My Past and Thoughts

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.

Of the Revolution they wanted to make their own republic, but it slipped between their fingers, just as the civilisation of antiquity slipped away from the barbarians-that is, with no place in real life, but with hope for instaurationem magnam.

The Reformation and the Revolution were both so frightened by the emptiness of the world which they had come into that they sought salvation in two forms of monasticism: the cold, dreary bigotry of Puritanism and the dry, artificial, civic morality of republican formalism. Both the Quaker3 and the Jacobin forms of intolerance \Yere based on the fear that the ground v.,·as not firm under their feet; they saw that they needed to take strong measures, to persuade one group of men that this was the church, and the other that this was freedom.

Such is the general atmosphere of European l ife. It is most oppressive and intolerable where the modern Western system is most developed, where it is most true to its principles, where it is most wealthy and most cultured-that is, most industrial. And that is why it is not so unendurably stifling to live in Italy or Spain as it is in England or France . . . . And that is why poor, mountainous, rustic Switzerland is the only corner of Europe into which one can retreat in peace.

3 Here Herzen ignorantly uses the word 'Quaker' as equivalent to 'Nonconformist,' or perhaps, 'Puritan.' It is need!"!ss to point out that tolerance is one of the most prominent principles of the Society of Friends. ( Tr.)

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l\1o11ey ct11d tlze Police

Ir-; THE DECEMBER of 1 849 I learnt that the authorisation for the mortgage of my estate sent from Paris and witnessed at the Embassy had been destroyed, and that after that a distraint had been laid on my mother's fortune. There was no time to be lost and I at once left Geneva and went to my mother's.

It would be stupid and hypocritical to affect to despise property in our time of financial disorder. Money is independence, power, a weapon; and no one flings away a weapon in time of

\var, though it may have come from the enemy and even be rusty. The slavery of poverty is frightful ; I have studied it in all its aspects, living for years with men who have escaped from political shipwrecks in the clothes they stood up in. I thought it right and necessary, therefore, to take every measure to extract what I could from the bear's paws of the Russian government.

Even so I was not far from losing everything. When I left Russia I had had no definite plan; I only wanted to stay abroad as long as possible. The revolution of 1 848 arrived and drew me into its vortex before I had done anything to secure my property.

\Vorthy persons have blamed me for thrO\ving myself headlong into political movements and leaving the future of my family to the will of the gods. Perhaps it was not altogether prudent; but if, when I was living in Rome in 1 848, I had sat at home considering ways and means of saving my property while an awakened Italy was seething before my windows, then I should probably not have remained in foreign countries, but have gone to Petersburg, entered the service once more, might have become a vice-governor, have sat at the head prosecutor's table, and should have addressed my secretary with insulting familiarity and my minister as 'Your Exalted Excellency.'

I had no such self-restraint and good sense, and I am infinitely thankful for it now. My heart and my memory would be the poorer if I had missed those shining moments of faith and enthusiasm ! \Vhat would have compensated me for the loss of them? Indeed, why speak of me? "What would have compensated her whose broken life was nothing afterwards but suffering that ended in the grave? How bitterly would my conscience have

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reproached me if, from over-prudence, I had robbed her of almost the last minutes of untroubled happiness! And after all I did do the important thing: I did save almost all our property except the Kostroma estate.

After the June days my situation became more dangerous. I made the acquaintance of Rothschild, and proposed that he should change for me two Moscow Savings Bank bonds. Business then was not flourishing, of course, and the exchange was very bad ; his terms were not good, but I accepted them at once, and had the satisfaction of seeing a faint smile of compassion on Rothschild's lips-he took me for one of the innumerable princes russes who had run into debt in Paris, and so fell to calling me Monsieur le Comte.

On the first bonds the money was paid promptly; but on the later ones for a much larger sum, although payment was made, Rothschild's agent informed him that a distraint had been laid on my capital-luckily I had withdrawn it all.

In this way I found myself in Paris with a large sum of money in very troubled times, without experience or knowledge what to do with it. Yet everything was settled fairly well. As a rule, the less impetuosity, alarm and uneasiness there is in financial matters, the better they succeed. Grasping money-grubbers and financial cowards are as often ruined as spendthrifts.

By Rothschild's advice I bought myself some American shares, a few French ones and a small house in the Rue Amsterdam which was let to the Havre Hotel.

One of my first revolutionary steps, which cut me off from Russia, plunged me into the respectable class of conservative idlers, brought me acquaintance with bankers and notaries, taught me to keep an eye on the Stock Exchange-in short, turned me into a Western European rentier. The rift between the modern man and the environment in which he lives brings a fearful confusion into private behaviour. We are in the very middle of two currents which are getting in each other's way; we are flung and shall continue to be flung first in one direction and then in the other, until one current or the other finally wins and the stream, still restless and turbulent but now flowing in one direction, makes things easier for the swimmer by carrying him along with it.

Happy the man who knows how to manoeuvre so that, adapting and balancing himsdf among the waves, he still swims on his own course!

On the purchase of the house I had the opportunity of looking more closely into the business and bourgeois world of France.

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The bureaucratic pedantry over completing a purchase is not inferior to ours in Russia. The old notary read me several documents, the statute concerning the reading of the main levee, then the actual statute itself-all this making up a complete folio volume. In our final negotiation concerning the price and the legal expenses, the owner of the house said that he would make a concession and take upon himself the very considerable expenses of the legal conveyance, if I would immediately pay the whole sum to him personally. I did not understand him, since from the very first I had openly stated that I was buying it for ready money. The notary explained to me that the money must remain in his hands for at least three months, during which a notice of sale would be published and all creditors V\'ho had any claims on the house would be called upon to state their case. The house was mortgaged for seventy thousand, but there might be further mortgages in other hands. In three months' time, after inquiries had been made, the purge hypothccaire would be handed to the purchaser and the former owner would receive the purchase money.

The owner declared that he had no other debts. The notary confirmed this.

'Your honour and your hand on it,' I said to him: 'you have no other debts which would concern the house?'

'I willingly give you my word of honour.'

'In that case I agree, and shall come here to-morrow with Rothschild's cheque.'

When I went next day to Rothschild's his secretary flung up his hands in horror:

'They are cheating you ! This is impossible: we will stop the sale if you like. It's something unheard of, to buy from a stranger on such terms.'

'Would you like me to send someone with you to look into the business?' Baron James himself suggested.

I did not care to play the part of an ignorant boy, so I wid that I had given him my word, and took a cheque for the whole sum.

When I reached the notary's I found there, besides the witnesses, the creditor who had c�me to receive his seventy thousand francs. The deed of purchase was read over, we signed it, the notary congratulated me on being a Parisian house-owner-all that \\"as left was to hand over the cheque . . . .

'How vexing ! ' said the house-owner, taking it from my hands;

'I forgot to ask you to draw it in two cheques. How can I pay out the seventy thousand separa tely now? '

'Nothing is easier: go to Rothschild's, they'll give i t you i n two chPques; or, simplPr still, go to the bank.'

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'I'll go if you like,' said the creditor.

The house-ovmer frowned and answered that that was his business, and he would go.

The creditor frowned. The notary good-naturedly suggested that they should go together.

Hardly able to refrain from laughter I said to them:

'Here's your receipt; give me back the cheque, I will go and change it.'

'You will infinitely oblige us,' they said with a sigh of relief; and I went.

Four months later the purge hypothccaire was sent me, and I gained about ten thousand francs by my rash trustfulness.

After the 1 3th of June, 1 849, Rebillaud, the Prefect of Police, laid i nformation against me; it was probably in consequence of his report, that some unusual measures were taken by the Petersburg government against my estate. It ·was these, as I have said, that made me go with my mother to Paris.

We set off through Neuchatel and Besan<;on. Our journey began with my forgetting my greatcoat in the posting-station yard at Berne; since I had on a warm overcoat and warm galoshes I did not go back for it. All went well till we reached the mountains, but in the mountains we were met by snow up to the knees, eight degrees of frost, and the cursed bisc. The

diligence could not go on and the passengers were transferred by twos and threes into small sledges. I do not remember that I have ever suffered so much from cold as I did on that night. My feet were simply in agony, and I dug them into the straw; then the driver gave me a collar of some sort, but that was not much help. At the third stage I bought a shawl from a peasant \YOman for fifteen francs, and wrapped myself in it; but by that time \Ye were already on the descent, and with every mile it became wc:rmer.

This road is magnificently fine on the French side; the vast amphitheatre of immense mountains, so varied in outline, accompanies one as far as Besan<;on itself; here and there on the crags the ruins of fortified feudal castles are visible. In this landscape there is something mighty and harsh, solid and grim; with his eyes upon it, there grew up and was formed a peasant boy, the descendant of old country stock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. And indeed one may say of him, though in a different sense, what was said by the poet of the Florentines: E ticnc ancor del montr e del maci�no. l

I Dante, Inferno, XV, 63. ( A .S.)

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Rothschild agreed to take my mother's bond, but would not cash it in advance, referring to Gasser's letter. The Board of Trustees did in fact refuse payment. Then Rothschild instructed Gasser to request an interview with Nesselrode2 and to inquire of him what was wrong. Ncsselrode replied that, though there was no doubt about the bonds and Rothschild's claim was valid, the Tsar had ordered the money to be stopped, for secret, political reasons.

I remember the surprise in Rothschild's office on the reception of this reply. The eye involuntarily sought at the bottom of the document for the mark of Alaric or the seal of Genghis Khan.

Rothschild had not expected such a trick even from so celebrated a master of despotic affairs as Nicholas.

'For me,' I said to him, 'it is hardly surprising that Nicholas should wish to purloin my mother's money in order to punish me, or hope to catch me with it as a bait; but I could not have imagined that your name would carry so little weight in Russia.

The bonds are yours and not my mother's; when she signed them she transferred them to the bearer (au porteur), but ever since you endorsed them that porteur3 has been you; and you have received the insolent answer: "The money is yours, but master orders me not to pay." '

My speech was successful. Rothschild grew angry, and walked about the room saying:

'No, I shan't allow myself to be trifled with; I shall bring an action against the bank ; I shall demand a categorical reply from the Minister of Finance! '

'Well,' thought I , 'Vronchenko won't understand this a t all. A

"confidential" reply would still have been all right, but not a

"categorical" one ! '

'Here you have a sample o f how familiarly and sans gene the autocracy, upon which the reaction is building such hopes, disposes of property. The communism of the Cossack is almost more dangerous than that of Louis Blanc.'

'I shall think it over,' said Rothschild; 'we can't leave it like this.'

Three days or so after this conversation, I met Rothschild on the boulevard.

'By the way,' he said, stopping me, 'I was speaking of your 2 Nessel rode, Karl Vasilevich ( 1 780- 1 862), Russian Minister for Foreign A ffairs. 1 8 1 6-56. (A.S.) Also inventor of Nesselrode pudding. ( D.M. )

:I This endorsement is done for security in sending cheques, in order that a cheque may not be sent unendorsed, by means of which anybody would be able to receive the money.

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business yesterday to Kiselev.4 You must excuse me, but I ought to tell you that he expressed a very unfavourable opinion of you, and does not seem willing to do anything for you.'

'Do you often see him?'

'Sometimes, at evening parties.'

