'But what are we wearing ourselves out for?'
'For the triumph of justice,' Proudhon tells him.
And the new Cain answers:
'But who charged me with the triumph of justice?'
'\Vho?-\vhy, is not your whole vocation, your whole life, the incarnation of justice? '
''Who set u p that object?' Cain will answer. ' I t is too stale; there is no God, but the Commandments remain. Justice i s not my vocation; work is not a duty but a necessity; for me the family is not life-long fetters but the setting for my life, for my development. You \Vant to keep me in slavery, but I rebel against you, against your yard-stick, just as you have been revolting all your life against bayonets, capital, and Church, just as all the French revolutionaries rebelled against the feudal and Catholic tradition. Or do you think that after the taking of the Bastille, after the Terror, after war and famine, after bourgeois king and bourgeois republic, I shall believe you \vhen you say that Romeo had no right to love Juliet because those old fools of Montagues and Capulets kept up an everlasting feud, and that, even at thirty or forty, I must not choose the companion of my life without my father's permission, that a woman who has been betrayed must be punished and disgraced? Why, what do you take me for with your justice? '
And i n support o f Cain, \Ye would add, from our dialectical side, that Proudhon's whole conception of an aim is utterly inconsistent. This teleology is also theology ; this is the February Republic, that is, the same as the July Monarchy, but without Louis-Philippe. ·what difference is there between predetermined expediency and providence?14
H Proudhon himself said: 'Rien ne ressemble plus a Ia premeditation que Ia logique des faits.'
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After emancipating human nature beyond the limit, Proudhon took fright when he looked at his cont('mporaries, and, in order that these convicts, these 'ticket-of-leave' men, might do no mischief, he tried to catch them in the trap of the Roman family.
The doors of the restored atrium, without its Lares and Penates, have been flung open ; but through them no longer is Anarchy seen, or the annihilation of authority and the state, but a strict order of seniority, with centralisation, with interference in family affa irs, with inheritance and deprivation of it as a punishment; and with these all the old Roman sins look out of every crevice with the dead eyes of statues.
Th(' family of antiquity naturally implies the ancient conception of the fatherland with its jealous patriotism, that ferocious virtue which has shed ten times more blood than all the vices put together.
Man bound in serfdom to the family becomes once more the bondslave of the soil. His movements arc circumscribed, he has put down roots into his land ; only upon it he is what he is: 'the Frenchman living in Russia,' says Proudhon, 'is a Russian, and not a Frenchman.' No more colonies, no more factories abroad ; let every man live a t home . . . .
'Holl�nd will not p('rish,' said William of Orange in the fearful hour; 'slw will go aboard ships and sail off to Asia, and here we shall break down the dykes.' It is peoples like that who arc free.
Tl!(' English arc lik(' that: as soon as they begin to be oppressed, they sail over the ocean and there found a younger, freer England. And yet nobody, of course, could say of the English that th('y do not love their country, or that they are lacking in national feeling. Sailing out in all directions, England has peopled half the world ; whil(' France, lacking in sap, has lost one SPt of coloni('S and does not know what to do with the rest.
She does not ewn n('ed them; Franc(' is pleased with herself and clings morp and more to her centre, and the centre to its master.
\Vhat indcpPndence can there be in such a country?
On the other hand, how can one abandon France, la belle FranccJ 'Is not shP PVPn now tlw freest country in the world, is not her language the best language, hPr literature the finest litl•ratur(', is not her syllabic line more musical than the Gr('ck hexam('tPr?' Moreover hPr universal genius appropriates to herself the thought and tlw works of all ages and all countries:
'have not Shakespeare and Kant, GoPthc and HPgel been made at honw in FrancP?' And what is more: Proudhon forgot that she refined them and dressed them, as landowners dress peasants whPn the'' take them into their household.
Paris-Italy-Paris
43 1
Proudhon concludes his book with a Catholic prayer adapted to socialism; all he had to do was to secularise a few Church phrases, and to put the Phrygian cap on them in the place of the cowl, for the prayer of the 'Byzantine' bishops to be at once the very thing for the bishop of socialism.
What chaos! Proudhon, emancipated from everything except reason, wished to remain not only a husband after the style of Bluebeard, but also a French nationalist-with his literary chauvinism and his unlimited paternal authority; and therefore after the strong, vigorous mind of a free man one seems to hear the voice of a savage greybeard, dictating his will and wishing now to preserve for his children the tottering edifice that he has been undermining all his life.
The Latin world docs not like freedom, it only likes to sue for it; it sometimes finds the force for liberation, never for freedom.
Is it not sad to see such 11w11 as August<> Cumtc and Pruudhon setting up with their last word, the one a sort of mandarin hierarchy, the other his domestic penal servitude and apotheosis of an inhuman percat mundus, fiat justitia!
Appe11dix : Seconcl 1 '/JOLitjlJts
Oil tlze f/J/ 01 n.cuz Question,
I
. . . ON ONE HAND we have Proudhon's family, submissively welded and tightly clinched together, indissoluble marriage, indivisible paternal authority-a family in which for the sake of the community the persons perish, except one, the ferocious marriage in which is accepted the unchangcability of feelings and the abracadabra of a vow; �n the other hand we have the doctrines that are springing up in which marriage and the family are unbound from each other, the irresistible force of passion is recognised, the non-liability of the past and the independence of the individual.
On one hand we have woman almost stoned for infidelity; on the other jealousy itself put hors la loi as a morbid, monstrous feeling of egoism and proprietorship and the romantic subversion of natural, healthy ideas.
Where is the truth . . . where is the middle line? Twenty-
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three years ago I was already seeking a way out of this forest of contradictions.
We are bold in denial and always ready to fling any of our Peruns1 into the river, but the Peruns of home and family life are somehow 'waterproof,'2 they always bob up. Perhaps there is no sense left in them-but life is left; evidently the weapons used against them simply glided over their snaky scales, have felled them, stunned them . . . but have not killed them.
Jealousy . . . Fidelity . . . Infidelity . . . Purity.