flows from it, drips from it in

impalpable pearls, and, luminous essence, floods all the forms and all

the external movements, crowns the individual.

What, ultimately, is physical beauty? The stalk of which mental beauty

is the flower. All beauty comes from labor; it is through labor that it

grows and blossoms on the brow of each, intellectual and moral crown.

Essentially carnivorous love, the love which is only instinct, is, for

the human race, only the sign, only the root of love. It grows, opaque

and without perfume, sunk in the refuse of the soil and delivered to the

embraces of that muck. Hominalized love, the love which is above all

intelligence, is the corolla of the transparent flesh, bodily enamel

from which escape some scented emanations, free incense, invisible atoms

that run the fields and rise to the skies.

— To Humanity in germ, tainted love…

— To Humanity in flower, flower of love!

This square or phalanstery, that I will call from now on the

Humanisphere, and that because of the analogy of that human

constellation with the grouping and the movement of the stars,

attractive organization, passional and harmonic anarchy. There is the

simple Humanisphere and the composite humanisphere, that is the

Humanisphère considered in its individuality, or embryonic monument and

group, and the humanisphère considered in its collectivity, or harmonic

monument and group. One hundred simple humanispheres grouped around a

cyclidéon form the first circle of that serial chain and take the name

of “communal Humanisphère.” All the communal humanisphères of a single

continent form the first link of that chain and take the name of

“continental Humanisphère.” The gathering of all the continental

humanisphères form the complement of the serial chain and take the name

of “universal Humanisphère.”

The simple Humanisphère is a building composed of a dozen wings united

together and resembling the star (at least the one of which I undertake

the description here, for there are all sorts of forms, diversity being

a condition of harmony). One part is reserved for the apartments of men

and women. These apartments are all separated by walls that neither

voices nor vision can pierce, partitions that absorb light and sound, in

order that each be comfortable at home and can laugh, dance, sing, or

even make music there (which is not always entertaining for the forced

listener), without bothering their neighbors and without being bothered

by them. Another part is arranged as the apartment for children. Then

come the kitchens, the bakery, the butcher’s shop, the fishmonger’s, the

dairy, the greengrocer’s; then the laundry room, the machines to wash,

dry, and iron the lingerie; then the workshops for all that which

relates to the various industries, the factories of all sorts; the

stores of provisions and the stores of raw materials manufactured

objects. Elsewhere there are the barns and stables pour some animals for

riding which wander during the day freely in the inner park, and with

which small children or grownups play at cavalier or coachman; nearby

are the barns for the fancy carriages; then come the saddlery, the sheds

for the tools and locomotives, some agricultural instruments. Here is

the landing stage for small and large aerial craft. A monumental

platform serves them for basin. They drop anchor at their arrival and

raise them at their departure. Further along there are the study-rooms

for all tastes and all ages, — mathematics, mechanics, physics, anatomy,

astronomy, — the observatory; the chemistry laboratories; the hothouses,

the botanical garden; the museum of natural history, the galleries for

paintings, sculpture; the great library. Here there are the rooms for

reading, conversation, drawing, music, dance, gymnastics. There, it is

the theater, the rooms for spectacles, for concerts; the riding stable,

the arena for equitation; the rooms for shooting, for playing billiards

and for all the games of skill; the rooms for the entertainment of young

children, the common room for young mothers; then the large meeting

rooms, the canteens, etc, etc. then finally comes the place where they

assemble to discuss the questions of social organization. It is the

little cyclidéon, a club or forum specific to the humanisphere. In this

parliament of anarchy, each is his own representative and the equal of

the others. Oh! It is very different among the Civilized; there, we do

not hold forth, we do not argue, we do not vote, we do not legislate,

but all, young or old, men or women, confer in common on the needs of

the humanisphere. Individual initiative accepts or rejects the word by

itself, according to whether it appears useful or not to speak. In that

enclosure, there is a bureau, as usual. Only, at this bureau, the only

authority is a book of statistics. The humanispherians find that it is

an eminently impartial president, of a very eloquent terseness. And they

want no others.

The apartments for the children are large rooms in suites, lit from

above, with a row of bedrooms on each side. This recalls, but in much

more spectacular proportions, the salons and cabins of the magnificent

American steamboats. Each child occupies two adjoining cabinets, one for

sleep and the other for study, where are place, according to its age and

tastes, its books, its tools or its preferred playthings. Day and night

some overseers, men and women, occupy watch-rooms in which are placed

divans. These watchers contemplate with concern the movements and the

slumber of all these young human sprouts, and provide for all their

desires, for all their needs. That guard, moreover, is an entirely

voluntary guard that those who have the strongest feelings of paternity

or maternity which rise and descend freely. It is not a corvée commanded

by discipline and regulation. In the Humanisphère there is no other rule

or discipline than the will of each; it is an entirely spontaneous

impulse, like the glance of a mother at the at the beside of her child.

It is up to those who evidence the most love for these dear little

beings, those who most enjoy their childish caresses. And all these

children are charming children. Mutuality is their humane educator. It

is mutuality which teaches them the exchange of pleasant manners, which

makes them disciples of rectitude, kindness, and generosity, which

trains their physical and moral aptitudes, which develops in them the

appetites of the heart, the appetites of the brain; which guides them at

play and in study; in the end it teaches them to pluck the roses

instruction and education without scratching themselves on the thorns.

Caresses, that is all that each seeks, the child as well as the man, the

man as well as the elder. The caresses of science are not obtained

without a labor of the brow, without expenditure of intelligence, and

the caresses of love without a work of the heart, without expenditure of

feeling. The man-child is a diamond in the rough. Its friction with its

fellows polishes it, sizes it and shapes it into a social jewel. It is,

at all ages, a pebble of which society is the millstone and of which

individual selfishness is the lapidary. The more it is in contact with

the other and the more it receives impressions from which multiply the

passional facets on its brow as in its heart, from which spring the

sparks of feeling and intelligence. The Diamond is born swaddled in an

opaque, tough crust. It becomes a really precious stone, it shows itself

diaphanous, it shines in the light only when rid of that rough crust.

Man is like the precious stone, he passes to the state of brilliance

only after having worn away, in all its senses and with all his senses,

his crust ignorance, his rough and impure virginity.

In the Humanisphere all the young children learn to smile at those who

smile at them, to embrace those who embrace them, to love those who love

them. If they are ill-tempered towards them who are friendly with them,

soon the shortage of kisses will teach them that they are not

ill-tempered with impunity, and will bring courtesy back to their lips.

The sentiment of reciprocity is thus engraved in their little brains.

The adults learn among them to become men humanely and socially. If one

of them wants to abuse their strength towards another, they soon have

all the players against them, they are banished from juvenile opinion,

and the desertion of their comrades is a punishment much more terrible

and much more effective than the official reprimand of a pedagogue would

be. In the scientific and professional studies, if there is one of them

whose relative ignorance casts a shadow in the midst of the scholars of

his age, it is a dunce’s cap much heavier for them to bear than would be

the paper wig inflicted by a Jesuit of the University or a professor of

the Sacré Collège. And they will hasten to rehabilitate themselves, and

strive to take their place again on the level of the others. In

authoritarian education, the martinet and the punishment exercise can

murder the body and mind of the students, degrade the work of human

nature, practice vandalism; they cannot shape original men, epitomes of

grace and strength, intelligence and love. For that we require the

inspiration of that great artiste who is called Liberty.

The adults almost always occupy their quarters during the night. It

happens, however, but rarely, if one of them, for example, spends the

evening at their mother’s and lingers there, that they will remain there

until the next morning. The apartments of the adults being composed, as

we known, of two bedrooms, free for them to share, if it is convenient

for the mother and child. This is the exception, the general custom is

to separate at bedtime: the mother remaining in possession of her

apartment, the child returning to sleep in its dormitory. What’s more,

in these dormitories the children are no more bound than the grownups to

always keep the same compartment; they change them as they wish. Nor are

there special places for the boys or the girls; each makes their nest

where they wish: only the attractions decide for them. The youngest

generally squeeze in pell-mell. The older ones, those approaching

puberty, generally group themselves according to sexes; and admirable

instinct for modesty distances them from each other during the night. No

inquisition, moreover, inspects the sleep. The watchers have nothing to

do there, the children being big enough to take care of themselves. The

children find, without leaving their abode, water, fire, light, and the

syrups and essences of which they may have need. During the day, girls

and boys meet either to the fields, the study halls, or the workshops;

gathered and urged to labor by these common exercise, taking part in

them without distinction between the sexes and without regular fixity in

their places; always acting only according to their whims.

As for these quarters, I needn’t add that they lack nothing, neither

comfort nor elegance. They are furnished and decorated with opulence,

but also with simplicity. The wood of the walnut and oak, marble, wax

cloth, mats of rushes, floral cloth, unbleached cloth striped in color

after color, or twill of soft shades, oil paintings and hangings of

varnished paper making up the furnishings and decorations. All the

accessories are in porcelain, terra cotta, stoneware, and tin, and some

are in silver.

For the youngest children, the great room is covered with sand like a

riding stable and serves as an arena for their faltering movements. All

around is a thick, wide roll of Moroccan leather, stuffed and surrounded

by frames of varnished wood. That is what takes the place of

wainscoting. Above this paneling, on boards divided into squares, are

frescos representing the scenes judged most capable of awakening the

imagination of the children. The ceiling is of iron and crystal.

Daylight comes from above. There are, moreover, openings arranged on the

sides. During the night, the candelabras and chandeliers spread their

light there. In the quarters for older children, the flooring is covered

with oilcloth, mats or carpets. The decoration of the walls is

appropriate for their intelligence. Some tables, placed in the middle of

the various rooms, are loaded with albums and books for all ages and

tastes, with toy-boxes and necessary tools; finally a multitude of

playthings serving as studies and studies serving as playthings.

In our times, many people, — even those who are partisans of large

reforms, — are still inclined to think that nothing can accomplished

except by authority, while the contrary alone is true. It is authority

which is an obstacle to everything. Progress in ideas is not imposed by

decrees, but results from the free and spontaneous teaching of men and

things. Compulsory instruction is an absurdity. Whoever says instruction

says liberty. Whoever says obligation says servitude. The politicians

and Jesuits may want to impose instruction, that it their affair, for

authoritarian instruction, is compulsory stupefaction. But the

socialists can only want anarchist study and education, liberty of

instruction, in order to have instruction for liberty. Ignorance is what

is most disagreeable to human nature. Man, at every moment of life, and

especially the child, asks nothing better than to learn; it is urged by

all his aspirations. But the civilized society, like the barbaric

society, like savage society, far from facilitating the development of

his aptitudes only knows how to contemplate and compromise them. The

manifestation of his faculties is put down as crime, as a child, by

paternal authority; as a man, by governmental authority. Deprived of

educated care, of the life-giving embrace of Liberty (which would have

made a race of fine, strong minds) child and man alike stagnate in their

original ignorance, wallows in the guano of prejudices, and, dwarfed in

the arm, the heart, and the brain, produces and perpetuates, for

generation to generation, that uniformity of misshapen cretins which has

only the name of human being.

The child is the mimic of the man, but the perfectible mimic. It

reproduces all that it sees done, but more or less slavishly, depending

on whether the intelligence of the man is more or less slavish, more or

less in infancy. The most prominent angles of the virile mask, that is

what first strikes the imagination. Let the child be born among a

warrior people, and it will play at being a soldier; it will love paper

helmets, wooden cannons, firecrackers and drums. Let it be among a

nation of seafarers, it will play at being a sailor; it will make boats

with walnut shells and set them going on the water. Among a farming

people, it will play in a little garden, it will amuse itself with

spades, rakes, and wheelbarrows. If it has a railroad before it, it will

want a little locomotive; some joiner’s tools, if it is close to a

woodworking shop. Finally, it will imitate, with an equal zeal, all the

vices as well as all the virtues which the society will display before

them. They will take up the habit of brutality, it they are among

brutes; of urbanity, if they are among polite folks. The child will a

boxers with John Bull, it will let out savage howls with Jonathan. It

will be a musician in Italy, a dancer is Spain. It will grimace and

gambol at all the unisons, marked on its brow and in its movements with

the stamp of the industrial, artistic or scientific life, if it lives

with laborers in industry, art or science: or else, marked with a stamp

of extravagance and inactivity, if it is only in contact with idlers and

parasites.

Society acts on the child and then the child reacts on society. They

move in solidarity and not exclusively of one another. Thus it is wrong

to say that, in order to reform society, we must first begin by

reforming infancy. All reforms must advance hand in hand.

The child is a mirror that reflects the image of virility. It is the

zinc plate where, under the radiation of physical and moral sensations,

the traits of the social man are daguerreotyped. And these features are

reproduced in the one in a more accentuated form the more in relief they

appear in the other. A man, like a curate to his parishioners, says in

vain to the child: “Do what I say and not what I do.” The child will not

take any account of the speech, if the speech is not in accord with the

actions. In its little logic, it will try especially hard to follow your

example; and, if you do the opposite of what you say, it will be the

opposite of what you have preached. So you could succeed in making the

child a hypocrite, but you would never make it a good man.

In the Humanisphere, the child has only good and beautiful examples

before its eyes. And it grows in goodness and beauty. It is taught

progress by everything which falls under its senses, by the voice and by

gesture, by sight and by touch. Everything moves, everything gravitates

around it in a perpetual exhalation of knowledges, under a streaming of

light. Everything exhales the gentlest sentiments, the most exquisite

perfumes of the heart and brain. Every contact there is a sensation of

pleasure, an embrace fertile with prolific delights. The greatest

pleasure of man, labor, has become a series of attractions by the

liberty and diversity of labors and reverberates from one to the other

in an immense and unceasing harmony. How, in such a milieu, could the

child not be hard-working, studious? How could it not love to play at

science, at the arts, or at industry, and not try its hand, from the

most tender age, at the use of its productive forces? How could it

resist the innate need to know everything, the charm, always new, of

educating oneself? To respond other than in the affirmative would be to

willfully misjudge human nature.

Even look at the Civilized child, the little one of the hosier or the

grocer; see them leaving their lodging, on the promenade; should the

child perceive one thing of which its does not know the existence or

does not understand the mechanism, a mill, a plow, a balloon, a

locomotive: straightaway it will interrogate son conductor, it wants to

know the name and the use of all the objects. But, alas! very often, in

civilization, its conductor, ignorant of all the sciences or preoccupied

with mercantile interests, cannot or does not want to give the

explanations that it requests. If the child insists, they scold it, they

threaten not to take it out another time. So they close the child’s

mouth, they violently arrest the expansion of its intelligence, they

muzzle it. And when the child has been very docile all along the way,

when it has kept to itself, and has not annoyed papa and mama with its

tiresome questions; when it has let itself be led slyly or stupidly by

the hand, like a dog on a leash; then they say that it has been very

wise, very nice, and, to reward it, they buy it a lead soldier or

gingerbread man. In the bourgeois societies that is called molding the

minds of children. — Oh! authority! oh! the little family!… And no one

is on the track of that father or mother to cry out: Murder! violation!

infanticide!…

Under the wing of liberty, in the bosom of the great family, on the

contrary, the child, finding everywhere among their elders, men or

women, only educators inclined to listen and respond to them, learn

quickly how to know the how and why of things. The notion of the just

and the useful also takes root in their juvenile understanding and

prepares them with equitable and intelligent judgments for the future.

Among the Civilized, man is a slave, a big child, a can that lacks sap,

a stake without root and foliage, an aborted intelligence. Among the

Humanispherians, is a free man in small form, an intelligence which

sprouts and whose young sap is full of exuberance.

The young children naturally have their cradle in the home of their

mother; and every mother nurses her child. No woman in the Humanisphere

would want to deprive herself of the sweet rewards of maternity. If the

inexpressible love of the mother for the little being to whom she has

brought into the light is not enough to convince her to be the nurse,

the care for her beauty, the instinct for her own preservation will

still speak to her. In our days, for having dried up the source of their

milk, there are women who die of it, all lose something of their health,

something of their ornament.