'Be so good as to tell him that you have seen me to-day, and that I have the worst possible opinion of him, but that even so I don't think it would be at all just to rob his mother on that account.'

Rothschild laughed; I think that from that time he began to surmise that I was not a prince russe, and now he took to addressing me as Baron ; he elevated me thus, I imagine, to make me worthy of conversing with him.

Next day he sent for me; I went at once. He handed me an unsigned letter to Gasser, and added:

'Here is the draft of our letter; sit down, read it carefully and tell me whether you are satisfied with it. If you \vant to add or change anything, we shall do it at once. Allow me to go on \vith my work.'

At first I looked about me. Every minute a small door opened and one Bourse agent after another came in, uttering a number in a loud voice; Rothschild, going on reading, muttered without raising his eyes: 'Yes-no-good-perhaps-enough-' and the number walked out. There were various gentlemen in the room, rank and file capitalists, members of the National Assembly, two or three exhausted tourists with youthful moustaches and elderly cheeks, those everlasting figures who drink-wine-at wateringplaces and are presented at courts, the feeble, lymphatic suckers that drain the sap from aristocratic families and shove their way from the gaming table to the Bourse. They were all talking together in undertones. The Jewish autocrat sat calmly at his table, looking through papers and writing something on them, probably millions, or at least hundreds of thousands.

'vVell,' he said, turning to me, 'are you satisfied?'

'Perfectly,' I answered.

The letter was excellent, curt and emphatic as it should be when one power is addressing another. He wrote to Gasser telling him to request an immediate audience with Nesselrode and the Minister of Finance; he was to tell them that Rothschild was not interested to know to whom the bonds had belonged ; that he has bought them and demands payment, or a clear legal declara-4 This was not P. D. Kiselev, who was in Paris la ter, the well known l\finister of Crown Property, a very decent man; but another one: N. D.

Kise!e,·, afterwards transferred to Rome.

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tion why payment had been stopped ; that in case of refusal he would submit the affair to the judgment of the legal authorities; and he advised careful reflection on the consequences of a refusal, which was particularly strange at a time when the Russian government was negotiating through him for the conclusion of a new loan. Rothschild wound up by saying that in case of further delays he would have to give the matter publicity through the press, in order to warn other capitalists. He recommended Gasser to show the letter to Nesselrode.

'I'm very glad . . . but . . .' he said, holding a pen in his hand and looking me straight in the face with a somewhat ingenuous air . . . 'but, my dear Baron, do you really think that I

�hall sign this letter which, au bout du comptr, might put me on bad terms with Russia-and that for a commission of one half of one per cent?'

I was silent.

'In the first place,' he continued, 'Gasser will have disbursements-nothing is done for nothing in your country-and of course they must be at your expense; and in addition to thathow much do you propose?'

'I think,' I said, 'it is for you to propose and for me to agree.'

'Well, five: what do you say? That's not much.'

'Let me think about it . . . .'

I simply wanted to calculate.

'As long as you like. Besides,' he added with an expression of Mephistophelean irony, 'you can manage this business for nothing. Your mother's rights are incontestable. She is a subject of Wiirttemberg: apply to Stuttgart-the Minister for Foreign Affairs is bound to support her and exert himself to procure payment. For my part, to tell you the truth, I shall be very glad to get this unpleasant affair off my shoulders.'

We were interrupted. I left the office impressed by all the oldfashioned simplicity in his look and his question. If he had asked for ten or fifteen pt>r cPnt, I should have agr!'ed thf'n and there.

His help was essential to me, and he knew this so well that he even put himself out for a Russified subject of Wiirttemberg; but, allowing myself to be guided as of old by the Russian rules of political economy, which ordain that, for whatever distance an izvo::.chik asks for twenty kopecks, one should still try to get him to take fifteen, I told Schomburg, on no sufficient basis, that I proposed that a commission of one per cent might be added.

Schomburg promised to tell him and asked me to come back in half an hour.

When half an hour later I was mounting the staircase of the

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vVinter Palace of Finance in the Rue Laffitte, the rival of Nicholas was coming down it.

'Schomburg has told me,' said His Majesty, smiling graciously, and majestically holding out his own august hand, 'that the letter has been signed and sent off. You will see how they will come round. I'll teach them to trifle with me.'

'Only not for half of one per cent,' I thought, and I felt inclined to drop on my knees and to offer an oath of allegiance together with my gratitude, but I confined myself to saying: 'lf you feel perfectly certain of it, allow me to open an account, if only for half of the whole sum.'

"\Vith pleasure,' answered His Majesty the Emperor, and went his way into the Rue Laffitte.

I made my obeisance to His Majesty and, since it was so close, went into the Maison d'Or.

Within a month or six weeks Nicholas Romanov, that Petersburg merchant of the first guild, who had been so stingy about paying up, now terrified of competition and of publication in the newspapers, did at the Imperial command of Rothschild pay over the illegally detained money, together with the interest and the interest on the interest, justifying himself by his ignorance of the la\vs, which in his social position he certainly could not be expected to know.

From that time forth I was on the best of terms with Rothschild. He liked in me the field of battle on which he had beaten Nicholas; I was for him something like Marengo or Austerlitz, and he several times recited the details of the action in my presence, smiling faintly, but magnanimously sparing his vanquished opponent.

\Vhile this action of mine was going on-and it occupied about six months-! was staying at the Hotel Mirabeau, in the Rue de Ia Paix. One morning in April I was told that a gentleman was waiting for me in the hall and wished to see me without fail. I went in there. A cringing figure that looked like an old government clerk was standing in tht hall.

'The Commissaire of Police of the Tuileries arrondissement: So-and-so.'

'Pleased to see you.'

'Allow me to read you a decree of the Ministry of Home Affairs, communicated to me by the Prefect of PoliCf•, and relating to you.'

'Pray do so ; here is a chair.'

'\Ve, the Prefect of Police-In accordance with paragraph

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seven of the law of the 1 3th and 2 1 st of November and 3rd of December of 1 849, giving the Ministry of Home Affairs the power to expel (e.Tpulser) from France any foreigner whose presence in France may be subversive of order and dangerous to public tranquillity, and in view of the ministerial circular of the 3rd of January, 1 850,

'Do command as follows:

'The here-mentioned' (le N-e, that is, nomme, but this does not mean 'aforesaid' because nothing has been said about me before; it is merely an illiterate attempt to designate a man as rudely as possible) 'Berzen, Alexandre, aged 40' ( they added two years), 'a Russian subject, living in such a place, is to leave Paris at once after this intimation, and to quit the boundaries of France "·ithin the shortest possible time.

'It is forbiddPn for him to return in future on pain of the penalties laid dovm by the eighth paragraph of the same law (imprisonment from one to six months and a money fine ) .

'All necessary measures will b e taken t o secure the execution of these orders.

'Done (Fait) in Paris, April 16th, 1 850.

'Prefect of Police,

'A. Carlier.

'Confirmed by the general secretary of the Prefecture.

'Clement Reyre.'

On the margin:

'Read and approved April 1 9th, 1 850,

'Minister of Home Affairs,

'G. Baroche.

'In the year eighteen hundred and fifty, April the twenty-fourth.

'\Ve, Emile Boullay, Commissaire of Police of the city of Paris and in particular of the Tuileries arrondissement, in execution of the ordPrs of M. le Prefet de Police of April 23rd:

'Have notified the Sieur Alexandre Herzen, telling him in words as written herewith.' Hen• follows the whole text over again. It is just as children tell the story of the \Vhite Bull, prefacing it every time they tell it with the same phrase: 'Shall I tell you the tale of the White Bull?'

Then: '\Ve have invited le dit Hcr:::en to present himself in the course of the next twenty-four hours at the Prefecture for the obtaining of a passport and the assignment of the frontier by which he will quit France.

'And that le dit Sieur Hcr:::en n'cn pretende cause d'ignorance ( what jargon! ) nous lui avons laissc cette copie tant du dit arrete en tete de ceile presente de notre proces-verbal de notification.'

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Oh, my Vyatka colleagues in the secretariat of Tyufyayev ; oh, Ardashov, who would write a dozen sheets at one sitting, Veprcv, Shtin, and my drunken head-clerk ! Would not their hearts rejoice to know that in Paris, after Voltaire, Beaumarchais, George Sand and Hugo, documents are written like this?

And, indeed, not only they would be delighted, but also my father's village foreman, Vasily Yepifanov, who from profound considerations of politeness would write to his master: 'Your commandment by this present preceding post received, and by

-

the same I have the honour to report . . .'

Ought there to be left one stone upon another of this stupid, vulgar temple des us et coutumes, only fitting for a blind, doting old goddess like Themis?

The reading of this document did not produce the result expected; a Parisian thinks that exile from Paris is as bad as the expulsion of Adam from Paradise, and without Eve into the bargain. To me, on the contrary, it was a matter of indifference, and I had already begun to be sick of Parisian life.

'When am I to present myself at the Prefecture?' I asked, assuming a polite air in spite of the wrath which was tearing me to pieces.

'I advise ten o'clock to-morrow morning.'

'With pleasure.'

'How early the spring is beginning this year! ' observed the commissaire of the city of Paris, and in particular of the Tuileries arrondissement.

'Extraordinarily.'

'This is an old-fashioned hotel. Mirabeau used to dine here ; that is why it bears his name. Have you really been well satisfied with it?'

'Very well satisfied. Only fancy what it must be to leave it so abruptly! '

'It's certainly unpleasant . . . . The hostess is a n intelligent, beautiful \\·oman-Mlle Cousin; she was a great friend of the celebrated Le Normand.'�

'Imagine that! What a pity I did not knovv it! Perhaps she has inherited her art of fortune-telling and might have predicted my billet doux from earlier.'

'Ha, ha! . . . It is my duty, you knmv. Allow me to wish you good-day.'

'To be sure, anything may happen. I have the honour to wish you good-bye.'

5 Mile Le Normand ( 1 772-1843), was a well known fortune-teller of the period. ( Tr.)

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Next day I presented myself in the Rue Jerusalem, more celebrated than Le Normand herself. First, I was received by some sort of a youthful spy, with a little beard, a little moustache, and all the manners of an abortive journalist and an unsuccessful democrat. His face and the look in his eyes bore the stamp of that refined corruption of soul, that envious hunger for enjoyment, power, and acquisition, which I have so well learned to read on Western European faces, and which is completely absent from those of the English. It cannot have been long since he had taken up his appointment; he still took pleasure in it, and therefore spoke somewhat condescendingly. He informed me that I must leave within three days, and except for particularly important reasons it was impossible to defer the date. His impudent face, his accent and his gestures were such that without entering into further discussion with him I bowed and then asked, first putting on my hat, wh<'n I could see the Prefect.

'The Prefect only receives persons who have asked him for an audience in writing.'

'Allow me to write to him at once.'

He rang the bell, and an old huissier with a chain on his breast walked in; saying to him with an air of importance, 'Pen and paper for this gentleman,' the youth nodded at me.

The huissier led me into another room. There I wrote to Carlier that I wished to see him in order to explain to him why I had to defer my departure.

On the evening of the same day I received from the Prefecture the laconic answer: '!'vi. le Prcfet is ready to receive So-and-So tomorrow at two o'clock.'

The same repulsive youth met me next day: he had his own room, from which I concluded that he was something in the nature of the head of a department. Having begun his career so early and with such success, he will go far, if God grants him a long l ife.

