The practice of the surgeon Babeuf could not interfere with the practice of Owen, the man-midwife.
Babeuf wished by force, that is, by authority, to smash what had been created by force, to destroy what had been wrongfully acquired.
37 The followers of Babeuf relied on the constitution accepted by the Convention of 24th June, 1 793, which they considered a genuine expression of the will of the people. (A.S.)
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
5 1 6
With this purpose he laid a plot: i f he had succeeded in making himself master of Paris, the insurrectionary committee would have enjoined his new system upon France, just as the victorious Osmanlis enjoined theirs upon Byzantium ; he would have forced on the French his slavery of general prosperity and, of course, with such violence as would have provoked the most fearful reaction, in the struggle with which Babeuf and his committee would have perished, leaving to the world a great thought in an absurd form, a thought which even now glows under the ashes, and troubles the complacency of the complacent.
Owen, seeing that people of the educated countries \'\'ere growing up towards a transition to a new epoch, had no thought of violence and simply wished to help this development. Just as consistently from his side as Babeuf from his, he set about the study of the embryo, the development of the cell. He began, like all natural scientists, with a particular instance: his microscope, his laboratory, was New Lanark; his study grew and came to puberty along with the cell <Jnd led him to the conclusion that the high road to the installation of a new order was upbringing.
For Owen a plot was unnecessary and a rebellion could only do him harm. He could get on not only with the best government in the \">'orld, the English government, but with any other.
In a government he saw a superannuated, historical fact supported by people who \Wrf' backv.,·ard and undeveloped, and not a gang of bandits which must be caught unawares. While not seeking to overturn the government he also did not in the least seek to amend it. If the saintly shopkeepers had not put a spoke in his wheel, there would be in England and America now hundreds of New Lanarks and New Harrnonies;38 into them would have flowed the fresh vigour of the working population, and little by little they would have drawn off the best vital juices from the State's antiqu<Jted tanks. Why should he struggle with the moribund? He could let them have a natural death, knowing that Pach child brought into his schools, c'est autant de pris from Church and government!
Babeuf ·was guillotined. At the time of his trial he grew into 3A By Owen's magic touch co-oprrativr u•orkrrs' associations began to be established in England; there are as many as 2.00 of them. The Rochdale society, which began modestly and in indigence fifteen years ago with a capital of 2.8 livrrs, is now building with the society's money a factory with two engines. each of 60 h. p., and each costing £30,000. The cooperative societies print a magazine, The Co-operator, which is published exclusively by working men.
England
5 1 7
one of those great personalities, those martyred and slaughtered prophets, before whom a man is compelled to bow. He was extinguished, and on his grave there grew and grew the alldevouring monster of Centralisation. Before this monster individuality withered and was effaced, personality paled and vanished. Never on European soil, from the time of the Thirty Tyrants at Athens to the Thirty Years War, and from that until the decline of the French Revolution, has man been so caught up in the spider's web of government, so enmeshed in the toils of administration, as in the most recent times in France.
v
AuouT THE TIME that the heads of Babeuf and Dorthes fell into the fatal sack at Vendome,39 Owen was living in the same lodgings as another unrecognised genius and pauper, Fulton, and giving him his last shillings in order that he might make models of machines with which he would enrich and benefit the human race. It happened that a certain young officer was displaying his battery to some ladies. In order to show the proper attention he fired off-without the slightest necessity-a few cannon-balls ( he tells this himself) ; the enemy replied: a few men fell dead and others were wounded. The ladies were left thoroughly content with the shock to their nerves. The officer felt some pangs of conscit>nce: 'Those people,' he says, 'perished absolutely unnecessarily' . . . but they were at vvar and this feeling soon passed.
Cela promettait, and subsequently the young man shed more blood than the whole of the Revolution, and demanded in one levy more soldiers than Owen would have needed pupils in order to transform the whole world.
Napoleon had no system, and for others he neither wished wealth nor promised it: wealth he desired only for himself, and by wealth he understood power. Now see how feeble Babeuf and Owen are compared with him! Thirty years after his death his name was enough to get his nephew recognised as Emperor.
What was his secret?
Babeuf wished to enjoin prosperity and a communist republic on people.
Owen wished to educate them to a different economic way of living, incomparably more profitable for them.
Napoleon wanted neither the one nor the other; he understood 39 27th May, 1 797. (A.S.)
M Y P A S T A :-; D T H O U G H T S
5 1 8
that Frenchmen did not i n fact desire to feed on Spartan broth and to return to the morality of Bn�tus the Elder, that they were not very well satisfied that on feast-days 'citizens will assemble to discuss the laws and instn�ct their children in the civic virtues.' But-and this is a different thing-fighting and boasting of their own bravery they do l ike.
Instead of preventing them, or irritating them by preaching perpetual peace, Lacedaemonian fare, Roman virtues and crowns of myrtle :1\'apoleon, seeing how passionately fond they were of bloody glory, began to egg them on against other peoples and himself to go hunting with them. There is no reason to blame him: the French would have been the same even without him; but this identity of tastes entirely explains his people's love for him: he was not a reproach to the mob, for he did not offend it by either his purity or his virtues nor did he offer it a lofty, transfigured ideal. He \Vas neither a chastising prophet nor a sermonising genius. He belonged himself to the mob and he showed it its very self (with its deficiencies and sympathies, its passions and inclinations) elevated into a genius and covered with rags of glory. That is the answer to the enigma of his power and influence ; that is \vhy the mob wept for him, lovingly brought his coffin over and hung his portrait everywhere.
If he did fall, it was not at all because the mob abandoned him, because it discerned the emptiness of his designs, because it grew weary of surrendering its last son and of shedding human blood without reason. He provoked the other peoples to a ferocious resistance, and they began to fight desperately for their slavery and for their masters. Christian morality was satisfied: it would have been impossible to defend one's own enemies with a greater fury!