The woman who aborts her breast commits an attempt at infanticide that

nature condemns equally to the one who aborts the organ of generation.

Punishment closely follows the fault. Nature is inexorable. Soon the

womb of that woman withers, weakens and testifies, by a hasty

decrepitude, against this attack committed against her organic

functions, an attack of lèse-maternité. against the bombing of his

bodily functions , attack the motherhood. What is more graceful than a

young mother suckling her child, lavishing caresses and kisses on it? If

only from vanity, every woman should breastfeed her child. And then it

is thus nothing to follow day by day the phases of development of this

young life, to feed it at the breast the sap of this sprig of a man, to

follow its continuous progress, to see this human bud grow, and grow

more beautiful under the rays of maternal tenderness, like the bud of

the flower in the heat of the sun, and open itself finally more and

more, until it has blossomed on its stem in all the grace of its smile

and the purity of its gaze, in all the charming naïveté of its first

steps? The woman who does not understand such pleasures is not a woman.

Her heart is a lyre whose strings are broken. She may have preserved a

human appearance, but she has none of its poetry. Half a mother will

never be but half a lover.

In the humanisphere, every woman feels the quiverings of love. The

mother and the lover alike tremble with delight at all the breezes of

the human passions. Their heart is a complete instrument, a lute where

not one string is missing; and the smile of the infant, like the smile

of the beloved man, always awakens sweet emotions there. There,

maternity is really maternity, and the sexual loves/amours are true

loves. Moreover, this work of breastfeeding, like all other work then,

is a game rather than a punishment. Science has destroyed what was the

most repugnant in production, and there are machines powered by steam or

electricity which are charged with all the rough tasks. There are those

that was the diapers, clean up the cradles and prepare the baths. And

these iron negresses always act with docility and promptness. Their

service responds to all needs. It is because of their care/tidiness that

all the rubbish, and all the excrement disappears; it is by their

tireless clockwork which takes hold of them and throws them down [the

maws of] some cast-iron conduits, subterranean boas which crush and

digest them in their dark circuits, and then excrete them on the

croplands as a precious fertilizer. It is that factotum that is

responsible for everything relating to the household; it makes the beds,

sweeps the floor, dusts the apartments. In the kitchens, it is the one

that washes the dishes, scrubs the pans, peels or scrapes the

vegetables, trims the meat, plucks and guts the poultry, opens the

oysters, scales and washes the fish, turns the spit, saws and breaks the

wood, carries the coal and tends the fire. It transports the food to the

domicile or to the common refectory; it serves it and clear the table.

And everything is done by that domestic gearbox, by that slave with a

thousand arms, with breath/murmur of iron, with muscles of steel, as if

by magic. Command, it says to the man, and you will be obeyed. And all

the order that it receives are punctually executed. If a humanispherian

wants to have dinner served in his individual abode, a sign is enough,

and the serving machine sets itself in motion; it has understood. If he

prefers to go the rooms of the refectory, a carriage lowers it running

board, an armchair lends him a hand, the crew rolls and transports him

to his destination. Arriving and the refectory, he takes his place

wherever seems good to him, at a large or a small table, and eats

according to his taste. Everything there is in abundance.

The salons of the refectory are of an elegant architecture, and have

nothing uniform in their decorations. One of these salons was carpeted

with embossed leather framed with an ornamentation in bronze and gold.

The doors and windows had oriental hangings, with a black base and

arabesques of gold, and adorned across with wide bands of sharp colors.

The furniture was of sculpted walnut, and decorated with fabric like the

hanging. In the middle of the room was suspended, between two archways,

a large clock. It was at once a Bacchante and Ceres in white marble,

lying on a hammock of polished steel mesh. With one hand she teased with

a sheaf of wheat a small child who tramples on her, with the other she

held a cup which she raised at arm’s length above her head, as if to

play/quarrel with the mischievous child who sought to seize the cup and

the sheaf at the same time. The head of the woman, crowned with grape

vines and grain, was bent back on a barrel of porphyry which served her

as a pillow, some sheaves of wheat in gold lay beneath her back and

formed her litter. The barrel was the face where to golden sheaves

marked the hours. At night, a flame poured from the cup like a fiery

liquor. Some bronze grapevines, which climbed the vault and ran across

the ceiling, darted flames in the form of grape leaves, made a bower of

light above this group and illuminated all its contours. Bunches of

grapes in grains of crystal hung across the foliage and sparkled in the

midst of these undulating lights.

On the table, the porcelain and the stucco, the porphyry and the

crystal, the gold and silver contained the host of dishes and wines, and

sparkled in the reflection of the lights. Some baskets of fruits and

flowers offered their flavor and fragrance to each. Men and women

exchanged words and smiles, and seasoned their repast with spirited

conversations.

The meal finished, one passes into other rooms decorated no less

splendidly, but more elegant, where one has coffee, liqueurs, cigarettes

or cigars; potpourri-rooms where burn and smoke all the spices of the

Orient, all the essences that please the taste, all the perfumes that

charm the sense of small, everything that caresses and stimulates the

digestive functions, everything that oils the physical mechanism

[engrenage], and, as a result, accelerates the development of the mental

functions. Some savor, in a crowd or apart, the vaporous puffs of

tobacco, the capricious reveries; some other drinks in, in the company

of two or three friends, fragrant mouthfuls of coffee or cognac, drink,

clinking glasses, the softly sparkly champagne, fraternize with all

these stimulants to lucidity; this one speaks of science or listens,

deposit or draw from a group the nutritious distillations of knowledge,

offer or accept the spiritualized fruits of thought; that one gathers

artistically in a little circle the fine flowers of conversation,

critiques one chose, lauds another, and gives a free course to all the

emanations of his melancholy or laughing spirits. If it is after lunch,

everyone soon goes, alone or in groups, to their work; some to the

kitchen, others to the fields or various workshops. No regulatory

constraint weighs on them, and the go to work as if to a pleasure party.

Doesn’t the hunter, sleeping in a warm bed, rise by himself to go wander

the snow-filled woods? It is also attraction that makes them rise from

their couches and leads them, through weariness, but in the society of

brave companions and a charming countryside, to the rendezvous of

production. The best workers reckon themselves the happiest. It is the

one who distinguishes himself among the hardest workers, who will

furnish the finest use of their tools.

After dinner, they go from the coffee salons to the great salons for

conversation, or to the little private get-togethers, or to the various

scientific courses, or else to the rooms for reading, drawing, music,

dance, etc., etc. and always freely, voluntarily, capriciously, for the

instructor as for the enthusiast, for study as well as for teaching.

Professors are always found, quite naturally, for the students, and

students for the professors. A call always brings a response; a

satisfaction always replies to a need. Man proposes and man disposes.

Harmony results from the diversity of desires. The classrooms for

scientific studies and the salons for artistic studies, like the

spacious meeting rooms, are magnificently ornate. The classrooms are

built as amphitheaters, and the tiers of seats, constructed of marble,

are embellished with velvet stalls. On each side is a room for

refreshments. The decoration of these amphitheaters in a rich, reserved

style. In the rooms for leisure, luxury flashes profusely. These room

communicate with one another, and could easily contain ten thousand

people. One of them was decorated as follows: wainscoting, cornices and

pilasters in white marble, with ornamentation in gilt copper. The

wall-coverings in the panels were of damask silk of a solitary color and

had for interior border a hem cover in silver on which was placed, by

way of gilt nails, a multitude of rhinestones. A field of pink satin

separated the border from the pilaster. The ceiling was in squares, and

from the heart of the ornaments issued some jets of flame which made

designs and completed the decoration, while also serving as lighting; in

the middle of the pilasters also sprung some arabesques of lights. In

the middle of the room was a pretty fountain in bronze, gold and white

marble; that fountain was also a clock. A cupola in bronze and gold

served as support to a group in white marble representing an Eve laying

nonchalantly on a bed of foliage and flowers, head resting on a rock,

and raising in her hands her child, who had just been born; two doves,

placed on the rock, bill; the rock served as face, and two hand in gold,

depicting serpents, market the hours. Behind the rock was seen banana

tree in gold, whose branches, loaded with fruit, stretched out above the

group. The bananas were formed by jets of light.

An artistic fireplace in white marble and gold served as pedestal for an

immense mirrors; mirrors or well-chosen paintings were also suspended in

all the panels in the midst of hangings of brown silk. The doors and

windows, in this room, like everywhere in the Humanisphère, do not open

by means of hinges, nor from bottom to top, but by means of runners on

springs; they go back from right to left and from left to right into the

walls arranged for this purpose.

In this way, the panels are in no one’s way and they can open doors and

windows as much or as little as they want.

Several times a week, there is a performance at the theater. They

present some lyric pieces, some dramas, and some comedies, but all of it

is quite different from the poverties played out on the stages of our

time. It is, in a magnificent language, the critique of the tendencies

to immobilization, an aspiration towards the future ideal.

There is also the gymnasium where they compete in strength and agility;

the stables where horsemen and horsewomen rival one another in grace and

vigor and excel at driving, standing on their backs, the horses and

lions galloping and bounding in the arena; the rooms for shooting

pistols and rifles, and the rooms for billiards or other games where the

enthusiasts exert their skill.

If the weather is good, there are also promenades in the splendidly

illuminated park; concerts in the open air, pastoral amusements,

excursions far into the country, across lonely forests, rustic plains

and mountains, where they encounter, at some distance, grottos and

chalets where they can refresh themselves and snack. Some aerial craft

or railroad wages locomote according to their whims these swarms of

ramblers.

At the end of the day, each returns home, one to summarize their

impressions of the days before giving themselves up to slumber; the

other to await or find their loved one. In the morning, lovers separate

mysteriously, exchanging a kiss, and again take up, each according to

their taste, the path of their multiple occupations. The variety of

pleasures excludes satiety. Happiness is their at every moment.

About once a week, more or less, as it is required, they assemble in the

conference room, otherwise known as the little domestic cyclidéon. Some

great works will be carried out. Those who are most versed in the

knowledge specially in question, take the initiative in the discussion.

Besides the statistics, proposals, and designs have already appeared in

the printed sheets, in the papers; they have already been discussed in

small groups; the urgency has generally been recognized or rejected by

each individually. And there is often only one voice, the unanimous

voice, for the acclamation or the rejection. They do not vote; the

majority or minority never makes law. If some proposition brings

together a sufficient number of laborers to accomplish it, let those

workers be the majority or the minority, and the proposition will be

executed, if such is the will of those who agree to it. and most often

the majority is won over by the minority, or the minority by the

majority. As in one part of the country, some propose to go to

Saint-Germain, the others to Meudon, these to Sceaux and those to

Fontainebleau; they will separate; then at the end of the day everyone

gives in to the attraction of reuniting with the others. And all

together in a single, common accord they take the same route, without

any authority than that of pleasure governing them. Attraction is the

whole law of their harmony. But, at the point of departure, as en route,

each is always free to abandon themselves to their whims, to keep to

themselves if that suits them, to rest if they are weary, or turn back

if they are bored. Constraint is the mother of all vices. And it is

banished by reason from the Humanisphere. Of course egoism, intelligent

egoism, is too well developed there for anyone to think of assaulting

their neighbor. And it is by egoism that they make fair exchanges.

Man is egoism. Without egoism, man would not exist. It is egoism which

is the motive of all his actions, the motor of all his thoughts. It is

what makes him think of his own preservation, and of his development,

which is also his preservation. It is egoism which teaches him to

produce in order to consume, to care for others because they are in

agreement, to like others because they like him, to work for others

because those other have worked for him. It is egoism which stimulates

his ambition and excites him to distinguish himself in all the careers

where man employs his strength, skill, and intelligence. It is egoism

which elevates him to the height of genius; it is to improve himself, to

enlarge the circle of his influence, that man carries his head high and

sets his gaze on the distance. It is for his own gratification that he

marches off to win collective satisfactions. It is for himself,

individually, that he wants to participate in the lively effervescence

of the general good fortune; it is for his own sake that he dreads the

thought of the suffering of others. His egoism, constantly goaded by the

instinct of his gradual development, and by the sentiment of solidarity

which ties him to his fellows, demands perpetual expression of his

existence in the existence of others. It is what ancient society

improperly called devotion, but which is only speculation—more

humanitarian as it is more intelligent, and more humanicidal as it is

more idiotic. Man in society only reaps what he sows. If he reaps

disease, he sows disease. He reaps health if he sows health. Man is the

social cause of all the effects he suffers in society. If he is

brotherly, he will create fraternity among those around him, if he is

fratricidal, he will create fratricide. It is not humanly possible to

make a move, to act with the arms, the heart or the brain, without the

sensation reflecting back from one to the other like an electric shock.

And that takes place in the state of anarchic community, in the state of

free and intelligent nature, as in the state of civilization, the state

of domesticated man, of nature enchained. Only, in civilization, man

being institutionally at war with man, he can only envy the good fortune

of his neighbor, and howl and gnash his teeth at his expense. He is a

mastiff, tied, crouching in his kennel and gnawing his bone, growling in

ferocious and constant menace. Under anarchy, man, being harmonically at

peace with his fellows, will know that competition with them, in the

pursuit of their passions, will bring universal good fortune. In the

Humanisphere, a hive where liberty is the queen, man gathering from men

only perfumes, will know how to produce only honey. So don’t curse

egoism, for to curse egoism is to curse man. The suppression of our

passions is the sole cause of their disastrous effects. Man, like

society, is perfectible. General ignorance has been the inevitable cause

of our misfortunes; universal science will be the remedy. Let us educate

ourselves, therefore, and let us spread the knowledge around us. Let us

analyze, compare, contemplate and thus arrive at the scientific

knowledge of our natural mechanisms.

In the Humanisphere, there is no government. An attractive organization

takes the place of legislation. The liberty of sovereign individuals

presides over all collective decisions. The authority of anarchy, the

absence of all dictatorship of number or strength, replaces arbitrary

authority, the despotism of the sword and the law. Faith in ourselves is

the religion of the Humanisphereans. Gods and priests, religious

superstitions will rouse against themselves universal disapproval. It is

by their own laws that each governs themselves, and it is on that

government of each by himself that the social order is founded.

Consult history, and see if authority has ever been anything but

universal suicide. The destruction of man by man—do you call that order?

Is it order that reigns in Paris, in Warsaw, in St. Petersburg, in

Vienna, in Rome, in Naples and Madrid, in aristocratic England and

democratic America? I tell you that it is murder! Order with dagger or

cannon, gallows or guillotine; order with Siberia or Cayenne, with the

knout or the bayonet, with the watchman’s baton or the sword of the

policeman; order personified in that homicidal trinity: iron, gold, and

holy water; the order of gunshots, or shots from bibles or bank-bills;

the order which sits enthroned on corpses and feeds on them, that can

pass for order in moribund civilizations, but it will never be anything

but disorder, a gangrene in societies lacking the sentiment of life.

Authorities are vampires, and vampires are monsters who only live in

cemeteries and only walk in darkness.

Consult your memories and you will see that the greatest absence of

authority has always produced the greatest amount of harmony. See the

people atop their barricades, and say if in these passing moments

anarchy, they do not testify, by their conduct, in favor of natural

order. Among these men who are there, arms bare and black with powder,

there are certainly no lack of ignorant natures, men hardly smoothed by

the plane of social education, and capable, in their private life and as

heads of families, of many brutalities towards their wives and children.