This time he led me into a big office. There a tall, stout, rosycheeked gentleman was sitting in a big easy-chair at a huge table. He was one of those persons who are always hot, with white flesh, fat but flabby, plump, carefully tended hands, a necktie reduced to a minimum, colourless eyes and the jovial expression which is usually found in men \vho are completely immersed in love for their own well-being, and who can have recourse, coldly and without great effort, to extraordinary infamies.

'You wished to see the Prefect,' he said to me ; 'but he asks you to excuse him; he has been obliged to go out on very important

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business. If I can do anything in any way for your pleasure I ask nothing better. Here is an easy-chair: will you sit down?'

All this he brought out smoothly, very politely, screwing up his eyes a little and smiling with the little cushions of flesh which adorned his cheekbones. 'Well, this fellow has been in the service for a long time,' I thought.

'You surely know what I've come about.' He made that gentle movement of the head which everyone makes on beginning to swim, and did not answer.

'I have received an order to leave within three days. Since I know that your minister has the right of expulsion without giving a reason or holding an inquiry, I am not going to inquire

·hy I a m being expelled, nor to defend myself; but I have, besides my own house . . . '

'Where is your house?'

'Fourteen, Rue Amsterdam . . . very important business in Paris, and it is difficult for me to abandon it at once.'

'Allow me to ask, what is your business? Is it to do with the house or . . . ?'

'My business is with Rothschild. I have to receive four hundred thousand francs.'

'What?'

'A little over a hundred thousand silver roubles.'

'That's a considerable sum ! '

'C'est une somme ronde.'

'How much time do you need for completing your business?'

he asked, looking at me more blandly, as people look at pheasants stuffed with truffles in the shop-windO\vs.

'From a month to six weeks.'

'That is a terribly long time.'

'My action is being settled in Russia . I should not \Yonder if it is thanks to that that I am leaving France.'

'How so?'

'A week ago Rothschild told mi.' that Kiselev spoke ill of me.

Probably the Petersburg government wishes to hush up the business ; I dare say the ambassador has asked for my expulsion as a favour.'

'D'abord,' observed the offended patriot of the Prefecture, assuming an air of dignity and profound conviction, 'France will not permit any other government to interfere in her domestic affairs. l am surprised that such an idea could enter your head.

BPsides, what can be more natural than that the govl'rnment, which is doing its utmost to restore or

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there is so much inflammable material, foreigners who abuse the hospitality she grants them?'

I determined to get at him by money. This was as sure a method as the use of texts from the Gospel in discussion with a Catholic, and so I answered with a smile:

'For the hospitality of Paris I have paid a hundred thousand francs, and so I considered I had almost settled my account.'

This was even more successful than my somme ronde. He was embarrassed, and saying after a brief pause, 'What can we do? It is our duty,' he took my dossier from the table. This was the second volume of the novel, the first part of which I had once seen in the hands of Dubelt. Stroking the pages, as though they were good horses, with his plump hand:

'Now look,' he observed, 'your connections, your association with ill-disposed journals' (almost word for word what Sakhtynsky had said to me in 1 840) , 'and finally the considerable subventions which you have given to the most pernicious enterprises, have compelled us to resort to a very unpleasant but necessary step. That step can be no surprise to you. Even in your own country you brought political persecution upon yourself.

Like causes lead to like results.'

'I am certain,' I said, 'that the Emperor Nicholas himself has no suspicion of this solidarity; you cannot really approve of his administration.'

'Un bon citoyen respects the laws of his country, whatever they may be. . . . '

'Probably on the celebrated principle that it is in any case better there should be bad weather than no weather at all.'

'But to prove to you that the Russian government has no hand in it, I promise to try to get the Prefect to grant a postponement for one month. You will surely not think it strange if we make inquiries of Rothschild concerning your business; it is not so much a question of doubting. . . .'

'Do by all means make inquiries. We are at war, and if it had been of any use for me to have resorted to stratagem in order to remain, do you suppose I should not have employed it?'

But this nice alter ego of the Prefect, this man of the world, would not be outdone.

'People who talk l ike you never say what is untrue,' he replied.

A month later my business was still not completed. We were visited by an old doctor, Palmier, whose agreeable duty it was to make a weekly examination of an interesting class of Parisian women at the Prefecture. Since he gave such a number of certificates of health to the fair sex, I thought he would not refuse to

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write me out a certificate of sickness. Palmier was acquainted, of course, with everyone in the Prefecture: he promised me to give X. personally the history of my indisposition. To my extreme surprise Palmier came back without a satisfactory answer. Tills trait is worth noting because there is in it a fraternal similarity between the Russian and French bureaucracies. X. had given no answer but had shuffled, being offended at my not having come in person to inform him that I was ill, in bed, and unable to get up. There was no help for it: I went next day to the Prefecture,

·

glowing with health.

X. asked me most sympathetically about my illness. As I had not had the curiosity to read what the doctor had written, I had to invent an illness. Luckily I remembered Sazonov who, with his great corpulence and insatiable appetite, complained of aneurism. I told X. that I had heart disease and travelling might be very bad for me.

X. was sorry to hear it, and advised me to take care of myself; then he went into the next room, and returned a minute later, saying:

'You may stay for another month. The Prefect has charged me to tell you at the same time that he hopes and desires that your health may be restored during that period; if this should not be so, he would greatly regret it, for he cannot postpone your departure a third time.'

I understood this, and made ready to leave Paris about the 20th of June.

I came across the name of X. once more a year later. This patriot and bon citorcn had noiselessly withdrawn from France, forgetting to account for some thousands of francs belonging to people who were not well off, or even poor, who had taken tickets in a Californian lottery mn under the patronage of the Prefecture !

When the worthy citizen saw that for all his respect for the laws of his country he might find himself in the galleys for swindling, he decided that he preferred a steamer, and went to Genoa. He was a consistent person and although he had failed he did not lose his head. He took advantage of the notoriety he had acquired from the scandal of the Californian lottery and at once offered his services to a society of speculators that had been formed at that time at Turin for building railways ; since he was such a trustworthy man the society hastened to accept his services.

The last two months I spent in Paris were insufferable. I was literally garde a vue; my letters arrived shamelessly unsealed and a day late ; wherever I went I was followed at a distance by

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a loathsome individual, who at the corners passed me on with a vvink to another.

It must not be forgotten that this was the time of the most frenzied activity of the police. The stupid conservatives and revolutionaries of the Algiers-Lamartine persuasion helped the rogues and knaves surrounding Napoleon, and Napoleon himself, to prepare a network of espionage and surveillance, in order that, by spreading it over the whole of France, they might at any given minute reach out by telegraph from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Elvsee and catch all the active forces in the country and strangle them. Napoleon cleverly used the weapon entrusted to him against these men themselves. The 2nd of December meant the elevation of the police to the rank of a state authority.

There has never a nywhere, even in Austria or in Russia, been such a political police as existed in France after the time of the Convention. There are many causes for this, apart from the peculiar national bent for a police. Except in England, where the police have nothing in common with Continental espionage, the police are everywhere surrounded by hostile elements and consequently thrown on their own resources. In France, on the contrary, tht> police is the most popular institution. Whatever government seizes power, its police is ready; part of the population will help it with a zest and a fanaticism which have to be restrained and not intensified, and will help it, too, with all the frightful means at the disposal of private persons which are impossible for the police. Where can a man hide from his shopkeeper, his concierge, his tailor, his washenvoman, his butcher, his sister's husband or his brother's wife, especially i n Paris, where people do not live in separate houses as they do in London, but in something like cora l reefs or hives with a common staircase, a common courtyard and a common concierge?

Condorcet escapes from the Jacobin police and successfully makes his way to a village near the frontier; tired and harassed, he goes into a little inn, sits down before the fire, warms his hands and asks for a piece of chicken. The good-natured old woman who keeps the inn, and who is a great patriot, reasons like this: 'He is covered with dust, so he must have come a long way; he asks for chicken, so he must have money; his hands are white, so he must be an aristocrat.' Putting the chicken into the stove she goes to another inn ; there the patriots are in session: a citoyen, who is Mucius Scaevola ; the liquor-seller and citoyen, who is Brutus, and Timoleon, the tailor. They ask for nothing better, and ten minutes later one of the wisest leaders of the

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French Revolution is in prison and handed over to the police of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!

Napoleon, who had the police talent developed to the highest degree, turned his generals into spies and informers. The hangman of Lyons, Fouche, founded a complete theory, system, science of espionage, through the prefects, unbeknown to the prefects, through \vanton women and blameless shopkeepers, through servants and coach-men, through doctors and barbers.

Napoleon fell, but his tool remained, and not only his tool but the man who wielded it. Fouche went over to the Bourbons; the strength of the espionage lost nothing; on the contrary, it was reinforced by monks and priests. Under Louis-Philippe, in whose reign bribery and easy profit became one of the moral forces of government, half the petits bourgeois became his spies, his police chorus, a result to which their service in the National Guard, in itself a police duty, specially contributed.

During the February Republic three or four branches of genuinely secret police forces were formed and several professedly secret ones. There was the police of Ledru-Rollin and the police of Caussidiere, there was the police of Marrast and the police of the provisional government, there was the police of order and the police of disorder, the police of Louis-Napoleon and the police of the Due d'Orleans. All were on the look-out, all were watching each other and informing on each other; if we assume that these secret reports were made from conviction, with the best of motives and gratis, yet they were still secret reports. . . . This pernicious custom, encountering on the one hand sorry failures, and on the other morbid, unbridled thirst for money or pleasure, corrupted a whole generation.

We must not forget, either, the moral indifference, the vacillation of opinion, which was left like sediment from intermittent revolutions and restorations. Men had grown used to regarding as heroism and virtue on one day what would on the next be a crime punished with penal servitude; the laurel wreath and the executioner's brand alternated several times on the same head.

By the time they had become accustomed to this a nation of spies was ready.

All the latest discoveries of secret societies and conspiracies, all the denunciations of refugees have been made by false members of societies, bribed friends, men who had won confidence with the object of betrayal.

There were examples on all hands of cowards who, through fear of prison and exile, revealed secrets and destroyed their friends, as a faint-hearted comrade destroyed Konarski. But neither among us nor in Austria is there a legion of young men,

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cultured, speaking our language, making inspired speeches in clubs, writing revolutionary a rticles and serving as spies.

Moreover, the government of Napoleon is excellently placed for making use of informers of all parties. It represents the revolution and the reaction, war and peace, the year 1 789 and Catholicism, the fall of the Bourbons and the four-and-a-half per cents. It is served both by Falloux the Jesuit, B illault the socialist, La Rochejaquelin the legitimist, and a mass of people to whom Louis-Philippe has been a benefactor. The corruption of all parties and shades of opinion naturally flows t

P. -J. ProLLclltOll

AFTER THE FALL of the June barricades the printing-presses fell too. The frightened journalists \vere silent. Only old Lamennais rose up like the sombre shadow of a judge, cursed Cavaignacthe Due of Alba of the June days-and his companions, and sombrely said to the people: 'And you be silent: you are too poor to have the right to speak!'

