All parties and shades of opinion in the petit bourgeois world have gradually divided into t\vo chief camps: on one hand the bourgeois property-owners, obstinately refusing to abandon their monopolies; on the other the bourgeois who have nothing, \Vho want to tear the wealth out of the others' hands but have not the power: that is on the one hand miserliness, on the other hand envy. Since there is no real moral principle in all this, the adherence of any individual to one or the other side i s determined bv Pxternal cond itions of fortune and social position.
One wave of the opposition after another achieves a victory: that is, prop<'l·ty or position, and passes naturally from the side of envy to the side of miserliness. For this transition nothing can be more favourable than the fruitless swing backwards and for-
� In English in tlw text. Ht>rz!'n has remembered a trifle incorrpctl y the phras<> usPcl hy certain Anglicans to dt>scribe the EstablishPd Church : Tlw Old Firm.' ( R . )
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wards of parliamentary debates-it gives movement and sets limits to i t, provides an appearance of doing something, and an external show of public interest in order to attain its private ends.
Parliamentary government, not as it follows from the popular foundations of the Anglo-Saxon Common Law but as it has taken shape in the law of the State, is simply the wheel in a squirrel's cage-and the most colossal one in the world. Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically-while simulating a triumphant march forward-than is performed by the two English Houses of Parliament?
But just that maintenance of appearance is the main point.
Upon everything belonging to contemporary Europe two traits, obviously derived from the shop, are deeply imprinted: on one hand hypocrisy and secretiveness; on the other ostentation and etalage. It is all window-dressing, buying at half-price, passing off rubbish for the real thing, show for reality, concealing some condition, taking advantage of a literal meaning, seeming instead of being, behaving decorously instead of behaving well, keeping up external Respektabilitii.t instead of inner dignity.
In this world everything is so much a stage-set that even the coarsest ignorance has achieved an appearance of education.
Which of us has not been left blushing for the ignorance of Western European society? (I am not speaking here of men of learning, but of the people who make up what is called society. ) There can be no serious theoretical education; it requires too much time and is too distracting from business. Since nothing that lies outside trading operations and the 'exploitation' of their social position is essential in the petit bourgeois world, their education is bound to be limited. That is what accounts for the absurdity and slowness of mind which we see in the petit bourgeois whenever he has to step off the beaten track. Cunning and hypocrisy on the whole are by no means so clever and so farsighted as is supposed; their endurance is poor, and they are soon out of their depth.
The English are aware of this and so do not leave the beaten track, and put up with the not merely burdensome but, what is worse, absurd inconveniences of their mediaevalism through fear of any change.
The French petit bourgeois have not been so careful, and for all their slyness and duplicity have fallen headlong into an empire.
Full of confidence in their victory they proclaimed universal suffrage as the basis of their new regime. This arithmetical
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banner suited their taste; the truth was determined by addition and subtraction, it could be verified by figures, and marked by pins.
And \Yhat did they put to the decision of the votes of all in the present state of society? The question of the existence of the republic. They wanted to kill it by means of the people, to make of it an empty word, because they did not like i t. Is anyone who respects the truth going to ask the opinion of the first stray man he meets? What if Columbus or Copernicus had put America or the movement of the earth to the 'liOte?
It \'lias shrewdly conceived, but in the end the good souls miscalculated.
The gap between the parterre and the actors, covered at first by the faded carpet of Lamartine's eloquence, grew wider and wider; the blood of June washed the channel deeper; and then the question of the president was put to the irritated people. As answer to the question, Louis-Napoleon, rubbing his sleepy eyes, stepped out of the gap and took everything into his hands-that is the petit bourgeois too, v11ho fancied, from memory of old days, that he would reign and they would govern.
\\'hat you see on the grea t stage of political events is repeated in microscopic form at every hearth. The corn1ption oi petite bourgeoisie has crept into all the secret places of family and private life. Never was Catholicism, never were the ideas of chivalry, impressed on men so deeply, so multifariously, as the bourgeois ideas.
Noble rank had its obligations. Of course, since its rights were partly imaginary, its obligations were imaginary too, but they did provide a certain mutual guarantee between equals. Catholicism laid still more obligations. Feudal lu1ights and believing Catholics often failed to carry out their obligations, but the consciousness that by so doing they were breaking the social allianc!' recognised by themselves prevented them from being lawless in their defections and from justifying their behaviour.
They had their festival attire, their official stage-setting, which were not a lie but were rather their ideal.
\Ve are not now concerned with the nature of that ideal. They were tried and their cause was lost long ago. We only want to point out that petite bourgeoisie on the contrary involves no obliga tions, not even the obligation to serve in the army, so long as then' arc volunteers ; or rather, its only obligation is per fas ct nefas to have property. Its gospel is brief: 'Heap up wealth, multiply thy riches 'til they are like the sands of the sea, use and misuse thy financial and moral capital, without ruining thyself,
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and in fullness and honour thou shalt attain length of years, marry thy children well, and leave a good memory behind thee.'
The rejection of the feudal and Catholic world was essential, and was the work not of the petit bourgeois but simply of free men, that is of men who had renounced all wholesale classifications. Among them were knights like Ulrich von Hutten, gentlemen like Voltaire, watchmakers' apprentices like Rousseau, army doctors like Schiller, and merchants' sons like Goethe. The petit bourgeois took advantage of their work and showed themselves emancipated, not only from monarchs and slavery but from all social obligations, except that of contributing to the hire of the government who guarded their security.
Of Protestantism they made their own religion, a religion that reconciles the conscience of the Christian with the practice of the usurer, a religion so petit bourgeois that the common people, who shed their blood for it, have abandoned it. In England the working class goes to church less than any.