See them, then, in the midst of the public insurrection and in the role

of men momentarily free. Their brutality has been transformed as by

magic into sweet courtesy. Let a woman pass by, and they will have only

decent and polite words for her. It is with an entirely fraternal

eagerness that they will aid her to pass over the barrier of

cobblestones. Those who, on Sunday, on the promenade, would have blushed

to bear their child and would have left the entire burden to the mother,

would, with a smile of satisfaction on their lips, that in their arms an

unknown child to carry it across the barricade. It is an instantaneous

metamorphosis. In the man of the day you would not recognize the man of

the day before. — Allow Authority to rebuild, and the man of tomorrow

will soon again become the man of yesterday!

Let us recall again the day of the distribution of flags, after February

48: there were in the crowd, larger than there ever was at any festival,

neither gendarmes, nor agents of the police force; no authority directed

traffic; each, so to speak, was his own police. Well! Was there ever

more order than in that disorder? Who was trampled? Nobody. Not a single

traffic jam took place. Everyone looked after one another. The compact

multitude flowed through the boulevards and streets as naturally as the

blood of a healthy man circulates in his arteries. In men it is disease

which produces congestion: among multitudes, it is the police and armed

forces: disease thus bears the name of authority. Anarchy is the state

of healthy multitudes.

Another example:

It was in 1841, I believe,—aboard a frigate of war. The officers and the

commander himself, each time that they presided over a maneuver, swore

and stormed after the sailors; and the more they swore, the more they

stormed, the more badly the maneuver was executed. There was an officer

on board who was an exception to the rule. When he was on watch, he

hardly spoke four word and he always spoke with a really feminine

mildness. Never were maneuvers better and more rapidly executed than

under his orders. If it was a matter of reefing a topsail, it was done

in the blink of an eye; and as soon as the reef was taken, the topsails

were hoisted; the pulleys smoked. A fairy could not have acted more

promptly with a wave of a wand. Long before the command, each was at his

post, ready to climb into the rigging or drop the halyards. They did not

wait for him to give the order to allow them to perform the maneuver.

And there was not the least confusion, not a knot missed, nothing which

was not rigorously completed. It was with enthusiasm and harmony. Do you

want to know the magic secret of that officer and the way in which he

brought about that miracle: he did not swear; he did not storm; he did

not command, in a word, but left them to the work [laissait faire]. And

that was best. Thus are men: under the lash of authority, the sailor

only acts like a brute; he goes slowly and stupidly where he is pushed.

Left to his own anarchic initiative, he acts like a man, and operates

with his hands and his intelligence. The events that I cited took place

on board the frigate the Calypso in the seas of the Orient. The officer

in question stayed only two months on board, the commander and officers

being jealous of him.

Now then the absence of orders is the true order. The law and the sword

is only the order of bandits, the code of theft and murder that presides

at the division of the spoils, at the massacre of the victims. It is on

that bloody pivot that the civilized world turns. Anarchy is its

antipode, and that antipode is the axis of the humanispherean world.

— Liberty is their whole government.

— Liberty is their whole constitution.

— Liberty is all their legislation.

— Liberty is all their regulation.

— Liberty is all their contracts.

— Everything that is not liberty is outside of morals.

— Liberty, all liberty, nothing but liberty — such is the formula

engraved on the tablets of their conscience, the criterion of all their

relations with one another.

Do we lack in one corner of Europe and products from another continent?

The newspapers of the Humanisphere mention it, it is inserted in the

Advertising Bulletin, that monitor of anarchic universality; and the

Humanispheres of Asia, Africa, America or Oceania dispatch the requested

product. If there is, on the contrary, a European product that is

lacking in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania, the Humanispheres of

Europe will ship it. The exchange takes place naturally and not

arbitrarily. Thus, what does it matter that a Humanisphere gives more

one day and receives less? Doubtless tomorrow it will receive more and

give less. Everything belonging to all, and each being able to change

Humanispheres as they change apartments, — if a thing is here or there

in the universal circulation, what difference does it make? Isn’t

everyone free to have it transported wherever they want or to transport

themselves wherever seems best?

In anarchy, consumption feeds itself by production. It would make no

more sense to a humanispherean that a man might be forced to work, than

that he might be forced to eat. For natural man, the need to work is as

pressing as the need to eat. Man is not all stomach: he has arms and a

brain, and apparently this is so he might work. Work, whether manual or

intellectual, is the food which makes him live. If a man has no needs

but those of the mouth and stomach, he is no longer a man, but an

oyster, in which case, nature, in place of hands, which are attributes

of his intelligence, would have given him, like a mollusk, two

shells.—And idleness! Idleness! Do you cry to me, you civilizées?

Idleness is not the daughter of liberty and human genius, but of slavery

and civilization; it is something foul and against nature, that one

could only encounter in some Sodom, old or new. Idleness is not a

pleasure, it is a gangrene and a paralysis. The bygone societies, the

old worlds, the corrupt civilizations could only produce and spread the

same scourges. Humanisphereans satisfy naturally the need for the

exercise of the arm, as well as that of the stomach. It is no more

possible to ration the appetite for production that the appetite for

consumption. It is up to each to consume and to produce according to

their strengths, according to their needs. By bending all beneath a

uniform remuneration, one would starve some and cause others to die of

indigestion. Only the individual is capable of knowing the proportion of

labor that his stomach, his brain, or his hand can digest. One rations a

horse at the stable; the master allocates to domestic animal so much

food. But in liberty the animal rations itself, and the instincts offer

it, better than the master, that which suits its temperament. Wild

animals scarcely know disease. Having all in profusion, they do not

fight among themselves to pull up a blade of grass. They know the wild

meadow produces more pasturage than they are able to graze, and they mow

it in peace, one beside the other. Why do men wrest consumption from one

another, when production, by mechanical forces, furnishes more than

their needs?

—Authority is idleness.

—Labor is liberty.

The slave alone is lazy, rich or poor:—the rich, slave to prejudice, to

false science; the poor, slave to ignorance and prejudices,—both slaves

of the law, the one to suffer it, the other to impose it. Isn’t it

suicide to dedicate its productive faculties to inertia? The inert man

is not a man; he is less than a brute, because the brute acts in the

measure of its means, and obeys its instinct. Whoever possesses a

particle of intelligence could at least obey it. And intelligence is not

idleness; it is fertilizing movement. It is progress. The intelligence

of man is his instinct, and that instinct says to him without ceasing:

Labor; put the hand and the brow to the work; produce and discover;

productions and discoveries, these are liberty. Those who do not work,

do not enjoy. Work is life.—Idleness is death!—Die or work!

In the Humanisphere, property being undivided, each has an interest in

making it productive. The aspirations of science, also rid of the

fragmentation of thought, invents and perfects in common some machines

suitable for all uses. Everywhere, the activity and the rapidity of

labor makes an exuberance of products blossom around man. As in the

first ages of the world, he no longer has to do anything but reach out

his hand to grasp the fruit, to stretch out at the foot of the tree to

have shelter. But the tree is now a magnificent monument where all the

satisfactions of luxury are found; the fruit is every luscious thing

that the arts and sciences can offer. It is anarchy, no longer in the

swampy forest, with murky idiocy and tetchy brutality, but anarchy in an

enchanting park with lucid intelligence and smiling humanity. It is not

longer anarchy in weakness and ignorance, the kernel of savagery,

barbarism and of civilization, but anarchy in strength and knowledge,

the branching trunk of harmony, the glorious blossoming of man into

flower, for the free man, in the azure regions under the radiance of

universal solidarity.

Among the humanispherians, a man who could only handle one tool, whether

that tool was a pen or a file, would blush with shame at the very

thought. Man wants to be complete, and he is complete only on the

condition of knowing a great deal. The one who is only a man of the pen

or a man of the file is a castrato that the civilized can well accept or

admire in their churches or in their mills, in their workshops or in

their academies, but he is not a natural man; he is a monstrosity who

will incite only distance and disgust among the perfected men of the

humanisphere. A man must be at once a man of thought and a man of

action, and produce with the arm as well as with the brain. Otherwise he

murders his virility, he forfeits the work of creation; and, to achieve

a falsetto voice, he loses all the broad and stirring notes of his free

and living instrument. The man is no longer a man then, but a serinette.

A humanispherian thinks and acts at the same time, but he also practices

different trades in the same day. He will carve a piece of jewelry and

work on a piece of land: he will pass from the chisel to the pick, and

from the kitchen stove to the orchestra seat. He is familiar with a host

of labors. An inferior worker in this one, he is a superior worker in

that. He has his specialty where he excels. And it is precisely that

inferiority and that superiority of some with regard to others that

produces harmony. It costs a man nothing to submit to a superiority, I

would not say officially, but unofficially recognized, when at the next

moment, in another phase of production, that superiority will become

your inferiority. That creates a healthy emulation, a benevolent

reciprocity, destructive of jealous rivalries. Then, by these various

labors, the man acquires the possession of more objects for comparison,

his intelligence is multiplied, as is his strength; it is a perpetual

and varied study that develops all his physical and intellectual

faculties, of which he takes advantage to perfect himself in his chosen

activity.

I repeat here what I have previously noted:

When I speak of the man, it is not only a question of one half of

humanity, but of the entire humanity, of woman as well as man, of the

Human Being. What applies to one applies equally to the other. There is

only one exception to the general rule, one work which is the exclusive

prerogative of woman, which is childbirth and nursing. While women

accomplish this labor, it is quite simple that they can hardly concern

themselves actively with others. It is a specialty which temporarily

takes her away from the multiplicity of general functions, but, her

pregnancy and nourishing accomplished, she resumes her functions in the

community, identical to all those of the humanispherians.

At birth, the child is enrolled in the full name of its mother in the

book of statistics; later, it takes for itself the first and last name

that suits it, keeping the ones it has been given or changing them. In

the humanisphere, there are neither disinherited bastards nor legitimate

children of privilege. The children are the children of nature, and not

of artifice. All are equal and legitimate before the mother, the

humanisphere and the humanispherity. As long as the external embryo is

still attached to the breast of his mother, like the fetus in the

internal organ, it is considered as being one with its nurse. The

weaning is for the woman a second delivery which occurs when the child

can come and go by itself. The mother and child can still remain

together, if such is the good pleasure of them both. But if the child

who feels the push of its little will prefers the company and dwelling

of the other children, or if the mother, worn out from a long

nesting/brooding, no longer cares to have it constantly near her, then

they can separate. The children’s apartment is there, and no more than

the others will it lack care, for all the mothers take their turns

there. If, in the permutation of deaths and births, it happens that a

newborn loses its mother, or a mother loses its child, the young woman

who has lost her child gives her breast to the child who has lost its

mother, or else they give to the orphan the breast of a goat or a

lioness. It is even the custom among the nursing mothers to make sickly

infants drink the milk of vigorous animals, such as the milk of the

lioness, as among the Civilized we give asses’ milk to the consumptive.

(Do not forget that in the era of which it is a question, les lionesses

and panthers are domestic animals; that men possess herds of bears, as

today we possess flocks of sheep; that the most ferocious animals

brought into line, subdued and disciplined under the pontificate of man;

that they grovel on their paws with a secret terror and bow before the

halo of light and electricity which crowns his brow and imposes respect.

Man is the sun around which all the animal races gravitate.)

The nourishment of men and women is based on hygiene. They prefer to

adopt the foodstuffs most proper to the nutrition of the muscles of the

body and the fibers of the brain. They do not have a single meal without

eating some cuts of roasted meat, either of mutton, bear, or beef; some

spoonfuls of coffee or other liquors which overexcite the sap of

thought. Everything is combined so that the pleasures, even those of the

table, are not unproductive or harmful to the development of the man and

of the man’s faculties. Among them every pleasure is a labor, and every

labor is a pleasure. The pollination of happiness is perpetual there. It

is a continuous springtime and autumn of satisfactions. The flowers and

fruits of production, like the flowers and fruits of the tropics, bloom

there in every season. As the banana tree is the little humanisphere

which provides the bed and food of the brown negro, so the humanisphere

is the great banana tree which satisfies the immense needs of the free

man. It is in its hade the he inhales with full lungs all the soft

breezes of nature and that, raising its pupils to the height of the

stars, contemplating all its beams.

As we might expect, there are no doctors, that is to say that there are

no diseases. What causes illness today? The pestilential emanations of

one part of the globe and, especially, the lack of equilibrium in the

exercise of the human organs. Man exhausts himself at a single labor, at

a single enjoyment. One writhes in the convulsions of fasting, others in

the colics and hiccups of indigestion. One occupies his arm to the

exclusion of his brain, the other his brain to the exclusion of his

arms. The strains of the day, and the anxieties of the next, tighten the

fibers of man, arrest the natural circulation of the blood and produce

internal cesspools from which rise decline and death. The doctor

arrives, he who has an interest in their being illnesses, as the lawyer

has an interest in there being trials, and he infests the veins of the

patient with mercury and arsenic; from a passing indisposition, he makes

an incurable leprosy, which is communicated from generation to

generation. We are horrified by a Brinvilliers, but truly what is a

Brinvilliers compared to those poisoners we call doctors? The

Brinvilliers only await the life of some of their contemporaries; they

await the life and intelligence of all the men down to their posterity.

Civilizees! Civilizees! have academies for executioners if you wish, but

don’t have academies of medicine! Man of amphitheaters or scaffolds,

assassinate the present if you must, but at least spare the future!…

Among the humanispherians there is equation in the exercise of men’s

faculties, and this level produces health. That is not to say that no

one there is concerned with surgery or anatomy. No art, no science is

neglected there. There is not even one humanispherian who has not more

or less pursued their course [of study]. Those laborers who practice

surgery apply their knowledge on an arm or leg when an accident occurs.

As for minor illnesses, as everyone has some notion of hygiene and

anatomy, they medicate themselves. One takes a bit of exercise, the

other a vial of some sleeping aid, and the next day, most often all is

said and done: they are the fittest people in the world.

Unlike Gall and Lavater, who have taken the effect for the cause, they

do not believe that man is born with aptitudes absolutely determined.

The lines of the face and the contours of the head are not things innate

in us, they say; we are all born with the germ of all the faculties

(save for rare exceptions, there are those who are mentally as well as

physically infirm, but the monstrosities are destined to disappear in

Harmony), and external circumstances act directly on them. Depending on

whether these faculties are or have been exposed to their influence,

they acquire a greater or lesser growth, taking shape in one manner or

another. The physiognomy of the man reflects his penchants, but that

physiognomy is most often very different from the one that he had as a

child. The craniology of the man testifies to his passions, but that

craniology most often has nothing in common with what he had in the

cradle. — Just as the right arm exercised to the detriment of the left

arm, gains more strength, more elasticity and a greater size than its

twin brother, so much that the abuse of that exercise can make a man

hunchbacked on one shoulder, so also the exclusive exercise given to

certain passional faculties can develop his organs and make a man

hunchbacked in the head. The creases of the face, like the bumps of the

skull, are the blossoming of our sensations on our face, but are not at

all original stigmata. The milieu in which we live and the diversity of

the viewpoints where men are placed, which make it so that not one can

see things from the same angle, explain the varieties of craniology and

phrenology among men, like the diversity of their passions and

aptitudes. The skull whose bumps are equally developed is undoubtedly

the skull of the most perfect man. The ideal type is probably to be

neither crooked/bumped nor horned. Yet how proud people in the present

world of their bumps and their horns! If some learned astrologer, in the

name of the so-called science, had just said that it was the sun that

escapes the rays, and not the rays which escape the sun, my word, he

would find some civilizees to believe it and some assistant professors

to utter it. Poor world! Poor teaching staffs! Hell for men! Paradise

for the small-minded/grocers!