When the first fright at the state of siege had passed and the newspapers began coming to life again, they found themselves confronted, not with violence, but with a perfect arsenal of legal chicanery and judicial tricks. The old baiting, par force, of editors began, the process in which the ministers of Louis-Philippe distinguished themselves. The trick consisted in exhausting the guaranteed fund by a sl'ries of lawsuits that invariably ended in prison and a money fine. The fine is paid out of the fund ; until this is made up again thl' paper cannot be published ; as soon as it is made good, thl're is a new la\'listlit. This game is always successful, for the ll'gal authorities are always hand in glove with the gowrnment in all political prosecutions.

At first Ledru-Rollin, and afterwards Colonel Frappoli1 as the representative of Mazzini's party, contributed large sums of 1 Frappoli, Ludovico ( 1 8 1 5-78 ) , an Italian politician who took part in the revolutionary movement of 1 8+8, was a partisan of Garibaldi's, and always on the extreme left in the Italian Parliament. He reintroduced Freemasonry into Italy. ( Tr.)

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money, but could not save La Reforme. All the more outspoken organs of socialism and republicanism were destroyed by this method. Among these, and at the very beginning, was Proudhon's Le Representant du Peuple, and later on his Le Peuple.

Before one prosecution was over, another began.

One of the editors-it was Duchesne, I think-was brought three times out of prison to the lawcourts on fresh charges ; and every time was sentenced once more to prison and a fine. When on the last occasion before the ruin of the paper the verdict was declared, he said to the prosecutor: 'L'addition, s'il vous plait!'

As a matter of fact, it added up to ten years in prison and a fine of fifty thousand francs.

Proudhon was on trial when his newspaper was stopped after the 13th of June. The National Guard burst into his printingoffice on that day, broke the printing-press and scattered the type, as though to assert, in the name of the armed bourgeois, that the period of the utmost violence and despotism of the police was coming on in France.

The indomitable gladiator, the stubborn Besant;on peasant, would not lay down his arms, but at once contrived to publish a new journal, La Voix du Peuple. It was necessary to find twentyfour thousand francs for the guarantee fund. Emile Girardin would have been ready to give it, but Proudhon did not want to be dependent on him, and Sazonov suggested that I should contribute the money.

I was under a great obligation to Proudhon for my intellectual development, and after a little consideration I consented, though I knew that the fund would soon be gone.

The reading of Proudhon, like reading Hegel, gives one a special method, sharpens one's weapon and furnishes not results but means. Proudhon is pre-eminently the dialectician, the controversialist of social questions. The French look in him for an experimentalist and, finding neither an estimate for 'l Fourierist phalanstery nor the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Cabet's Icaria, shrug their shoulders and lay the book aside.

It is Proudhon's own fault, of course, for having put as the motto on his Contradictions: 'Destruo et aedificabo'; his strength lay not in creation but in criticism of the existing state of things.

But this mistake has been made from time immemorial by all who have broken down what was old. Man dislikes mere destruction: when he sets to work to break something down, he is involuntarily haunted by some idenl of future construction, though sometimes this is like the song of a mason as he pulls down a wall.

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In the greater number of sociological works the ideals advocated, which almost always either are unattainable at present or boil down to some one-sided solution, are of little consequence; what is of importance is what, in arriving at them, is seen as the question. Socialism touches not only on what was decided by the old empirico-religious way of living, but also on what has passed through the consciousness of partial science; not only on juridical conclusions founded on traditional legislation, but also the conclusions of political economy. It treats the rational way of living of the epoch of guarantees and of the bourgeois economic system as unmediated rudiments for itself to work upon, just as political economy is related to the theocratic-feudal state.

It is in this negation, this volatilisation of the old social tradition, that the fearful power of Proudhon lies; he is as much the poet of dialectics as Hegel is, with the difference that one stands on the tranquil summit of the philosophic movement, and the other thrusts into the hurly-burly of popular commotions and the hand-to-hand fighting of parties.

Proudhon is the first of a new series of French thinkers. His works constitute a revolution in the history not only of socialism but also of French logic. There is more power and fluency in his dialectical robustness than in the most talented of his fellowcountrymen. Intelligent and clear-thinking men like Pierre Leroux2 and Considerant3 do not grasp either his point of departure or his method. They are accustomed to play with ideas as with cards already arranged, to walk in a certain attire along the beaten track to familiar places. Proudhon often drives ahead bodily, not afraid of crushing something in his path, with no regret for running down anything he comes across, or for going too far. He has none of that sensitiveness, that rhetorical revolutionary chastity, which in the French takes the place of Protestant pietism . . . that is why he remains a solitary figure among his own people, rather alarming than convincing them with his power.

People say that Proudhon has a German mind. That is not true; on the contrary, his mind is absolutely French: he has that ancestral Gallo-Frankish genius which appears in Rabelais, in Montaigne, in Voltairl', and in Diderot . . . even in Pascal. It is only that he has assimilated Hegel's dialectical method, as he 2 Leroux, Pierre ( 1 797-1 87 1 ) , a prominent follower of Saint-Simon.

( Tr.)

:J Consid�rant. Victor ( 1 808--93 ) . a philosopher and political economist, an advocate of Fourierism. ( Tr.)

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has assimilated also all the methods of Catholic controversy. But neither Hegelian philosophy nor the Catholic theology furnished the content or the character of his writings; for him these are the weapons with which he tests his subject, and these weapons he has squared and adapted in his own way just as he has adapted the French language to his powerful and vigorous thought. Such men stand much too firmly on their own feet to resign themselves to anything or to allow themselves to be lassoed.

'I like your system very much,' an English tourist said to Proudhon.

'But I have no system,' Proudhon answered with annoyance, and he was right.

It is just this that puzzles his fellow-countrymen, who are accustomed to a moral at the end of the fable, to systematic formulae, to classification, to binding, abstract prescriptions.

Proudhon sits by a sick man's bedside and tells him that he is in a very bad way for this reason and for that. You do not help a dying man by constructing an ideal theory of how he might be well if he were not ill, or by suggesting remedies, excellent in themselves, which he cannot take or which are not to be had.

The external signs and manifestations of the financial world serve him, just as the teeth of the animals served Cuvier, as a ladder by which he descends into the mysteries of social life; by means of them he studies the forces that are dragging the sick body towards decomposition. If after every such observation he proclaims a new victory for death, is that his fault? There are no relations here whom one is afraid of alarming: we are ourselves dying this death. The crowd shouts indignantly: 'Remedies!

Remedies! Or be quiet about the disease! ' But why not speak of it? It is only under despotic governments that we are forbidden to speak of crops failing, of epidemic diseases and of the numbers slain in war. The remedy, obviously, is not easily to be found ; they have made plenty of experiments in France since the days of the immoderate blood-letting of 1 793 ; they have treated her with victories and violent exercise, making her march to Egypt and to Russia ; they have tried parliamentarianism and agiotage, a little republic and a little Napoleon-and has anything done her any good? Proudhon himself once tried his own pathology and came to grief over the People's Bank-though in itself his idea was a good one. Unfortunately, he does not believe in magic charms, or else he would have added to everything: 'League of Nations ! League of Nations! Universal Republic! Brotherhood of all the World ! Grande Armec de la Democratic!' He does not use

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these phrases, he does not spare the Old Believers of the revolution, and for that reason the French look upon him as an egoist, as an individualist, almost as a renegade and a traitor.

I remember Proudhon's works, from his reflections On Property to his Financial Guide; many of his ideas have changed-a man could hardly live through a period like ours and whistle the same duct in A minor like Platon Mikhaylovich in Woe from Wit. What leaps to the eye in these changes is the- i nner unity that binds them all together, from the essay \'\Titten as a school task at Bcsa!l(;on Academy to the carmen horrendum of Stock Exchange depravity,� which has recently been published ; the same order of thought, developing, varying in aspect, reflecting events, runs through the Contradictions of Political Economy, through his Confessions and through his Journal.

Sluggishness of thmtght is an appurtenance of religion and doctrinairianism ; they assume a wilful narrow-mindednc>ss, a definitive circumscription, living apart or in a narrow circle of its own that rejects everything new that life offers . . . or at any rate not troubling itself about it. The real truth must lie under the influence of events, must reflect them, \vhile remaining true to itself, or it would be not the living truth, but an eternal truth, at rest from the tempests of this world in the deadly stillness of sacred stagnation." Where, and on what occasion, I have sometimes asked, was Proudhon false to the organic basis of his view of things? I have been answered each time that he was so in his political mistakes, his blunders in revolutionary diplomacy. For his political mistakes he was, of course, responsible as a journalist; but even here it was not before himself that he was guilty : on the contrary, some of his mistakes were due to his believing more in his principles than in the party to which he, against his own \viii, belonged and with which he had

� "E\"en in d!'spair [because he couldn't support his family after he was relt•ased from prison in 1 852] Proudhon had 110 di fficulty in refusing

. . . a subn•ntion of 20.000 francs offPrPd through th!' patronage of Prinn• Jeronw Bonaparte'. H<> p rderred to <>arn h is Ji,·ing by hack work and brought out an anonymous i\lanual for Speculators on the ExcltangP.''-J . HamdPn Jackson : 1\Jari, Proudhon and European Socialism ( i\lacm illan, n .d . ) . " I n this yPar.'· adds Jackson. "Karl i\Iarx. in London, had to borrow two pounds to p<�y for his daugh ter's coffin and pawned his OYercoat to [ financt'] a pamphlet." The 1 850s wer<>n't kiwi to radicals. ( D .. H.)

:-, In S tuart i\Iil l's nPw book On J.ibrrl)'. he usPs an excPIIPnt expn•ssion i n rPgard to tlwse truths st•ll lt•d once and for t'\"Pr: 'tlw del'P slumber of a dPcidPd opinion.'

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nothing in common and was only associated by hatred for a common foe.

It was not in political activity that his strength lay; it was not there that he found the basis of the thought which he invested in the panoply of his dialectic. Quite the contrary: it is everywhere plainly to be seen that politics in the sense of the old liberalism and constitutional republicanism were, in his eyes, of secondary importance, as something passing, half elapsed. He was not indifferent to political questions and was ready to make compnimises because he did not ascribe any special importance to the forms, which in his view were not essential. All who have abandoned the Christian point of view stand in a similar relationship to the religious question. I may recognise that the constitutional religion of Protestantism is somewhat more liberal than the autocracy of Catholicism, but I cannot take to heart the question of church or creed; in consequence of this I probably make mistakes and concessions which the most ordinary graduate in divinity or parish priest would avoid.

Doubtless there was no place for Proudhon in the National Assembly as it \vas constituted, and his individuality was lost in that den of the petite bourgeoisie. In the Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon tells us that he was completely at a loss in the Assembly. And indeed what could have been done there by a man who said to Marrast's constitution, that sour fruit of the seven months' work of seven hundred heads: 'I give my vote against your constitution, not only because it's bad, but because it's a constitution.'

The parliamentary rabble greeted one of his speeches:6 'The speech to the !Honiteur, the speaker to the madhouse ! ' I do not think that in the memory of man there had been many of such parliamentary scenes from the days when the Archbishop of 6 On 13 July 1 8+8. the Constituent Assembly debated Proudhon's Gtopian Bill which proposed the taxation of movable and real property by a single tax at the rate of one third of the revenue from it. This enraged the bourgeois majority in the Assembly and the bourgeois press. His speech was accompanied by obstruction from the deputies. cries that the speaker should be sent to a madhouse. etc. Marx observed that Proudhon's speech in defence of his project was 'an act of lofty manliness.' although it also displayed how little he understood all that had happened.

The chief speaker who opposed Proudhon was Thiers. The Assemblv rejected Proudhon"s project (only two votes were cast for him, on�

of them his own) as an incitement to attack property and 'an abominable allentat on the principles of social morality.' (A.S.)

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Alexandria brought with him to Ecumenical Councils lay brothers armed with clubs in tlw name of the Virgin, till the days of the VVashington Senators \vho proved the benefits of sla,·ery to each other with the stick.i

But even there Proudhon succeeded in rising to his full height and left in the midst of the wrangling a glowing footprint.

Thiers in rejecting Proudhon's financial scheme made an insinuation about tlw moral depravity of the men who disseminated such doctrines. Proudhon mounted the tribune, and with his stooping figure and his menacing air of a stocky dweller in the fields said to the smiling old creature:

'Speak of financr>, but do not speak of morality: I may take that as personal, as I have already told you in committee. If you persist, I-I shall not challenge you to a duel' (Thiers smiled) ;

'no, your death is not enough for mt>--that would prove nothing.

I ch�llenge you to another sort of contest. Here from this tribune I shall tell the whole story of my life, fact by fact, and anyone may remind me if I forget or omit something; and then let my opponent tell the story of his ! '

The eyt>s o f all were turned upon Thiers; he sat scowling, and there \Vas no trace of the smile, and no answer either.

The hostile Chamber fell silent and Proudhon, looking contemptuously at the champions of religion and the family, came down from the platform. That was vvhere his strength lay: in these words of his is clt>arly !ward the language of the new world coming with its own standards and its o\vn penalties.

After the Revolution of February Proudhon was foretelling what France had come to: in a thousand different keys he rPpeated, 'Beware, do not trifle ; "this is not Catiline at your gates, but death." ' The French shrugged their shoulders. The skull, the scytht>, the hour-glass-all the trappings of death-were not to bt: seen. How could it be death)-it was 'a momentary eclipse, the after-dinner nap of a great people! ' Eventually many people discerned that things \vere in a bad way. Proudhon was less downcast than others, less frightened, because he had foreseen it; j In the Senate debate on the Kansas- N!'b1·aska Act ( 1 856 ) , Senator Charles Sumner of :\lassachusetts. a leading opponent of slavery. denounced the Act as "a swindle" and its two main defenders. Senators Douglas and 13utlP.-. as "myrmidons of slavery." Two days later a young Congrpssman. one Preston Brooks of South Carol ina. Butler's nephew, achiev!'d his Oswaldian footnotP in history by im·ading the S!'nate chambPr, shouting that Sumner had l ibPl!'d his uncle and his state and then attacking him with a heaq· GlllP. It wok Sumner three years to recOVPL (D.l\1. )

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then he was accused of callousness and even of having invited disaster. They say the Chinese Emperor pulls the Court stargazer's pigtail every year when the latter announces that the days are beginning to draw in.

The genius of Proudhon is actually antipathetic to the rhetorical French; his language is offensive to them. The Revolution developed its own special puritanism, narrow and intolerant, its own obligatory jargon; and patriots reject everything that is not written in the official form, just as the Russian judges do. Thei_r criticism stops short a t their symbolic books, such as the Contrat Social and Declaration of the Rights of Man. Being men of faith, they hate analysis and doubt; being men of conspiracy, they do everything in common and turn everything into a party question. An independent mind is hateful to them as a disturber of discipline and they dislike original ideas even in the past. Louis Blanc is almost vexed by the eccentric genius of Montaigne. It i s upon this Gallic feeling, which seeks to subject individuality to the herd, that their partiality for equalising, for the uniformity of military formation, for centralisation-that is, for despotismis based.

The blasphemy of the French and their sweeping judgments, are more due to naughtiness, love of mischief, the pleasure of teasing, than the need for analysis, than the scepticism that sucks the soul. The Frenchman has an endless number of little prejudices, minute religions, and these he will defend with the fire of a Don Quixote and the obduracy of a raskolnik.s That is why they cannot forgive Montaigne or Proudhon for their freethinking ami lack of reverence for generally accepted idols. Like the Petersburg censorship, they permit a jest at a titular councillor, but you must not touch a privy councillor. In 1 850

Girardin printed in the Presse a bold, new idea, that the bases of right are not eternal but vary )Vith the development of history.

What an uproar this article excited ! The campaign of abuse, of cries of horror, of charges of immorality, promoted by the Gazette de France was kept up for months.

To assist in re-establishing such an organ as the Peuple was worth a sacrifice; I wrote to Sazonov and Chojecki that I was ready to supply the guarantee fund.

Until then I had seen very little of Proudhon ; I had met him twice at the lodgings of Bakunin, with whom he was very intimate. Bakunin was living at that time with Adolf Reichel in an extremely modest lodging at the other side of the Seine in the 8 Schismatic. ( R.)

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Rue de Bourgogne. Proudhon often went there to listen to Reichel's Beethoven and Bakunin's Hegel: the philosophical discussions lasted longer than the symphonies. They reminded me of the famous all-night vigils of Bakunin with Khomyakov at Chaadayev's and a t Madame Yelagin's, also over Hegel. In 1 847

Karl Vogt, who also lived in the Rue de Bourgogne, and often visited Reichel and Bakunin, was bored one evening with listening to the endless discussions on phenomenology, and went home to bed. Next morning he went round for Reichel, for they were to go to the Jardin des Plantes together; he \vas surprist!d to hear conversation in Bakunin's study at that early hour. He opened the door-Proudhon and Bakunin were sitting in the same places before the burnt-out embers in the fireplace, finishing in a brief summing-up the argument begun overnight.

At first, afraid of the humble role of our fellow-countrymen, and of being patronised by great men, I did not try to become intimate even with Proudhon himself, and I believe I was not altogether wrong. Proudhon's letter in answer to mine was courteous, but cold and somewhat reserved.

I wanted to show him from the very first that he was not dealing with a mad prince russe who was giving the money from revolutionary dilettantism, and still more from ostentation, nor with an orthodox admirer of French journalists, deeply grateful for their accepting twenty-four thousand francs from him, nor, finally, with a dull-witted bailleur de fonds who imagined that providing the guarantee funds for such a paper as the Voix du Peuple was a serious business investment. I wanted to show him that I knew very well what I was doing, that I had my own definite object, and so wanted to have a definite influence on the paper. ·while I accepted unconditionally all that he wrote about money, I demanded in the first place the right to insert articles, my own and other people's; secondly, the right to superintend all the foreign section, to recommend editors, correspondents, and so on for it, and to require payment for these for articles published.

This last may seem strange, but I can confidently assert that the National and the Rcforme would have opened their eyes wide if any foreigner had ventured to ask to be paid for an article. They would take it for impudence or madness.

Proudhon agreed to my requirements, but still they made him wince. This is what he wrote to me at Geneva on the 29th of August, 1 849: 'And so the thing is settled: under my general direction you have a share in the editorship of the paper; your articles must be accepted with no restriction, except that to which the editors are bound by respect for their own opinions and fear of legal responsibility. Agreed in ideas, we can only

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differ in conclusions; as for commenting on events abroad, we leave them entirely to you. You and we are missionaries of one idea. You will see our line in general controversy, and you will have to support it: I am sure I shall never have to correct your views; I should regard that as the greatest calamity. I tell you frankly, the \vhole success of the paper depends on our agreement. The democratic and social question must be raised to the level of the undertaking of a European League. To suppose that we shall not agree means to suppose that we have not the essential conditions for publishing the paper, and that we had better be silent.'

To this severe missive I replied by the despatch of twenty-four thousand francs and a long letter, perfectly friendly, but firm. I told him how completely I agreed with him theoretically, adding that, like a true Scythian, I saw with joy that the old world was falling into ruins, and believed that it was our mission to a nnounce to it its imminent demise. 'Your fellowcountrymen are far from sharing these ideas. I know one liberal Frenchman-that is you. Your revolutionaries are conservatives.

They are Christians without knowing it, and monarchists fighting for a republic. You alone have raised the question of negation and revolution to a scientific level, and you have been the first to tell France that there is no salvation for an edifice that is crumbling from within, and that there is nothing worth saving from it; that its very conceptions of freedom and revolution are saturated \vith conservatism and reaction. As a matter of fact the political republicans are but one of the variations on the same constitutional tune on which Guizot, Odilon Barrot and others are playing their own variations. This is the view that should be pursued in the analysis of the latest European events, in attacking reaction, Catholicism and monarchism, not in the ranks of our enemies-that is extremely easy-but in our own camp. We must reveal the mutual guarantees existing between the democrats and the authorities. If we are not afraid to touch the victors, let us not from false sentimentality be afraid to touch the vanquished also.

'I am thoroughly convinced that if the inquisition of the Republic does not kill our newspaper, it will be the best newspaper in Europe.'

Even now I am convinced of this. But how Proudhon and I could think that Napoleon's government, which never stood on ceremony, would put up with a paper like that, it is difficult to explain.

Proudhon was pleased with my letter, and wrote to me on the 15th of December from the Conciergerie prison:

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'I am very glad to have been associated with you in the �arne or similar work. I, too, have written something in the nature of the philosophy9 of revolution under the title of The Confessions of a Revolutionary. You will not perhaps find in it the verve barbare to which you have been trained by German philosophy.

Do not forge� that I am writing for the French who, for a ll their revolutionary fire, are, it must be admitted, far inferior to their role. However limited my view may be, it is a hundred thousand toises higher than the loftiest heights of our journalistic, academic and literary world. I have enough in me to be a giant among them for another ten years.

'I entirely share your opinion of the so-called Republicans; of course, they are only one species of the whole genus doctrinaire.

As regards these questions there is no need for us to try to convince each other; you will find in me and my colleagues men who will go hand in hand with you . . . .

'I too think a peaceful methodical advance by imperceptible transitions, such as the political economists and philosophical historians want, is no longer possible for the revolution; we must make fearful leaps. But as journalists announcing the coming catastrophe, it is not for us to present it as something inevitable and just, or we shall be hated and kicked out; and we have got to live . . . .'

The paper was a wonderful success. Proudhon from his prison cell conducted his orchestra in masterly fashion. His articles were full of originality, fire and that exasperation which is fanned by imprisonment.

'What are you, 1'11. le President?' he writes in one article, speaking of Napoleon; 'tell us-man, woman, hermaphrodite, beast or fish?' And we still thought that such a paper might be kept going!

The subscribers were not numerous, but the street sales were large; thirty-live thousand to forty thousand copies a day were sold. The sale of particularly remarkable numbers, those, for instance, in which Proudhon's articles appeared, was even greater; fifty thousand to sixty thousand were printed, and often on the following day copies were being sold for a franc instead of a sou.10

But for all that, hy the 1 st of March, that is, six months later, 9 I had then published Vom andern Ufer (From the Other Shore ) .

Ill My answer t o the speech of Donoso Corts of which fifty thousand copies were printed, was sold out : awl when two or three days later I asked for a few copies for myself. they had to be searched for and bought in bookshops.