As there are neither slaves nor masters, chiefs nor subordinates,

proprietors nor disinherited, nor legality, nor penalty, nor borders or

gates, nor civil or religious codes, there are no longer civil, military

and religious authorities, nor lawyers or bailiffs, nor solicitors or

notaries, nor judges or police, nor bourgeois or lords, nor priests or

soldiers, nor thrones or altars, nor barracks or churches, nor prisons,

nor fortresses, nor butchers or scaffolds; or, if they still have them,

they are preserved in esprit-de-vin [ethanol], mummified at their

natural size or reproduced in miniature, all lined up and numbered in

some back room of a museum as objects of curiosity and antiquity. Even

the books of French authors, Cossacks, Germans, English, etc., etc., lie

in the dusty attics of the libraries: no one reads them, and besides

they are in dead languages. A universal language has replaced all these

national jargons. In that language, they say more in a word than we

could say in a sentence in our own. When by chance a humanispherian

risks casting their eyes on the pages written in the civilized times and

has the courage to read a few lines from it, they soon close the book

again with a shudder of shame and disgust; and, thinking about what

humanity was in that era of Babylonian depravity and of civilitic

constitutions, they feel the blood rise to their face, like a woman,

still young, whose youth had been soiled by debauch, would blush, after

having been rehabilitated, at the memory of her days of prostitution.

Property and commerce, that putrid affection for gold, that usurian

sickness, that corrosive contagion which infests contemporary societies

with a virus of venality, and metalizes friendship and love; that

scourge of the nineteenth century has disappeared from the bosom of

humanity. There are no longer sellers nor sold. The anarchic communion

of interests has spread purity and health in mores everywhere. Love is

no longer a filthy traffic, but an exchange of pure and tender

sentiments. Venus is no longer the immodest Venus, but the Uranian

Venus. Friendship is no longer a merchant of the halles fondling the

pocket/fob of the passersby and changing the best words into fighting

words, according to whether they accept or refuse his merchandise, it is

a charming child which asks only for some caresses in return for its

caresses, sympathy for sympathy. In the Humanisphere, everything that is

apparent is real: the appearance is not a distortion. Concealment was

always the livery of lackeys and slaves: it is de rigueur among the

Civilized. The free man bears frankness in his heart, that badge of

Liberty. Concealment is not even an exception among the humanispherians.

Religious artifices, the structures of superstition respond among the

civilized, as among the barbarians, as among the savages, to a need for

the ideal that these populations, not finding it in the world of the

real, will breathe in the world of the impossible. Women especially,

that half of the human race, even more excluded from the other from

social rights, and relegated, like Cinderella, to a corner of the hearth

of the household, delivered to their catechismal meditations, to their

pathological hallucinations, woman is abandoned with all the impetus of

the heart and the imagination to the charm of religious pomp and masses

of great spectacle, to all the mystical poetry of that mysterious

romance, of which the handsome Jesus is the hero, and divine love the

intrigue. All these songs of angels and angelesses, this paradise full

of light, music and incense, that opera of eternity, of which God is the

great maestro, the designer, the composer and the conductor, these

stalls of azure where Mary and Magdalene, these two daughters of Eve,

have places of honor; that whole phantasmagoria of the sacerdotal

physicians cannot fail in a society like our own to strongly impress the

sentimental fiber of the woman, that compressed and always trembling

fiber. The body enchained in its kitchen stove, at its boutique counter

or its salon piano, she wanders by thought, — without ballast and

without sails, without rudder and without compass, — towards the

idealization of the human being in the scattered spheres of reefs,

star-studded with superstition from the fluidic azure, in the exotic

reveries of the heavenly life. She reacts by mysticism, she rebels by

superstition against this level of inferiority on which man has placed

her. She calls to it from her terrestrial humbling to the celestial

ascension, from the bestiality of man to the spirituality of God.

In the Humanisphère, nothing like that can take place. The man is

nothing more than the woman, and the woman is nothing more than the man.

Both are equally free. The urns of voluntary instruction have poured

streams of science on their brows. The clash of intelligences has

leveled the path. The rise/spate of the fluxtueux needs raises its level

every day. Man and woman swim in that ocean of progress, embracing one

another. The lively headwaters of the heart pour forth in society their

syrupy and burning passions and make for man and woman alike a delicious

bath, perfumed by their mutual ardors. Love is no longer [a matter of]

mysticism or bestiality, love has all the delights of the physical and

moral sensations, love is of humanity, humanity purified, invigorated,

regenerated, humanity made man. The ideal being on the earth, earth

present or future, who would want to go seek it elsewhere? In order for

the divinity to walk on the clouds of the imagination, there must be

clouds, and under the humanispherian cranium there are only rays of

light. There where light reigns, there is no darkness; there where the

intelligence reigns, there is not superstition. Today, where existence

is a perpetual mortification, a cloistering of the passions, happiness

is a dream. In the future world, life being the expansion of all the

passionnal fibers, life will be a dream of happiness.

In the civilized world, everything is just masturbation and sodomy,

masturbation or of the flesh, masturbation or sodomy of the mind. The

mind is a sewer of vile thoughts, the flesh a drain for filthy

pleasures. In our time, men and women do not make love, they do their

business… In that time they will have a need only for love! And it is

only with the fire of passion in the heart, with the fervor of feeling

in the brain that they will join in a mutual embrace. All the sensual

pleasures will no longer stir except in the natural order, those of the

flesh as well as those of the mind. Liberty will have purified them all.

After visiting in detail the buildings of the Humanisphere, where

everything is just workshops of pleasure and salons of labor, stores of

sciences and arts and museums of all the productions: after admiring

these machines of iron of which steam and electricity is the mobile,

hard-working multitudes of gears which are to the humanispherians what

the multitudes of proletarians or slaves are to the Civilized; after

witnessing the no less admirable of those human gears, of that multitude

of free laborers, a serial mechanism of which attraction is the sole

motor; after observing the marvels of that egalitarian organization

which produces harmony through its anarchic evolution; after visiting

the fields, the gardens, the pastures, the rural sheds/depots where the

herds that wander the countryside come to shelter themselves, the attics

of which serve as granaries for feed; after having traveled all the

lines of iron which traverse the interior and exterior of the

Humanisphere, and having navigated in those magnificent aerial steamers

which transport, as the eagle flies, men and products, ideas and

objects, from one humanisphere to another humanisphere, from one

continent to another, and from one point on the globe to its

extremities; after having seen and heard, after having felt all these

things with the fingers and with thought, — how is it, I said to myself,

reflecting on the Civilized, how is it that we ca live under the Law,

that Knout of Authority, when anarchy, that law of Liberty, has manners

so pure and so sweet? How is it that we regard that intelligent

fraternity as such a freakish thing, and that fratricidal imbecility as

something so normal?… Ah! freaks and utopias are only freaks and utopias

in relation to our ignorance. Everything that is freakish for our world,

is entirely ordinary for another world, whether it is a question of the

movement of planets or the movement of men; and what would have seemed

much more freakish to me, is that society would remain perpetually in

social darkness and not awaken to the light. Authority is a nightmare

which bears down on the chest of Humanity stifles it; what does the

voice of Liberty hear, when it awakens from its unpleasant slumber, and

soon it will have recovered the fullness of its senses, and its aptitude

for labor, love, and happiness!

While in the Humanisphere the machines do all the coarsest work, there

were, in my opinion, some labors more disagreeable than other, there

were even some which seemed to me must be to the taste of no one.

Nevertheless, these tasks were accomplished without any constraining law

or regulation whatsoever. How was that? I asked myself, I, who still saw

things with my civilized eyes. It was, however, very simple. What is it

that makes labor attractive? It is not always the nature of the labor,

but the conditions under which it is exercised and the condition of the

result to be obtained. In our times, a worker will practice one

profession; it is not always the profession that they would have chosen:

chance, more than attraction, has determined it so. let that profession

procure for him a certain, relative ease, let his wages be raised, let

him do business with a boss who does not make his authority felt too

severely, and that worker will accomplish his labor with a certain

pleasure. Consequently, let this same worker labor for a surly boss, let

his wage be diminished by half, let his profession no longer procure

more than poverty, and he will now feel only disgust for the work that

not long ago he accomplished with pleasure. Drunkenness and idleness

have no other cause among the workers. Slaves at the end of their

patience, they throw up their hands and, cast-offs of the world, they

wallow in the much and the lees, of if they are of the best character,

they rise up to the point of murder, to the point of martyrdom, like

[Louis] Alibaud, like Moncharmont, and demand their rights as men, iron

against iron and face to face with the scaffold. Glorious immortality to

them!

In the Humanisphère, the small number of labors which by their nature

appeared repugnant to me nevertheless found some workers to execute them

with pleasure. And the cause was the condition in which they worked. The

different series of laborers recruited themselves voluntarily, as men

recruit themselves for a barricade, and are entirely free to remain

their as long as they want or pass on to another series or another

barricade. There is not chief, official or unofficial. The one who has

the most knowledge or aptitude at the labor naturally directs the

others. Each take the initiative mutually, as they recognize their

capacity for it. Each in turn gives and receives opinion. There is an

amicable understanding, there is no authority. What’s more, it is rare

that there is not a mixture of men and women among the laborers of a

series. And the work is in conditions too attractive, though it would be

repugnant by itself, for them not to find a certain charm in

accomplishing it. Then there is the nature of the results to be

obtained. If this work is indeed essential, those most disgusted by it

and who abstain from it will be delighted that others are responsible

for it, and they will affably give back, in laborious considerations

elsewhere, compensation for the service that the others have rendered

them. We must not believe that the coarsest labors are, among the

humanispherians, the portion of inferior intelligences; quite the

contrary, it is the superior intelligences, the eminent figures in the

sciences and arts who are most often happy to accomplish these chores.

The more exquisite the sensitivity is in a man, the more developed his

moral sense, and the more apt he is at certain moments to the harsh and

dreadful labors, especially when these labors are a sacrifice offered in

love to humanity. I have seen, during the transportation of June, at

Fort du Homet, and at Cherbourg, some delicate natures who could have,

by means of a few bits of change, had their turn at the chores done by a

fellow inmate, — and it was a nasty job to empty the tubs of waste, —

and who, to satisfy their moral pleasures, in internal testimony to

their fraternity with their fellows, preferred to do that chore

themselves and to spend in the canteen, with some of their comrades for

the drudgery, the money which could have served to free them from it.

The man who is truly a man, the man who is egoistically, is more happy

to do a thing for the good that it provides other than to dispense with

it with an eye to an immediate and entirely personal satisfaction. He

knows that it is a seed sown in good earth, from which he will sooner or

later gather the fruit. Egoism is the source of all the virtues. The

first Christians, those who lived in community and fraternity in the

catacombs, were egoists, they placed their virtues at usurious interest

in the hands of God, in order to obtain the premiums of celestial

immortality. The humanispherians place their good actions in an annuity

on Humanity, in order to enjoy, — from the extraction of their birth to

the extinction of their life, — some of the benefits of mutual

insurance. Humanely speaking, we can only buy individual happiness at

the price of universal delight.

I have still not spoken of the costume of the humanispherians. Their

costume is not at all uniform, each dressing as they please. There is no

special fashion. Elegance and simplicity is its general mark. It is

especially distinguished by the cut and quality of the fabrics. The

smock, called a roulière [or carter’s smock], à pagoda sleeves, of

canvas for work, or serge or silk for leisure; Breton trousers or pants,

loose or tight-fitting, but always narrow at the bottom, with top-boots

over the pants or light buskins in patent leather; a round felt hat with

a simple ribbon or topped with a feather, or else a turban; the neck

bare as in the Middle Ages; and the facings of the shirt spilling out at

the neck and wrists underneath the blouse, such is the costume most

often in use. Now, the color, the nature of the fabric, the cut, and the

accessories largely differ. One lets their smock flutter, the other

wears a scarf as a belt, or else a handbag in morocco leather or cloth,

suspended by a steel chain or a leather band and falling on the thigh.

In winter, one wraps themselves in a coat, the other in a burnoose. Men

and women wear the same costume indifferently, but the women most

generally substitute a skirts for the pants, decorate their smock or

tunic with lace, their wrists and neck with artistically worked jewelry,

striving for the hairstyles most capable of highlighting their facial

features; but none of them would find it graceful to pierce their nose

or ears in order to pass hoops or gold or silver and attach gems there.

A great number wear fitted dresses in an endless multiplicity of forms.

They do not seek to be uniform with one another, but to differentiate

themselves from one another. And it is the same for the men. The men

generally all wear beards, and long hair parted on the top of the head.

They do not find it more natural or less ridiculous to shave the chin

than the skull; and in their old age, when the snow of the years has

whitened their brow and dulled their vision, they do not pluck the white

hairs any more than they pluck out the eyes. They also wear many diverse

costumes, costumes of the Louis XIII variety, among others, but not one

of the masculine or crinoline costumes of our era. The balloons in which

the women of our era navigate over the earth are reserved for the aerial

steamers, and the tubes of sheet metal or black silk only serve as

headgear for the cerebellum of a chimney. I do not think that there is a

single man among the humanispherians who would want to make a fool of

himself in the bourgeois redingote or frock coat, that livery of the

Civilized. There they want to be free to move, and want their costume to

testify to the grace and liberty of the one who wears it. They prefer

the majesty of a loose and roomy pleat to the puffed up rigidity of

crinoline and the epileptic grimace of a tailcoat with the head of a

cretin and the tail of a cod. The clothes, says a proverb, do not make

the monk. That is true in the sense of the proverb. But society makes

its clothes, and a society which is dressed like ours, denounces, like

the chrysalid for its husk, its caterpillar ugliness to the clarity of

the eyes. In the humanisphère, humanity is far from being a caterpillar,

it is no longer a prisoner in its cocoon, it has sprouted wings, and it

has put on the loose and graceful tunic, the charming coloration, the

elegant wingspan of the butterfly. — Taken in the absolute sense, the

envelope is the man: Physiognomy is never a mask for those who know how

to examine it. The moral always breaks through into the physical. And

the physique of the present society is not handsome: how much more ugly

still are its morals!

In my excursions, I had seen no cemeteries anywhere. And I asked myself

where the dead pass, when I had occasion to witness a burial.

The dead man was lying in an open coffin which had the form of a large

cradle. He was surrounded by no funereal aspect. Some natural flowers

were plucked in the cradle and covered the body. The uncovered head

rested on some bouquets de roses which served him as pillow. They put

the casket in a wagon; those who had most particularly known the dead

man took place behind them. I imitated them.

Once in the country, at a place where there was an iron machine erected

on some granite steps, the convoy halted. The machine in question had

very nearly the appearance of a locomotive. A drum or boiler sat on an

intense brazier. The boiler was topped by a long hose with a valve. They

took the corpse from the casket, wrapped it in its shroud, then slid it

through a drawer-like opening in the drum. The brazier was charged with

reducing it to ash. Then each of the witnesses cast a handful of plucked

roses on the slab of the monument. They burst into a hymn to universal

transformation. Then they all separated. The ashes of the dead are then

cast as fertilizer on the cultivated lands.

The humanispherians claim that cemeteries are a cause of squalor, and

that it is much preferable to sow them with wheat seed than gravestones,

since the wheat nourishes the living and the marble vaults can only work

against the regeneration of the dead. They do not understand the

funerary prisons any more than they understand the cellular tombs, or

the detention of the dead than the detention of the living. It is not

superstition which makes law among the, it is science. They only have

reason, and no prejudices. For them all matter is animated; they do not

believe in the duality of soul and body, they only recognize the unity

of substance; only, that substance acquires thousands and thousands of

forms, it is more or less course, more or less purified, more or less

solid or more or less volatile. Even admitting, they say, that the soul

was a thing distinct from the body, which all deny, — it would still be

an absurdity to believe in its individual immortality, in its eternally

compact personality, in its indestructible fixity. The law of

composition and decomposition which rules the body, and which is the

universal law, would also be the law of souls.