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not only was there no cash in hand, but already part of the guarantee fund had gone in payment of fines. Ruin was inevitable ;md Proudhon hastened it considerablv. This was how it happened. On one occasion at his rooms in Ste Pelagie, I found d'Alton-Shee and two of the editors. D'Alton-Shee is that peer of France who frightened all the peers by his answer from the platform to the question,

'Why, are you not a Catholic?'

'No ! and what's more, I am not a Christian at all, and I don't know whether I am a deist.'

He was saying to Proudhon that the last numbers of the Voix du Peuple were feeble: Proudhon was looking through them and growing more and more morose; then, thoroughly incensed, he turned to the editors:

'What is the meaning of thisJ You take advantage of my being in prison, and go to sleep there in the office. No, gentlemen: if you go on like this I shall refuse to have anything to do with the paper, and shall publish the grounds for my refusal. I don't want my name to be dragged in the mud ; you need someone to stand behind you and look over every line. The public takes it for my newspaper: no, I must put a stop to this. To-morrow I shall send an article to cancel the bad effects of your scribbling, and I shall sho\v how I understand what ought to be the spirit of our paper.'

Seeing his irritation, it might have been expected that the article would not be of the most moderate, but he surpassed our expectations: his 'Vive [' Empercur!' was a dithyramb of ironyfrightful, virulent irony.

In addition to a new action against the paper the government avenged itself on Proudhon in its own way. He was transferred to a horrible room-that is, given a far worse one than before: the window was half boarded up so that nothing could be seen but the sky; no one was admitted to see him, and a special sentry was stationed at the door. And these measures, unseemly for the correction of a naughty boy of sixteen, were taken seven years ago against one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Men have grown no V\'iser since the days of Socrates, no wiser since the days of Galileo; they have only become more petty. This disrespect for genius, however, is a new phenomenon that has reappeared during the last ten years. From the time of the Renaissance talent has to some extent become a protection ; neither Spinoza nor Lessing \vas shut in a dark room or stood in a corner. Such men are sometimes persecuted and killed, but they are not humiliated in trivial ways; they are sent to the scaffold, but not to the workhouse.

Bourgeois Imperial France is fond of equality.

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Though persecuted, Proudhon still struggled in his chains; he still made an effort to bring out the Voix du Peuple in 1 850; but this attempt was strangled at once. My guarantee money had been seized to the last farthing; the one man in France who still had something to sny had no choice but to be silent.

I saw Proudhon in Ste Pelagic; for the last time.1 1 I was being expelled from France, while he still had two years of prison. It was a mournful parting; there was no shadow of hope in the near future. Proudhon maintained a concentrated silence, whilst I wns boiling with vexation; \\"e both had many thoughts in our minds, but no desire to speak.

I have heard a great dcal of his roughness, rudcssc, and intolerancc; I ha ,·e had no expcril•nce of anything like it in my own case. "'hat soft people cnll his harshness was the tense muscle of the fighter; his scowling brow showed only the powerful working of his mind: in his anger he reminded me of a wrathful Luther or of Cromwell ridiculing the Rump. He knew that I understood him and, knowing too how few did understand him, appreciated it. He knew that he \vas considered an undemonstrative man; and hearing from Michclet of the disaster that had overtaken my mother and Kolya, he wrote to me from Ste Pelagic, among other things: 'Is it possible that fate must attack us from that dircction tooJ I cannot get over this terrible calamity.

I love you, and carry your image deep here in this heart which so many think is of stone.'

Since thcn I have not seen him: in 1 85 1 \vhen, by the kindness of Leon Fauclwr, I visited Paris for a few days, he had been sent away to some central prison. A year later, when I. was passing through Paris in secr<'t, Proudhon was ill at Besan<;on.

Prou

'How lucky is our frieml N.!' Proudhon would say jestingly;

'his \vifl' is not so stupid that slw can't make a good flOt-au-fcu and not clen•r enough to discuss his articles. That's all that is neccssary for domPstic happiness.'

In this jest Proudhon laughingly (•xpresscd the essential basis of his view of womnn. I lis conceptions of fnmily rclntionships wen' coarse and reactionary, but they expressed not the bourr:;cois Plemcnt of the townsman, but rather the stubborn feeling l l In the first three weeks of Jun<' 1 850. ( ;l.S.)

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of the rustic paterfamilias, haughtily regarding woman as a subordinate worker and himself as the autocratic head of the family.

A year and a half after this was written, Proudhon published his great work on Justice in the Church and in Revolution.

This book, for which France, now become farouche, condemned him once more to three years' imprisorunent,12 I read through attentively, and I closed the third volume oppressed by gloomy thoughts.

A grievous . . . grievous time! . . . The a tmosphere of decomposition stupefies the strongest. . . .

This 'brilliant fighter,' too, could not endure it, and was broken: in his last work I see the same might of controversy, the same flourish, but it brings him now to preconceived results; it is no longer free in the very fullest sense. Towards the end of the book I watched over Proudhon as Kent watched over King Lear, expecting him to recover his reason, but he raved more and more-there \Vere the same fits of intolerance, of unbridled speech, as in Lear; and in the same way 'every inch' reveals talent, but . . . a talent that is 'touched' . . . and he runs with a corpse, only not a daughter's but a mother's, whom he takes to be living.13

Latin thought, religious in its very negation, superstitious in doubt, rejecting one set of authorities in the name of another, has rarely gone further, rarely plunged more deeply in medias res of reality, rarely freed itself from all fetters, with such dialectic boldness and certainty as in this book. In it not only the crude dualism of religion but the subtle dualism of philosophy is cast off; the mind is set free not only from heavenly phantoms but from those of the earth, it strides beyond the sentimental apotheosis of humanity and the fatalism of progress, and has none of the invariable litanies of brotherhood, democracy, and progress which are so pitifully wearisome in the midst of wrangling and violence. Proudhon sacrificed the idols and the language of revolution to the understanding of it, and transferred morality to its only real basis, the heart of man, recognising reason alone, and no other gods but it.

And after all that, the great iconoclast was frightened of human nature's being set free ; for, having freed it abstractly, he fell back once more into metaphysics, endowed it with a fictitious will, could not manage it, and led it to be immolated to an 1 2 In 1 858. Proudhon did not sen·e this sen•ence, but emigrated to Belgium, where he lived till 1 862. (A.S.) l3 I have partly modified my opinion of this work of Proudhon ( 1 866) .

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i nhuman god, the cold god of ;usticc, the god of equilibrium, of quiet and repose, the god of the Brahmins, who seek to los, all that is personal and to be dissolved, to come to rest in an infinite world of nothingness.

On the empty altar were set up scales. This would be a new Caudine Forks for humanity.

The 'justice' vvhich is his goal is not even the artistic harmony of Plato's Republic, the elegant equilibrium of passion and sacrifice; the Gallic tribune takes nothing from 'anarchic and frivolous Greece' ; he stoically tramples personal feelings under foot, and does not seek to conciliate them with the sacrifice of the family and the commune. His 'free personality' is a sentry and a workman with no fixed terms of service; he will serve and must stand on guard until he is relieved by death ; he must kill in himself all ptrsonal passion, everything outside duty, because he is not himself: his meaning, his essence, lie outside himself; he is the instrument of justice ; he is pre-destined, like the Virgin Mary, to bear the idea in suffering and to bring it into the world for the salvation of the state.

The family, the first cell of society, the first cradle of justice, is doomed to everlasting, inescapable toil; it must serve as the altar of purification from the personal ; in it the passions must be stamped out. The austere Roman family in the workshop of today is Proudhon's ideal. Christianity has softened family life too much: it has preferred Mary to Martha, the dreamer to the housewife: it has forgiven the sinner and held out a hand to the penitent, because she loved much; but in Proudhon's family, just

"·hat is needed is to love little. And that is not all: Christianity puts the individual far higher than his family relationships. It has said to the son: 'Forsake father and mother and follow me'to the son who in the name of Proudhon's incarnation of iusticc must be shackled once more in the stocks of absolute paternal authority, who in his father's lifetime can have no freedom, least of all in the choice of a \vife. He is to be tempered in slavery, to become in his turn a tyrant over the children who are born without love, from duty, for the continuation of the family. In this family m<�rriage will be indissoluble, but in return it will be as cold as icP. Marriage is properly a victory over love ; the less love there is between the cook-wife and the workmanhusband the bPtter. And to think that I should meet these old, shabby bogeys from right wing Hegelianism in the writings of Proudhon !

FPPling is banished, everything is frozen, the colours have vanishPd, nothing is left but the dull, exhausting, inescapable toil of the proletariat of to-day, the toil from which at least the

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aristocratic family of ancient Rome, based on slavery, was free: the poetic beauty of the Church is no more, nor the delirium of faith, nor hopes of paradise; even verse by that time 'will no longer be written,' so Proudhon asserts, but in return work will

'be increased.' For individual freedom, for the right of initiative, for independence, one may well sacrifice the lullaby of religion; but to sacrifice everything for the incarnation of the idea of justice-what nonsense!

Man is doomed to toil: he must labour till his hand drops and the son takes from the cold fingers of his father the plane or the hammer and carries on the everlasting work. But vvhat if among the sons there happens to be one with a little more sense, who lays down the chisel and asks:

'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.

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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.

Dark forces, menacing words, thanks to which rivers of tears have flowed, and rivers of blood-words that set us shuddering like the memory of the Inquisition, of torture, of the plague . . .

and yet they are the words under the shadow of which, as under the sword of Damocles, the family has lived and is living.

There is no turning them out of doors by abuse or by denial.

They remain round the corner, slumbering, ready on the slightest occasion to destroy everything near and far, to destroy us ourselves . . . .

Clearly we must abandon our honourable intention of utterly extinguishing these smouldering flames and modestly confine ourselves to humanely guiding and subduing the consuming fire.

You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the lawcourts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.

Jealousy, moreover, has always enjoyed special privileges. In itself a violent and perfectly natural passion, which hitherto, instead of being muzzled and kept under, has only been stimulated. The Christian doctrine which, through hatred of the body, sets everything fleshly on an extraordinary height, and the aristocratic worship of blood and purity of race, have developed to the point of absurdity the conception of a mortal affront, a blot that cannot be washed off. Jealousy has received the ius gladii, the right of judgment and revenge. It has become a duty of honour, almost a virtue. All this will not stand a moment's criticism-but yet there still remains at the bottom of the heart a very real, insurmountable feeling of pain, of unhappiness, called jealousy, a feeling as elementary as the feeling of love itself, resisting every effort to deny it, an 'irreducible' feeling .

. . . Here again are the everlasting limits, the Caudine Forks t ' . . . the Prince' ( Vladimir) ' . . . ordered that Perun should be bound to a horsp's tail and dragged along Boriche,· to th!' rin•r. . . . After they had thus dragged thP idol along they cast it in to tht> DniPpt>r.' Samuel H. Cross: The Russian Primar)· Chronicle ( Cambridg!', Mass., 1 930) , p.

20 l. ( R. )

2 English in the original. (R.)

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under which history drives us. On both sides there is truth, on both there is falsehood. A brusque entweder-oder will lead you nowhere. At the moment of the complete negation of one of the terms it comes back, just as after the last quarter of the moon the first appears on the other side.