Just as, in the heat of caloric, water vapor condenses in the brain of

the locomotive and constitutes what we could call its soul, so in the

interior/hearth of the human body, the bubbling of our sensations,

condensing in steam within our skull, constitutes our thought and makes

move, with all the force of the electricity of our intelligence, the

gears of our bodily mechanism. But does it follow that the locomotive, a

finite form and consequently ephemeral, should have a soul more immortal

than its casing? Certainly, the electricity which animates it will not

disappear into the impossible void, any more than the palpable substance

with which it is adorned. But at the moment of death, as at the moment

of existence, the boiler, like the steam, cannot preserve their

exclusive individuality. Rust eats away the iron, the steam evaporates;

bodies and souls are transformed incessantly and disperse through the

entrails of the earth or on the wings of the winds in as many bits as

the metal or the fluid contains molecules, that is to say ad infinitum,

the molecule being for the infinitesimals what the terrestrial globe is

for men, a world inhabited and in movement, a living aggregation of

imperceptibles susceptible to attraction and repulsion, and consequently

to formation and dissolution. What makes life, or, that which is the

same thing, movement, is the condensation and expansion of the substance

formulated by the chemical action of nature. It is this alimentation and

evacuation of steam in the locomotive, of thought in the man, which

moves the pendulum of the body. But the body wears out form friction,

the locomotive goes to the scrapheap, the man to the tomb. That is what

we call death, which is only a metamorphosis, since nothing is lost and

everything takes new forms under the incessant manipulation of the

attractive forces.

It is recognized that the human body renews itself every seven years;

there does not remain to us one molecule on another. From the sole of

the feet to the tips of the hair, all has been destroyed, bit by bit.

And we would wish that the soul, which is only the summary of our

sensations, something like their living mirror, a mirror where is

reflected the evolutions of this world of infinitely small elements of

which the whole is called a man; we would have it that the soul is not

renewed from year to year and instant to instant; that it loses nothing

of its individuality by breathing itself out, and acquires nothing of

the individuality of others by breathing in the emanations? And when

death, extending its breath over the physical, finished form, comes to

disperse its debris to the wind and scatter its dust in the furrows,

like a seed which bears in it the germ of new harvests, we would have

it, — vain and absurd silliness on our part! — that this breath/blast

destruction could not break the human soul, finished form, and disperse

its dust to the world?

In truth, when we hear the Civilized boast about the immortality of

their soul, we are tempted to ask if we have swindlers or brutes before

us, and we end by concluding that they are both.

We cast, say the humanispherians, the ashes of the dead as fertilizer on

our croplands, in order to incorporate them more quickly into ourselves

in the form of foodstuffs and cause them to be reborn more quickly into

the life of humanity. We would regard as a crime to relegate the bottom

of the earth a part of ourselves and thus delay it coming to light. As

there is no doubt that the earth exchanges emanations with the other

globes, and that in the most subtle of forms, that of thought, we are

certain that the purer the thought of a man is, the more it is apt to

rise towards the spheres of higher worlds. That is why we do not want

what has belonged to humanity to be lost to humanity, so that these

remains called again into the alembic of human life, an alembic always

more sophisticated, acquire a more ethereal property and pass thus from

the human circulus to a higher circulus, and from circulus to circulus

in the universal circulation.

The Christians, the Catholics eat God out of love for divinity, they

commune as god-eaters [théophages]. The humanispherians push the love of

humanity as far as cannibalism: they eat man after his death, but in a

form which is not at all repugnant, in the form of the Host, that is in

the form of bread and wine, de meat and fruits, in the form of

foodstuffs. It is the communion of man by man, the resurrection of

cadaveric remains to human existence. It is better, they say, to revive

the dead than to cry. And they accelerate the clandestine labor of

nature, they shorten the phases of the transformation, the twists and

turns of the metempsychosis. And they pay tribute to death, as well as

birth, these two cradles of a new life with festive songs floral

perfumes. Immortality, they maintain, is not at all immaterial. The man,

body of flesh, luminous with thought, like all the suns dissolves when

it has furnished its career. The flesh is ground up and returns to the

flesh; and thought, brightness projected by it, radiated towards its

ideal, decomposes in its rays and adheres there. — Man sows man, harvest

him, shapes it and makes it himself by nutrition. Humanity is the sap of

humanity, and it blossoms in it and is exhaled outside, a cloud of

Thought or incense which rises towards better worlds.

Such is their pious belief, a scientific belief based on induction and

deduction, on analogy. They are not, if truth be told, believers

[croyants], but viewers/surveyors [voyants].

I crossed all the continents, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania. I saw many

diverse physiognomies, but I saw everywhere only one single race. The

universal interbreeding of the Asiatic, European, African and American

(Redskin) populations; the multiplication of all by all has leveled all

the unevenness of color and language. Humanity is one. In the gaze of

every humanispherian there is a mixture of gentleness and pride which

has a strange charm. Something like a cloud of magnetic fluid surrounds

his whole person and illuminates his brow with a phosphorescent halo.

You feel yourself drawn to him by an irresistible attraction. The grace

of his movements adds still more beauty to his figure. The word which

flows from his lips, impressed throughout with his sweet thoughts, is

like a perfume which emanates from him. Statuary could not model the

animated contours of his body and face, which lends to that animation a

charm that is always new. Painting could not reproduce the pupil and the

enthusiastic and limpid thought, full of languor or energy, mobile

aspects of light which vary like the mirror of a clear stream in calm or

rapid, but always picturesque course. Music could not create his speech,

for it could not achieve its ineffability of sentiment; and poetry could

not translate its sentiment, for it could not attain its inexpressible

melody. He is the idealized human being, bearing in his form and

movement, in look and in gesture, in word and in thought, stamped with

the most utopian perfectibility. In short, he is man become man.

Thus the ulterior world appeared to me; thus unrolled before my eyes the

succession of times; thus was raised to my mind harmonic anarchy: the

libertarian, egalitarian society and universal human family. 0 Liberty!

Ceres of anarchy, you who plough the heart of modern civilizations with

your heel and sow rebellion there, you who prune the savage instincts of

the contemporary societies and graft on their stems the utopian thoughts

of a better world, greetings, universal fécondatrice, and glory to you,

Liberty, who bear in your arms the sheaf of future harvests, the basket

of the flowers and fruits of the Future, the cornucopia of social

progress. Greetings and glory to you, Liberty.

And you, Idea, thank you for having allowed me the contemplation of this

human paradise, of this humanitary Eden. Idea, lover always beautiful,

mistress full of grace, enchanting houri, for whom my heart and my voice

quiver, for whom my eye and my thoughts have only looks of love; Idea,

whose kisses are spasms of pleasure, oh! let me live and die and live

again in your abiding embrace; let me take root in this world that you

have evoked; let me develop in the midst of this human flowerbed; let me

bloom among all these flowers, men and women. Let me gather in and

exhale the fragrances of universal bliss!

Idea, [magnetic] pole of love, magnetic star, attractive beauty, oh!

remain attached to me, do not abandon me, do not plunge me back from the

future dream into the present reality, from the sun of liberty into the

darkness of authority; make it so I am no longer just a spectator, but

an actor in this anarchic romance which you have displayed for me. 0

you, by whom miracles are worked, let drop again behind me the curtain

of the centuries, and let me live my life in the humanisphere and the

humanispherity!…

Child, she said to me, I cannot grant what you desire. Time is time. And

there are distances that thought alone can cross. The feet belong on the

ground that has seen their birth. The law of gravity will it so. Remain

then on the soil of Civilization as on a Calvary, as you must. Be one of

the messiahs of the social regeneration. Make your words shine like a

sword. Plunge them, bare and sharp, into the breast of corrupt

societies, and strike at the place of the heart the walking corpse of

Authority. Call to you the little children and the women and the

proletarians, and teaching them by preaching and example to demand the

right of individual and social development. Confess the almighty power

of the Revolution on the steps of the barricade, and even on the

platform of the scaffold. Be the brand which sets aflame and the torch

which enlightens. Pour gall and honey on the heads of the oppress. Wave

in your hands the standard of ideal progress and provoke the free

intelligences to a crusade against the barbaric ignorances. Oppose truth

to prejudice, liberty to authority, good to evil. Wandering man, be my

champion; cast a bloody challenge to bourgeoisial legality; fight with

the rifle and the pen, with sarcasm and cobblestones, with the brow and

the hand; kill or be killed! Martyred man, social crucified, bear with

courage your crown of thorns, bite the bitter sponge that the civilized

put to your lips, let the wounds of your heart bleed; it is this blood

which will make the scarfs of free men. The blood of the martyrs is a

fertile dew, shake drops of it on the world. Happiness is not of this

century, it is on the earth which is revolutionized each day by

gravitating towards the light, it is in the future humanity!…

Alas! you will still pass through the sieve of many generations, you

will still witness many misshapen attempts at social renewal, many

disasters, followed by new progress and new disasters, before arriving

at the promised land and before all the cracies and the archies have

given way to anarchy. Men and nations will still break and reforge their

chains many more times before casting their last links behind them.

Liberty is not a prostitute [femme de lupanar], who gives herself to the

first comer. She must be won by valiant proofs, you must make yourself

worthy of her to obtain her smile. She is a grande dame who is proud of

her nobility, for her nobility comes from her brow and heart. Liberty is

a chatelaine who sits in state at the antipodes of civilization, she

invites Humanity there. With steam and electricity we abbreviate the

distances. All the roads lead to the goal, and the shortest is the best.

The Revolution has laid its iron rails there. Men and nations, let us

go!!!

The Idea had spoken: I bowed before it…

Part III. The Transitional Period.

How will the progress be accomplished? What means will prevail? What

route will be chosen? That is what is it is difficult to determine in an

absolute manner. But whatever these means, whatever the route, if it is

a step towards anarchic liberty, I will applaud it. Let the progress

take place by the arbitrary scepter of the czars or by the independent

hand of the republics; let it be by the Cossacks of Russia or the

proletarians of France, German, England or Italy in whatever manner the

unity should come about, let the national feudalism disappear, and I

will shout bravo. Let the soil, divided in a thousand fractions, be

unified and formed into vast agricultural associations, the associations

could even be, like the railroad corporations, usurious exploitations,

and I will still cry bravo. Let the proletarians of the city and country

organize themselves in corporations and replace wages with vouchers [bon

de circulation], boutiques with bazaars, private monopoly with public

exhibition and the commerce in capital with the exchange of products;

let them subscribe in common to a mutual insurance and found a bank of

reciprocal credit; let them begin to decree the abolition of all sorts

of usury, and always I will shout bravo. Let women participate in all

the advantages of society, as she does in all its burdens; let marriage

disappear; let us suppress inheritance and employ the product of the

successions to dower each mother with a pension for the feeding and

education of her child; let us take from prostitution and begging ever

chance of occurring; let us take the pickaxe to the barracks and the

churches, raze them, and build on their sites monuments of public

utility; let arbitrators replace the official judges and individual

contract to the law; let universal registration [l’inscription

universelle], as Girardin understands it, demolish the prisons penal

colonies, the penal code and the scaffold; let the smallest, or the

slowest, reforms be given rein, reforms with the scales and legs of a

turtle, and provided they are real progresses and not harmful

palliatives, a step into the future and not a return to the past, and

with both hands I will cheer them on with my applause.

Everything that has become big and strong was first puny and week. The

human being of today is incomparably greater in science, and more

powerful in industry than the man of the past. Everything that begins

with monstrous dimensions is not born viable. The fossilized

monstrosities have preceded the birth of humanity as the civilized

societies still precede the creation of harmonic societies. The earth

requires the fertilizer of dead plants and animals to render it

productive, as humans required the detritus of rotten civilizations to

render them social and fraternal. The times reap what time has sown. The

future supposes the past and the past a future; the present oscillates

between these two movements without being about to keep balance, and is

drawn by an irresistible magnetic attraction toward the unknown. We

cannot resist Progress indefinitely. There is an irresistible weight

that will always and despite everything drag down one of the trays of

the scale. We can certainly violently resist it for a moment, jolt

things in the opposite direct, subject it to reactionary pressures; but

when the pressure fades, it will just regain, and more strongly, its

natural inclination, and affirm more vigorously the power of the

Revolution. Ah! Instead of clinging with rage to the branch of the Past,

instead of agitating ourselves about it unsuccessfully and covering our

powerlessness with blood, let us allow the social pendulum to swing

freely towards the Future. And, one hand resting in the ropes, feet on

the edge of the spherical plateau, oh you, gigantic aeronaut who has the

terrestrial globe for a gondola, Humanity, do not block your eyes, do

not throw yourself in the bilge, do not tremble thus with fright, do not

tear your chest with your nails, don’t clasp your hands in a sign of

distress: fear is a bad adviser, it peoples our thoughts with ghosts.

Raise, on the contrary, the veil of your eyelids and look, eagle, with

your pupils: look and greet the limitless horizons, the luminous, azure

depths of the Infinite, all these splendors of anarchy universal. Queen,

who has for jewels in her crown the gems of intelligence, oh! be worthy

of your sovereignty. Everything that is before you is your domain, the

vastness that is your empire. Enter there, human beautiful as Venus,

mounted on the terrestrial globe, your triumphant aerostat, and led by

the doves of attraction. Stand, blonde sovereign, — mother, not this

time of a sick child, of a love [that is] blind and armed with poisoned

arrows, but on the contrary of men in possession of all their senses, of

clear-sighted loves, armed with a productive mind and arm. Go, Majesty,

fly at your prow your flag of purple, and sail, diadem on the head and

scepter in the hand, in the midst of cheers for the Future!…

Two sons of the Bourgeoisie, who have partially renounced their

bourgeois education and sworn themselves to [the cause of] liberty,

Ernest Cœurderoy and Octave Vauthier, together in a pamphlet, la

Barrière du Combat, and one of them in his book la Révolution dans

l’homme et dans la société, prophesy the regeneration of society by a

Cossack invasion. They rely, in order to make this judgment, on the

analogy that they see existing between our society in decline and Roman

decadence. They maintain that socialism will only be established in

Europe when Europe is one. From an absolute point of view, yes, they are

right to claim that liberty must be everywhere or nowhere. But it is not

only in Europe, it is all over the globe that unity must be made before

socialism in its catholicity, embracing the whole world with its roots,

can rise high enough to shelter Humanity from the cruel storms, and

bring it to the harbor of the charms of universal and reciprocal

fraternity. To be logical, it is not only the invasion of France by the

Cossacks that we must call for, but also the invasion of the Sepoys of

Hindustan, of the Chinese, Mongol and Tartar multitudes, of the savages

of New Zealand and Guinea, Asia, Africa and Oceania; that of the

Red-Skins of the two Americas and of the Anglo-Saxons of the United

State, more savage than the Red-Skins; we would have to call all of

these tribes from the four corners of the earth to the conquest and

domination of Europe. But no. The conditions are no longer the same. The

means of communication are completely different than they were in the

times of the Romans; the sciences have made an immense step forward. It

is not only on the banks of the Neva of the Danube that there now rise

up hordes of Barbarians summoned to the sack of Civilization, but on the

banks of the Seine and the Rhône, the Thames and the Tagus, the Tiber

and the Rhine. — It is from the empty furrow, it is from the floor of

the workshop, it is sweeping along, in its floods of men and women, the

pitchfork and the torch, the hammer and the gun; it is under the

farmer’s overalls and the smock of the worker; it is with the hunger in

the belly and the fever in the heart, but under the supervision of the

Idea, that Attila of the modern invasion; it is under the generic name

of the proletariat and rolling its eager masses towards the luminous

centers of the utopian City; it is from Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin,

Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, Naples, that, raising up its enormous waves and

pushed by its insurrectionary flood, the devastating torrent will

overflow. It is at the noise of the social tempest, it is in the current

of that regenerating deluge that Civilization will collapse in

decadence. It is at the breath of the innovating spirit that the popular

ocean will bound up from its gulf. It is the [stormy] turmoil of new

ideas that will bring down the heads and thrones of the civilized and

pass with its level of iron and fire over the ruins. It is this that

will drown in blood and flames all the notarized and certified deeds,

and the procurers of those deeds, and will make the parceled and

propertized soil a collective whole. This time it is not darkness that

the Barbarians will bring to the world, but light. The old order took

from Christianity only the name and the letter, but they have killed its

spirit; the new will not profess absolutely the letter, but the spirit

of socialism. Wherever they can find a patch of social earth, they will

plant the seed of the tree of Liberty. They will pitch their tent there,

the nascent tribe of free people. From there they will project the

branches of the propaganda everywhere they can be extended. They will

increase in number and strength, in scientific and social progress. They

will invade, step by step, idea by idea, all of Europe, from the

Caucasus to Mount Hekla and from Gibraltar to the Urals. The tyrants

will struggle in vain. Oligarchic Civilization cede the terrain

ascendant advance of Social Anarchy. Europe conquered and freely

organized, America must be socialized in its turn. The republic of the

Union, this breeding ground of grocers who award themselves voluntarily

the name of model republic, of which all the grandeur consists in the

extent of the territory; this cesspool where wallow and croak all the

villainies of mercantilism, filibusters of commerce and piracies of

human flesh; this den of all the hideous and ferocious beasts

revolutionary Europe will have rejected from its breast, last rampart of

bourgeois civilization, but where, also, some colonies of Germans, of

revolutionaries of all nations, established within, will have driven

into the earth the mileposts of Progress, laid down the first

foundations of social reforms; this shapeless giant, this republic with

a heart of stone, an icy face, a goitrous neck, a statue of cretinism

whose feet rest on a bale of cotton and whose hands are armed with a

whip and a Bible; harpy carrying a revolver and a knife in her teeth;

thieving like a magpie, murderous like a tiger; vampire with bestial

thirsts, who must always have gold or blood to suck… finally, the

American Babel will tremble to its foundations. From the North to the

South and from the East to the West will crash the thunder of the

insurrections. The revolts of the proletarians and the revolt of the

slaves will crack the States and the bones of the exploiters of these

States. The flesh of the politicians and industrialists, of the bosses

and masters, the shopkeepers and planters will smoke under the bloody

feet of the proletarians and slaves. The monstrous American Union, the

fossil Republic, will disappear in this cataclysm. Then the Social

Republic of the United States of Europe span the Ocean and take

possession of the new conquest. Blacks and whites, creoles and redskins

will fraternize then and will found one single race. The killers of

Negros and proletarians, the amphibians of liberalism and the carnivores

of privilege will withdraw like the caymans and bears before the advance

of social liberty. The gallows-birds, like the beasts of the forest

dread the company of human beings. The libertarian fraternity will

frighten the denizens of Civilization. They know that where human rights

exist there is no place for exploitation. So they will flee to the most

remote parts of the bayous, to the most unexplored caverns of the

Cordilleras.

Thus socialism—first individual, then local, then national, then

European, from ramification to ramification and from invasion to

invasion—will become universal socialism. And one day there will no

longer be a question of the little French Republic, nor of the little

American Union, nor even of the little United States of Europe, but of

the true, great and social Human Republic, single and indivisible, the

Republic of human beings in the state of freedom, the Republic of the

united individualities of the globe.

Appendix A: The Extremes

Under this title, “The Extremes,” here is a note on The Humanisphere,

the true subject, ways and means of which are sketched rather than

discussed. It is even an incomplete sketch. Nonetheless, I deliver it to

the public as-is, unless I return to it later. More than one reader will

believe themselves bound to condemn me for having published it. “We

think these things, but we do not say them”, they will add in a very low

voice. All that we think should be said. Moreover, it is necessary that

the revolutionaries as well as the reactionaries familiarize themselves

with that idea. It is in the logic of things, and we try to avoid it in

vain. I only work to uncover that which is, for many eyes, still hidden;

to explain tomorrow by yesterday; to draw some rigorous conclusions. It

is not my fault if the philosophy of contemporary history is a page that

can only be written in blood. There are inevitable paths plotted by

centuries of oppression and servitude. The desire to diverge from them

on byways is impossible: all roads return there. We must follow the

straight line, hasten our steps and go to the end. That is the shortest

way out, and it is the sole means. The aristocracy of every shade needs

a lesson; the proletariat of every country needs a stimulant. It is

necessary to force the world, lost to overindulgence or hunger, to

think, to shake it with an arm of iron, to wake it from its gloomy

apathy. It is necessary that the Future and Past alike, standing at

their full height, clash in the Present, and that one of these two

colossi shatters the other. To the coalition authoritarian interests we

must oppose the coalition of all the anarchic interests. We must

rekindle the days of September and strike with terror those who oppress

us with terror. We must have the audacity of solidarity with all the

insurgents of the world, whatever they may be, to push temerity to the

point of moral, if not physical complicity with all those who give back

to civilization iron for iron and fire for fire. Ah! revolutionaries, if

you have the Revolution in your heart as you have it on your lips; why

recoil and cover your face before such means? What is the use of

invoking the principles if you can only faint before the consequences?

It is not by mystical sighs that you will ward off tyranny and

exploitation, but by drawing the sword with the idea, by stabbing the

Reaction in its flesh and in its spirit:

Note on The Humanisphere

I am far from wanting to say that the aristocracy of our times is a

model of society for the world of the future; quite the contrary. What I

wanted to make clear is that man, according to the diverse conditions in

which he moves, is more or less worthy or unworthy. The more he has a

sense of his liberty, the more he also has a feeling of his dignity; the

more respect he has for himself, and also for his fellows. But the

aristocrat is not free; he is master, and he is slave: master of those

inferior, but slave of his superiors; he is free only with his equals.

And still, that liberty is very limited, for the aristocrat is not even

a man, he is half a man. (And I speak here of the most intelligent, of

those who have intellectual learning, a reasoned consciousness of their

own value, the lettered, the artists, the scientific, or at the very

least those who have a feeling for letters, arts and sciences, the great

crowd in its largest sense, the cream of the elegant and learned

worlds.) The aristocracy, even in the best sense of the word, is a

cripple that does not know how to use its arms, and in which,

consequently, one of two senses is lacking. The proletarian, the white

slave, is nearly as infirm as the aristocrat: he has arms and no brain,

or a least a brain that he hardly knows how to use. As for the

bourgeois, that thing that is not an aristocrat and is not a

proletarian, that heap of flesh, — neither arm nor head, nor heart, but

all belly, it is a being so deformed and vile that it can only serve as

a foil to the extremists of the proletariat as to the extremists of the

aristocracy. Sometimes the extremes meet, but it is on the condition of

developing from the two ends, and by crushing in this double

rapprochement everything that is between them. It is not a question of

dethroning the aristocrat from his place of luxury, of making him

descend from his artistic or scientific pedestal, but of making the

proletarian rise, of enthroning him there; as it is also not a question

of breaking in the hands of the proletarian the scepter of industrial or

agricultural labor, but of arming the aristocrat with it. worker from

above, worker from below, idle with the arm or idle with the head, both

must be completed, not only by one another, but also the one and the

other, in order to make both of them able-bodied men, instead of making

both of them, as today, cripples. The good there is in one must be

acquired b the other, and vice versa. The day cannot be far off with

manual and intellectual labor le travail will be the prerogative of

each. It is not as difficult to achieve this as we suppose. Except,

“those who want the end must want the means.”

The proletarian is too worn out by poverty and forced labor; the

excesses of fasting and of drink, of wakefulness and unemployment have

unnerved him too much; they are too full of distressing and infamous

prejudices; his brow has been for too long plunged like a sponge in

swill, in the dregs of bourgeois education; too many chains and gates,

too many heavy burdens and thick walls; too many obstacles, finally,

still trouble him for him to be able to evolve daily and without bumps

in the road of scientific and artistic progress. It is not by peaceful

and proper means that he can complete himself as a social man, and

revolutionize his brain. It is only with the aid of an anarchic

commotion that will put all his fibers in motion, and will raise him, by

the enthusiasm of all vibrating in each, and of each vibrant in all, to

a level of lucidity that will be equal to the greatest intelligences and

will allow him to accomplish the greatest things. Is there anything in

the world more dishonest and more treacherous, viler and more base than

the bourgeois? No, you think. Well, if he is free there, the worker who

labors for himself, the shopkeeper in his own shop, misshapen species of

the genus of drudges, still worker by the arm and already shopkeeper by

the head. What is more hideous and more repulsive, more horrible to see

and know than that sort of human spider crouched behind the panes of a

window and weaving on his workbench and in his head the web of his

exploitation, a net intended to take the little public, the public of

gnats? It is not lies and vile tricks that this monster on two legs,

half-proletarian and half-bourgeois, puts to work to trap you, you who

are his brother in misery and in production, but are also, his spoils in

your role as consumer. — Commerce is the most demoralizing, most

withering thing that I know of, for a society or for an individual. A

people, a caste or a man given over to mercantilism, is a man, a caste

or a people lost; it is the gangrene in the side of Humanity. There is

no arguing about such wounds, it is necessary to apply the hot iron.

The aristocrat is too full of vanity, too puffed-up with

self-importance; he is too pampered in his listlessness, too titillated

in his luxury, too well provided in his gastronomy; he is too certain of

enjoying with impunity some easy pleasures procured by rank and wealth

to not detest every movement of manual production, every physical labor.

That inaction of the arms necessarily has an influence on his brain, by

paralyzing its development. The aristocrat only considers the

proletarian as an ass good above all to bear the pack-saddle; and he

does not only realize that he is himself only a sort of calf stretched

bound hand and feet, on the back of the other beast, and good, above

all, to bleat, waiting for the abattoir.

The aristocrat, like the proletarian, can only be regenerated by a

cataclysm. As long as there endures for the masses the spirit of lucre,

the meager wage and the small trade, the day’s gain and the fear for the

next day, the proletarian could never escape from his stupefaction, from

his degradation. And yet he must escape. Too, as long as their indolent

and insolent security endures, the aristocrat from birth, and still less

the thinking bourgeois or the pot-bellied bourgeois, the upstart

bourgeois, will never feel proud of giving himself up to manual and

productive labor; they will never resolve themselves to it. and yet they

must become men, physically and intellectually. They must, or they must

disappear. But the means? The means are very simple. What is the cause

of their inaction? The impunity in which they live. Well! Let us put the

pleasures of their lives and their lives themselves in peril each day.

Let us dare to assimilate ourselves to all those who attack the life and

property of the rich. By assimilating ourselves to them, we take them

in, and consequently we moralize them. So we become a menace, a

formidable danger. The social war takes quotidian and universal

proportions. There is not a hair that falls from a head, not the most

minor theft of property that is not the work of the Revolution. We will

complement ourselves, we, the plebs of the workshops, with a new

element, the plebs of the penal colonies. All the convicts are made one

then, all the arms are under the same cloak, all the heads under the

same hat. Each of us could continue to make rebellion according to our

aptitudes; and if the use of the jimmy and the knife is more repugnant

to you than the use of the barricade and the gun, well! we will at least

have in our ranks some specialists, some workers accustomed to these

tools to accomplish the fierce and bloody task. Assassins and thieves,

urban guerillas, solitary insurgents, each of them must be conscious

that by attacking the legal society, they carry upheaval among the

Civilized, they act in the name of “the most sacred rights and the most

indispensable of duties.”—by raising all the daily attacks, the attacks

on the life and property of the rich, to the height of a social

insurrection, not only will the revolution rage permanently, but it will

also become invincible. Nothing could resist it. The aristocrat put in

danger this way will be forced to seek a heroic remedy to an imminent

evil. The spirit of caste will disappear to give place to the spirit of

individual conservation. Then, and only then, he might come to the idea

of becoming a worker, as much to escape from that epidemic of ruin and

death than to obey a new need for him, which could not fail to manifest

itself among the most intelligent, the need to earn, by the sweat of his

brown, his right of existence and the flourishing of that existence.

From the aristocrat will be made a man. His intelligence will develop

with his arm. And soon, instead of seeking to stifle the revolutionary

and social ideal, he will be the first to activate it, he will march

hand in hand even with the most socialist, the most revolutionary of the

proletarians. The proletarian having taught him to work with his arms,

will learn from him to work with his brain; the fraternal sentiment will

replace in both of them fratricidal feelings. Here there will no longer

be the man of the brow, crippled in the arms, and the man of the arms,

crippled in the brow, there will be the man of brow and arms at once,

the whole man. His heart will grow with all that will be acquired by his

arms, with all that will be acquired by his brain. The human being will

be formed, and Humanity will be near.

In individual medicine, as in social science, the palliatives, the old,

routine procedures have never succeeded in restoring a sick person to

health; drugs more harmful than useful, they have never produced

anything but empiricism. The social body, like the human body, suffers

from a malady that gets worse each day. There is only one means of

saving them, which is to treat them with a new system, to employ

homeopathy. Oppression is kept alive by theft and murder; it must be

combated with theft and murder. We will cure the evil only with evil. —

So let us provoke a terrible crisis, a renewed outbreak of the disease,

so that tomorrow, at the end of that crisis, Humanity, taking possession

of its senses and entering an era of convalescence, can nourish heart

and mind on the juice of fraternal and social ideas, and so that,

finally rendered healthy and strong in its movements, it testifies thus

to the free and generous circulation of all its nutritious fluids, of

all its productive forces, by a physiognomy radiant with happiness!

The Universal Circulus

I

The universal circulus is the destruction of every religion, of all

arbitrariness, be it elysian or tartarean, heavenly or infernal. The

movement in the infinite is infinite progress. This being the case, the

world can no longer be a duality, mind and matter, body and soul. It

cannot be a mutable thing and an immutable one, which involves

contradiction—movement excluding immobility and vice versa—but must be,

on the contrary, an infinite unity of always-mutable and always-mobile

substance, which implies perfectibility. It is through eternal and

infinite movement that the infinite and eternal substance is constantly

and universally transformed. It is by a fermentation at all instants; it

is by passing through the filtering sieve of successive metamorphoses,

by the progressive emancipation of species, from mineral to vegetable,

from vegetable to animal and from instinct to intelligence; it is by an

ascending and continuous circulation that it is raised gradually and

constantly from the near inertia of the solid to the subtile agility of

the fluid, and that, from vaporization to vaporization, it constantly

approaches ever purer affinities, always in the midst of a work of

purification, in the great crucible of the universal laboratory of the

worlds. Thus, movement is not separate from substance; it is identical

to it. There is no substance without movement, as there is no movement

without substance. What we call matter is raw mind or spirit; what we

call mind or spirit is wrought matter.

As it is with the human being, summary of all the terrestrial beings,

essence of all the inferior kingdoms, so it is with the universal being,

encyclopedia of all the atomic and sidereal beings, infinite sphere of

all the finite spheres—the universal being, like the human being, is

perfectible. It has never been, is not, and will never be perfect.

Perfectibility is the negation of perfection. To limit the infinite is

impossible, as it would no longer be infinite. As far as thought can

reach, it cannot discover its own limits. It is a sphere of extension

which defies all calculations, where the generations of universes and of

sidereal multiverses gravitate from evolution to evolution without ever

being able to reach the end of the voyage, the ever more remote

frontiers of the unknown. The absolute infinity in time and in space is

eternal movement, eternal progress. Put a limit to that infinity without

limits—a God, any heaven whatsoever—and immediately you limit movement,

limit progress. It is like putting it on a chain like the pendulum of a

clock, and to saying to it: “When you’re at the end of your swing, stop!