Hegel removed these boundary-posts of human reason, by rising to the absolute spirit; in it they did not vanish but were transmuted, fulfilled, as German theological science expressed it: this is mysticism, philosophical theodicy, allegory and reality purposely mixed up. All religious reconciliations of the irreconcilable are won by means of redemptions, that is, by sacred transmutation, sacred deception, a solution which solves nothing but is taken on trust. What can be more antithetical than freewill and necessity? Yet by faith even they are easily reconciled.

Man will accept without a murmur the justice of punishment for an action which was pre-ordained.

Proudhon himself, in a different range of questions, was far more humane than German philosophy. From economic contradictions he escapes by the recognition of both sides under the restraint of a higher principle. Property as a right and property as theft are set side by side in everlasting balance, everlastingly complementary, under the ever-growing Weltherrschaft of iuslice. It is clear that the argument and the contradictions are transferred to another sphere, and that it is the conception of justice we have to call to account rather than the right of property.

The simpler, the less mystical and the less one-sided, the more real and practically applicable the higher principle is, the more completely it brings the contradictory terms to their lowest denomination.

The absolute, 'all-embracing' spirit of Hegel is replaced in Proudhon by the menacing idea of justice.

But the problem of the passions is not likely to be solved by that either. Passion is intrinsically unjust; justice is abstracted from the personal, it is 'interpersonal'-passion is only individual.

The solution here lies not in the la\'\'Court but in the humane development of individual character, in its removal from emotional self-centredness into the light of day, in the development of common interests.

The radical elimination of jealousy implies eliminating love for the individual, replacing it by love for woman or for man, by love of the sex in general. But it is just the personal, the individual, that pleases; it is just that \vhich gives colouring, tone,

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sensuality to the whole of our life. Our emotion is personal, our happiness and unhappiness are personal happiness and unhappiness.

Doctrinairianism with all its logic is of as little comfort in personal sorrow as the consolations of the Romans with their rhetoric. Neither the tears of loss nor the tears of jealousy can be wiped away, nor should they be, but it is right and possible that they should flow humanely . . . and that they should be equally free from monastic poison, the ferocity of the beast, and the wail of the wounded owner of property.3

I I

To REDUCE the relationships of man and woman to a casual sexual encounter is just as impossible as to exalt and bolt them together in marriage which is indissoluble before the planks of the coffin. Both the one and the other may be met with at the extremes of sexual and marital relationships, as a special case, as an exception, but not as a general rule. The sexual relationship will be broken off or will continually tend towards a closer and firmer union, just as the indissoluble marriage will tend towards liberation from external bonds.

People have continually protested against both extremes. Indissoluble marriage has been accepted by them hypocritically, or a As I was correcting the proofs of this I came upon a French newspaper with an extremely characteristic incident in it. !'\ear Paris a student had a liaison with a girl, which was discovered. The girl's father went to the student and on his knees besought him. with tears, to rehabilitate his daughter's honour and marry her; the student refused with contumely.

The kneeling father gave him a slap in the face. the student challenged him, they shot at each other; during the duel the old man had a stroke which crippled him. The student was disconcerted, and 'decided to marry,'

and the girl was grieved, and also decided to marry. The newspaper adds that this happy denouement will no doubt do much to promote the old father's recovery. Can this have happened outside a madhouse? Can China or India, at whose grotesqueries and follies we mock so much, furnish anything uglier or stupider than this story? I will not say more immoral. This Parisian romance is a hundredfold more wicked than all the roastings of widows or buryings of vestal viq:�ins. In those cases there was religious faith, which removed all personal responsibility, hut in this case there is nothing but com·entional, visionary ideas of external honour, of external reputation . . . . Is it not clear from this story what the student was like? \Vhy should the destiny of the girl be shackled to him a perprtuite.) \Vhy was she ruined to save her reputation? Oh, Bedlam!

( 1 866.)

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in the heat of the moment. Casual intimacy has never had complete recognition; it has always been concealed, just as marriage has been a subject of boasting. All attempts at the official regulation of brothels, although aiming at their restriction, are offensive to the moral sense of society, which in organisation sees acceptance. The scheme of a gentleman in Paris, in the days of the Directorate, for establishing privileged brothels with their own hierarchy and so on, was even in those days received with hisses and overwhelmed by a story of laughter and contempt.

The healthy, normal life of man avoids the monastery just as much as the cattle-yard; the sexlessness of the monk, which the Church esteems above marriage, as much as the childless gratification of the passions . . . .

Marriage is for Christianity a concession, an inconsistency, a weakness. Christianity regards marriage as society regards concubinage.

The monk and the Catholic priest are condemned to perpetual celibacy by way of reward for their foolish triumph over human nature.

Christian marriage on the whole is sombre and unjust; it establishes inequality, which the Gospel preaches against, and delivers the wife into slavery to the husband. The wife is sacrificed, love (hateful to the Church) is sacrificed ; after the Church ceremony it becomes a superfluity, and is replaced by duty and obligation. Of the brightest and most joyous of feelings Christianity has made a pain, a weariness, and a sin. The human race had either to die out or be inconsistent. Outraged nature protested.

It protested not only by acts followed by repentance and the gnawing of conscience, but by sympathy, by rehabilitation. The protest began in the very heyday of Catholicism and chivalry.

The threatening husband, Raoul, the Bluebeard in armour with the sword, tyrannical, jealous, and merciless; the barefoot monk, sullen, senseless, superstitious, ready to avenge himself for his privations, for his unnecessary struggle; jailers, hangmen, spies, . . . and in some cellar or turret a sobbing woman, a page in chains, for whom no one will intercede. All is darkness, savagery, blood, bigotry, violence, and Latin prayers chanted through the nose.

But behind the monk, the confessor and the jailer who, with the threatening husband, the father and the brother stand guard over the marriage, the folk-legend is forming in the stillness, the ballad is heard and is carried from place to place, from castle to

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castle, by troubadour and minnesinger-it champions the unhappy woman. The court smites, the song emancipates. The Church hurls its anathema at love outside marriage, the ballad curses marriage without love. It defends the love-sick page, the fallen wife, the oppressed daughter, not by reasoning but with sympathy, with pity, vdth tears, lamentation. The song is for the people its secular prayer, i ts other escape from the cold and hunger of life, from suffocating misery and heavy toil.

On holidays the litanies to the Madonna were replaced by the mournful strains, des eomplaintes, which did not abandon an unfortunate woman to infamy, but wept for her, and set above all the Virgin of Sorrows, beseeching Her intercession and forgiveness.

From ballads and legends the protest grows into the novel and the drama. In the drama it becomes a force. In the theatre outraged love and the gloomy secrets of family injustice found their tribunal, their public hearing. Their case has shakf'n thousands of hearts, wringing tears and cries of indignation against the serfdom of marriage and the fetters of the family riveted on by force. The jury of the stalls and the boxes have over and over again pronounced the acquittal of individuals and the guilt of institutions.

Meanwhile, in the period of political reconstructions and secular tendencies in thought, one of the two strong props of marriage has begun to break down. As it becomes less and less of a sacrament-that is, loses its ultimate basis-it has leaned more and more on the police. Only by the mystic intervention of a higher power can Christian marriage be justified. Here there is a certain logic-senseless, but still logic. The police-officer, putting on his tricolour scarf and celebrating the wedding with the civil code in his hand, is a far more absurd figure than the priest in his vestments, surrounded by the fumes of incense, holy images a nd miracles. Even the First Consul, Napoleon, the most prosaic bourgeois in matters of love and family, perceived that marriage at the police station was a mighty poor affair, and tried to persuade Cambaceres4 to add some obligatory phrase, some moral sentence, particularly one that would impress upon the bride her duty to be faithful to her husband (not a word about him) and to obey him.

As soon as marriage £'merges from the sphere of mysticism, it 4 Cambac�res, Jean-Jacqups ( 1 753-1824 ). one of the nearest advisers of Napoleon, and compiler of the Code Civil. He attempted to dissuade Napoleon from the invasion of Russia. (Tr. )

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becomes expedient, an external course of action. It was introduced by the frightened 'Bluebeards' (shaven nowadays, and changed into 'blue-chins') in judges' wigs, and academic tailcoats, popular representatives and liberals, the priests of the civil code. Civil marriage is simply a measure of state economy, freeing the state from responsibi lity for the children and attaching people more closely to property. Marriage without the intervention of the Church became a contract for the bodily enslavement of each to the other for life. The legislator has nothing to_ do with faith, with mystic ravings, so long as the contract is fulfilled, and if it is not he will find means of punishment and enforcement. And why not punish it? In England, the traditional country of juridical development, a boy of sixteen, made drunk by ales and gin and enrolled in a regiment by an old recruiting sergeant with ribbons on his hat, is subjected to the most fearful tortures. Why not punish a girl? Why not punish with shame, ruin, and forcible restoration to her master the girl who, with no clear understanding of what she is about, has contracted to love for l ife, and has admitted an extra, forgetting that the 'season-ticket' is not transferable. But these 'blue-chins'

too have been attacked by the trouvercs and novelists. Against the marriage of legal contract a psychiatrical, physiological dogma has been set up, the dogma of the absolute infallibility of the passions and the incapacity of man to struggle against them.

Those who were yesterday the slaves of marriage are now becoming the slaves of love. There is no law for love, there is no strength that can resist it.

After this, all rational control, all responsibility, every form of self-restraint is effaced. That man is in subjection to irresistible and ungovernable forces is a theory utterly opposed to that freedom of reason and by reason, to that formation of the character of a free man which all social theories aim at attaining by different paths.

Imaginary forces, if men take them for real, are just as powerful as real ones; and this is so because the substance generated by a human being is the same whatever the force that acts upon him. The man who is afraid of ghosts is afraid in exactly the same way as the man who is afraid of mad dogs, and may as easily die of fright. The difference is that in one case the man can be shown that his fears are nonsensical, and in the other he cannot.

I refuse to admit the sovereign position given to love in life ; I deny it autocratic power and protest against the pusillanimous excuse of having been carried away by it.

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Surely we have not freed ourselves from every restraint on earth, from God and the devil, from the Roman and the crim:nal law, and proclaimed reason as our sole guide and governor, in order to lie down humbly, like Hercules at the feet of Omphale, or to fal l asleep in the lap of Delilah? Surely woman has not sought to be free from the yoke of the family, from perpetual tutelage and the tyranny of father, husband, or brother, has not striven for her right to independent work, to learning and the standing of a citizen, only to bPgin owr again cooing like a turtle-dove all her life and pining for a dozen Leone Leonis5

instead of one.

Yes, while considering this theme it is for woman that I am sorriest of all ; she is irreparably gnawed and destroyed by the all-devouring Moloch of love. She has more faith in it and she suffers more from it. She is more concentrated on the sexual relationship alone, more driven to love . . . . She is both intellectually more unstable and intellectually less trained than we.

I am sorry for her.

I I I

HAs ANYONE made a serious and honest attempt to break dO\vn conventional prejudices in female educationJ They are broken down by experience, and so it is life and not convention that suffers.