You shall go no further.” It is placing the finite in the place of the

infinite. Well! Don’t we realize that perfection is always relative,

that absolute perfection is immobility, and that consequently

immobilized perfection is something absurd and impossible? Only idiots

could dream that up. There is and can be no absolute except

perfectibility in the universal infinity. The more a being is perfected,

the more it aspires to perfect itself further. Would nature, which has

given us infinite aspirations, have lied to us, promising more than it

could give? Where has she ever been seen to lie? One must be a Christian

and a civilized person, which is to say a cretin and a eunuch, to

imagine with delight a paradise in which old Jehovah is enthroned. Could

you imagine anything more stupid and boring? Could you imagine these

blessed ones, these saints cloistered in the clouds as in a convent, all

their pleasure consisting of telling their rosaries and ruminating, like

brutes, on praises to the reverend father God, that unchanging superior,

that pope of popes, that king of kings, having the mother abbess Virgin

Mary to his left, and to his right the child Jesus, the heir apparent, a

great oaf who carries, with the air of a seminarian, his crown of

thorns, and who,—in the representation of the mystery of the

so-sacrosanct Trinity,—fills—with his immaculate mother cradling in her

lap the peacock Holy Spirit, which spreads its tail,—the role of two

thieves on the cross, nailed on each side of the greatest of criminals,

the supreme and divine creator of all the oppressions and all the

servitudes, of all the crimes and all the abjections, the Word and the

incarnation of evil! In the earthly convents, at least, men and women

can still console themselves for their imperfection, for their deadly

tortures, by thinking of a future perfection, of another and immortal

life, of celestial bliss. But in heaven every aspiration more elevated

is forbidden them: are they not at the apogee of their being? The very

high and all-powerful magistrate, the one who judges, in last resort and

without appeal, the living and the dead, has given them the maximum of

beatitude. From now on, they have taken on the cassock of the elect;

they drag, in paradise, in forced idleness, the ball and chain of their

days; and they are condemned for all time! There is no appeal for mercy

possible; no hope of change, no glimmer of future movement can reach

down to them. The hatch of progress is forever sealed above their heads;

and, like the conscript-for-life in his hulk, immortal galley slaves,

they are forever fastened to the chain of the centuries in the eternal

heavenly stay!

The only diversions these poor souls enjoy consists of chanting hymns

and prostrating themselves before the sovereign master, that cruel old

man who, in the times of Moses, wore a blue robe and curly beard, and

who according to the current fashion, must wear today a black coat and a

stiff collar, mutton-chop sideburns or an imperial goatee, with spittle

in place of his heart, and a rainbow of satin around the neck. The

Empress Marie and her divine ladies-in-waiting most certainly have

crinolines under their petticoats, and most certainly the saints, in the

livery of court, are starched, cravated, pomaded and curled neither more

nor less than the diplomats. Their blessed grandesses doubtless bang

away at the piano for all of the holy eternity, and their blessed

excellencies turn the hand of the organ-of-paradise… What fun they must

have! That must be amusing! It is true that I am not rich, but I would

certainly still give some few pennies to see such a spectacle—to watch

for a moment, you understand, not to remain there; and only on the

condition of paying on the way out, if I was pleased and satisfied. And

yet, on reflection, I find it hard to believe that what goes on inside

is worth even a trifling sum at the door. Is it not said: “Happy are the

poor in spirit, the kingdom of heaven belongs to them”? That property

will never delight me. Definitely, at times, the holy Gospels display a

naïveté that is… amusing: bestow then some donkey’s ears on all the

laureates of the faith! These first fathers of the Church must have been

mischievous: might as well confess right off that paradise is not worth

the four fetters of a… Christian. And to admit that women have been left

to take the promises of these Lovelaces of superstition, that they have

smiled at all these cretinous seductions, that they have given their

love for this anti- and ultra-human paradise! To admit that the men have

been taken in like the women, that they have believed all these ignoble

ones—nonsense, that they have worshipped them!—Poor human

nature!—However, one will admit that it would be difficult to invent

anything more detrimental to the happiness of humans who do not already

have the pleasure of being absolutely poor in spirit. In truth, I would

reckon myself happier to be a convict in prison than one of the chosen

in paradise. In prison, I would still live by my hopes. Every progress

would not be completely closed to me, and my thoughts, like my physical

strength, could attempt an escape from the galleys. And the eternity of

the life of a man is not so long as the perpetuity of the life of a

saint. The universal movement, by transforming me from life to death,

will finally deliver me from my torture. I will be reborn free. While in

the case of the heavenly imprisonment it is immobility without end,

knees bent, hands clasped, head bowed, brow void of hope—an

unprecedented torture, with body and soul, muscles and fibers put to the

question under the inquisitorial eye of God…

When I think that, profiting from the deterioration of my faculties,

brought on by age or illness, a priest could come at the hour of my

death, and give me, one way or another, the absolution of my sins, of my

heresies; that he could deliver to me, a subject suspected or convicted

of lèse-divinité, a lettre de cachet for heaven, and send me to rot in

that divine Bastille without a ray of hope of ever leaving it,

brrrrrrr!… that gives me shivers. Happily, the expected paradises are

like castles in Spain: they only exist in imaginations suffering from

mental alienation; or, like houses of cards, the least breath of reason

is enough to knock them down. However, I declare it here: On the day

when death weighs down on me, let those who can surround me then, if

they are my friends, if they respect the wishes of my reason, and not

allow my agony to be soiled by a priest and my cadaver sullied by the

church. A free thinker, I want to die as I have lived, in rebellion.

Living and upright, I protest strongly and in advance against every such

profanation of my remains. A particle of humanity, I want even after my

death to serve the education and life of humanity; that is why I leave

my body to the practitioner who wants to make an autopsy of it and study

the organs of a man who did all that he could to be worthy of that name;

and that I ask him, if it is possible, to inter the remains as

fertilizer in a sown field.

But let us return to our subject, the universal circulus. The unlimited

sphericity of the infinite and its absolute movement of rotation and

gravitation,—its perfectibility, in short, is demonstrated by all that

which strikes our view and our understanding. Everything turns, in us

and around us, but never precisely in the same circle. Every rotation

tends to raise itself, to approach a purer ideal, a remote utopia which

will be realized one day in order to make place for another utopia, and

thus progressively from ideal to ideal and from realization to

realization.

On the earth, all beings, our subalterns, at whatever degree they are

placed in the hierarchy of kingdoms or of species, minerals, vegetables

or animals, tend towards the human ideal. As with the infinitely small,

so with the infinitely large—our globe and the multitude of globes which

follow it at a distance in one single whirl, tend equally, whatever

their relative superiority or inferiority, towards their luminous ideal,

the sun. And all approach it each day, however insensibly: the man, like

the sun, tends in his turn towards some more utopian spheres, by an

ascending and continuous gradation; and always thus until the end of

ends, or rather without end or terminus.—The mineral pivots

imperceptibly on itself and draws to itself all that it can appropriate

of the lesser orders; it grows and extends itself, and then it entrusts

to some conducting agents a few fragments of its exuberance and feeds

the plant.—In its turn, the plant grows, rocking in the breeze and

blossoming in the light. The insects gather pollen from it; it offers

them its honey and its fibers, everything it has stolen from the bowels

of the earth and that it has made to rise to the light of day through

the filters of its tissues. The insects and worms then become the prey

of the birds. The plant itself is feed for the large animals. Already

the mineral has been transformed into flesh and bone, and the sap has

become blood; instinct is more prompt, and movement more pronounced. The

gravitation continues. Man assimilates the vegetable and the animal, the

grass and the grain, the honey and the fruit, the flesh and the blood,

the gas and the sap, the breezes and rays. Terrestrial star, he pumps

through all his pores the emanations of his inferiors. He raises them

drop by drop, bit by bit, to his level and returns to them to knead

again that which is still too coarse for him to incarnate within

himself. In just the same way, he exhales through thought the aromas too

pure to be retained in his calyx, and he scatters them on humanity.

Humanity, after having incorporated them, integrates everything that can

sympathize with its degree of perfection, and returns for kneading to

the instinctive species, to the inferior orders, that which is too

coarse for it in these fluids, and exhales that which is too subtile

towards the higher humanities of the outer spheres.

Thus it is with the planets moving around the sun, and with the sun

moving in its turn with all its satellites around another more elevated

center, star of that star.

Now, if everything turns first in a spiral, from its need for

preservation, and if, turning on itself, everything reaches beneath

itself, from its need for alimentation, and raises itself above itself,

from its need for expression; if life is a perpetual revolution, a

circle always in movement, each movement of which modifies its nature;

if all movement is a progress, and if the more rapid the movement of

rotation and gravitation is, the more it accelerates progress in us; can

men and women, to whom analogy demonstrates all these things, do less

than to bow to the evidence? Can we not desire to be revolutionaries,

and, being revolutionaries, not desire to be more revolutionary still?

For the human being, to live the life of the mineral, vegetable or

animal, to live the life of stones or brutes, is not to live; and to

live the life of the civilized persons is to live the life of stones and

brutes. Humans, let us not stiffen against our destiny, but deliver

ourselves with passion to its teachings; let us advance boldly to the

discovery of the unknown; reach out to progress in order to accomplish

with it humanitary evolution in the great circle of perfectible beings

and societies; let us initiate ourselves fearlessly into the mysteries

of the eternal and universal revolution in the infinite. The infinite

alone is great, and the revolution only has malice for those who would

remain outside its circle. Let us live by movement for movement, by

progress and for progress, regardless of whether the grave is close and

the cradle far. What is death to us, if it is still movement, and if

movement is still progress? If that death is only a regeneration, the

dissolution of our crumbling unity, an organism incapable for the moment

of moving itself, perfectibly in its continuous disaggregation, and,

moreover, the re-aggregation of the plurality of our being in younger

and more perfectible organisms? If that death, finally, is only the

passage from our state of senility to the embryonic state, the mold, the

matrix of a more turbulent life, the crucible of a purer existence, a

transmutation of our brass into gold and a transfiguration of that gold

into a thousand coins, animated and diverse, and all stamped with the

effigy of Progress? Death is only frightening for those who bask in

their own muck and are transfixed in their porcine husks. For, at the

hour of the decomposition of his organs, those will adhere, by their

heaviness and vileness, as they adhered during their lives, to all that

which is mud and stone, stench and torpor. But those who, instead of

growing fat and sinking willingly into their ignominy, burned their fat

to produce light; those who acted with their voice and strength, with

heart and intelligence which will be invigorated by labor and love, by

movement—those, at the hour when the last of their days are used up;

when they has no more oil in their lamp nor elasticity in their works;

when the largest part of their substance, long since volatilized,

journeys already with the fluids; those, I tell you, will be themselves

reborn, in conditions made more perfectible to the degree that they had

labored at their own perfectibilization. Moreover, does not death have a

place in all the instants of the lives of beings? Can the body of a man

preserve for a single moment the same molecules? Does not every contact

constantly modify it? Can it not breathe, drink, eat, digest, think,

feel? Every modification is at once a new death and a new life, more

painful and more inferior to the degree that the alimentation and the

physical and moral digestion have been idler or more coarse; easier and

superior to the degree that they have been more active or refined.

II.

Just as the human digests the vegetable and animal, assimilates their

juice or essence and discharges their skin and excremental detritus as

the manure that will give birth to lesser beings; just so humans digest

the hominal and the generations of hominals, their juice or essence and

discharge their skin and excremental detritus as the manure on which

will wallow and pasture the bestial and vegetative societies.

Like the works of a mill, the individual organism of the human being and

the organism of humanity grind in their gears the fruit of good and

evil, and separate the good from the bad, the bran from the flour. The

bran is cast in the trough for the livestock, the flour is gathered by

the human being and serves its nutrition. The good is destined to the

highest classes of beings, the bad to the lowest. The one is transformed

into white bread or into cake and is set on the table on trays of

porcelain or silver at the feast of the intelligences; the other remains

raw or is transformed into slops, and falls in the feed trough for the

farm stock or beasts of burden. The good or bad grain, and each grain of

that grain, is treated according to its value, punished or rewarded

according to its merit. Each carries within itself its chastisement and

its recompense, the human being as much as the grain; its purity or

impurity makes its paradise or hell in the present, its hell or heaven

in the future.

All labor is an instrument of progress, all idleness is a straw bed for

decrepitude. Labor is the universal law; it is the organ of purification

for all beings. No one can escape it without committing suicide, for we

can be born and grow, form and develop only by labor. It is through

labor that the grain sprouts in the furrow, put sup its stalk and is

crowned with a rich fruit; it is also by labor that the human fetus

closes off and encircles itself in the womb of the mother, and, obeying

an imperious attraction, appears by escaping from the organ of

generation; it is by labor that the child stands on its feet, grows, and

that, become an adult, it is crowned with the double fruit of its manual

and intellectual faculties; it is also by labor that the individual

matures physically and morally before falling under the scythe of Time,

that universal and eternal reaper, in order to begin again, in the

eternal and universal life, a new work and new destinies.—Being,

whatever they may be, are called to labor to the degree that their

attractions are lofty; and their sensations are voluptuous to the degree

that they are purified by labor.

Happy are those whose productive faculties are overexcited by the love

of the good and the beautiful. They will be fruitful in goodness and in

beauty, for no labor is fruitless. Unhappy are those whose productive

faculties sleep, shrouded in the apathy that the dreadful and evil

brings. They will not know the joys that hard-working and generous

passions give. All inertia is infertile; all narcissism, every exclusive

adoration of itself is doomed to sterility. Happiness is a fruit that

can be picked only on the high summits, and it has a delicious flavor

only after having been cultivated. For the idle, the inert, as for the

merely cunning, it is too green a fruit: it ripens only for the agile,

the laborers. It is not by sequestering it in our being, by isolating

our hearts from the hearts of our fellows that we can obtain it; it does

not belong to the fratricidal but to the fraternal. Those only can

harvest it who do not fear to put arms and heart and head into it, and

make a communion of individual efforts.

The human and humanity carry within them the seed of individual and

social well-being; it is up to individual and social labor to cultivate

it, if they want to savor its fruits.

It is for having tasted the fruit of the tree of science that, according

to the Jewish and Christian mythologies, we have lost the terrestrial

paradise. Ah! If instead of having only a taste, Humanity had tried to

eat its fill of it, it would not be difficult to recover that Eden, so

narrow and so little regrettable. Then, we could have had it,

prodigiously, without limits and replete with felicities of a very

different sort than those of the primitive ages. I do not say that with

the aid of science we could, like the alleged gods, make something from

nothing, but we could regenerate what exists, make the world a better

world, transform our societies in the civilized state into a society in

the harmonic state, and enter almost without transition from the life of

present ages into that of the future.

The religions, as absurd as they are, nonetheless represent the need for

an ideal innate in humanity. All the fables of the past and present

represent future hopes, the sense of immortality in mortals. Ignorance

and superstition have made shapeless monsters of these aspirations; it

is up to science, to reason freed from its swaddling clothes, to give

them humanitary forms. The human and humanity, as well-perfected as they

will be one day, will nonetheless experience desires which will never

find satisfaction in any present time. The future will always be a

beacon towards which all their efforts will tend, the object of their

constant longings. The call of progress will always resonate in their

ears. Perception will always be superior and will always reach further

than realization. Human beings sense clearly that all is not closed

forever under the lid of the coffin. The idea of progress protests not

only against all destruction, but also against all degeneration; and not

only against all degeneration, but against all that which is not

regeneration and perfectibilization. Ignorance and superstition have

imagined the immortality of the soul and the heavenly resurrection. I

believe I have demonstrated that there is no soul distinct from the

body; and there would be an inadmissible duality unless that soul still

obeyed the same laws of decomposition as the body. The absolute soul and

absolute paradise would be the negation of progress; and we can no more

deny progress than we can movement. God, in the religious as in the

philosophical sense, can no longer exist with regard to us, as we

ourselves cannot exist as God with regard to the myriads of atoms of

which our body is the Great-All. It is not the human body, in its small

totality, which creates and directs these myriads of atoms of which it

is composed; it is these atoms, instead, that create it and direct it by

moving according to their passional attractions. Far from being their

God, the human being is hardly anything but their temple: it is the

beehive or anthill animated by these innumerable multitudes of the

imperceptible. The universal being would not, any more than the human

being, be the creator or the director of the colossal multitudes of

worlds of which it is made up; it is these worlds, instead, which create

and direct it. Far from being their maker, their producer—their God, as

the metaphysicians say—the universal being is hardly anything but the

workshop or, at most, the product of the infinity of beings. How then

would it be the motor of each, if it is only the machine of which each

is the motor? God and the absolute is denied by everything in nature

that has life. The progress which is movement and the movement which is

progress issue them a certificate of non-existence, characterize them as

imposters. If the absolute could exist above us, we would be the

absolute for that which is below us, and movement and progress would not

exist. Life would be nothingness, and nothingness cannot be conceived.