People skirt the questions we are discussing, as old women and children go round a graveyard or places where some villainy has been committed. Some are afraid of impure spirits, others of the pure truth, and are left with an imagined derangement amid uninvestigated obscurity. There is as l i ttle serious consistency in our view of sexual relationships as in all practical spheres. We still dream of the possibility of combining Christian morality, which starts from the trampling underfoot of the flesh and leads towards tlw other world, with the realistic, earthly morality of this world. People ;up annoyed bPcause the two moralities do not get on with each other and, to avoid spending time tormenting themselves ovPr thP solution of thP problem, they pick out according to their tastPs and retain what they like of the Church teaching, and reject what they do not care for, on the same

" Leone I.Poni is th" ""' v, or rather Yillain, whose name supplies the title of one of George Sand's ParliPr noYels. ( Tr. )

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principle as those who do not keep fasts will zealously eat pancakes and, while observing the gay religious customs, avoid the dull ones. Yet I should have thought it was high time to bring more harmony and manliness into conduct. Let him who respects the law remain under the law and not break it, but let him who does not accept it show himself openly and consciously independent of it.

A sober view of human relationships is far harder for women than for us; of that there is no doubt; they are more deceived by education and know less of life, and so they more often stumble and break their heads and hearts than free themselves. They are always in revolt, and remain in slavery; they strive for revolution and more than anything they support the existing regime.

From childhood the girl is frightened by the sexual relationship as by some fearful unclean secret of which she is warned and scared off as though it were a sin that had some magical power; and afterwards this same monstrous thing, this same magnum ignotum which leaves an ineffaceable stain, the remotest hint at which is shameful and sets her blushing, is made the object of her life. As soon as a boy can walk, he is given a tin sword to train him to murder, and an hussar's uniform and epaulettes are predicted for him; the girl is lulled to sleep with the hope of a rich and handsome bridegroom, and she dreams of epaulettes not on her own shoulders but on the shoulders of her future husband.

Dors, dors, man enfant,

Jusqu'a l'iige de quinze ans,

A quin::e ans faut te reveiller,

A quin::e ans faut te marier.

One must marvel at any fine human nature that does not succumb to such an upbringing: we ought to have expected that all the little girls lulled to sleep like this would, from the age of fifteen, set to work speedily to replace those who had been slain by the boys trained from childhood to murderous weapons.

Christian teaching inspires terror of the 'flesh' before the organism is conscious of its sex ; it awakens a dangerous question in the child, instils alarm into the adolescent soul, and when the time to answer it is come-another doctrine exalts, as we have said, for the girl her sexual assignment into a sought-for ideal: the school-girl becomes the bride, and the same mystery, the same sin, but purified, becomes the cro·wn of her upbringing, the

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desire of all her relations, the goal of all her efforts, almost a social duty. Arts and sciences, education, intelligence, beauty, wealth, grace, all these are directed to the same object, all are the roses strewn on the path to her sanctioned fall . . . to the very same sin, the thought of which was looked on as a crime but which has now changed its substance by a miracle like that by which a Pope, when anhungercd on a journey, blessed a meat dish into a Lenten one.

In short, the whole training, negative and positive, of a woman remains a training for sexual relationships; round them revolves her whole subsequent life. From them she runs, towards them she runs, by them is disgraced, by them is made proud .

. . . To-day she preserves the negative holiness of chastity, today she whispers, blushing, to her bosom friend of love ; to-morrow, in the presence of the crowd, in glare and noise, to the light of chandeliers and to strains of music, she is flung into the arms of a man.

Bride, wife, mother, scarcely in old age, as a grandmother, is a woman set free from sexual life, and becomes an independent being, especially if the grandfather is dead. \'Voman, marked by love, does not soon escape from it. . . . Pregnancy, suckling, child-rearing are all the evolution of the same mystery, the same act of love ; in woman it persists not in the memory only, but in blood and body, in her it ferments and ripens and tears itself away-without breaking its tie.

Christianity breathed with its feverish monastic asceticism, vvith its romantic ravings, upon this physiologically strong, deep relationship, and fanned it into a senseless and destructive flame-of jealousy, revenge, punishment, outrage.

For a woman to extricate herself from this chaos is an heroic feat: only rare and exceptional natures accomplish it; the other

\Vomen arc tortured, and if they do not go out of their minds it is only thanks to the frivolity with which we all live without oversubtlety in the face of menacing blows and collisions, thoughtlessly passing from day to day, from fortuity to fortuity and from contradiction to contradiction.

\Vhat breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!

I have seen one such struggle and one such victory.

E N G L A N D

( 1 8 5 2 - 1 8 5 8 )

The Fogs of Lo11dort

WHEN AT DAYBREAK on the 25th of August, 1 852, I passed along a wet plank on to the shore of England and looked at its dirty white promontories, I was very far from imagining that years would pass before I should leave those chalk cliffs.

Entirely under the influence of the ideas with which I had left Italy, stunned and sick, bewildered by a series of blows which had followed one on the other with such brutal rapidity, I could not look clearly at what I was doing. It seemed as though I had needed to be brought again and again into physical contact with familiar truths in order that I might renew my belief in what I had long known or ought to have known.

I had been false to my own logic and forgotten how different the man of to-day is in opinions and in actions, how noisily he begins and how modestly he carries out his programmes, how genial are his desires and how feeble his muscles.

Two months had been filled with unnecessary meetings, fruitless seeking, painful and quite useless conversations, and I was still expecting something . . . expecting something. But my real nature could not remain for long in that world of phantoms. I began little by little to grasp that the edifice I was raising had no solid ground beneath it, and that it would inevitably crumble into ruins.

I was humiliated, my pride was outraged and I was angry with myself. My conscience gnawed at me for the sacrilegious deterioration of my grief, for a year of vain anxiety; and I was aware of a fearful, inexpressible weariness. . . . How I needed then the breast of a friend who, without judging and condemning, would have received my confession and shared my unhappiness; but the desert about me extended more and more ; there was no one near to me, not one human being . . . and perhaps that was even for the best.

I had not thought of staying longer than a month in London, but little by little I began to perceive that I had absolutely nowhere to go and no reason to go anywhere. Nowhere could I have found the same hermit-like seclusion as in London.

Having made up my mind to remain there, I began by taking a house in one of the remotest parts of the town, beyond Regent's Park, near Primrose Hill.

The little girls remained in Paris ; only Sasha was with me. As the fashion is here, the house was divided into three storeys. The 445

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whole middle storey consisted of a huge, cold, uncomfortable

'drawing-room.' I turned it into a study. The owner of the house was a sculptor and had cluttered up the whole of this room with various statuettes and models ; a bust of Lola Montes was always before my eyes, together with Victoria.

When on the second or third day after our crossing, having unpacked and settled in, I went into that room in the morning, sat down in a big arm-chair and spent a couple of hours in complete stillness, \vorried by no one, I felt myself somehow free for the first time after a long, long time. My heart was not the lighter for this freedom, but yet I looked out of the window with a greeting to the sombre trees in the park, which were hardly visible through the smoky fog, and thanked them for the peacefulness.

For whole mornings I used now to sit utterly alone, often doing nothing, not even reading; Sasha would sometimes nm in, but he did not interfere with my solitude. Haug, who lived with me, never came in-without some pressing need-before dinner which was between six and seven. In this leisure I went, fact by fact, over the whole past, words and letters, other people and myself. I found mistakes to the right, mistakes to the left, vacillation, weakness, action hindered by irresolution and overreadiness to be influenced by others. And in the course of this analysis, by degrees, a revolution took place within me . . .

there were bitter moments and more than once tears rolled down my cheeks; but there were other moments, not of gladness but of courage: I was conscious of power in myself. I no longer relied on anyone else, but my confidence in myself grew stronger; I grew more independent of everyone.

The emptiness about me strengthened me and gave me time to collect myself; I grew unaccustomed to others: that is, I did not seek real intimacy with them: I avoided no one, but people became indifferent to me. I saw that I had no ties that rested on earnest, profound feelings. I was a stranger among outsiders; I had more sympathy for some than for others, but was in no close intimacy with any. It had been so in the past, too, but I had not noticed it, being continually carried away by my own thoughts; now the masquerade was over, the dominoes had been removed, the garlands had fallen from the heads, the masks from the faces, and I saw features different from those that I had surmised.

What was I to do? I could help showing that I liked many people less, that is, I knew them better, but I could not help feeling it; and, as I have said, these discoveries did not rob me of my courage, but rather strengthened it.

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London life was very favourable for such a break. There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London. The manner of life, the distances, the climate, the very multitude of the population in which personality vanishes, all this together with the absence of Continental diversions conduces to the same effect. One who knows how to live alone has nothing to fear from the tedium of London. The life here, like the air here, is bad for the weak, for the frail, for one who seeks a prop outside himself, for one who seeks welcome, sympathy, attention ; the moral lungs here must be as strong as the physical lungs, whose task it is to separate oxygen from the smoky fog.

The masses are saved by battling for their daily bread, the commercial classes by their absorption in heaping up wealth, and all by the bustle of business; but nervous and romantic temperaments-fond of living among people, fond of intellectual sloth and of idly luxuriating in emotion-are bored to death and fall into despair.

·wandering lonely about London, through its stony lanes and stifling passages, sometimes not seeing a step before me for the thick, opaline fog, and colliding with shadows running-! lived through a great deal.

In the evening, when my son had gone to bed, I usually went out for a walk; I scarcely ever went to see anyone; I read the newspapers and stared in taverns at the alien race, and lingered on the bridges across the Thames.

On one side the stalactites of the Houses of Parliament would loom through the darkness, ready to vanish again; on the other, the inverted bowl of St Paul's . . . and street-lamps . . . streetlamps . . . street-lamps without end in both directions. One city, full-fed, went to sleep: the other, hungry, was not yet awake-the streets were empty and nothing could be heard but the measured tread of the policeman with his lantern. I used to sit and look, and my soul would grow quieter and more peaceful.

And so for all this I carne to love this fearful ant-heap, "·here every night a hundred thousand men knov\' not where they will lay their heads, and the police often find women and children dead of hunger beside hotels where one cannot dine for less than two pounds.

But this kind of transition, however quickly it approaches, is not achieved all at once, especially at forty. A long time passed

\vhile I was coming to terms with my new ideas. Though I had made up my mind to work, for a long: time I did nothing, or did not do what I wanted to do.

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The idea with which I had come to London, to seek the tribunal of my own people, was a sound and right one. I repeat this even now, with full, considered conviction. To whom, i n fact, are w e to appeal for judgment, for the re-establishment of the truth, for the unmasking of falsehood?

It is not for us to litigate in the court of our enemies, who judge by other principles, by laws which we do not recognise.

One can settle one's quarrels for oneself; no doubt one can. To take the law in one's own hands is to snatch back by force what has been taken by force, and so restore the balance; vengeance is just as sound and simple a human feeling as gratitude ; but neither revenge nor taking the law into one's own hands explains anything. It may happen that a clear explanation is what matters most to a man. The re-establishment of the truth may be dearer to him than revenge. My own error lay not in the main proposition but in the underlying assumption ; in order that there may be a tribunal of one's own people one must first of all have one's own people. \Vhere were mine . . . ?

I had had my own people once in Russia. But I was so completely cut off in a foreign land; I had at all costs to get into communication with my own people; I wanted to tell them of the weight that lay on my heart. Letters were not allowed in, but books would gpt through of themselves; \'>Tiling letters was impossible: I would print ; and little by little I set to work upon My Past and Thoughts, and upon setting up a Russian printingpress.

The En1L{j·rctn ts il1 Lorldon

By the waters of Babylon we sat doun and wept.

PsALMs 1 37 : 1