All that we know is that life exists: thus movement exists, thus

progress exists, and thus the absolute does not exist. All that we can

conclude is that the circulus exists in universality as it exists in

individuality. Like every individuality, the universality, however

infinite it may be, is itself only a rotation and a spherical

gravitation which, moving more and more from the darkness and chaos and

approaching more and more light and harmony, perfects itself by working

itself ceaselessly, by a mechanism or organism that is constantly more

rectified… But all of that absolutely contradicts the idea of a God from

which everything emanates and towards which everything returns, the idea

that everything has been created, by God, from nothingness, in order to

be annihilated in the bosom of the same God—which is to say, something

starting from nothing in order to lead to nothing, going beyond the

absurd in order to fall back into the absurd. God, source of all things,

central point from which everything follows and towards which all

returns, is one of these contradictory rationales that one can give to

the children of men and to the humanities-in-infancy, because their

still-sleeping intelligence cannot yet respond. But it is absolutely

absurd. A river cannot flow back towards its source. The source is no

more eternal than the river. They both exist only on the condition of

movement, which is to say of progress, of birth and of death, of

generation and regeneration. Like the river, the source has a cause. It

is not everything, this small central point from which gushes the living

water which produces the stream. The opening is only an effect, it is

not a cause; and, by returning from the effect to the cause, we would

find that the cause is still only the effect of another cause, and so

forth. God explains nothing. It is a word to cross out of the vocabulary

of men, since it serves to quibble with the difficulty without resolving

it. God is only a mannequin, the breastplate (or shirtfront) of

ignorance, a stick in the wheels of progress, a snuffer on the light, a…

rag in a lantern! It is time to cleanse the universal language of it.

Excrement of human cretinism, from now on it belongs to the Domange

Academy and the consorts: let it reign in the pits of the Villette, and

let it, reduced to powder and cast to the four winds, serve finally as

fertilizer to movement, to the eternal and universal and perfectible

creation, to the unlimited development of the infinite.

God!… In truth is it possible that two men agree on the meaning that

they give to this word? I do not accept that for the needs of the

dialectic it should be necessary to resort to it. Let a philosopher

employ it in his writings, and, if it is a Catholic who reads them, he

would only want to see,—despite whatever cautions the author has

given,—the God of his own religion. If he is a Calvinist, a Lutheran, a

Israelite, a Muslim, a Hindu, a believing philosopher or a philosophical

believer, each would not want and would not be able to see anything but

the God of his own imagination. In the end, these three cabalistic

letters will represent as many different Gods as there are readers or

listeners. I do not see what need the dialectic could have of the word,

and I believe that it would do better and more wisely to do without it.

New things require new words. I know that there are many other

expressions which we use, myself as much as anyone, and which do not

have the same meaning for everyone: it is an evil which it is necessary

to try to remedy, otherwise we would discuss a long time without

understanding each other. GOD being the first cause of all social

falsities, the source of all human errors, the capital lie, GOD can no

longer be employed in the discussion except as an abusive term, as a

spatter spit from our lips or our pen. It is not enough to be an

atheist, it is necessary to be a theocide. It is not enough to deny the

Absolute; it is necessary to affirm Progress, and to affirm it in

everything and everywhere.

Defects in logic are what mislead the greatest thinkers, what carry

perturbation to the mass of intelligences. It is because we is not in

agreement with ourselves that often we cannot come to agreement with

others. All of us who affirm the movement in the infinite and

consequently infinite progress, the single and solidary universality,

affirm equally the movement in ourselves and consequently progress, the

single and solidary individuality. Let is deny duality in the finite as

we deny it in the infinite. Let us reject that absurd hypothesis of the

immortality of the soul, of the absolute in the finite, when we have the

proof in the body that every finite thing is perishable, divisible and

multipliable, which is to say progressively perfectible. Matter is not

one thing and spirit another, but one same and single thing which

movement constantly diversifies. The spiritual is only the result of the

corporeal; this is not a matter of spirituality but of spirituosity. The

soul or, to put it better, thought is to the human being what alcohol is

to wine. When we speak of the spirit of wine, we speak of an entirely

material thing. Why should it be otherwise when it is a question of the

spirit of a human being! Do you still believe then that the earth is

flat, that the heavens are a cupola to serve it as a dome, and that the

sun and stars are candles lit by the creator God in honor of Adam and

Eve and their descendants? And if you no longer believe in these

supposed revelations, in these charlatanries or in this aberration of

the faith, and if you believe in what science and the genius of

observation teaches you, in virtue of what reason would you want spirit

to be distinct from matter? And, even being distinct, that the one be

the movement and the other inertia, and that precisely the one to which

you attribute movement was never-changing in its individuality?

Inexplicable paradox! Well, observation tells you, through my testimony,

that all that which has been vapor or dust and is grouped and has taken

finished, definite form, will come away grain by grain, drop by drop,

molecule by molecule and will scatter into the undefined, in order to

assume, not another form, but a multiplicity of other forms, and will

leave these multiple forms anew in order to divide again and multiply

and progress eternally in the infinite. In order to be convinced of it,

there is no need of having studied Greek or Latin; it is only necessary

to examine the analogy, to infer and to deduce.

I have established that all that which is inferior to human beings tends

to gravitate towards them. The human being is the summary of terrestrial

creation. The Earth is a being, animated like all beings and endowed

with various organs proper to life. Humanity is its brain, or rather it

is that part of it which, in the human brain, we have called the gray

matter, the eminently intelligent part; for the animal and the vegetal,

and the mineral even—in a certain proportion—also live under the

terrestrial skull and form the ensemble of its brain. Alone,—of all the

atoms which live obscurely in the innards of the planetary body or rest,

vegetate, crawl, walk or fly by the light between the soil and the

atmosphere,—humans are a perfectible species. They possess some

faculties which are unknown to other beings or which are hardly sensible

among them: that of memory, for example, or calculation; that of the

emission and transmission of idea. Unlike the mineral, vegetable and

animal, the hominal generations succeed and do not resemble one another;

they always progress and do not know the limit of their perfectibility.

Eh! well, that which exists for the earth obviously exists for human

beings. The human being is another globe, a small world which also has

in it its privileged race, its humanity in miniature, the ideal of all

the atomic species that people and form its body. That humanity is

called the brain. It is towards it that gravitate all the kingdoms or

all the molecular species of the human body. These molecules,—the most

revolting as well as what we might call the most inert,—all tend to rise

from their beds and their lower natures to that type of superiority

which lives under the human skull. And, as humanity, the intelligent

part of the brain of the terrestrial body, is perfectible, the

cervellity, or intelligent part of the brain, which is the humanity of

the human body, is also perfectible. While outside of the brain, the

lower molecules only act mechanically, so to speak, and with more

inertia the lower they are place on the scale of the progression of the

kingdoms or species; in the brain, on the contrary, capstone of hominal

creation, the movement is rapid and intelligent. The brain of the human

being, like the brain of the planet, also has its three, or rather its

four gradations which corresponds to the four kingdoms: the mineral, the

vegetable, the animal and the hominal. The cretin, for example, who in

the human race is the being most dispossessed of intelligence, has, in

the brain, in the state of development, only matter recumbent and

vegetative, that which corresponds to the mineral and vegetable, but

where the mineral prevails in volume over the vegetable. The imbecile is

the one in whose brain the vegetable prevails over the mineral, and

where there can be found a little of the animal, which is to say of

matter of a creeping and somewhat instinctive sort. In the civilized

person, all three kingdoms are developed in the brain, but the animal

kingdom prevails over the other two. That which corresponds to the

hominal, which is to say to intelligent matter, is still in a state of

infancy or savagery, and dispersed under the skull, amid the virgin

forests of the vegetal system, between the blocks of rock of the mineral

system and exposed in its weakness and nudity to the ferocity of the

animal system.—It is then the industrial and scientific labors of these

generations of perfectible atoms, moving between our two temples as

between two poles; it is their joys and their pains, their science or

their ignorance, their individual and social struggles which constitute

our thought. Depending on whether these infinitesimals are more or less

in the harmonic state; whether they obey among themselves the natural

law of liberty—to anarchy, to autonomy—or the artificial law of

authority—to monarchy, to tyranny; whether they are under the empire of

superstition or they are freed from it; whether their populations are

more or less given over to pauperism and aristocracy, or rich with

equality and fraternity; whether these small diminutives of humans are

more or less penned up between national barriers and the fences of

private property, or circulate more or less easily from one passional

height, home or homeland, to another, and from one craneological

continent to another; finally, according to whether they are more or

less free or more or less enslaved, and also whether we ourselves are

more or less dignified or more or less close to slavery or liberty.—The

cervelain being, like the human being, takes in as food everything that

is below it, discharges from the lower organs that which is too coarse,

assimilates that which is perfectible enough to become incarnate in it,

and exhales outside, on the wings of human thought, that which is too

subtile to remain captive in it. Thus we incorrectly classify mind and

matter as being two distinct things, the one mobile and immutable, the

other mutable and immobile, the one invisible and impalpable, the other

palpable and visible. Everything that is mobile is mutable, and

everything that is mutable is mobile. That which is palpable and visible

for the human being, the infinitely large, is invisible and impalpable

for the cervelain being, the infinitely small. That which is impalpable

and invisible for the human being is visible and palpable for the being

placed higher in the hierarchy of beings, the humanitary beings or the

terrestrial being. For the beings infinitely more perfected than us,—the

humanities of the astral spheres, I suppose,—what we will regard as a

fluid, they will consider as solid; and what they will regard as fluid

will be regarded as solid by the humanities still more elevated in

superiority. The most subtile, here, for the one, is, there, for the

other, what becomes the coarsest. Everything depends on the point of

view and the condition in which the being is placed. The last word of

the cervelain being is certainly not the skull, as the last word of the

human being is certainly not the terrestrial skull. The human being is

not the absolute of the one, and humanity is not the absolute of the

other. Without doubt, the cervellity gives birth to generations which,

like the human generations, produce and transmit ideas, and accumulate

in the memory of the man of gigantic labors. Without doubt also,

humanity piles generations on generations and progress on progress. The

better, the good, and the best, all increase as a result of the efforts

of each. But the planets, like human beings, are born, grow and die. At

the death of humans or globes, the purified humanities or cervellities

rise by whatever fluid character they have towards spheres in formation

or in expansion and of a more perfectible nature. The progress is

eternal and infinite, after one step another step, after one life

another life, and still and always.

Any being whatsoever, a human being, or the superior or the inferior

that being, is like a sack of grain or of molecules of all the sorts,

which movement, that is to say life and death, fills and empties without

ceasing. These grains, come from the field of production, returns to the

field of production or, according to their degree of perfectibility,

they produce rye or wheat. The content of the sack procreates a

multitude of stalks, and on each stalk each of grains subdivides and

multiplies in the ear. Nothing of that which is can preserve for one

minute its full individuality. Life is a perpetual exchange to the

profit of each. The richest in perfectibility are the most lavish, the

ones who venture the most of their being in circulation: the more the

laborer sows and harvests! The poorest are the stingiest, those who have

their gaze turned inward, who stack molecule on molecule in the hollows

of their being, who seal themselves in their innermost selves, and

waste, in a stupid private contemplation, a capital of faculties, troves

of sensations that external contact would have made bear fruit.

What I want to make well understood, and what I strive to generalize at

the risk of repeating myself, is that the religions, the artificial or

deceitful moralities have had their day, and that they are nothing more

today than immorality or irreligion; it is that there is a morality, a

natural religion to inaugurate on the rubble of the old superstitions,

and that that morality or that religion can be found only in the science

of man and of humanity, of humanity and of universality; it is that the

human like the universe, is one and not double: not matter and spirit,

nor body and soul (matter or inert body, spirit or immaterial soul), but

animated and passional substance, susceptible of thousands and thousands

of metamorphoses and constrained by its animation and its passionality,

by its attractions, to a perpetual upward movement.—What it is important

to note in order to destroy all of the secular theologies, and with them

the authoritarian system which still serves as the basis of the

organization of contemporary societies and postpones the fraternal

communion of humans, is that with movement the absolute cannot exist; it

is that the individuality of the human and of humanity, like the

individuality of all the atomic and sidereal beings, cannot preserve for

one single instant their absolute personality, it is that the movement

revolutionizes them without ceasing and constantly adds something and

takes away something from them; it is that we all, minerals, vegetables,

animals, humans, and stars, would not know how to live in ourselves and

by ourselves; that there is no life without movement, and that movement

is an infinite transformation of the finite thing; it is that we live

only on the condition of taking part in the lives of others, and that

the life in us is more fruitful the more we sow it outside the plots,

plots which returns to us in ripe and abundant crops; and more lively as

we give it more external elements, as we put passions in combustion on

its hearth. Finally, it is that the more we give off light and caloric,

the more we expend intelligence and love, the more we raise ourselves

with swiftness from apotheosis to apotheosis in regions more and more

elevated, more and more ethereal.

Everything is solidary in universality. Everything is composed,

decomposed and recomposed according to its reciprocal and progressive

attractions, the atom like the human, the human like the stars, and the

stars like the universes. The universes are atoms in universality, as

the atom is itself a universe in its individuality. The infinite exists

at the two antipodes of creation, for divisibility on a small scale as

for multiplicity on a grand scale. The short view of the human, its weak

understanding cannot sound its incommensurable depths. The finite cannot

embrace the infinite, but can only sense it. But what the thinkers,

supplied in the powerful instrument that we call analogy, can touch and

make thought touch, what they must proclaim by strokes of logic on all

the public places and in all the public papers, is that the individual

being is not the consequence of the universal being, but that the being

universal is the consequence of individual beings; it is the infinitely

large group of which the infinitely small are the constitutive members.

God, the soul, and the spirit are myths that Humanity, approaching the

age of reason, must toss without regret into the rag basket like some

dolls from our youth. Science, from now on, and no longer superstition,

must occupy our thoughts. Let us not forget that humanity is a daughter

and fiancée of progress. The polichinelles, the good gods and the

devils, all the Guignols and the puppets armed with sticks, are of

childishness unworthy of it, today, as its minority comes to its end. It

is time, high time, that it thinks of its emancipation; that it girds

its forehead with the intellectual banner; that it finally prepares

itself for its social destinies, if it does not want to serve forever as

laughingstock for the Humanities of other globes.

To sum up, I say:

Movement, which is to say progress, being proven, the absolute can no

more exist in the finite than in the infinite, and thus the absolute

does not exist.

As a consequence, God, universal or absolute soul of the infinite, does

not exist.

And as a further consequence, the soul, the absolute of the human,

individuality one and indivisible, eternally finished form, does not

exist.

Matter is all. Movement is the attribute of matter, and progress the

attribute of movement.

Like matter and movement, progress is eternal and infinite.

The universal circulus does not lead to absolute perfection. It conducts

to infinite perfectibility, to unlimited progress, the consequence of

eternal and universal movement.

Thus, absolute perfection does not exist, and cannot exist. If it

existed, progress would not exist.

Absolute perfection is against all evidence, and absurd.

Movement is, obviously, truth.

No transaction is possible between these two terms: it is necessary

either to believe in God and in his diminutives and deny movement, or to

affirm movement and invalidate God.

—God is the negation of Progress.

—Progress is the negation of God.

[1] Salomon de Caus was credited, incorrectly, with the invention of the

steam engine.—Editor.

[2] A guide.